- Alcohol
- Drugs
I am not one to choose to be trapped in my past, but I want to share for those of you who may have experienced similar circumstances. From birth through age 12 I faced abuse on every level imaginable by parents, extended family members and several stepfathers. I realized at the age of 12 that the world I knew as normal was a horrifying existence.
I found safety through a children’s home and foster care. I found peace, calm and a lack of crisis or chaos. No one was doing unthinkable things to me, as I pretended to sleep or while locked in places where I had no way out. What healthy children knew as normal was absolutely unfamiliar, and I felt disconnected. I learned to not talk about how painful everything felt and how distorted everything appeared.
I became an alcoholic and drug-using teenager. I found that sniffing glue, drinking alcohol, using prescription and street drugs and hurting myself never ended the intense pain I felt inside. I became a teen mom and found myself right back where it all started with sexual abuse and abuse by my husband. All I knew was to use, so the pain would go away. It never did. By age 21 I found divorce court, lost a son due to my inability to show up to a hearing and recreated pain, trauma and loss.
I ended up in Los Angeles, CA with my mother. She made it clear that I would not drink or use while living in her home, and I needed a job immediately. I knew I needed to do exactly what she told me to. I immediately got hired in a SETA training program, and in one year opportunity presented itself and I was hired by a governmental organization that believed in me. The sky was the limit. I was rapidly promoted through to junior management to senior management as a small business and finance consultant, and I found my demise again thanks to a lot of drinking and social drugging with some of the wealthiest people in the LA region. I provided services to politicians, entertainment professionals, athletes and other members of the rich and famous. Some of these individuals were addicts and consumed large amount of alcohol and drugs without ceasing, and I chose to get caught in the snare.
One night during the winter of 1980, I realized that despite the condo, the three story home, the Mercedes and the office in downtown Los Angeles, all I could do is drink from my imported South American leather bar and smoke cocaine. Out of my mind, paranoid, I looked out on to the city and thought, “If I can get away from here, I can get away from them and be okay.” Within 24 hours I found an independent mover who arranged for the moving van and packed up both of my residences. I had no plan and no destination. I was convinced in my drug induced state that I needed to escape my environment and associations. I sold the business with everything in it, and with the finances I had and the funds from the sale I was able to live comfortably for a while.
I went through cold-turkey detox while cared for by a family member and old friend. They helped me find a flat and moved all of my belongings inside of the residence and returned the moving van. When I came out of my thick fog of delusion, I saw pieces of love made manifest all around me. I got sober, and I attended a course at UC Berkeley extension for paralegals. Before I completed the course, I began taking steps to develop an office to provide paralegal and process-serving services. What skill I had to brand and market companies had not been lost, and I used it to build the new business. The business was an overnight success, but I had no coping skills. The only means of coping I knew were drinking and getting high. Within the first four years I was a great success, having social parties for the elite and supplying the cocaine, but when everyone was gone I was down in the basement of my estate smoking cocaine again.
Within one year I was back in my addiction. I was experiencing hallucinations and paranoia, and eventually I was stopping to get high to and from work, at work, in gas station bathrooms, in my car and, in the extremes of desperation, even when I was driving. I decided I needed to put my home up for sale and find a new location.
The house sold immediately, I received a generous check and I made a trip to the corner liquor store. I woke up three months later in southern California in the depths of the ghetto. I was hung over, disheveled and incoherent, but I found my way to my mother’s place a few towns away. She and my stepfather had packed up what the thieves had not taken from my estate, and it was all sitting in storage. I never did stick around one place for long after that.
For the next six years I lived in my worst nightmare of drinking, drugging and transient living. I survived kidnappings, rapes, beatings, Russian roulettes, sleeping on sheets of cardboard under overpasses or in abandoned buildings and cars. My journey seemed endless, hopeless and full of absolute despair. I would pray that I could die, because getting clean and being substance free and unchained from my lifestyle was not my reality. I did make small attempts to go to a 12-step meeting, and I touched down in 30, 60 and 90-day programs, but I never stayed long. During the hard winter months I tried living in shelters, but I had far too much going on in my head to deal with rules. I could not shut down the pain without medicating it, and I always returned to the street.
One day I found myself in Stockton, California. There was a lot of money to be made and access to crack coming in from Mexico. I made a makeshift abode under the overpass and survived there for quite a while. I did not rest, eat or sleep. I just wanted to be high and not have the ability to think or feel. I began taking drugs from gang members. There was a contract out on my life.
God sent an angel to me, a homicide detective who has since passed away. He came to me with a woman in an unmarked car and placed me in a witness protection program. This is the day that began to change my course. I have no recollection of the two-hour drive. I only recall waking up in a room at my mother’s home. I called out, and she arrived with a list of what I needed to do: Bathe, eat and go to J’s. J was the 12-step guru of my mother’s town. She became one of my angels too. We lived at 12-step meetings, until she could help me get into a residential treatment program. I entered the program, graduated the program and agreed to continue attending 12-step meetings and get a job. I got a job within days, my mother helped me get a place to live and many people helped to furnish it. I even got a really nice car. Within 24 hours of getting my key to the place and the car, I found my way back to drinking, smoking crack cocaine and snorting china white heroin all over again.
