The Hopeful Journey of Addiction Recovery and Community Support: Carolyn Delaney

Lisa Belisle: Hello. I am Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. This is our video podcast that celebrates creativity and the human spirit, which is sponsored and produced by the Portland Art Gallery located in Portland, Maine. And today I'm very fortunate to have in the studio with me Carolyn Delaney, who is the founder of Journey Enterprises. Thanks for coming in today.

Carolyn Delaney: Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I'm really happy that you're here. Let's start with what is Journey Enterprises, but then I really want to talk more about you.

Carolyn Delaney: Sure. So Journey Enterprises is a media company on a mission to make recovery from addiction more visible to more people in more places. We really want the conversation to be more accessible, more approachable. We believe that visible recovery will save lives.

Lisa Belisle: And how did you get to be interested in this?

Carolyn Delaney: Well, it's an interesting story. It actually started in 1990. The name Journey is from the nineties. I got sober in 1993, so I'm a woman in long-term recovery. My path leading up to getting sober was a decade of trying to stop drinking alcohol and doing drugs without really understanding that there was nothing in there that I could control. I ended up on the streets of Portland as a homeless gutter drunk, and I had two children. In 1991, the state stepped in for the first time. In 92, they stepped in again.

I ended up in a 12 step program, and I went to rehab in November of 92. So Crossroads of Maine in Windham. And it was there that I learned that I have this disease of addiction that I can't control with my own head. It was really almost a moment of horror when I realized that there was nothing I physically could do to stop myself from picking up that first drink. My early steps into recovery were rehab, and then a women's halfway house called Voya House, and then a transitional residence called McAuley Residence. And it was at McAuley that I got my kiddos back. When I was in McAuley from 93 and 94, I was the first alcoholic there. And they knew that as a woman in early recovery with no life skills and no parenting skills, I really needed a lot of support around me.

I got my kids back, I got an apartment, I bought a house, I got married. I've just had this amazing second bonus life that I really didn't think was possible. So fast forward 25 years. I managed large IT departments my entire professional career. And in 2017 is when the first seed was planted, literally, for Journey. It was a dream, like a sleeping dream. It was about this newsletter from the nineties that I was a desktop publisher for on a Macintosh, which was really new in those days. I had a dream about the banner on the top of the newsletter, completely out of the blue. I had my own consulting business. I was doing data integration and automation, that's my jam. And completely out of the blue, I had this dream. And from that dream, amazing things have unfolded over the last seven years. And Journey Enterprises is kind of the birth of that.

Lisa Belisle: I think what you're describing and modeling is so crucial to moving to a new place of our understanding of substance abuse disorder. The stigma around substance use and the people that have this disease is so difficult to overcome. It's so easy to make assumptions about who these people are, because these people are not these people. These people are us.

Carolyn Delaney: Right.

Lisa Belisle: And to be able to tell that story and to say, listen, this isn't somebody that you don't recognize. This is your sister, your neighbor, your mother, your grandmother. It can happen at any age. It can happen to any person, and it can have a really devastating impact on any life or series of lives around it.

Carolyn Delaney: Right, exactly. The reason I started Journey is because there are so many recovery programs out there, millions of beautiful stories about people reclaiming their lives and healing the damage done, repairing relationships and being engaged community members. We're neighbors and tellers and waitresses and bankers. We're everywhere. And that was the story I really set out to tell with Journey, to lift up and amplify these stories and the programs and the resources. Because in media, this was 2019, really all we saw in the news was the overdose deaths. That's all we were seeing. And there was this group of us that were like, wait a minute. There's another side of that that is not the only way through this addiction. When I started Journey, I thought that I was going to be met with a lot of stigma. And really my experience has been a handful of people, some really interesting conversations.

What I've come to see for myself is that so many people are affected, and it's really a lack of understanding and a lack of awareness. Some people think everybody knows. Everybody doesn't know. I've met people who legitimately don't know that AA is free. Shocking. My first year with Journey, I was only met with two people that said no to my magazine when I was out doing distribution. My experience was that people were affected. People had a person. That's what I would hear. And that actually gave me a lot of hope, the fact that we don't need to create a new digital blah blah blah. We just really need to lift up the solutions that are already here. We don't need a new drug to figure out how to stop the problem.

