#43 Hilary Phelps: Founder of The Right Room, Author, Speaker, Community Builder, Mother, Woman in Long-Term Recovery

Hilary Phelps spent a long time being a woman who appeared to function — who had the family, the work, the life that looked like something — while quietly managing something she didn’t want to name. The perfectionism. The performing. The slow, creeping sense that the version of herself everyone saw wasn’t the whole story. Alcohol was part of it. So were the choices she made to keep disappearing into her own life rather than living it. The need to be good enough. The belief, wired into her early, that if she just held it together long enough, she’d eventually feel okay. She didn’t feel okay.In 2022, Phelps made her sobriety public. That decision was not about bravery. It was about not being able to pretend anymore that her private experience and her public life were two separate things. The work she was asking other women to do, the honest, uncomfortable work of looking at themselves clearly, required her to do it first.She grew up in Baltimore, the eldest of the Phelps family — a household that understood ambition, excellence, and the particular pressure of being expected to be extraordinary. Hilary spent the first half of her life meeting that expectation. She spent the second half learning that meeting it had cost her something she couldn’t immediately name.She works with women who are somewhere in the middle of their own becoming: not at the beginning, not at the triumphant end, but in the messy, necessary middle. That middle is where she lives too. That’s why she can guide you through it. She founded The Sanctuary because she needed a space that didn't exist: a community for women doing serious inner work that felt like a home rather than a program. A room where you don't have to explain what you're going through, because everyone in it has been in the dark too. In this episode Hilary shares her experience, strength, and hope through her mental health and sobriety journey (19 years!), her daily practice of opening her heart after experiencing what she calls, the quiet collapse, being in the right room, and the release of her forthcoming book in 2027 about women and addiction. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kelleykitley.substack.com