She Recovers cofounder to speak at Betty Ford Center
The Betty Ford Center will be celebrating 41 years of helping people on the road to addiction recovery with its annual alumni weekend this Friday through Sunday.
The lineup includes a variety of events such as hikes, recovery workshops and panels. One of the guests who will be joining this year's celebration is Dawn Nickel, author, speaker and founder of the nonprofit women's recovery movement She Recovers. She will hold her "We Are All Recovering from Something" workshop at 3:15 p.m. Saturday at the Rancho Mirage campus. The cost of the workshop is $25, and tickets can be purchased at the door. For a full lineup of events at the Betty Ford Center anniversary weekend, visit hazeldenbettyford.org/ events/anniversary-event.
Nickel has been an advocate for those in recovery for several years because she's been navigating the process herself. For the past 30 years, she has attended and been involved with 12step recovery programs and has spoken about how every person is "recovering from something." Her nonprofit She Recovers, which she cofounded with her daughter, Taryn Strong, offers a host of supportive services for women all over the United States who are navigating their recovery journeys with alcohol, drugs and other addictions. Additionally, Nickel has spent years researching and writing about women experiencing substance use disorders, mental health challenges and intimate partner violence. Her book, "She Recovers Every Day: Meditations for Women," was released in February.
The Desert Sun spoke with Nickel about her road to recovery and how she utilizes the knowledge she's gained to help others. This interview has been been edited for length and clarity.
DS: You have a very exciting weekend coming up at the Betty Ford Center. Have you visited before?
DN: I've never been to the Betty Ford Center, but she's kind of one of my heroines just because I believe so deeply in the power of recovering out loud. Betty Ford was one of the very first people and women in the United States to recover out loud, to talk about not only her recovery from alcohol and pills but also recovering from breast cancer. She's such a changemaker and has helped save so many lives through helping to shatter some of the stigma associated with both conditions.
DS: Coming to the center in Rancho Mirage to share your story and what She Recovers does, I'm sure that is such a monumental moment for you.
DN: It's been on my recovery bucket list for probably a dozen years. It's a big deal.
DS: As you just mentioned, you have gone through recovery and are still on that journey three decades later. Would you mind sharing your story?
DN: I went into my own residential treatment program on the west coast up in Canada in 1987. I was a mom and I had two little girls, and I was in an abusive relationship with another person who had addiction problems. I just made the decision that my girls deserved more. I don't think I believed I deserved more at the time, I kind of had really low self-esteem having been in an unhealthy relationship. So recovery kind of introduced me to a whole new way of life, and I just continue to choose it each and every day and have for this many past years.
My daughter is the cofounder of She Recovers, and she also got into trouble with addiction in her teens, and she chose recovery. We believe that addiction crosses through the generations, but so does recovery.
DS: What did your recovery process look like, because everyone has their own individual journey, and you preach that everyone is recovering from something?
DN: It's kind of one of the pillars of the She Recovers movement. We call ourselves a modern women's recovery movement and that we're all in recovery for something.
For me, like many people, when I left treatment in 1987, I was told I had to go to a 12-step program. That's all that was available. Nobody told me to go to a yoga class and listen to some podcasts. It was go to 12-step recovery, or you will probably use drugs again and die, and it was probably true for me. Today, I think we have a much greater understanding that there are a lot of other pathways. With the principle that we're all recovering from something, we, the foundation, strongly believe that we have to be supportive to find and follow individualize pathways and patchworks of recovery. I live that in my recovery. In addition to 12-step recovery, I've done therapy, medication, yoga, writing and more therapy. Writing has been a big part of my patchwork. Believe it or not, knitting is something I do for my recovery because I find it very regulating for me, something about the click, click, click of the knitting needle. Always at the center of my recovery and my patchwork is other women. I don't believe that I would be where I am today, either in my recovery or my life, without women who are on a similar journey.
DS: What inspired you to create She Recovers and be that person that helps guide others?
DN: Taryn and I refer to She Recovers as our accidental movement. We really didn't intend to start a women's recovery movement.
For me, all through the first several decades of my recovery, I just observed that there were a lot of different ways to recover that a lot of women didn't necessarily know about. Despite the fact that 12-step recovery is still the most available, accessible recovery pathway out there, there are other things that we can do. There's Women for Sobriety, there's Recovery Dharma, a lot of people do different things for their recovery. I wish everybody felt like they had a place in recovery and they could do recovery.
In 2011, as it turned out, I hit the wall with a new addiction to work, and it was workaholism . ... I realized I had survived addiction and overdose, and I had survived cancer and I survived a lot of other things, and I didn't think it made sense that work should be the thing that took me out of this life. All I knew was that I knew how to recover because I had done it with other things, especially substances, so I just kind of recommitted myself to recovery. I looked up a 12-step recovery program for workaholics, called Workaholics Anonymous, and I started working that program. I went back to therapy and started focusing on my physical health, got really reconnected with friends and others in recovery. I started writing a blog about my experience and started this discussion of we're all in recovery from something and we need to be able to do it in all sorts of different ways. The blog was called Recovering Dawn, but people started talking back to me, so we just kind of started this conversation about women in recovery and how we're all in recovery from something. After four months of rest, I had to go back to work, and I knew that I needed to figure out a different way. So, instead of blogging every day, which I had been doing for months, we started a Facebook page called She Recovers, but I continued the conversation about how everybody deserves a community in which they can be themselves and be authentic and raw and vulnerable and ask for help.
DS: Bringing it back to this weekend, what are looking forward to with the workshop?
DN: I want it to be interactive. The way I've got it set up is I'm going to tell my story a little bit, I'm going to open up with figuring out that I was a workaholic was what started this movement. Then I want to hear from other people what it's like in recovery . ... Everybody has a thing, so what I like to talk to people about is if we just all admit that we're all recovering from something, that's really going to help diminish stigma around it.
Ema Sasic covers entertainment and health in the Coachella Valley. Reach her at ema.sasic@desertsun.com or on Twitter @ema_sasic.