A Caring Community With John Curtiss, President And CEO Of The Retreat In Wayzata Mn.
Most alcoholics refuse to get into a retreat center to be treated because most of them have overly expensive costs and utilize demeaning approaches that degrade the people’s dignity. John Curtiss took note of this alarming situation and has decided to take action. In this episode, he joins Fr. Jim Swarthout to share how he provides a more personalized, humane, and affordable treatment of alcoholics through his retreat center in Wayzata. John explains how they effectively integrate the 12-step recovery process in their treatments to guide people toward complete healing. He also discusses how they monitor their “guests” once they are out of the retreat center to help them reduce the chances of relapsing.
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A Caring Community With John Curtiss, President And CEO Of The Retreat In Wayzata Mn.
Welcome to the show. My name is Father Jim. We're here on campus and visiting with John Curtiss, who is the Principal and Director of The Retreat here in Wayzata. Thank you, John, for being here. It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Likewise. Thank you.
Looking Back
It's an honor to be in Wayzata at The Retreat all the time. Could you tell me a little bit about how The Retreat started? You had shared a little bit with me earlier about that. Could you share that with me?
We've been around since 1998. It's been quite an adventure. In 1991, I was working for the Hazelden Foundation. At that time, I was the vice president of Hazelden International Continuum and Dr. George Mann was the founder of St. Mary's Treatment Center in Minneapolis, one of the first hospital-based twelve-step programs.
Talk about that.
George is an amazing guy. I met George during a think tank in ‘91. The theme was “Where Are Alcoholics Going To Get Help In The Future?” The cost of treatment was skyrocketing. Access to treatment was diminishing across the country. Managed care was squeezing the bottleneck, making it harder to get into treatment. We said, “We have to come up with another way to help alcoholics and addicts find recovery that doesn't break the family bank.”
George, I, and a group of medical directors from treatment programs around Minnesota, along with longtime recovered men and women business leaders, came together and we met at the Basilica, St. Mary's, in the rectory once a month for seven years. We brought social model movement people in from California to talk to us. We brought the people from High Watch Farm in to say, “What was Bill W thinking back in 1939 when he wanted to create this AA retreat center?”
Rockefeller wouldn't give him the money to create these AA centers all around the country, but he and Marty Mann decided, “We're going to create a center for the High Watch in Connecticut.” High Watch Farms started in 1939, but it was a retreat center for alcoholics to go and study the big book that had been written and learn how to take the steps together. My job at Hazelden was teaching the Minnesota model, which is the history of Hazelden.
When Hazelden started, it was to get alcoholics and addicts out of the psych hospitals where they were being poorly treated, with terrible outcomes, and overmedicated, and let's find a more dignified way to help alcoholics and addicts find recovery. They were retreat centers. People would go. At Hazelden, they'd go and listen to Lynn Carroll talk about the big book and the steps. It grew from there and became a full-bodied multidisciplinary treatment program.
Along with that comes all the licensure, accreditation, certifications, staffing requirements and growth. It got big, expensive, and heavy because insurance companies said, “We don't want to pay to find God and do an inventory, but we will pay to help deal with the co-occurring issues.” The whole treatment field across the country certainly started moving in the direction of focusing more on biopsychosocial assessments and treating the co-occurring issues that people brought to the party. By the way, that is important. You have to deal with that stuff. However, what got lost was teaching the basic principles of recovery embodied in twelve-step recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon, and NA. The spirituality of recovery stopped being the focus, and it became much more clinical and medical.
In ‘95, I wrote a business plan for a little twenty-bed experiment. I was trying to find a name for it. I plugged in The Retreat as a placeholder, which ended up sticking. We stuck with the name. In 1998, after we all rallied around the idea that what we wanted to do was create a very simple, affordable immersion in the steps and spirituality of twelve-step recovery. They said, “Do you believe in the model enough to leave your cushy job at Hazelden to do it?” After a lot of prayer, I said “yes.”
In April of 1998, I left Hazelden, and we started The Retreat with basically four employees and a handful of volunteers. Guest number one was Jimmy P., who showed up from West Palm Beach, Florida. It turns out I was his counselor sixteen years earlier at Hazelden. He was a guest number one, and it was exciting. It was the right idea at the right time in the field that everyone was concerned about the rising cost of treatment, the over-pathologizing of the human condition, and the need to get back to a simpler, more basic approach to helping people recover. That's how it started.
A Work Of God
What makes The Retreat so much different than other places?
