It’s up early today and a quick breakfast before driving to Oxford. It’s a mere 80 miles and my satnav says it’s going to be an hour and forty seven minutes, so of course I leave at 06:15, which in theory means I will get there at 08:02, a full hour early. Given that I will have to find a parking spot in a street close to the service I am visiting this seems a reasonable tome to arrive. I finally get to the service at about 09:45 due to an accident on the M40 and appalling traffic in Oxford. That and the fact that by the time I arrived in the parkable streets of Oxford all the spaces were taken. I finally found a space in a rather dodgy road position but by the time I had found it I just thought “fuck it this will have to do”. I walked, actually I more limped due to my stiff calf muscle and swollen foot, to the service hoping that I would find my way back to the car at the end of the day. Although since discovering that my phone has Google maps on it this anxiety has been decreased in my life. I arrive and meet the team and we settle into the routine of the assessment visit. We introduce ourselves to the members of the service we are accrediting and get on with the business of reviewing their evidence and asking them all sorts of questions about their experience and work practices. I obviously cannot share any of this. What is so lovely for me is that feeling sitting in a room, in a circle of people who are committed to exploring who they are and how they can reform their personal universes to live more fulfilling lives. There really is nothing quite like it. It is not a random process or a matter of luck, there are rules and there are structures that enable this to happen. It is a risky but safe place to be. In essence people are trying to make meaning of their lives to date, how they became who they are and how they can live a life that is more …. This is the difficult bit. What we all want for ourselves in our lives is not the same and finding out what we want and how we achieve it is a hard task. In essence the participants in this are accounting for their lives to date and using the shared experience of the lives of others to cooperatively explore their individual personal universes, or how their world makes sense in relation to their experiences. This exploration inevitably is embedded in the personal relationships in the community, in a real time here and now context. For anyone who has not done this it is difficult to imagine the impact that this can have. It takes great courage and moral fortitude to undertake this journey and to expose and explore all those things that shame us, make us scared, and all the hidden Dark and Tricky parts of us that colour the way we make meaning of the universe and our relationship to it. I spent many years sitting in these circles with high risk prisoners exploring the universes of those that killed, raped and in general were at war with the rest of humanity. The bravery of some of these men was outstanding and exquisite, which I doubt will ever be a popular view of people labelled criminals or even worse, animals.

 In a conversation with an old colleague we compared our experiences of recently having contact with the medical profession due to life threatening illnesses. Our experience of the industrialised nature of medicine and the constraints met with doctors who dislike questions were similar. It led us to discuss the nature of the therapeutic community and the fact that people (carbon based organic mammals) have processes that require time (18 months at least in a TC) to explore, account for and change the self. Despite reductionist demands to distil the essentials of a treatment and to just deliver those components that are deemed the “active ingredients”, people just go taking the time they need. That’s human mammals for you. Once you accept that the process becomes accessible and a thing of beauty, not an aggravation, frustration or scientific imperative to reduce.

The day went well with the community feeding us well and being very open and welcoming. Occasionally the review team would huddle together and discuss their experience of the community and scribble notes and frame questions for the next session. Nice people. I always want to spend more time with the teams but alas we are always working busily to get the work done and do the community justice.

At the end of the day we give some feed back to the community and promise to have our report with them in a month. Then we, the team, scatter in our different directions. I head for my car and only at the end point have to try three different streets before I find my car. I tap in my home destination to the satnav and head for home. Getting out of Oxford was a fucking nightmare. Tiny streets, one way systems, huge congestion and a plethora of road works; when I do get onto a dual carriage way there is another hold up. It takes a long time to get home where I meet my partner who has just returned from the gym. I devour soup and crackers and watch a football match before retiring to bed very tired and glad to horizontal. I am hoping all my impressions of the day will consolidate and some of the questions I’ve asked myself about today’s experience will think themselves through while I slumber. I take my night drugs and try to sleep.