A. Reason to Live Podcast

with Aaron Reason

Episode 7 – Tesse’s Story

For Episode 7, our guest is Tesse. Tesse shares her story with addiction, recovery, and her role as Corporate Relations Manager for our facility. Tesse has a heart for the people we serve, making an effort to save lives and educate the public.

Transcript

Aaron Reason:
Hey guys. Welcome back to another episode of A Reason to Live. Today, we have our friend and coworker, Tessie, on the show, and our podcast is designed really for the people that are still out there struggling and the people that are in the recovery scene.
Today’s episode is just really a testimony to what can happen if somebody puts in the work in their recovery, the growth opportunities that are there, and somebody that is driven like Tessie is. So we’re so glad to have had her on the show and really look forward to the feedback on this episode. Enjoy.

Speaker 2:
Located in Anderson, Indiana, Bridges of Hope is a detox and residential treatment facility assisting those experiencing alcohol and substance abuse addiction. Our treatment philosophy is based on a comprehensive and integrated approach to addressing all issues related to substance use disorders and co-occurring mental health issues.
Addiction treatment at Bridges of Hope can guide you safely through withdrawal from drugs and alcohol and teach you important skills that help you achieve long-term recovery. Client care is our highest priority and we offer our clients all-inclusive treatment services.
Our ultimate goal is to identify the challenges, concerns, and problems related to substance use and mental health disorders to provide professional clinical treatment to all of our patients. For more information on our services, visit us @behoperehab.com or call 844-449-6392.

Aaron Reason:
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of A Reason to Live. I am your host, Aaron Reason here with my producer, Michael Whitlock.

Michael Whitlock:
Hello, friends.

Aaron Reason:
And we are here with our coworker and our dear friend Tessie. She’s going to tell us a little bit about her story and what it is that she does here. Tessie, I feel like you do so much at this place. Honestly, I feel like you’re probably limited to one title, but you’ve got so many because you do so much for us. You’re just such a huge part of this place. So just tell us a little bit about what you do here and…

Michael Whitlock:
Also, what’s the secret to getting 48 hours out of a 24-hour period? Because I see all hours of the day emails from Tessie, and I know that you’ve got a family in there and a job and probably would like to have a personal life at some point, but I don’t think there are enough hours.

Aaron Reason:
Yeah.

Tessie:
Believe it or not, I do sleep. I do shut my phone off at times.

Michael Whitlock:
Both of them? She carries two phones, people.

Aaron Reason:
Uh-oh. Two phones.

Tessie:
So I like to be available and flexible. So yeah, I’m the corporate relations manager here, and like Aaron said, that is one title, but I assist in the admissions team. I get to network with all types of entities and make relationships across Indiana and even out of state, I do event planning, assist with the other coworkers here in the case management team with aftercare planning. And-

Michael Whitlock:
One of my… I think it was my first day here, I met Tessie. She was one of the first employees I met and I got invited to lunch with her and the governor was speaking, so she’s not just hanging out with low rollers, she’s hanging out with the high rollers in Indiana.

Aaron Reason:
She is literally building bridges.

Michael Whitlock:
She is building bridges.

Aaron Reason:
She is literally building bridges is what she does.

Michael Whitlock:
Yeah.

Tessie:
Yeah, it’s definitely a rewarding position. There are a lot of growth opportunities that I’ve had since being in this role and just in my recovery journey in general. So yeah, I get to do those fun things, go to those events and experience those things and show others that it can be done. You can get out there and reach your goals and fulfill your dreams.

Aaron Reason:
And you started out as a tech here, didn’t you?

Tessie:
Yeah. So I started out as a behavioral health tech. I had just finished my associate’s degree and started my bachelor’s degree in the BHT role. So I then finished my bachelor’s practicum underneath the clinical team and then started facilitating five groups a week. My favorite was neuroscience; my groups were my babies, and that’s where you get the most interaction with the clients, so that was my favorite. And then promoted to corporate relations manager two years ago. It has been a journey.

Michael Whitlock:
What does a typical day look like? And I probably shouldn’t even use the word typical because I don’t think you have a typical day. I think probably your job is very different from one day to the next, but walk me through a day in the life of a corporate relations manager.

Tessie:
You’re absolutely right. You have to be able to adapt to wrenches are going to get thrown in your day. I could have my schedule made out, which actually is made out to look like I get up in the morning, I’m going to do some prospecting, make some phone calls, follow up emails, and map out what my week is going to look like, and make sure I’m getting into those appointments. Right now I’m event planning, so it looks a little bit different there, but those phone calls come in, people need help, and the phone is constantly ringing so wrenches get thrown in. So you just have to be able to adapt and adjust to the day and just make it work. It just works.

