CHRIS NEWCOMB: welcome to Peer Into Recovery, a podcast with a focus on the profession of peer support. For more information about how to subscribe, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I am your host, Chris newcomb, of Peer Into Recovery Podcast, the VPRSN Network. Our Facebook page is growing, and if you are a listener and have not joined us, please do. VPRSN Network is the page, VPRSN. And today, we have Robyn Hantelman joining us.

Robyn is very accomplished and well known in our community, has a great passion for helping folks. She has a master’s of education. She’s a registered CPRS and she’s also a certified older adult peer specialist trainer and a revived trainer. She also has MARS, Medication Assisted Recovery Supports Trainer. And currently, she’s working as a recovery coordinator for Guchelin Powhatan Community Services and the Rural Overdose Outreach Team or ROOT Project, and is serving as the co-chair of Virginia Year of the Peer 2020-2023 initiatives, and I think has almost solved world poverty. So pretty much everything’s good because Robyn’s here. No, it’s great. Great. It’s really good stuff. So let’s get into it. I’d like to learn more about you and our listeners would too. Tell me your story of origin.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: Goodness. Well, my story has a lot of years of trying to figure out where I fit in to things. I was born in, actually, I was born just a little ways up the road from where I am currently, which is Henrico, born in just outside city of Richmond. I grew up about an hour and a half southwest, in a little town called Crewe Virginia, in the shadows of Farmville. I’ve been looking for my crew my whole life. I think that recovery has given me a pretty solid crew, no E. I’m an only child. My folks were a little bit older when they had me. I developed some of those typical only child things, some perfectionism, some overachiever things. And also it’s a really great place to be under a microscope, I think, when you grow up in a small town. And I wanted to do everything, so all of those letters and acronyms and things, that’s kind of a pattern in my life. I was a cheerleader in high school. I was definitely involved in everything. I was an emergency medical technician with our volunteer crew down in Crewe. Wanted to just head off to college, like couldn’t wait to get going.

But I still felt like there were some things that I hadn’t addressed with, my mental health and when someone who’s accustomed to be in a big fish in a small pond goes to a much larger pond, you might forget how to swim. And that’s a lot of what happened to me. I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do and really fine tuning things. So I started at James Madison University and went there for a couple of years. And then the pull of family and the pull of the pursuit of wellness brought me right back to good old Farmville, Virginia where I got a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. Very loyal to Longwood. I started picking up some unhealthy habits and some unhealthy relationships and realized at some point that I hadn’t addressed some trauma. And then at some point physical illness started to have an impact on my life. Grief started to have an impact on my life. And those relationships became a lot more strained. And the more strained those relationships became, the more I turned to means of escape through substances, alcohol, compulsive behavior, just the whole gamut of things that were not healthy for me.

I had witnessed a lot of trauma at a fairly young age in my late teens working in as a first responder in a rural area. And I internalized a lot of that, I think. Combine that with the diagnosis of lupus and fibromyalgia in my early 30s, late 20s, early 30s. And I was a little bit of a mess, but I kept trying to achieve and kept trying to live up to the standard. And at some point, things caught up to me. I managed to get a master’s degree while being what I thought was a functioning person who used drugs.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: What I found, and I would be curious to hear what your thoughts are in your journey, is as I began to embrace health and wellness as best as I could, achievements still matter. And it actually has gotten more since I’ve gotten into recovery, but it’s balanced with my view of who I am. It’s not, I could never achieve tomorrow, ever again, and it has nothing to do with who I am as a person. But that’s a leap to make, and it wasn’t a quick leap. So was that kind of part of your journey?

ROBYN HANTELMAN: That’s super relatable, Chris.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: When you actively pursue health and wellness, I think you come home to yourself.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: Yes, it feels authentic, and you can actually come into your own. I actually mentioned this in a recovery meeting recently, life becomes more about, less about the things we have to do, and more about the things we want to do, and the stuff we get to do because of recovery. Having a chronic diagnosis just opened the floodgates. You know, it doesn’t take long, and that became my new way of coping, and turned to opioids and alcohol. It’s a work in progress. If someone had told me that I would get to almost lose my fight with addiction.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Transitioning then into current time, let’s talk your registered CPRS. When you’re registered CPRS, the CPRS other part goes away because now you’re registered?

