“I’m in this trap house. There’s no doors in any of the bedrooms. They’ve all been kicked down from a previous police raid. There’s empty liquor bottles. Used crack pipes. Naked girls having sex and passing out. The house is disgusting, and here I am laying on this mattress; it had blood, pee, dirt…..it looked like someone had pulled it out of the dumpster,” said Sam.
“And I did something I had never done. I got down on that pee-stained, bloody, dirty mattress and prayed, ‘I don’t know who you are and I don’t know if you’re real, but if you are, you need to show up right now or I’m gonna give up and I’m gonna die here on this mattress.’ ‘”
As soon as she prayed that prayer, her phone rang……
***
When we pass people on the street who have all the tell-tale signs of addiction; twitching, non-coherent babbling, rotted teeth, sores on their skin and dirty clothes, it can be easy to dismiss them as “those addicts”.
But like they say, everyone has a story; and an addict usually has a story that led them to addiction. And Sam’s journey to addiction definitely has a story.
When Sam’s dad married her mother, he was a recovering alcohol, and for the first four years of Sam’s life he was sober, but that all changed when he found out some shocking news. Sam had been being molested for several years by his mom’s brother, but what made it even worse was his mother knew and didn’t stop it.
His mom’s brother had a lot of money, and apparently it was enough money to keep Sam’s grandmother quiet about the abuse. All this was too much for her dad to bear, and he slipped back into addiction. Eventually the strain of everything tore her parents apart and they soon divorced.
Sam’s mother remarried shortly after, to the man Sam suspects she was cheating on her father with. Either way, Sam got what she says was a “bonus brother” through her stepdad, whom she became extremely close with.
However, worried about her father’s drinking, and because he had isolated himself from his family due to the molestation and betrayal, Sam felt a sense of obligation to spend the majority of her time with her dad since he was all alone.
Although, a few years after he and Sam’s mom split up, he met a much younger woman and they eventually married, but it wasn’t long before the two of them were both in the throes of addiction.
And even though her dad was using, up until this point he was still a functioning addict, but when his second wife also left him for another man, it “broke him”, Sam says.
Having both of his wives betray him, along with the betrayal of his uncle and mother, sent him into a massive downward spiral. Feeling like he couldn’t trust anyone, he began isolating himself, and drugs and alcohol became his new confidants.
“After she left, my dad was miserably depressed, and one day he asked me to go into the closet and get his gun,” she says.
“He was drunk and high on cocaine, Xanax and PCP, and so I hid the gun in this chest and called the police,” Sam recalls. “They put him in the psych ward and then he went to jail, but when he went to court, I lied to the judge about everything to protect my dad like I always did. Cause I knew if they took my dad I’d have to go live with my mom, and I didn’t want to go live with her.”
So, in the meantime, while Sam was trying to be the parent to her father, her mother was chasing after her new cheating husband.
“I remember being left alone in this alley with the car doors locked. It was dark, cold and I was scared. There were these red, neon letters and I remember practicing my alphabet until my mom came back,” Sam recalls.
(Sam as a little girl.)
These types of instances weren’t uncommon. Countless times, Sam’s mother would drag Sam along while she would be outside women’s houses screaming at them for cheating with her husband.
“I didn’t like being with my mom,” she exclaims. “She was never home. She was always chasing after my stepdad, and if she was home, she’d be locked in the bedroom with him.”
The feelings of loneliness was one of the main reasons Sam didn’t like being at her mom’s.
And even though her dad was an addict and alcoholic, Sam says she enjoyed being with her dad. “Growing up, he spent time talking to me. We gardened together. He would take me to car shows. We went to Hollywood. He took me to see the Harlem Globe Trotters. We would watch Saturday Night Live together,” she says. “He was a really good dad. The best dad he could be. He was my best friend.”
So, it was only a matter of time before Sam started following in the footsteps of her best friend, who at this point, had now slipped into a non-functioning addict. As his addiction progressed, he ended up getting fired from his job, which led to them losing their home and being forced to move into low-income housing. It was there that Sam met a group of friends who were also the product of drug-addicted parents and trauma.
“All we had was each other,” she says. “Most parents if you don’t come home at night come looking for you, but not ours, they were all high.”
This is the point where Sam started her entry into addiction.
“I got drunk at the age of 13 and I absolutely loved it!” she says. “Every time I drank, I didn’t feel nothing, and I didn’t have to deal with anything.”
After years of trying to take care of her father and cover for his addiction, it was starting to take its toll on her; and now that her dad was on a major downward spiral, Sam was starting to cave under the pressure.
The next three years she started using hard drugs like Xanax and cocaine, along with marijuana and alcohol with her dad. “These were daily parts of my life,” she says.
“I was still trying to fill that emptiness. I felt alone all the time. Even when I wasn’t alone, I felt like I was,” she states.
As the addiction took over, she started getting into trouble at school. After getting kicked out of two schools her father moved them to another city, however, the addiction always followed.
