Sonya Johnson, 41, started taking drugs at age 11, when a man who was sexually abusing her gave them to her behind her parents’ back. It was the beginning of a 23-year journey through addiction that began with cigarettes, marijuana and ecstasy and eventually led to cocaine and prescription opioid pills. At first, the drugs took away the emotional pain from the abuse, but Johnson quickly grew dependent on them. She was arrested for the first time at age 18 and sent to a detox facility, beginning  a cycle of rehab, release and relapse that took 16 years to break.

When she was young, Johnson didn’t see her destructive pattern. She got married at age 24 and became a stay-at-home mom to two young boys. She and her husband, who had also been addicted to pills, moved to Georgia to try to escape the lure of getting high. For a while, everything seemed to be working, but Johnson’s addiction was lurking in the shadows. “Because I hadn’t dealt with my internal trauma, I felt this emptiness inside that I knew the drugs could fill,” she says.

On a visit to Florida to see her mother, Johnson connected with a former dealer and started using cocaine again. She convinced her husband that they needed to move back. “That was when things started falling apart,” she says. Her husband began using again, too. They began intravenously injecting heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl.

A neighbor eventually called the Department of Children and Families and the couple’s sons went to live with Johnson’s mother. In 2018, Johnson was arrested for possession of methamphetamine, Xanax and drug paraphernalia, and ended up in the Sarasota County jail. Estranged from her husband and family, she hit bottom. Detox in jail was excruciating, the worst she’d experienced, but something finally began to shift. “It was like a spiritual awakening,” she says. “I call it my gift of desperation, because during that very difficult season in jail, I was looking at myself and saying, ‘Is this the life you want?’”

Johnson eventually transferred to a wing of the jail called the “recovery pod,” where community organizations hold recovery meetings and bring in volunteers to speak with inmates about their struggles. “For the first time, I believed that recovery was possible for me,” Johnson says. “Although I was in jail, I felt freer than I ever had in my entire life.”

Johnson realized she’d been struggling with depression, anxiety and PTSD as a result of the childhood abuse. One of the volunteers in jail, who had witnessed Johnson’s commitment to breaking her addiction, advocated for Johnson at a court hearing. The judge spared Johnson a 20-month prison sentence and allowed her to enter the four-month Salvation Army VIPER program, which provides intensive counseling and helps incarcerated people integrate back into the community. Johnson reunited with her husband, who was also in treatment, and they saved up enough money to move into their own apartment on Valentine’s Day in 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was about to send the world into lockdown. Their kids, now 15 and 16 years old, came home two months later. “While the rest of the world was falling apart, ours was coming together,” Johnson says.

Johnson now works as the lead peer coordinator of the Parents for Parents program at the Sarasota/Manatee branch of the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), which provides support to parents struggling in the child welfare system. “I live my recovery out loud in both my professional and personal lives,” Johnson says. “We share it in an age-appropriate way with our sons so they don’t go down that same road.” She also regularly returns to the Sarasota County jail as a volunteer, talking to inmates about her own recovery. “What they did for me in the recovery pod was life changing,” she says. “I want to do whatever I can to give back.”