Alyssa Mainhart, substance use counselor at Foundations Medical Services, was open and raw speaking about her struggles with addiction and the way certain programs and people helped her get to 11 years of clean recovery. She spoke during the Butler County Summer Conference of the county’s Opioid Overdose Coalition at Butler County Community College in Butler Township on Tuesday, Aug. 8. Laura Welsh/Special to the Butler Eagle

BUTLER TWP — Addiction recovery experts from around Pennsylvania gathered for the sixth annual summer conference held by the county’s Opioid Overdose Coalition at Butler County Community College’s main campus on Tuesday, Aug. 8.

The two-day conference highlights resources and noteworthy trends in addiction recovery, with presentations from practitioners in the field and people whose experiences in recovery adding valuable insight to the issue.

Alyssa Mainhart, substance use counselor at Foundations Medical Services, shared her story after the opening remarks. July marked 11 years of living sober, she said.

When she expressed she was nervous to address the room, the audience, made up in large part of addiction recovery specialists, encouraged her to continue.

"I just want to share with people that recovery is possible,“ Mainhart said. ”We can get better, and we can overcome this. It takes a lot of strength; maybe we dig inside that strength we didn’t know we had, but we do, and if we do have it, we can make a difference.“

Mainhart’s opioid addiction began at 16, when she suffered injuries from a car accident that left her with brain bleeds and severe damage to her left arm.

During a three-and-a-half-month stay at a hospital, Mainhart was treated with opioid pain medication to help manage her pain.

“That’s when I really learned that, like, I don’t have to hold all these feelings inside,” she said. “I found something that made me happy. It made me feel good. And I started to kind of spiral down from there.”

She noted that coming from an abusive household, she gravitated toward dysfunctional relationships.

“I’m from a very broken home, so I learned not to talk about my emotions from a young age,” she said. “As I progressed through school, I kind of got in with that crowd ... I was drinking, I was smoking weed on the weekends, and I thought that was cool.”

“Those are the people that I gravitated toward, those were the people that accepted me, and that’s where I felt comfortable,” Mainhart said. “When life wasn’t chaotic, I felt uncomfortable because I was so used to living in that chaos.”

Once in recovery, she went to cosmetology school and became a manager of a hair salon. Feeling that she wanted to do more-fulfilling work, she said, she went back to school at BC3 in 2018. She graduated with high honors. This spring, she received her bachelor’s degree in social work from PennWest Edinboro, also with high honors.

Mainhart credits her success to social workers who empathized with her and worked collaboratively with her through recovery.

“The social workers viewed me as a person, and not just another addict, or another throwaway,” she said.

As a practitioner working on the other side of addiction recovery, Mainhart helps people who find themselves positions similar to where she once stood.

“I want to represent other people who maybe feel the way that I felt,” she said. “I think in the last, well, 11 years, we’ve come a long way, but I think we still have a long way to go.”

The event progressed with breakout sessions focusing on drug trends, trauma and pathways to recovery, as well as sessions exploring emotional intelligence and empowerment training for counselors.

Tammy Barney, a family wellness program coordinator at Glade Run, said the conference will help her stay up to date with trends in how communities cope with substance use.

“Everything changes constantly, but we deal with families that are homeless and have CYS (Children and Youth Services) cases, and so they’re very vulnerable,” Barney said. “We’re often, you know, looking for red flags, things that we need to be concerned about.”

Amanda Milliren, of Erie, who works as a regional service coordinator at White Deer Run, said she attended the conference to learn more about topics concerning Butler County, since her facility provides treatment to a wide range of patients from Pennsylvania.

Milliren said addiction counseling and treatment often involve whole families and substance use disorder and recovery impact communities and families beyond the users themselves. Family members often develop disordered habits along the way, she said.

“Everybody gets sick,” she said. “Everybody plays a role ... whether they become an enabler, they become hypervigilant, they become resentful. And so that anger, then, you know, it all impacts the individual that’s using, and the individual that’s using also impacts the entire family.”

Milliren said she would want those in active addiction to know there are people who want to help them, and that help is available to them.

The conference will continue Wednesday at Butler Intermediate High School’s Teachers Center with remarks from District Attorney Richard Goldinger, Drug and Alcohol Program director Donna Jenereski, and a presentation from Special Intelligence Agent Brian Dempsey about vaping trends among young adults and drug trafficking trends in Butler County. It was moved there late Tuesday following a power outage at BC3.

“We’re honored that they were able to join us to lend knowledge and insight and enliven passion for our work,” Lisa Gill, prevention specialist of Butler County Human Services’ Drug and Alcohol Program, said about the group of speakers and facilitators Tuesday. “We’re especially proud to recognize and celebrate that right here in Butler County we have many experts in the field as well. And we’re honored that they’re able to join us to share their knowledge, experience and gifts.”

Lisa Gill, prevention specialist of Butler County Human Services, Drug and Alcohol Program, welcomes attendees to the Butler County Summer Conference for Butler County Opioid Coalition at Butler County Community College on Tuesday. Laura Welsh/Special to the Eagle