Cast Your Vision To The Future

Cast Your Vision To The Future

What drives someone to seek a life without addiction? This conversation follows Joe Ryan, an aftercare coordinator in Vermont, as he talks frankly about two decades of substance use, repeated incarceration, and the long climb towards a different future. You’ll hear how Joe’s job at Valley Vista Treatment Centre starts the moment someone arrives on the unit.

He has just 16 days to help each person plan their next steps: sober living applications, probation and parole contacts, medical and therapy appointments, and connections to peer recovery centres. He describes this work as acting like a bridge, trying to make the move from treatment back into everyday life as smooth and practical as possible. Joe also runs SMART Recovery meetings, having completed facilitator training after using the tools himself in therapy.

He contrasts SMART with traditional 12-step approaches, saying that for him, the focus is less on the past and more on “making a mental switch” and casting a vision for the future. His meetings are highly interactive, using cost–benefit analyses and the hierarchy of values on a whiteboard. When he asks groups why their addictive behaviour isn’t listed among the things they value, he says “light bulbs were just going off left and right”.

Joe’s story includes tough moments: using oxycontin with his father as a teenager, intravenous drug use, a suicide attempt, and the belief that prison was simply where he belonged. He explains how a pen pal, sober living, and people who believed in his potential slowly shifted his thinking. He talks about near-misses with relapse, the stigma he faced around MAT and psych meds, and how exercise, therapy, and giving back now keep him grounded.

By the end, Joe shares how SMART’s “five questions” tool helped him picture the person he wanted to become, leading him to change his clothes, vocabulary, and habits step by step. His message is clear: casting a vision for yourself and making small consistent changes can add up to something far bigger than you imagine. What sort of future are you ready to picture for yourself?