17/01/2026
For decades, drug and alcohol treatment systems have largely been designed from the top down … clinical, procedural, and often disconnected from the messy reality of what addiction actually looks and feels like. People enter services not as whole humans, but as referrals, case numbers, “service users”.
Yet recovery does not happen in tick-box rooms or under fluorescent lights.
Recovery happens in kitchens, on buses, in chaotic mornings and sleepless nights. It happens in the quiet courage of turning up when shame says stay home. It happens in relapse, repair, humour, community, and stubborn hope.
This is why lived experience is not just valuable, it is essential.
At Rhubarb Farm CIC, this belief is woven into everything we do. Through Rhubarb Recovery placements and The Recovery Space (our LERO, Lived Experience Recovery Organisation), recovery isn’t something delivered to people, it is something built with them.
Because the people who have walked through hell are often the ones who know where the ladders are.
Why Lived Experience Changes the Game
Someone who has lived through addiction doesn’t need you to explain:
• why mornings are hardest
• why guilt weighs heavier than anything
• how stigma burrows in deep
• why self-belief takes so long to grow back
They already know.
And because they know, they approach support differently.
Lived experience leaders:
• listen without judgement
• understand non-linear recovery
• recognise that relapse is information, not failure
• meet people where they are, not where a form expects them to be
In The Recovery Space and Rhubarb Farm, people are greeted not as “clients”, but as neighbours, peers, fellow travellers. There are no lanyards, no hierarchy, no “professional vs patient” divide. Instead:
• people sit in a circle
• power is shared
• voices are equal
• humour replaces shame
• compassion replaces fear
It is (deliberately) the opposite of a waiting room.
