Family Conversations: Changing The Language Of Recovery With Kate Duffy

 

Finding the courage to recover from addiction and other forms of abuse is not an easy thing. Yet, those who are already on their journey to recovery tend to face some struggles with the kind of intervention they are getting. Today’s guest, Kate Duffy, is passionate about changing the language of recovery after facing her own battle with substance abuse. In this episode, she shares with us the story of how she pursued the recovery coaching world and became the President of Tipping Point Recovery. She talks about the many people she has encountered and the way they struggled with finding the right help that they need. Centering on recovery conversations, Kate shares how important conversations are between someone in recovery and their family who’s left in the dark. She then talks about helping families decode their loved ones and shares her mentorship and family programs that aim to gather an army of recovered people to help teach others.

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Family Conversations: Changing The Language Of Recovery With Kate Duffy

Kate Duffy, President of Tipping Point Recovery, is an inspirational facilitator and catalyst for change who has inspired growth for over 25 years. She became deeply passionate about changing the language of recovery after facing her own battle with substance abuse. Kate graduated from Lesley University with a BS in Early Childhood Education. Before devoting her time to recovery coaching, she was the Founding Executive Director of Evergreen Day School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She then moved into a consultant and training role in the field of education before becoming a life coach. Kate’s strongest skills are engaging individuals resistant to begin recovery and in educating families to understand recovery language, causing them to assist their loved one in a more impactful way. Kate trained with Earl Hightower of Hightower Associates and Michael Wilson’s CFI, Certified Family-Focused Intervention Training Baystate Recovery, nationally recognized certified interventionists and facilitators with over 40 years of combined experience. Kate, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

It’s a pleasure to be able to talk to you. Tell me how did you get started in the work you’re doing?

I think of it as the back door. I came in through the back door. I’m working as an interventionist and a family specialist with addiction and it wasn’t a typical path. I got sober and my background as an entrepreneur, I had a nonprofit preschool and did some life coaching prior to losing control of my own life. When I got sober, the pull to help others was strong. I didn’t have a Master’s as a clinician. I didn’t see any opportunity for me. I did what was recommended and I took a Getwell job. In my second year of sobriety. I found myself working as a case manager and a detox because the pull was too strong. I had hit such a hard bottom and at 50, my sobriety was so important to me. I felt confused as to why when I was struggling, I didn’t hear anybody talking about recovery. I felt strongly I wanted to talk about it. I took this job in a detox and the story I’ll say that led me to what I’m doing now in that detox was this girl who had been in and out of treatment 7 or 8 times and had a couple of young children.

The job as a case manager, I learned quickly, was to sell recovery because somebody in detox needs a whole lot more than a week or two of treatment. This was what I was doing, trying to inspire her to do more treatment and she was having no part of it. She said, “My mother said I can go home and stay with her. I’ll go to meetings. I know what I need to do.” I was coming up in the elevator after lunch and there was a woman who looked pretty forlorn in the elevator. I said, “Are you okay?” She said, “No, I’m disappointed. My daughter, Amanda, said there are no beds for her to go to further treatment.” I knew that wasn’t the case because I knew her daughter. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have any background in this field. I knew about HIPAA, but my stomach clenched. I didn’t say anything. I left the elevator. I went to my boss and I told my boss, “This girl told me her mother said she can come home. Her mother thinks there are no beds for treatment.” The boss said to me, “You can’t tell the mom the truth.” I didn’t do anything at the time or change anything. I followed protocol, but I’ll tell you that landed in me as something wrong that the mother didn’t know the truth.

The reason it felt so wrong is because I lied all the way to my last day drinking. I could see that Amanda was trapping herself by not telling her mother the truth. A year later, I took a job as a recovery coach. That I could do. It was a peer-to-peer role. I had some training, I had some experience in recovery and I was on call with a busy police department in Massachusetts. Every day, I would get a call from the police department that somebody had experienced a non-fatal overdose. I would go to the ER to meet them. When I first got to the ER, I was shocked at what I saw happening. Because of HIPAA, the individual who had experienced an overdose, sometimes having Narcan administered 4 or 5 times is pretty close to dead, was there. The nurse would have to ask the patient, “Would you like to speak to someone?” I can’t walk in the room.

