🔒After drugs and prison, CT man finds peace with holistic remedies

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For most, the thought of going to prison is a nightmare.

For Connecticut native Kelvin Young, a 26-month sentence was no picnic, but he looks back on his time served as divine intervention.

“It might sound kind of funny, but I was relieved,” Young said. “I was tired.”

On May 5, 2009, the day before he went to prison, Young said he was intoxicated and used cocaine, heroin and klonopin.

It wasn't the first time he'd used. Young began sniffing heroin and cocaine, drinking, smoking marijuana and ingesting OxyContin in the mid-1990s.

After a painful detox period, Young was lying in his prison bunk thinking about life. He didn't like who he'd become.

“I felt guilt, shame, remorse,” he said of his jail sentence, which was the result of him violating a restraining order and being charged with third-degree strangulation after choking his girlfriend at the time.

“My family brought me up much better than that,” he added.

He also thought about his daughter, who was 11 at the time.

“She's seen me in very, very negative places,” said Young, who also sold drugs at one point. “I wanted to be the man my daughter could look up to and be proud of.”

Young was incarcerated when he decided he wanted to turn his life around, so he joined a recovery program in prison and learned to better cope with his emotions through meditation, sound healing and other holistic methods. He said he's been clean ever since.

In recent years Young, now 44 and living in Middletown, has worked for recovery nonprofits Advocacy Unlimited and Toivo, and launched his own company, Sacred Sound Healing, to help others cope with stress.

View HBJ's "Opioids in the Workplace" series here.

Sound healing or sound therapy is a holistic practice Young learned about in prison and studied further upon his release in 2011. It's a type of meditation that involves making sounds and vibrations by rubbing and striking mallets against crystal bowls.

Young has built up a client base over the past few years, holding sound healing sessions and workshops with groups at yoga centers, recovery facilities and community centers, as well as one-on-one sessions.

Last month, he acquired Waterview Wellness Center in Portland, where he hopes to grow his business to the next level.

He said helping people, including those in or seeking recovery, cope with stress is now his calling.

“People constantly worry about bills or work or whatever,” Young said. “We're often in that stress response.”

He's hoping that his services will also catch on with employers who want to help their workers relax, perhaps through their employee assistance programs.

Replacing a toxic relationship

Besides sound healing, Young said he's used meditation and yoga to advance his recovery, the foundation of which he built in the Narcotics Anonymous program.

He also goes on walks, spends time with friends and family, listens to relaxing or uplifting music, and has converted to a vegan diet.

All of those things have taught him to self-reflect and to ask a key question: “What are drugs doing for me?”

For a time, they were making him more sociable and easing emotional pain.

“I would feel the stress just wash away,” he said.

It worked until it didn't. Eventually he had to use heroin just to feel normal.

“I had a relationship with drugs. It was an unhealthy, toxic relationship but it was a relationship,” he said. “Now I have healthier ways to maintain emotions and feelings and move forward without it.”

Not everyone is comfortable discussing their past drug use publicly. But Young has made a point of being open about it. He said anonymity breeds stigma, which ultimately doesn't help society to change its perceptions about addiction.

“There are so many lessons to be learned from our experiences in life,” he said. “We have to be open enough to see it through a different lens.”

It's one of the factors that has created a bond between Young and Kim Beauregard, CEO of East Hartford recovery nonprofit InterCommunity.

Young talked to a reporter recently in Beauregard's office, a meeting Beauregard arranged.

”I feel very connected to Kelvin,” said Beauregard, who met Young through his post-prison recovery work and has since brought him to InterCommunity to work with clients. “We're totally different people but we are the same because we share that gift of recovery.”

It wasn't long ago that Beauregard herself decided to publicly discuss her own past struggles with addiction, particularly with alcohol. Initially, it was something she shared only with friends, worried the stigma might negatively impact her career.

But InterCommunity was asking its clients to be brave and open, and it nagged at her.

”Here I was sitting holding my own story in,” Beauregard said. “I wasn't brave enough to tell my story.”

“I didn't use again and I have a very successful life, but I didn't give as much (of my own personal story) as I could and should have. I think it hurt my recovery for all these years.”

A longer tail

For some, perhaps because of news coverage, the opioid epidemic might feel like a recent phenomenon. But in many ways it's not.

Though heroin laced with a super-powerful opioid called fentanyl has become more common, the drug isn't new. (Fentanyl has been the key driver of rising overdose deaths in Connecticut and other states.)

Young recalls a bad batch of heroin in the early 1990s called “Tango & Cash” that killed approximately a dozen people in Connecticut and New York. The New York Times and Hartford Courant both wrote about it.

“I really believe it's beyond 'epidemic' now, because it was an epidemic years ago,” Young said.

What's made more people pay attention, and helped shift the perception of addiction as a disease, he suspects, is that heroin has moved from poorer neighborhoods into the suburbs.

“It's good people are receiving services and it's good things are changing, but at the same time this was an epidemic a long time ago,” he said.

Beauregard thinks school administrators and parents of teenagers aren't making the connection between painkillers and heroin. Some simply don't want to think about it, she said.

“It's very important for some people that it's not heroin, but a pill,” she said. “It's the image of it. But one often inevitably leads to the other.

“Once you're on all the other stuff and you then can't afford it and you can't get it anymore, you are going to do heroin. That's what I think people don't understand.”