Get to know Sorin Thomas, a Licensed Addiction Counselor and Licensed Professional Counselor, and the Executive Director at queer* (Queer Asterisk). Sorin has recently partnered with us at the Odyssey Center to develop a new course, Gender Awareness and Responsiveness, training counselors how to communicate with members of the LBGTQ community.
Sorin was interviewed by fellow counselor, Rachelpenina “RP” Whitmore-Bard. The two are good friends and are alumni from the same university, Naropa University. RP specializes in Contemplative Psychotherapy.
Who are you and what ignited your passion for this work?
I started drinking when I was 14 in Spain and stopped when I was 17 because I was serious about my education and I didn’t want to mess that up with my drinking. No one around me in high school seemed to understand what alcohol did to the brain. In high school, there was just D.A.R.E. but at The University of Notre Dame, it was very much about informed choices. I was really excited about that kind of programming and I wanted to equip young people with information to make informed decisions about their lives. I was an Architecture major at the time and at a student fair I signed myself up to be a peer mentor with the Office of Drug and Alcohol Education.
Eventually, the second year at Notre Dame, I was hired as the Assistant to the Director of the Drug and Alcohol Education Program where I did guest lecturing and public speaking. I went to national conferences and implemented programs on campus. That’s when I switched from studying architecture to studying psychology. I knew I wanted to do clinical, instead of research-based psychology, so I transferred to Naropa University. I encountered a lot of substance use at Naropa and decided to start a similar peer education program at Naropa to the one I was involved in at Notre Dame. We brought in Avani Dilger, who started Natural Highs. I worked with Avani for a couple of years, doing prevention work at the collegiate and high school level. Avani became a major mentor figure in my life. She encouraged me to go back to Naropa for my graduate degree in somatic psychology. She’s a motivational interviewing trainer, so my style really came from her. Her creativity also really inspired me – she does all of these experiential, fun activities with people.
I got a grant from WorkForce Boulder County to take the Odyssey classes after I graduated from Naropa because it was very difficult to find jobs in a town where there are so many therapists. WorkForce has an amazing program where, if you share with them a training that might give you a leg up in the workforce, they have grants to pay for it. I applied for the grant and received it. One thing I was really grateful for was looking at addiction work through the lens of Motivational Interviewing. It’s an evidence-based practice that works really well with people who struggle with addiction. It indicates someone’s intrinsic motivation for change. There has been other models in the past where the clinician has all the answers and there’s a philosophy of fixing the client. In Motivational Interviewing, it’s so much more humanistic and relational. In my mind, it’s connected to the philosophy of basic goodness – that everyone is whole and right, exactly as they are. If they wish to make changes in their life to reduce their suffering, then there are people like addiction counselors who are willing to support that process.
What is the impact of addiction on transgender people?
It’s very common for folks to have some kind of anxiety or depression co-occurring with a substance disorder. The transgender experience is extremely challenging and most trans people at some time in their life develop some kind of coping mechanism. A pretty prevalent coping mechanism in our society is substance use. Especially right now, there’s an epidemic of over-the-counter pain killers to numb our experience and put a buffer between us and reality. It’s not unique to the trans community – it’s an epidemic. It affects our young people.
In AA you typically have a same-sex sponsor. The protocol is based around a heteronormative assumption. It wasn’t set up to be inclusive to queer people, just like mainstream culture. We are the exceptions, and we can make it work, but the system wasn’t set up to accommodate us. There are queer specific AA meetings. Out!Boulder runs a weekly queer AA meeting.
Why is education and training in addiction important?
Historically, some addiction treatments have been punishing and shaming. I think whenever we have historical roots that have had a chance to take hold in mainstream consciousness, but then we modified them, that it’s really important to catch people up. Earlier views around addiction created a ton of stigma. And now it’s our work to deconstruct the stigma, with the most up-to-date understanding and treatment models. Right now, one of them is Motivational Interviewing, humanistic and strengths-based approaches to treatment. Training workers who are going to be interfacing with folks with substance abuse issues is really important so that when they’re sitting across from someone with an addiction, they can catch their stigma and interact with that person with more humanity.
The person suffering has enough to struggle with, they don’t need the extra weight of the disapproval of someone who’s supposed to help them. Then, they can focus on themselves and the encouragement they’re getting to make the changes they want to make. It’s actually similar to the trans experience. We spend so much time defending ourselves, defending the fact that we have a right to be. If people could just get on board with the fact that we have a right to be, then we could move into the realm of thriving. If from the start we are fighting for the right to be, then that’s where all the energy is going. If there’s space for the trans community to thrive, then we’ve opened up this whole opportunity. We have to deal with what’s right in front of us. If what’s right in front of us is this huge stigma, not until we’ve moved past it, can we fill the space with all of our potential.
What is the new training you have developed?
The training I’ve developed with contemplative psychotherapy graduate student, Sophia O’Conner is called Gender Awareness and Responsiveness. The purpose of this course is to provide participants with the necessary skills to offer gender-inclusive addiction treatment to their clients. The focus of this training is the intersectionality of gender, biological sex and sexual orientation and the diversity inherent therein. We’re going to be doing experiential activities, ways of identifying and working with your own privilege, in the hopes of interacting with the LGBTQ community in a less harmful way. The idea of the training is to feel more competent and confident working with the queer community. We’re going to present informative material and engage in our assumptions through a group process where people get to share what they’re struggling with in terms of working with the queer community. People are going to get to share their assumptions in this space and move through the mess so that those assumptions don’t come out when they’re working with clients. If people really understand how to make spaces inclusive, then they can make their own informed decisions about how to incorporate these tools, instead of just doing what they think they’re supposed to do.
Learn more about Sorin’s work at Queer Asterisk and by following them on Facebook.
“For those of us who identify outside the heteronormative bubble”