“Call me.”
Pathway Staff Survivor: 2018 - 2020
Every couple of months I get the same text that sends chills down my spine and my stomach sinks to my feet. The breath in my lungs escapes and it feels like no matter how hard I try to inhale, the oxygen around me is gone. My heartbeat gets progressively louder until it’s a ringing in my ears and my mouth gets dry and the anxiety is deafening. Another one is gone. I know that text. “Call me.” Another one is gone.
Another bright, funny, wild, full-of-love young adult is dead at the hands of addiction, or more importantly, the hands of programs that were supposed to save them but were never equipped to. Imagine if these souls, desperate for help, spent 3 years getting actual treatment instead of wasting precious time filling the void with temporary pleasure that could be spent saving their life.
We spend years face to face with m*rderers advertised as miracle workers. We rewrite our stories to fit a narrative that they deem acceptable. We rewrite ourselves and our goals and our pasts and our futures and our struggles and our accomplishments. We embellish everything, until we have no idea who we are. We alienate ourselves from the outside world until the program is our only reality. And then they abandon us.
I shouldn’t be 24 and nearly on the 20th friend I’ve lost to addiction. This isn’t normal. I shouldn’t have attended ten times more funerals than I ever have weddings. I shouldn’t get a text that says “Call me” and find myself drowning in grief again.
A lot of these kids come in desperate for help. And they actually need it. They give every ounce of themselves to the program until they’re abandoned. And by then, they’re exhausted and their trust in “professional help” is depleted. Their chance to escape the chains of addiction is wasted on a program literally built on fraud and dishonesty. So by the time they’re spit back out into the real world, they don’t have it in them to try anymore. And the addiction wins.
Call me.
I hate that text. I hate that I know I’m going to have to be the one to send it next. “Call me.” Then it’s my turn to update the few of us who are still living & have found the other side. We went through the program years ago, and yet it still finds a way to haunt us month after month after month. No matter how hard we try to rewrite our stories and our futures and move on from the program, we’re all still tied together with that one damn text that brings us all back to that place of desperation and dread and heartbreak.
Call me.
-Pathway Staff Survivor
Share your story
Share your story to help other survivors feel heard, seen and understood. We aim to expose the consistent patterns of abuses in Enthusiastic Sobriety Programs and prevent potential families from years of suffering from undue influence and abuse under the guise of drug and alcohol treatment. Enthusiastic Sobriety Survivor stories can be submitted anonymously by former group members, staff and families.
