Episode Details

My experience with addiction began in a place I never imagined would take me where it did. After being prescribed opioid pain medication, I developed a dependence that eventually progressed to heroin. At the time, I was working in healthcare and attending nursing school — just six months away from graduating — but addiction slowly took everything I had worked so hard to build. I was arrested and ultimately served four years with the Indiana Department of Correction.

During incarceration, I entered a program called Purposeful Incarceration and began the difficult, honest work of rebuilding my life from the inside out. When I came home in 2018, I made a decision: my past would not be the end of my story. Recovery gave me the chance to rebuild relationships, establish a career, become a homeowner, and most importantly, show up fully for my family and my community again.

My journey also opened my eyes to how desperately rural communities need more recovery resources, long‑term support, and trauma‑informed environments. Addiction has touched nearly every part of my life — including the loss of my brother and my father — and those painful experiences became part of the driving force behind founding New Roots Recovery Village, Inc.

Today, I use both my lived experience and the lessons I learned along the way to advocate for people still fighting their way out. New Roots is being built to give women more than a place to stay. We are creating a structured, nature‑based, trauma‑informed recovery community centered on connection, purpose, peer support, and rebuilding a life worth protecting.

I cannot change the chapters behind me, but I can use them to help rewrite someone else’s future. That is what recovery means to me.

— Lauren Abshear