A perfect paradox is exactly what my older brother and I were in this life together. We came to this realization somewhere along the way and became inspired to write one of our greatest tunes, called ‘A Perfect Paradox’. Although heavily addicted to drugs throughout most of our adult lives together, it wasn’t always chaos. We had gentle and lucid moments. Moments where our connection to each other was the only thing in the world.

It all started in 1976 for Patrick, he was born into a loving family just north of the Mediterranean Sea. One of the kindest and most gentle souls I’ve ever known. He had 4 siblings and I am very grateful to be one of them. 50 years later, he flies with angels.

Our childhood was a blur of riotous living, much to the dismay of our parents, we were wild and free. Belligerent, independent, sassy and full of vim and vigor.

San Diego in 1984 was cardboard boxes, ghetto blasters and break dancing. Every corner spit a new beat. Downtown was teeming with trolleys; bells tinkling through the streets along with pedestrians and cabbies. Like most large West Coast cities, the shrill blast of large ships in the bay was a constant and jumbo jetliners flew catastrophically close to the beautiful skyline of monolithic downtown. Also native to the skies in this area were the spectacular Blue Angels of The United States Navy. They would come roaring in at close to the speed of sound and shake our house twice a week, putting on shows of unbelievable feats. San Diego was seafood, submarines and star-spangled banners. Patrick and I loved it. Our feet would fly together at every opportunity. Those were what I dub ‘The freedom years’. In the midst of all of this, our parents were plotting against us… ha ha, not really, but they started a steam roll of events that would land us in Lehi, Utah by 1989.

All of us children were culture shocked, as you can imagine. And quickly ended up going our own ways. In high school, Patrick met the love of his life, Andrea England, who became Andrea Nelson. They had 2 children together, Jordan and Lela. He loved his family, he was the comedian and the peacemaker for us all.

He first picked up a guitar around the age of 19. He was a natural. He latched onto playing rhythm guitar and discovered his voice shortly after. He had a tenacity for song writing and he was very good at song composition. While I was away in prison, he and my uncle Billy wrote and played soulful music. When I came home from one of my stints in 2004, we began a journey together that would shape us both for the rest of our lives. We wrote and or started probably over a hundred songs. It would flow out of us, completing each other’s madness with precision. I was off in left field, he in right… somehow together, we always managed to come up with another haunting melody. Our souls would collide in ways untold. We named our band Echoes of Emptiness and wrote our music based on the life experiences that shaped us every day, individually and together. I miss these years. When my brother left, a huge piece of me went with him.

The Emptiness crept in too early. Alcohol, pills and eventually Heroin for Patrick. As a lot of us readers know, it’s impossible to let our authentic and beautiful selves be present when the hard stuff takes over. The moments of clarity were far and few between. One of my fondest memories of Patrick is that even in the midst of his madness, he was a calm and gentle soul. Selfish with his time, to be sure, (as if I have room to talk), but always meek. We all saw him through our own eyes of course, yet I am sure the consensus is the same. How can you sum a life up in a few written pages? You can’t. Nothing on paper will ever give justice to his life except for his own lyrics…

Soul Searching

Patrick Anthony Nelson

Patrick Anthony Nelson, you’re beautiful to me. You will always be here with me. I love you.

Fly high with the Angels, until we meet again…

Contrary to public opinion, a life is never truly stolen by drug addiction. It may appear tarnished, It may bring added sorrow, But there is never a wasted moment in God’s Eternal Plan and we are all involved…

Shawn Nelson

“I’ve been blessed and honored to have drug addiction be a major force in my life. The battles fought, the lessons learned, and the continuing struggle to find and embrace freedom keep me heavily introspective and feeling alive.”

comments@theartofrecoverymag.com

Remembering Pat

Pat was a gentle soul. His mission here was to help people who felt judged or forgotten. He saw the good in people when others couldn’t, and that changed lives. Sadly, for us his work here was done, but the impact he left continues through the people he helped.

Kathryn Nelson

I was married to Patrick for over 13 years. I miss those years. Looking back now, I can see that it was one of the best parts of my life. Patrick was smart, funny and good looking. He was my whole world back then. We were just kids when we fell in love. Our house was always the place to be, birthday parties, Christmas with all of the family, 4th of July cookouts and fireworks in the yard.

He was so into camping and catching crawfish, he took it much more seriously than anyone else. Don’t get me started on the crazy dishes he would invent, people still bring them up. He was honestly hilarious and I miss laughing with him.

I believe Patrick is still watching over me and the kids. I feel it in the peace that shows up when we need it and in the ways that we are looked after. He is not gone, he is just loving us differently now.

I am learning that love leaves an imprint. Even when the relationship didn’t last, I am allowed to honor that imprint.

Andrea Nelson

I knew my older brother Pat as a peacemaker by nature. He used humor to keep the peace in the family and in life. He was intelligent and inventive, creative and musical. He loved music, he taught himself to play the guitar, write music and sing. He wrote many amazing songs with his brother Shawn. He was loved by everyone who knew him.

Though he struggled with addiction for much of his life, it was evident that he maintained a faith in Jesus Christ, because in his hardest times, he turned to the Lord for help. On occasion, he turned to me for a priesthood blessing. He also wrote a beautiful song about the savior called ‘The Healer of Pain’.

I was blessed to be able to do his temple work and I can tell you that in death, he was anxious to receive his temple ordinances, so that he could move forward in his progression with the Savior. I have no doubt that he will be there waiting for his loved ones, perhaps with his guitar in hand, to share his newest songs…

Jeff Nelson

If you or someone you love is struggling with substance use, the SAMHSA National Helpline is free, confidential and available 24/7 at 1‑800‑662‑HELP (4357).

Part One

I grew up in a small rural town with the same kids all through school. I knew the landscape, the houses, the families, the faces. But visual repetition isn’t the same as recognition.

By the end of eighth grade, the most popular girl in school asked me to ride bikes with her.

Wow, I wonder if she likes my new Adidas. Or maybe I’ve grown into my teeth.

I met her on my white Heat Huffy one warm Saturday. We hit it off and spent the entire summer meeting up every day to go swimming. I felt like I had finally been admitted into something.

Then one day she asked, “Where did you move from?”

Record scratch.

I had known her since second grade. I told her I’d lived here my whole life. We laughed it off. She was genuinely nice and really fun. I adored her. So much so that I learned how to act like her.

How to walk. How to talk. What not to say. What not to do.

And suddenly other people started noticing me too.

Boys I had known for years would start talking to me and then ask, “What’s your name?”

Or, “Where did you move from?”

I would smile and answer, but my stomach would tighten. These were people I had looked at for years. They were looking back now.

I had wanted that. So why did being seen feel so much like being caught?

People kept telling me I was “getting pretty.” I saw nothing different about myself, so I started observing what “pretty” was. My control group was large.

I studied girls at school, girls at the mall, cheerleaders from other schools, motion pictures from the 1920s all the way up to the present. I did my best to dig up specifics about femmes fatales from recorded history: Cleopatra, Helen of Troy. Then singers, pop stars, dancers, models, and so on.

After all that research, I found zero evidence that I qualified. Not even the slightest. That made me feel lied to. And paranoid.

By the time I was sixteen, I had started to slide sideways. A little here, a little there.

Around early October, a guy in my English class handed me some old CDs.

“I brought these for you,” he said after class. “I don’t want them anymore. I have two of each.”

He had a weird grin. He dumped them on my desk and started walking away, then turned back toward me, still walking.

“I think you will love these.”

Undertow by Tool. Dirt by Alice in Chains. Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails.

The bubble-gum girl listening to music like that was apparently hilarious to him. But what actually happened was stranger.

I finally heard something that sounded like the pressure inside me. The emotions that usually required a long private cry and a spewing of the same miserable thoughts (“I’m ugly, fat, and I hate myself”) had drums now. Guitars. Noise. I played those CDs over and over until I could scream, sing, and sob along with every lyric.

Alone. My sanctum sanctorum.

Meanwhile, every morning at 6:15, cheerleading was giving me an entirely different education.

The last forty-five minutes of practice were stunts. I was a novice flyer, the one who got thrown around.

I became very good at getting up off the floor and saying, “Sorry.” No tears or hesitation. Just “Sorry.” Again. “Sorry.” I said it more than I inhaled.

Sometimes my timing was off. Sometimes a grip slipped. Sometimes the throw was wrong. But Misty, one of my bases, told me a million times that I was “too heavy to lift.”

I would’ve rather slept with a snake than be around her when she complained about me hurting her precious wrists because I was “too fat.”

So I stopped eating.

Once I got the hang of it, we became the strongest stunt team and stayed at the top all year.

That split second at the top, when their hands were gone and there was nothing under me. That feeling was the feeling. The floor was worth it every time.

At ten till eight, practice ended, and we had twenty minutes to get ready for school. Looking back, I wish I’d known before tryouts that we’d have to get ready in a place not even ghosts dared go: the locker room.

Fluorescent-lit hell, with an entire wall of side-by-side mirrors.

The ruler of the locker room was Sophie. Sophie couldn’t walk past anything reflective without admiring herself out loud. Mirrors. Windows. Glass doors. Probably the polished side of a toaster.

She’d pull up her shirt, turn sideways, suck in, flex as hard as possible, and say with a bored sigh, “My stomach is soooo flat.”

The first time she did it, I blurted out one of those pressure-release laughs. I looked around. No one else was laughing.

It wasn’t a joke? She was actually serious?! Then I saw the look on her face and knew I’d made a huge mistake.

After that, she started standing next to me at the wall of mirrors.

“Oh my gosh, you make me feel so good about myself. Look how tan I am compared to you.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Sit and spin, Sophie, I’d think.

I was jealous, hurt, and taking notes.

Around us:

“Eww. If I ever have cellulite like so-and-so, tell me so I can kill myself.”

“She thinks she’s so hot, but have you seen her nose? And her teeth?”

They laughed, then turned back toward themselves.

“I seriously need to lose weight.”

“I hate my thighs.”

I listened and watched. They pulled things from their bags I had never even seen in stores. I wondered where they bought them and how they knew what anything did.

What was cellulite? Why were thighs bad? How fat am I really?

I had wavy, dirty-blonde hair. I wore only mascara and powder, with permission from my parents.

Then came the advice.

“Have you ever thought about plucking your eyebrows? You’d look way prettier.”

“If you want to borrow my foundation for your freckles, let me know.”

“Thanks…”

Nobody was trying to destroy me. That almost made it worse.

These were ordinary conversations. Ordinary girls. Ordinary mirrors. So I started looking for everything I had apparently failed to notice.

