How Recovery Unfolds: Dr. Stephanie Brown on Her Life, Her Work, and the Developmental Model of Recovery
How Recovery Unfolds: Dr. Stephanie Brown on Her Life, Her Work, and the Developmental Model of Recovery
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An Open Community Gathering · 90 minute
How Recovery Unfolds
Dr. Stephanie Brown on Her Life, Her Work, and the Developmental Model of Recovery
With Stephanie Brown, PhD
In conversation with Mary Kennedy, LCSW
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About this gathering
Stephanie Brown, PhD, is a psychologist, author, and teacher who has spent close to 50 years in the field of addiction. When she began, recovery was little understood beyond getting people to stop. Drawing on her own recovery and years of listening closely to others, she created the developmental model, which sees recovery as an unfolding process that continues long after the addictive behavior ends. She first laid it out in her 1985 book Treating the Alcoholic: A Developmental Model of Recovery.
She went on to write about the lasting impact of growing up with alcoholism in Treating Adult Children of Alcoholics and Safe Passage, two books that gave many people language for what they had carried quietly for years. In A Place Called Self, she explored women's experience of sobriety and change. More recently, Speed looked at our culture's addiction to fast and faster, and what it costs us when slowing down feels like failure.
In this conversation with Mary Kennedy, Stephanie reflects on her life and work, the questions that guided her, and what she believes still matters most.
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Times by region
This 90 minute gathering begins at 10:30 a.m. Pacific time (PST), that's:
| Central US (CST) | 12:30 p.m. |
| Eastern US (EST) | 1:30 p.m. |
| UK & Ireland (GMT) | 6:30 p.m. |
| Germany (CET) | 7:30 p.m. |
Tip: On this website, add your city and hover over PST – 10:30 a.m. to see what time that is where you live.
About Stephanie Brown
Speaking for the first time, Stephanie recalls that she started “her story” with these words: “I was born and raised in the family of alcohol.” At the center of my family life, alcohol was the only organizer. Everyone was an alcoholic, yet no one could acknowledge this deep reality. I was the first one to do so, entering recovery and grateful for the label; others have come since, and some never made it.
Starting graduate school and her addiction recovery at the same time, Stephanie soon was asking “what will happen now, and what can I expect as I listen to others, identify as an alcoholic, fill out the realities of my alcoholic family, and my own recovery story evolves?” She has been asking these questions ever since, designing research and writing based on an integration of the developmental process of recovery and mental health theories and their clinical application. A Founder of the National Association for Children of Alcoholics, and the creator of the Family Recovery Research Project, she has defined addiction as trauma and expanded her thinking to explore technology and addiction. Most recently, she asked grandmothers to talk together about technology and their grandchildren.
Bringing treatment, training, research and teaching together, she founded The Stanford Alcohol Clinic in 1977 and served as director for 10 years. Stephanie founded The Addictions Institute in Menlo Park, CA, translating the Stanford outpatient model to the community, offering psychotherapy based on the integration of her research defining a continuum of short and long-term recovery stages of development and theories of mental health, including trauma. She has been translating and applying her dissertation research model to clinical work, teaching, consultation and writing ever since.
stephaniebrownphd.com
About Mary Kennedy
In 2019, Mary launched The Addictions Institute San Francisco (AISF) as an expansion of The Addictions Institute in Menlo Park, which was founded in 1989 on the research and theories of Dr. Stephanie Brown. AISF offers the theory and application of the developmental model as an integration of addiction recovery, mental health and trauma to the next generation of clinicians and to anyone needing help with their own or a loved one’s addiction. Today, The Addictions Institute San Francisco offers training and teaching to professionals and outpatient psychotherapy to individuals, couples and families in San Francisco, the Bay Area and across California. Mary is a strong voice in San Francisco’s professional recovery community and maintains a psychotherapy practice in San Francisco.
marykennedylcsw.com
Recovery Reimagined workshops and community gatherings are educational and recovery-supportive spaces. They are designed to complement, rather than replace, professional mental health care, therapy, treatment or an individual's existing recovery program. Personal reflection and questions are welcome, but participation does not create a therapeutic or clinical relationship with Recovery Reimagined or a guest presenter.