At 16 she got pregnant by a boy whose life had been fueled with trauma, much like hers. When he was two years old, his mother was murdered; and since his dad was an alcoholic and not in the picture, he laid in the crib for two days covered in pee and feces, while his mother’s dead corpse lay decaying in the living room, before anyone found him.
It was only a matter of time before this relationship failed. Seven days before Sam was to give birth to their daughter, he went to prison for felonious assault.
From there, Sam met another man named Justin and they soon became involved. He told her he didn’t care that she was pregnant with some other man’s child, that he would take care of the baby.
After welcoming her daughter into the world, six weeks later, she was pregnant by Justin. And even though Justin took in her daughter as his own, the relationship was fueled with alcohol, drugs and abuse.
Somehow, they thought marriage would fix their problems, and so Sam moved out of her dad’s house and in with her husband and his parents.
“But with me being the parent and my father like the child, I would still go over there every day and check on him,” she says. “Until one day I called and he wouldn’t answer the phone.” So, Sam drove over to his house and begin anxiously knocking on the door. But there was no answer, so she nervously called the police.
Sam’s worst nightmare was about to come true.
“I’ll never get that image out of my head,” she says. “There he was in the bathroom. There was pee….blood….he had bit his tongue. He was a big guy so they had to drag him out.”
At the age of 50, Sam’s best friend and father was dead from addiction.
“I spiraled down at this point,” she says. “I started taking as many drugs and drinking as much alcohol as I could. To this day I still don’t remember my dad’s funeral.”
“I got really angry at the world. You couldn’t even talk to me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything. I was mad at my dad because I thought by me leaving, he would have stopped. Then I felt guilty for leaving. I felt like I had failed my dad and he had failed me.”
“I was angry at my mom for splitting up with him. I was angry at my grandma for giving my dad money, which fueled his addiction. I was angry at my uncle for getting high with him. I was really angry at my dad. So, I went inward with my pain.”
From here, one thing after another started coming at Sam like an ambush.
Her brother, one of the only people she had left that she could talk to, got sent to prison for eight years. Then, after a night of being out drinking, her husband woke her up at 4 a.m. to tell her he was leaving her for another woman.
So there she was at 18 years old; a one-year-old child to take care of, a baby on the way, no education….her husband was leaving her for another woman, and she had just buried her father.
From there she decided to get an apartment with her best friend. Not long after they moved in together, one night when her friend was drunk, she confessed to Sam that she had slept with her husband.
Shocked, Sam told her to get out. However, without her friend helping to pay the bills it was only a few months before Sam could no longer afford everything and got evicted.
“I didn’t have anyone at this point. I didn’t have any relationships with anyone in my family,” she says. So, in a search to once again try and fill that ever-increasing void, she met another man named Jeremy.
They soon began dating, which then led to doing cocaine together and taking pills. Four months later they moved in together, and shortly after that she had her third child, with marriage following. As time went on, their drug usage increased, and with all the trauma and betrayals at Sam’s heels, she was starting to fall into a dark place.
However, she was still holding down a full-time job and maintaining her appearance of normalcy; volunteering at her son’s preschool, coaching her daughter’s cheerleading, and helping with her other son’s football practice.
However, much like her dad’s story, a final blow was coming to “break her”.
“I saw it on Facebook and thought it was a joke at first, but then I realized it was real, so I thought maybe it was someone else with the same name. But it wasn’t. It was my brother,” she recalls.
Only seven months after being out of prison, her brother, and closest friend was murdered.
It was later found out that her brother had started using drugs and had robbed a gas station to fuel his addiction. The girlfriend had her son murder him while in the shower to take the money. Afterwards, the girlfriend beat herself up to allege that Sam’s brother was the culprit.
Having lost her father, her brother, and being estranged from her mother; Sam fell deep into the pits of addiction. She and her second husband started using meth. This drug would be the vehicle to take her on a ride to hell and back.
And just when she thought her trauma couldn’t get any worse, she found out her husband had been taking secret videos of her 12-year-old daughter in the shower.
“It was the worst day of my life,” she said.
She left him and filed charges. He was facing 30 years in prison; however, he ended up only serving two years and 10 months before he was freed from prison. In the interim, children services got involved and due to Sam’s severe addiction, she made the hard decision to let her children go.
At that time, she believed her children were safer and better off with family. However, without her children in the picture to keep some semblance of accountability, she went off on the deep end. She lost any reflection of normality. Shortly after her split with her second husband, she met a man who started prostituting her out, and would almost be the death of her.
(One of the motels Sam spent many nights in the throes of addiction.)
“I thought I was going to die with his hands around my neck,” she recalls, as she points to a missing tooth. It was one of the many beatings she endured at his hands that would end in blackened eyes, bloodied noses, broken ribs and missing teeth.
