The citizens we serve are homeless, addicted, mentally ill, traumatized and full of shame.
We’ve all seen the pictures of children in the back seat of a car with their parents overdosed in the front. What is that? How can it be? It hits us full force. It hurts. We ache for those kids.
Many of the adults we serve are the children of yesteryear who never received the help they needed to recover from neglect, abuse, and all types of unspoken trauma. Self-medicating that pain to numb it away was often the only thing they knew how to do because being sober and feeling all that pain was unbearable.
Some escape it, but many do not. We see it every day. The stealing, lying, destroying of relationships for the money needed to numb that pain. By the time their addiction has hit full force, we don’t like them anymore, we’re scared, and we disconnect. We don’t want to help, or know how.
They were the children in the back seat…and they still need us.