It's that people are just unaware of those solutions. I see this in large events where I'm a speaker. When you say the word addiction, you see that energy that creates automatically. You see shoulders come up. Because the word addiction brings up somebody close, somebody you've read about, somebody you've heard about, a loved one, some type of a human being connected to that story. And depending on your relationship with that someone, energy gets created and emotion gets created. So in a room of a hundred people, everybody's got all this emotion. And because of the stigma, nobody wants to talk about it. So in the room, I can see it, it's palpable, where there's almost this, I can't breathe kind of emotion.

So I just have everyone take a deep breath. I call it out for what it is. Okay, we just connected. Everybody's sitting in some big emotion. Let's just everybody take a deep breath. I learned this in rehab, the parasympathetic something or other. Okay, let's all breathe, and you can see the shoulders come down. Even the word stigma, there's a reaction to that. But when we can call out the emotion and we can keep talking, my goal is to make people a little bit more curious and a little bit more inquisitive. We don't have to have the conversation be about, is it a disease? Is it nature? Is it nurture? But if we can just generate enough curiosity around the solutions, then because of the power of media and social media, every single human being has an opportunity to amplify something.

And the more curious people get, the more people understand what's available. Our goal is that they amplify that hope. If the only experience people had with alcoholism and addiction was me climbing out of a gutter in 91, of course there's judgment and stigma and all this other stuff. That's the very visible consequences of active addiction. What we don't see often, and when Journey started, is the benefits of recovery. We don't see that beyond the handcuffs or beyond the next stage. In the recovery process, we don't see that because some people are scared. I worked with the same people for 20 years, and I never told people I was in recovery. I told five people in 20 years that were outside of the recovery rooms, because I was afraid. And I think stigma is fueled by silence and fear and personal experiences. So with the magazine, because we're out in communities, we're at the tire dealerships, we're at car dealerships, we're in nail salons and hair salons, we're just out in community saying treatment works, recovery is possible. There's hope, help and support available. Because one way to combat stigma is education.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I find very appealing about what you're describing is, what we often hear are the things to avoid and the reasons not to have an issue with addiction. We don't want to lose our children. It's all the things that we're running from. But what you're describing is a running or walking or strolling, whatever, toward. You're saying, we're going to move to a position of strength and we're going to show you that this is possible, and it is going to be a journey, and it is going to require effort, and it will be lifelong, but it's out there. It's so easy to try to deal with the avoidance. Fear and anger and frustration, those get you so far. But the energy needed to actually positively move forward is much, much greater. It can be such a long-term process.

Carolyn Delaney: Yes, I love that. I really love the highlighting of moving towards instead of away. And I think that's the power of, honestly, the 12 step community. I'm a 12 step baby. When people share their stories, and they come from the same kind of place, the dark night of the soul, for those that know what that is, they know other people have experienced it too. When you talk about it in an open and honest way, and you see, I've been there, that type of relating to a story. And then you hear about them on the other side of that dark night and the things that their lives have become. Until you hear it in a room where you trust the speaker and the messenger, you don't even know it exists. But that's the benefit of the 12. Thank God I'm a 12 stepper, because my experience with addiction, my experience with life in general, was very, very minimal.

The fact that I am an alcoholic and a drug addict exposed me to a world that I never knew could be possible for someone like me, a woman like me, a mom like me. When I hear other people talking about, yeah, I was there and now I'm over here, I'm like, oh, maybe it's possible for me too. One of the sayings in our programs is, you're eligible too. And I always heard it in my early days as, you're eligible too for being arrested while drunk. Been there. Jail, been there. You're eligible too for that stuff. But at some point along the way I saw that, you're eligible too for a life better than you can even imagine it. I remember meeting with a woman, I was four months away from a drink, and I was on this Cloud nine, which is what happens when you stop putting crap in your body and you start getting a clearer head. And she listened to how happy I was, and she said, oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy it. But without that exposure to what's possible, there's no compelling vision of a future for someone like me without being in a space where people are honestly sharing their lives. And when you come through the hell of that, there's someone in front of you that is sharing a compelling vision for what's possible for you too. So I love that moving towards instead of away from, and that's what we do with Journey. We are no drama, no trauma, no triggers. We are all about the hope. Our goal with every single issue of the magazine is really that people put it down and say, maybe that's possible for me too.