The truth is that we lie all the time. Click To Tweet

The question they would ask the patient is, “Do you want help?” Nine out of ten were saying no and they’d be discharged within an hour, which also surprised me. I understand it now to be not the best place for the person to be and that’s where they end up right now. I looked at the nurse and I said, “I don’t think you’re asking the right question,” because what I know to be true, even though I don’t know that person is, no doesn’t mean they love their life. No doesn’t mean they don’t want to get well. No doesn’t mean anything other than, “I have to go right now because I don’t know where my truck is. I’m afraid my wife saw me. I’m not high and I was and I need to use again.” That does not mean they don’t want help. I said, “Could you ask them if they would speak to someone in recovery?” “Someone in recovery is here, would you like to speak to her?” We started to see the numbers flip. Instead of 9 out of 10 saying no, 7 or 8 out of 10 were saying yes.

I didn’t take that as enough though. I knew 10 out of 10 would talk to me. As I got to know the nursing staff, I said, “If you think they’re going to hesitate, why don’t you say, ‘There’s an addict down the hall?’” Not one person said no, when they described me in that way. Here’s the reality, no one other than someone who’s been there, at least with drugs and alcohol from my experience, will ever deny talking to someone with the experience. We started to see this huge surge in people being willing to talk to me. The next challenge I had was what they want at that point. Very few were interested in treatment in that moment, but the majority, I would say 80%, were interested in seeing me later that day or the next day. How I came to start the work I’m doing now is I was engaging 80% to 90% of people in the ER. After six months in this position being asked to train clinicians in a popular well-known treatment facility in Massachusetts, the CEO called and asked if I would train as clinicians.

That’s when I started to feel like my higher power was asking me to do something that I didn’t see as an opportunity before. It took me a while to step into that role because my first response when he said, “Could you train our clinicians?” I thought, “On what? I’m not a clinician.” I thought to train a clinician you had to be a clinician. He said, “On how you’re engaging many people.” That’s when I realized the current model or the current approach isn’t working. Showing up as a peer was engaging more people. The other piece that landed me with the work I’m doing and creating now is most of the individuals that I met with for coffee, for a burger, maybe an AA meeting, but more likely in the community, would ask me within a matter of hours of knowing me, “Would you talk to my family?” If you know anything about people in this stage of change, they don’t usually want anyone to talk to their family because we’re protecting our family from the right to use again or from the shame or mess that we’ve created.

When someone says, “Would you talk to my family?” that is gold for their wellness. My first response when someone asked me was, “Sure, but I need to tell you something. I’m going to tell them the truth and that is that we lie all the time.” That’s when I could tell if someone wanted to get well or not. I say to people, “If you want to get well, you’ll like what I do with families. If you don’t want to get well and you want to keep using, you won’t like what I do with families.” I teach families how to decode their loved one. People call me an addict interpreter because I know when someone wants recovery and I know when someone doesn’t because I know what it looks like having been on that side. I engage a numerous 40, 50, 60 family members. Through this grant that I was working as a recovery coach, I started a support group.

After a full year of running this weekly support group, literally showing up as a recovered person, sharing my story, trying to explain things as best I could to the pain the family was in, one day we realized every person in the room’s loved one was sober. Some of them I had met and many of them I hadn’t met. By the families changing what they were doing, how they were talking to their person and how they were interacting, they had opened a door for their loved one to be able to get sober. That’s when I realized, there’s something here that’s of huge need. We call it recovery conversations. It’s a conversation between someone in recovery and the family who’s stuck in the dark.

You mentioned that’s how you got into the work you’re doing now. How would you describe for me what is the work you’re doing now?