AGAIN.

My eyebrows. My freckles. My thighs. My teeth. My skin. My weight.

I became aware of myself from the outside: where my hands were, how I stood, what my face was doing when someone talked to me, whether I laughed too loudly. Whether I should cross my arms, uncross them, move my hair, stop moving my hair. Existing had somehow become something I had to operate manually.

And then the mirrors changed. By November, they had become my number-one actual fear.

Sometimes I would forget. I would walk into a bathroom or the locker room with my guard down and catch myself. My stomach would drop. I’d recoil. For a second, I’d have a brain shock, like its electricity had been interrupted. Then I’d freeze and watch as my teeth started rearranging, my nose grew or shifted places on my face, and my eyebrows began to twist.

I knew faces weren’t supposed to do that. But I was watching mine do it, and I had no idea which version was real. I’d squint, look away, look back. Get closer, then back up. Turn my head, try another angle. Sometimes I could find normal again, but usually I couldn’t.

On bad days, my reflection looked like one of the Nazis from Indiana Jones whose face melts off when they open the Ark of the Covenant. It was so real, it was an actual jump scare.

After that, bathrooms became complicated. Where were the mirrors? Where was the light switch? Could I turn the lights off without seeing myself? I avoided mirrors whenever I could.

At cheer practice, I moved to the back near the showers where there weren’t any. The only mirror I trusted was the tiny one inside my Maybelline compact. Small enough not to show all of me at once.

At home, I started leaving the bathroom door cracked open so a little hallway light reached the shower. Enough light to wash. Not enough to see myself.

Before school, back by the showers, it was a race: mascara, hair check, lip gloss. Go. I walked into school before any of the other girls. Blonde enough. Bubble-gum enough.

I kept my face pleasant, laughed when everyone else laughed, floated through the halls, and smiled on cue. Autopilot.

By the time school was over, keeping up appearances was a physical burden.

Ha! Burnt out by age sixteen. Isn’t your future bright?!

After school, I picked up my little sisters and brother from their school. As soon as we got home, I’d run downstairs, yelling, “I have a headache, Mom!” I’d close my door and tear that dumb, fake girl off with music.

Not gentle music. Not moody little acoustic sadness. I mean the hardest, ugliest, most offensive music I could find. Music that sounded like someone had dragged rage behind a truck.

Ahhhhhh… The first exhale of the day.

And then I heard it live. My other half was born in a mosh-pit baptism at a Korn concert. It was loud, dark, hungry, and safer than anywhere else in my world.

I threw myself into a savage pit, not caring whether I survived the plethora of six-foot-three, 250-pound Goliaths who started the push.

Someone slammed into my shoulder. I slammed back. My lungs burned. Sweat ran into my eyes. My hair stuck to my face. An annoying elbow-punk beside me was throwing his arms like windmills and clocked my left eye. My nose stung, but I loved it.

And for once I wasn’t wondering what I looked like. None of me needed fixing.

During one of Korn’s most offensive songs, one that got me grounded for playing it too loud, something inside me sat bolt upright. Dr. Frankenstein’s teenage monster on the table.

She screamed along to the sonic equivalent of Satan being forced through an amplifier. Steel-toed boots rose and fell around her. She didn’t know whether they would crush her and couldn’t have cared less.

When the song ended and the circle broke apart, a few of the giants gave her approving fist bumps and asked about her eye, which was rapidly turning colors. She walked away with her pants ripped nearly to her thighs, drenched in sweat, stripped of makeup, and without a voice.

She had fists I didn’t have.

The morning after the concert was a Thursday. I woke up feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. More like a hundred heavy, tattooed trucks in cutoff sleeves. And one particular windmilling idiot.

My eye was black and swollen. I dressed in my practice clothes in the dark and sped out the door. I arrived late. 6:20.

“Laps. Five minutes,” Coach yelled.

I started running. Practice usually hummed with gossip, but that morning the hum was gone. While I ran and the girls stretched, I heard why.

Apparently Sophie’s boyfriend and a bunch of his friends had been at the concert. They’d seen me in the pit. And what came out of me.

I was found out.

When we broke into stunt groups, Misty and Donna barely acknowledged me. I acted like I didn’t notice. We hit the high sweep and high lib twice, perfectly.

Then came my favorite stunt: the basket toss. Sophie and Sam joined us.

I counted.

One. Two. Jump on three. Throw on four. Highest point at five. Twist on six. Catch on seven. Land on eight.

Only this time:

One.

Two.

Jump…

The throw exploded from my right. My stomach knew before my brain did: too far left, not enough height. I started the twist anyway and came down on my left side, hitting the wooden floor so hard the air was knocked out of my lungs. For what seemed like five minutes, I couldn’t make them work.

No one came over.

Then Sophie’s face appeared above mine. She knelt close while I fought for air.

“You’re not very badass now, are you?”

I couldn’t answer.

She laughed and moved even closer to my face, looking at my swollen eye.

“Looks like you’re just a wannabe little b***h.”

She stood up and raised her voice toward Coach while still looking at me.

“Oh my gosh, I am soooo sorry. I’m just so strong lately. My bad.”

“Hit the showers,” Coach yelled. “That’s enough.”

Misty and Donna looked straight ahead and stepped over me. Sam smirked and followed Sophie.

The tears came before my breathing was normal. I wiped my face, stood up, and marched past every single one of them.

The ones who had dropped me. The ones who had walked over me. The ones who pretended not to see. The ones I called friends.

My ankles were shaking. I was so mad I could barely stay on the ground.

Back beneath the ugly yellow fluorescence, I grabbed my bag, changed, and put mascara on my right eye. Then I walked out.

Through the halls, I held my head high. Brazen, like a middle finger to whoever had a problem with me.

The bubble-gum girl, with a black eye and an all-new f**k-it attitude.

Part Two

The black eye faded.

Whatever came out of me in the pit didn’t.

The music was food. Ritual. It sated the darkness and summoned it. If you know the song “Surfacing,” you know. If you don’t, words fail.

Its lyrics became my mantra. I wrote them on my rib cage. It reached something enormous in me. Something that had no name.

I felt most alive doing things I could never tell a therapist. Or a friend. Or anyone who might lower their pen, call in an antipsychotic, and give me another diagnosis I could neither pronounce nor spell.

Things like finding abandoned buildings and punching through glass windowpanes just to hear the sound. And see the blood.

Things like the raccoon incident. I saw it get clipped on the interstate. I pulled over, threw a blanket over it, put it in my trunk, and drove it out near the reservoir so I could give it a proper burial.

The ground was frozen. I tried digging with my hands, but nothing gave. I found a few pointed rocks and made myself a hand shovel. Dug. Scraped. Dug again. Until the grave seemed deep enough.

I covered the raccoon and stood over the disturbed earth. And decided there was still something that needed to be done.

A cleansing.

My car was parked near the cliffs. I took off everything except my bra and underwear, because that would have been way too immodest. I folded my clothes and set them on the ground next to the car, then walked toward the cliffs overlooking the water.

The reservoir sat a few miles from the mountains I had grown up beneath. In summer, we rode Jet Skis across it. This was late January. Dusk. No one around.

I remember thinking that if I drowned from the cold, then fine. I had just buried one of God’s creatures. Maybe the sequence would make sense to Him.

I jumped.

The water hit like cold cement.

Then everything went silent.

Not quiet.

Silent.

The reservoir was no longer scenery. It was everywhere: above me, below me, against my face, inside my ears. For a moment I didn’t move. I don’t know whether I forgot to or couldn’t.

Then the burning started, chest first, then everywhere. My body convulsed toward the surface. I broke through and tried to inhale. My mouth opened, my chest seized, and finally air ripped in.

A sound came with it. Loud. Ugly. Barbaric. No front. No rehearsal. Just whatever sound a body makes when it realizes what has happened to it.

There was no one there to hear it.

I blinked. Something shot from my eyes.

My contacts. Both of them. Gone.

The cliffs disappeared. The shoreline disappeared. Everything beyond me dissolved into dark shapes and color. Without my contacts, I had no depth perception. I couldn’t tell how far away anything was, even if I could make it out.

I turned toward where I thought I had jumped from. Nothing. Turned again. Nothing.

There was no bottom under my feet. No boat, dock, person, or phone. Nothing I could see well enough to move toward. My arms started striking the water. My legs kicked.

Up. Air. Down. Cold. Up. Air. Down.

At first I thought I was swimming. I wasn’t. I was keeping my mouth out of the water. Barely.

There was nothing dragging me down. No heavy clothes. It was just my body.

My arms started slowing anyway. My legs too. I went under, came back up, coughed, tried to inhale, and went under again.

The cold had stopped feeling sharp. That scared me more.

My thinking started breaking into pieces.

Get out. Where? Swim. Which way? Up. Breathe. Again.

My brain was getting stupid. I knew enough to know that was bad, but not enough to fix it.

Then through the blur I saw something pale beneath the surface. Yellow-white. It moved. Something brushed my leg.

“OH MY GAWWWWDDDD! A DEAD BODY!”

No. No no no no no.

Every horror movie I had ever seen arrived simultaneously. I imagined a dead hand closing around my ankle. I kicked violently.

Something touched me again. I screamed, went under, swallowed water, and came back up choking. I flailed harder. Arms, legs, nothing coordinated anymore. I bet it looked like I was being drowned by a giant invisible finger.

Then my foot hit something. I stopped. Kicked downward. Something solid. Again.

Ground. Sweet, sweet ground.

The bank was steep. I tried to stand and got knocked backward. I grabbed at roots, rock, mud, anything I could hold, and hurled myself toward the ground above the water. My knees hit bottom, then my hands. I crawled, the water pulling backward at my legs, until my whole body was out.

I stayed there for a minute. Maybe longer. On all fours. Shaking. Breathing into dirt.

Then I remembered the car. So I stood up. Or tried to.

My legs barely belonged to me. My whole body was shaking now, not shivering but violently jerking. My jaw wouldn’t stay still. My hands had become useless little claws. I felt like Samara from The Ring crawling out of the well.

I knew one thing. Find the car.

So I walked barefoot through frozen mud ruts, across sheets of ice and sharp rocks, up a hill, down the other side, through sagebrush and dried Russian thistle. I discovered a barbed-wire fence by walking directly into it. That was fun.

Then goathead weeds. The nemesis of all bare feet.

Eventually pain stopped arriving as separate information. Cold, feet, hands, scratches. Everything had become one giant signal:

GO.

It took nearly an hour. I think. Chronology has never been my thing.

Then something large appeared through the blur. My car.

I stumbled toward it and grabbed the handle. Locked. Of course.