The greatest surprise that we had when we started The Retreat was it wasn't this isolated environment where these core staff would carry the message of recovery to the guests that showed up at The Retreat. It was God working through the community. I think what we found out when we opened The Retreat was that we went to these bright light AA groups around the metro area. There's great AA everywhere, and then there are these pockets of enthusiasm that are very active in service work, sponsorship, big book orientation, with real focus on taking the steps. We went to those groups and said, “Would you be willing to not just give your AA orientation meeting that you do in detox and treatment but come and help deliver the curriculum?” They were like, “Sign me up.”
Now, we have 400 volunteers who come into The Retreat every month to carry the message of hope and recovery. There are 88 different AA and NA groups that hold meetings at The Retreat. When you're here as a guest, you're surrounded by these bright light characters who look and sound like you. You want what they have. It makes a recovery look attractive. That, to me, I think, is the real miracle of The Retreat model of care. It's this power that God works through the community that came and shone a bright light on the possibilities of recovery.
We were sitting with John for about an hour or so for lunch, and a young man came over to us, if I may be bold, as we had finished and we had empty plates. Some young man with tattoos, the whole schmear, came over and he said, “May I take your plates away?” He looked at all of us. He had shining eyes. It's the best way to put it. He said, “I would've never done this for you two weeks ago when I got here, but I know that it's about service now more than I ever did before.” It was a delight to hear that simple story.
This is a lot of what we teach at The Retreat. It's this transition from this isolated bubble that we all existed in. I'm a sober guy. I got sober when I was 23 years old, which is many years ago. Going from this self-centered bubble where it's consumed with, “me, me, me,” to being other-centered, and that's that spiritual transition where you go. You realize, all of a sudden, I'm receptive to these amazing messengers that many of them had been in my whole life, but I was consumed with me that I didn't notice them.
You mentioned a word that I'm always taken aback by here. It's not a patient. You have guests here.
We call them guests. We don't do counseling sessions. We share experience, strength, and hope. We had to alter the whole lexicon of this model to be more of a supportive educational language rather than a clinical medical language. Part of it is as the world becomes more healthcare-oriented, there becomes this distance between the messenger and the receiver of the message that things get colder and more clinical to where all of a sudden, you're dealing with the personality disorder in room 303 instead of, “No, that's Jimmy. He's scared to death, and he wants a happy, sober life. He has some struggles. He's working on them.”
As the world becomes more healthcare-oriented, the distance between messenger and receiver gets colder and more clinical.
It's like we want to keep this experience personal so that people feel like wherever they look, from our board of directors to all of our employees and volunteers, they're all in recovery. You can't look in any direction and not run into somebody who's a living example of what it is you want in your life to find joy. If you can't be happy being sober, you're not going to stay sober. Now, we've grown from this little 20-bed experiment that happened many years ago to 171 beds, and we have 12 or 13 locations around the world that have replicated this model. It's grown beyond our wildest dreams.
My challenge as the president of The Retreat and one of the founders is how do we grow and stay small. How do we stay intimate with the people we serve? When we structure the organization, me as the President and CEO, I still talk to guests every day. I'm in the hallways. I talk to people. We try to keep things flat. We don't have these layers and layers of management. Obviously, you have to run a business and organize the right business functions. We want all our employees, whether they're in fundraising, alumni services, accounting or business, to talk to the people we're serving.
It's a heart-to-heart conversation that I pick up here all often. It's like tattoos on the heart. You get a tattoo on the heart, and it is passed on from one person to the next.
That's what it's about. It's the language of the heart.
12-Step Program
It is the language of the heart all the way. In the twelve-step program, how do you see that immersion happening here in a different and more unique way than other treatment centers?
In many treatment programs now, you're lucky to get somebody through steps 1 through 3. It used to be in the Minnesota model, steps 1 through 5. You take your fifth step, and then you go out in the community. At The Retreat, we take people through steps 1 through 8. We want you to have the experience of acknowledging and accepting the fact that, “If left to my own devices, I'm not going to be able to solve this problem. This illness will kill me if I don't surrender to the fact that I'm powerless.”
The next part is looking at, “Where's the power going to come from?” This is where we interject them with these amazing bright light people and say, “These are the messengers that are going to help guide you in this process. All you have to do is be receptive to hearing the message and being willing to take direction,” which is the third step. How do you act on those messages? Are you willing to go to any lengths to live a happy, sober life? The 4th and 5th step is helping people dig deep. The people who come to The Retreat, 80% of them have been to one to five previous treatments. They're smart, they know all the words and they can't hear the music.
