Our Stories
Share the power of long-term recovery. If you are in recovery, a family member, friend or ally of someone in recovery, we want to hear your recovery story!
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Voice of the Recovery Community Award
Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery (CCAR) is the recipient of The Joel Hernandez Voice of the Recovery Community Award!
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Our Stories
Barbara Nicholson-Brown
Scottsdale, AZ
With over 15 years of continuous sobriety I am still amazed at how my life has changed. As a young girl the message I received was: drinking, it was FUN, made people laugh and joke, not a care in the world. Later I would see it destroy our family due to an alcoholic mother. I swore I would never be like her. But I followed in her path, step by step. From my first drink to my last I was a blackout drinker. Somehow I managed to keep a job (sometimes) but I lost friends, respect and self esteem along the way. I never wanted to admit I had a problem, though I knew it all along. Like many others I lied, cheated and stole to get what I wanted. One drink led to 5 or 10 or 20, one bottle led to 5 in a sitting and at the end of 24 years of living driven by getting high I am amazed I made it out alive. As a single woman I was unable to have relationships because everything depended how much others used. It was a selfish existence based on fear and self loathing. By the Grace of God I hit my bottom in 1990. None of it was pretty. The bright side is I was given a chance to take a different course of action and I chose to do so out of desperation. Today I am publisher of a recovery newspaper, Arizona Together and am the founder of The Art of Recovery Expo in Phoenix Arizona. We are part of National Recovery Month and the basis of our event is to offer others a place to discover how to get help for themselves or their loved ones. Whose life is not touched by addiciton? The work I have done to stay sober has been well worth the effort and I can never say thank you enough for the help I received. It really is a day at time thing. Life does not end because we get sober, life gets real and we get real with it. Drinking and drugging never made anything about my life better. My hand is out to help anyone who needs it.
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