The Road to Recovery
“No one wakes up one day and decides to be an addict”
Trigger Warning: This article and the accompanying film discuss addiction, childhood abuse, and suicide.
DigitalMe is our pioneering programme that allows people to talk about difficult or painful subjects with the safety of anonymity. The bravery and honesty that our participants demonstrate never ceases to amaze us and we continue to ensure that these important stories are shared so that others can be helped. That sharing of experience is at the very heart of what the Recovery Church is doing and is the subject of a recent DigitalMe.
The Recovery Church is based at Newcastle Cathedral. It provides a space where people who are seeking recovery from any addiction can be in a community with other people with the same experiences. Their trauma-informed approach seeks to understand the whole person so that they can be helped and get the sort of treatment they need. Unfortunately this is not the universal approach, as the people in our DigitalMe explain.
“Me …
I’m a dad; I’m a friend; I’m a partner; I was a bowel cancer screening practitioner; I’m really strong willed; I call myself a rambler; I love art.”
All of these people also have lived experience of addiction of some kind and know that once the label of ‘addict’ has been applied, people rarely see anything else. The addiction becomes the whole story so that services like the police, the judicial system or social services miss opportunities to delve deeper. Instead people are talked down to, not listened to and treated like failures. Worse still, sufferers are persuaded to be honest about the scale of their addiction, only to have it used against them later down the line.
The Recovery Church has a better way.
Recovery coaches who have experience of addiction use trauma-informed practice to get to the root of the problem. They take time to get to know the whole person. Those seeking recovery find they are listened to, understood, encouraged, empowered.
This compassionate, humane approach means that the people in this film are able to talk about the end of their addiction and look forward:
“Tracy gave me hope that my life was going to get better.”
The people who have shared their stories in this film want to see a change in attitudes and approach to recovery across all services, one grounded in empathy and compassion, not shame and guilt. The Recovery Church will use this film to share their practice with council leaders, public health professionals and social workers; recovery needs a community.
You can watch their powerful film here.