Without the perspective of watching someone else, you think you're the only one. Click To Tweet

After two years of running the support group, I took all my journals and all my notes from those meetings and I went away for a couple of months. I took a couple of months off and I poured over the material. I prayed and I went to meetings myself and I said, “What is this that we’ve created as a community?” I created ten principles to teach and guide families. I do interventions. I threw myself into training with a couple of incredibly well-recognized interventionists who supervise and mentor me on doing actual surprise interventions. What’s close to my heart is working with families over a long period of time, at least a year. A number of families that have been with me have been with me for a few years. One of my clients coined it as Al-Anon for the modern-day. I am in no way trying to replace Al-Anon. What I find with Al-Anon, to answer your question of what I’m doing now is I’m teaching and training families to change the conversation, which involves a few things.

It involves knowing addiction, what’s happening in the brain, why does it lead with denial and lying and justifying? What does it look like? How do I know when my person is presenting as an active addict? Also, then learning how it’s impacted you. We all know it’s a family disease but we are not treating it as a family disease at all, in my opinion. The example I use is if your loved one lost their hearing, would you keep shouting at them or would you go learn American Sign Language? You would. If your loved one had cancer and they said, “There’s a clinical trial,” you’d be in the office of the oncologist. The only reason you’re not learning recovery language and the solution for the addict is because the addict is telling you, “It’s all fine.” Why is that? Why is the person who’s the most compromised, in charge? For a while, I was nervous to say that because I would say, “Is this right?” I didn’t have any training. It was coming out of my heart. I’d say to my kids, “If I relapse, don’t ask me what I want. I won’t tell you the truth.” What does addiction show up as? Lying and denying.

To me, it’s this vicious cycle that ends when the family sees what’s going on. The word I’m using is I train, I excavate addiction. I pick it apart and I have families, hundreds, following me to learn more. Do you know what ends up happening? They start saying, “I’m codependent. I’m sick too.” I have people that call me and say, “How do you get so many families in your programs? I’m running a program for co-dependence. They don’t come.” I say, “I don’t make them wait to see that they’re codependent. I take them wherever they are and when they come and they call me and they’re upset about their person who’s going to die, I’ll say, ‘Come on in.’” It’s like addiction, the family sickness. We have to treat it as it is. When I was drunk and went to AA meetings, they let me in. When a family comes to me in the crazy of codependency or enabling, I let them in and I’ll take them right where they are. Not all of them wake up and say, “I have become lost.” I’ll tell you, it’s incredibly beautiful and that does happen.

Is most of the work you do with individual families or are you back to doing the groups? What’s the structure of your work like?

It’s pretty new. I’ve been writing the curriculum and writing a workbook and organically teaching families as they show up. What I’m launching is the second virtual course. I ran it as a pilot over Zoom, this course program for families. It’s twelve weeks long. Most of them at the end of the twelve weeks want to roll into a longer-term engagement. I don’t think it should be cost-prohibitive for families to have this work. Intervention is a big expense. Interventions are incredible. I want to teach these concepts in very small soundbite ways for families because there’s a lot to teach. It’s a several-year process. Early recovery for me took time for me to get better. I’m starting a Facebook group for families who are recovering. I’m starting this course. The main words we use to describe it is our recovery conversations. My vision for the group that I’ll be running is alcoholics and addicts in recovery partnered with families. A recovery meeting that is for both.

Is the Facebook group or these virtual classes that you’re doing, are they something you’re promoting now? How can our readers find that?

 

The Facebook group is called Families Recovering No Matter What. The company is Tipping Point Recovery. The course will be available through there at TippingPointRecovery.com. I’m literally hammering out the final details to get the program out. We have a couple of experts that will be joining on that twelve-week course that will be coming on to teach that strongly endorsed the work. I’m grateful for the people I’m partnering with and it’s a robust program. At this point, it will be twelve weeks, but it can grow. That’s one of the challenges. I’ve decided I couldn’t be writing this for two more years. It’s very organic. It’s coming out of conversations with families.