I shook out my clothes looking for the key, then searched the frozen dirt near the car, under the tires, and in the ruts. Nothing.

I stood up. Every muscle in my body tightened. My back started arching.

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME, GOD?”

As if this had been His idea. As if He had peer-pressured me into all of it.

The world tilted. I fell backward. Something dug into my ribs. My freaking key.

“I’m so sorry. Thank you, God. Thank you.”

I closed my hand around it. Now I had to get it into the lock. My fingers barely bent.

Like Quasimodo, I dragged myself toward the driver’s-side door, half folded over, half standing. I pressed against the car so I could feel for the key slot. Instant burning. My skin stuck to the metal. Like that one kid who licked the flagpole.

I found the lock with one hand and kept my finger there, bringing the key toward it with the other. Missed. Again. Metal scraped metal.

Click.

I pulled the door open and fell inside. The interior light came on.

My body was a grotesque snakeskin ombré. Red blotches, blue veins beneath nearly translucent skin. Purple hands, feet, nose, and mouth. Almost black.

Blaple? Purack?

My hair had frozen into ropes, my hands wouldn’t close, and my teeth were chattering so hard my jaw hurt.

I shoved the key into the ignition. The engine sputtered, then caught. The speakers exploded back to life. I blasted the heater and ejected the CD.

My body kept jolting. My jaw clacked so hard I chipped the corner of my right front tooth.

“AAAAAWWWWESOOOOME!”

Freaking psycho.

Then my hearing started to wane, tunneling farther and farther away. I was back under the water. A pressure lodged in my chest and closed off my throat.

My shoulders folded forward, and my mouth opened while every part of me howled like an animal without making any sound at all.

I felt myself diffusing into the air. Or my soul was. I couldn’t tell where I ended.

I made it through almost dying a million times to die now? That was the last thing I remember thinking.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Then suddenly every noise was back in my ears. I blinked, and I was back inside my body, looking out from my eyes.

The sobs came. I couldn’t stop them. It felt as if I were wringing the dank water and horror from my bones.

Then I reached for my CDs. Tori Amos. Under the Pink.

I put it in. “Pretty Good Year.”

Piano keys filled the car. Blood needled back into my skin. Prick by prick.

I was already on the two-lane highway headed home when some of the shock cleared. I looked down. I was still in my skivvies.

Then I looked at the clock. 10:59 p.m.

I was supposed to be home at six.

Babysitting.

◆ ◆ ◆

Xia

If you or someone you love is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is free and available 24 hours a day: call or text 988. For eating-disorder support, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline is 1-866-662-1235.

Dear Reader,

As a child growing up in Northeast Los Angeles, early influences attracted me to trouble. The amount of problems stacking against me influenced the Juvenile Court System to make me a ward of the State.

Despite the Court's intentions of education and discipline, the trauma of being incarcerated with so many other broken children and sadistic staff left me with dark impressions. Serious limitations were placed on my viewpoints. My goals in life became corrupt.

Looking back, it's easy to understand how self-hate being expressed through violence resulted in me spending the majority of my twenties and thirties serving prison time. It's clear for me to see exactly how the abandonment, judgement, and humiliation that came with my last twenty-two (plus two!) year prison sentence, pushed me to states of isolation and depression that left me plotting on how to take my own life. I almost succeeded.

But apparently, the Infinite had other plans for me.

A few close friends, a few family members, and lots of coincidence were used as instruments to uplift me. They showed me signs that connected me to the forgiveness, love, and light that not only put me back together, but led me to a higher calling.

I've served over a dozen years on this prison sentence and by grace I've earned enough good time to finally be at the tail end of it. I feel very blessed.

Realizing the immortality and true purpose of our spirits has created a fathomless love for every single event that ever took place in my life. I get it now!

Recognizing that life in this world is a loving game of Hide & Seek with Providence keeps my heart bursting with happiness. And grasping how we, as in every human being, are all perfectly beautiful extensions of each other leaves me so humbled; I have no choice but to be of service to others.

I look forward to my upcoming release. My most motivating visions of the future involve my networking with enlightened groups who understand the needs of humanity and whose sole purpose is spreading that healing, illuminating, and infinite love that each and every one of us is entitled to.

I wish you all the best.

Robert "Bobby" De La O

If you are struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is free, confidential and available 24 hours a day. Call or text 988. The SAMHSA National Helpline, at 1-800-662-4357, offers free, confidential referrals for substance use and mental health, also 24 hours a day.

Step One

Examine, how you define incarceration then abandon that misconception.

Replace the word “prison” with the word “monastery” and accommodate that perception.

Step Two

Appreciate, how your small humble cell allows mastery over primal urges.

At last, you're free of mundane distractions. Shed tears while your heart now purges.

Step Three

Identify the masks you've created, and suppressed feelings over their disclosure.

Remove them. Embrace your hurt inner-child, whose greatest fear was always exposure.

Step Four

Recognize how defending these masks always forced you against the grain.

All things created for illusion do fail. Need I mention their lessons of pain.

Step Five

Look within. Find your inner-child's gift. You'll know it by how it makes you feel.

Don't just fantasize about its potential wealth. Focus! Cultivate! Make it real!

Step Six

Become a channel for collective compassion. Use your gift to let it flow through you.

Witness the miracles that manifest from, the challenges now brought to you.

Step Seven

Smile when you picture your future. You're quite unique in embracing your call.

So many lives will be empowered by hope, sharing your story of recovery with all.

Robert De La O - Federal Inmate

Robert “Bobby” De La O grew up in Northeast Los Angeles. He is at the tail end of a long federal sentence and looking ahead to his release.

comments@theartofrecoverymag.com

Dear Journal,

Okay, confession: some days I open you up and have absolutely nothing profound to say. And that’s kind of the point. You’re not here to be perfect. You’re here to hold whatever I’ve got.

I’ve been thinking about why I keep coming back to these pages, and it’s simple: writing things down gets them out of my head. When my thoughts are racing, putting pen to paper slows everything down. I can actually see what I’m feeling instead of just drowning in it.

There’s real research behind this too. Expressive writing has been linked to lower stress, better mood, and a clearer sense of what’s actually going on inside us. For anyone in recovery (or honestly, anyone human), that kind of self-awareness is gold. You start noticing patterns: what triggers you, what fills you up, what you’re grateful for even on the hard days.

But here’s my favorite part: going back and reading old entries. Flipping through past pages is like having coffee with a younger version of myself. Some entries make me laugh, some make me cringe, and some make me want to hug her. Mostly, they remind me how far I’ve come. The things that felt impossible back then? I got through them. That’s proof on paper, and on the tough days I need that proof.

And who said journaling has to be just words? My pages are a total mess in the best way: ticket stubs, photos from my travels, little cut-outs, doodles, a pressed flower here and there, notes scribbled in the margins. Every page has its own personality. Some days I write three pages; other days I just tape in a receipt from a café in a city I fell in love with. It all counts. It’s all me.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting, don’t overthink it. Grab a notebook, glue something in, write one sentence. Your future self will thank you.

Until next time,

Grace

BandJAM is a group music wellness platform. In a single guided session, a group of people with no musical experience writes and performs an original song together, led by a vetted JAM Master, and everyone leaves with a recording of what they made. Rock to Recovery is the nonprofit that pioneered this work in treatment centers.

The three songs here were each written in one session, in one room, by the people whose stories they tell. The cover art was made by the same groups. No one is named: each group chose a band name, and the band is the credit.

“Dancing in My Sleeping Bag” · The Know Knows

Written at Multi Concept Recovery · JAM Master Brandon Jordan · Pop rock, 4:07 · portal.bandjam.co/s/M8V9EANG

About thirty people gathered in one room at Multi Concept Recovery, and each shared a magical music moment: a time they truly felt connected. Some talked about concerts. Some talked about the songs they grew up with. One person described how a song carried them through the grief of losing someone. Every one of those moments was woven into a single song, and the whole room sang it together.

The theme was simple: music is my best friend. Music isn’t just a thing, it is an active friendship in our lives. It helps us feel less alone, it helps us make better decisions, and it never lets our calls go to voicemail.

“Someday” · Chrysalis

Written at The Canyon · JAM Master Sophie Kaiser · Indie rock, 4:53 · portal.bandjam.co/s/GCYVUPE7

The group had just lost a peer. He had been part of many BandJAM sessions, writing lyrics and singing, and one of the people who sang on this song had collaborated with him on song after song. The room was raw. The conversation kept returning to the same place: we are all living with the same serious disease, one that is hard to grasp, and we get through it by staying connected to each other.

The lyrics came in the moment, drawn from that loss and from everyone’s own experience of recovery and of active addiction. Writing the song together, and then being vulnerable enough to perform it, became a vessel for grief and reflection that was plain to see from across the room.

“Hearts on Fire” · On the Dead Loks

Written at a ROWI location · JAM Master Brandon Jordan · Blues rock, 3:12 · portal.bandjam.co/s/S4AR8KCN

This one is told by the JAM Master who ran the room.

“This song came out of my first group at one of our ROWI locations. During check-in, a couple of people shared recent breakups. Part of a JAM Master’s job is guiding the room’s energy into something the group can make together, so after I put down a simple bass line, a piano part and a drum beat, I suggested we draw on those breakups for the lyrics.

At first nobody knew where to begin. With some encouragement they started offering lines, and I showed them how to follow the rhyme. Then we landed on this.”

“The uncertainty about working with a new facilitator turned into excitement, and the song started writing itself. A naturally gifted singer in the group brought the lyrics to life, and the whole thing came together the way we hope every group will: the room saying what it wanted to say.”

Brandon Jordan, JAM Master

◆ ◆ ◆

Every song has its own page, where you can listen, read the full lyrics and see the credits. More sessions are at soundcloud.com/rocktorecovery, the Rock to Recovery catalogue. To learn how a session works, or to bring one to your program: bandjam.co.

First, a word on why we are even talking about this topic. As an addiction medicine doctor, I was always fascinated by how nearly everyone who comes to treatment for the first time starts their conversation with something like this: “Hey Doc, I have heard about this medication or injection that will make me quit using.” My initial response is always a smile of understanding and compassion, while my brain tells me, “Oh man, I wish there was a magic pill for this.”

The reality is that it is perfectly consistent with our culture and human nature to seek a shortcut to treat this incredibly complex disease. It certainly rhymes with my desire when I was at the beginning of the first attempt of my personal recovery from alcohol use disorder, when I went to a private clinic in Moscow and demanded to receive an implant of disulfiram (implantable Antabuse) – perhaps a topic for next month’s article.

