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She Was Never Broken: A Client's Journey Through Trauma, Addiction, and Recovery

I want to tell you about someone I will call S.

I won't share her name, or the names of her children, or any detail that would identify her. She deserves her privacy — and she deserves to tell her own story in her own time and on her own terms.

What I can share is what I witnessed across five months and fourteen sessions of working together: someone doing something that many people never manage. Facing the worst of themselves and their past, with no guarantee of what was waiting on the other side, and choosing — again and again — to keep going anyway.

This is what that looked like from where I was sitting. And why I think it matters far beyond the two of us.

Who She Was When We Met

S came into our work through a Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) process. She was living in a specialist mother-and-baby residential placement with her infant daughter, and had been sober for approximately a year — her first sustained period of sobriety in over a decade.

She was doing all of that while navigating care proceedings, a court process, and the slow, painful work of beginning to understand who she really was underneath the addiction.

When I met her, she was on edge. Watchful. She told me she felt constantly vigilant — like she was always waiting for something bad to happen.

I told her that made complete sense.

By the time we started working together, S had been through significant professional involvement: courts, social workers, assessments. I think a part of her expected more of the same from me — another professional with a clipboard, another person deciding what she was worth.

I wasn't interested in doing that.

Why She Used — and Why That Matters

Before anything else, I need to say this clearly: S was not weak. She was in pain.

Her history included childhood sexual abuse that was disclosed and not believed, serious domestic violence, sexual assault, and a suicide attempt during a pregnancy when she was left alone at her most vulnerable. She carried all of that — largely by herself — for years.

Substances were the most effective tool she had found for managing pain that had nowhere else to go. They numbed what needed to be numbed. They provided a kind of relief when relief felt impossible to find any other way.

Understanding addiction through this lens — as an organised, even intelligent response to unprocessed pain — is not about removing accountability. S was honest about the harm her use had caused and she carried that honestly. But it is about removing the shame that so often stops people from believing that recovery is possible for them.

Because shame says I am broken. And broken things, the logic goes, don't heal.

S was not broken. She never was.

A Different Kind of Conversation: Internal Family Systems

From early in our work, I used an approach called Internal Family Systems — or IFS — and it turned out to be exactly the right language for S.

IFS, developed by therapist Richard Schwartz, is built on the idea that we all carry multiple parts within us: different voices or sub-personalities that have developed in response to what life has thrown at us. Some are protectors, working to keep us safe. Others — what IFS calls exiles — are wounded younger parts that carry the pain of past experience, often kept out of awareness because that pain feels too enormous to bear. And underneath all of them is what IFS calls the Self: a calm, compassionate, curious centre that, when we can access it, is capable of leading and healing.

I chose IFS for S because it is, at its core, a non-judgmental framework. It doesn't ask you to fight your defences, or overcome your darker impulses, or get rid of the parts that have caused problems. It asks you to understand them. To meet them with curiosity. To discover what they were trying to do — and, over time, to help them find a different role.

For someone who had experienced so much shame and so much judgement, that framing was important.

In one of our early sessions, after being introduced to the idea of her parts for the first time, S said something I haven't forgotten:

"It feels a bit lighter. Like I'm not just one overwhelmed person but many parts trying to survive."

I have rarely heard a client articulate the relief of that framework so quickly or so precisely.

The Parts We Met Together

Over our sessions, S and I came to know a number of her parts well:

The Hypervigilant Protector — always alert, always scanning for threat, exhausted but unwilling to stand down. This was the part that had kept her alive through some of the most dangerous periods of her life.

The People-Pleaser — suppressing her own needs to keep harmony, keeping conflict at bay at enormous personal cost.

The Critic — the voice that told her she wasn't doing enough, that she wasn't enough.

An eight-year-old exile — the little girl who had been hurt, who had told someone and not been believed, who was still waiting to be seen and comforted.

The Shame Part — quiet, young, carrying a belief that she wasn't enough. A belief that, as S came to understand, had been there long before the people who later exploited it.

