Emotional ties Brown has learned that people recover on their own time frame. Her daughter, for example, joined Divine Light for six months before returning to active addiction. There was a time when this would have provoked a dramatic response from Brown. “I used to see clients leave and I would get very emotional. I would act on my feelings because I didn’t want them to go back out - I would physically hold them back,” she says. “Now I talk to them and let them go through their own process, because sometimes we interrupt that process.” She allows people to take their own path toward recovery, keeping in mind her own 20-year struggle with addiction, which included several attempts at recovery programs. “There were so many times I wanted to be clean and I just didn’t know how,” Brown says. It wasn’t until she reached Divine Light that she says she caught a glimpse of the program’s namesake. She accepted a Higher Power into her life and situated herself in a prime position to follow suggestions. “It was nothing that I did at all. It was all God,” she says. “The only thing I did was sit still.”
“When I came in I was broken, spiritually and mentally. Someone saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” - Penny Brown director of recovery services
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