The Story Isn't Over: The Many Stories Families Carry Through Recovery and Loss

Session Description: Families facing addiction often watch the same video of an event and walk away with entirely different stories about what happened. This session explores why. Every culture uses narrative to make sense of shared history, and families are no different. The instinct is to seek one agreed-upon version of "what happened" and treat consensus as the path to healing. But what the camera never captures, the internal experience, the fear, the shame, the love, is often what matters most. Recovery is not built on everyone agreeing to the same story; it is built on a collection of individual and family stories about the same events, each valid, each different by design, and each deserving to be heard. Presenters bring decades of combined experience translating personal and clinical storytelling into practical tools - as a public speaker whose own story has evolved over years in front of national audiences, as an author who writes for families navigating a loved one's addiction, and as a clinician who works with families as interconnected systems rather than individual cases. Together, they offer practical ways to elicit, hold, and connect multiple family narratives without forcing consensus, approaches that hold up whether a family is in the middle of active use, early recovery, long-term recovery, or grief after a loss. Presenters will lead a live improv storytelling exercise, and attendees leave with a reframed view of "pathways to recovery": not a menu of modalities, but a group of people, each walking their own story, together.