- Drugs
- Faith
- Friends & Family
submitted by: Susanne Johnson
Nicole grew up very sheltered as a daughter of a preacher. She really did not come into contact with any alcohol or drugs at all during her adolescent years and didn’t know much about it. There were some alcoholics in her family, but nobody talked about it.
Many years went by and at the age of 33 her life partner unexpectedly left her in a very bad breakup. She had no idea that it was going to happen and it hit her very hard. A friend saw her in pain for a long time and offered her crack to ease her pain. It was her friend’s way of coping and she wanted to help Nicole. Nicole couldn’t even inhale the smoke, so her friend blew it into a paper bag that she put over Nicole’s head to have her inhale for the first time. Nicole loved the effect it had on her right away. She didn’t know what it was, she only knew it was somehow wrong to do. But, she loved it so much that she kept coming back to the drug.
For many years all went fine for her. Nicole was running a small business, a little country convenience store in Atlanta, Georgia. She lived in denial about addiction and didn’t think that she had a problem at all. Just her kids noticed that she had a problem. “If you love me you would stop,” she heard numerous times.
Time passed by and she kept losing everything. She felt stuck and couldn’t function anymore. The drug took over her life. Her children went to child protective services, and even then it took her 18 months to accept that she needed to change her life. She was court ordered to stop drugs and participate in programs. She wanted to have her children back and she went to all those meetings and outpatient services for the wrong reasons at first. “Fake it until you make it” was her idea at that moment. She was forced into a treatment center, but checked out after just a week. “The longer I stayed clean for the wrong reasons, the more I came to the right reasons,” states Nicole.
One night she was lying in bed and all of a sudden she got the thought that she wanted to stop using drugs, but not for her children, the judge or anybody else, but rather for herself. She entered the recovery process for the wrong reasons but found love in the new lifestyle and feelings she had. It changed her and now she wanted it from her heart and for herself. She asked God to help her and she felt that her recovery took a change that day for the positive.
Nicole is 53 today and lives in Indiana. She goes to school now to become an addiction counselor. She also has a prison ministry and enjoys helping people. “God has helped me to turn my life completely around,” she says. Her relationship with her father today is doing well again and her youngest children are back at home.