In the final year of my psychology degree at university in the mid-1970s, I did not know whether I wanted to go on to study clinical psychology or conduct research in neuroscience. I decided to do the latter and ended up spending 25 years as a neuroscientist, studying the regulation and function of brain dopamine systems, and trying to improve the treatment of ‘disorders’ such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and drug addiction. And then I changed!
I had a great time as a neuroscientist and loved my work. I was lucky enough to spend three years (1981-84) as a postdoctoral fellow with Arvid Carlsson, the ‘father’ of dopamine and recipient of The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000. I had such an amazing time in Gothenburg (Sweden) and our research was truly very exciting.
I then spent two years working in the US before returning to the UK at the end of 1986 to take up a prestigious five-year Advanced Research Fellowship awarded by the Science and Engineering Research Council, and set up my own research laboratory in the Department of Psychology at the University of Reading. Our research was focused on the regulation and function of different dopamine-containing systems in the brain.
In 1992, I was awarded a Wellcome Trust University Award and moved my laboratory to the Department of Psychology at the University of Wales Swansea (later known as Swansea University). I was lucky enough to live on the beautiful Gower Peninsula, and have an office at the University on the ninth floor overlooking Swansea Bay. An unrivalled view in British academia!
Over time, my research had become increasingly focused on addiction. The laboratory was doing well—attracting good research funding and generating numbers of science publications—and I was excited by what we were doing. However, despite our success, I was beginning to feel that something wasn’t quite right.
By the end of the millennium, I realised that I had become a frustrated neuroscientist! I did not feel that I (nor any other neuroscientist) was actually helping anyone overcome addiction. It was time for me to meet, and learn from, people suffering from serious drug and alcohol problems and with practitioners who were helping people overcome their addiction …
And what a time that was! I learnt a great deal from such people. And I soon became aware of the need to catalyse activity at a grassroots level, as I (and others) had little confidence in the mainstream treatment system. It seemed more focused on itself, rather than on the people needing help. Along with my most talented university students (and later ex-students), and people in recovery from addiction, I developed the grassroots initiative Wired In (and charity Wired International Ltd) to help empower and connect people. Our multifaceted work continued through 2000 to 2006, whilst I continued my Professorial duties at the university.
In order to work-full time on our Wired In projects, pay the Wired In team members, and finance the development of an online community, Wired In To Recovery, I eventually decided to take early retirement from my university in 2006. We launched Wired In To Recovery in late 2008, just a month before I moved from South Wales to live in Perth, Western Australia, due to personal reasons. I continued running the online community for four years before having to close it due to lack of funding.
I loved interacting with people in recovery from addiction, and some became close friends. I also greatly enjoyed visiting genuine recovery communities and catching up with people like Dr. David McCartney (LEAP), Noreen Oliver RIP (BAC O’Connor), Stuart Honor and Michelle Foster (The Basement Recovery Project), and Wynford Ellis Owen (The Living Room, Cardiff), to name just a few, and their colleagues.
I loved writing Recovery Stories, believing that such stories can have a healing impact. I developed the Recovery Stories website in 2013, which included stories written by people in recovery, as well as those that I wrote after multiple interviews with other recovering people.
After moving to Australia, I became increasingly dismayed by the racism I saw towards Aboriginal peoples. I decided to learn more about Aboriginal peoples and their culture and history. One book I read, Trauma Trails, Recreating Songlines: The transgenerational effects of trauma in Indigenous Australia by Judy Atkinson, had a strong impact on me. Judy described how the colonisation process created trauma amongst Aboriginal people that has been unwittingly passed down the generations. This transgenerational trauma still has a profound impact today.
Judy’s book also gave me important insights into the healing of trauma. I was so fascinated by what I read, and by later spending three days with Judy in the Northern Territory, I developed an educational website, Sharing Culture, that was focused on the healing of transgenerational trauma. [This website is no longer available, but some of the key posts I wrote are available elsewhere.] I also started reading work by leading trauma experts such as Bruce Perry, Bessel van der Kolk, Judith Herman, and Gabor Maté. I continued reading about Indigenous healing and cultures from around the world, and realised that there was much that Western culture could learn from Indigenous peoples and their healing practices.
Given the healing power of story, I started to look for Aboriginal stories of healing. I soon found an enthralling and inspirational story, one that was almost from my own backyard. Over a period of seven years, I worked with Social Anthropologist John Stanton to tell the magical story of traumatised Aboriginal children who rose above considerable adversity in 1940s Western Australia to create beautiful landscape artworks that are acclaimed around the world.
This healing story is told through The Carrolup Story website (which includes a Healing Blog) and accompanying YouTube channel, as well as my eBook Connection: Aboriginal Child Artists Captivate Europe. One of our aims has been to empower local communities to tackle the deleterious effects of disconnection in society today.
Early in 2021, in Covid times, I had an itch. I started to scratch the itch. It got worse. That itch was a desire to start writing about recovery again. I contacted the people who had provided their Stories for the Recovery Stories website, and asked if I could include their original stories in an eBook. They agreed. Most agreed to include an update, seven years on, which either they wrote or I wrote after interview sessions. I published Our Recovery Stories: Journeys from Drug and Alcohol Addiction, in eBook form In April 2021. These Stories can also be found here. I was also blogging on Recovery Stories again, after pausing for a number of years.
I was very emotional seeing my children and grandchildren (one I had never seen) again in the UK in late summer 2022, after a gap of two and a half years due to Covid. I also caught up with a number of my old recovery friends, which was very special for me. These meetings convinced me that I needed to start a new recovery project involving friends in the UK. My interest was sparked by conversations with Wulf Livingston, and the fire inside of me intensified as I travelled around talking with other friends.
Wulf and I launched Recovery Voices in September 2023, thanks to Ash Whitney from Cilfrew in South Wales who has designed various websites for me over a period of 23 years. It was great to have a new project with old friends from Wales, the country in which I spent a wonderful 14 years. A country in which I have discovered in recent years had been the home for a large collection of my ancestors. Wulf and I interviewed various leading UK addiction recovery advocates for Recovery Voices, including a good number from Wales. I was soon to learn a great deal about North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC) and Eternal Media, two inspiring recovery communities based in North Wales.
In April 2024, I spent a week in Bangor visiting NWRC and also spent some time at Eternal Media. It didn’t take me much time to decide to write a book about these two recovery communities, which involved a large number of interviews over Zoom. Eventually, I decided the break the content up into two books, as I had so much good material. As I write this article, I am very close to finishing to finishing the NWRC book, and over halfway through the Eternal Media book. I will be visiting North Wales in mid-September.
It seems so right that I’m working with colleagues from the country where my personal journey into understanding addiction recovery began.