Every couple of years, the internet and other media outlets explode with news of a very promising intervention that providers or manufacturers with commercial interests start claiming is going to cure the addiction. I think that this year is clearly a year of peptides and weight loss drugs.

What is a peptide?

A peptide is a short chain of amino acids, a very small protein. Your body makes thousands of them, and they work like messages passed between organs. Insulin is a peptide. So is GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide-1, which your gut releases after a meal. It tells the pancreas to release insulin, slows how quickly the stomach empties, and signals the brain that you have had enough. Semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy), liraglutide, and tirzepatide are laboratory-made versions of that gut signal, engineered to last for days instead of minutes.

How a diabetes drug ended up in addiction research

The first clue came from patients, not scientists. People taking these medications for diabetes or weight loss began reporting something no one had asked them about: they had lost interest in alcohol. Wine stopped appealing. The cigarette after dinner lost its pull. Many described the quieting of what is now called "food noise," the constant background chatter of craving, and noticed it had gone quiet for other things too.

There is a reason that makes biological sense. GLP-1 receptors are not only in the gut and pancreas. They also sit in the brain's reward circuitry, in the same regions where alcohol, nicotine, and stimulants produce their surge of dopamine. In animal studies, GLP-1 medications blunt that surge and reduce drug-seeking behavior across alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, and opioids.

What the human data shows

The large database studies have been striking. A 2024 study of nearly 84,000 patients with obesity found that those taking semaglutide had roughly a 50 to 56 percent lower risk of both developing and relapsing into alcohol use disorder, compared with people on other weight-loss medications. A 2026 study of US veterans with type 2 diabetes found lower rates across the board: alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, nicotine, and opioids. A separate analysis found fewer opioid overdoses and fewer episodes of alcohol intoxication among people who already carried those diagnoses.

Those numbers are genuinely exciting. They are also the weakest kind of evidence.

The reality check

Database studies can only show that two things happened at the same time, not that one caused the other. People who get prescribed these drugs may differ from those who do not in a hundred ways nobody measured.

For cause and effect, you need a randomized trial, and the first one is more modest than the headlines suggest. In 2025, researchers randomly assigned 48 adults with alcohol use disorder to semaglutide or placebo for nine weeks. The result: people on semaglutide drank less on the days they drank and reported fewer cravings. But they did not drink on fewer days overall. That is a real signal. It is not a cure. A second trial, using oral semaglutide, followed in 2026.

Forty-eight people. Nine weeks. That is a starting line, not a finish line.

What this means if you are in recovery

These medications are not approved for treating any addiction. Prescribing them for that purpose is off-label: legal, but still experimental. A few cautions are worth taking seriously:

• Side effects are common, especially nausea, vomiting, and constipation.
• They suppress appetite. In early recovery, when the body is working to rebuild after years of poor nutrition, that can work against you.
• If you have a history of an eating disorder, an appetite-suppressing medication deserves a careful conversation with your physician before anything else.
• Rapid weight loss can take muscle with it.
• Cost and insurance coverage remain real barriers for most people.

Most importantly, nothing here replaces what already works. Naltrexone and acamprosate for alcohol. Buprenorphine and methadone for opioids, medications with decades of evidence and a proven record of saving lives. Therapy. A sponsor. A room full of people who understand.

As I write this, I have learned that some recovery centers and addiction medicine practitioners (at least here in Southern California, where I practice) are prescribing these medications to nearly every patient they treat, as a way of setting themselves apart from the many facilities competing for the same admissions. They market GLP-1 agonists as a "cutting-edge" addition to their programs, and that framing almost certainly brings in business. It also alarms me, because it confirms something I have long suspected: that some facilities let the bottom line drive clinical decisions, with patient safety a distant second.

Two observations from a practitioner who does this work daily.

The first is secondhand, though from a source I trust. A close friend of mine, a gastroenterologist, has described a growing number of patients arriving in his clinic with gastrointestinal dysfunction that appears to follow prolonged use of these peptides. The symptoms are painful, persistent, and may well prove permanent. What troubles him most is that we have no established treatment to offer these patients.

The second is my own. In all the time these medications have been available, not one patient has walked into my office and told me they stopped drinking or using because of them. Not one.

I offer both for what they are: clinical impressions, not evidence. But they are worth sitting with.

And what if it were me? Some time ago, I was the one clutching at any straw within reach, looking for something that would "cure" my own alcohol addiction. Would I have taken this route as a patient rather than as a physician? I would have considered it. That is exactly how my brain worked then: reach for whatever looks like a shortcut out of the nightmare. Except that now I know better.

There are no shortcuts.

The honest bottom line

GLP-1 medications may turn out to be a real addition to addiction treatment. The biology is plausible, early signals point in the same direction, and larger trials are underway.

But promising is not proven, and recovery is a poor place to gamble on a maybe. If you are curious, bring it to your physician as a question rather than a plan. Ask what is known, what is not, and whether it fits your particular situation.

The science here is moving quickly, and that is genuinely good news. It is just not news to act on alone.

This article is for general information and is not medical advice. Talk with your own clinician before starting, stopping, or changing any medication.

Sources

1. Wang W, Volkow ND, Berger NA, Davis PB, Kaelber DC, Xu R. Associations of semaglutide with incidence and recurrence of alcohol use disorder in real-world population. Nat Commun. 2024 May 28;15(1):4548. PMID: 38806481.
2. Hendershot CS, Bremmer MP, Paladino MB, et al. Once-Weekly Semaglutide in Adults With Alcohol Use Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry. 2025 Apr 1;82(4):395-405. PMID: 39937469.
3. Schacht JP, Sakai JT, Raymond K, Shelton R. Oral Semaglutide for Alcohol Use Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Am J Psychiatry. 2026 Sep;183(9):636-645. PMID: 42522065.
4. Cai M, Choi T, Xie Y, Al-Aly Z. Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists and risk of substance use disorders among US veterans with type 2 diabetes: cohort study. BMJ. 2026 Mar 4;392:e086886. PMID: 41781010.
5. Qeadan F, McCunn A, Tingey B. The association between glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide and/or glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist prescriptions and substance-related outcomes in patients with opioid and alcohol use disorders. Addiction. 2025 Feb;120(2):236-250. PMID: 39415416.
6. Wang W, Volkow ND, Berger NA, Davis PB, Kaelber DC, Xu R. Association of semaglutide with reduced incidence and relapse of cannabis use disorder in real-world populations. Mol Psychiatry. 2024 Aug;29(8):2587-2598. PMID: 38486046.
7. Völker KM, Prechtl BLH, Bormann NL, Choi DS. The potential role of GLP-1 receptor agonists in substance use disorders — a systematic review. Front Pharmacol. 2026 Jan 2;16:1702448. PMID: 41552827.
8. Scheen AJ. Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists and alcohol use disorders: An emerging unexpected beneficial effect. Diabetes Obes Metab. 2025 Aug;27(8):4083-4091. PMID: 40364515.

I walked, well, no, I raced into Sephora eighteen minutes before they closed. The entire mood of the store deflated, and I knew why. Customers who arrive just before closing are a particular kind of nuisance. Technically, I had beaten the fifteen-minute mark by three minutes, and the crisis at hand trumped the closing-time rule. It was my stepson’s wedding in two days, and I had zero foundation. I wasn’t going to buy the cheap crap anymore. It had all failed me, and I was going to spend every one of those eighteen minutes finding the perfect product, no matter the price. I ran up and down the aisles, testing colors wherever I could find available skin on my arm, and hands, but even the good stuff was bunk so far. The shade names weren’t helping either: Antique Porcelain: from a doll or an old sink? Nude Beach: which beach? Swedish Beige: ummmm?

I approached an employee and asked for help. Under the fluorescent lights, I presented my face for inspection. Each pore had filed a complaint. Every shade was too yellow, too pink, too dead, too bridal, too taxidermy. I wanted beauty to behave for once. I wanted the bottle to say, Here. This is you. This is the version of you that survives daylight. The employees were kind. They brought out more bottles, swiped colors along my jaw, and tilted my face toward the light, as if the right shade might reveal itself from the right angle. Unfortunately, it didn’t. The store grew quieter around me, the way a room does when everyone is politely waiting for you to LEAVE ALREADY! I walked out carrying no foundation and a tiny existential injury.

Outside, the sky was doing something obscene. Not pretty. Pretty is too obedient a word. The sunset was bruised gold, crushed violet, and some impossible coral that would look vulgar in a palette and holy in the air. It had arranged itself above the parking lot like God had decided, for three minutes only, to stop being subtle. I stopped mid-road, in awe, while searching for my phone.

This is where the madness begins. Because you can try to capture it. You can hold up your phone. You can zoom in. You can tap the screen with the desperation of a woman trying to prove something happened. But the light doesn’t obey. It changes while you are looking at it. It changes because you are looking at it. It slips. It blushes. It withdraws. By the time the camera agrees, the genius is already leaving.

Maybe this is why Monet painted the same places again and again. The haystacks. The lilies. The cathedral. We call it genius because museums can make obsession look tidy. But I wonder if he was serene at all. I wonder if he was furious. I wonder if he saw the light hit the side of a building one morning and understood, with full spiritual irritation, that he would spend the rest of his life failing to catch it. Maybe he kept painting the same thing because it was never the same thing. That is the cruelty of beauty. It pretends to repeat itself, then changes one molecule of light and becomes unreachable again.

It pretends to repeat itself, then changes one molecule of light and becomes unreachable again.

The Taoists have a word for what the light was doing: ziran.

Zi: self.
Ran: so, thus, as it is.

Self-so. A thing arising without force, instruction, or approval. Not fixed. Not finished. Not trying to look natural. Just this, then this, then this.

The sky was ziran. My face was too, which was harder news.

I think genius is often like that. Not rare, exactly. Just uncooperative. Perhaps the rare thing is space or room: that unclaimed second in which we stop asking what we see to explain us back to ourselves. It appears in bad lighting and parking lots. In the child saying something so clean and accidental that it ruins every sermon you have ever heard. In the eighteen-minute panic before a store closes. In the little humiliation of wanting to be beautiful and not knowing which version of your face the world will believe.

Maybe genius does not need to be captured.

Maybe it only needs a witness.

For once, instead of giving my attention to the machinery of keeping, I could give it back to the moment itself.

I could just be.

Be the witness…

That would have been very ziran of me, but I am not quite that ziran yet. What I actually did was whip out my phone, twirl around in the middle of the road, and snap the sky. The photograph kept the colors but lost the sky. This is what makes beauty so compelling: it passes. What cannot be captured, explained, or even named creates an ache for response. The need to hold a souvenir because something moved through us and refused to stay. This may be the most human paradox: we know we cannot keep beauty, and still, we make art.

