Willing to go to any Length - Even in Prison
ABOUT ROXANNE
Roxanne has over twenty-three years of experience working with clients suffering from high-risk substance use disorders, many with dual diagnoses.
Additionally, she has sixteen years of experience helping family members who love them. Her disarming authenticity and decades of recovery experience have given her the ability to build a strong rapport with her clients.
Her passion for seeing others recover drives her to support and help clients achieve their goals using evidence-based practices, motivational interviewing, reflective listening, compassion, and using positive reinforcements.
CONNECT WITH ROXANNE
Roxanne McDonald, NCRC-II, NCIP-I, CADC-R
Recovery Coach, Interventionist, Family Systems,
Case Manager, Drug & Alcohol Counselor
LinkedIn
READ
WHAT FLIPPED ROXANNE’S LID?
Roxanne suffered pain and trauma in her childhood growing up in Anchorage, Alaska with alcoholic parents. She can remember the pit in her stomach walking home each day. Like most children of alcoholics, she grew up saying, “I will NEVER be like them.” And for most children of addicts, they either avoid it or dive in early.
By age 19, Roxanne was a daily drinker. Her disease progressed over time. On June 18, 1997, she drank as she usually did— until the wheels fell off. When she left the bar, she got behind the wheel of a car, which was not an unusual occurrence. All she can remember is impact, a flash of white light and then being airborne. And then being crushed. She wasn’t even able to inflate her lungs. But she was somehow able to climb out of the car. She had suffered a blow to the head so hard her teeth had gone through her face.
When the police arrived, she was arrested and taken to jail. She was processed and then passed out. There was a TV in the processing cell and she woke to hear her name on a news story about her accident. She saw her car wrapped around a tree and the newscaster said that she had killed a 32-year-old bicyclist.
Roxanne landed in a Maximum security death row penitentiary where she did not receive the help she needed. For many years, she tortured herself with guilt and couldn’t forgive herself.
Kim and Roxanne discuss the complexities of substance use and that there is rarely the intention of harming others, only seeking to stop personal pain. Roxanne’s real journey to reconnecting with herself and with God over the last 23 years has been centered on self-forgiveness. The primary way she was able to do this was through helping other people get clean and sober so that other families could be spared the suffering of a loved one with substance use disorder.
HOW DID PRISON PLAY A ROLE IN YOUR SELF-FORGIVENESS?
Roxanne was sentenced to 16 months of incarceration. She tried to get the help she needed within the walls of the institution, but it was considered a privilege, not a right to attend a 12-step program. The way to qualify for a spot in a 12-step program was to be in school or a work program, but those programs had limited capacity. Because of this, she wasn’t able to get into a 12-step program for 5-6 months.
Thankfully, before she left she had gotten involved in a home group that would write to her and she was able to write letters in order to process her pain. This resulted in a service commitment she brought to Charlotte, NC called Correspondence in Correction. This is a way for anyone to be of service to individuals in prison.
Roxanne desperately needed a message of hope in the violent environment she was in. It was very difficult to feel God, even though she knew she had to find a higher power. She would walk the prison yard and say, “God if you’re there, just shake that tree!” And if the wind would blow, she felt heard. But there was so much hate and fear that kept her in a trauma response due to untreated PTSD and depression.
On the one-year anniversary of the accident, she went to the prison church. She was sitting in the back and a woman at the front started singing, “Just a little bit of faith…” This was a spiritual experience for her because she realized that if she had just a little bit of faith— that if she trusted God, cleaned house, and helped others, that there was hope for her. She felt there was a chance that her life could be redeemed.
Roxanne knew that her mother had been worried about her leading up to the anniversary and so Roxanne called and she was crying. When she asked her mother what was wrong, she shared that her grandmother was dying. Roxanne felt regret about her lack of correspondence with her grandmother leading up to her incarceration and knew that her grandmother was trying to hold on until she could come home. Sadly, she did not make it, but Roxanne put one foot in front of the other, one day at a time.
Kim shared that she was a correctional officer for a time and reiterated the level of violence and normalcy around violence in prisons that inmates can never rest. Getting sober is hard enough in the best of circumstances, but it’s even more difficult to learn or hang on to new information in a 12-step program when you’re in a constant state of trauma response due to your environment.