Michael Whitlock:
One thing that I admire about you is… So you help get some patients into our services, but just getting them in here isn’t where you stop. I know that you go above and beyond and you actually check in on people and you put a face with a name. So how are you doing? Welcome through their day. Just check in on them. And I appreciate that because it’s scary.
You don’t want someone to feel like they’re just being dropped off the door, say good luck with your future. You’re actually saying, “Hey, I’m Tessie. I’m the one that talked to you on the phone,” or helped you get in here. And so I think that is pretty neat.

Tessie:
Yeah, that is my favorite part. I remember my second week in this position, I actually cried because I was giving up the BHT role and then I was giving up the groups and that’s the interaction. In order for me to agree to this position, I said I still need to have some type of hands-on with the patients. So I do get to come in on Fridays and facilitate a group where I have guest speakers come in from different step-down opportunities for the patient.
So I get that interaction with them and like you said, coming in and just saying hi, or the patients will hear my name throughout the facility and they’ll say, “That’s you? You talked to me on the phone.”
So it is great, although I’m not getting that day-to-day interaction with them, it’s nice that is happening, but I’m also fulfilling my goals on my own recovery, which was to work more on a macro level. I went to school for social work. I’ve always wanted to work on the macro level and I feel like that’s kind of where I’m at.

Aaron Reason:
And I work taking calls and stuff. As a supervisor, we get calls all through the night with new clients wanting to come in. And one thing that I’ve noticed about you, you’re probably so busy with your other stuff, but you always make time to answer the emails that I send for admissions.
Even late at night, I’ll see you responding to emails and I’m like, “Man, she really does it all.” And honestly, from me starting out as a tech too, it’s inspiring to see somebody like you that started out as a tech and started going back to school and getting your degree because I actually just signed up to start going back to school. I guess I can break through-

Michael Whitlock:
Oh, that’s awesome.

Tessie:
Very nice.

Aaron Reason:
Yeah, so it’s inspiring to see that for real. That’s awesome.

Tessie:
Yeah. I mean, it just takes a second when those late-night calls come in, I just grab my computer and sit on the floor by my bed and do what we have to do. They need that. It might be three o’clock in the morning, but they’re coming through the door to get help.

Michael Whitlock:
I get the feeling watching you work, never hearing you complain, you don’t look at these people as a job. You look at them as an investment. You really want to see them succeed in life and help them get back and write their path. And I’m guessing that you have a real passion for what we do here and why is that? Can you shine a light on that?

Tessie:
Absolutely. About eight months into my first year of recovery, I finally found some footing and decided, I was like, “Okay, I have to do something. What am I going to do?” So I prayed and asked my higher power, what am I supposed to do now? And the thought to go to school came to mind. I thought, “Okay, well I barely passed high school. How am I going to do in college?” I’m not going to… I did surprisingly well in college, a lot better than I did in high school.
And so just looking back, I think that my higher power wanted me to gain the tools that I needed to help others so that I could be that vessel and be able to reach back. And so I do tell a lot of people, I am employed and I do receive a paycheck, but my first job is to reach back and help the next addict.

Aaron Reason:
I love that. I love that. And I think that should really be the goal for every addict, honestly. When I sponsor guys, that’s one of the first things I tell them is the people that I’ve seen that are successful and have long-term recovery are those that help others and go back and not necessarily just work in this field, but sponsor and stay involved because a lot of people will get to that two or three-year mark and it seems like they’ll drift away and stop doing the things that they did to get to the place that they’re at.

Michael Whitlock:
Well, I remember a few specific cases here where people have put the work in, we’ve talked about putting in the work, and they say, “You know what? In another year or two, I’m going to come back and put my application in here.” They loved what we were doing. They believe in our system. They know they still have a little bit more work to do, but the goal is to come back and go full circle and pay it forward.
And you’re living proof of someone who has put in work and helped out and you care about people’s future.

Tessie:
Yeah. And it’s great to see them get excited about it. I remember in my first year to know all of this planning and getting myself into school was going on. I had all these ideas and blueprints and I had everything written down. And so I tell people now too, “We need you on our team.” I had all these ideas that I wanted to do, so when I see someone else saying, “Hey, I’m going to go do this,” and I’m like, “Yes, that’s awesome, because that’s something I wanted to do before, but I’m only one person.”
So it takes a bunch of us to be able to reach out and help others that were in the spot that we were in before.