What we’re doing is we’re creating a whole new language for families. Let me give an example. You’re in a family and this is a typical scene. There’s a mom and there’s a dad, and let’s say the 35-year-old daughter is an alcoholic. The mom and the dad are almost always arguing because one of them wants to help in one way and the other one wants to help in another way. There’s that challenge. They’re terrified, angry, wanting to distance. What I typically see is somebody who’s either over-involved, trying to help in a way you would help for any other illness. It doesn’t work here. You have somebody in the family who’s mad and out, “I’m done.”

You have the alcoholic who’s left alone to self-destruct and cause this chaos. That was me. What I teach families first is there’s an assessment period, “What’s going on? What do you want?” I have to ask these individuals that come to me, “What do you want?” Some people want their person sober and some people want to leave. Some people want to not talk about it. I’ve got to find out where they are. The recovery language that I teach is the most beautiful, this is what I was alluding to. Let me think of an example. The family has decided we’ve got to stop enabling.

The individual comes to them and says, “I’m late for my car payment. Can you pay my car payment?” The family doesn’t want to pay it. What the family’s used to saying is either yes and not liking it or no and being angry about it. It’s like a punishment, “No, because you’re doing this, so therefore we won’t do this.” What we talk about is having families say something like, “That’s a great question. I’ve learned that what I’ve been doing for you or with you isn’t helping me or you. I’m going to step back and need to think about that.”

What I teach families to do is talk about how it’s draining your bank account. It’s not, “You don’t deserve it.” You’ve got a person who’s filled with self-hatred. Because there were two things going on for me at the same time. Lying to my kids right to their face, knowing I was lying and then this argument in my head defending the drinking. There’s a lot of self-hate. When you have family who we love, even when we’re using, mad or scared, you’ve got fear going on to fear, no one gets well in that case. I help people reframe. That’s one example. “That’s a great question. I can see why you’d asked me that. I’ve been paying it before. I’m rethinking how I do things.” People send me screenshots of what their people say to them and I help them reframe it. What I say when I do that is let’s save that because we need to teach that to people. That’s what I mean when I say organic.

What I hear in what you’re saying that’s critical is that if I’m going to move forward in a healthy way, I have to pull out or detoxify the negative emotions. If I act from fear, the only thing fear is ever going to tell me to do is some behavior that will let fear run my life another day. If I act from anger and I get a good result, then I’ve got to get angry more often. I’m pouring negative emotional energy into the field where what I say I want is love and connection and support. That’s excellent that the root of what you’re doing there in that example is slowing down and refusing to act from the negative emotion.

The sick can't heal the sick. Click To Tweet

There are days I sit and I realize this is applicable to anybody. I’m teaching connection and I’m teaching stillness in a chaotic home. For example, we have a closed Facebook group for this for the last course that ran, and the dad said, “My son called and I could tell he was working up to asking for help with his bills. The kid’s sober, but I don’t want to pay.” My suggestion to him was, “Where’s your discomfort?” He said, “He had a big story he was making up about what might be happening. I’m worried that he’s going to need money. I’m worried I’m going to run out of money.” We had him run through what he was worried about. I asked him to make a list. This was eye-opening to the whole group. I said, “Make a list, two columns. What’s your discomfort and what do you imagine your son’s discomfort is?” He wrote his son’s discomfort. He doesn’t have money. He’s worried he’s not going to pay his bills. When he went to list his discomfort, this is how it sounded. “I’m worried he’s going to.”

