On October 4th and 5th, End Overdose is hosting the SAVE A L!FE fundraiser in La Jolla, California. The weekend of overdose prevention/response features a packed schedule that’s headlined by a talk from Jaywalker Lodge and Alpha 180 owner Bobby Ferguson. Bobby has decades of experience in forward-thinking residential treatment settings with the pathway to recovery through a peer-to-peer model. Combined with his own long-standing sobriety, Bobby brings a wealth of knowledge, so we’re thrilled for his keynote speech at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines.
In advance of his talk at SAVE A L!FE next month, we spoke with Bobby about his journey from active addiction to recovery, the vital need for peer-based communities in treatment settings, and the importance of naloxone.
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EO: I would love it if you could give me some of your background and where your recovery journey eventually began.
Bobby Ferguson: Sure. I was based in New York City and loved growing up in Manhattan. By the time you're 14 years old, me and my buddies all had fake IDs and the drinking age was 21. So I would say by the time I was 18, I was well on my way into putting chemicals and alcohol at the center of all my social activities. Like many of the kids I grew up with, I ended up going off to a prep school in New England.
Which was an unbelievable academic opportunity, which I squandered in favor of having no parents around – the guardrails were off. By the time I was 14, we were unsupervised on campus. In an environment where both there and in college I had tremendous academic opportunities, but being a little bit self conscious, a little bit insecure, a real need to fit in and belong, socially, I ended up pretty much willing to do whatever it took to just fit in.
I like to say I graduated from college [in] 1984 with a diploma, but not much of an education. I went to a private liberal arts school in Virginia and then moved back to New York City and spent my twenties in New York as an aspiring journalist. I loved the work. I loved the go-fast attitude. I loved the lifestyle [that] promoted work hard, play hard. New York City was the city that never sleeps, and [if] I could make it there, I could make it anywhere. And yet what I noticed was the behavior that you could get away with your half dozen or so buddies in college…we all showed up with behaviors that would look almost like an addict or an alcoholic getting messed up every chance we could in college. I kept doing that after college and found other guys, growing up and moving on, getting promotions, moving in with their girlfriends, making adult life decisions, whereas for me it was, if it was Tuesday, every night was Friday night and I was looking for cocaine and a keg and trying to keep the party going.
So I was that guy in the group that people started to get a little worried about. And sure enough I ended up having all the alcoholic and drug addict consequences that somebody in their twenties without any guardrails would experience. I got fired from a job that I liked a lot. I couldn't show up. I was living with a girl at the time. Couldn't show up in that relationship and ended up going to my first treatment [center] at age 27. There would be three more residential treatment experiences over the next three years: getting fired, going to rehab, getting hired at some different job. And finally, I went out on a 13 day binge in Spanish Harlem. I'm a privileged kid from an upper middle class family in the wrong part of town completely given every advantage and opportunity in life and just living in the shadows and on the dark side. [When] I came off of that binge, I had credit card fraud charges for using the company credit card. It had all reached a point where my parents no longer were interested in my ideas about my sobriety and my aftercare. So they said, “We found this place in Minnesota, you get a one way plane ticket and you do what they say and we wish you luck. This is your last chance.”
Off I went to Hazelden, which is a treatment center in Minnesota. I went into a 30 day men's unit on that campus. They transferred me to a four month extended care residential program … which was for chronic relapsers. And things really started to change there. I found my people. Every other kind of screw up from every other part of the country. I found myself around like minded people with a will to fail and a fear of failure and we really connected. They did a lot for me, those peers and counselors in that program … I think my big awakening in that long-term extended care program was … we used to do these things [and] we still do them at Jay Walker. It's a peer evaluation. We called it a full group, but two or three guys would get the attention of the group over the course of an eight hour day. And really did a kind of a double click and a deep dive on the Bob show and it wasn't getting very good ratings. I hadn't gotten drunk or high in months. And yet there I was. Not showing up as a person that other people felt safe around. And by the time the group was done, I was alone in a room full of people without any drugs and alcohol to blame. And the walls came down a little bit and I felt extremely vulnerable and hopeless.I had always thought that, to the extent that I was insufferable and an asshole, that it was just because of the drugs and the alcohol. But I was learning that I didn't know the first thing about how to show up as a friend, what it meant to be in a relationship, what it meant to listen to another person instead of waiting for my turn to talk. And I suddenly became much more interested in other people's ideas about my situation. I started to pay attention. I started to listen, I started to get interested in other people's ideas and … escaping a little bit from the bondage of self and becoming part of a group instead of apart from.