Aaron Reason:
It does. Okay, well, we’re going to take a quick break and go to our sponsors and then we’ll be back with some more of Tessie’s story.
Speaker 2:
At the Indiana Community Addiction Network, we offer the new standard and medication-assisted treatment. So if you’re ready to put substance abuse behind you, we’re here to help.
We are a local family-owned center who will create an individualized physician-led care plan to help you reach sobriety at ICAN, we treat your addiction based on your unique needs and have full addiction treatment programs Get started on recovery today. Call ICAN now to speak to an advisor at 888-635-1470 or visit us @addictionsnetwork.com.

Aaron Reason:
Okay, Tessie. So we’ve heard a little bit about what you do here, and we’ll go back to that here in a minute. But just tell us a little bit about your story with addiction and your personal journey.

Tessie:
Yeah. So hearing patients and learning through recovery that my story is not as unique as I thought it was. We all have some things in common and traumas and things that we’ve gone through that might have led us to that addiction. So I grew up with my biological mother for about seven years and endured a lot of physical abuse. My twin sister and I pretty much raised ourselves during that time. And so I was removed from her when I was seven, separated from my brother, and didn’t get to see him for 11 years. And so that was a hard time. My mother suffered from schizophrenia, bipolar, so it was hard to maintain a relationship with her.
We tried to maintain that over the years, but it was very stressful. And over time as I grew older, I began to understand mental health and substance abuse and I still always love my mom. She really did the best that she could with what she had experienced herself growing up and then having the mental illness and substance use herself.
So yeah, just fast-forward in my story at about 17 was when I first started using. Had my first job as driving, started out with minimal use just like it does after facilitating some of the groups, I’m like, “Oh look, this adds up. This is exactly what happened to me.” Started out as mental use with marijuana and then a few pain pills here and there at parties.
And then it just started to consume me. So I had graduated high school and was enrolled into college and I ended up dropping out and packing up and moving out of home without even telling my parents and moved in with my boyfriend at the time. And then that became the party house. So that’s what I did. I didn’t want to be at school. I didn’t want to be missing out on what was going on. And so just over time, because I’m not sure and I’m going to be mindful of the time here, over time that use turned into heroin and fentanyl and bath salts.
So by the time it had gotten to that point, I was working a waitressing job and was stealing money out of the cash register to be able to re-up every night and ended up losing that job because that deal didn’t go as planned. So when they come back in and count the drawer and the money is missing, they already had a suspicion that was happening. So ended up losing that job and then it just started to kept spiraling from there.
I was actually renting a home from my parents that they evicted me from. They didn’t know what else to do. And so yeah, that was their only solution. They knew that things were getting pretty bad, bills weren’t getting paid, wasn’t working, obviously wasn’t maintaining the home properly, and not doing any of the things that I should have been doing.
So then we had to go and live out in the middle of nowhere with the in-laws. And that didn’t even stop me from using. It doesn’t really matter where you’re at, you’re going to find it. You just have to learn to be honest with yourself. And that’s what I found later in my recovery that you have to be very intentional about that.
So things got… Just to highlight that part of my life, it got very scary. It got to the point to where we had people coming into our home who were dictating what we were doing. And it got so bad that I actually asked for my kids to be picked up and removed from my care by family. I knew it wasn’t safe for them. I didn’t even get to drive myself to and from work before I had lost my job. I had the people who came into our lives and was running us, was taking me to work and bringing me home. I didn’t get to do my own things. So it was a really hard time. And I remember laying on the couch and almost felt like I was outside the window looking in at my life and it just seemed so dark and unreal.

Michael Whitlock:
Were you scared at that moment or did you realize later on that it was a scary time in your life after you were sober?

Tessie:
I do feel… I was scared in those moments. There were several moments that I had that consciously, I knew that it wasn’t okay. And I remember one time running out and to the front and I just dropped to my knees and prayed. It was my dealing with using with other people. And someone had almost overdosed and I was scared. I didn’t really feel scared, but consciously I knew I was scared if that makes sense because it was hard to feel at that time.
And this is just all looking back. Yeah, I would say those were all the seeds that were planted, all those experiences of I know this is not okay. I know I shouldn’t be doing this. I had tried to quit several times. I had those conversations of, “Hey, I need help and I need to do something different,” but I just kept going back.

Michael Whitlock:
Probably felt trapped to a degree too. And you’re around people that you care about that are also using, and that just is kind of an endless cycle that keeps people there. And we’ve heard it from several of our patients. And I think you even talked about that moment with your wife where you were trying to decide, can I move forward in this marriage or am I going to have to be sober and alone?