The Addictive Part — reframed, crucially, not as an adversary to be defeated, but as a protector. A part that had carried S through periods of her life that would otherwise have been unbearable.

The Part That Loved Her Daughter — the most Self-led part we encountered throughout our work. Strong, certain, and oriented entirely toward the future.

The Moment That Stayed With Me

One of our deepest sessions came mid-way through our time together. S arrived saying she was ready to go in — that something had been rattling around long enough and she needed to face it.

We worked with several parts that day. Anger at someone who had left her at her most vulnerable. Exhaustion from years of hypervigilance. A grief that had been quietly building.

But the moment I keep returning to was quieter than the others.

We reached a part that felt smaller — younger — sitting with a core belief that S wasn't enough. I asked her when she thought that belief had first arrived.

Without me leading her there, she said:

"This shame was there long before him. He didn't create it — he found it and used it."

I remember the stillness in the room after she said that. That kind of insight doesn't come from being clever. It comes from being brave enough to look.

She then imagined this part as a little girl sitting alone — and she spoke to her: "It wasn't your fault. You didn't deserve it."

In my notes, I described that as a significant moment of internal compassion. Looking back, that feels like an understatement.

Recovery Is Not the Absence of Substances

By the time we reached our final sessions, S was stable and sober, building a real relationship with her infant daughter, and beginning to approach the grief she had been circling for months — grief for the years she had lost, for the milestones she had missed with her older child, for the versions of herself and her family that the addiction had stolen.

She was also grappling with something I think conventional addiction support often underestimates: the challenge of stability itself.

S's nervous system had organised around chaos for most of her life. And the absence of crisis was becoming, in its own way, a kind of dysregulation. She put it better than I could:

"Where's the chaos?"

This is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that recovery has reached a new phase — one that needs to be explicitly named and supported. A nervous system that learned to survive in crisis needs time, and help, to learn that safety is actually safe.

It also pointed to something I return to again and again in this work: recovery is not the absence of substances. It is the presence of something else. Meaning. Connection. Structure. A life that feels worth living. S was building all of that, session by session.

What I Said to Her Near the End

Toward the close of our work, I offered S a reframe about the part of herself she had found hardest to forgive — the part that had used substances, that had made choices with devastating consequences, that she had spent years feeling ashamed of:

"That part took a lot of shit to keep you safe. That was compassionate love."

She softened. Visibly.

That was not a small thing. That was a woman, perhaps for the first time, moving toward something close to forgiveness — not of what the addiction had cost, but of the part of her that had reached for it in the first place.

Why I'm Sharing This

I'm sharing S's story — anonymised, with enormous respect for her courage — because I think it illustrates something that often gets lost in how we talk about addiction and recovery.

We talk about willpower. We talk about consequences. We talk about hitting rock bottom. We rarely talk about the extraordinary bravery it takes to sit with yourself, really sit with yourself — to meet the parts you have spent years running from — and to do it without any guarantee of what you'll find.

S did that. She did it while caring for a baby, navigating a court system, and working through grief that would have broken many people entirely.

She has the insight. She has the motivation. And she has, increasingly, a relationship with herself that is built on something sturdier than shame.

If Any of This Resonates With You

If you recognise something of yourself — or someone you love — in S's story, I want you to know this: the parts of you that have been labelled as problems, weaknesses, or failures are very rarely what they appear to be. More often, they are responses. Adaptations. Parts of you that were doing the best they could with what they had, in circumstances that were not of your choosing.

That doesn't mean nothing needs to change. It means that change is possible — and that it begins not with self-condemnation, but with curiosity.

If you'd like to explore what that kind of work might look like for you, I'd be glad to talk.

Paul Burrows is a Drug & Alcohol Counsellor working within the Family Drug and Alcohol Court system, using an IFS-informed approach alongside the 12-step framework and trauma-centred practice.

To get in touch or find out more about working together, contact me here.