Lisa Belisle: I like the idea of "yet" as a word also, because it's more of that growth mindset. It's more of that kind of learning based approach, which is, it might not be there now, but I'm just not there yet.

Carolyn Delaney: Yeah.

Lisa Belisle: Exactly. It's all part of the process, that you haven't closed any doors on yourself necessarily. There's always that opportunity that exists to do something differently.

Carolyn Delaney: Yes. With being in recovery, I'm surrounded by people who've been there before me. So even starting a business, there are people in recovery that have started their own businesses, so I trust the messenger. There's always that. When we stop dying, we can start living, and life can be very different than just not hurting. I think that with the opiates these days, thank God I got sober before that. It's just awful to watch. There's just such a lack of understanding about the drugs. It's not that people are getting high and woo-hoo, like smoking a joint at the Dead concert. It's like, when they stop using drugs, every single nerve ending in their body screams out for a thousand kinds of pain. If you can't know what that's like, thank God you don't know what that's like, because it's awful.

And for those that have no experience with what that's like, some people can lean into the science, and there's brain scans. There's a whole science aspect that some people can lean into once they become aware of it. But you have to get past that initial stigma, judgment. There's this ick right there. Once you can get past that first hurdle, for some people it's science. For other people, it's compassion. They connect to somebody. Some people you'll never be able to change their mind. But I believe the more we educate people on the science that we have today, I'll go off on a little soapbox. That's the worst part about it, is that we have brain scans that prove the science behind addiction and alcoholism that we didn't have in the nineties or the eighties.

Modern technology has allowed us to understand what is going on for the human body around this topic. And yet we don't use the advancements in communication and social media and media and marketing and publishing to lift up that information and tell people. It's not like, here's your brain, here's your brain on drugs. It's like, scientifically, an X-ray of your brain. In this issue of Journey Magazine, we actually have an article about the brain science. It's from a PhD. The recoveryanswers.org, this is their world. And our hope with our media company is to lift that really important and valuable information up and put it in places that can help people connect to that information. So we're in the jails and the prisons and recovery centers, and with community members who just think they're broken. We use everything we can to put that out there, because there's so much lack of understanding.

Lisa Belisle: I agree with you. I think that there are still people who believe that there's some sort of moral lacking in an individual who is choosing to use, whereas choice is so much more physiologic. It's like your psyche has to move your body towards something that it just needs physiologically. And I don't think that people really quite understand the level to which that is true. I also think structurally in our society now, it's become more attractive to consider, I don't know, some people, they've now called it the sober lifestyle. I'm sober curious. Which I think is just a rebranding of what has been going on for a long time. But I think the ubiquity of glass of wine equals happiness, or social events means using these substances, that has kind of convinced many people for a very long time that if you don't do these things, then somehow you're missing out. As somebody who chooses not to drink alcohol, that's just a choice I make. It doesn't really matter why. But then I'm in a situation and people are like, oh, you don't drink. Why? I'm like, well, why don't you drink coffee? Isn't it okay to make that choice no matter what my reasoning is? I think that's become more accepted now than it once was. But isn't that strange that we judge people for not partaking in a substance that for some of us would be fine, and for others of us, maybe it's not so fine.

Carolyn Delaney: Right. And around many things. Sugar. Part of the work of being a human, for me, is to be able to, like you said, be okay with just saying, yeah, it's not for me. And be okay with that, and letting go of the look or the questioning, or, let me buy you something that you might like, maybe you just haven't had the right drink. That actually happened to me one time. Just being okay with not caring and being really solid in how I maintain my own value system. That can be really tricky depending on how I take care of myself. For me, I believe that I have so many things between me and that very first drink. So many things. I had nothing between one and two. I really believe that if I were to pick up a drink, all of my filters would be down.

