Two years ago, I was interviewed by Huseyin Djemil for the Towards Recovery Journeys Podcast. Towards Recovery is a recovery community in Henley-on-Thames that Huseyin founded back in 2012. I edited this interview into 12 film clips and last week I posted them into the Recovery Voices section of this website. Here is one of the edited films which relates to Natalie, the young lady I first met back in 2000 and who inspired me to start writing stories about recovery.
David describes meeting ‘Natalie’, a former heroin addict, in his early days of working in the field. He reads a section of her Story that is posted on the his Recovery Stories website.
‘There were about fifteen people in my first group session, one of whom was an ex-heroin user who had been clean for about 16 years. She came over to talk to me and I was in awe. She had done exactly what I was doing and she had gotten through it. From that moment on, I didn’t feel so alone. She had done exactly what I was doing and she had gotten through it. It was a Light Bulb Moment.’
When I first met Natalie back in 2000, I didn’t realise that she would play a role in my decision to change career from neuroscientist to addiction recovery advocate, researcher and educator. Her words also contributed to my decision to write a collection of Recovery Stories. Thank you, Natalie. (1,730 words)
In my last blog post, I described my 2022 reunion with Natalie, a recovering heroin addict who first inspired me to start writing recovery stories back in the early 2000s. You can read the version of Natalie’s Recovery Story, I Didn’t Plan To Be An Addict, I initially wrote for this website back in 2013 
It was wonderful for me to catch up with ‘Natalie’ whilst I was in Wales in September 2022. She was the first treatment service user I spent in-depth time with, and from whom I learnt a good deal about the nature of heroin addiction and recovery. She told me that when she was using heroin, she did not know how to stop. She could find no information about how to stop using. She knew no one who had stopped using. The solution to these problems was to keep using, letting heroin kill her pain, shame and the hatred of herself for what she had become.
