WITHINTEGRATION
Change Your Reality, Change Your Life
Become Your Most Authentic Self
Mission
To facilitate access to addiction recovery services and provide educational and spiritual resources and experiences which empower people to improve their health and wellness and become their most authentic selves.
Services
Referrals - We stay on top of the available resources in the area and can help match you up with the organization and/or services that will best suit your needs.
Emotional Integration Training - We will walk you through this 11-Week Course which will give you the tools to manage your emotions in a skillful way and become your most authentic self. Watch Lesson 1 for free: www.eit4all.org
Workshops - We offer ongoing workshops and events that are designed to support people in recovery to connect at a deeper spiritual level.
Access Breathwork Sessions - Music is the vehicle and your breath is the fuel... You can do years' worth of therapy in a single session 'on the mat'. You can have a psychedelic experience without substances and 'access' higher levels of consciousness. www.accessbreath.org
Soaking Prayer - Conect with your Higher Power and your Self with a session of worship music designed to inspire, uplift and heal.
Scholarships - We work to get contributions from individuals, businesses and community resources to be able to provide scholarships and financial assistance to people who demonstrate need so they can get into programs that would otherwise not be accessible to them.
About
In early childhood I remember thinking to myself that something was wrong with me. I never felt like I fit in anywhere that I went. I was born prematurely to a mother of many ism’s and a more than absent father. I was raised primarily by my grandmother and my mother’s younger sister Shanna the first ten years of my life because my mom had alcohol and substance abuse issues and she was rarely ever around. When mom was in the picture during that time of my life it was quite a chicken fried situation. I was taught by the age of three that I was not like other kids, and to me that meant that something was wrong with me. I was told all growing up that I was too sick to play sports or games that the other kids played because I had asthma. So by the age of seven when all the other kids were reading Green Eggs and Ham, I was reading anatomy books describing the respiratory system functions trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I wanted to know why I was “different”. I wanted to know what it meant when the doctors said that my lungs were too sick to do what the other kids my age were doing. I felt like I was no good compared to all of them. I also come from a large family of drug abusing, alcoholics on both sides of my family tree, and on my mother’s side there was religion. A religion that I never felt like I belonged to. The very first event that I attended as an infant new into this world was a church service at a United Pentecostal Church revival. I grew up as a Pentecostal, but I always felt like the black sheep in the church. I never felt like I belonged there either.
By the time I got to high school, everything was different because my mom had remarried a man named Jon whom I now call dad. He even helped me show my mom through my own discoveries about the respiratory functions that it was actually better for me to be as active as I could be. Being active as an asthmatic actually helps your lungs open up and function way better. He helped me convince her of this and then it was off to the races. I joined as many sports as I possibly could. By my freshman year of high school, I was running varsity track and cross country. I was also playing soccer and cheerleading and lifting weights in power lifting meets. So, in my freshman year I went from asthmatic to all-star varsity athlete. I had everything going my way, except that my mom couldn’t stay sober. Her addictions followed me around at school and despite my jocularity I still got looked at as the kid with many problems. I ignored the crude remarks from my peers by turning my focus to my future plans for college.
I had plans to go to East Texas Baptist University and play soccer on their women’s team and study psychology. I always wanted and knew that one day I would be in a position to help others. I had goals of being a psychiatrist or a counselor of some kind so that I could help children deal with their own traumas from having parents like my own. Then by the age of 16 all of those dreams and goals ground to a halt because I got injured in a district power lifting meet. While doing a max lift on squats I tore my ACL and meniscus in my right knee. I went to physical therapy first for eight weeks, and then after my therapist saw that I was not progressing he ordered a scope on my knee. I needed surgery and after the six-hour surgery was completed I was prescribed pain killers along with another 12 weeks of physical therapy. That was my introduction to Hydrocodone. It was almost instant dependence. My sports career and high school experience came to a sudden end when my parents saw that they couldn’t afford to send me to summer school to make up for the time I missed. Instead they decided to enroll me in an alternative school so that I could catch up my junior year and complete my senior year and graduate early. Little did they know that by the time I got to my senior year at Pride Alternative School that I would have a severe addiction to opiates.