So I use everything I can between me and that, and that's my responsibility. I really believe that I do my part and the universe does their part. I don't go to war against the alcohol industry or tobacco or any of that, but one of the things that I constantly have to breathe through is alcohol that is served in gumball containers for young ones. They just keep marketing it. They're this big, and they're right on the counter, and I just breathe through that, because I know that they're targeting young ones. The earlier the better. And I think prevention, regardless of whatever stage that is, whether it's alcohol, drugs, sugar, isolation, all these things where the human psyche finds some kind of comfort and it becomes harmful for them, that the conversation can help with that at every stage. I was listening to one of your podcasts, I can't remember who it was with, but it was about having one solid human in your life, one person that you can trust. Whether that's an adult for a child, or an adult for an adult, having community or a single model of being able to say something really hard, is how, as humans, we can combat that advertising. We could step away from that.

When I first started Journey, I was in a mastermind group of women professionals. I had a consulting business, and we went around the table and there was eight of us there. When they got to me, I was the last one, I said, I'm a drug addict. I'm an alcoholic. I'm starting this thing. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I believe that visible recovery will save lives, and I'm just going to start this business. And then two other women opened up. It was fascinating. Sometimes all it takes is one person to be real in a situation like that, where it becomes okay to have a conversation. I think with what I've seen at the Chambers and the Rotaries is that I have to say why I'm there, which is, I'm a drug addict and alcoholic. I have no problem with the terminology. For myself, to me, it's really important. And I think it gives permission to people to talk to me after the fact. The more visibility we have, we'll attract people who may need to be attracted to someone who can say, I'm an alcoholic.

You never know who's in the room. You never know who is really, really struggling and just needs to connect with someone they know has been there, even if it's a surfacey level. It never is, honestly. It never stays at the thank you for sharing, the walk out to my car. There's always a hug. It's a weird thing right after Covid, there's always a hug. But with the magazine and the media, we do engagements, we are out in communities. We were at the Blueberry Festival in Machias, not a place you commonly talk about addiction. We're there with safe drug disposal. We're there for prevention, we're there with Narcan, we're there with our magazine. We're there to have the conversation. And I can see how people's shoulders drop a little bit because, hope out there. So when you go to a restaurant and you're like, no wine list, I don't need that, that actually gives permission to other people. If you're with another couple, they'll be like, yeah, I don't need to drink tonight. No wine for me.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I love to do is I love to go to restaurants and say, wow, look at that special drink that's made just for me, that has no alcohol in it and it tastes great. I'm always so appreciative of the things that somebody has taken the time to put together, to taste that little special something, so I can celebrate too. And that means a lot.

Carolyn Delaney: It means a lot. And more and more are doing that. Have you noticed that? More and more restaurants are really encouraging inclusivity and serving all of their community members. With drinks that are really in the fancy glasses with really interesting combinations of liquid that don't include alcohol. And the more we see that, the more we will see that. That wasn't true 20 years ago. That wasn't even true probably five years ago. It's only in this sober curious, sober interested. I think Covid did a lot to fuel all of this desire to really look at not drinking when we go out. So hopefully we'll see more and more. It's all over the place. In one of our issues of Journey, we did this article about, there's 14 football stadiums that have a yellow section for sober people. 14 of them. The Patriots have a yellow section. They might actually call it their sober section, I'd have to reread the story, but it's for people who want to enjoy an event without alcohol. And they're all season tickets at the Patriots. This doesn't affect a small portion of our population. If 14 football owners are saying this is important to us, it's an important topic. And the more we see that, the more we will see that. I didn't know yellow was the color, the yellow section. They have them at concerts, they have them with football, theaters. It's starting. And the more that we can say thank you to the restaurant that provides that, or thank you to the Patriots, or thank you to the concert that offers that opportunity, the more that they'll see that we're serving a population of people that's important to us, the more that they'll do that. This ripple effect that will start to spread. How do we be more inclusive, regardless of why people stop drinking. But to be able to enjoy an event without having alcohol spilled on me. That's a thank you, Patriots.

