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Yvette's Story |
Yvette’s story starts out like a little bit of that old Beach Boy’s tune ‘California Girl’. Growing up in the Northern California beach town of Santa Cruz in a family with some fame and fortune, the private school, and cutting school to go surfing’, what could be better! Well, as Yvette learned as she played out her life, a whole lot could have been better.
The good life wasn’t ever quite as good as it might sound. Yvette’s parents had issues of their own, and Yvette had enough rebel in her that she split from home at 13. While her drug use was fairly tame at the time, she was feeling pretty lost and wound up in a group home early on. From that point on it was all highs and lows. She attended Business College and had some good jobs, but over the years she got further and further into the drug scene. By the ‘80’s she had made it to CRC, but that didn’t quite get her attention and she was out and using again. During all of these up and down years Yvette had a son who soon disappeared with his father. Given all of this, catching a beef for possession in 2002 with a subsequent stay at VSPW might have been THE blessing in her life.
At VSPW Yvette heard Wayne Garcia say some words she knows to this day. “If you want something you’ve never had, you’ll have to do something you’ve never done.” She was inspired and soon she navigated her way in to see Daryl Hamilton, VSPW Director, to get a TIR so that she could go to FOTEP El Monte. There she experienced what the program had to offer, but also reunited with her parents and found some needed support to begin to find her son. In 2005 they were reunited as well, a major milestone in Yvette’s life. What Yvette says about FOTEP is simple and straightforward. “If I hadn’t gone through the women’s issues group, I just wouldn’t have grown.”
Yvette went from FOTEP as a client to Phoenix House where she was fortunate enough to get the chance to give back and began her next journey as a counselor, but was recruited back to Walden House as a front line counselor, and now Outpatient Counselor. Yvette says life is good now, her son is back in her life, and she has Walden House. She also feels that if not given the opportunity to give back she would not have been able to continue to grow or move forward in her recovery. And what does Walden House mean in her words? “Family. We are one. And I believe in family.”