The #RecoveryFirst Podcast with Mike Todd "Met With Dignity & Making Connections"The #RecoveryFirst Podcast with Mike Todd "Met With Dignity & Making Connections"
The Recovery First Addiction Recovery Podcast by Freedom Recovery Services of Greenville
Mike Todd shares a raw story of how being met with dignity at a recovery meeting helped him choose life and stay in recovery. He also talks about the rise of recovery housing, the risks of exploitation, and efforts in South Carolina to support ethical operators and bring naloxone into every recovery home.
12:38•20 Aug 2021
Met With Dignity: Mike Todd on Connection, Recovery Housing and Hope
Episode Overview
- Meeting people who use drugs with dignity and love can be life-saving and can change their view of themselves.
- Addiction was often seen as a moral failure, and shifting towards understanding it as a disease is crucial for reducing shame.
- Simple acts of companionship, like someone saying "What if I just walk with you?", can help a person stay in recovery.
- Recovery housing has grown from informal shared living into an industry, creating both support and risks of exploitation for vulnerable residents.
- The South Carolina Recovery Housing Association works to support operators and aims to ensure all recovery housing has naloxone and resident training.
“"What if I just walk with you?"”
What can we learn from those who have battled addiction? This short, heartfelt episode of The Recovery First Addiction Recovery Podcast centres on host Mike Todd sharing why being "met with dignity" as a drug user changed his life – and why that phrase still matters today. Mike keeps things unscripted and honest, joking that he "doesn't write anything down" and speaks straight from the heart.
After a morning of prayer and meditation, he reflects on his early recovery days in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when addiction was widely seen as a moral failure rather than a disease. He remembers being told over and over to "just really get yourself together" and the despair that followed when he couldn't. The emotional core of this episode is Mike’s story of 21 October 1990, when he sat in his car, exhausted and contemplating ending his life.
Standing outside a recovery meeting, convinced "there's really no hope for me", he was stopped by a man named Bill who simply asked, "What if I just walk with you?" That small act of kindness – walking into the meeting and sitting beside him – was the first time in a long time someone treated him with dignity and love. Mike credits that moment with helping him finally stick around in recovery.
The episode then shifts toward the modern recovery housing landscape. Mike explains how informal shared living between people in recovery has grown into a full-blown industry, bringing both opportunity and exploitation for a vulnerable population. To respond, he talks about the South Carolina Recovery Housing Association, set up to support, mentor and advocate for recovery housing operators, and to push practical standards like getting naloxone into all recovery homes and training residents to use it.
Anyone interested in recovery, connection and respectful care will find plenty to reflect on here – whose car park moment could you be standing in today?
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