The road to Healing Housing started in a women’s prison.
Olivia Mullin was volunteering as part of a program to help inmates learn to make better life decisions. The last person Mullin was paired with was in on a drug conviction. As she got to know the inmate and listen to her story, questions began to run through Mullin’s head.
“OK, she’s been in prison, she’s been clean and sober while she’s been in here,” Mullin remembers thinking. “Where can she go when she gets out in order to maintain that sobriety?”
The thought refused to go away. Mullin could not stand the idea of women in recovery from substance abuse, particularly those on the low side of the income scale, falling back into addiction just because they could not find or afford a place to live while soberly transitioning out of treatment programs. Looking around her community, Mullin did not see good options for those women. So she decided to act.
Mullin recruited some friends, many of them from Brentwood United Methodist Church, and together they undertook a multi-year project of research and organization. The end result is Healing Housing, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing women in recovery a safe space in which to live and get their feet back under them. The organization’s first housing location is set to open in Williamson County in April. Mullin, who has an eclectic work history — going from emergency room nurse for 16 years to head of a gift manufacturing company for 15 years to her present job as a co-owner, with her husband, of an accounting firm — is the group’s executive director.
The stereotypes about addiction are not true. That’s one of the most powerful things Mullin learned touring transitional housing facilities around the country and talking to recovering women.
“When people hear addiction, it’s definitely a stigma,” Mullin said. “You think laziness and bad choices and certain words come to your mind.”
The women Mullin met, though, were not lazy or irresponsible. They were hurting — in many cases, victims who were getting through life the best they could.
“What you learn is that addiction is really a Band-Aid,” Mullin said. “What so many girls have experienced is sexual abuse as young children. When you start digging through the layers, the addiction is on top but as you dig down and understand these women’s stories, many of them have been traumatized at a young age and as they grow addiction becomes part of how they numb that pain.”
Pat Ralls agrees. Ralls is a part of the Healing House management team. Like Mullin, she has met enough women addicts to know that their condition is not the result of some character defect.
“It is extremely likely that they have experienced trauma,” Ralls said. “Nobody wakes up wishing they were addicted.”
Pat Ralls was asked to join the group by some fellow members of Brentwood United Methodist Church who were already involved. Working alongside Mullin, she has seen how dedicated the organization’s founder is to the cause of helping addicted women.
“She has more drive and energy than any person I’ve ever met in my life,” Ralls said.
That dedication is a big part of how Healing House is where it’s at today: preparing to open its housing to 15 women who will be referred to the organization from local treatment programs at the beginning of April.
When Mullin was conducting research about transitional living, she was startled to find how few options there were for economically struggling women in recovery.
“What we found was there are plenty of places serving women who have money, but … the crisis in housing is for the women who don’t have money and don’t have any safe place to which they can return,” Mullin said. “That’s the need we’re trying to meet.”
The need was especially great right here in Williamson County, Mullin said. Healing Housing’s management team could not locate any transitional living homes for women in Williamson County. Just because Williamson is the richest county in the state, though, doesn’t mean there are not plenty of people struggling with addiction here. That’s another one of those stereotypes.
Addiction “is everywhere it has no walls,” Mullin said. “It bleeds across every socioeconomic class.”
The reason that transitional living spaces are so important is because research shows they provide recovering addicts a better chance of staying sober.
“Research shows that women that live in transitional housing after completing treatment have a much higher likelihood of remaining sober than women who don’t have access to transitional housing opportunities,” Mullin said.
When she talks about completing treatment, Mullin is referring to the fact that Healing Housing is intended to be the second step in a woman’s recovery process. Women who stay with Healing Housing must have gone through a treatment program already and achieved six months of sobriety.
Whereas the treatment phase is about kicking an addiction, the transitional housing phase is about keeping that addiction at bay while at the same time “really preparing [women] for launching back into the world and living independently,” Mullin said.
Healing Housing hopes to achieve that result in several different ways. Foremost, it will give women a place to go that is different than the environment that may have contributed to their problems in the first place. The transitional housing will have either a daytime program director or nighttime house manager on staff at all times. Women who stay there will also receive counseling and training in basic life skills, budgeting and financial management. The goal is for the women to be able to leave Healing Housing and, as Mullin said, “not return to the lifestyle they were used to living.”
Getting and staying sober is not an easy process, though. As Mullin pointed out, that can especially be the case for women, who may have children to care for.
“The women have a tougher time committing to treatment or transitional living because they feel the pressure to go back and be with the children sooner,” Mullin said. “Not that they don’t want to take the treatment step or the transitional living step, but because they feel like they can’t. That adds a layer of complexity.”
Mullin and Healing Housing, though, are prepared for the challenge. Not only do they believe that “God can change lives from the inside out,” as Mullin said, they have faith in the plans they are putting into action. They’ve seen it work before and the result is profound.
“When you watch a woman who has so much going against her pull herself up and turn her life around and help so many people, it speaks to all of us and teaches us what life is really about and what’s really important,” Mullin said.
Furthermore, the people at Healing Housing want recovering women to know that they are not going to have to face their problems alone. Everyone at Healing Housing is, in a way, on the same mission, management team and recovering women alike—all united by the common struggle that is life.
“I think we’re all broken in different ways,” Mullin said. “It’s more walking with them, not separating ourselves from them, but recognizing we’re all on this journey together.”
That sense of unity also means that one women’s successful recovery is not just the story of one woman. When a sober, healthy mother is reunited with her children, or chooses to volunteer and help sponsor a woman who might be in the same, addicted place she used to be in, the story continues to unfold.
“One life turned around has an exponential positive impact on society in many ways,” Mullin said.
A fundraiser for Healing Housing will take place from 7 to 8:15 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 14, at Brentwood United Methodist Church. For additional information you can email [email protected] or call 1-888-445-4325
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