I’ve got a confession to make. 

The idea for my company was not mine. 

Over a two year period, I received five urgent messages from five different leaders in a community desperately trying to make an impact on the horrific opioid epidemic. And all of these messages led to what is now Tipping Point™ Recovery.

The first urgent message came in from the chief of police while I was working a job on-call doing overdose intervention. He asked me to ride along with his officers to offer help to people on the street. We would fly through town with the blue lights on, and the officer would pull over, and people would start to scatter. But he’d yell, “I don’t want to talk to you. She does.” And I would walk over to them, and I’d start talking about being an alcoholic, and I’d offer them help. 

The second urgent message came from the chief of physicians in the emergency room. She asked me to come share my story with the doctors at morning rounds. She also asked me if she could take the recovery coach training that I was leading. She was desperate to learn more. 

The third urgent message came from the CEO of an addiction treatment center, who called me one day and asked, “Will you train our fifty clinicians on what you’re doing that’s making such an impact?” 

The fourth urgent message that came was from the chief medical director of a behavioral health unit in a large insurance company. She brought me into her team to do a presentation on what we were doing in the emergency room. And she discussed with me doing a pilot project for one hundred of their highest utilizing members. 

The fifth urgent message that came in over this two-year period, and probably the most impactful one, was from the grandparents of a young man named Eric. They were desperately trying to help their grandson get sober, yet the things they were doing instinctively to help him weren’t helping. They were actually unknowingly helping the cycle of the addiction to continue, and their whole family was hurting. 

We as a society don’t know how to love an alcoholic, and we don’t know how to help an alcoholic. 

But the real problem is not the alcoholic. 

The real problem is the systems around us that are all operating in an outdated, compartmentalized model. 

Addiction is now known as a brain disorder, not a moral failing yet, these compartmentalized systems are all swirling around the struggling individual who is hiding. They’re not hiding because they’re bad or wrong. They’re hiding because they have a hiding disease. 

Addiction is a hiding disease. 

And all the systems designed to care for this person that I observed over these two years are expecting a person to do the things that their disease actually prevents them from doing. We’re pouring money into just making new drugs and improving each of these compartmentalized systems, trying to make a bigger impact. 

We’re trying, but the problem is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And one of the worst things about the way we’re handling this right now is the family is left completely in the dark. 

That’s why I created Tipping Point™ Recovery. 

A tipping point™ happens when we educate the people who care for and love the person struggling. Our programs provide education—lots of it—community, resources and tools. We teach and train families the things that we wish our families knew when we were struggling with our hiding disease but the addiction wouldn’t let us tell them. 

Currently, our services are a membership model with private services, but our long-term plan is to have a mobile app with a free hub for people to get their questions answered every single day, as well as an insurance-covered family model. 

As I said at the beginning of this, this was not my idea. This came as the result of these five leaders in a community trying to make an impact. And we observed, and we listened, and we leaned in, and we showed up in service, and Tipping Point™ Recovery was born. 

It was built by the brave families who show up every day and roll up their sleeves to recover first so their loved ones can also recover. Well over 87% of those in our programs see their loved ones on a long-term path of recovery.

I did not plan to start this company, and I cannot do this alone. 

Will you join me and all of us in this much needed recovery conversation™? 

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It’s time we did recovery differently.