‘We lost my husband aged 50 to chronic alcoholism,’ Kim Moore of Blossome told the conference. ‘We also lost his dad, his mum, and his sister attempted suicide – twice. That is the impact of addiction on families.
‘I got lost too,’ she said, and it wasn’t until almost three years after his death that she started to ‘thaw’ and process the ‘really complicated’ grief she was carrying. ‘I started to make a commitment to my own self-care.’ It was through that healing journey that she founded her organisation Blossome, she said – ‘a compassionate, trauma-informed self-care community. It’s not counselling, it’s not therapy, it’s community-based. And it’s about people coming together to practice self-care and heal.’
SELF-COMPASSION
Blossome used an evidence-based practice called ‘mindful self-compassion’, she told the conference. ‘We’re all very good at helping other people, but how good are you at turning compassion inwards towards yourself? If you can learn self-compassion it changes everything. We’ve got to do things differently.’
Self-compassion was about mindful awareness, common humanity and self-kindness, she said. ‘It’s all about treating that difficulty in a different way. Self-compassion completely changes the relationship that you have with yourself.’ Its ultimate aim was to ease suffering, she said, ‘something that we can all use. When it comes to addiction there’s an awful lot of suffering that we all feel.’
RIPPLE EFFECT
Blossome was the first organisation to deliver a self-compassion programme specifically designed for people affected by addiction, she told delegates, ‘and we delivered it to the family members’. A pilot programme had finished in March, and ‘the impact that we’re already seeing is incredibly significant,’ she said. ‘It’s not only helping the people who’ve taken the skills training and have learned self-compassion, it’s helping everyone around them – like a ripple effect.
‘As family members when we focus on our own self-care and develop our own self-compassion what happens is it takes the pressure off the loved one who’s in recovery,’ she continued. ‘It changes the dynamics of the relationships of how we communicate with one another – and we all begin to heal. Self-compassion is the antidote to shame.’
Watch video footage of the DDN Conference 2025 here.
FROM THE FLOOR
The interactive final session posed a series of questions for contributions from the floor: How do we get the right treatment and support for every one of us? How do we use ‘power mapping’ (targeting key people) to get our messages across to each other? And how can people in abstinence-based recovery help people in medication assisted recovery, and vice versa?
‘If we think about meeting people where they’re at, we work in commissioning frameworks where it’s very outcome-focused. The systems are dependent on commissioning agreements. It is public money and we do need to be accountable for that, but some people don’t want to come into treatment and fill in forms and jump through hoops and do this and do that. But we’re governed to do that, so how do we be accountable for the public money and the investment we’re getting but still meet people where they’re at?’
‘Ways of engaging the people not in treatment are safe supply and safe access to OST prescribing outside of a treatment framework. As an opiate recovery practitioner a lot of my clients I would say are in long-term maintenance, not necessarily by will of their own. They’re engaged in treatment because it’s their only access to OST prescribing, and it’s punitive. There is a lot of positive stuff happening, but it’s not enough.’
‘Tailor it to people’s individual needs. What might work for him might not work for me. For all these situations like probation and rehabilitation, get people from a LERO in there.’
‘Just because one thing works today it doesn’t mean it’s going to work next week. I spent a long time in abstinence-based recovery, but just because I didn’t want my old life it didn’t mean I wanted the one you had on offer. How do we build a lighthouse that gives everyone a direction and a bearing as to where we’re going? That’s what addiction does – it moves you about in the tide, regardless of where you think you’re going to go. That’s been my experience for 35 years.’
‘One of the many things we need in order to get to the people who might benefit from being in touch with us is drug consumption rooms. I don’t understand why we’re so frightened of them, and why we can’t persuade our MPs to allow us to have them wherever they might be needed. We also need a lot more drug checking because of the nitazenes, which I’m terrified about. And I think it’s going to get an awful lot worse.’