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Recovery in the News: Rally for Recovery! 2007
Annual Recovery Walk Focuses Attention On Addiction Services
Judy Benson
The Day.com
September 14, 2007
Probably every one of the 2,000 or so people expected to gather Saturday morning at Bushnell Park in Hartford has their own painful but inspiring story to tell about leaving the prison of drug and alcohol addiction behind them. New London residents Carol Jones, James Smith and John Haugabook plan to be among the faces in that throng.
“I'm very excited to go and be in all that positive energy with thousands of people who are also clean and sober, and to feel how proud we all are,” says Jones, a 53-year-old New London resident who beat heroin addiction 18 years ago. She now works with people with AIDS and HIV as a case manager at the Alliance for Living.
The means for expressing their pride is the annual “Recovery Walks!” event organized by the Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery, or CCAR. CCAR runs support centers around the state for recovering addicts, people interested in recovery, and families affected by addiction, including the New London Recovery Community Center in Waterford. Jones, Smith and Haugabook all volunteer and participate in activities there.
The walkers will circumnavigate the park three times, passing the state Capitol and office buildings for various state agencies that line the nearby streets as a way of reminding state officials that former addicts are part of their constituencies, too.
“There are politicians that come who are really pro-recovery,” says Smith, 60. “But for me, it's also a social event.”
About 60 others from southeastern Connecticut will also participate. Kimberly Turner Haugabook, who is married to John Haugabook, is the peer services coordinator of the New London center and will be going to “Recovery Walks!” for the third time. She and her husband are celebrating 10 years since putting addiction behind them, a milestone that entitles them to special “honor guard” status during the walk. The couple married eight years ago.
The event is not about raising money. It's about raising awareness. “It's about using ourselves as examples that recovery is alive and well,” she says.
For Jones, Smith and Haugabook, describing their own journeys from addiction to recovery is another way of encouraging others to seek help, and to dispel ignorance and stigma about recovery. Here are their stories:
CAROL JONES
During high school in the late 1960s and early '70s, recalls Jones, she first began using drugs. Naively, she considered it harmless experimentation that seemed to go along with the anti-establishment politics and social activism she was involved in at the time.
“But my life became consumed by drugs. I became a heroin addict and would do anything I had to do to get drugs,” says Jones, who grew up in what she described as an upper-middle class home in New London. “My family quickly learned to give me tough love. As long as I was using, I wasn't allowed in their home. It wasn't until I got clean and sober that I began to appreciate all the pain they had gone through because of my addiction.”
During her years as an addict, she bore a child she put up for adoption, and never, she says, had a healthy relationship with a man. She was incarcerated several times on various drug charges.
Eventually, she ended up in a prison in New Hampshire that had just begun a new program for female addicts. Jones had long been searching for a way out of the life she was leading, living for the next fix, sometimes waking up in the morning on a park bench.
“There never was an actual turning point,” she says. “I just got so sick and tired of doing drugs. They didn't get me high anymore. I was tired of not having any meaningful relationships. In prison in New Hampshire, I first made the commitment to stay clean and sober. One day led to two days, and that led to three days, and then I got hope. I saw that there was another way of life.”
After she left prison, she found a job picking apples. The orchard was one of the few places that would hire someone with a criminal record. Her attitude became one of gratitude — for her life, for a job outdoors in a beautiful setting, for another chance.
After the orchard job, she stayed in New Hampshire to work in a recovery program doing street outreach before eventually heading back to southeastern Connecticut. Six years ago she married Raymond Jones. The daughter she put up for adoption, now 26, contacted Jones a few years ago, and the two are working at building a relationship.
“Every day I get up and I'm so thankful that I'm alive,” Jones says. “I have a great life today. But I have to tell my story. I never try and make it sound prettier than it is. There was a lot of pain and a lot of loss. But you can't stay stuck in the shame and the guilt.”
JAMES SMITH
“I'm a product of the '60s,” James Smith says. “I was a hippie. Somewhere along the way, I crossed the line from being a drug user to being an abuser.”
Eventually, he says, he became addicted to heroin. Several times over the 25 years he was an addict he tried unsuccessfully to wrest himself free. Finally, it happened after he came across a book that gave him focus and inspiration. Then he joined a 12-step recovery program.
“It was a gradual thing,” he recalls. “I just got to the point where I said, 'Enough is enough.' I was tired of being in and out of jail, getting stuff only to lose stuff. Sometimes I say that I just grew up one day. It just took me a while to find my path.”
