Kelley K. is the mother of Phase 3 Men’s Program resident, Kyle K.

“We have been on this journey for a good long while,” said Kelley of her son Kyle’s path to recovery. “He’s 26 and it all started when he was 15. We didn’t realize until he was 17 that he had been experimenting with [drugs and alcohol] in junior high and high school. This process has been long and exhausting”.

Kelley describes her son as a typical Texas teenager. “He was a star athlete, popular- he just had everything going for him.” It wasn’t long before Kelley noticed a change in him. “We started noticing signs of his school work dropping off. When we finally figured it out, we came home one day and he was just passed out on the couch. We took him to the ER. That’s when it came out what he was taking and how bad it was. It was heroin and opiates. We bawled, we cried. As far as we knew, our lives would be different forever. We knew it would not be an easy journey and we have been on that journey now ever since.”

For Kelley and her husband, this was shocking news. “It was just awful. We were blind. We did not know where to go or what to do. [Addiction] has never affected my husband and I or anyone in our immediate family. We did not know what to do.”

Staff at the hospital suggested they take Kyle immediately from there into an inpatient facility. “We thought ‘No, let us go home, let us talk about this.’ We went home but had we known then what we know now, we would have taken him to treatment right away.”

Kelley and her husband made an effort to help Kyle while maintaining his school and extracurricular life by trying outpatient treatment. “He was on the baseball team, the football team. He had all kinds of stuff going on in his world. We thought we’d get him into IOP and see what happens.” This solution did not last long as Kyle’s old patterns emerged. “After a few months it got severe. We got a call from the school one day that he was passed out again. We knew this was not working.” From there, Kyle entered an inpatient treatment program, however, he was on a merry go round of inpatient and outpatient treatments for years before coming to Turnbridge.

“It had gotten to a point where it was out of hand. He’d been to the same thirty-day program a few times. It got to the point where he was in and out. He couldn’t hold down a job, he had gone to jail a few times. He tried a sober living community and that fell apart after a few weeks,” explains Kelley. “He was truly on the verge of death.”

Finally, a counselor recommended long term treatment. “Turnbridge is Kyle’s first residential long term treatment. It has always been thirty days but now we know that’s not an option. I wish there was more education out there- at the time we had no clue. Now, this is our first journey through long term care and it’s the first time he’s been sober this long. Sometimes, we thought he'd been doing well for a while, but he later told us he has never made it 90 days [sober] in the entire time 10 years we've been doing this- until now. He is now almost 11 months sober. If you would have told me back then that’d he'd be where he is now, I'd would say ‘I hope so, but I don’t see it.’ He was in such bad shape. We never gave up hope but we also didn’t know if it would ever get any better. We had to try something different and that’s where we are now. He’s doing amazing. It’s a miracle”.

While Kyle worked on his recovery, Kelley had healing to do of her own. “I need to work on me because it's been all about Kyle for the past 10 years. [During that time] you forget about yourself. You go into survival mode just to keep him alive. My husband and I now both work on ourselves. For me, that means changing how we communicate with [Kyle]. There’s a lot of habits we are trying to break. For one, we try not automatically think he’s lying or question him.” Setting boundaries and working on building this trust back was key for Kelley, as she and Kyle were across the country. “I got so used to calling him constantly to make sure he’s alive and I don’t have to do that anymore. I still catch myself wanting to call him all the time to make sure he’s okay and I’m trying to let go of that. I’m working on my own piece and changing old habits.”

Recently, Kelley was able to have Kyle home for a visit. “Unfortunately he’s so far away so we don’t get to visit much but he did come home a few weeks ago and it was so amazing. He was laughing, he was talking and I didn’t catch myself questioning every move he made or looking at his eyes to see if he was sober. I said to him ‘you are like your old self’. It was an amazing transformation and it was just so nice to spend time with him. He spent time with his younger brother who has always longed for a relationship with Kyle. I know he’s still got work to do, but it was like everything was normal.”

Currently, Kyle is in school to be an electrician. “It’s a miracle. I mean, I didn’t think he was going to get to the point where he'd be back in school. Kyle’s a brilliant and bright person but all of that had been gone for so long. When he signed up for school I thought ‘Oh my gosh, he’s really doing it!’”.

Kyle’s recovery has been healing for the whole family. “It's amazing now that I can go out and have a life,” said Kelley. “My mind still rarely leaves him but now I don’t feel fear. Now its wondering how is day is going or how school was instead of whether or not he is alive. This experience has been transformative for the whole family. It's amazing, I can breathe again.”

Neha S. is a Phase 3 client in the Women’s Program.

Growing up in Maryland, Neha found herself drawn to substance use as a means to “fit in” with her peers. “It was really hard growing up in an Indian family because at home, I lived with all these cultural values and when I went to school, society seemed completely different. I was always trying to morph to wherever I was at. I had all these masks and I didn’t know what my own face looked like.”

Through experimenting with drugs and alcohol in late middle school and early high school, Neha found herself falling in with a group of like-minded people. “I started smoking weed and I met all these people that also enjoyed smoking weed,” she remembers. “That quickly became my identity. I was that stoner who hung out with the stoners.” Despite this drug use, Neha managed to maintain good grades throughout high school. “I always still cared about school. Everything seemed okay on the surface. It didn’t cause problems at first. Nothing became unmanageable until I got a little bit older.”