ROBYN HANTELMAN: No, that’s actually a really good question, and I hope that some of my past and future PRS trainees, since I’m a trainer as well, I became a trainer this year, which was a really big goal of mine. I hope that they’re listening though, because a lot of times we don’t know what the letters mean and what the alphabet soup is all about. We take a 72-hour training that is endorsed by Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, and take a 72-hour classroom training, 500 hours or more, if you’re like me. 500 hours of 500 hours, maybe a few years, I don’t know. But that’s when you really get that valuable experience of being a peer and learning what it’s like in real time to apply some of that book knowledge from the 72-hour training. Then you take a test from the state board or state certification test, and that makes you passing, that makes you a certified peer recovery specialist. So after we get our certified peer recovery specialist, the CPRS, then we can apply for registration status through the Virginia Department of Health Professions. What being registered gives us is the ability to have our organization bill Medicaid for that awesome, valuable peer support service.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Awesome. So, peer recovery specialist, and then you’re also a Revive trainer. And Revive is a great program to teach people about using Narcan to help folks who are in an overdose situation and saving lives, which is awesome. The certified older adult peer specialist trainer, I believe, or just a specialist trainer. Tell me about that. Tell us about that. I had heard of that before.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: Sure. That’s a relatively new initiative in Virginia. But the certified older adult peer specialist curriculum was developed by some amazing folks out of the University of Pennsylvania, who trained a select group of those of us from Virginia who were already PRS trainers. And we were selected to become trainers of the COAPS curriculum. And we will start implementing that in Virginia. Let’s see, in about three short weeks.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow. And so what is the substance of what you’re doing with that?

ROBYN HANTELMAN: So we focus a lot on recovery across the lifespan. There’s a lot of integration between not just substance use and or mental health challenges, but aging and services that we need to keep our wellness intact as we progress through life. Reaching older adult status is one of those get-tos. It’s a gift. So how do we help people to remain well and stay centered in their recovery to get the best quality of life during the golden years?

CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s really great because we live in a culture that worships youth. The idea of purposeful inclusion to wellness and health doesn’t just stop because you hit a digit. That’s just awesome. That’s really cool. Then the Mars Medical Assistant, tell us about that.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: I’m a really big fan of Mars. Really large part of my recovery, actually my initiation into my own recovery process involves going to basically trying everything other than a medication-based pathway. Mars focuses on how peers can support each other by embracing the knowledge about medications like buprenorphine or spoxin, vivitrol, methadone, sublicate. Anything focuses primarily on medications for opioid use disorder, and just getting the facts about that information. There’s so much misconception out there. People don’t know what they don’t know, but I’m passionate about this because it was such an integral part of my pathway. In the beginning, I took a medication and life didn’t suddenly get better. I know this is surprising. Life didn’t suddenly get better just because I took a tablet or put a film of suboxone in my mouth. I thought all of my relationships would be intact again, and it just doesn’t work that way. So Mars is the stuff we do other than taking the medication. It’s how to make medications like suboxone and methadone work most efficiently, and that’s through that value of peer support.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I heard a lot of stories of how people were on them for a certain amount of time, and then they were able to wean off of it, but it was integral in there. It’s like a bridge to get from point A to point B, because we all know if you’ve had any run-in with a substance, when you don’t use a substance, it still knocks on the door for a while.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: Absolutely, and that’s a beautiful thing for me about suboxone was that I walked into a suboxone clinic about almost five years ago on November 29th, will be five years since the day I walked in there. It was the only thing I was doing for my recovery, and I started on a fairly significant dose, but then as you start to bring in more recovery tools and more connection, and more peers, and the goals start to shift. They have to diminish a little bit. I have to go to the doctor, but I get to go to a meeting later. I get to talk to a friend. I get to do something with my husband and son, and I get to be present. The medication is great for initiating recovery, but the sustaining, that’s the stuff that we get from something like Mars or the meetings that I attend for my recovery, which are MARA, Medication Assisted Recovery Anonymous, fellowships like that and places where we can go and finally feel understood. That’s been integral to my recovery. So I took Mars as soon as I knew Marjorie was offering it, because being a Mars trainer is important to me so that I can share that, you know, recovery doesn’t have to look like what we think it has to look like in the beginning.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah, you know, there’s lots of, as a musician and a music fan, I’m sure many of our listeners love music. The heavy metal god, Alice Cooper, was a massive alcoholic. And the way he got sober was golf. I think one of his roadies one day was when he was hungover, was like, let’s go play golf. And he’s like, I don’t play golf like I’m Alice Cooper. He doesn’t play golf. And he goes and plays golf. And he finds out that he’s actually really good. And then he likes it. He’s a very good scratch golfer. He plays with pros. He’s that good. And that got him sober. So, you know, recovery and wellness is not a one size fits all. It’s a mosaic of different opportunities and things that we get to do to build health and wellness in. And one of those things that promotes the health and wellness, I’m pretty sure, as part of it, is the Virginia Year of the Peer 2023 campaign. That you are the initiative and the co-chair of the initiative. So I would love for you to tell us a little bit. I know some of us tops the group because you’re going to be revealing it at some point, but whatever you are clear to talk about.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: Well, hopefully by the time this reaches folks’ ears, a lot more of this is going to be out there. But I can give you a little sneak peek on that. So Year of the Peer 2023 is an idea that originated from the PRS and Stakeholder Roundtable that’s held on the second Tuesday of each month that folks are, of course, welcome to join. I’ve been attending those meetings for a while. And this idea of having a statement, having an initiative to say, peers are valuable, peers are integral to wellness. People are out there doing so much good stuff. There’s, last time I checked the roles, there were 870 certified peer recovery specialists in Virginia. That’s a lot of people doing a lot of really amazing stuff. So we wanted to figure out how to highlight that and also bring attention to some of the things that individual peers are advocating for.

So my involvement with Year of the Peer 2023 came from a little something called Recovery Leadership Academy, which is a partnership, a collaboration between VCU and DBHDS. So I went out on a limb and applied for this Recovery Leadership Academy. It sounded like a pretty cool thing. And then I got accepted. So right at the end of 2021, I was celebrating that and getting ready to embark on this new journey. So Recovery Leadership Academy is an 11-month long program where emerging leaders from across Virginia are paired with mentors in various organizations and localities. And we learn to set goals and learn to do the things that leaders do. So part of what leaders do is we propose things and we pitch projects, and we hope that these things come to life.

I don’t know about you, Chris, but I sit up at nights writing notes in my phone or notes in a journal about programs and projects and things that I want to see brought to life in recovery communities. So this is one of those things. So we have five members. So one of the big projects that we dreamed up as part of Recovery Leadership Academy, we have a capstone group. There’s actually four capstone teams within Recovery Leadership Academy. And I want to give a little shout out to my capstone team because they’re amazing. But our group came together and we were supposed to formulate a problem. Well, we had some very different problems or ideas or things we thought needed a little extra support or a little extra research. And we pitched one project. It kind of fell short. We were having trouble pulling ideas together. Then we remembered that it was mentioned about Year of the Peer by my other co-chair, Michael Lane up in Fairfax. And it kind of dawned on us all at once that we could do something.