As a counselor at the Lebanon Pines Treatment Facility in Lebanon, Smith now uses his own experiences and insights to help others struggling with addiction. He also works part-time at a methadone clinic in Westerly.
For many addicts, he says, one of the hardest parts of sobriety is that it forces them to leave a community they've become part of, however destructive.
“Your old life kind of ends, and you have to get back into mainstream society,” Smith says. “That's the biggest fear a lot of people have.”
Finding the way to recovery, he says, often takes several false starts. Failing once, twice or three times at breaking the cycle doesn't doom a person to being an addict forever, he says. It's essential to keep trying, and to realize that everyone has to discover what will work for them.
“People do recover and become really positive parts of their communities,” he says.
Smith knows both the triumph of overcoming drug addiction, and the frustration. Several years ago, he recalled, grief over the death of his wife from cancer led to a relapse.
“I learned from that,” he says. “At that time, I didn't have anything to fall back on.”
He realized he needed the support of others who'd overcome addiction. He's found that at the New London center.
“It keeps me focused, and gives me a chance to give something back” through volunteering, he says.
JOHN HAUGABOOK
For the two decades John Haugabook lived the life of a heroin addict and drug dealer, shuttling back and forth between prison and the Hartford neighborhood where he grew up, virtually no one used his first name.
Most of his friends and acquaintances only knew him by one of his street names. Today, when he goes back to visit his family in Hartford and runs into someone from the old days still caught up in drugs, he tells them about the life he's living now as a homeowner, husband, father, professional counselor and recovery success story. They aren't disdainful, he says, but tell him they're proud of him.
“I began to use my name, John, when I came into recovery,” says Haugabook, 48. “When I think about how fortunate I am to have made it out, I don't take my life for granted. It's not by chance that I'm here. I could just as easily have been dead.”
Haugabook did the Recovery Walks! event twice before, and expects Saturday's walk will be no less empowering than before. In past years, he's run into former addicts he knew in Hartford, now, like him, grateful for their recovery and living purposeful lives.
“It is absolutely amazing to be amongst all these others and know I'm not by myself in this thing,” he says. “There were people I forgot about or who I thought were dead who I've met on the walk. It just connects people. There are people from all walks of life.”
Since shortly after completing a residential treatment program at Stonington Institute 10 years ago, Haugabook has worked as a counselor and supervisor at the North Stonington facility. The job, he recalls, found him.
He distinguished himself in group sessions and morning meditation at the treatment center as someone fellow recovering addicts listened to. He was first hired to run a newly established halfway house, and still keeps in touch with some of its first residents, now “taxpaying citizens with families,” he says. Currently, he supervises a program for 12- to 18-year-olds with substance abuse and mental health problems.
“It is extremely difficult, but it is rewarding in the sense that you're able to be a role model and to build healthy relationships with them when the majority have been abandoned all their lives,” he says.
He believes God led him out of the physical and spiritual prison he had made for himself with drugs and opened doors for him to share the lessons he learned the hard way.
But getting to recovery, Haugabook said, was more complicated than giving up drugs alone. He had to confront the painful circumstances of his life, mostly his abusive father — for whom he was named — who died when Haugabook was 10. The death of his father, who provided the family's only income, thrust him into the position of helping his mother take care of his six siblings.
“I always felt I had to become a man too fast, so I couldn't enjoy being a child,” says Haugabook, today the father of three. He and Turner Haugabook have a daughter in elementary school, and he also has two teenage sons who live elsewhere in the state.
After his father's death, he says, “people were always expecting things from me, and that caused me to rebel and seek drugs to get outside myself.” Along with the drugs came other destructive and criminal behaviors — at age 14, he says, he fathered a child with a prostitute. The baby died in infancy. That same year, he was sent to prison for nine years after he killed a man. Midway through his prison term, his mother died.
After his release, he returned to Hartford only to resume his old ways. Eventually he grew weary of his Russian-roulette existence. By the time he took a friend's advice and went to the Stonington Institute, he had come to view his life as a kind of slavery, and he was determined to get free.
Completely overcoming the grip of drugs, he says, happened when he let go of the intense feelings of hatred for his father and emotional abandonment by both his parents.
“I came to understand that for me, love was stronger than hate,” he says. “Recovery isn't just about not using drugs and alcohol, it's about growing totally as a person.”