As part welcoming visitors – I was going to say “important” visitors but they are all important – to our services, we invite some current users of the service to talk to our guest(s) about their experience of addiction and recovery and to provide some insight into how the service is helping in advancing their journey into a new way of life.

Clients are invariably co-operative and keen that people they have never met before leave the service with a much improved understanding of the destructive trail of addiction and the contrastingly hopeful narrative of recovery. I am always amazed at their honesty and I observe how visitors are disarmed by such openness which is so uncommon in “normal” life. I am invariably reminded of some truth or introduced to a new perspective. Clients always seem clear about how the service helps them, even those who may have come to it with some scepticism, reluctance or resistance.

During the most recent of these events, I listened to one woman who explained how her use of alcohol (in particular) had been an attempt to cope with motherhood. The irony was not lost on her that this rapidly led to a complete loss of coping ability. She realised she had to find new coping strategies and integrate them into her everyday life through practice. As we like to remind people, in this regard recovery is just like addiction. It takes practice. The more you do it, the better you get at it and the more it takes over your life. If you try to acquire and fix recovery to you in one go it is likely to elude you. If you keep doing all the things you need to do to move away from addiction, recovery roots itself and will grow organically.

I enjoy these service visits for a number of reasons but especially because it gives me an opportunity to re-connect at quite a personal level with the people for whom the Charity exists.

Nick Barton
Chief Executive