Teah Lovejoy, 35
Recovery Treatment Coordinator
Mother of four
Home town: Mahnomen
Tribal affiliation: Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe in South Dakota
Seven years of sobriety
As a teenager, Teah Lovejoy was opposed to substances: She didn’t want to smoke cigarettes or drink. The only drug she took was Tylenol.
But by the time she was 20, she couldn’t get through one of her waitressing shifts without pain from rheumatoid arthritis, she says. Her eyes are warm, and she’s wearing a white and pink flowered ribbon skirt. Her hair falls to her waist.
Lovejoy’s doctor told her about a medication called Tramadol to ease her arthritis pain. He told her how safe it was, and she took it, as prescribed, for a year. When her prescription ran out, she found she could easily order more online.
“It was like I needed them,” Lovejoy says. “It seemed like when I didn’t take them, the pain was way worse than before I’d started taking them. I started taking more and more and more.”
She was addicted. And in 2014, when authorities changed the classification of Tramadol to a controlled substance, she could no longer order it online.
“When I couldn’t get them, that’s when I discovered withdrawals,” she says. “I was like, I feel like I’m gonna die [without it].”
Soon, she found her addiction problems compounding: Lovejoy discovered that her partner had started dealing heroin. And on a day when she couldn’t find anything else to control her withdrawal, she put a little bit of his stash on her tongue.
The heroin immediately stopped her withdrawal symptoms.
She wasn’t the only one who discovered his stash, however: Police raided their home and charged the couple with drug possession.
“We almost lost everything,” she says.
The couple feared Child Protection Services could send their three young children to foster care. When her partner went to court to deal with the charges, Lovejoy hid. For two and a half years, she ignored the warrants from the drug possession charge. When cops picked her up, her partner bailed her out. Eventually, he convinced Lovejoy to turn herself in.
“My significant other had always said, ‘If our using ever got CPS involved, and we were faced with the choice of losing our kids to foster care, we would be done with drugs.’ We’d get help and do everything we could to keep our kids out of foster care.”
After 60 days in jail, she relapsed the night she got out.
A court ordered Lovejoy and her partner to MOMS in October of 2015. Julie Williams, the MOMS coordinator, says she’s never understood why couples and relatives face so many barriers to seeking treatment together. All four of the women who shared their stories with Sahan Journal say that they didn’t recover until their significant others joined them in the process.
“My significant other and I both attended anger management, couples counseling, and individual therapy, and really started to grow together as a team and as individuals,” she says.
For Lovejoy, MOMS was the first time she had tried medication-assisted treatment. If she’d known about Suboxone and methadone, she says, she would have tried it earlier.
There were bumps along the way: she struggled with relapsing. One day, she returned home to find her family and all their belongings — furniture, groceries, clothes, toys — gone. Sign a contract to stop using for good, her partner told her, or he would file for full custody of the kids.
She did, and this time she also sought mental health therapy at MOMS. It turned out to be the final key to her recovery.
Success led to more success. She and her partner started their careers in 2017 and 2018 and became homeowners soon after.
“We created a warm loving home for our family. Our kids have a routine, structure, and they never have to worry about anything.”
Lovejoy has been sober since August 9, 2017.
The series is part of a reporting fellowship sponsored by the Association of Health Care Journalists and supported by The Commonwealth Fund.