Aaron Reason:
Yeah, I think those are the tough decisions that you have to make. And kudos to you for honestly getting your kids out of there in addiction. That’s huge. That takes a lot of courage. I don’t even think that you can explain it well enough to talk about how terrifying it is when somebody that you know and you’ve been using with overdoses in front of you.
To me, that was one of the scariest things and in addiction is just seeing somebody… You just literally see the light go out their eyes. And we got to this place in my recovery or my addiction where we would have Narcan on hand always. And it’s like we didn’t even care if somebody overdosed because we knew we’d be able to bring them right back. But now the game is changing and the disease is progressing, and now we’ve got drugs that even Narcan… They’re having to make Narcan stronger because of these new drugs that are coming out. So it is a terrifying feeling and you definitely do feel trapped.

Tessie:
Yeah. I would say those were probably the last two to three months in my addictions was the darkest for me. Losing my job and then my home and having to have the kids be removed and then moving in with the in-laws in the middle of nowhere and still continuing to use.
And then there wasn’t an intervention there. I won’t go into to too much details, but then that caused the family to become even more separated. And so then I’m just by myself and my son and the rest of the family is kind of all scattered. So it was a huge… It’s like, “Now what do I do?” And so that’s where my journey began. I had to come back to Anderson and live with my parents for about eight months. I worked two jobs, started school, put my son in the daycare and kept going.

Michael Whitlock:
And we’re so glad that you put in the work because you are an asset for this company and an asset for all the people that you help get into treatment. And we are very thankful for all of those things.
And you’re definitely a shining star here. And I’d like to hear a little more about now that you’re in a good place, some of the good things you’re doing in your job.

Tessie:
So like I mentioned before, right now I’m event planning for our May event, so I’m excited about that. And what I like most about being able to do this is I get to present these ideas from our department to our owners and the other departments and say, “Hey, this is what I would like to do.” And they’re like, “Yeah, how can we support you in that?”
And so my thought is to be able to raise money for other nonprofit organizations in our own community. And so I’ve got another event that I would like to start planning after this one finishes for more of the winter, December, January time. So I’ll be starting that soon. And then just program building and going out into the communities; that’s something that we’re working on right now. And just kind of gaining that assessment, I guess, if you will, from the community of what the need is. And then finding out, “Okay, what do we need to have X, Y, and Z implemented to make this happen for them?”
So really fulfilling the need of the community and being able to take that to our owner and our COO and say, “Hey, this is what the community is saying that they need. How can we do that?” And then again, being supportive in that.
And I mentioned some other things earlier when I talked about what my day-to-day looks like. I would say that the most… I mean, it’s really all rewarding, but being able to network and make connections with other folks that work in the field and go to other events, travel… I mean, there are a lot of things. There are a lot of things. I’m probably forgetting all of the things that I do just because it comes so naturally, I feel, at this point.

Michael Whitlock:
Do you think that you have an advantage in your job because you have worked in this industry in other positions like the BHT position and you know what our treatment modalities look like versus somebody who just comes in and is hired as an educator?
Because I would imagine that would be a bonus. You’ve got real knowledge of what the inner workings of our field and our business look like versus someone that just comes in and says, “Oh yeah, I’ve got the script.”

Tessie:
Definitely. And I feel like that I use as a tool, I guess if you will, when we are gathering assessments from the community and having those talks about implementing and expanding programming. Because we’re also looking at how does this affect our staff. They already do X, Y, and Z. How do we not put too much on their plate while also fulfilling the needs of the community?
So I think it’s very helpful and beneficial. I think it helps me be even more passionate because I love and care about our coworkers. I know the work that they put in. I know how passionate they are. And so I don’t have a script I get to tell people about our family here.

Aaron Reason:
That’s a good way to put it. Our family.

Michael Whitlock:
And we are a family. It’s one of the things that has drawn me to want to stay here because you know, check in on the patients and you check in on the staff too. You build relationships and ask what’s going on and you want to network both inside and outside of the organization so that you can educate people on what we really are doing here.
And I appreciate that very much. Definitely appreciate you for all that you do for us. Keep going on. We appreciate everything.

Aaron Reason:
Yeah, definitely. What a testimony. I mean, what a testament to what somebody in recovery can do.

Michael Whitlock:
A Tessie-mony if you will.

Aaron Reason:
A Tessie-mony. There you go. Look at that. We tied it all in together, didn’t we?

Michael Whitlock:
Yep.

Aaron Reason:
Well, thanks, Tessie. We really appreciate you coming on and giving us some of your limited time with us. So that’s where we are going to wrap it up for this episode.

Michael Whitlock:
Thank you for coming in.

Aaron Reason:
Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.

Michael Whitlock:
That’s a wrap for episode seven of A Reason to Live. Thanks for coming back and visiting with us and sharing these great stories. Want to give a special thank you to our guest, Tessie, for sharing her story. What a great story it was.
We’d like to also thank our sponsors, Bridges of Hope and Indiana Community Addiction Network. We couldn’t do it without you. Come back soon and listen to our stories and we’ll see you next time.