From there I was sent off to a, what they call the halfway house, which is really so gleaming in the Twin Cities in St. Paul and spent four months there. I had a job 40 hours a week. Everybody did. And what was interesting about that, I was no longer in a safe, secluded campus. It was a hectic and structured, chaotic re-entry into real life on life's terms. The cool thing about Fellowship Club was, there were 55 of us. There were men and women. We were in a converted old mansion in the wrong part of St. Paul. And anybody could use drugs and alcohol any day you wanted, and most of us, many of us, me included, just didn't. We wanted to be part of something bigger. We felt connected to this incredible community of recovering people that had come from all over the country. And there was this like minded energy with this common call to purpose that was bigger than my addiction when it needed to be. What I took away from that was that I arrived there feeling like I was a hopeless case, but getting given the opportunity to drink and use every day and yet put my head on the pillow at night with another day of recovery was a big shift for me.
And I started to get what they now call recovery capital and traction and equity in my own recovery and a sense of momentum. By the time all that was done, my friends were saying, maybe you should stay in Minnesota, maybe you don't [need to]go back to New York. By that time I was very interested in other people's ideas about my situation and I stuck around because I hadn't soiled the zip code. I hadn't ruined my recovery. I had a job, I had sober friends, and I had a life I had a life beyond my wildest dreams, which included a small apartment with a futon, a color TV, a rescue dog, and sobriety, and it felt great, and that's when life really changed for me. That's the backstory on how I got out of the darkness into the light and within and out of isolation and into community.
Today at Jaywalker Lodge, that's what it's all about for us. I am a jaywalker. More About Alcoholism on page 37, it talks about the strange character with an unusual idea of fun, skipping in front of fast moving traffic, and he keeps getting run over and keeps trying to do it again. I opened Jaywalker Lodge 20 years ago, it was for men in their 20s who did well in rehab and badly afterwards. And the whole idea was, if you did great in treatment and bad in recovery, we were going to figure it out together and I was going to get you interested in a group of like minded individuals with a common problem and a common solution and take treatment out of containment and put it in community. Because that's where the rubber hit the road for me and that's where I got traction. I am not an expert in anything, but what my own story has to teach me … we've attracted men over the years that were stuck in that same place and we begin with that idea.
Most of the guys that show up at Jaywalker have been in three to five previous treatments. We have a minimum 90 days to six month commitment to come out there. We do begin with a few weeks in containment, but move guys as quickly as we can into this open community model where they can get some traction, some sober capital, recovery capital and momentum and equity. And it's all rooted in the peer system. My experience is that addicts are like kids. They don't listen to what adults say. They watch what their friends are doing and they assign meaning to those relationships above all else. So we have this unapologetic and relentless embrace of intimacy among men, vulnerability, and making friends and having fun. And those are the things I needed and those are the things I wanted in my recovery.
EO: You mentioned that the program when you were going into rehab for the third time was specifically for people dealing with chronic relapses. So that informed your approach to starting Jaywalker Lodge?
BF: Yes, 100 percent, because I was the kind of guy that would lament my loss of freedom and how I wanted and needed autonomy. I had sufficiently low self esteem that I needed to be right and look good on the outside, because I felt so insecure and unstable on the inside. I had to project and that meant that I needed to get back in the game and I didn't just need to get at bat, I needed to hit a home run to make up for lost time. And what I needed to know was not what I wanted to hear. And what I needed to know is that recovery is really hard. We're changing our lives. We're changing our outlook on life. We're changing our relationship with everything and everybody. And it's a time consuming and difficult process.
And it requires patience, which is a poor man's word for faith. And I didn't have either of those. I needed to get back in the game and on top of the game because I was insecure and I needed to show you I was fine. I did not do a focus group in Peoria and identify an unmet need for eating disorder treatment for adolescent women and open a business. I simply tried to create an environment and open a program for guys exactly stuck in the exact place that I was. That's it. That was the limit of my expertise was what it was like stuck in that piece in that way. I got better when people told me what I needed to know, even when it wasn't what I wanted to hear.