As Neha moved onto college, not only did her academic horizons expand, but her drug use broadened as well. “[In college] someone would bring acid and I started doing that. I was always a kid who was curious,” Neha explains. “I trying harder drugs every now and then.”

Up until this point, Neha had used drugs out of curiosity and in an attempt to find a group to which she belonged. Not long after, she found the substance that would lead her down a darker path. “I didn’t fully fall in love with something until I was introduced to Xanax. I had always suffered from a lot of anxiety issues. When I popped my first Xanax bar I loved and I ran with that.”

From them on, Neha began to use substances for self-medication instead of partying with friends. “My friends changed as my using changed. I hung out with the really smart kids who focused on school, even though I'd been popping pills.” As Neha began to use more frequently, her priorities when it came to friendships started to change.” My friend group kept adapting to this lifestyle I was living. I lost every friends possible. Eventually, the people I hung out with didn’t care about me, they just wanted to get high with me. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t want anybody to care about me or tell me what I was doing was wrong. I just wanted people to get messed up with and for that to be the extent of our friendship.” Neha found herself living what she described as a “double – even triple life.”

“In order to keep up with school, I needed uppers. My life became a balancing act; downers to feel okay and uppers to be functional. I got really into coke and everything went downhill. I didn’t have any money and couldn’t hold down a job. I became a thief. I would rob people, stores – anything I could steal. I got arrested a couple of times and each time the charges got heavier and heavier.”

Her addiction continued to take a toll on her life and Neha continued to keep up the charade in front of her parents. Mostly, she felt it was out of concern for them. “I just didn’t want them to worry. I didn’t want them to know I wasn’t okay,” she explained.

Throughout the downward spiral, Neha managed to graduate college with a degree in Healthcare Management and Business Administration. Unsure of her next step, Neha turned to her parents for guidance. “We decided I was going to move home for a couple months, save money and look for a real job with my degree.” Once she moved home, Neha’s façade began to crumble. “My parents obviously realized something was wrong. I weighed 94 pounds.” They immediately became suspicious and did some investigation of their own. “They always invaded my privacy- for the best. I always smelled like weed or alcohol and they’d find pills and vials for coke in my room.”

Once the act was up, Neha’s parents did their best to help. “Another thing with Indian culture – it's hard to accept that somebody has a problem. They accepted that I had a depression and anxiety problem so they send me to a depression and anxiety clinic.” Eventually, Neha stopped showing up. She gave an IOP program a shot and had a similar experience after meeting a guy in the program. “We both ended up leaving. I left my house and my parents didn’t hear from me for a couple weeks. I was doing a bunch of drugs; literally anything I could get my hands on. I was at the point where I didn’t care whether I lived or died. I couldn’t cope with reality. I had a 5-day window where I did acid every single day and at that point, I realized I needed help.”

Neha got advice from the man she left her IOP program with. “He had been clean before and showed me a thirty-day treatment center. He told me ‘It will really help you. Call your mom. You should call your mom.’”  For Neha, this was her first attempt at taking advice, something she would later consider one of the most helpful parts of her recovery. In this moment, Neha became willing to ask for help and accept it.

“[Going to treatment] was the best decision I ever made. I was lucky enough to have the gift of desperation. Anything anyone told me to do, I would do it. My counselor suggested to me extended care and I knew if I went home it would not end well. My parent showed me Turnbridge and after my thirty-day program we drove straight there.”

Neha remembered initially wanting to “get through” three months of Turnbridge and return home. “When I got here, I realized I needed more help than that. I didn’t want to go home. I knew I needed help, I just didn’t know what kind of help. All I knew was that I didn’t want to go back to how I had been living.” Once realizing this, she made a conscious decision to commit to her treatment. “I really immersed myself in the program. I took meeting seriously. I got myself a sponsor I really trusted. I work the steps. I really hit the ground running and took every suggestion possible. I knew I just did not know how to live and I needed others to show me.”

This act of total surrender has been crucial to Neha’s recovery. “I know I have a strong support network at Turnbridge and I make sure to utilize it. I talk to my case manager anytime I want. Now, I run my big decisions by my sponsor, case manager or [peers] because I have strong people to rely on for guidance. Today I can control my anxiety and I have never felt better.”

“Now, I have a year and a month clean. I know that life is still hard and I have to deal with life on life’s terms. I’ve gone through issues [in sobriety] and I just try to do my best and stay clean. I continue to work my program when things get hard and lean on people I know will be there.”

Through Neha’s journey through addiction- from searching for an identity to coping with mental health issues – Neha hopes to use her experience to help others. “I started the [Drug and Alcohol Recovery Counselor] program at [Gateway Community College]. I have about a year and a half left.” Neha hopes to combine this knowledge with her Healthcare Management Degree to build herself a career helping others. “I got clean at 22. I notice a lot of people trying to get clean younger. In my experience, every I met when I came into recover was older and whenever I found someone who was younger and got clean, I related to the better. I hope I can use my perspective to help somebody somewhere down the road.”