We're here to try to teach them the music. Part of that is taking a very deep and honest 4-step inventory, and then sharing that in the 5-step experience, and then moving them right into action around steps 6 and 7. If you look at all the treatment centers across the country, most relapses happen in 3 to 8 weeks when somebody gets out of treatment.
Retreat Center: Most relapses happen within three to eight weeks after a person gets out of treatment.
Everybody looks good in any treatment program because they're loved, fed well, and cared about. It's like, “What happens when you leave?” That's the most important part. We put a lot of energy into helping people make those contacts from day one, so they come to The Retreat with people they're going to be connecting with for years after they get out. Most people who relapse do so because they ran head-on into steps 6 and 7.
It’s the dirty little secret in Alcoholics Anonymous that it's not about not using. It's about changing the way you live your life and treating yourself and others around you. It takes a lot of soul searching and a willingness to say, “I'm willing to change the way I think, talk, and act in my life,” which is all about steps 6 and 7. We take them all the way up through 6 and 7, up to step 8, where they now have their list of people they need to make amends to and restitution so that when they leave, they're ready to go into action.
Family Program
I know I'm going to meet somebody later who runs a family program.
That's a critical piece. What we have found is that your outcomes are significantly better if your family is on the same page that you are. The family is as powerless and as challenged as the addict and the alcoholic is.
Retreat Center: Your recovery outcomes are significantly better if your family is on the same page as you.
They are being held hostage.
They're like, “What do we do? We've tried everything to get Johnny sober.” It's driving us all crazy. We don't know what to do. We've lost our sense of self. The cost for the 30-day stay is $6,900, which by itself is an amazing thing, given the fact that a lot of treatment centers are $40,000, $50,000 to $80,000 a month. Participation in the family program is included in that package.
A family member can come and be a part of our four-day residential family program, which is, like The Retreat, this immersion in the steps and spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous, the family program is an immersion in the steps and spirituality of Al-Anon. They are surrounded with 100 Al-Anon volunteers who come in and carry the message. They're getting a connection to a community of people who not just get where they're coming from. They're there. They've been with them. They're with them on this journey.
Outcomes
Any other thoughts or insights that you would offer in the conversation? What about outcomes? You had an outcome study done. I can't remember who that was that did outcomes on the twelve-step program, if I'm not mistaken.
Dr. John Kelly at Harvard and Mass General, the Recovery Research Institute. They have pulled together the most comprehensive study on Alcoholics Anonymous ever done with 10,000 lives followed over many years, the Cochrane Study. We've done outcome studies for seventeen years at The Retreat. We had a research firm out in Oregon that measured everything that we did when somebody arrived, when they left The Retreat, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months out. We're looking at everything from abstinence to quality of life indicators, from what's your relationship like with your family, work, self-esteem, relationship with your recovery community and your higher power? How much love and service do you do in the community?
We measured a whole variety of different metrics, and we found that 54% of the people who go through The Retreat will be continuously sober for 12 months, which is frankly at or better than most numbers out there that we've seen now. We started a new study that began in 2023. It's a three-year project with Harvard and Mass General, and Dr. Kelly through the Recovery Research Institute. They're going to follow people for this one-year period after they get out of The Retreat, and also, while they're at The Retreat. It's going to take a couple of years to complete the study and then begin to put the report together. We feel pretty confident that the numbers that we've experienced over all these years will be very similar.
Closing Words
Any other insights that you could offer us?
To say to people that if you're out there struggling, or if you have a loved one who's struggling with addiction, there is hope. Don't give up. Never give up. The Retreat, whether we're the place for your loved one to go, call us. You can call The Retreat at our main number, (952) 476 0566. We'll help at least hold your hand through the process. If we think, after interviewing your loved one, that they need a higher level of care, then we'll help make recommendations of other appropriate settings. Whether you come to The Retreat or not, we want to help you find hope.
If you are struggling with addiction or have a loved one going through it, there is hope. Don’t give that up.
John, you have treatment center relationships or recovery home relationships throughout the country. Am I correct?
Yes, and we are a member of NATP, the National Association of Treatment Providers, which is the best of the best out there. We punch way above our weight for a relatively small nonprofit. We have a very big footprint out there in the world. That is partly because we work together with people. We don't see anyone out there as competition, so if you're better served at Hazelden, Karen Foundation, Betty Ford Ascension Health, or any other program out there, we're going to send you there. That's the joy of working in this field.
If I may be as bold, it's always a joy to be with you and you have shining eyes. Thank you for offering hope and joy to many on this day. Thank you, everyone, and have a great and happy day.
