Michael Gallagher is an author, speaker and coach, whose recovery has involved peeling back layers of childhood trauma and family instability while examining the effects of highly controlling religious teachings. His book, Waking Up: A Guide for Transformation, is part memoir and part self-help guide. In it, Michael details dramatic events that shaped his early life and how being disfellowed and shunned from his mother’s religion fuelled his mental and physical decline into addiction.
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Adam Fout is an addiction / recovery / mental health blogger and a speculative fiction / nonfiction writer in North Texas. Adam recounts his early experiences with drugs and alcohol, and describes how he tumbled instantly into addiction at a young age. His problems began to compound as drug use led to legal troubles, disrupted his education, and caused relationships to breakdown. Adam recounts how he worked through anger and resentments to find healing, and also how taking charge of mental health issues has affected his success in recovery.
Visit Adam’s website to connect and learn more about his work: www.adamfout.com
Chekesha Kay Ellis had a busy, full life that she loved. The product of a strict upbringing, she worked hard at two jobs and had no interest in partying or trouble. But trouble found her. A fall at work resulted in an injury that required surgery, and she developed an addition to the pain medication she was prescribed in followup care. A dacade-long sprial took her to lows she will never forget and impacted her health permanently as she lost her hearing due to opioid abuse. Now after a decade of sobriety, Kay shares her joy and lives her truth by shinging a light for others.
Dennis Berry is a life coach in Colorado who has been working with people worldwide for over 15 years. His expertise is in Addiction Recovery for men. He has firsthand experience, having been sober since April 8, 2003. His journey in sobriety and recovery from drug abuse has helped him find his mission in life, which is to help others on their journey through sobriety and achieve inner peace and success in every area of their lives.
Dennis knows what it is like to be helpless and hopeless with no positive direction. He was able to climb out of the gutter and transform his life and he spends his life helping others do the same. Connect with Dennis and learn more at www.dennisberry.com.
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Kate grew up in a household with two alcoholic parents who constantly subjected her to neglect and abuse. Much as she swore she would never follow in their footsteps, the pain she carried in her heart called for escape and she turned to drugs and alcohol as a teen. Over her 9 years of sobriety, Kate has been working on a memoir that is now available. Visit www.KateRussellAuthor.com to learn more about her book, Down the Rabbit Hole: A Memoir of Abuse, Addiction and Recovery.
After 25 years of freedom from heroine addiction, Ben realizes that his sobriety has the power to transform every aspect of his life. When he and his wife divorced, he used the principles of recovery to examine his role in the breakdown of the marriage and shifted from anger and resentment into a solution-seeking frame of mind.
Ben and his ex-wife Nikki DeBartolo wrote about the experience in their book, Our Happy Divorce.
A must-listen episode for anyone struggling to understand chronic relapse.
Erica C. Barnett had her first sip of alcohol when she was thirteen, and she quickly developed a taste for drinking to oblivion with her friends. In her late twenties, her addiction became inescapable. Volatile relationships, blackouts, and unsuccessful stints in detox defined her life.
By the time she was in her late thirties, Erica Barnett had run the gauntlet of alcoholism. She had recovered and relapsed time and again, but after each new program or detox center would find herself far from rehabilitated. “Rock bottom,” Barnett writes, “is a lie.” It is always possible, she learned, to go lower than your lowest point. She found that the terms other alcoholics used to describe the trajectory of their addiction–“rock bottom” and “moment of clarity”–and the mottos touted by Alcoholics Anonymous, such as “let go and let God” and “you’re only as sick as your secrets”–didn’t correspond to her experience and could actually be detrimental.
With remarkably brave and vulnerable writing, Barnett expands on her personal story to confront the dire state of addiction in America, the rise of alcoholism in American women in the last century, and the lack of rehabilitation options available to addicts. At a time when opioid addiction is a national epidemic and one in twelve Americans suffers from alcohol abuse disorder, Quitter is essential reading for our age and an ultimately hopeful story of Barnett’s own hard-fought path to sobriety.