How are we going to promote Year of the Peer? So our capstone teams project for the Recovery Leadership Academy is a media and events toolkit for Year of the Peer that anyone can use, has some great things, plug and play, Facebook posts, social media graphics. We designed a logo that I’m super proud of. We have put together a Spotify playlist, an iTunes playlist, just all kinds of different things. We had an event back in September with Vocal. Vocal sponsored us to have kind of a listening session, feedback session with a select group of peers who told us what they were looking forward to about Year of the Peer and the things they were looking forward to using as part of a toolkit. And what type of peer gear, like, do you want shirts? Would you carry a water bottle? How about a laptop cover? Just things that will improve peer morale and also help us to build connections across gaps that might already exist or relationships that we’re working on cultivating out in our community. Relationships like the ones with our first responders and law enforcement.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s pretty cool. It sounds like it’s going to be a really, really cool thing. I want to get into what you’re doing now. You’re at Goochland Community Service Board. Tell me about the Root ROT program.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: My very first day, I was looking over my job description and there was something there about fostering connection with law enforcement and first responders in our community. And of course, that was about the time that we started really taking note of that national overdose death rate. I believe that we were around 80,000 at that point in time, which of course we’ve far surpassed that at this point. It was suggested that we make some contacts in the Powhatan community in the first responder world. Kind of a familiar world to me. I served as an EMT, but ironically, 25 years after serving as an EMT in my own community, I was on the receiving end of their services as a result of having an overdose from opioids and losing consciousness. And I saw this opportunity when I first met some of the folks from Emergency Services Solutions. Met with those folks and just started brainstorming and listened in on like a community brainstorming session about how to get ahead of the overdose rate, which is surprisingly more than I thought it was going to be in an area like Powhatan or an area like Goochland.

So I hear the passion behind these folks. And these are people who have been running calls for substance-related emergencies over and over, and they’re tired and we’re all just trying to try something different. So Blanton Marchese at Emergency Services Solutions is the CEO over there, had decided to start a community paramedicine program with one of their passionate paramedics. And we just collaborated, got an MOU together with the CSB. And in April of 2021, four short months after I started there, we launched the Rural Overdose and Outreach Team, also known as the ROOT Project. I don’t think anyone had really big lofty goals for the ROOT Project. They’re like, we’ll maybe have a call every six months. Our numbers in the six month pilot for ROOT were pretty incredible as far as number of people we were able to reach, people we were able to offer recovery resources, people we were able to give Narcan and fentanyl testing supplies to in our community. People we could talk to about harm reduction, and people that I could be with and share some of those vulnerable moments with both on the first responder side and people who were patients or family members of patients who had had a substance related emergency.

So that value of lived experience, it really comes into play there. And the other thing that I think really makes root above and beyond, aside from the fact that we’re doing this in a rural area, which is a little bit off script. It’s been done, overdose outreach has been done in a lot of different areas, but doing it in a rural area, you have to be particularly attentive to build it to scale. What’s the community ready for? So we have some amazing, I call them my champions, some EMTs, paramedics, some of our folks in dispatch, some of our folks in community organizations, our folks at the sheriff’s office. We’ve been really well supported by our recovery champions in the Powhatan community. And I’m super grateful for that. Root wouldn’t be where it is without that. In a rural area, it’s definitely a microcosm, but I know a lot of the medics and the volunteers in Powhatan County. I have some roots there and some really lifelong friends who live in that area. But then I also tend to have at least a passing relationship with some of the folks that we encounter as patients. So it’s really an honor to be able to flex in that role and bring my own lived experience that comes from different diverse perspectives as an EMT, as a person in recovery, as a person who has experienced what that person’s experienced, and just bring it all together. It’s definitely an honor.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s awesome. So you’re not just integrating into the rural community of those who you’re reaching out to, you’re connecting with other resources there with law enforcement and EMTs and whatnot. So it’s really kind of a, it’s a cliche statement, but it’s true. It takes a village. It takes more than one of us to get this thing happening and to make it work and to make the impact. In the rural community, there’s a different feel about hospitals, health and wellness, all that sort of stuff that’s different than the city, that’s different than the burbs. So being culturally specific to where you’re working is a target audience. I think it’s great to tap the knee.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: Yes, absolutely. I feel like we really did. We’re trying to create brave spaces. We want to create spaces where people can go and not just know that they’re safe and that they can be comfortable, but places they can be uncomfortable to and places that they can be vulnerable without fear. That’s what we’re hoping to accomplish with Brave Spaces. We do two things very different than anything I had actually ever imagined that we would do, especially in a rural area. The first thing that we do is Julie MacIsaac is my community paramedic and person who shares the other half of my brain. Julie will train all of the folks who are running on the duty crews. She just keeps hammering away at it. And she, we crafted something together that’s called a mention, a root mention. And if you’ve ever been in an emergency situation for physical wellness, emotional wellness, any type of a crisis situation, and someone asked you a question like, hey, can these people come talk to you and visit you? I don’t know about anybody else, but my answer would have been even in in my worst moments, it would have been absolutely not. Please don’t call me because I think I might be in trouble or I think I’m going to get arrested, or there’s just it’s shrouded in shame and guilt.