I said, “No, I’m looking for your discomfort.” He kept referring back to his son. The point of that is we don’t even know where we end and another person begins. The Facebook group and the group coaching and the teachings allow people to look at it from different angles. The community allows the others to watch this dad because without the perspective of watching someone else, you think you’re the only one. It’s far beyond though. Others are saying, “I’m going through that too.” That feels good in a group. In this case, people were able to see, “I do that.” He looked back at his writing and I said, “Your discomfort is not in there. How is that making you uncomfortable?” It’s beautiful when you watch that light go on. It’s far more than intervention. It’s personal development. It’s spiritual work. It’s mindfulness. It’s very organic. I don’t want to do anything else and I will not do what doesn’t work. That is a fact.

One of the hallmarks of my work for years beginning as a probation officer was I want it to be practical. I want it to be result-oriented. I got lucky early on and somebody said, “Things tend to work out better if you keep your eyes open and observe rather than try and make it work out the way you think it should or acting from a belief or a dogma. That sounds like what you’re doing. How many interventions are you engaged in or do you do, or how do you get the word out about that?

I started this business not wanting a business in this field. I was afraid. I was very respectful of my own recovery and this is a pretty draining work. You can’t deny the higher calling. I knew I was to do this, but I wasn’t quite sure how. I’ve been taking it slow. I’ve done seventeen interventions in the surprise intervention way, in the family systems model. I would say I’ve worked with 100 families through the free groups or courses that I run.

The direction that I hear you’re going in is more to be able to make what you do available to more families at a lower cost.

I knew right away I don’t want an office in a community and have the people that can drive to me be who I see. What I could see happening was I feel like I was closing gaps. In the first six months of someone’s recovery, there are many big gaps where people fall through. I could see that some of the things I was doing in my way of engaging people and their families was closing those gaps. It’s needed across the country. It’s needed in the world. I decided everything I’ve been creating can be offered virtually because I want to have a wider reach. I’d like all of us in this field to be using this methodology, which I didn’t think was anything unique. What I’m seeing is it is, and not that I’m unique. To me, it’s surrounding the person that is most struggling with people that are getting healthy so that they can help the person get healthy. Sick can’t heal sick. We can make this happen in all industries if people learn to have a conversation that is compassionate. It’s not about being understanding of addiction or mental health issue. It’s looking within and exploring how you’ve become sick as a result of being around addiction for so long. Not everybody’s willing to do that.

 

I used to tell people, “Even if you live with somebody who was wheelchair-bound as your roommate, spouse, whatever for 5 or 6 years and then whatever happened, that situation changed and now you’re living with an able-bodied person, you have some relearning to do. The able-bodied partner you have is going to get upset at the dinner party when you reach over to cut their steak for them.” You don’t think you have a problem because you’ve lived with an alcoholic or your parents were alcoholics or etc., yet you have some relearning to do.

That’s a big piece of what we’re doing is relearning. There’s no doubt. You’re right.

The other thing that I work with people so much and try and help them understand is that many people that ended up in my office want to help somebody else. It’s a very noble desire. What they don’t understand is that 80% of whatever anybody learns from them is going to come by watching how they live their life. Unless they can get on a healthier pattern, unless they can get more honest with themselves and those around them, they can’t reach their goal. They can’t achieve their goal of being of assistance in somebody else’s pattern unless they’ve corrected their own.

One of my favorite ways to get to the root of that, and I didn’t ever think I’d be doing this, but I’m pretty bold, I ask permission. In a case like that, I would use what I take from one of the fourth step that I’ve learned through AA, that is I’d ask, “Why?” seven times. The person pretty quickly comes to why they want that other person to change. It’s because of their discomfort. I say, “Now I can help you.” Other than that, if the other person’s not here, it’s going to be hard for me to help you help them. Not everybody’s willing to wake up to that.

What is it that we haven’t even talked about yet that you would like our readers to know about either what you do or where you’d like to take your business?

I decided to reach out to the twenty or so people that I know I’ve helped that are doing well and we gathered over a Zoom meeting. They very much want to tell their story with their family members, how they started their recovery journey by having their family know the truth. They very much want to help other families. That is such a win-win because in recovery at any stage, one of the ways we stay recovered is by helping others. It’s frustrating when you’re trying to help an alcoholic or an addict and they keep falling. It’s hard to keep trying. When you can help the family who’s pretty willing to get new direction, this mushrooming is happening. What I’ve done is I’ve created a mentorship program that’s going to run alongside of the family program because I need an army of recovered people to help teach the families this work.

