Deepening Recovery with Lisa DeMario

Deepening Recovery with Lisa DeMario

How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This conversation with author and clinician Lisa DeMario gives a raw, honest look at what happens **after** the chaos of early recovery settles down. Speaking with host Casey Arriaga on *Addiction and the Family*, Lisa talks about her book *Notes From the Middle*, which looks at the often-ignored phase she calls "the middle" of recovery.

This is the stage where you're sober, doing the work, going to meetings, sponsoring others – and yet something still feels off. As Lisa puts it, she was "doing all the things" and "following every suggestion" but "nothing was working. Nothing was getting better." The heart of their chat centres on trauma, grief, and what happens when old survival strategies start to backfire. Lisa describes how a major loss shook loose buried trauma and exposed patterns she "didn't know existed".

She speaks openly about over-serving others as a way to avoid herself, and how that became a subtle form of self-abandonment. Casey and Lisa talk about moving from self-containment – constantly trying to hold big feelings in – to what she calls self-authorship: "I live by what feels right to me… that's self-authorship." They highlight how long-term recovery may require more than meetings alone, and how seeking outside help for trauma is "more than okay" and sometimes exactly what's needed.

You’ll hear practical tools such as meditation, body awareness, simple nervous system calming skills, and parts work (like Internal Family Systems) to help bring all those "splintered" pieces of self back together.

Lisa’s message lands in one powerful line: "There is nothing so terrible that using won't make it worse and you are absolutely worth it." If you’re sober but unsettled, or love someone in that space, this conversation might be the nudge to ask: is it time to stop performing recovery and start writing your own story?