A Story of Hope, Strength and Resilience

KF started with our family.

We were a happy, chaotic, blended family. Kids everywhere, careers, businesses, a new home and a little girl we'd had together. Life was busy and full and, from the outside at least, we were doing pretty well.

What I didn't know was that Ben had developed a dependency to alcohol and had been drinking in secret.

I knew something was wrong. I just didn't know what. He had changed, things increasingly didn't add up, but it was Covid, work was stressful and life was weird for everybody, so I found explanations for it.

Until I couldn't anymore.

One afternoon, following an argument the night before, I received a message saying Ben had left the house with a knife and didn't want to be here anymore. The police eventually found him in a hotel. He had harmed himself, but he was alive.

And that was the moment life as I knew it completely fell apart.

I knew absolutely nothing about addiction, so I did what I've always done when life throws something at me that I don't know how to deal with.

I found a way.

Within days I'd found and privately funded a 28-day residential rehab. Ben went into treatment and I stayed at home trying to keep everything else going — kids, school runs, businesses, bills, dinner, bedtime and endless questions about when Daddy was coming home — while privately trying to get my own head around what the hell had just happened to us.

I buried myself in learning – I learned about addiction, trauma, recovery, relapse, enabling and boundaries, but if I'm completely truthful, underneath all of that learning was one belief:

If I understood this enough, I could fix it.

Not his addiction necessarily. I knew intellectually that only he could do that.

I thought I could fix us. I thought I could save our family.

And for a while, it looked like I had.

Ben finished rehab. He didn't come straight home because too much had happened and the trust had gone, but we worked through it. There were meetings, therapy, boundaries and some really difficult conversations.

Slowly, we rebuilt.

And then something quite incredible came from something really bloody awful.

KF.

I created the thing I wish somebody had handed me when our lives first exploded. Somewhere you could walk into and say, I don't actually know what the f*** I'm doing anymore, and somebody would understand.

No shame. No judgement. No clinical language you needed a degree to understand. Just people who got it.

KF grew.

So did we.

Three years later, Ben and I renewed our wedding vows on a beach in Thailand and I stood there genuinely believing we'd made it.

Not pretending. Not putting on a happy face.

I believed it.

We had survived addiction. We'd rebuilt our marriage. Our family was together and KF existed because we'd taken the worst thing that had happened to us and somehow made something good from it.

That was the ending on this website.

Recovery. Resilience. Love wins.

Lovely.

Except life apparently hadn't finished writing the story.

The Bit I Never Expected to Write

Over the next year, circumstances in my own life changed dramatically.

My dad was diagnosed with an aggressive terminal cancer and, at the same time, my own physical health had deteriorated. What started as symptoms and significant pain eventually resulted in the diagnosis of a brain tumour and the need for spinal fusion surgery.

There isn't really a nice way of dressing that period up. It was a lot, even for somebody like me who had become very good at dealing with a lot.

For years I'd been the person who kept everything moving. If there was a problem, I found a solution. If something went wrong, I dealt with it. I'd become very good at managing children, businesses, life, Ben's recovery and whatever else happened to be thrown at us.

Suddenly, my attention had to be somewhere else.

My dad was dying.

I was splitting my time between Derbyshire and South Wales caring for him and trying to make the most of whatever time we had left, while still being a mum, running KF and dealing with the fact that my own body wasn't exactly cooperating either.

And that's when things at home started to unravel again.

The difficult part is that I could see it happening. There were changes in behaviour, inconsistencies and little things that probably wouldn't have meant much to anybody else but felt horribly familiar to me. That feeling when you've lived through something before and your body seems to recognise it before your brain is quite ready to admit it.

I spoke about it. I said I was worried. I explained that old patterns seemed to be resurfacing and that some of the behaviours I was seeing frightened me.

I was shut down, and despite everything I knew by then, I still questioned myself. Maybe what we'd been through had made me hypervigilant. Maybe I was reading too much into things. Maybe I was stressed because of Dad.

The truth was, I didn't have the capacity to investigate it.

My dad was  dying.

There was a finite amount of time left with someone I loved beyond words and I wasn't prepared to spend it checking up on another grown adult or becoming some bizarre combination of wife, detective and recovery worker again.

The first time Ben became unwell, his addiction became the centre of our lives.

This time, life simply didn't give me the capacity to make it the centre again.

And perhaps that exposed far more than I was ready for.

January 2025

In January 2025, while splitting my time between home and South Wales caring for Dad, I discovered that Ben had been using substances.

I wasn't shocked in the way I'd been the first time. It was more a horrible sinking feeling of I fucking knew it, followed very quickly by the realisation that I knew exactly what could come next.