So we build trust through transparency and [that’s what] I wanted our place to be. Transparent, trustworthy, and tell people what they needed to know, even if it's not what they wanted to hear. And that's what I got from my peers. They told me what I needed to know. And, I remember at the end of that encounter group, I was furious. I was like, every one of you guys its just grandstanding in the group, to sound good and take a shot at me … We walked on the serenity path together [and] you didn't tell me any of these things. I ripped the whole room, a new asshole, for no reason. Because I wanted my chance to [address] the feedback they were giving me. And the counselor turned to me at the time, his name was Don, and he said, “Bobby, the fact that you're in a room full of people that don't feel safe talking to you honestly about how they're experiencing you … it may not be your fault, but it's damn sure your problem. And if you don't pay attention to it, it's going to haunt you the rest of your life.”
And they wrapped me up. They picked me up. They were brave enough to tell me what I needed to hear. And I didn't want to hear it. And I really wanted to hold space for guys in that same way. Create an environment, hold space for like minded guys in this safe way where peers and friends could really lean in and be honest with one another. That's what I needed and that's what we do. So yeah, we value the peer to peer relationship above all else. [A] clinical team's great, but we keep redirecting folks back to the peers. Because I agree. That was what I needed my peers to tell me what I needed to know, even when I didn't want to hear it, and so we just try to replicate that and keep that going, because at the end of the day that's where it lands, that's where it landed for me.
EO: I think that peer-to-peer model is so important. With End Overdose, our whole model is peer-to-peer. High school and college kids don't want to hear an instructor talking down to them. They want to hear from someone in the same position.
Yeah. And especially on a college campus, it's such an incredible role. The collegiate recovery movement started to really get my attention about ten years ago.I started attending all these collegiate recovery conferences and these young men and women that I would meet were just amazing, and their whole mission was to basically create a cohort of purpose driven, like minded students who were on campus with one another in purely a social context. There were clubs, there were chapters … the university might give them an advisor or maybe a space to meet, but that's all they needed to get something really powerful going. And, addicts are typically authority and oppositional defiant to any person in a position [of power].. If the power differential is [present], we tune them out by default, whether it's a coach or a teacher or a landlord or a boss or a father. We need to hear it from one another.
We pay a lot of attention to what our peers do and disregard a lot of what those authority figures say. And that movement really started to gain momentum and get traction 10 or 12 years ago. And that's when we opened Alpha 180. A buddy of mine and I bought the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house from the University of Texas in Austin and basically opened up this transitional program for newly sober students that were returning to campus life. It's been one of the most joyful and inspirational communities I've ever been a part of. It's just a seed. And not just at Alpha, but what's going on all over the country, but yeah I got blown away. I became convinced that if you could hold space for students in early recovery to feel a sense of connection and belonging, and make that your primary goal, then the incremental benefits of just belonging in that will manifest both in terms of academic excellence and thriving in their recovery.
I've always felt like we've positioned a sense of belonging socially. Making friends and having fun is this incremental benefit of getting serious about your sobriety and getting sober. But I've come to believe over the years that it's not an after the fact benefit, but it's an actual path to all the other good things. It's paying the rent, succeeding academically, having a full and abundant life. [Those are], to me, the byproducts of putting that need to belong first. So I think we've always had it backwards and that's been my takeaway from the last 35 years. It's not something you should expect as a promise or a benefit or a byproduct of your recovery. It's a path to your recovery. Learn how to be among others in a way where you feel safe, where you can take risks, where you can be open, transparent, trustworthy, and vulnerable. And everything follows from that. So both at Alpha 180 and at Jaywalker, and when I work with sponsors, I'm always like, “Look, This is a disease of isolation and relationship is your salvation. Work on the relationships. You can pretend to care, but you can't pretend to show up. Start showing up in other people's lives. Everything else will fall into place.”
EO: Absolutely. I personally got sober with a month left in college and I'll never forget how excited I was to see someone my age who was also sober. I truly learned how to be a sober adult through all these people in social settings and it directly strengthened my ability to recover.
BF: We're pack animals. I believe that. We need to belong. The need to belong is right up there with oxygen and calories. We need to belong. And that is not unique to addicts. I think that's inherent in the human condition. I think if we can solve for that variable, all the rest doesn't change, it doesn't change our situation.It changes our perspective on our situation and then all things are possible.
EO: How do you facilitate other people's entrance into recovery versus your own recovery? Are there any challenges you have to overcome as organizations with Jaywalker Lodge and Alpha 180?