Lisa Belisle: I didn't realize that, and I find that fascinating. I also am very grateful to organizations that make that choice. But I liken it to the non-smoking section. For such a long time, people who were not born before a certain time will never know what I'm talking about. First of all, everywhere with smoking. And then we got small non-smoking sections. And of course you sit in a non-smoking section, it's right next to the smoking section. You're on a plane, and the next row back would be the smoking section. Yes, people, this did happen. But then eventually it came to a place where it's like, oh, well actually maybe we should be primarily or entirely. And I don't want to stigmatize the people who choose to smoke. That's not the point. The point is that if you're choosing to do something and make something available over here, there is going to be an effect to the people over here who may not choose to do that. So how do you strike that balance?

Carolyn Delaney: Right. And there are also, what do they call, sober cafes, in New York and Boston and places where they have, I don't think they call them bars, but it's just a venue where they serve drinks that are not made with alcohol, where there's dancing and bands and live music and coffee shops. They're popping up all over the country as a way for people to have kind of a third space to go, that's not work, that's not home. It's called a third space. And to enjoy an outing or an event. Actually, I don't even know if it's without, as much as it is welcoming, being more inclusive of those that choose not to drink for whatever reason. There's a movement towards the more healthier lifestyle that excludes alcohol. We don't do a lot of that in the magazine, because of our distribution. Our goal is really to lift up and amplify the resources, and coming from people that, I would say half of us are in recovery, we have an opportunity to share a message to people who know that we've been there. So we're a little more trusted.

But I can tell you, the person who's sitting in prison right now for drugs has no idea about the yellow section at the Patriots. There's no awareness of all of the society that is now shifting to this more inclusive, more welcoming message to the masses. With Journey, I hope we'll see more signaling. I know we'll see more signaling. I have an event coming up at Colby College to talk to some of the healthcare students. One of the questions that often comes up with healthcare providers and others that are interested in what we're doing is, what can we do? And I think for the people that are people-facing, you don't have to ask them directly, do you have a problem with alcohol? But if you put up a poster that talks about finding help, anti-stigma posters that are really that message, how important it is to be able to ask for help and resources, that type of signaling is so valuable.

I went to my PCP, and they're like, are you safe at home? I'm guessing it's a requirement that they have to ask that. But what would probably help me more is like a domestic violence poster that I can look at quietly, and with the phone take a picture of the QR code. That would probably help me more than some random person asking me if I'm safe at home, if there are firearms at home. I'm guessing that's all required. They've been asking me every time I go in now. But that signaling probably would be more helpful to the person who is not feeling safe at home, because if they're not feeling safe at home, they're certainly not going to feel safe with some random person coming in for three minutes. Just my thought.

So the more we signal, the more we get to amplify hope, the more people that talk about recovery, and the more people say, I'm choosing to not drink here, they'll create a ripple effect. I brought you one. Amplify hope. And I have it pointing towards me, because I believe every human being has an opportunity to do it. When people become aware of the type of hope that they could amplify, that could actually save lives, we're hoping they'll choose to do that. We hope they'll choose to amplify messaging that reduces stigma, sends a signal to others that it's okay to ask for help. That we've been there, we survived, and there's an amazing life on the other side. That's the type of messaging that we'd like to see more people do.

With this issue that's coming out next week, we have our first type of new thing in our magazine, and it's called Burger Glue. It's a poster. It's an anti-stigma Narcan poster that you can rip off the magazine and hang up on your wall. And it's our first attempt at trying to extend the amplification for other people to help us, because the magazines stick around forever and we want them to be able to hang something up. We know that people pass it along and everybody knows somebody. For Journey, we keep our focus on amplifying the hope and resources and personal stories, so that more people will live.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things that you mentioned is your children early on. And having recently spoken with Rebecca Hoffmann about intergenerational impact, it really strikes me that what you were doing for yourself was also something that was going to impact others around you, and in particular the next generation in your family, your children. There's so many layers to it. At the time, providing a physical and safe home, which obviously you move to that place with them. But then there's also the modeling of moving towards something different and taking on something new. And I know you've done that not only through working with your own recovery, but also starting a magazine a little later in your life, and deciding, okay, I wasn't there yet, and now I'm at this new stage, and I'm going to keep moving forward. And I think that that's so important for people around us, but specifically our kids.

