Hannah decided to give sobriety one more try. If her efforts failed, she planned to end her life. She’d thought a lot about her decision; she was at peace with it.
Hannah’s probation had been revoked two years after her release. She was sent back to prison for using heroin and turning tricks. Hannah believed it was that revocation that saved her life.
She was no longer eligible for the prison drug program, but Hannah was given work release. That was a big deal for someone who didn’t have a dime to her name. Hannah signed up for two outside jobs. She saved her earnings while she contemplated her past, her present, and what she wanted her future to be.
In prison, as Hannah broke free from the vise grip of drugs, she experienced moments of increasing clarity. She realized she’d lost every one of her relationships. Hannah felt ashamed of her entire life. The darkness that dwelled inside convinced her she was a lost cause. She believed everyone would be better off without her.
There was a lot of praying and a lot of journaling. Hannah joined the prison therapy group. She poured herself into her work-release jobs. If she failed, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.
About six months in, there was a prison presentation by a woman from a place called Course Change. There was free food, which helped draw a crowd. This was the first time Hannah heard of a center devoted to trafficking victims. Drug recovery places, sure, but now Hannah realized there was help for people like her, people who had been dragged into the sex trade.
Until prison, Hannah had no idea of the number of inmates who had been trafficked or sold for sex. Hannah estimated it was at least 75 percent of the inmates she encountered.
For six months prior to Hannah’s release, she wrote back and forth with the lady from Course Change. The woman sent Hannah an intake form and told her, “When you get out, call me.” That’s what Hannah did. It was her first call.
The prison work-release program required inmates to pay $700 a month for the privilege of working outside the walls. That left Hannah with $1,800. This time, there was no sober-living residence to go to, no state-subsidized funding. Hannah needed a place to stay, and she needed a way to get to and from her new job. She decided to kill two birds with one stone. Hannah took $1,200 and bought a used car—to drive and to live in.
There were long commutes from her heavy-machinery job to her regular therapy appointments at Course Change. Hannah showed up for therapy filthy, but she showed up. One of Course Change’s cofounders asked Hannah where she was staying. Hannah was embarrassed to admit it, but she told her that she was homeless. When Course Change administrators offered to pay the deposit and one month’s rent on an unfurnished apartment, Hannah accepted. She slept on the floor at first.
Then Course Change won a grant that allowed Hannah to work for them. Hannah quit her job and never looked back. I asked Hannah if there was anything remarkable about that moment when everything clicked after so many excruciating attempts to drive off her demons.
“It came down to this inner desire. I never gave myself a fair shot. I always got caught up in unhealthy relationships and other distractions from what I really needed to do. I needed to do this, to cut all the crap. It was time.”
I was surprised by the apparently sudden onset of what Hannah called her inner desire, her decision to cut all the crap after reaching rock bottom. But as I came to understand, there was nothing sudden about it. For Hannah, as with many addicts and trafficking victims, the downward spiral of repeated attempts at sobriety followed by multiple relapses, destruction of relationships, loss of employment, alienation from family, and run-ins with law enforcement is all part of the agonizing prequel before recovery happens. As Professors Williamson and Sepowitz explained, their programs let victims know that someone they can trust is ready to help and will be there when the victim is ready.
It’s been seven years now for Hannah. Seven years sober. Therapy and life revealed what works and what doesn’t work for her. This is what works for her. For now.
Hannah was promoted to a new role at Course Change, a position, funded by a grant, for a person who had Hannah’s life and work experiences, the type of experiences that Hannah has shared with so many trafficking victims and, now, with me. Someday, Hannah might share her whole story with everyone, all the remarkable details. I saved the best and the worst parts for her to tell.
I asked Hannah about her approach to her work at Course Change and what she tells the women who so badly want to turn their lives around.
“I build trust. I tell them about my background—that opens the relationship. I start slowly. It’s overwhelming if you tell them the whole reality, that every part of their life must be reconstructed. So I just tell them, ‘I will walk hand in hand with you until you can walk on your own.’ I share parts of my story when I was at my lowest, otherwise they would never guess that about me. I’m very careful not to overwhelm them, otherwise it could drive them to use drugs again. I would have to use if I considered all the work that was ahead of me! I tell them it’s day by day. We are the same people.”
Nancy Yarbrough spent what seemed like an eternity pondering her fate. She wasn’t sure she would ever make it to what she called “the other side.” She knew one thing: She was trapped in a hellish existence that she saw no way out of. Wherever she turned, Nancy remained lost in a maze of bad options.
Nancy likes to say that she made it through by God’s grace. She tells everyone that through is her word now. “I always tell people the most powerful word that I had, that God has given me thus far, is the ability to say through. Because of the forward motion—I went through it, you know. I’m not in it.”1
Just like with Hannah, somebody was there for Nancy when she was finally ready. It is said that God meets you where you are. Since Nancy eked out her excruciating existence at truck stops, God met her in a truck.
“I got in the truck2—and I always call it my olive branches of love, my bread crumbs from God, because it was amazing things that ended up happening that kept me safe and secure. Anyway, I got in the guy’s truck. He was like, ‘What are you doing out here? You’re not supposed to be out here. Why don’t you just go to sleep.’ Now, mind you, he could have been a serial killer. I wouldn’t have known.”
This trucker paid Nancy the cash she was supposed to hand over to her pimp. All he wanted in return was for Nancy to sleep. Once she got some shut-eye, the trucker dropped her back at her motel. That was kindness from a stranger that Nancy will never forget. But there was an entirely different experience back at the motel with someone she was all too familiar with.
Nancy turned over the night’s earnings to her trafficker, a guy she thought she loved. She explained the amount was so low because a trucker had just let her fall asleep. That’s when her man let her know her true value.
“And then, pow, he hit me. And that is when my whole world about this so-called loving, caring relationship kind of thing—it didn’t make sense to me anymore.”3
Nancy was a lifelong people pleaser, and this violence from her man wasn’t enough for her to stop trying to please him. But Nancy stored that moment away along with the words of the kind trucker who had told her that she wasn’t supposed to be out there hustling.
Soon enough, there was another sign from a most unexpected messenger. Nancy had finished the night at another truck stop and was chatting with the woman who had trained her in the trade.
“She was like, 4 ‘You don’t belong here. Like, you need to go home.’”
Nancy thought maybe this was a prank. Was she about to be disciplined by her man? Nancy continued talking with the woman and eventually allowed her to take her back home. Escape wasn’t easy; it never is. Nancy’s trafficker-boyfriend found her, intimidated her, then tried to play lovey-dovey, but Nancy wasn’t having it.
The transition out of a pimp-controlled life wasn’t pretty. Like Hannah, Nancy turned to self-trafficking to maintain her drug addiction. Then, also like Hannah, Nancy oversaw other women and trafficked them. It wasn’t until she was thirty that Nancy was ready to go back to the lessons her preacher-father had instilled. She turned to a heavenly father, the proverbial higher power in Twelve-Step programs, for help to put an end to her drug and alcohol use. She was ready.
Trafficking victims were ready for Nancy. They needed her help. Nancy is the founder and executive director of Fresh Start Learning in Milwaukee. Fresh Start supports and advocates for victims of domestic violence and human trafficking. It’s the same line of work that Hannah pursued. Or maybe the work has pursued Hannah and Nancy.
When it comes to being addicted and trafficked, Nancy’s been there, done that. As she would say, she’s not in it anymore, she’s through it. She’s not just a survivor, she’s a thriver, and if she has anything to say about it, many more survivors and thrivers will find their way through it too.