Sometimes art does not arrive as something we make. Sometimes it arrives as recognition.

I watched it happen with my mother-in-law. She was slouched low in her wheelchair, her eyes closed, her head barely moving. She had become mostly nonverbal. Familiar faces no longer always arrived as familiar. People leaned close to hug her and speak to her, hoping recognition might come. Often, she looked frightened. We had gathered for my father-in-law’s funeral when Elvis Presley’s version of My Way began to play, a song she had loved, a song that was part of the soundtrack of the life they’d shared.

Grief moved through the room. Then something changed. She lifted her head and opened her eyes. Her hand began keeping time, and then: the twinkle. She began to sway. She even smiled. The song had reached a place in her that we could no longer reach.

The sunset had shown me beauty as something impossible to hold: light arriving, changing, and disappearing before the camera could contain it. In that room, beauty appeared in another form, not as color spread across the sky, but as recognition lighting her face. The song did not erase the grief. It did not undo what illness had taken, and it didn’t bring her back to us; she had been there all along. For a few minutes, the song simply opened a door through which we could see her. Recognition. Watching her was more beautiful than every sunset combined.

So maybe art does not keep beauty, instead it keeps beauty moving.

From the song into her hand.

From her face into mine.

And then…the twinkle.

Founder, Art Director & Writer · The Art of Recovery

They say that if you find a job you’d happily do for free, only someone actually pays you to do it, you’ve discovered the secret to a fulfilling life.

Well, Amy would first have to narrow down her rather eclectic list of prospective careers: fiction and nonfiction author, professor of English and Russian literature, Qigong master, Taoist monk, archaeologist, philosopher, professional dancer, pimple popper, shaman, astronaut, treehouse builder, maximalist interior designer, professional DJ, yoga instructor, traveling photographer, theologian, opera singer, and astrologer, to name just a few.

But no matter how far her imagination wanders, she always comes back to writing.

Or, more accurately, she has never been able to not write.

Trauma doesn't always look like trauma.

Sometimes there are no flashbacks, no vivid memories, no clean line between the person you were before and the person you became after. Sometimes it's quieter than that. Sometimes it's just the sense that your body never fully relaxed again: that somewhere beneath a life that looks fine from the outside, your nervous system is still braced for an impact that already came and went.

For a lot of people in recovery, that unrelenting bracing is the very thing that first sent them looking for relief. Long before the substance became the problem, it was the solution, the one reliable way to turn down a body that wouldn't stop signaling danger. This is the part of the story that too often gets skipped. We talk about the drinking, the using, the behaviors we couldn't stop, and we treat those as the disease itself. But underneath so much addiction is a nervous system that never learned how to feel safe, reaching for anything that could quiet it, even for an hour.

Trauma rarely announces itself. More often it shows up sideways: a low hum of tension you can't trace to anything, anxiety that arrives without warning, small frustrations that swallow a whole afternoon. You might overreact to a moment and know, even as it's happening, that it shouldn't feel this big. Or you go the other way entirely: shutting down, going numb, drifting somewhere just outside your own life. Sleep comes hard, or it comes and leaves you exhausted anyway. Your body feels restless and stuck at the same time. Closeness is complicated, even when you want it. You please, you overthink, you scan the room for a danger you can't name. Some days you feel genuinely safe. The next, you're back in survival mode with no idea how you got there.

In active addiction, these are the exact states that drive the reach for a drink, a pill, a hit, a behavior. In recovery, they're often the states that make staying clean feel impossible. The craving isn't only chemical. It's the body trying to escape a level of activation it doesn't know how else to survive.

The most confusing part is that none of this requires ignorance. You may understand your trauma completely. You may have worked the steps, sat in the rooms, read the books, done years of honest therapy, and still find your body reacting as though the danger were unfolding right now, in this room, in this moment. You can know exactly why you use and still feel the pull.

If you recognize yourself here, nothing is wrong with you, and you are not failing at recovery. This is simply what trauma does. It changes how your brain and nervous system answer the ordinary demands of living. It rewires the stress response and leaves the body idling in survival mode long after the threat has passed. Which is why lasting recovery was never only about insight, or willpower, or even abstinence alone. It's about helping the body feel safe again.

Why you still feel stuck, and still crave relief

We tend to imagine trauma as something that lives in the mind: a bad memory, a story we carry. But trauma isn't only a memory. It's a biological survival response, and it can stay switched on long after the danger is gone.

When something overwhelming happens (abuse, neglect, violence, an accident, chronic stress, emotional abandonment, humiliation, loss), the body does exactly what it was built to do. It protects you. It shifts into fight, flight, freeze, or shutdown, and in the moment that response can save your life. The trouble comes afterward. When an experience is too intense, too long, or too unsafe, the nervous system doesn't always find its way back to baseline. Years can pass, and the body stays stuck in the same state of readiness.

That's the origin of so much that seems to come from nowhere: the unexplained anxiety, the overreactions, the shutdowns, the sleepless nights, the racing heart and tight stomach and heavy chest, the difficulty trusting people you genuinely want to be close to. And for anyone who has struggled with addiction, it's the origin of something else: the deep, physical hunger for relief. Because trauma isn't just what happened. Trauma is what happens inside your body when you don't have the safety, support, or connection to process what you lived through. When that support was missing, the body learns to self-soothe however it can. Substances and compulsive behaviors are, at bottom, a nervous system's attempt to regulate itself.

This is why so many people get sober and still don't feel well. The substance is gone, but the state it was medicating is still there, often louder than ever, now that there's nothing dampening it. This is also why understanding your trauma perfectly can leave you feeling every bit as trapped, and every bit as vulnerable to relapse. Insight doesn't automatically calm the nervous system. The body doesn't change through willpower; it changes through safety, repetition, and new experiences that teach it something the mind already knows but the body hasn't yet believed: It's over now. You're safe now.

Which is the whole case for putting the body at the center of recovery: not just addiction recovery, and not just trauma recovery, but the two understood as one. For a great many people, they are. Treating the addiction without addressing the dysregulated system underneath is like bailing water without patching the hull. The behavior may stop for a while, but the pressure that drove it keeps building, and eventually it finds a way out: the same substance, a new one, or a new compulsion wearing a healthier disguise.

Recovery begins when the body feels safe

Here is the shift most people are never taught: you don't recover by fixing yourself or by white-knuckling your way past every craving. You recover by helping your nervous system feel safe again. The goal was never to erase the past; it's to stop the body from reliving it, and to give it something other than a substance to reach for when the old alarm goes off.

So the most durable recovery work isn't only talking, analyzing, and understanding, and it isn't only counting days. It's building inner safety from the inside out, little by little, through body-based practices that teach the system something new. I can stay present. I can feel my emotions without being overwhelmed. I can sit with a craving and let it pass. I can set a boundary without fear. I don't have to numb out to survive. Each of those is a lived experience the body files away as evidence that it no longer needs the old escape.

This is what leading trauma researchers and addiction clinicians have been demonstrating for decades. When recovery pairs an understanding of trauma with genuine nervous system regulation, the body begins to change, and when the body changes, everything downstream of it changes too. Triggers loosen their grip. Cravings become weather rather than commands: intense, real, but survivable, and passing. Sleep improves. Reactions soften. Relationships start to feel less like a risk. You begin, gradually, to feel like yourself again, not because you forced it, but because your system no longer needs to stay on high alert, and no longer needs to be medicated into stillness.

None of this replaces the fellowship, the steps, the sponsor, the community that so many people rightly credit with saving their lives. It deepens them. It addresses the layer beneath the behavior, so that sobriety stops feeling like a daily battle against yourself and starts feeling like something your whole system can actually sustain.

That's the approach. Not positive thinking. Not willpower. Not abstinence held together by sheer grip. A practical, body-based path out of survival and into safety, the kind of safety that finally makes recovery something you can live inside, rather than something you have to fight for every single day.

If any of this resonates, that recognition is where the work begins.

Paul Mundt is one of the premiere trauma experts in the field. His unique “Workshop” approach has helped thousands deal with and overcome the life and relationship issues associated with trauma. On any given weekend, Paul can be found at one of the many residential treatment centers across the U.S. that he regularly travels to, delivering his lifesaving workshop.

comments@theartofrecoverymag.com

In this monthly column, I’ll share simple practices to support physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

This month, we begin with something we carry everywhere: the breath.

That’s the whole practice, and there is no wrong time to begin: notice the inhale, gently lengthen the exhale, and give yourself a moment before deciding what comes next.

As a child and throughout adulthood, I watched people I love live with the effects of substance use. The fear, grief, worry, and helplessness touched everyone, not only the person struggling. These experiences have stayed with me and shaped my life’s work.

This practice has helped me, my children, and my clients find moments of steadiness and connection. It may not help every time, and you don’t have to do it perfectly. Begin wherever you are, with what feels manageable today.

I believe in you!

With love, light, and healing energy,

Sandra Benedict

Sandra Benedict, also known as Raven Moon, is a licensed massage therapist, Reiki master, hypnotherapist, aromatherapist, and practitioner of shamanic healing and breathwork. She has worked with individuals and families from many walks of life, holistically supporting their spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental well-being. Sandra brings a rare incandescence to her work, a warmth that draws people seeking compassion, straightforward guidance, and a safe place to begin again.

comments@theartofrecoverymag.com

Let's get one thing out of the way: Cyril Beck is not my real name. It's a pen name, and I chose it for two reasons. First, I knew from the start that I was going to write some things that wouldn't make everyone happy. Second, my current boss would be considerably less happy if he knew I was writing them. I wanted this to be my very first article. I was gently advised to "ease into it." So consider this me, no longer easing.

Here's the thing. I love the treatment world. I also hate it. Some days in the same hour. I've met people in this field I would trust with my life: people who have, in fact, helped save it. And I've met characters so shady and dishonest I still can't figure out how they're allowed anywhere near a license.

This is a story about the second kind. And about the moment I almost became one.

It started out beautifully. A brand-new facility just outside LA, tucked into a quiet, semi-remote neighborhood. An amazing house with all the extras. The kind of place where you walk in and think, This is it. This is where we do it right. I'd been a BHT for over five years. I'd seen good systems, great systems, and a few places whose system was "pray and hope the state doesn't visit." I figured this was my shot to climb the ladder a little. Maybe even land in leadership.

So I became That Guy. You know the one. Twenty minutes early. Takes out the trash without being asked. Customer service. Above and beyond. I ran the swing shift and I loved every minute of it.

