Tucked away behind office parks, backed by a line of trees, is an unassuming building that is transforming people’s lives.
The one-of-a-kind facility in Richland County, New Beginnings is a co-ed, non-medical residential treatment facility for individuals suffering from substance use disorders, specializing in treatment for pregnant women. It’s a home away from home; maybe a first home for those who never quite felt safe wherever they lived.
When I arrived on a late fall afternoon, residents were shuffling about the kitchen preparing dinner while a few chatted amiably on couches nearby. They greeted me with guarded smiles and curiosity.
One agreed to share his story with me.
We sit across from one another in a small room at the front of the facility; he’s a man in his 40s with big, pooling eyes that seem vulnerable and kind. He wished to remain anonymous, but his story, for all its particulars and individuality, could stand in for the experiences of so many others grappling with addiction.
It also carries a lesson: you never know what brought people to where they are.
“Where do you want me to start?” he asks.
I tell him to begin where it all began which for him was a wedding when he was just 6 years old; that, was the first time he ever got drunk – dangerous and too young, but innocent enough. From there though, life took a dark turn when at age 8 he was sexually abused by a man who’d shoot him up with stuff.
“He kinda helped create an addict, I think,” he says, looking down at the table between us.
For 10 years he endured this abuse until he graduated high school and left home. Yet everywhere he went (and he went far, up and down the California coast and worked in Alaska for a while) those earlier experiences stayed with him. Addiction has been with him too, on and off, for over three decades.
He came to New Beginnings after he OD’d while driving, half-consciously pulling into a driveway just in time.
“Thank God the people were home and came out and saw I was unresponsive.”
He was rushed to the hospital, but also charged with possession of heroin and sentenced to drug court and intensive outpatient treatment. That’s when the real struggle began. Try as he might, he could not stay clean.
“I couldn’t say I was done,” he says, “I couldn’t stop. I wanted to stop with everything I had and could not.”
After going months like this: trying and failing, unable to get through the horrific withdrawals, the dope sickness, and then trying and failing some more, he began to despair and his mind turned to suicide.
That’s when his then girlfriend, fearing the worst, persuaded him to check himself into the hospital. Sitting on the third floor of the hospital he realized that if he didn’t do something he WAS going to die, one way or another.
“I just didn’t really want to die, ya know. I didn’t really care if I lived, but I didn’t want to do it to myself and it was about my mom and my family. I just couldn’t do that to them.”
He’d been to New Beginnings once before, in 2010, and managed to stay sober for a whole year before old habits got the best of him; he knew it was a place that could help.
When I spoke with Elaine Surber, Director of New Beginnings and Associate Director of Catalyst Life Services (of which New Beginning’s is a part), she explained that this is how it often goes with recovery: it happens in spurts and starts.
“We have people who have been in treatment many times and then come here and for some reason the stars align and things work for them.”
Success for her isn’t defined as a final destination but rather as a collection of small victories, “increments” that act as signposts on the road to recovery.
It could be someone staying sober for a month when they’ve only ever been able to last a couple days, or someone learning how to take care of their children again. Sometimes, success is as basic, yet profound, as simply finding the will to live. To her, and her dedicated staff at New Beginnings and Catalyst, it all matters, and they look to treat the whole person: mind, body, and spirit.
For the man seated in front of me, it was the mind and spirit that he needed to address most.
“I think that was a big part of my relapses before: the PTSD, the depression.”
He also had trouble trusting people, especially men.
“It was like I’d pour my heart out to them and they’d accept that and try to help me, but I would always just refer back to this guy (the man who abused me). I would try (a different treatment program) and try it and try it, but it was just that every time I got close to a man, I ran. It was fight or flight and I chose to go.”
Perhaps it was the stars, or just exhaustion after a long and arduous journey on a dead end road, but he decided to face that which frightened him most.
“I just surrendered,” he said.
For Elaine Surber, director of New Beginnings Alcohol and Drug Treatment Services & Associate, that’s one of the hardest and least understood elements of addiction for the community to understand: the level of trauma people are working through.
“So many of the people who come to us are dealing with some kind of trauma that happened in their life, even if they grew up in a middle class home where everything was OK,” Surber said. “If they became involved with drugs and alcohol, they sometimes put themselves in situations that were very traumatic, where they sold their bodies or lived in flop houses, or contracted hepatitis C.”
For her, there are no simple answers. There is only understanding and compassion; in particular, the understanding that addiction is a disease, like diabetes or heart disease, that physically changes the brain, sometimes permanently, and goes far beyond simply pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.
With experience in substance abuse that spans years, first working at Richland Hospital, a private psychiatric hospital, then at The Ohio Department of Youth Services, assisting adjudicated juveniles, to her position today with Catalyst Life Services, Surber knows that there can be many lapses along the way to recovery until something finally clicks.
“Nobody wants to be putting a needle in their arm or living in the back of somebody’s car or staying on somebody’s couch being estranged from their family. Nobody would choose that,” she says, her voice soft and considered.
