Have a seat and grab your favorite sparkling water. It's Recovery Happy Hour.

Hi guys, welcome to Recovery Happy Hour where we talk about life beyond the bottle

and what happens after we get sober. I'm your host Trisha. Thanks for joining me today.

So I'm super excited about today's guest because she played a huge role in my own decision

to finally try for a life of sobriety. And that's what today's topic is about too.

Why sharing your story matters? In Recovery, we're taught that service work is an essential part

of your success. And at first I thought that meant that I needed to sign up for volunteer work

or go help in a nursing home or something, but like most things, I was over complicating it and

making it way harder than it needed to be. So today let's get back to basics.

To start with, service is defined in many ways. In the dictionary definitions that apply here are

contribution to the welfare of others, the act of serving a helpful act. And there's a lot of ways

to help others in recovery, but the simple and the most effective way is this, sharing your story.

One of the scariest roots of addiction is caused by isolation, feeling alone. You know what that

feels like? You're stuck in your own head thinking that no one could possibly know what this feels

like. And the more you have those thoughts, the more they progress into a deeper, darker,

spiral of feeling alone. And the best lifesaver to get you out is hearing someone else tell you

that they've been there too. We talk about our stories in recovery not only because we love to

talk about ourselves, but because this is the key to helping other people get sober too. It's the

easiest way to give back and it's the best way to give back. Do you remember how you felt the

first time you heard someone's story and you related to it? I do because it was Sarah's story,

or Sarjay, as many of us know her. I had been sober for three whole days when I listened to a

recovery podcast and heard a woman speaking about what her drinking looked like. And I remember

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