Every time I got drunk or high, the consequences of my addiction and untreated mental health worsened. On March 9th, 1991 I was walking down a side street and praying to God to let me have one more hit, and I would stop using. It was early in the morning. I had been up for days on end. I was clothed in a man’s oversized dashiki, oversized dashiki pants that were rolled up and tied with a cloth belt at the waist to keep them up and the same plastic high heels I had worn when I left. I was hoping and praying for someone to stop, so I could con them for money.
I was walking close to the curb, sad, hurting, scared and lost, and a gold car came racing around the corner and pulled right up close to the curb. A hand came out of the back rear car window, and I was shot in the heart. I have no words to describe the moment of shock, disbelief, relief, fear and anger that occurred as I looked down at my chest and saw red all over the front of me. I can still hear the screams of people who were out in the street with me, crying, sobbing and yelling for help. More angels were dispatched. There was an ambulance sitting just across the street from where I was. I began to fade. I recall being on a stretcher inside the ambulance with two men. The larger one was looking at me with tears rolling down his cheeks, and he was wiping them away with his jacket sleeve. I recall looking him in his eyes and asking him, “Am I going to die?” He just wept and said, “No.”
The very next time I saw anything was a life-changing moment. I saw my mother, grandmother and a nurse, and they were hysterical and sobbing. I saw my feet sticking out from the sheet. They were raw, blistered and sore. As I continued to scan my body, I found a machine flat-lined to the left of me and a sheet over my face. Something was different. I was looking at the top of me from above, and there was a sense of peace with no pain. I felt compassion for those grieving in front of me. There was a warm and powerful presence with me in the room, and the face of this presence was too bright to see. I did hear him say, “Your work is not finished.” I had never had the feeling I encountered at that moment in my entire life. The presence of God left. I heard the monitor begin to beep, the lines were green, and my mother called the nurse saying, “She is still alive!”
There is so much between this day and February 16, 1992, when I fully gave up my substance use including smoking cigarettes. The rehabilitation period was rough. I became addicted to opiates and relapsed back into drinking and drugging. I went into treatment at a local program, got tired of doing the right thing, was defiant and left. I do not suggest you leave treatment, unless your clinical team and treatment plan recommends that it is time. I began doing what I had always done, except now I had 52 staples going down my chest, a bullet in my heart, pericardial bag repair and, according to the medical team, one year to live due to my condition. My journey resembled my last living nightmare, as I was again living homeless with no medical care.
I was assisted by another angel who believed in me. Her name was Sister N, and she was open to befriending me and provided basic needs for survival. She gave me a sense of belonging and let me know that I mattered. I laughed when I was with her, and she trusted me with various tasks. This was enough to keep me going. What she did not know is that I sold the new things she gave to me with tags on them and got drunk and high when I was not with her. It was because of her unwavering love and care that I was able to get clean. I believed her prayers and her encouragement, and I agreed to go when she asked me to attend 12-step meetings to get sober. My clean date is February 16, 1992.
I began feeling sick but ignored the potential seriousness of the situation because of what doctors had said about the short time I had before me. Sister N helped me get to a hospital, and I found out I was four months pregnant. Sister N helped me get into a maternity home for unwed mothers, and this led to a long-term residential treatment program for mothers and their babies. I completed a one-year residential program, one-year aftercare program and transitional housing, and it changed my life. I received assistance to go to junior college in 1993 and completed two semesters of chemical dependency studies. I then applied to a 4 year college in 1994 and was accepted. I was hired as a case manager at a Dual Diagnosis homeless shelter and in 1995. I earned my first doctorate in the field of psychology in 2004. In 2006 I began providing alcohol and other drug services independently in my region. I earned a second doctorate in pastoral care and counseling in 2008.
I continue to work as a clinical director and have developed a consulting, training and educational firm to improve the overall leadership, resiliency and quality of treatment in recovery programs. I am blessed to be a part this extraordinary field. I get to help people recover their lives. I celebrated 21 years of living substance clean last February 2013. I have been invited to leadership trainings and to be a guest at some of the finest treatment programs in the country.
I have many credentials, honors, letters of appreciation and testimonials, yet one of my most incredible works has been being a mother to my twin daughters. They just celebrated their 21st birthdays, are full-time college students and are employed, engaged and living amazing lives.
I close with this: I did not know what love was my entire life. I did not know what it really meant, what if felt like or how it looked. Through my relationship with my twins, my spiritual daughters and colleagues who love me even when I do not feel 100%, I’ve found that people love me despite my imperfections. This year I have met some of the most amazing, extraordinary individuals, and I hope they all know who they are. I want to share that love does not seek a return. Love loves for the sake of loving. It is not how people treat me or whether they even like or love me that matters. What is important is genuinely showing up in their lives, and that, for me, is what heroes are all about. I live to make a difference in the lost, the broken, the addicted and those in pain. If anyone reads my story and your loved one is addicted and in pain, do not give up on them. Hand all of it over to faith and trust, and for the most part it will all turn out fine. Wishing peace, love and hope for your today.