Pondoff's Anonymous Season 3 Episode 30: "My Drug Dealer Couldn't Believe I Quit" with Michelle Charbonnier

Michelle Charbonnier knows addiction from both sides of the conversation.Today, she's a clinician, recovery advocate, executive director of a recovery community center, and someone who helps individuals and families navigate treatment. But long before she was helping people find their way into recovery, Michelle was trying to find her own way out.Michelle joins Chris, Zoë and KG to tell the story of growing up in Granite City, experimenting with drugs before she even entered high school, smoking weed every day, bartending in biker bars and eventually developing a cocaine addiction that escalated into a roughly $300-a-day crack habit. While working toward her MBA and maintaining one version of her life on the surface, she was spending days isolated in hotel rooms and making daily trips to East St. Louis to smoke crack. Eventually, the addiction won out over school.But quitting crack wasn't the end of Michelle's story.Her relationship with substances continued to change—from cocaine to Adderall, marijuana and eventually alcohol—until a complete mental and emotional breakdown forced her to confront the fact that she couldn't keep living the way she was living.Now, Michelle has turned those experiences into a career helping other people. The conversation gets into harm reduction, Narcan, marijuana, mental health, finding the right treatment instead of simply a treatment, the importance of what happens after someone leaves treatment, and why there's no single correct way to recover.As Michelle puts it: “Judging other people's recovery doesn't serve ours well.”It's a story about addiction, survival, purpose and what can happen when the person who once needed help becomes the person helping someone else find it.