Filling in the Gaps of the Continuum of Care for College-Age Students in Recovery

TLDR: In the summer before ninth grade, my father, a minister, moved to Houston, TX to serve a church that harbored people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, bringing along my stepmother, half-siblings, my brother, and myself as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: During the summer before ninth grade, my father, a minister, moved to Houston, TX, to serve a church that harbored people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, bringing along my stepmother, half-siblings, my brother, and myself. Shortly after the move, my brother was sent to inpatient drug rehab. At one point I only drank socially, but now it turned into a continual attempt to drown my loneliness. I was feeling depressed and full of self-pity. Pills and psychedelics, which were once taboo to me, became accepted as normal recreation drugs. I knew that if I showed that my life was unmanageable, my father would send me back to my mother, so I tried to hide my behavior as much as I could. By the spring, my life reached a level of unmanageability I had never experienced before. This pattern continued until I hit my bottom: I was arrested in the middle of February for a drug-related incident. I was consumed by resentment, anger, and frustration. My pain, coupled with the negative consequences of my substance use, led to a process of change. My parents enrolled me in Teen and Family Services, an alternative peer group, in Houston in June 2010. In the middle of July, I was on the Teen and Family retreat sitting in the valley within the Collegiate Peaks of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The sun was to the west, and the sky had been teased with partial cloudiness. The day had been filled with soul searching and questions—questions of the life I had been living and of the life that was being presented to me. Although I did not know it at the time, this was the day that my life began to change. Addiction treatment and recovery for adolescents is complicated by the complex and multiple needs of teens and families, the spectrum