I don't see those as problematic. I think the larger problem you have is that we're in two locations. Jaywalker is in Carbondale, Colorado, which is this pretty little mountain town at the base of Mount Sopris population 7,000, versus Alpha 180 is down in Austin, Texas – I think something like 45,000 students undergrad and graduate [students] just on campus and it's a thriving town. So one of the issues that we deal with professionally as staff members is setting boundaries for your own recovery, in a way where you can get your needs met, so you can show up. After a challenging or difficult day at Jaywalker, you don't want to show up at a meeting with six clients there [and] vent about how horrible they were that day. That is a challenge for small town recovery. I think one of the things that our industry struggles with at large is healthy boundaries and self care for so many of our clinicians and support staff in the treatment industry are themselves in recovery.
One of the things I learned right away, I went to work for Hazelden [when] I was two and a half years sober. Hazelden wouldn't hire you until you had two years sober. And I went to work in their alumni department. The first thing my boss told me is, “You are going to be tempted to back off your step work, your service work, your sponsorship, and your meetings because we tell ourselves we're working. We spent all day working in recovery.” And he said, “You're not working in recovery. You're working in addiction and you're not in the solution at Hazelden. You're the problem. You need more self care. You need more personal recovery. You need to double down on your investment in your own recovery capital as a person working in recovery. In this field. That's something we emphasize and stress a lot at Jaywalker is that congratulations, it's exciting when somebody entrusts you to work in the field. Now you need to really get to work on your recovery because you're the problem here and you're not in the solution.
I don't know if that answers your question, but it's definitely for sure both at Jaywalker and at the other places I've worked. I've seen the toll that can take on people, both through complacency among staff members who don't attend to their own recovery, and also that taking on other people's trauma and the price that we pay for working in a crisis environment and then not going and doing the work we need to address that. So that is absolutely front and center and a major issue for all of us in this field.
EO: You mentioned alumni and I know a strong community has emanated from Jaywalker and Alpha 180. Can you describe that community?
When I opened Jaywalker … My background is that I worked at Hazelden for six years as their alumni relations person. I started as a coordinator and ended up becoming an alumni director there and that is where I onboarded and learned what I know about residential treatment through the lens of aftercare. In other words, I did not come up with a counseling degree. I did not come through as a program administrator. I did not come through on the business development side. I came through alumni relations. So when we opened Jay Walker, it wasn't a conscious decision, but all of my unconscious biases were around the alumni experience because that's what I had been trained in and that's where I was comfortable.
Today what I understand is, now we have about 400 local alumni living in the Carbondale area who sponsor our men there. They help employ our men, they get them jobs, they get them places to live after treatment. And they are without a doubt the most positive and profound impact on a long term sober outcome. More even than our clinical team. Or our great programming, or anything that happens in treatment, is this connection that they make organically with guys that they run into at the local meetings, doing service at Jaywalker, hanging out. We have an open kitchen policy, so alumni are always in the kitchen making food.
We have an alumni dinner every Wednesday night where the guys come back, we have an open AA meeting on Friday with 100 guys and a speaker. So this infusion of alumni that wrap up and surround our bed while they're trying to figure out what my life is going to look like going forward? They answer that question by example and in real time. Without a doubt to me, [it’s] the single most important bridge to a sober outcome. If I were an automotive manufacturer, our alumni would be the cars coming off the assembly line. They are the product of who we are and what we do. One of my great grievances with the way that treatment communities and treatment centers are organized is that alumni are typically regarded as aftercare and an afterthought. But for us, in the first week that you show up at Jaywalker, you're going to have alumni coming in to tell their stories before you have to tell your story.
We want them to hear the solution from someone else in real terms on a volunteer basis before they start getting treatment plans from a paid clinician or trying to engineer their own path, and fix them, fix their thinking with their own thinking. Alumni, again, bullseye. And I think [at] both Alpha and Jaywalker, we'd be dead in the water without our alumni. And there they are, available to all of us as treatment providers. It's this army of like minded soldiers, eager and willing to help. And yet, sometimes, as providers, we get in our own way by consciously or unconsciously keeping them on the periphery. They need to be visible every day and a part of everything that our guys see and do every day.
There's no bigger fan of the importance of alumni than I am and what they mean to your community. They're literally everything. And 70 percent of our staff are alumni, including our clinical director, our CEO, our chief operations officer. They've all been in that bed and been in that group room and know what it's like and what those guys are going through.
EO: Seeing the solution in people is so vital. I feel like many people view rehabs as a jumping off point and a box to check before moving onto the real world.
