By: Charles Romans
Carter County Times
Addiction recovery isn’t an easy road. It’s rough, rutted, bumpy, and a lot of hard work to navigate. But having the support of your community can help smooth the way. Facilitating that kind of support is exactly what Pathways hopes to do, with their upcoming community event, and every day.
Pathways will be bringing such an event to Grayson next Thursday, September 17, focused on the multiple facets of recovery from substance use. The event will be held at the Pathways Outpatient Office, at 840 Interstate Drive, from 4 to 7 pm. The goal is to celebrate recovery, educate the public, bring the community together, fight stigma, and support those on their recovery journey. Those in attendance can look forward to hearing from inspiring speakers, the chance to win exciting door prizes, enjoying delicious food, and plenty of chat and fellowship.
Pathways Peer Counselor Jackie Willis explained that September is National Recovery Month. The event on September 17 celebrates that while also working to raise awareness and help those suffering addiction and their families connect with resources that improve their chances of a successful recovery.
“Last year Brittany (McKenzie) and I kind of took the initiative to begin making it a little bigger event,” Willis said of the recovery event. “Last year we had between 100 and a 120 people here. And this year we want to grow from that.”
Willis said his thoughts while helping to put the community event together was the Kentucky motto of “United We Stand.”
“Addiction has really riddled all of Appalachia,” Willis said.
That in itself was a divide in communities, but Willis said that the isolation of COVID magnified that isolation.
“So many people still think of addiction as a moral failure,” he said.
His experiences, he said, have led him to believe there is far more to it than that. Willis said the goal of the event is to help people learn how addiction happens, and what is needed to help someone suffering from substance abuse to overcome it.
“This community has seen me at my lowest,” Willis said of his own struggles recovering from addiction. “But this same community has helped me to overcome.”
Willis said it is his hope and the goal of the event that those in need can receive the same help he received along the way.
Brittany McKenzie, who has experienced her own recovery journey, said the event will also focus on what many members of the community might not think of as a crucial piece of the recovery puzzle; what happens afterward.
“After care is so important,” McKenzie said.
Once a person has the initial recovery period from addiction, it is important that they learn how to move forward on the right path, so they do not slip back into old, destructive habits.
“The current recovery programs are doing very well,” McKenzie said. “I went through a long recovery myself. I learned how to live one day at a time. But I was also taught to build the support I needed after the program.”
The area she believes needs more work is the after-addiction environment.
“People need to be set up with stable housing,” she said. “We need to make sure that they (the recovering addict) will be going into a safe environment. Some people around here, unfortunately, have to go back into the same environment they were in when the addiction problems began.”
Both McKenzie and Willis agree that the way to begin crafting the solution for an issue that plagues so many in rural communities is to provide education of the possibilities of treatment, the resources available, and the need to directly address addiction. The September 17 event is designed to do that and so much more, they said.
For more information on the event, interested members of the community are encouraged to call the Carter County Pathways office at (606)474-5151. It is also a great way to support the event through donations of all kinds including monetary support, door prizes, or food donations.
Contact the writer at charles@cartercountytimes.com
