Anji Dickson spent 35 years drinking. She started at age 12, and tried to quit over and over again. She tried meditation, cleanses, back- packing in developing countries, and even multiple stints in rehab.
“Nothing seemed to work,” Dickson said. Despite her powerful alcoholism, she continued to have what she describes as “a good life,” including owning her own pest control business in Scottsdale, but her drinking addiction, along with abuse of prescription pills, was making it impossible to live that life. She ended up in the hospital on multiple occasions, and eventually lost support from family after yet another overdose and arrest.
Dickson is 17 months sober. She has changed everything in her life, not only giving up on drugs and alcohol, but also switching
from her high-powered jet-setting professional life to a much simpler one, working for Steps to Recovery, the drug treatment organization that helped her get clean. Dickson is now the manager for Miracles Happen, the resale store run by Steps to Recovery that funds their rehabilitation efforts.
“I can tell you I don’t think I’d be alive sitting here with you if I didn’t come here,” Dickson said of Steps to Recovery. “I definitely wouldn’t have been. I had lost hope in every- thing. I was depressed. I wanted to die.”
To Dickson, what made Steps to Recovery different from other rehab facilities was that connection to work with the organization that began shortly after she began living there. Steps to Recovery clients are put to work in the resale store’s warehouse and matched up with life coaching and career development, trying to not just address the addiction, but the life changes necessary to keep people clean.
“We knew it wasn’t just about the substance,” Steps To Recovery Executive Director Damien Browning said. Browning himself is a recovered meth addict who founded the organization in 2013 with his wife after a stint in prison that eventually got him clean, feeling that other recovery programs in the area were lacking. “Our recoveries taught us we used as a self medication, so it’s not about what we were using, it was why we were using it.”
“One of the things with life coaching is that when people get clean from any mind or mood altering substance — when they stop alcohol, they stop weed, they stop whatever they’re using to self medicate — we call that abstinence,” Browning said. “But then how do you stay clean? So there’s a difference with us between getting clean and staying clean. Staying clean is the hardest thing. How
do you stay clean with all the stressors in life? Work, family — that’s where the life coaching really came in. We had to teach people the skills and the guidance on how to live life on life’s terms.”
“When I was in institutions — hospitals, inpatient rehabs — you’re in the hospital, you’re not dealing with the outside public, and you’re not dealing with life,” Dickson said. “And then I’d get out of these rehabs and I’d have all this stuff piled up — bills, etc. And here what we’re able to do is we’re dealing with regular things in life. We’re out in public, we’re having to do all the big girl things we have to do in life, but we’re immersed in life. It’s not an easy program.”
Under the Steps to Recovery model, clients who stay at the facility are put to work 15 hours a week to pay off the cost of their stay, and have five days a week of life coaching. The program is geared toward accountability and helping clients develop the necessary skills to live on their own. Clients are aided with mock interviews as well as resume building workshops, and encouraged to find career paths that might be different from what they had believed they were capable of when they were using.
“Many of our clients come with very little job experience,” Steps to Recovery Board President Chris Heyer said. Heyer is a former Yavapai College professor and administrator [she met Browning when he was one of her students there, post recovery] and designed Steps’ job development curriculum. “Most have had jobs that they didn’t need a lot of training and education for, and maybe they had never asked themselves what they wanted to do. They just did enough to get by — to pay rent, or to buy food or whatever — and they never really thought about what they wanted to do for a career instead of a job.”
Though Steps to Recovery has been operating for 6 years, the intensive job development program was only started in the past year. In the 2018-2019 iteration of the program, Steps received grant funding from the Northern Arizona Healthcare Foundation, United Way, Wells Fargo and the One AZ Credit Union, collectively raising over $60,000 for the organization. This year, an $80,000 grant from the USDA joined an additional $18,640 collectively raised from the Arizona Community Foundations of Sedona and Yavapai, and the One AZ Credit Union. The organization also gets help from the Arizona Cardinals and the city of Cottonwood.
Browning said that even with grants, the group is trying to raise more funding, and noted the Arizona Tax Credit contributions.
For Dickson, going through the program has allowed her to find a better version of herself than the one she was when she was using. She said that she used to think about dying nearly every day, and never does now.
“It gives us hope, because then we’re able to see that we can still get things accomplished, and still do things,” Dickson said. “I had really lost my self confidence. But I’m a very talented person, and if you meet people in here, we all are. Everyone’s interesting and creative, and we all have special gifts and talents. In my addiction, I started forgetting those things about myself. And here I’m able to develop that.”