Something that clicked for the man I interviewed was the realization that he needed to give himself the same love and care as he gives to everyone else.
“I never felt like I deserved this, because I was abused all that time. I never thought I was good enough. My counselor is trying to make me see that I’m worth this and I’m starting to come around to the idea that if I do the work, I deserve the rewards.”
Part of the work is repairing the damage he’s done to those he loves the most. Addiction has many victims, and families take an especially hard hit. He recounted for me the time he stole his mother’s rent money – all the money she had in the world.
“I helped her look for it and I swore to her that she lost it, and I actually convinced her that she’d lost it and I had it in my pocket the whole time. I mean, she is looking at me, looking like she’s ready to have a nervous breakdown, and my thoughts are you done yet? I need to go get high.”
He describes how it feels to get high after committing such acts; how after you get your fix you start thinking about all the things you’ve done and how the pain of it just makes you want to go out and get numb, get high again: the problem and the solution all tangled together.
“But” he says, “eventually, my solution turned on me. The word they use in recovery is insidious, and that’s just a perfect word for it. Insidious. It twists the mind.”
He described the monotony of drug addiction, also the isolation: “I could be in a room full of people and feel all by myself.”
A daily blessing for him is the structure that he’s received by coming to New Beginnings.
“It puts me back into the human race, ya know, back into society. They give us chores, they give you expectations and a schedule, and I just took advantage of that, because I’m tired of being a sloth drug addict, a couch potato, because all I did was get drugs and come home.”
Structure and stability are key points Surber touches upon as necessary for recovery. Its Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: you have to secure the basics before you can take care of your higher desires. It’s hard to focus on sobriety when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep, or if you’ll have enough money for food.
“If you’ve burned all your bridges, and nobody wants you to live with them and you were couch surfing before you got here it’s hard; it’s important for us to have the resources for people to stay stabilized.”
New Beginnings has an arsenal of programs to help people at all levels of need: medication assisted treatment programs, intensive outpatient programs, family programs to help those coping with loved ones who are in treatment, vocational assistance, mental health services, access to detox facilities and a stabilization unit for individuals coming out of detox facilities. In addition to the New Beginnings non-medical, 16-bed residential facility, transitional housing and recovery housing are offered as part of the continuum of care.
People seeking assistance for services at Catalyst Life Services begins with an assessment at no cost to them. They can access an assessment by scheduling an appointment or utilizing the Walk-In-Clinic. Assessments are also conducted at Municipal Court and Common Pleas Court.
Surber discussed a misnomer that people have to hit bottom before they’re ready for help.
“I like to think of it as we provide the safety net to prevent them from hitting bottom, because they already live there – they’re already at the bottom.”
For the man that was brave enough to share his story with me that safety net has given him 60 days sober and clean. He’s hesitant to project too far into the future when I ask.
“Right now, I can’t base recovery around my life,” he says, “I gotta base my life around recovery. It’s gotta be the nucleus holding everything together.”
He also shies away from such pat addiction generalizations as triggers.
“I don’t like that word. I can use any excuse to get high, any. If I feel bad, drugs will make me feel better. If I feel good, drugs will make me feel real good. If I’m feeling great, look out! It’s not about excuses to use, it’s that I’m hooked.”
He tells me how it was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, how wild it could be and how enticing everything was in the early days. It’s not that he wants to forget that part of his life either.
“I can look at it differently and change the way it affects me…if I hear an ACDC song now I don’t go into a hole of self-pity because I got high at their concert. It’s just a change of thinking. There’s a promise in AA that no matter how far down the scale we’ve gone, we will see how our stories can benefit others. So, it doesn’t matter.
“I don’t want to shut the door on it. I don’t want to forget it, because now it’s a motivator for me to do different.”
The days of ACDC might not be forgotten, but all he really wants now is to be part of his family’s life again and for them to trust him and know he’s okay.
Once out of New Beginnings residential facility, he plans to utilize opportunities through Progress Industries, a Catalyst Company that specializes in vocational services, and finding a job. He even hopes to one day aid others in their recovery. With his understated eloquence and personal experience, I’d wager he’d be an excellent fit for such a role.
He’s also hoping to connect with an even deeper meaning in his life and explore his spiritual impulses.
“They talk a lot about the difference between religion and spirituality in recovery and I believe our personal path toward God is what spirituality is. Maybe religion is more of a community, a base of people that have the same ideas. Honestly, I don’t have a clue what God is, but I’m pretty sure what it’s not, and that back there is what it’s not, and, maybe, the further away I get from that, the closer I get to what it is.”
For our part, as a community that reads of drug overdoses every week in the paper, or knows someone who’s lost loved ones or are losing loved ones to this insidious disease even as I write, there is hope.
If you are reading this, and know someone who’s suffering, or if you yourself are suffering, please understand that there is help and hope and that the best gift you can get this holiday season, the most precious, is the gift of your own life.
It all starts with a single call to the Helpline; 419-522-HELP (4357).