“He did some really evil things to me and I allowed him to do some really evil things to me. We did a lot of drugs. We committed a lot of crimes and we ruined a lot of people’s lives,” she admits.
(One of Sam's many arrests.)
He eventually went to jail and she ended up in a trap house – the one with no doors and the bloody, pee-stained mattress. But this is where the story gets interesting and is proof that God works in mysterious ways.
At the trap house, Sam was hitting rock bottom.
“I had no soul left.”
“I was doing things for drugs and alcohol that I never imagined I would do. I couldn’t even get high anymore because I couldn’t find a vein in my body that I could use. My family was giving up,” she says. “My mom told me that she was going to start pretending like I was dead, so that when it happened it wouldn’t be such a shock.”
But then, the unlikely happened – she prayed for help from God. Sam wasn’t a believer in God. She didn’t grow up hearing about him, and her ex-husband had told her that the bible was written just so people had something to look forward to, and to prevent people from doing something crazy; but it wasn’t true.
And Sam believed him.
But the man who went to jail; the man who prostituted her out and beat her, and who she refers to as “evil” – was a believer in God. And he told her that Jesus was real, and he would tell her stories in the bible about Adam and Eve and the woman at the well. “He used to tell me I was the woman at the well,” Sam says.
So, in Sam’s darkest moment of despair, when she was so bad that even her drug dealer refused to sell her drugs anymore and would drag her out of trap houses; the words of this man echoed in her mind, and she prayed to this God her abuser told her about.
“You need to show up right now or I’m gonna give up and I’m gonna die here on this mattress.”
And as soon as she prayed that, her phone rang.
It was the rehab calling her. They were letting her know that they had an open spot at the rehab center and wanted to know if she could come that day.
What made this even more amazing, was they had just told her a few days ago that there were 12 people in front of her waiting to get in, which meant a minimum of a two to four month wait.
(The text message that saved Sam's life.)
There was no doubt in Sam’s mind, that this was God answering her prayers; and that her abuser was right. God was indeed real.
And if that wasn’t enough to prove that God’s hand was in this, and that He definitely works in mysterious ways, guess who took her to rehab?
None other than her drug dealer. If that’s not the hand of God, I don’t know what is. For the next 32 days she went through rehab, and unlike the other 22 times she had tried rehab, this time it worked because God was at the center of the plan.
However, her change didn’t happen instantly. God still had some work to do. Even though she now believed in Him she says, “I didn’t think He liked me. I thought He put me on this earth as an example of what not to be.”
But, “just believing in Him, gave Him enough to work with,” she says. “And He started really showing up in my life.” So, even though the drugs and alcohol were out of her, she still had this aching emptiness inside of her; that was until she came across a church called New Hope in Dayton, Ohio.
She started attending Alcoholics Anonymous there and this is where she heard her first ever sermon from their pastor – Jeff Cartwright. This sermon changed her life. “He told me that God made me on purpose for a purpose, and that even my pain had a purpose, and we all had a calling,” Sam says.
She says she didn’t know what a “calling” was. “I thought I might get a certified letter with my job assignment from heaven or something,” she says.
Instead, Pastor Jeff told her she needed to ask questions, read her bible, talk to God, listen and simply pray. He also told her that she wasn’t alone anymore and to listen to people who were further along in this thing than she was. So, Sam prayed for that guidance and God made good on His word.
He sent her a sponsor and a crowd of women to mentor her on how to be a strong, independent Christ-centered woman. And then something powerful happened.
“I stopped calling myself a victim and started calling myself a survivor,” she declares.
Soon she began taking charge over her life and control over decisions affecting her mental health. The court had ordered her to take 10 pills a day, but they were making her feel like a “zombie”. So, she went to Pastor Jeff and said, “These meds are making me feel crazy.”
Pastor Jeff told her, “God is the best physician and if God wants you to be off of them, He will remove them.” The next day she stopped taking them, and everything has been going uphill ever since.
“I was no longer empty. I filled that void with Jesus and found the answers to all my problems in the Word of God,” she says.
God began blessing her beyond what she imagined. Her criminal records were cleared. She got a home of her own; a car; a husband who loves her, and God began to mend her relationships with her mom and her family. And best of all, she’s in the process of reestablishing her relationship with her kids.
(Sam with her youngest son.)
She became a certified peer supporter and now gets to help people whose struggle she understands. “I work with addicts, the helpless…broken people who are crippled with the same pain I use to have. I walk with them in their journey through recovery,” she says.
“Every day I get to tell people how Jesus pulled me out of the pits of hell and restored me, and He will do it for them too!”
(Sam's life today with her new husband, Ben, whom shares her faith and redeemed life.)
Sam’s life is proof that God can and He will use whatever or whomever He needs to get us the help we need to change our lives. There is no situation so dark that God’s hand cannot reach down and bring hope out of it, even if He has to use our abuser and drug dealer to get us there.
- Written by Julie Nicole; Dayton, OH
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