Roxanne remembers that she didn’t have a Higher Power and tried everything her teachers and mentors suggested in order to believe in and connect with God. One time she made a list of everything she wanted in a best friend. She was desperate for someone who would love her unconditionally, who would support her, who wanted the best for her. So in the beginning, she would pray to that concept of a best friend.
Roxanne shared that when she encounters others who struggle to believe, she said, “Believe that I believe and borrow my higher power for now.”
Roxanne can remember the first time she felt the presence of God. She was alone and that was so rare. She was overcome with a sense of compassion for the women she was surrounded by— women who had done really horrible things. The majority of these women had also committed their crimes either under the influence, or it was directly related to some mental health issue. She felt deep compassion for what each one had been through.
Kim points out that these people could be a threat to her, but somehow she had to adjust to the dangers and unknowns that bring about hypervigilance. Roxanne had no background that would have given her any sense of what to expect in prison. Then she had to readjust to life on the outside as well. One thing is that you eat with your hands in prison because cutlery is a potential weapon. When she got out she ate a lot of hamburgers because she didn’t want people to see that she couldn’t eat with silverware.
WHAT HAS BEEN THE BIGGEST SURPRISE TO YOU ON THE JOURNEY TO SOBRIETY?
Roxanne shared first that it is such a long road. One day in prison, there was a huge crowd of women, but there was no violence. Her survival tactic was to be invisible, so she didn’t dare go see what happened. The crowd dwindled as the day went on, and at the end of the day, there were two lifers with their faces pressed against the glass. Right outside the window, in the gravel, a baby bunny had made a nest. That’s what had taken the attention of hundreds of women. One of the lifers said, “Thank you, God, for showing me that.” That woman died incarcerated and had missed a lifetime behind the walls of the prison.
Roxanne knew in that that the 12-steps were her way out. She didn’t want her legacy to be the lady that killed someone. So she began the program by mail with a sponsor who would write to her. She didn’t even have a piece of paper, so she would do her steps on toilet paper wrappers and mailing them back to her sponsor.
It’s hard to beat yourself up at the end of the day when you’ve done all the right things. If you take the right actions, you’ll get the right results. In the beginning, it might feel like you have nothing to give, but sometimes being a good listener is doing the right thing.
Roxanne got sober through the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program and has spent many years making that program available to prisoners in Mecklenburg county. Additionally, since Roxanne had abandoned a child to go to prison and her making amends was becoming a guardian ad litem for children in the court system. Staying clean and sober was living amends to the victim and family.
Roxanne shares that she was completely broken. Her sponsor told her that if she was able to share her story at the podium that she would be able to heal. She had the gift of desperation that led to her being able to repurpose her pain by serving others. Roxanne remembers hearing a speaker and being transformed by hope and she knew that if she did the same, she might be able to help others as well.
There are so many surprising gifts that come with being clean and sober. One example: Roxanne had lost custody of her daughter in prison and had to go through the court system to regain custody of her. Later, her daughter had written a report about her hero— her mom. Roxanne was stunned because she never thought that she would ever regain the respect or admiration of others.
Roxanne has become a voice of hope for so many others who suffer from Substance Use Disorder and their families. Learn more about her work and hear her session in the hot seat by listening to the full interview!
While you’re here, why not check out Kim’s book?
But Your Mother Loves You is the witty and candid tale of how a renowned psychotherapist moved from “not good enough” to “the right person” despite childhood neglect and a toxic relationship with her mother.
Everyone knows at least one person who demonstrates toxic love, someone who consistently jabs a straw in others and sucks the life right out of them. Without an in-depth understanding of how to navigate these relationships, most people continue to emotionally regress and remain paralyzed in familiar, pain-soaked patterns. But Your Mother Loves You helps readers overcome this cycle of toxicity.
Kim Honeycutt shares the real-life experience of how a shame-based, self-destructive little girl grew up to be a recovered alcoholic, entered the world of psychology as a professional, and created her own strategies to address and conquer toxicity.
This story, both witty and practical, is told through the lens of personal life experience and expert psychological strategies combined with Godly intervention. Readers learn how to either walk away from or walk with a toxic loved one without losing themselves. Covered in both vulnerability and clinical information, But Your Mother Loves You provides a step-by-step approach on how to stop toxic love and the subsequent self-abuse.