The
VIOLEnCE
Link BETWEEN
CHEMICAL
DEPENDENCY
Prevention and Treatment
On Friday afternoon, I left Juneau, Alaska — flying home to Seattle after
the first two weeks of school. Amid all the management meetings,
strategic planning and policy writing — the one experience that I knew I
would miss was sixth period at Juneau Douglas High School. Every
school day, I had led a community health class for a dozen young adults
in recovery from substance abuse or chemical dependency. All the
students were in a parallel 80-hour service plan, where they received
their own individualized treatment needs and prevention activities. They
also received credit for this 80-hour community health practicum where
they developed their own portfolios of educational achievement.
It had been over a decade since I ran a “recovery class” in a high school
setting. So much had changed in that time. Most schools in the country
no longer have such classes, except in the occasional alternative school
setting where they are usually run by a chemical dependency
professional for therapeutic goals. Usually the classes are “aftercare” for
kids who have finished treatment for addiction. Unfortunately, the
schools also see it as a location to place a chemically dependent youth
that has not received treatment — either from their own denial or the
problems with managed care. Sadly, over the years, the untreated youth
often overcome the ones in aftercare; the class becomes toxic and fades
out. Often, in its waning moments, it is a place of anger, frustration and
aggressive behavior — another link in the behavioral health worlds of
substance abuse and violence.
In the chemical dependency field, we know that untreated chemical
dependency, either in the addict or co-addict, leads to violence against
themselves or others. What persons in other helping professions don’t see
is that violence often leads to substance abuse in both the perpetrator
and the victim. Now that the chemical dependency profession treats
both substance abuse and chemical dependency, it is time to address
issues that lead to substance abuse without feeling we are giving the
mixed message that chemical dependency is not a physiological disease.
A Chemical Dependency Professional Finds His
Role in Violence Prevention and Treatment
My chemical dependency counseling career began back in 1981,
amidst the detoxification beds and crisis receiving mats of San Diego.
4 Community of Recovery • Fall 2002
AND
by David D. Moore, Ph.D.
Eighteen years later, I returned to lead the program that was one of my
intern sites during that first year, Scripps McDonald Center. Outside
of addressing anger as a part of chemical dependency recovery, I never
believed that my two decades of training and practice prepared me to
be a “violence” professional. The moment I emerged from that cocoon
as a chemical dependency professional and realized that our field had
to take a leadership role in the emotional development of our youth,
particularly violence prevention, stays in my mind with stark clarity.
It was a phone call on March 5th asking me to help coordinate
throwing a “human blanket” of therapeutic support over a high school
that had just been torn apart by 38 bullets and 13 wounded teenagers
who were receiving emergency trauma wound care in local hospitals.
Two other students from Santana High did not make it to trauma care;
one died at the feet of the shooter and the other made it halfway
across the student commons, only to die in the arms of one of his
teachers in front of hundreds of his classmates. Although we had
learned a great deal from Columbine, there was not yet a very good
action model to address this level of adolescent trauma for over 2,200
young adults. Three weeks later, after learning a great deal, Santana’s
sister high school three miles away was shot up by another student
gunman. This time, six students from Granite Hills High were in
trauma care with no fatalities.
We had learned enough in the three weeks since Santana to place a
sheriff ’s deputy on campus. He brought down the shooter in a
gunfight in front of the administrative building. There were other,
more important lessons that we learned from Santana as well: a) many
youth had experienced their first intoxication on alcohol and other
drugs in that time, b) those who were already using often increased
their use, c) and those in recovery were experiencing their most
difficult struggle to avoid relapse. A turning point occurred for me
when the Los Angeles Times writer who had been following two of us
around the campus for a week began to put together the connection.
On March 20th, three days before the second shooting at Granite
Hills, that reporter began the process of linking the chemical
dependency recovery field together with violence prevention and
recovery. Hopefully, this story continues the message she began with
her article 18 months prior, where she wrote:
 “And then there was the
student who was once a user of
marijuana and methamphetamine
who had successfully completed
a drug treatment program. Now
for the first time in two years, he
was feeling urges to use again.

Without hesitation, Moore

opened his own wallet and drew
out a coin given to him to
commemorate 19 years of his
own sobriety. He pressed it into
the boy’s palm.

The boy’s insistence that the

therapists on campus could
never understand him melted. He
put the coin in his own bag, next
to the coins given to him to
commemorate his own first and
second years of sobriety. At the

Reprinted with permission from the Union Tribune, San Diego, C A 3/6/02
time of the article, three weeks
later, he had not relapsed.”
(LA Times, 3/20/2001)