Carolyn Delaney: Yes, absolutely. I know my kids' lives were saved because of McAuley Residence. McAuley is multi-generational. It affects ripples. But my kids have seen. I always felt like I was this far ahead of my kids on the maturity scale, trying to figure out, this far ahead. I was a single mom for 10 years, trying to balance two small kids. I was 30 years old. I bought a house and I was sober, thank God, because of the community. I had this community of mamas around me that helped me get through what being a single mother in early recovery looks like. And at each stage. So in 2000 is when I went from junior developer, like eight people down from a CEO in a call center, to director of IT in one week. Junior developer learning at the speed of light in an environment where I'm just soaking it all in. Everybody got laid off above me, massive layoffs.

I now run IT. I've never been to college. I've never been certified in any technology, and now I'm in charge of other people's salaries, and a lot of tears, a lot of overworking, a lot of figuring it out. And my kids saw all that. My kids were part of that process of, I don't know how to do this, but here's where I'm at. This is the position I find myself in. I can either make a decision to go back to a junior developer and get out of that, or do everything I can to figure out what are the resources available to me. It was a lot harder back then, because you had to buy these 300 word big books to read, or from the library. This was in 99 and 2000. And my kids are resilient. They've got grit. My daughter put herself through college. She's got an MBA, and her study habits are so much better than mine. I've learned from her. I don't know what their paths would've looked like without me getting sober, but we would not have been together. And probably as a mom who really struggled to be a mom, my desire to be the best mom, and just not knowing what that looks like as a sober woman, one of the best things we did was family game night. This is where I could see the ripple effect of traditions, where when they were teenagers, we played board games on Friday nights. I think secretly they called it forced family fun. But Friday nights was board night. They were not going out. They weren't going to dances. They were playing board games with their mom and the cat. And that started when they were young. And we still have family game day, and they're 37 and 33, and now they're board gamers. That's a big part of their life. That's a big part of my life. That's a big part of our life. We have a family game day monthly, and I think that that is it.

Are the relationships that I wished maybe better, I don't know, but they're pretty darn good. I have amazing kiddos, and I have to believe that my own personal journey with them affected that. The fact that we were able to, we went to a Saturday 12 step meeting for years. They had babysitting, and they got to know this woman named JoJo who was a little kooky, but she was their babysitter. Every step of the way, all of that impacted them in a positive manner. Had I tried to define that path for myself, I couldn't have created it, if that makes sense. I couldn't have said, oh, they're going to go to this school and they're going to go to this college and we're going to do that. I couldn't have done that. But their trajectory changed forever, really because of McAuley. It really was the catalyst for rooting in recovery for me, especially with my kids.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I guess in talking to you, I now understand why you won the SBA award.

Carolyn Delaney: Yeah. I still don't know. Thank you. I think it was right time, right product. It was an amazing experience. Because what I love about winning the SBA award, besides meeting the Vice President and going to the White House, was that it put this conversation about addiction in a completely different audience, and has the ripple effect of winning that award. I now am invited to the table to have conversations about making recovery, and even a little bit mental health, just to bring resources to bear for other audiences in a way that is digestible and approachable and accessible. At the SBA, we were there with engineering and accounting and all these different types of businesses, and we're all about recovery. So it was magical. I was shocked. I cried for days. It was an honor, an absolute honor.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it's been an honor for me to talk with you today, Carolyn.

Carolyn Delaney: Thanks, Lisa.

Lisa Belisle: I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Carolyn Delaney: Me too, me too. Great questions.

Lisa Belisle: I hope that those of you who are listening take the opportunity to try to get to know the work of Carolyn Delaney with Journey Enterprises, in particular Journey Magazine, which I understand has some fun and exciting things going on in the upcoming or current issue by the time you watch this. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You have been listening to or watching Radio Maine, which is our video podcast, celebrating creativity and the human spirit, and is sponsored by and produced by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Thanks so much for coming in today.

Carolyn Delaney: Thank you.