Stay up-to-date on the latest articles written by Frances Stone by opting-in to our newsletter HERE.

Have a Question you'd like Frances to answer in her next YouTube Podcast?

After recording the last video in September, I connected with my Higher Power by taking time off from making YouTube videos, giving myself a social media break and beginning to make significant changes in my career to prevent future burnout. These changes included partnering Family Recovery Society of Canada (the nonprofit organization I founded five years ago) with the nonprofit organization, Together We Can - Addiction Recovery & Education Society. At this time, I reac

This is the video I made after recording an emotionally vulnerable video of myself experiencing a lot of anger & sadness. In it, I talk about how for so many years of my life, I never felt my feelings. I would try to fix them, stop them or push them down. In recovery, I have learned to feel my feelings. Sometimes they feel like a wave, and I have to trust that I am safe to feel my feelings and that my Higher Power will bring me safely back to shore. Feelings won’t kill me. Fe

This is a very vulnerable video for me to share. In this video, I begin talking about anger, betrayal and passion. I talk about how anger makes me feel big and powerful, but also about how beneath my anger is often sadness and fear. For me, anger is usually a sign that I need to acknowledge and feel my feelings, set boundaries and learn the lesson the experience is trying to teach me. At the time of recording this video, I had started dating someone and we had just broken up.

Coming into recovery was like learning a new way to think, a new way to speak and a new way to live. Early in my recovery, I would look up the definitions to different things because there were words that I had always heard and thought I understood, but that I needed to relearn in the context of recovery from addiction. One of those words was faith. Some of the things I have heard often said about faith in recovery is that it is the strong belief and confidence in something o

In this video, I am talking about how isolated, confused and ashamed I was when I was still struggling all by myself with addiction. At that time, I didn’t know how to ask for help or how to get sober. This is why I think it’s important to make our stories of recovery accessible to people. However, in 12 step programs of recovery, anonymity is a spiritual principle. So this me talking about my fear of sharing my story and recovery “out loud” and how I have decided to share my

The first video I created on YouTube was of me wanting to be of service in the middle of the pandemic. I recorded it six months before I actually published it. Family Recovery Society was still “Mother’s Recovery Society” and we were just starting to organize a community for fathers in recovery. In this video, I share a little bit about why I want to start a YouTube channel, my personal struggle with addiction, and what supports have helped me on my path of recovery. I also s