And I couldn't do it again.

Not because I'd stopped loving him or stopped believing in recovery. By then I'd lived addiction, studied it, worked in it and built an organisation around supporting people affected by it.

But I also understood the cost.

I knew what addiction had already cost our family and what it had cost me. I wasn't prepared to go back to monitoring, questioning, checking, rescuing and reorganising our lives around somebody else's substance use.

So I held my boundary and was met with words I don't think I'll ever forget:

“Drugs are more important than you.”

I filed for divorce the following day.

I'd love to tell you that was some hugely empowering moment where I knew my worth, walked away and never looked back because that would make a much nicer story.

It wasn't.

The next six months were hell.

I had filed for divorce, but I still loved my husband. I remembered the man who had gone to rehab and rebuilt our family with me. I remembered standing on that beach in Thailand believing we'd come through the worst of it.

Then came the promises I'd heard before. He didn't mean it. He'd change. He'd stop. This time would be different.

And there were moments when I desperately wanted to believe them.

That's the thing about knowing a lot about addiction: knowledge doesn't remove love and it certainly doesn't remove hope. You can recognise exactly what a pattern looks like while simultaneously wanting more than anything for this time to be the exception.

The difference was that this time I had lived experience, knowledge and insight, and although I didn't always manage it perfectly, I was finally learning to trust myself.

I didn't need to keep proving something was wrong before I was allowed to say it wasn't okay.

And Then Dad Died

Dad died in March 2025.

To say that was the hardest period of my life feels ridiculously inadequate.

I was trying to understand how the person who had always been there suddenly wasn't, while helping my children understand that they'd lost their grandad. I was carrying my grief and theirs at the same time, and there are parts of that period that I don't think will ever leave me.

At the same time, my marriage was falling apart. I was living with significant physical pain, dealing with a brain tumour and spinal surgery, running KF, parenting and trying to keep some version of normal life going.

I wasn't okay.

And I'm not going to look back now and turn it into some lovely inspirational story about how strong I was.

I was absolutely broken.

I kept going because there wasn't really another option. The children still needed feeding. Bills still needed paying. KF still had people who needed us. Emails still arrived. School runs still happened.

Life has this slightly offensive habit of carrying on when yours feels like it's fallen apart.

So I carried on too.

What became painfully obvious was that, for probably the first time in our relationship, I was the person who genuinely needed looking after.

For years I'd had enormous capacity for Ben's crises. I'd researched addiction, found treatment, funded rehab, made the phone calls, held everything together, supported recovery, forgiven, rebuilt and tried again.

Now my dad had died, my own health was frightening, I was in pain and emotionally I had very little left.

I didn't need somebody to fix it. Most of it couldn't be fixed.

I needed kindness. Support. Compassion. Somebody to recognise that the person who had spent years carrying everybody else couldn't carry everything anymore.

And I wasn't met with those things.

That was incredibly painful to accept, but it also made me see our relationship differently.

When I no longer had the capacity to keep carrying everything, I finally understood how much I'd been carrying all along.

Enough

Things continued to escalate and in July 2025 I found substances again.

By then something in me had changed. I didn't need another six hours on Google researching addiction, another conversation about trauma or another internal debate about whether my boundary was fair.

I'd reached enough.

And through all of this what do you think I was met with?

Yup – Blame – it was my fault this had happened – an email landed with Ben attempting to justify his drug use due to his unhappiness – the reason for HIS unhappiness? –ME - and the fact I didn't laugh anymore.

I remember reading it and genuinely wondering whether we were living in completely different realities.

Because he was right about one thing.

I wasn't laughing very much.

My dad had just died. I had a brain tumour. I needed spinal fusion surgery. I was in pain. I was supporting my children through grief, running an organisation, going through the breakdown of my marriage and once again dealing with substance use in our family.

Frankly, I think being a bit less cheerful was a fairly proportionate response to the circumstances.

I can laugh at the absurdity of it now.

I absolutely couldn't then.

Following an incident, Ben left the family home and was subsequently arrested. What followed were police reports, safeguarding concerns, supervised contact and contact centres, protective orders, solicitors and family court proceedings.

I became the sole day-to-day parent and provider for our child while grieving Dad, dealing with my own health, running KF and navigating safeguarding and a legal system which, despite having a law degree, feels very different when it's your child and your life being discussed.

Our divorce was finalised in October 2025. The children proceedings concluded in May 2026, and the financial proceedings are the final piece, with the final hearing due in September 2026.

Writing those dates down makes everything sound strangely neat.

It wasn't.

