Yesterday I got an email from a young woman in Mississippi who agreed to let me share part of her message with you:

“I am a single mother and am in recovery. I have been sober almost a year and I have also been to prison because of my drug addiction. 

I am not a bad person or a criminal by any means. I was just a drug addicted woman that was trapped in a horrible cycle of trauma that y’all speak of. Now I am on the other side of my battle and I want to make a difference and help someone else come out of the pit of despair that I was once in. 

I am grateful that there are people like you out there in this world because people like me mostly get thrown away due to a decision that was made because of an addiction that I couldn’t beat…”

Mothers struggling with a substance addiction are often stigmatized because of society’s understandably strong feelings about the potential impact on their children.

I came to this work as a foster mom grappling with this exact issue.

If we lack personal experience, as I did, it can be hard to understand the life-altering hold addiction can have on a person.

Honestly, it’s also easier to rage against behavior than weep over what caused it.

So we often ask a reactive question like:

How should we punish mothers who use drugs?

But what if we asked proactive questions like:

How can we create the safest, widest path to help, so more mothers can overcome their addictions?

and

How can we reduce the collateral damage of a mother’s addiction, even if she can’t overcome it today? 

and the biggest question of all

How can we decrease the trauma experienced by each person in our community so we decrease their risk of addiction in the first place? 

If you read the woman’s email above, addiction wasn’t enjoyable. This was a woman “trapped in a horrible cycle of trauma,” someone who has just come out of “the pit of despair,” someone who was once “thrown away.”

If trauma could heal, she wouldn’t have been addicted. 

That’s the thing we’ve missed. More hurt doesn’t heal.

Sometimes I wonder if the term “recovery” also applies to the healing journey many people need after the trauma-filled ways we mishandle their addictions.

When we offer care instead of condemnation, we might just get more mothers echoing the end of the woman’s email:

“My daughter is back with me and life is going well.”