At any stage in recovery, one of the ways we stay recovered is by helping others. Click To Tweet

It felt early for me to start mentoring people because I’m starting to get the family program launched. I realized they need to go together because it’s us, the recovered people, that are teaching these principles. That is an area that I’m looking forward to growing. It’s people in recovery who want to help others and their families. We have closed AA meetings and we have open AA meetings. A closed meeting is you have to identify as an alcoholic or an addict. I’m sure you know this. An open AA meeting, anybody can go to. One of the first things I say to families when they come to me is, “Go to an open AA meeting.” People don’t recommend that often. People are pretty nervous, “Won’t I feel weird and will they be upset that I’m there?” No, they’re always widely welcomed. My dream is for wide open AA meetings, meaning we all recover together and everything’s on the table.

That hits the idea of the truth being the light that does the healing. The age-old adage that it’s my secrets that keep me sick. The mechanism for that, as I understand it, is that whatever amount of mental energy I have to put into hiding a secret from anyone, an equal amount of that energy is feeding the conclusion in me that I’m damaged, broken and unlovable. If this person finds out what I’m hiding from them, they’re going to do one of two things equally evil. One is attack me, the other is run away from me. The more I shine that light of truth and open things up, the better things get. You mentioned HIPAA and maybe some of the people that are reading won’t know what HIPAA means, but it’s that Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act that mandates so much secrecy in medical and mental health. Unless we can get people to move past that secrecy, one of the primary mechanisms for keeping us stuck in our illness stays in place.

I feel like HIPAA in addiction is protecting the addiction. When you say, “Where else would I want this to go?” if we kept talking, it would keep getting bigger. I’ve been talking to a few CEOs of treatment facilities because I like to push back. I want to ask questions. For example, I might find treatment for an individual who then signs a release of information. They can talk to me, their staff and then they might pull that release and I call and I can’t talk to them. I know family does that. I might drop my husband off at treatment. He could change his mind, take me off the list. I call the next day and they’d tell me he may or may not be there. The treatment facilities CEOs know that’s a problem. That law’s in place right now. We have to protect the individual, but because we know it’s not protecting the individual, why don’t we then put the family on with someone who can teach them about addiction? They don’t have to confirm if the individual is there, but let’s refer them to maybe this program or a program like it that says, “These are not just the things you need to look out for. This is how addiction speaks and this is how recovery speaks. This is what recovery looks like.” That would be amazing.

If you can plug the family and even if the identified person as the troubled person or the addict or the one in the mental health crisis, even if they decide to pull out, the family can still get educated, learn tools and move toward health. As you said, if they’re surrounding the person with the greater need with more and more healthier people, there’s a greater possibility for healing to happen.

That’s the goal for me as long-term. I’ll work with people for as long as I need. In my early recovery, that’s how it was. We don’t turn people away. I don’t want to turn people away because they don’t see their problem the same way I see it. It’s humanity. To me, it’s a humane way to serve. I’ll keep talking to you. I’ll keep showing up because it’s a process. When someone tells an alcoholic, “Stop drinking,” that mirrors the family member when someone says, “Stop enabling.” We don’t stop anything that quickly.

You alluded to what so many of us in the field understand is that there’s an underlying pain. It’s driving me to my drug of choice. When the underlying pain is gone, there’s little or no attraction for that drug of choice. If we aren’t busy helping people identify and resolve their underlying pain, we aren’t providing a solution to the addiction or the mental health problem.

 

Likewise, families are trying to control or obsessively worrying because they’re trying to cover up their own pain, “Someone I love is dying and I can’t do anything about it.” Does the work I do guarantee someone gets sober? Absolutely not, but I can tell you so much. You have 10 to 20 times greater chance of helping your person when you’re more whole. Why not spend your time getting better and helping them along the way in a new way?

