Intro to The Four Pillars of Recovery

What do recovery and Maslow's hierarchy of needs have to do with each other? I'm sure you could think of many reasons. That's why I'm here tonight. I'm looking forward to telling you a little bit about that. My name is Jason Lennox, and I am your resident recovery champion, here to talk about all things recovery, mental health, and well being. I'm excited to be sharing with you my first recorded session. m. Live series that I do titled Sunday Serenity. And that's where I pull stories and things that have happened throughout the week that jog memories and turn them into experiences to share with you.

So this recorded series, my recorded videos, will be a little more strategic in nature. I will dive into content, I'll create series, I'll do things like that, and I'll title this one recovery reinspired. And that actually comes from a blog that I started five years ago. It lasted about two years. It served its purpose, which was to put together the framework of my life in writing, at which point then I could work on the memoir that I published last year. So recovery reinspired is just what it sounds like.

It's recovery. But reinspired, we have so many things happening in our world, so many people dying, unfortunately, each year, that I just feel like we need a different kind of spark into this thing. And so that's what I'm here to do. And again, my first series, I want to start with a foundation. And really, I go to Samhsa for that. So SAMHSA is the substance abuse mental health Services Administration. It's a federal body that's really responsible for funding, resources, data training in education.

It really is the gold standard when you think about the mission of addressing substance use disorder. And according to SAmHSA, the four pillars of recovery are health, home purpose, and community. And as I thought about those four and how they tie into my own life, I actually put them in a different order. I thought housing, health, community, and then purpose. And so, as I studied a little bit, as I mentioned earlier, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and in case you're not familiar with that, it's a framework actually shaped like a triangle when you see the visuals.

Five levels. The simplified version has five levels in, we're going to go simplify because simple is better, in my opinion. Five levels. And the first is the physiological needs and second, safety and security. Then it's love and belonging, self esteem, self actualization, and the idea behind the hierarchy is that it's very challenging to move to the next level without meeting those needs. And so that makes sense, right? The physiological needs to be able to get food and water and those things. Those are primary focus.

And once we can meet those, we can think about stepping up. And so, as I thought about that hierarchy and the four pillars and the way that I ordered them show, sure, housing makes sense, because it's on that first level, health is on the second level, community is on the third. We jump over the fourth, kind of into the fifth for purpose. And so I want to talk about how each of those four pillars tie into that hierarchy and how we truly, from a holistic standpoint, have to think about addressing all of those things.

So again, we're going to dive into home and housing and how important and critical that is as part of the physiological needs. And then beyond that, as we think about health, we think about mental health, physical health, spiritual health. There are many, many dimensions, by the way, a Cadre. This is precisely the aim of Cadre in the app, is to bring you all forms of health and wellness in one place. And so as we think about health meeting that safety and security level of the hierarchy, then we move into love and belonging, that level, which is where community falls into, and who are the relationships that we're in with, and what does our community look like?

Where are we spending time with? Who are we connected to? All those important things, right? And then again, we kind of jump over self esteem and think about self actualization as the very top there. And that's where we get into purpose. And in my opinion, point, when we can get there and we can land with our purpose and we're waking up and that's the life we're living. It is really, really hard to go back to any of those other levels, and we constantly addressing those, but I mean, like, really, really regress into those and struggle with those levels as well.

So again, this is the introductory message I'm looking forward to in the next four videos. Tapping into home, tapping into health, community, and then purpose. And my, my ask of you is that you come ready to watch the next video, doing a little thinking about home health, community and purpose, and what you have and maybe what you haven't had, and maybe, perhaps what we're taking for granted in those areas. So thinking about those four things, and then perhaps you do a little research if you're not familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, because there's really a lot of good stuff in there, not just for recovery, but we're going to blend those two together and really talk about how we can continue to progress up that and get to that top part of the triangle.

So, again, incredibly grateful to be here sharing this journey with you and really look forward to having you back. So stay tuned. Coming up soon, we'll be talking about home and housing and what that means. Hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day. We'll see you next time. Thanks.