Real Lives Touched by Addiction: How We Recover Better Together
Breaking The Cycles of Addiction & Leading Level Healing and Change
Addiction doesn’t just affect one person.
It moves through families, nervous systems, relationships, and generations.
For me, addiction has been woven through my life in many ways, as a mother and as a wife. I have loved two husbands impacted by addiction, and I have walked beside a child through mental health challenges and substance use. These experiences took me into the deepest corners of addiction and into systems that were meant to help, but too often couldn’t hold what families truly needed.
What I came to understand is this: families don’t fail; they are doing the best they can within complex systems that are still evolving and often meet resistance to change.
My Story: Loving Through Addiction
My journey didn’t begin with theory or training. It began with love.
Love for my child.
Love for my partners.
Love that stayed, hoped, tried, and kept going.
We didn’t do everything “right.”
We did everything we knew to do.
We sought out support.
We asked for help.
We pursued treatment.
And still, my child slipped through the cracks, not because he wasn’t worthy, but because essential pieces were missing. Most systems focus on sobriety, not recovery. They center the individual while often overlooking the family. They treat symptoms while not always addressing root causes, trauma, nervous system injury, and relational wounds.
Families live alongside addiction every day, carrying fear, grief, and chronic stress yet are rarely included, educated, or supported as part of the healing and integration process. That absence leaves families isolated at the very moment they need connection most.
What Addiction Really Does to Families
Addiction doesn’t just disrupt behaviour, it dysregulates entire families.
It creates:
- Chronic anxiety and hypervigilance
- Emotional exhaustion and burnout
- Guilt, shame, and self-blame
- Overfunctioning and codependency
- Loss of identity, joy, and peace
For years, I believed my needs didn’t matter. Good mothers sacrifice themselves. That rest was selfish. My job was to hold everyone else together.
But here’s the truth:
You cannot heal what you abandon.
The Turning Point That Saved My Life
There was a moment when I reached a turning point in my life.
Everything felt unbearable: the fear, the grief, the exhaustion of loving people through addiction, and the feeling that I was disappearing inside it all.
And in that darkness, something extraordinary happened.
I heard a voice, gentle, loving, unmistakable, that said:
“Your life matters too. This is not for nothing. Keep going.”
In that instant, I felt a warmth and a love wash over me in a way I had never experienced before, as if I was being held by something far greater than my pain.
That moment saved my life.
Not because everything outside of me changed, but because I did.
I remembered that I matter.
That my story wasn’t over.
That love is bigger than despair.
That was the beginning of my healing.
The beginning of my remembering.
And the beginning of the mission, I now live.
The work that I get to do everyday empowering families touched by addiction to break free from the cycles, stems from this very moment.
A New Understanding of Addiction
My understanding of addiction didn’t come from textbooks alone. It came from loving people in it and from healing my own.
I was not addicted to substances, but to love, overfunctioning, and codependency, all trauma responses, not failures. Through trauma-informed training, nervous system healing, ancestral and subconscious reprogramming work, and spiritual psychology, I began to connect the dots.
What became clear is this:
Addiction is not the root.
It is the adaptation.
It is what happens when pain, disconnection, and unresolved trauma live in the body and mind with no safe way out.
By integrating both science and soul — trauma healing, nervous system regulation, subconscious rewiring, and spiritual remembrance, a deeper, more compassionate understanding of addiction emerges.
Not about blame.
Not about weakness.
But about healing what was never held.
Healing Begins With You
Real healing doesn’t come from control.
It comes from regulation.
When a mother heals her nervous system, reclaims her boundaries, and reconnects to her worth, she becomes the most powerful stabilizing force in the family.
Not by fixing.
But by modelling.
This is how cycles break.
Where This Work Lives: Beyond Blame, Into Possibility
There are people inside our healthcare, mental health, and addiction systems who care deeply and work tirelessly to help. There are programs that save lives, clinicians who show up with heart, and supports that truly matter. And at the same time, too many families still fall through the cracks, not because they aren’t trying, but because the system was never designed to fully address trauma, family dynamics, prevention, or long-term recovery.
The challenge isn’t the people, it’s the gaps, the fragmentation, and the resistance to honest change. We are still too focused on crisis response instead of prevention, on symptoms instead of root causes, and on individuals instead of families. Lives are lost in those gaps.
This is why I align so deeply with the Preventative Health Awareness Movement (PHAM), founded by Margaret Wallis-Duffy. PHAM isn’t about tearing systems down, it’s about building what’s missing. Education. Empowerment. Collaboration. Prevention.
As a proud PHAM Ambassador, I lead the Real Lives Touched by Addiction movement and podcast, amplifying lived experience, family-centered recovery, and community-based solutions that create lasting change.
My work exists both alongside and beyond the system, supporting families where they are, while helping create the new models of care and connection the world is ready for.
From Silence to Soul Recovery
My mission is rooted in storytelling, not to persuade, but to create resonance.
When we share our truth in compassionate, grounded spaces, something powerful happens.
Shame dissolves.
Agency returns.
Worth is remembered.
Remembering who you are beneath the fear is the beginning of soul recovery.
Because the truth is:
We are all recovering from something.
And we were never meant to do it alone.
A Final Reflection
If addiction has touched your life, know this:
You are not broken.
You are not failing.
You are not invisible.
Your healing matters — not someday, but now.
When families heal, systems shift.
When mothers reclaim their power, cycles break.
And when truth is spoken with compassion, real change becomes possible.
This is how healing spreads
one regulated nervous system,
one honest story,
one remembered soul at a time.
If something in this story resonated with you, I invite you to explore the free resources available on my website or join the conversation on the Real Lives Touched by Addiction podcast. These spaces were created so no one has to walk this path alone.
Visit Enable No More to learn more about our community of healing, breaking the cycles and leading legacy-level healing and change together.
