SMART participant wellnessandhope (her screen name) says her “destruction of choice” started In her freshman year and continued throughout college. While her friends were graduating, she was in rehab. This was not how she thought her life was supposed to go. Eventually, though, it put her on a path to recovery and led to helping teens and young adults going through the same experiences. Today, wellnessandhope is a licensed mental health and addiction recovery counselor, working as a Project Coordinator at Youth Recovery CT and as a SMART Recovery Facilitator.

In this podcast, Pam talks about:

  • Continually abusing substances throughout college and going to rehab instead of graduation
  • Learning to make her life less complicated by not using substances
  • Finishing her education and focusing on helping teens and young adults 
  • Driving across the state to the only library that carried the book Rational Recovery
  • How the recovery needs of young people are different than those of adults
  • The rewards of watching young people connect with recovery
  • Realization that recovery makes things less complicated
  • The impacts of using social media
  • Celebrating the many ways people succeed in recovery
  • Having multiple SMART meetings available for teens, young adults, and family and friends at Youth Recovery CT

Additional resources:


Click here to find all of SMART Recovery’s podcasts


PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU COMMENT:

SMART Recovery welcomes comments on our blog posts—we enjoy hearing from you! In the interest of maintaining a respectful and safe community atmosphere, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines when making or responding to others’ comments, regardless of your point of view. Thank you.

  • Be kind in tone and intent.
  • Be respectful in how you respond to opinions that are different than your own.
  • Be brief and limit your comment to a maximum of 500 words.
  • Be careful not to mention specific drug names.
  • Be succinct in your descriptions, graphic details are not necessary.
  • Be focused on the content of the blog post itself.

If you are interested in addiction recovery support, we encourage you to visit the SMART Recovery website.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you or someone you love is in great distress and considering self-harm, please call 911 for immediate help, or reach out to 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline @ 988, https://988lifeline.org/

We look forward to you joining the conversation!

*SMART Recovery reserves the right to not publish comments we consider outside our guidelines.*

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