I didn't find my way to this work. I was broken open by it.
Speaker. Author. Founder of The Recovery Room. 17 years sober.
In 2009, I almost lost my life to addiction. I got sober, and I did everything I was told. I went to meetings, worked the steps, and counted the days.
At the end of my first year, I lost my sponsor, a man with 22 years clean. I couldn’t understand how someone could do everything right for that long and still be carrying that much pain.
So I kept going. On paper, my recovery looked perfect. I became a Doctor of Physical Therapy and ran my own clinic for ten years. But I had swapped the drugs for perfectionism, and I was missing from my own life. At five years sober, my marriage started to fall apart, and I came closer to using than I had in years.
That’s when my healing finally began to take hold.
I started working the steps differently. When I reached Step 9, the person working them with me turned it back around and asked when I was going to make amends to myself. No one had ever asked me that. For the first time, I stopped hunting for what was wrong with me and got curious about what had happened to me.
In the years since, I’ve built a deep relationship with the protective parts of me: the perfectionist, the people-pleaser, the part that reached for relief. Slowly, I came to understand that I was never insane or defective. I was surviving. And as those parts finally felt safe, my authentic self came home.
Then, in 2022, at 13 years sober, I lost my big sister, Jessica, to an overdose. Two people I loved, both fighting the pain underneath addiction.
That’s when I understood: stopping a behavior is not the same as healing what drives it.
So I built the recovery framework I wish I’d had on day one, the one I wish they’d had. It brings together what we now know about trauma, shame, and the nervous system with the 12 Steps that gave me my start, reimagined for modern recovery.
The Recovery Room is the result: a place where you can be honest without being shamed, and where healing starts at the root.
My Credentials
Expert care meets lived experience.
The training behind the work, and the seventeen years of recovery behind the training.