I never actually met our business development team. All I knew was what I'd been told: the boss had a relative who owned a call center, and that call center was sending us our clients. Lots of them. All from one state in the middle of the country.

At the time, I didn't think twice about it. Maybe that state was just a smart marketing play. Maybe Google AdWords were cheaper out there. Maybe the people there just really, really love the Southern California coastline.

Looking back, I liked my life a lot more when I was in the dark.

The beginning of the end came with a phone call from the owner. He wanted me on a Zoom meeting with our billing company.

I nearly fell out of my chair. This was it. My hard work was finally getting noticed. I combed my hair, put on a collared shirt (from the waist up, anyway) and logged on eagerly.

For the next hour, I nodded along while they talked about utilization reviews, verifications of benefits, length of stay, medical necessity, and a dozen other things I understood about as well as I understand cryptocurrency. What I did understand was the part about money. A lot of money. They'd found a strong marketplace policy and were marketing heavily in that one state. It sounded smart.

At first.

After the meeting, my boss asked if I wanted to move into admissions. I said yes before he finished the sentence. Then I told him I'd need some training.

"Not really," he said.

The process, as he described it, was simple: he'd text me prospective clients' information, I'd email it to the verification team, and once the VOB came back, I'd call the client, set up the pre-admission assessment, and schedule the intake. Easy.

We hung up, and the questions started flooding in. How do I read a VOB? How do I collect a copay? Can I offer a payment plan? What's a deductible, really? But instead of asking, I did what every confident, slightly underqualified person does: I told myself I'd figure it out as I went.

The next morning, my phone lit up with photos. Insurance cards from the same out-of-state carrier. State IDs from the same state. One after another. I forwarded them to verification, and back came the reports: active coverage. No deductible. No copay.

My boss told me to start dialing. We had three open beds. I went to work.

The first client had an area code from somewhere else entirely. I fumbled through my script, told him we had his verification back, and asked about setting up an assessment. He was ready to go, right now, and needed a flight out as soon as possible. I looped in our CDAC, who called him immediately. Then I told my boss the client needed a flight.

He texted me a photo of his credit card. "Book it."

Assessment done. Flight booked for the next day. Bed filled.

I sat back in my chair, feeling pretty proud of myself. That was easy. Am I a natural closer? Is it really this easy?

Spoiler alert: when it's that easy, something is usually very, very wrong.

As I worked my way through the rest of the list, I started noticing a pattern. Every single policy had gone into effect on the first day of the month. And not one phone number matched the state on the insurance card. Most of them were California numbers.

So I started asking questions. Casual ones. Friendly ones.

"Where are you from?"

"Born and raised in San Diego."

"Where do you live now?"

"Moved to L.A. from Oregon a couple years ago."

"Have you ever lived in the state on your insurance card?"

Long pause. "...No?"

Not one of them had ever set foot in the state that was supposedly insuring them. And here's the kicker: they'd all gotten "help" with their insurance from the same guy. They'd heard about him from a friend. No website. No office. No business card. Just a guy.

There's always a guy.

Convinced I had uncovered a massive scam, I called my boss to warn him. I was practically breathless. I was a whistleblower. I was a hero. I was going to save the company.

His reply landed like a bucket of ice water:

"We aren't detectives. It's not our job to prove every policy was obtained properly. Your job is to verify that it's active and get them in the door. Understand?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

We hung up. I immediately opened my browser and typed, in this order: "body brokering," "insurance fraud," "can an admissions employee go to jail for accepting a fraudulent policy," and my boss's full name.

I didn't love any of the results.

Find an easy policy, milk it for everything it is worth, and get out before it all collapses. Everybody does it.

Feeling trapped, I called an old friend who used to work admissions at one of my former facilities. I laid it all out. He didn't even sound surprised.

"That's just how the system works," he said. "Find an easy policy, milk it for everything it's worth, and get out before it all collapses. Everybody does it." Everyone? There is no way. So I called two more admissions people I knew and got very similar results.

Well. If everybody does it...

I tried the billing company next. Surely they'd have an opinion. They did not. "We don't give advice," they told me. "We don't research where a policy came from. We just bill."

So that was that. The owner didn't care. The billers didn't care. My friend said everyone was doing it. Maybe this really was just how it worked.

But I knew that feeling in my gut. If you're in recovery, you know it too. That buzzing mix of adrenaline and guilt you get right before you do something you know you shouldn't. Do I look away? Do I fall in line and not rock the boat? Do I just do what everyone else is doing?

I was torn right down the middle. So I did the one thing I've learned to do when I can't trust my own head.

I went to my mentors.

If you've never been to the O'Reilly house, picture a three-ring circus run by people who genuinely love each other. Kids everywhere. Noise in every room. Not a quiet moment to be found. It's hard to believe that not so long ago, addiction nearly tore this family apart. Today, their home is living proof that people (and families) can heal. I admire how openly they talk about their past, and how grateful they are for the hardships that brought them here. But that's a story for another time.

I had arrived seeking wisdom. Instead, I arrived in the middle of bedtime. Baths. Brushed teeth. Brushed hair. Sleepy-time tea. Squeals, laughter, and a rotating cast of small humans negotiating for "just five more minutes" with the skill of seasoned little defense attorneys.

I sat on the couch and waited for someone to notice me.

Amy did first. She plopped down next to me and asked, "What's up?"

I told her everything. She admitted she didn't know the finer points of the business (or what was legal and what wasn't), but she asked me one simple question: "Is what you're doing helping people get into treatment? Maybe even saving lives?"

That was an easy one. "Yes."

Just then a small child streaked past at full speed. Amy leapt up to give chase, calling over her shoulder, "See? You are saving lives! Everyone deserves a chance at good treatment!"

And just like that, I felt fantastic.

I wasn't a criminal. I was a hero! My boss wasn't a greedy owner; he was a hero too! We were simply taking from the rich insurance companies and giving to the people who desperately needed treatment. I was a modern-day Robin Hood, armed with email, insurance forms, and absolutely zero bow-and-arrow training.

People in recovery are always talking about "working an honest program," and that's exactly what I was doing. I was honestly saving lives.

At least, that argument sounded a lot more convincing in my head than it does now that I've written it down.

I was still basking in the warm glow of my Robin Hood glory when a voice boomed from the staircase.

"Dude. Don't you have your own house?"

Mike has a way of making you feel welcome.

He came down the stairs with his youngest clinging to his neck like a koala, tickling her and warning that the alligators would get her if she let go. Somebody's going to need a therapist someday, I thought. He set her down, gave her a pat, and watched her sprint back upstairs giggling. Then he dropped onto the couch next to me.

"What's up? You look stressed."

So I launched into it. The whole story. Only by now I had a much better ending: I'd basically solved the whole thing. I was focusing on the outcome. Everybody else was doing it. It was work, not my personal life. I was still an honest person.

About halfway through, I noticed Mike's jaw tighten. I stopped. "You okay?"

"I've heard this story a hundred times," he said. "I don't need you to finish it. Just ask what you want to ask."

My mouth went dry. But I asked.

"Is what I'm doing okay?"

He didn't even blink.

"Are you asking whether participating in fraudulent insurance billing is okay? Let me guess. You're saving lives, so the theft and dishonesty are worth it. Or lots of places are doing it. Or this is just how the system works."

And just like that, Robin Hood was gone. In his place stood John Dillinger, with a bag of cash in each hand.

"Well... yes," I said, sheepishly. "That's pretty much exactly what I'm asking."

Mike leaned in.

"So let's break it down. You're asking if you get to live by a different moral code at work, as long as it might help somebody. You're asking if allowing fake IDs and addresses is okay? You're telling me the only way to save these lives is with one of the highest-paying policies on the market, that there's no honest way? You're asking if committing felonies to make your owner rich is acceptable?"

He kept going, but I'd stopped needing him to. I finally saw it for what it was.

It was wrong. It was illegal.

And I was standing right in the middle of it.

We talked for a long time that night. Mike walked me through the real damage this kind of thing does: not just to facilities, but to the clients themselves. People flown across the country on someone else's credit card, admitted on a policy that might vanish at the end of the month, and left wondering what happens to them when it does. I'd never fully considered that harm, because I'd never been part of it before.

"So what do I do?" I asked.

"I can't tell you what to do," he said. "You're a grown-ass man."

Oof.

The weight of it settled right back onto my chest. I needed help. I needed direction. And worse: I could see he was disappointed in me. I hate that. I hate that. I didn't want to ask again, but I did.

"Seriously. What do I do? Call the FBI? Call the insurance company? I don't want to get anyone in trouble. I don't want the facility shut down. What do I do?"

His answer was almost annoyingly simple.

"Make a stand. Control what you can control. Maybe your boss just needs another option."

Then he grinned. "Let's put together a real marketing plan. You present it as the alternative."

Brilliant. Simple. Risky?

Maybe.

We spent the rest of the night researching and building the plan. I left the O'Reilly house knowing exactly what I had to do, and absolutely terrified of how it was going to go.

I did it anyway.

I called my boss and told him I couldn't participate in the "system" anymore. It violated my moral code. It threatened my sobriety. And it put the entire facility at risk.

He didn't take it well. In so many words, the message was: follow orders or find the door.

Before he could finish, I cut him off. "I have a plan. I think it'll work."

Silence. The longest pause of my life.

Then: "I'm listening."

I walked him through the outline. He was intrigued. We met the next day and built it out together, and he decided to give it a shot. (Sorry, Mike; he thinks it was all my idea.)

That was ten weeks ago. I wish I could offer a fairy-tale ending, but the truth is, it has been hard. Filling the beds with good policies is difficult, and even at full capacity, the combined average daily rate from all six beds does not match what a single one of those other policies paid. I understand why fraud is so widespread: the pressure is enormous. A six-bed facility has a high per-client cost, and marketplace policies are unpredictable: they may pay one month and not the next. I can feel the owner's stress. If my math is right, we are not profitable, and I do not know whether he will stay the course or return to his old ways. I try to put myself in his position: Do I close an unprofitable business, or cut a corner and take one high-paying policy just to cover the bills? It's a hard decision to make. This 6-bed model just doesn't seem to make sense. With the co-pays, deductibles and out of pocket being so high and so hard to collect, scaling seems to be the only way to make a place work. I'm not blaming the state for fraud but this model really puts people's backs up against a wall. Why not change the bed count to 8? It would make a massive difference and perhaps reduce fraud. Give the small owners a chance!

So why am I writing this?

Because I'm still in shock at how much dishonesty and outright illegal conduct I've seen in this industry. Because too many people in this field should be ashamed: not just of what they've done, but of the courage they've lacked to demand something better. And because insurance fraud is crippling the very business that's supposed to be saving lives.