I couldn’t make it a full day without meeting the “dope man” in the parking lot at school to get my fix from feeling dope sick. It all started with hydrocodone. Then it shifted to Percocet, and Soma. Then all of those shifted to Oxycontin everyday while in school. The sad part was that I was naïve to the fact that I had become dependent on pain killers. I had become addicted and was totally blinded by the way the medicine made me feel. A short time later I went to visit a friend in Silsbee, Texas and that is where I met Michael. We connected immediately and the energy was magnetic between us. I was seventeen at the time, and he was 25. No one but my drug dealer knew just how bad my addiction to opiates actually was, not even Michael, but by 2009 I turned 18 in February and Michael and I got married the following April. I was happy to marry Michael. Not only did I have love for him, I also loved the idea of moving away from my home town (the geographic solution). I had begun to realize that I had a problem with opiates and I believed that if I moved away from home that I could resolve my problems because I wouldn’t know anyone with pills to purchase in the new town, thus it would end my pill problem. It never even crossed my mind that what I was experiencing was “active addiction”. I just knew without the pills I felt like dying, and my only solution was to move away from everything I knew and start over in a place that I couldn’t find them so easily. So, I did, and the withdrawals were terrifying. There were several moments that I thought that I would have been better off dead than experiencing the gruesome sensations that came from opiate withdrawal.
Michael was so naïve to substance abuse that he had no earthly idea what was actually going on with me, and I kept it that way and suffered in silence because the shame that sank in during the withdrawal was so overwhelming. I remember thinking: How could I let myself get here? How did I let my lifestyle turn into this? I am no better than my mother! The extreme guilt that came with all of that prevented me from telling Michael the truth. Instead he assumed that I had a bad stomach virus, or food poisoning and I let him roll with that idea for nine days of chronic vomiting and misery. I managed to stay clean and sober for two years, and then on December 24, 2011 I gave birth to my son Lucas. The doctor at the hospital sent me home with Vicodin, and being that the doctor gave it to me I assumed that it was okay for me to take it (after all he’s a doctor!). I quickly started taking them two at a time, and was right back where I had been in only a month’s time. I went back to work at a small finance company in Silsbee when Lucas was almost six weeks old as a loan officer and tax preparer. My mother in law Sharon had retired and she agreed to watch Lucas for me so that I could return to work.
My boss at the time also had her own pill problem. Which meant that if she didn’t have pills, we had problems. She introduced me to all of the ways she managed to keep up her habit. She introduced me to the various ways she scored her drugs of choice which worked out perfectly for me because we used the same kinds of drugs. After about four months of doctor hopping and doctor shopping I realized that my addiction had taken back over and that I once again needed to slow myself down. To do so meant that I would have to quit my job and remove myself from such easy access to the many acquaintances that I had made at my job that were helping support my habit and destroy my mind. Once again, I would have to uproot myself and start over. I didn’t feel the need to move to another town but the need to change jobs was a must so I did and started working in health care. In the back of my mind I still wanted to go to college and make something of myself. I really wanted a psych degree. I really wanted to help others face their emotions that kept them in constant fear, but how could I when I was living in fear myself? I was constantly masking my own emotions. I knew that one day my dream of being a counselor would come true. Just as I had dreamed of the day that my lungs wouldn’t hinder me from playing sports, I knew one day I would be that person that people could count on to help them face their fears, and anxieties.
My relationship with Michael ended in divorce seven years later despite our resolutions and promises to make things work. That didn't make a difference though and I started to crash under all of the pressure and started taking Tramadol like it was candy just to cope with the stress. I convinced Michael to pack up our house and move with me back to my home town of Huntington and start over fresh as a family. My dad even agreed to give Michael a job in the Huntington school district in the maintenance department with him. We packed our house up and off we went. Michael had not even started his job yet when I realized that I had made a huge mistake because even though he loved us I felt like he hated me in the back of my mind. I felt like I was not good enough for him and that I didn’t deserve such a great man in my life so I left him and we got divorced in 2017. I began bouncing around from couch to couch at friends' and family's houses on what I like to call “the pro sofa tour”. Living a life of a depressed addict. That is also when I was introduced to crystal meth, and lost myself completely for two years straight. I was homeless, hopeless and confused. By 2019 I was using a needle at least three times a day, and dealing crystal to the bikers at a local bar in my home town. That bar is where I met husband number two. When I met him, I needed saving and he wanted to be my savior, so I let him. I have been through hell and back with my addictions several times now and have been to treatment twice.
Only on my second attempt at rehab can I truly say that I am in recovery. My counselor helped me learn more about myself than I have ever known, and not only that, taught me how to process the wreckage of my past traumas at a deep emotional level that has made it truly possible for me to love and accept myself today. That is something that until now I have never been able to do. Today I can accept all of my past trauma as life experiences that I have felt and processed at an intense emotional level that I never have before thanks to the process of recovery I learned that isn’t focused on “not drinking or using” but on being healthy, making my own choices and living up to my full potential. I know that I am living my very best life, and that my life now has purpose, and meaning. I commend myself for overcoming my obstacles and finding the person that I was meant to be. Who knew that when I lost myself that I would find my authenticity. It is now my desire to share my own experiences with others that may be struggling and help them begin their journey out of the darkness and into the light of their own genius. I feel that this is what my genius is intended for. While searching for myself I found my recovery. Now in recovery I strive to help others reach their full potential in their own way become their most authentic selves.
