Next NAMI WRAP Class
When: September 5th – October 24th, Thursdays from 2:30-5:30pm
Where: Bridgeview Resource Center, 505 Omaha Way, Vancouver, WA
Who: Individuals in recovery or on their journey
Developed in 1989, the Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) is designed to help you 1) identify what makes you well, and then 2) use wellness tools to relieve difficult feelings and maintain wellness. Your WRAP program is specific to your individual recovery because it is designed and implemented by you and you alone. WRAP is not intended to replace traditional treatments, and can be used as a complement to your current treatment plans.
What is WRAP?
Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) is a simple and powerful process for creating the life and wellness you want. With WRAP, you can:
- Discover simple, safe, and effective tools to create and maintain wellness
- Develop a daily plan to stay on track with your life and wellness goals
- Identify what throws you off track and develop a plan to keep moving forward
- Gain support and stay in control even in a crisis
The WRAP process supports you to identify the tools that keep you well and create action plans to put them into practice in your everyday life. All along the way, WRAP helps you incorporate key recovery concepts and wellness tools into your plans and your life.
The five key concepts are at the core of WRAP and, along with the WRAP values and ethics, help bring WRAP to life in your life.
- Hope. The belief that we can get well, stay well, and go on to fulfill our dreams and goals. When we consider what hope means to us, we can also consider ways to increase hope in our own lives.
- Personal responsibility. It’s up to each of us to take action and do what needs to be done to stay well. We get to decide what personal responsibility means to us and the steps we want to take to be responsible for ourselves and our wellness.
- Education. Learning all we can about what we are experiencing helps us make good decisions about all parts of our lives. We can each define education for ourselves and explore steps we want to take to learn more in any area.
- Self-advocacy. Reaching out to others and expressing our needs helps us get what we need, want, and deserve to support our wellness and recovery. We can determine for ourselves how we want to self-advocate in different areas of our lives, including how we want to communicate our needs and preferences to others.
- Support. Receiving support from others, and giving support, will help us feel better and enhance our quality of life. We get to decide what support means to us, what we look for in supporters, and how we want to provide support as well as how we want to receive it.
The foundation of WRAP’s six parts is the wellness toolbox. Using the tools in our wellness toolbox, we build our WRAP.
- Wellness Toolbox. A list of skills and strategies for keeping ourselves well and for feeling better if we don’t feel well. Wellness tools are simple, safe, accessible, and often free things we can do to recover or maintain our wellness. They give us hope and help us feel connected to others and to ourselves.
- Part 1: Daily Plan. The daily plan is a simple structure for putting wellness tools into action for daily living. This includes a description of how we look and feel when we’re well, things we need to do every day to stay well, and things we may want to do on a particular day to maintain wellness and make our life how we want it to be.
- Part 2: Stressors. These are events, circumstances, or situations that may lead to uncomfortable feelings or behaviors. Some people prefer the words “triggers” or “red flags.” Whatever you call these occurrences, when they happen they cause a normal reaction to the events in our lives—but if we don’t respond to them and deal with them, they can make us feel worse and disrupt our wellness. In this part of WRAP, we identify our stressors and the wellness tools we will use to respond if they occur.
- Part 3: Early Warning Signs. These are subtle signs of change that indicate we may need to take some action to keep our situation from worsening. Whereas stressors are things that happen around us, early warning signs are things we notice about ourselves or our environment that tell us we need to be proactive to protect or restore wellness. In this section, we identify our early warning signs and the wellness tools we will use to respond if we notice them.
- Part 4: Signs That Things Are Breaking Down or Getting Much Worse. When things are breaking down, we’re feeling worse and worse despite our best efforts. This is the time to take immediate action to prevent a crisis. In this section, we make a list of our signs that things are breaking down and the specific, concrete plan we will follow to use our wellness tools to help prevent a crisis.
- Part 5: Crisis Plan. If a crisis happens, it’s not your fault. The crisis plan helps you stay in control even when things feel out of control by making advance plans for yourself and for your supporters for what you need during this time. In this section, we define what a crisis looks like for our personal situation, who supports us, what supports we want and do not want, and how we want to be supported by others, including medical professionals if appropriate.
- Part 6: Post-Crisis Plan. The post-crisis plan helps us navigate the period after a crisis so we can return to our daily plan on the timetable and in the way that makes sense for us. It also helps us evaluate our WRAP to identify new tools or strategies we want to use based on what we learned about ourselves through the crisis we experienced.
Whatever your goals or challenges, WRAP can help you make a plan that really works, with results you can really see. For more than 30 years, people around the world have used WRAP to support their goals and transform their lives. However you define “wellness” for your situation, WRAP can help you achieve it, step by step, your way, and on your terms.