'You don't need to live in addiction'

Michelle knows how it feels to be on the margins of society, struggling with family breakdown, trauma and addiction - but now she is in recovery.

As part of that recovery, she's become a citizen journalist, finding and telling the stories of those currently affected by addiction.

She's one of the journalists who feature in the BBC Disclosure programme From the Margins, a collaboration with the investigative news website The Ferret.

Using journalists with real-life past experiences of addiction, the joint project aims to provide a deeper understanding of the social crisis facing Scotland, and the solutions needed to help turn lives around.

Michelle was 10 when she started drinking and it's taken her 30 years to get to the stage where she feels she can tackle her addiction.

"My life was in absolute chaos," she says.

Now in her early 40s and in a more stable place, Michelle remembers what things were like during her darkest times when she kept getting sober and then relapsing.

Eventually her children were taken to live with another family member.

"Wakening up to silence and finding out that they're not there, that's the worst sound you can ever hear in a family home," she says.

Michelle filled the hole that losing her children left in her life with more alcohol.

"You're drinking to try and take the pain away, but it won't go so you keep on drinking," she says.

Despite policies that say Michelle should have got help to recover and be reunited with her children, this didn't happen.

"I got no support. The kids were gone, that was it," she says.

As part of From the Margins, Michelle visited a group in East Dunbartonshire which supports children whose parents have addiction problems.

Two teenagers supported by the charity, Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol and Drugs (SFAAD), spoke to Michelle about what it is like living in a house with parents who have alcohol and drug issues.

Billie (not her real name), who is 16, says: "They'll make arrangements for your birthday, that they're going to turn up in the morning, sober.

"And us being young, we do believe it. And it comes up, and they're drunk.

"Now, because they promised me so much, now I hate people telling me: 'I promise I'll do this for you', or 'I promise I'll do that'."

Michelle say this is something that she did with her own children.

"I promised them the world. And every time I promised them, I believed it myself, because I believed that I can do this."

But at that time, she says, she needed the alcohol to cope with life.

Billie says living with addicted parents mean that the children become responsible for themselves and their family.

"You become the parent," she says.

"In addiction, you become the worrier.

"What is my mum doing? Is my mum okay? Is my mum safe? Is my mum in the house? Is she dead?"

Another teenager helped by the charity, 18-year-old Maisie (not her real name), says she feels protected by the support she now receives from SFAAD.

"If you can't go home to your parent and say, 'Oh, I got this achievement in school,' and they don't care about you because they're on drugs and alcohol, you can go to [the charity] and they'll be like, 'That's fantastic, well done...'

"It's like it becomes a bit like your safe family.

"Because maybe family at home isn't safe, but Scottish Families is safe."

Billie says that over time she has realised that she can change her life and try to create the future she has always wanted.

For Michelle, it was the death of someone who was once close to her which provided the catalyst she needed to get sober.

"At the funeral I watched some faces closely," she says.

"It was something I saw in their eyes - I can't tell you exactly what - but it gave me the push I needed.

"I could have gone either way - back into addiction or forward into recovery."

Michelle had been going to AA for several years, but this time she was able to follow the recovery steps.

"I got that counselling, and all the help I needed to be able to sit with my feelings, and the loss of my kids," she says.

"I had to learn how to deal with life without numbing the pain of it."

Her life has changed. Michelle is building relationships with her family and has care of her children again.

She is immersed in volunteering with the recovery community and is working again.

"You don't need to live in addiction," she says.

"The biggest thing ever, for me, was somebody listening to what I needed and wanted.

"I love life, and I want everybody else to experience loving life. There's thousands of people out there, well millions, living life normally. And everybody should be getting that."

Disclosure: From the Margins will be broadcast on BBC One Scotland at 20:00 on Monday 28 March.