Behind the hearings, reports and court orders were people trying to adjust to a completely different life, children who needed stability, grief that didn't conveniently wait until the legal proceedings were finished and days when I genuinely didn't know how I was going to keep doing all of it.

But somehow, I did.

Not beautifully. Not because I'm some incredibly strong woman who handled everything perfectly.

I just kept finding a way.

The Part That's Hard to Admit

This is probably the most uncomfortable part of the story for me.

By the time this happnened, I knew this stuff.

I was running a lived experience recovery organisation. I had qualifications and training. I'd supported hundreds of people, sat in safeguarding meetings and advocated for families experiencing exactly the kind of chaos that was happening in my own life.

I could sit opposite somebody at KF and recognise patterns in their life that I would then go home and question in mine.

There's a temptation to think knowledge protects you. That once you understand the psychology and recognise the patterns, surely you'll spot it immediately if it happens to you.

Turns out, that's bollocks.

Knowledge doesn't make you immune to loving somebody. Understanding addiction doesn't stop you hoping. Being educated doesn't stop you questioning yourself, and being strong and capable doesn't mean you can't slowly become accustomed to things you would immediately recognise as unacceptable if somebody else was sitting opposite you describing them.

If anything, sometimes understanding addiction gives you more ways to explain things away.

I could understand trauma, shame, relapse and why somebody might lie when they were frightened of the consequences.

I could explain almost everything.

Eventually I realised something that fundamentally changed me and the way I approach our work at KF:

Being able to understand why something is happening doesn't mean you have to continue living with its impact.

For years my questions had been about Ben.

Why is this happening? What does he need? How can I help? What haven't we tried? What can I do differently?

Eventually, I asked a different question.

What is this doing to us?

And once I started looking at addiction through that lens, rather than only through the experience of the person using substances, I couldn't unsee what was there.

My Recovery

For years, recovery in our family had revolved around Ben — his drinking, sobriety, treatment, meetings, behaviour, relapse and wellbeing.

Without really noticing it happening, our family had learned to orbit around one person's addiction, and I had become incredibly good at keeping everything moving.

People told me how strong I was.

I've learned that sometimes what looks like strength from the outside is simply somebody who hasn't been given the option of falling apart.

Eventually I realised I'd spent years fighting for somebody else's recovery without recognising that I needed one of my own.

I needed to recover from constantly anticipating what might happen next, questioning my instincts, trying to work out what was true and carrying responsibilities that were never actually mine.

I needed to unlearn the belief that understanding somebody meant accepting their behaviour.

And I needed to grieve both my dad and the family I'd genuinely believed we'd managed to save.

That last part matters because I refuse to rewrite our history just because I know how it ended.

The family standing on that beach in Thailand was real. The love was real. The recovery we'd experienced was real. And what happened afterwards was real too.

I've had to learn how to hold all of those truths at the same time.

What This Means for KF

I haven't come out of this hating people who use drugs or alcohol.

Quite the opposite.

I still believe fiercely in recovery. I see people make extraordinary changes to their lives every day and I will never allow KF to become somewhere people feel judged, shamed or written off because of their substance use.

Someone can walk through our door after their first relapse or their fiftieth and we'll meet the person before we meet the behaviour.

But my understanding of recovery is bigger now.

Because while somebody is experiencing addiction, there is often an entire world of people experiencing it alongside them.

The parent answering the phone at 2am. The partner trying to work out whether somebody has been drinking. The child who's become incredibly good at reading the atmosphere in a room. The family desperately trying to keep somebody alive. The person who wants to stay. The person who knows they need to leave.

And the person experiencing addiction who thinks they've f***ed everything up so badly that there's no way back.

There has to be room for all of them.

That's the KF I want now.

Not sides. Not good people and bad people. Not judgement.

People.

Because lived experience has taught me that addiction and recovery are messy, complicated and very rarely fit neatly into the boxes we create for them.

Sometimes recovery means rehab. Sometimes it means rebuilding your family. Sometimes it means relapse and trying again. Sometimes it means finally putting a boundary in place and keeping it there. Sometimes it means learning to trust yourself again.

And sometimes two people who once loved each other need to recover separately.

All of those things can be true.

My story didn't get the ending I wanted, but I'm not going to rewrite the beginning because of that and I'm not going to sanitise the ending because it's uncomfortable.

I'm still here. My children are moving forward. KF is growing, and I'm rebuilding a life that looks very different from the one I thought I'd have.

And somehow, after all of it, I still haven't lost hope.

I still believe people can change.

I still believe families can heal.

I just understand now that healing doesn't always mean staying together.

Same hope. Same lack of judgement. A hell of a lot more lived experience.

Steph x