Faces of Recovery

Addiction Recovery – there is a great deal of confusion, stigma, shame and discrimination surrounding addiction, addiction treatment and addiction recovery. Very briefly – please find the following explanations:

Addiction is a chronic, often relapsing brain disease.
Addiction is a developmental disease that starts with substance abuse, which is what chemically and structurally changes the brain. These brain changes make a person more vulnerable to their risk factors. The five key risk factors are: genetics, social environment, childhood trauma, early use and mental illness. Several of these also change the brain’s circuitry (mental illness, childhood trauma and genetics, as examples).
Addiction treatment requires doing whatever it takes to heal the brain, the first step for which is abstinence from all use of one’s substance. This initial phase is often called rehab.
Addiction recovery is the ongoing work a person does to maintain a healthy brain – very similar to what people do to maintain their health after the initial acute care for other kinds of diseases, such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease, to name a few.
Those who have the disease of addiction (whether to illegal or prescription drugs or alcohol) and are in recovery live healthy, productive, engaged lives – the same kinds of lives as people who do not have this disease. They live the same kinds of lives as people who have had or are managing the diseases of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, as examples.

MEET the PEOPLE BEHIND the
FACES of ADDICTION RECOVERY

All the words and definitions and explanations in the world are not as powerful as the people themselves. To that end, we are grateful to the people living in recovery who have decided to share their experiences so that we all may put a Face to Recovery. It’s real, it happens to real people, and it happens all the time.