Surviving Addiction

Introduced to heroine and alcohol for the first time at the tender age of eight-years-old programmed me and opened up a flood gate of feel good receptors in my brain, causing a high that I spent years trying to recreate over and over again.

This is my story. After a lifetime of trying to help everyone else get their lives together, I have finally figured out how to get mine together. I am now 72 years old, semi-retired from a business I created to help young adults with autism function in the world. I live in Mexico with my loving partner. I have fulfilling relationships with my adult children and grandchildren.

Faith Smith has always had a problem with alcohol. At first, she didn’t believe it was an issue, but slowly, her life begins to unravel. Her job as a teacher hangs in the balance, her marriage begins to crumble, and she realizes that she’s putting her addiction before even her own children. Faith knows she has to do something to regain control of her life. But her demons won’t abandon her so easily.

An alcoholic mother of three children, married, then divorced, then homeless, Patty Tierney lived a double life as a sex worker for 17 years. She looked for love in all the wrong places, saying “I love you” when she was really saying, “Do you love me?” Patty struggled to be the mother she knew her children needed, until she realized that she had become her own mother—the alcoholic mother who had abandoned her when she was five.

Author Brandon Lee is a two-time Emmy winning journalist for his reporting on the opioid crisis. The irony is that Brandon was also a drug addict. Brandon’s trauma, however, started as a child when he was sexually abused by his piano teacher and youth soccer coach...It wasn’t until the age of 37 when he finally got the courage to break his silence about being a sex victim and how that trauma led him down a dark path of sex and drug addiction. Brandon’s mission is to give other addicts hope that they can build a new life they never thought possible.