The other real powerful thing about that is that as long as I’m focused on somebody else getting healthy, I’m focused on things I have no control over. As soon as I turn and focus on myself getting healthier, now I’m focused on something I have control over. I feel more in control.

Conversations around you change as a result because you’re changing the dance.

That’s the key that I learned many years ago to avoiding absolute irreversible burnout. When I was told by my supervisor at the juvenile hall that it’s not my job to make these kids healthy, it’s my job to show up and be responsible, firm, honest, loving, respectful and put in my eight-hour shift. If I do that, I’m going to be perhaps one of the only adults in that kid’s life that’s doing that. I’ll model good behavior and I won’t go home with the burden of upset when they relapse.

That’s fantastic because the burnout potential is so real. I have had months where I thought I was in control of everything. I joke and say, “I did think I was gone for one month and that took its toll on me.” There’s no doubt families can identify with the overtness of what they try to do. We talk a lot about if you practice a faith, you can learn and know it’s not my path. How do I know what their journey is? When you talked about cutting someone’s food over helping someone who doesn’t need the help, it made me remember one time with a group of families at a table in a conference room.

It occurred to me that every single one of their loved ones, myself included, the alcoholic, the identified individual, was treated differently from a very early age. We are treated like we can’t. We are usually the one in the family that has siblings that excel. It’s might be subliminal, it might not be overt, but we are the ones people thought early on they needed to help more. There’s this over helping, which gives us the message, “I probably can’t then.” I remember getting sober thinking, “I don’t need help. Thank you so much.” People wanted to help me lovingly, but it was disempowering me. If people were giving me things in my family, it taught me I didn’t need to do for myself.

You have a greater chance of helping a person when you're more whole. Click To Tweet

I deeply appreciate your taking this time to talk to us. I would love to keep informed about how this series of projects you’re launching moves forward. I look forward to the book and would you mention for us again the name of the company and the name of the Facebook group?

The company is Tipping Point Recovery, TippingPointRecovery.com, the tipping point being the family having the truth is the precipice at which someone has a better chance for success. The Facebook group is Families Recovering No Matter What. Families can recover no matter what. When they do, their loved ones stand a whole lot better chance.

If people go to Facebook and type in Families Recovering No Matter What, will they get an open group? Do they submit a request for membership?

They will be asked to answer a couple of questions and it’s a closed group. It’s private. It’s public for them to see, but what happens inside the group stays inside the group. They’ll be asked a couple of questions and then the administrators will see if it looks like a fit and they’ll be invited to come in. In that group, there’s a lot of good and free content, videos and a supportive community.

When you change the dance, conversations around you change as a result. Click To Tweet

Thank you so much for what you do and for taking the time to share with us here. It’s a pleasure to know you.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Important Links:

• Tipping Point Recovery
• Evergreen Day School
• Hightower Associates
• Certified Family-Focused Intervention Training
• TippingPointRecovery.com

About Kate Duffy

Kate Duffy, President of Tipping Point Recovery, is an inspirational facilitator and catalyst for change who has inspired growth for over twenty-five years. She became deeply passionate about changing the language of recovery after facing her own battle with substance use.

Kate graduated from Lesley University with a BS in Early Childhood Education. Before devoting her time to recovery coaching, she was the Founding Executive Director of Evergreen Day School in Cambridge, MA. She then moved into a consultant and training role in the field of education before becoming a Life Coach.

Kate’s strongest skills are engaging individuals resistant to begin recovery and in educating families to understand recovery language, causing them to assist their loved one in a more impactful way.

Kate trained with Earl Hightower of Hightower Associates and Michael Wilson’s CFI, Certified Family Focused Intervention Training, Baystate Recovery. Nationally recognized, certified Interventionists and facilitators with over 40 years experience combined.

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