When I completed a ten week stay in rehab at age twenty-three, I believed the hardest part of my life was over. I had hope and excitement about living. I felt I had experienced a psychic shift. I was intentionally chemically sober for the first time since early adolescence. I had survived, I had stopped flirting with death and no longer felt the daily obsession and compulsion to drink and drug. I was in “recovery.” What I didn’t understand was that the term sobriety, or bei

This is first part of my story. This story is an effort to trace the early contours of a life shaped by adaptation, confusion, longing and glimmers of recovery. If any of these words feel familiar to you, it is not an accident. It’s an invitation. I’ve had four major pivotal points of healing transformation in my adult life, four events that shattered the story I was living and forced me into a new one. But long before those moments, there was the first chapter: the descent I

Many of us carry lifelong childhood wounds that have defied definition and existed behind a closed door. Through a series of written reflections shaped by a lifetime of recovery and years of trauma-informed clinical work I hope to help others open and walk through this door and view what healing those wounds and coming home to ourselves can truly mean for us, for our loved ones and for generations ahead. Despite the years of education I have received, I believe that the mos