Talking with Mike about "the good old days," and how much harder everything is now, made me realize something I didn't want to admit. In this industry, we love to paint the insurance companies as the villains. And often, they deserve it.

But we fueled a lot of this fire ourselves. With our own greed. With our own dishonesty. With every "everybody does it" and every "it's just how the system works."

Yes, the insurance companies can be villains.

But we can be villains too!

The good news? Villains get to change. Don't you think it's time?

Cyril Beck is a San Diego-based skateboarder, Behavioral Health Technician, and self-described observer of life, people, and nature. After a long history of drug use he became curious about why he was often able to stop while many friends could not. That question led him to work in seven treatment facilities over the last five years, where he has witnessed both the beauty and the failures of modern recovery care. His perspective is observational, unpolished, and deeply human: less about answers, more about paying attention to what actually helps people come back to themselves. Cyril Beck is a pen name.

comments@theartofrecoverymag.com

There's a certain kind of quiet that settles over a treatment facility in trouble. It may not even be readily noticeable at first, but there are signs. Staff stop asking questions. Notes are signed without being read. Morning meetings are held, but the hard questions or gaps are skipped over. Sometimes, the owners or other executives don't even realize how close to the edge they're operating.

I walked into a facility like this nearly sixteen months ago. It was a twelve bed, adult residential facility in the suburbs of a major city. From the outside, the place looked immaculate. It was clean, well staffed, and the census relatively full. The owners were caring, well-meaning people. They hired capable therapists and solid support staff, and when they talked about client care, you could feel they meant it.

What they didn't have was anyone who knew how to really run the place.

It's not that the owners or executives were careless. They just didn't know what they didn't know. They'd listened to people they trusted and made decisions they felt were reasonable. And they built something that worked well enough – until you looked closely. I got my first indication a few days in. After reading their policies and procedures, I spent a few hours with the staff and watched them do something entirely different.

It was clear: the staff had drifted. Staff always drifts when no one is watching for it. Treatment plans are filled out with the same boilerplate goals and objectives, long after anyone remembers why those templates were used in the first place. Assessments were being missed. Deadlines were sliding. In the end, the policies and procedures described one facility, while the building housed another, with everyone seemingly accustomed to the gap.

I learned something that afternoon that I've seen many times since. A policy manual may tell you what a facility intends to do, but it doesn't tell you what's really happening today. This facility didn't lack policies. Rather, it lacked a reliable way to check that those policies were being followed – and someone whose job it was to notice when they weren't.

Over the next few weeks I dove into their charts, personnel files, and policies, and I leaned heavily on AI tools to do it. They let me review more records in less time and spot patterns I may have otherwise missed. That's when I realized the problems ran a lot deeper than a few boilerplate treatment plans and missed notes.

When I sat down with the owners and showed them what I'd found, they weren't defensive. They were stunned. No single finding was catastrophic. What floored them was how much administrative and compliance work existed that they had never known about, and how much it was costing them in overhead they couldn't see. They were relieved. Someone had finally named the thing that had been wrong for months.

That facility isn't an isolated case. In fifteen years and more than thirty treatment centers, I've walked into some version of that building more times than I can count. The size of the facility may vary and the state changes. The core problems, however, almost never do.

Client care rarely suffers first in the group room or treatment sessions. Much more often, the trouble starts in the back office: an expired license, a missed competency evaluation, a treatment plan that stopped describing the actual client six weeks ago, or an intake follow-up that slipped because the person responsible had four other jobs that day. None of that looks clinical. But any one of them can leave a clinician working with incomplete information, or a leader believing a safeguard is in place when it isn't.

I call this the slow bleed. It's the steady drain that operational dysfunction puts on the delivery of care, and it compounds. It doesn't show up in a single incident report, and nothing sounds an alarm. It builds in the background until a surveyor walks in, or a payer audits a chart, or a family member asks a question nobody can answer cleanly. Every hour a clinician spends on redundant documentation, and every dollar that disappears into administrative chaos, comes out of what was meant for clients. Better operations mean better care.

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you that AI fixes everything. It doesn't. I run a company that uses AI to do this kind of work, which is exactly why I'm wary of anyone who oversells it. Behavioral health is crowded with AI products right now. Some are legitimate, plenty are mediocre, and some are ordinary software with "AI" painted on the box. Telling them apart will be a regular subject here.

What I can tell you, from working inside facilities every week, is that AI applied with some care is very good at exactly the problems that nearly sank that twelve-bed center. Its biggest advantage is consistency. It doesn't get tired and it doesn't forget. It can check in the background whether deadlines are being met, whether assessments are done, and whether notes are finished before a shift ends. It can flag what's coming due before it's overdue and nudge the right person without a supervisor having to remember. It takes enough off an employee's plate so they can spend their time on the parts of the job that need judgment, and in an industry where burnout and turnover never let up, that counts for a lot.

There's a limit, however, and it matters. AI can show you the drift, but on its own, it probably shouldn't correct it. Someone still needs to decide whether a flag is real and what to do about it, and that takes a leader willing to close the gap and staff who understand why the standard exists. The technology only ever serves that work, and at the end of that work there's always a human being in a room, trying to get better.

Most owners and operators I talk to don't need another dashboard telling them they have a problem. They need someone accountable for fixing it. The goal isn't to just be ready when a surveyor shows up. It's to build an operation that works on an ordinary Wednesday, even when nobody is coming to inspect it.

That facility I referred to earlier is still operating. Within six months of starting our work, they earned Joint Commission accreditation, and they're more profitable today than ever before. They didn't get there by hiring more people or overhauling their clinical model. They got there because they finally understood what was happening inside their own building, and they built systems to keep it from drifting again.

That's what this column is about. I write from the operator's chair. I'm not a clinician, and I won't pretend to tell clinicians how to do their jobs. What I know is how facilities run and where they tend to break, and I've spent the last two years learning what AI can and can't do about it. Each month, I'll give you my honest take on one piece of that puzzle, with one goal in mind: helping facilities run better so the people providing care can focus on the people who need it.

Ryan West has spent 15 years helping treatment centers operate smarter, first as a compliance and operations consultant and now as the founder of Kiraly, which uses AI to help behavioral health facilities stay compliant and run more efficiently. His legal training sharpened a relentless eye for regulatory risk, and his work with more than 30 treatment centers has convinced him that operational chaos quietly undermines the care clients receive. Practical Intelligence appears here monthly.

comments@theartofrecoverymag.com

Editor’s note. This piece reflects Dr. Young’s own practice and point of view. The Art of Recovery neither endorses nor disputes the claims made here, and nothing in it is medical advice.

The Human Story

“Man, can I use a drink?” … “a drag” … “a hit” … etc.

100% of the time, these thoughts (and thoughts like them) are preceded by stress.

What if looking at stress differently gave you control over it 100% of the time?

Things aren’t going the way you want: at work, in your relationships, for your favorite team… or maybe you’re just bored.

Where do you feel that in your body?

Every “stressful feeling” is preceded by a stress reaction in your body. Your heart rate is a little faster than it needs to be. Your face and shoulders are a little tight, particularly around the eyes and jaw. Your breathing is faster and shallower than it should be. Your digestive system contracts as blood leaves to support your skeletal muscles in preparation to flee or fight.

All of these are reactions that kept your ancestors alive when their lives were literally being threatened. In today’s world, how often are you actually in physical mortal danger where physically running away or fighting is the solution to the problem?

Before feelings of inadequacy, depression, anxiety, PTSD, etc., become noticeable in your conscious mind, there has already been a subconscious physical reaction to a physical, emotional, or chemical stressor.

That automatic reaction isn’t directed by your brain. The “fight, flight, or freeze” reaction is instant and automatic; there’s no time for thought. It’s primal. It’s the reason each of us is here, with all of the personality and physical traits of our ancestors. It’s why they survived long enough to reproduce.

It’s not bad. In fact, it’s VERY good.

Imagine a life where your heart rate never elevated, butterflies never flew in your stomach, and adrenaline never coursed through your body… that would be a life without stress.

Before you “feel stressed,” you can “feel stress.”

Consider everything that causes you stress.

How many of those things do you want to eliminate from your life permanently?

Kids, jobs, romantic relationships, driving your car, watching your favorite sport… all stressful.

What if you started to see stress as a GOOD thing?

Even “bad stress” can usually be flipped to become “good,” depending on the perspective we choose.

The human animal is designed to survive all sorts of hardships. The stress response is integral to that design.

The problem that exists for the modern human animal is that we exist in a completely different world from the one we were designed for.

We sit, which is an “anatomically incongruent” way for the human frame to repose. We don’t have to work physically for food and water. Even if our labor is physical, it’s almost always in a way that we need to train for and recover from, rather than in a way that is inherently supportive of our health.

In our effort as a species to find comfort and convenience, we’ve accidentally eliminated the balance that exists in nature.

The result is a pandemic of chronic stress, resulting in all sorts of health issues, including (but certainly not limited to) mental health and addiction problems.

We’ve all heard the saying, “The program works if you work the program.” The billion-dollar question is: Why don’t people “work the system”?

If every cell in your body is screaming at your brain that you’re in physical mortal danger 24 hours a day, what’s the likelihood that you’ll be able to achieve long-term sobriety?

What happens to that likelihood when you learn to regulate your nervous system, learn to FEEL stress in your body as a GAUGE, like RPMs in your car, and make a physical shift BEFORE you feel the feelings that trigger the thing you’re trying to eliminate from your life?

This isn’t theoretical. It’s not ethereal. We’re not talking about something that requires faith in God or man. It’s simply an observation of the human condition.

We’re talking about recognizing how you can regulate and manage the stress in your body and practicing when it’s easy so that when it’s hard, you’re ready.

If your daily habits are intentionally built around keeping your mind informed that your basic needs are, in fact, being met and that you are, in fact, safe from mortal danger, how much easier will it be to “work the program”?

UNDERSTAND: What’s Happening in the Body

When you have a stress response, your body is getting ready for a physical fight, to run away, or to hide. All of the systems of your body are focused on survival of the impending physical challenge that almost never comes.

Before you “feel stressed,” you can “feel stress.” Your heart rate elevates, your breathing speeds up and becomes shallow, the muscles in your neck and face tighten, the blood leaves your digestive system, etc.

Each of these elements of the stress response functions as part of a series of feedback loops to ensure that the body is ready for what’s coming.

For example, speeding up your breathing will elevate your heart rate, and elevating your heart rate will make you breathe faster.

