meet the recovery coaches
Kevin’s Recovery Story
I’m here because I’m still here, and loved ones are not
I was in my young teens when my dad sought help in a 12-step program for his alcoholism. He wanted recovery, but he couldn’t muster the strength to make it work. His decline was steady, progressive and terrifying.
When I was 17, my brother Mark and I found dad in a hotel room with a shotgun in his lifeless lap. I spiralled into a 14-year addiction to alcohol, while Mark found cocaine and heroin his preferred approach to numbing the pain of what we saw that night.
Mark also tried various forms of recovery, but found he couldn’t relate to available peer support groups. Despite his best intentions, he endured an onslaught of re-occurrences. He died at 42 in a hospital emergency ward of a drug-related heart attack.
Putting down the bottle, I found, was the easy part. Building a life with purpose was turbulent and often terrifying. However, I found that moving forward in life was key. Standing still, was actually slipping back into old and dangerous patterns.
I’ve been continuously sober now since 1991.
No one in my life would have guessed I’d ever see recovery, least of all me. My life was a train wreck of twisted relationships, broken trust and emergency room hospital visits. Because of my addictive behaviour, friends and loved ones learned not to rely on me.
A few people important to me asked me what I would like to do with this one precious life. It got me considering some crucial questions, deep shifts that caused me to ask myself: “Is a better life available?”
It sparked an intrinsic motivation had me committing to recovery on July 22, 1991.
I continue to wonder why I managed to find recovery and my brother and dad did not. What forces were in play for me, that failed to give them traction. It turns out, I was fortunate into land in a brand of recovery that made sense for me.
I’ve since learned recovery is not a one-size-fits-all prospect. Recovery works best when it’s designed by and for the person who is struggling. We, as individuals, and as a society, can do better at matching people with their own perfect form of recovery.
It begins quite simply—ask them.
I often wonder how things might be different if we were able to pair my brother and dad with a skilled recovery coach. I’ll never know.
I’m here because I’m still here, and they are not.
Professional Bio
Recovery Coach Professional, CCAR
Canadian Certified Recovery Coach, CACCF
Certified Recovery Coach-Facilitator, CCAR
Qualified MBSR Mindfulness Teacher, UMass
Certified CISM (Trauma Response) Justice Institute of B.C.
In long-term continuous recovery, with the benefit of strong recovery capital, Diakiw discovered fairly quickly that many of those he worked with didn’t have that same supportive capital.
As a mindfulness teacher and recovery coach trainer, he explored many of the cracks in the system where people were falling. Recovery coach training exposed more of those chasms where the addicted were tumbling away from a life free from addiction.
Recovery is complicated, and it requires a full suite of responses, some of which we have, others of which we need to construct.