Last night, I struck up a conversation on Threads with someone who wasn’t looking for advice or answers, they were looking for community. For connection. For a sense they weren’t alone. We talked about the importance of community in recovery.
It stopped me in my tracks, because community has been at the very centre of my own recovery. Not just from alcoholism, but from childhood sexual abuse as well.
I still remember my very first AA meeting. I was nervous, unsure, and probably half-expecting to bolt. As I descended the steps of a church basement into a smoky room, (it was 1986!) one of the first slogans I saw on the wall read:
You are no longer alone.
I didn’t fully understand what that meant at the time, but something in me registered it as truth.
Years later, I would hear almost the same message again in a different context. One of the first sessions of the Phase 1 program at The Gatehouse is called From Isolation to Belonging. Different room, different wounds, same core truth.
Community, or fellowship, has been the thread that has held my recovery together.
When I committed to sobriety after my final slip, I was 27 years old. I told my sponsor at the time that I needed to find people my own age to spend time with. The group I was attending felt “old” to me, people in their 40s and 50s, and at that stage of my life I couldn’t see myself there. So I went looking elsewhere and found Young People in Alcoholics Anonymous.
What I found wasn’t just sobriety. I found my tribe.
Many of those people are still my friends today.
Later in life, after my separation, I found myself at another low point. I wasn’t seeking sobriety, I was well past that stage of recovery. I was seeking companionship and purpose. I returned to the rooms of AA and rediscovered not only community, but something deeper, my calling to be of service to others.
I took on General Service roles, GSR, Alternate DCM, eventually DCM. Joined committee after committee to help carry the message. Through those roles, I found a deep and steady sense of satisfaction. Being useful mattered. Showing up mattered. Being part of something larger than myself mattered.
When I eventually stepped down from my roles in AA, it hit me harder than I expected. There was real grief there. But by then, something else had already begun.
I had started my CSA healing journey at The Gatehouse.
When I first walked up the five steps to the Gatehouse, I wasn’t thinking about giving back. I was focused on understanding my own story, getting my voice back and on healing. When the opportunity came up to become a facilitator, I didn’t hesitate. I jumped at it.
It felt as though everything that had come before had quietly been preparing me for that moment.
Through my work with other survivors, I experienced a shift in how I saw myself. I was no longer only a survivor. I was becoming something else. A CSA warrior, standing alongside others, not ahead of them, not above them, but with them.
Today, I am fully enmeshed in the CSA community through my various roles at The Gatehouse as a facilitator, Board member and on the committees I am on. Community is no longer something I seek, it’s something I help hold. And that, more than anything, continues to heal parts of me I didn’t even know were still hurting.
Recovery, in all its forms, is not meant to be done alone. Whether the room is a church basement or a Threads post, whether the language is spiritual or secular, the message remains the same:
You are no longer alone.
And sometimes, with time, you discover that you are also exactly where you are meant to be.