The C-STARS Model of Violence

Prevention and Treatment
In June of 2001, the University of
Washington’s Center for the Study
and Teaching of At-Risk Students
(www.uwcstars.org) entered a long-term
relationship with the community of
Juneau, Alaska (www.asdn.org/JEPP) to
develop a comprehensive safe and drug-free
community. Having spent three months
incorporating what we had learned at Santana High with what we had
learned years ago in case managed student assistance programs, we
were able to build a strategic model that broadened the methods from
chemical dependency recovery for youth with a much broader group
of needs. In particular, those with “safety” needs in the safe and drug-
free network. Three very formative experiences from Santana and
Granite Hills were the underpinning of these groups. Most chemical
dependency professionals have long and deep understanding of all
three parts of this model:
1. The Johari’s Window of group communication: The
formative text written on chemical dependency counseling was
Vernon Johnson’s I’ll Quit Tomorrow, written in 1971. It describes how
people in pain form walls of defenses that block their ability to share
their feelings with other people. The appendices shows, in detail, how
to use a “Johari’s Window” model of interpersonal communication to
reduce defenses, regain trust and rebuild healthy development in a
peer group process. When I helped therapists put together groups for
youth in shock and denial from the shootings, we used this basic
model to begin to reconnect them to one another. Then we supported
the natural human dynamic of mutual support take root among the
adolescents.
2. The Feelings Chart: What to do when feelings emerge?
Although the final part of resolving sadness and fear is following the
grief and loss cycle of replacing life’s losses, making the connection
from sharing feelings to that model is a difficult one. A school
psychologist that had worked with me in the mid-nineties saw the key
to violence to be prevention long before I did. Mike Phimister is a
short, Sigmund Freud-looking elementary counselor who insisted on
the two of us treating youth with weapons violations in the Federal
Way school district. His model was that most of the youth were either
children of alcoholics or “dry” drunks. What he worked out was a
“feeling chart” approach where youth could see that feelings identified
losses or gains in life. In addition, we borrowed the denial-anger part
of the grief and loss cycle to show how anger was a secondary feeling
that covered up loss or fear of a loss. Once we helped them make this
discovery, we were able to move them to place their “loss or fear of

Continued on page 7
Community of Recovery • Fall 2002 5
Continued from page 5

Minnesota Model Process in the Classroom

“Isn’t there a stigma on the kids in that class as drug addicts?” The
school counselor was worried, remembering the old “aftercare
class.” The classroom teacher and I shook our heads in unison,
“No, the kids label the classroom culture by its content and, frankly,
at least 30 percent of the kids aren’t chemically dependent. Some
have substance abuse or eating disorder problems and have
problems with aggressive feelings towards themselves or others.”
The content is all about using community resources to build healthy
development — treatment happens in the community. We had just
taught the youth the three parts to the C-STARS Model and the
class was becoming known around campus as a place where young
adults were working on building new relationships. Frankly,
anything with the tag “relationships” in high school creates a
positive interest. The final part of the model is that it is Minnesota
Model in nature, which means that anything that is used in the
curriculum will parallel the 12-Step Program to fully support any
youth who are in those programs. Each youth has to have an 80-
hour service plan that supports an abstinence lifestyle and any
therapeutic activities that they need for their individual needs. In
addition, it is based on the building of assets using the Minnesota
Model. Each youth has one or more mentors with the goal that
“each youth will be able to identify five adults that are concerned
with their success in life.” Obviously, the youth in the 12-Step
Program have sponsors. Each youth also has to choose an adult-led
peer group activity where they can affiliate and enjoy social
development (athletics, community service groups, co-curricular
study groups, scouting, etc.). The youth in the 12-Step Programs
have a home group. Finally, the class chooses curricula where
members can practice personal responsibility and restoring broken
relationships through activities that are parallel to steps 4-9.
Meditative and reflective activities support whatever spiritual path
loss” onto a version of the classic “Grief and Loss Chart” from
each student takes in their community life. The class, as a whole, is
Elizabeth Kubler Ross.
active in developing class projects that “carry the message” of
healthy development to the community as a whole. This is part of
3. The C-STARS Grief and Loss Model: At Santana, we first
their community health practicum.
used a Critical Incident Debriefing to get all the youth talking about
the event and facing any tendency towards denial. Then, we showed
It hasn’t been an easy transition to consider myself part of the
them that their experiences were normal for acute stress (nightmares,
violence professionals’ field. However, I am grateful for the
numbing, hyperarousal, etc.) and that they needed to work through it
opportunities that have come my way to play a role in our
or it would grow into symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder over
communities’ needs for both drug-free and SAFE schools. And,
time. The model that several of us refined at Santana and gave to the
remembering that most of the youth in the community health class
students in classes and groups is re-printed here. It is equally useful in
(along with the teacher herself!) WERE in recovery from chemical
showing youth who have had past trauma that what they have gone
dependency, I was able to fall comfortably asleep during my flight
through since is an understandable process — they do not have to stay
home and arrive in time for my 7-year-old daughter’s soccer game on
“stuck” in anger, at themselves or others. The group then helps them
Saturday morning. With both parents in recovery from chemical
rebuild what they lost in their lives. We have been doing this in
dependency, there is a special satisfaction to seeing the spread of the
chemical dependency recovery since the first treatment programs
Minnesota Model of Recovery throughout the teenage world that is
were built in Minneapolis, San Diego, Yakima and across the country
waiting for her and her biology.
in the 1960s.

Understanding the Meaning in our Emotions For over 15 years, Dr. David D. Moore has been project director charged with
PAST FUTURE developing Safe and Drug-Free Schools programs at the Center for the Study and
Teaching of At-Risk Students, University of Washington. This includes six field
research and training projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S.
GAIN

Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the U.S. Department
of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services. He has served as director of several
GLAD EXCITED associated mental health and chemical dependency agencies, including Scripps
Health McDonald Center in San Diego. He currently leads the C-STARS national
SAD AFRAID school-community restructuring demonstration project in Juneau, Alaska. Dr. Moore
LOSS

is a frequent presenter and contributor to medical journals on the subject of

Anger counseling and treatment for at-risk and addicted youths. Dr. Moore has been a
certified and licensed Chemical Dependency Professional for 20 years and an
Denial addictions psychologist since 1995.

Community of Recovery • Fall 2002 7