BF: I feel like a lot of treatment centers aren't building community. It's hard, but there is an ROI for an operator and provider to invest in managing their alumni. It's like managing the credit, it's just like crude oil bubbling out of the ground. And [if] you don't manage the resource, you're just going to have an oil slick. But if you put it to work it can fuel your entire spirit, your milieu, and your core values come to life. For us it's these guys [that] are in it … One of the things that Hazelden's done for 60 years is they have this auditorium, and there's a lecture there at 9 o'clock every morning, and one of the staff will get up like a college professor and do a 30 minute lecture on one aspect of your disease or recovery. And then after lunch at 1:30, there's another 30 minute lecture. And I would sit there as a patient thinking, “Okay this is like being in a lecture in school. It's important, but I wasn't exactly leaning forward in my seat, taking notes.” But then after dinner at 7 o'clock, people are like, that's a long day. And they would tell their story. And 30 nights in a row, you couldn't get an angle on these people.
These men and women weren't being paid. And they understood everything about my problem. But they had a life beyond my wildest dreams. And I understood nothing about their solution. And it was so powerful. Because I could write off and discount as this sardonic, skeptical New Yorker. All the paid messaging I was getting at 9 o'clock and 1:30. But at 7 o'clock, those alumni got my attention. They were there on their own time, sharing their experience, strength, and hope. And it was real.
I definitely feel like when alumni show up and lean in, I think our men have the same reaction. Why is this person here? What, why do they even care about me? And so you get that trust and that transparency going right away. And I believe a lot of the barriers that keep providers from including alumni in their day to day activities are that you can't really control it, right?
There's very little downside. These people are coming back as the best version of themselves. They are not going to hurt you guys. They are not going to break your regulations. They are not there to make your life harder. All they do is bring your two dimensional playbook to life and give it depth and meaning and bring it into three dimensions – some real guys that want what they have. And yeah, it's it's relatively low cost way to get your clients excited about an outcome. And I think you can tell I'm pretty bought in and passionate about it.
EO: I love it. I'm fired up after this interview. I want to wrap up by asking, what can we expect from you speaking at the SAVE A L!FE fundraiser?
BF: Thank you. I'm incredibly honored to get an opportunity. You guys are doing some amazing things. it'll be 30 years next spring that I've been working in this field. And it's not a particularly politically savvy thing for me to say this, but I feel if you could boil it all down to a t- shirt, it might say on the front of the shirt, “nobody gets sober at rehab.” And then the back of the shirt would say “recovery happens in communities.” Unless, we as providers can change our practices and prayers can change their policies and families and consumers can change their expectations to look at a longer term process where we get our hands wet and dirty in that messy part that happens outside of containment and bridge people from containment into community. People always do well in a safe, secluded time out from their life with a structured, all their needs met. Then the rubber hits the road and recovery gets real. The autonomy and the self actualization to bring it into the community.
You can't control all the variables in your community. It's a higher risk, higher proposition. We've got to push our thinking, our process, our payer policies and everything down the continuum. That's the best way. Because this value proposition that you can go off to some safe, secluded time out from your life for four weeks and everything will be fine afterwards is absurd. And it doesn't work. If we don't figure out through best practice and share ideas and encouragement for one another, how are we going to transition a treatment episode into a recovery experience? We have to pay more attention to what happens in sober living. We have to pay more attention to coaching.
You have to pay more attention to peers that have. You don't get to put recovery on your pillow at night. If you haven't faced relapse on the table during the day, we've got to stop playing it safe and we've got to push our entire paradigm and way of thinking and way of operating further down the continuum, or else we'll never be able to create, to, to connect a recovery outcome with a treatment episode.
So I think that's the work I do at NAATP, that's what I try to do with the force is just get people interested in the 31st day. You're out of containment, you're in community, the shit's getting real. And what are we doing with you and for you at that point? And I think that's really the push that'll get us some recovery outcomes. Because we have plenty of treatment, but we're not getting the recovery outcomes without paying attention to that messy part afterwards.
The other thing I'll talk about is all of our staff is trained [in] first aid, CPR, and [how to use] Narcan. We have Narcan in every building. We do not sit there and say, “Isn't recovery great?” and put our head in the sand on the reality of what we're able to do, with life saving medications and so forth. We need to have our head in the stars and the principles of recovery and put our feet on the ground in the reality of the condition. And it's something all of our teams and even our patients and our alumni are excited about, are aware of where the Narcan is and how it works and so forth. We fully embraced that, on campus, down at Alpha and of course up here in Carbondale and we have saved lives doing that. Many of our guys have, they've been resuscitated many times before they've gotten to us.