So the medics in in our area, they don’t ask a whole lot of questions. They say, hey, we’ve got some friends from the Root Project that are going to be reaching out to you in the next couple of days. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. It’s they’re really nice, benevolent people. They just want to talk to you and mostly listen to what you have to say. So just be on the lookout for their call. That way, the power is on the person who feels most powerless. And if they want to answer the phone, and 78.5 percent of the time, they do answer the phone, which is a great return rate on making contact with people after an emergency like that. So the mention is a different perspective. And then we, you know, there’s a lot of talk in peer support about meeting people where they are. But I believe it was Jan Brown that recently said, why don’t we just meet people? Don’t even worry about where they are. Just come authentically to come alongside someone in their journey. We don’t force treatment, a certain pathway. We don’t force, we don’t even force recovery. We want you to feel safe and we want you to know what the options are in case you want to make changes. And if you don’t, you know what? The conversation is not over. The conversation is over when the patient or the family member wants it to be.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: We are people of story. And so there is power in the story and there’s a lot of power in listening to someone’s story without judgment and just letting it be whatever the story is.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: Absolutely. And the telling of those stories and the nights around the campfire with the guitars, that taps right into the rural culture and the rural perspective. So if we can build authentic relationship with people with familiar experiences, not to say that I’ve been there with every single person, sometimes I don’t even reveal that piece, but holding the space to allow comfort to take center stage and putting the focus on those stories, because that’s where the value of people’s experience is, is in the telling of the stories and the listening to the story.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yes. And the story lives because the person is living. We can’t divorce the two. They’re there intricately. Which if you think about it, when you talk about trauma and stuff, that’s an interruption into somebody’s story. You know, I wrote a song one night. I was sitting in our breakfast room, and I was just playing around, and I had this kind of like cowboy sounding riff that came out of nowhere. And as I was playing around with it, I was not trying to write a song, I just had a guitar in my lap. And out of the blue, I just got this image in my head of like being in a field in Wyoming, and the sun’s going down, there’s a fire and it’s crackling, and there’s a bunch of people around telling tall tales. And the song is called Parts Unknown. And the whole idea of the song is there’s this guy, and he’s heading for Parts Unknown because she’s not there. It has kind of that rural feel, but rural feel is, and it’s not like, I don’t say that in like, oh, you get your dog back if you stop listening to country.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: Get me there quick. And when you think about Parts Unknown, I like the double entendre there too, because we could be referring to geography, but we could also be referring to even the ugly parts of our stories, the things that we don’t reveal to anyone, the unknown, unspoken pieces to allow safe space for that and vulnerable, brave space to reveal the things that we’ve never revealed before. I couldn’t picture five years ago sitting here talking about having had the experience that I did in 2017, and I certainly couldn’t have pictured five years ago having the get-tos and the life that I’m having today. So there’s value in that.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow. Well, thank you so much for being on the program and talking about the root program and all the things that you’re doing.

ROBYN HANTELMAN: Thanks so much, Chris.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I’d like to thank our listeners for listening to the Peer Into Recovery podcast, which is brought to you by the Virginia Peer Recovery Specialist Network and Mental Health America of Virginia. And if you like our show and would like to subscribe to the podcast, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. And please leave us a brief review on iTunes. Until we meet again, take care of yourselves, everyone. We’ll see you soon.