Change is Possible Through Healthy Connections!

Change is possible through healthy connections!

Sometimes it takes the threat of losing your most important relationship to lead you to change. Sam Garcia knew he would lose contact with his 17-year-old daughter Allison if he didn’t find a new hope, new friends and a new world.

Sam entered the men’s Life Change Relapse Prevention program at the Mission for the first time in 2017, but was asked to leave due to anger, defiance and aggression. From there, his alcoholism spiraled.

“I lost everything again and was homeless,” Sam said. “My daughter was at an age where I couldn’t fool her. She said, ‘if you don’t get help, I can’t have you in my life.’”

Sam came back to the Mission in October and is now flourishing, but his road from re-entry to thriving wasn’t simple or quick: “25 years of recklessness can’t be fixed in six months,” he said.

The Life Change program acknowledges that recovery – whether from isolation, addiction, trauma, or a combination of these things – is a team effort in which building new, healthy connections over time is just as important as severing the toxic connections that brought people to our door.

Sam, who recently moved into Phase 4 of the program, or the “working” phase, says his connections with new people, the truth he’s encountered through the faith-centered program work, and accountability have helped carve away the pain and old patterns of the past and forge in him a new spirit of honesty, integrity and openness to life.

“The true person I am is coming out; before, he was drowned in alcohol,” Sam said. “I’m figuring out who that person is and falling in love with him.”