Hello again, dear friends.
TLDR: Please attend our farm party fundraiser tomorrow. If you can’t make it, please send a donation (preferably a small, recurring monthly donation) so we can keep providing life saving non-religious addiction recovery services to our community! If you’re reading this, you know the distinct pain of addiction, and hopefully the peace that recovery can bring. Please help us continue to provide space for other people to find that peace.
Keep reading for more about why RD is changing lives.
Over the past two years Recovery Demystified has held 93 support groups, had 35 sober social events, and brought together over 1,300 members of our community here in Northwest Arkansas. We’ve seen people arrive at our support group after getting out of the psych ward, or jail, or the worst breakup of their lives, after a car crash, or after their friends stopped talking to them.
I almost died as a result of my addiction (more than once), my sister barely survived, and several of my friends didn’t. It’s a miracle I’m here talking to you. I’m not alone.
People who make it to our group learn to open up, connect with each other, and begin to heal the wounds created by the consequences of their addiction. We laugh and we cry, sometimes in the same breath. These are people who have been alienated by the ubiquity of religious ideology forced onto them. People who have nowhere else to go. People from marginalized groups that are beaten down and forgotten by society. Their pain is released and transmuted by the power of connecting with others in the group.
Many of these people have taken leadership roles in our organization, some are on the board of directors and others, after a year of attending the support group — are now facilitating it.
The Recovery Demystified podcast reaches every corner of the earth, and has climbed to the top 5% globally, according to Listennotes.com. Thousands of people across the globe tune in each month to hear a message of hope: that they’re not broken, healing is possible, it’s gonna be OK.
This is all intertwined with the pain of the stories I hear, and my own stories, of watching people die before they receive help. Nobody should have to die from their addictions because there wasn’t a place out there to welcome them. For 1,300+ people and counting here in Northwest Arkansas — we are that place. I have no doubt that people stayed alive because of our support groups.
What I’m trying to say, is that in an an increasingly broken and traumatic world, we are a force of healing. That healing radiates out into our community in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. If you want to contribute towards this healing, please snag a ticket to our fundraiser, or donate via our website, our Patreon, or by subscribing to this Substack for $8/month.