You can’t THINK your heart into slowing down, but you CAN ALWAYS slow down your breathing.

You can’t THINK to your digestive system to pull more blood into the walls of your intestines to better digest your food, but you CAN train your body to be in a better postural position and drop your shoulders, and that will improve your digestion.

Understanding these feedback loops gives you the opportunity to take the wheel.

When you practice feeling how fast you’re breathing, developing an awareness of the tension in your face and shoulders, and becoming aware of your posture and the signals that all of these are sending, you can start to use your subconscious reactions to stressors as gauges and then as levers.

NOTICE: The Practice of Awareness

These three “moments” in the stress response (the tension in your neck and face, the position of your shoulders, and how fast you’re breathing) are all potentially within your control 100% of the time, even if you don’t believe me right now…

Sometimes the stressors are so numerous and the feedback loops are so persistent that it feels like you can’t control these things. But as you practice and use them to control each other, you’ll find that you become aware that the other elements of the stress reaction are following suit.

Your heart is, in fact, slowing down. Your digestive system is, in fact, starting to churn again. Your thoughts are slowing down, even if it’s just a tiny bit at first.

Notice first how forcing your breath to slow down will allow your shoulders to drop a little more. As you drop your shoulders a little more, your face starts to relax. Then the slow breathing starts to feel “normal,” and you can more easily breathe with your diaphragm, expanding your ribs with every breath.

Then your shoulders drop a little more, and you feel the muscles in the back of your neck start to let go a little. Then the breathing feels even EASIER, and you feel your stomach start to gurgle a little.

Observing these things (and how you can use them to manage each other) will give you the awareness to start using them as tools, as levers that you can pull to manage the physical stress response BEFORE it becomes a stressful feeling.

And when you find that it’s all spooled up faster than you were ready for, you can use these levers to turn down the anxiety, depression, etc.

You become an observer and manager of these things rather than simply a victim of the circumstances.

PRACTICE: One Tool

Breath is the most powerful and impactful tool you have in this new set of tools. Specifically, start to train yourself to breathe with your diaphragm.

First, find your diaphragm.

Sit up straight and tall wherever you are right now. Feel where your breath is happening.

Now take your thumb and ring finger (the fourth finger, the one closest to your pinky) and press the pads of them together. This is a yoga mudra that will activate your diaphragm. Don’t ask me how; it just works.

That muscle that is pushing your ribs from the inside out through the whole circumference of your trunk is your diaphragm.

Another way to find the diaphragm is to wrap a pillowcase or towel around the bottom of your ribs and push out against that resistance.

After you’ve found your diaphragm, take 5–10 deep breaths with it. Inhale for 5 seconds and exhale for 10. Feel what happens to your shoulders and face, then do it more. Notice what happens to your thoughts and feelings as you continue to breathe this way.

This pace of 15–20 seconds per breath will put you into the optimal range of 3–6 breaths per minute.

A note on the practice. Breathing exercises affect people differently. If slowing your breath leaves you lightheaded, dizzy or uneasy, stop and return to breathing normally. This applies to any breathing practice in this piece, including the box breathing further on.

There are tons of different breathing techniques and practices, and the benefits of all of them are magnified when you breathe intentionally with your diaphragm.

CONNECT: Meaning and Recovery

In yogic philosophy, there is the concept of the koshas: these layers, or sheaths, that describe the human experience.

They describe a progression from managing the physical in order to facilitate the awakening of awareness that leads to connection with the infinite intelligence that resides within and, ultimately, to a state of bliss.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs describes a progression from basic needs and safety to transcendence.

The Big Book describes the observation that the only way the writers had ever observed anyone achieving long-term sobriety was through connection with a higher power to the point that their character was changed.

What if these are all saying the same thing in different ways, and you can use the combination of them as a road map to give you the tools to allow you to connect with that higher power that will, in fact, change your character to the degree that sobriety becomes a side effect of a lifestyle in which you’re managing your physical state with the conscious intention of signaling to your mind and soul that your basic needs are, in fact, being met and that you are, in fact, safe from physical danger?

What if being a productive member of your community then feels natural and effortless, and your talents and skills are expressed to the point that you start to become more and more aware of the spiritual aspects of life and the associated connections with other people and nature?

And you start living your life at a higher frequency, tapped in more often to the loving and healing influence of your higher power…?

Recovery isn’t just something you think about. It’s something you learn to live in your body.

Helping others has become one of the most important parts of my life. It is more than a job to me. It is something personal that comes from my own experience with addiction, recovery, and learning how much a person’s life can change when someone is willing to help.

I have been sober for more than 23 years, and I have worked in behavioral health for nearly 20 years. Over the years, I have worked with people struggling with addiction, mental-health issues, family problems, and many other difficult situations. I have worked as a recovery coach and sober companion, assisted with interventions, transported people safely to treatment, and helped families figure out what to do next.

Because of my own recovery, I understand what it feels like to need help. I also understand that it is not always easy to accept that help. Sometimes people are afraid. Sometimes they are angry, confused, or in denial. Other times, they have been struggling for so long that they have lost hope that their life can ever be different.

I never want a person to feel like I am judging them. I try to meet people where they are and speak to them in a way that is honest but also compassionate. I believe people can usually tell when someone truly cares about them and when someone is just doing a job.

One experience that has stayed with me involved a young woman who was experiencing a serious mental-health crisis. Her family contacted the interventionist I was working with because their daughter had taken a bus across the border during what appeared to be a psychotic episode. She was somewhere in the city, possibly wandering around by herself, and her family was terrified.

When I heard what was happening, I immediately said, “Absolutely, let’s go look for her.”

I rearranged my plans and arranged to meet her father at the border. I could see how scared he was. His daughter was in another country, she was not thinking clearly, and he did not know if she was safe. He also did not know whether she would agree to come home even if we found her.

We crossed the border together and went to the area where her phone or last known location had been identified. We started walking around and searching for her. We did not know exactly where she was, what condition she would be in, or how she would react if we approached her.

While I was walking around, I noticed a young woman sitting alone on a bench in a park. Something about her made me stop and pay attention. I contacted her father and asked him to come over to see if it was his daughter.

When he arrived, he confirmed that it was her.

At first, there was a sense of relief because we had found her and knew she was alive. But the situation was not over. Her father approached her and tried to get her to leave with him, but she refused. She was still in crisis and did not completely trust what was happening.

We were advised not to push her too hard. We stayed nearby, watched her, and followed at a safe distance when she moved. The last thing we wanted was to frighten her and cause her to run away or disappear again.

Eventually, I was able to approach her and make contact. I spoke to her calmly and let her know that we were not there to hurt her or force her to do anything. We were there because her family loved her, was worried about her, and wanted to help her get somewhere safe.

I tried to talk to her like a person instead of treating her like a problem. I wanted her to know that she still had choices and that accepting our help did not mean she was giving up her dignity or control over her life.

After spending some time talking with her, she agreed to come with us. We got into a taxi with her father and made it safely back across the border. From there, we were able to get her into a place where she could receive the help and support she needed.

That experience meant so much to me because today I see this young woman in the community. She is doing well and being productive in her life. When I see her, I think about that day, and how different things could have turned out.

I do not take credit for her recovery because she is the one who had to do the work. Her family also continued to support her, and professionals provided the treatment she needed. I was simply one person who showed up during a very important moment and helped her take the next step.

Knowing that I played even a small part in getting her to safety brings me a great deal of happiness. It also reminds me why I continue doing this work.

I have been involved in many situations like this over the years.

Sometimes my role has been to sit with someone who is struggling and listen to them. Sometimes it has been helping a family plan an intervention. Other times it has been driving someone to treatment, staying with a person as a sober companion, or helping someone put the pieces of their life back together as a recovery coach.

Every situation is different. There is no single way to help everyone. Some people respond to direct honesty, while others need more time and patience. What matters is that they feel heard, respected, and supported.

I have also learned how important it is to help the family. When someone is dealing with addiction or a mental-health crisis, the whole family is affected. Parents, partners, siblings, and children may spend years worrying, arguing, rescuing, and trying to fix the situation.

I remind families that they can love someone without supporting destructive behavior.

By the time a family reaches out for help, they are often exhausted. They may feel guilty because they do not know whether they are helping or making things worse. Part of my role is to help them slow down, understand what is happening, and make healthier decisions.

I remind families that they can love someone without supporting destructive behavior. They can have compassion while still setting boundaries. Asking for professional help does not mean they have failed their loved one. Sometimes it is the most loving decision they can make.

My own recovery has helped me understand both sides. I know what it is like to struggle, and I know what it is like for the people around us to want something better for us before we are ready to want it for ourselves.

I also know that people can change. I am not the same person I was before I got sober. Recovery gave me opportunities, relationships, and a meaningful life. It allowed me to turn some of the most difficult parts of my past into a way of helping other people.

I do not believe that I can save anyone. I cannot force someone to get sober or make them participate in treatment. What I can do is show up, be honest, offer support, and help them see that another way of living is possible.

Sometimes one conversation can make a difference. Sometimes it is one safe ride to treatment. Sometimes it is sitting with a person during a frightening night or helping a family understand that they are not alone.

The young woman sitting on that bench was going through one of the worst moments of her life, but that moment did not have to become the rest of her life. Today, when I see her doing well, I am reminded that we should never judge a person only by what they look like during a crisis.

People are capable of recovering. Families can heal. Relationships can be repaired, and lives can become meaningful again.

My passion for helping others comes from knowing that people once helped me. I did not build my life in recovery completely on my own. Other people believed in me, supported me, and showed me that change was possible. Today, I try to offer that same hope to others.

When a person or family calls me, I know they may be experiencing one of the hardest days of their life. I want them to know that someone is willing to listen and help them figure out the next step.

That is what gives my life purpose. It is not about receiving attention or being called a hero. It is about being available, being trustworthy, and being willing to go where help is needed.

Sometimes helping means sitting quietly and listening. Sometimes it means having a difficult conversation. And sometimes it means meeting a frightened father at the border and going to search for his daughter.

Whatever the situation may be, I am grateful that my own recovery has allowed me to be there for other people. Helping others is not only what I do. It is a big part of who I am.

Johnny Perez grew up in Southern California, the youngest of eight, and lives in West Hollywood. He has been in recovery for more than 23 years and has worked in behavioral health for nearly twenty, carrying his experience onto panels in prisons, jails and treatment centers. Two things guide him: doing the right thing when no one is looking, and asking whether a choice brings him closer to God or further away. He dives when he can, loves Italy, French bulldogs and a medium rare steak, and will happily shop Rodeo Drive and the dollar store on the same day.

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