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Mastery Vibes: Peer Support Unleashed, Season 2, Episode 7

”When the System Forgets You: Charlie’s Story of Survival, Sanity & Self-Determination”

In this episode of Mastery Vibes: Peer Support Unleashed, Charlotte Armstrong and Robyn Priest are joined by Charlie, a First Nations peer cadet at a lived experience residential service in Adelaide that has only just opened its doors. Robyn met her during two days of training with role plays, where Charlie was the one who put her hand up to go first while the rest of the room sat frozen.

Charlie has been in recovery or as she says “clean and sober” for 14 months. Before that she used drugs for 33 years. She is direct about why people start, that substances are often a way to cope with something that has already happened, and that nothing in a life moves forward while they are still in the picture. For Charlie, giving up drugs meant going back and feeling all of it.

Her turning point has a date. On 6 May last year she got a phone call from her twin boys, who she had not seen in 14 years, telling her they needed her. She talks about what followed without smoothing any of it out, including the part most recovery stories leave off the end: that the hardest thing she had to learn was how to set boundaries, and that things did not go the way she hoped they would.

Charlotte picks up the thread from the family side, where much of her own work sits. Carers spend their energy trying to make things better for their person, and sometimes making things better starts with taking care of yourself first. She and Robyn also name a gap they keep running into lived experience services are opening without any family or carer peer support beside them, so people do the work, go home, and find that the household has not.

The phrase both hosts stopped on is Charlie’s own. A friend in the dark. Someone who does not have to do anything and does not have to fix you, who just has to be there. She puts it plainly. She did not need anyone to fix her, because what she has lived through is not the kind of thing that gets fixed. She needed someone to walk beside her while she worked it out. She also names the parts of her history that still carry the heaviest stigma, including sex work, where she sees people struggling with almost nowhere to turn.

Charlie walked into her group interview convinced she did not stand a chance, coming straight from being a client of these services into applying to work in one. She got the job. What she wants to do with it is be loud enough, and stubborn enough, to not take no for an answer on behalf of people who have no one in their corner.

Her closing line is the one to sit with: you do not have to walk alone, and if you have trouble finding someone, come find me, and I will walk with you.

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#PeerSupport #LivedExperience #LivedAndLivingExperience #Recovery #AddictionRecovery #FirstNations #PeerWorkforce #FriendInTheDark #Boundaries #StigmaFree #FamilyPeerSupport #CaregiverSupport #PeerSupportUnleashed #MasteryVibes

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