I entered recovery as a transitional age youth, with my relationship with my family pretty much nonexistent after the progression of my substance addiction led me down a dark path toward isolation. By the grace of God and through the love and service of those in my recovery support community, I was able to build a solid foundation in recovery, develop resilience and find a sustainable path toward becoming a sober man who values honesty, accountability, love, faith, compassion, gratitude and humility.

Learning not to pick up a drink or a drug was only the beginning.

The recent HHS and SAMHSA voluntary pledge on behavioral health quality and best practices caught my attention. I support its goals around access, evidence-based care, measurable outcomes, accountability and long-term wellness. The definition of success has to reflect what it really takes for someone to build a life in recovery.

Looking back, the things that reflected my progress were staying sober, learning how to live a new life based on service, becoming employable and responsible, repairing the damage I had done and building a community that supported my recovery and held me accountable. A completed treatment episode would have shown that I crossed one important threshold, but most of the change that enabled me to sustain my recovery came later.

Many people know how to get sober. The struggle is being able to remain sober over the long haul and learning how to live successfully in recovery.

During the last ten years at Awakening Recovery, I have watched men and women come to us after several attempts to stabilize. Some know the language of recovery very well. Consistently living by those principles once the immediate crisis passes is a much deeper and more durable process.

One size does not fit all in recovery. What I have seen produce the best long-term outcomes is for people in recovery, especially with co-occurring disorders, to be in the same safe place with the same recovering people, doing the same recovery based things for as long as possible - optimally, at least a year to build a solid foundation and a walkable path.

This gives your mind, body, and spirit a chance to heal from the effects of chronic substance addiction. One solution is to actively, consistently, and with integrity engage in a recovery process that helps bring about a fundamental change in your thinking, feelings, and actions in a way that will enable you to live a successful sober life, one day at a time.

People with substance addiction seeking recovery typically want a quick fix to their struggles with immediate gratification, thinking that is the easier softer way or at least a familiar way to live their life in their active addiction. My experience, and what I have seen in those I have helped, is that a durable recovery process takes hard work as people are often also trying to heal from the layered, complex, and deep damage that has been done during years of active addiction.

The things we typically don't want to engage in are the most imperative and crucial - such as honesty, open-mindedness, willingness, patience, and humility. This requires doing the consistent and hard work that has depth and weight to uncover, discover, and discard the maladaptive thinking and behavior that keeps us in our addiction and instead embrace the honesty, hope, faith, and courage it takes to awaken to a new way of life - and ultimately enables sustainable recovery.

According to SAMHSA's National Outcome Measures, outcomes already include abstinence, employment or education, housing stability, social connectedness, treatment retention and criminal justice involvement. These measures, especially when taken together and followed over time, can give us a much better picture of what is happening in someone's life than admissions, discharges and days of service alone.

Recovery is a dynamic process that makes changing demands over time, which is why I believe outcomes should be followed at 30 days, six months, one year and beyond.

Research involving recovery residences has connected stronger engagement and retention with growth in recovery capital, the personal, spiritual, social and community resources that help a person sustain recovery. A recent systematic review of recovery housing also found comparative evidence of benefits in abstinence, income, employment and cost-effectiveness, while calling for stronger research.

Follow-up will never be perfect. People lose contact, some return to illicit substance use and sometimes another intervention is not possible until that person seeks recovery again. Providers and funders cannot control every part of another person's recovery, but they can take responsibility for the quality of their work and learn what happened after the person left.

At Awakening Recovery, we have work to do here too. We are continuing to evolve how we understand what happens after residents leave our homes. Are they sober, housed, connected and working? Are they continuing to build their recovery foundation? We need honest answers, including the difficult ones.

Taking all of the above into account, I believe we can hold providers accountable and still understand that meaningful change takes time. The measures we choose will influence what gets funded, so following people beyond a clinical treatment episode can help us make better decisions about long-term recovery housing, coordinated care and continuing support. Defining success in a way that reflects how recovery actually unfolds over time would give the behavioral health quality pledge real weight for people and families trying to build and sustain new lives in recovery.

I got sober in 1988 at the age of 19, close to death. Legally I was an adult. In almost every practical sense, I had no idea how to live successfully as one. Recovery gave me my life back, but it took time.

That experience is part of why the newly released data on young adults hits me so hard. SAMHSA estimates that 24.5% of young adults ages 18 to 25 in Los Angeles County had a substance use disorder in the past year. Almost one in four. The same estimates show that 32.8% experienced mental health issues and 12.5% experienced both.

The latest report on Los Angeles County's publicly funded substance use disorder treatment system makes it more sobering. Among treatment admissions, 58% involved reported mental health issues, 44.1% involved homelessness, and 69.4% involved unemployment. It also shows that 41.8% began using their primary substance between ages 12 and 17, and 72.5% had received treatment before.

What do these numbers actually tell us? To me, they describe the symptoms. They do not by themselves explain the underlying causes and conditions that brought a young person there, or why another episode of stabilization may not lead to lasting recovery.

The following are some thoughts about what may be happening underneath the numbers:

The sequence can begin years before the SUD diagnosis: The CDC's 2023 national survey of high school students found that 76.1% reported at least one adverse childhood experience and 18.5% reported four or more. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris does a great job in The Deepest Well of explaining how toxic stress can become biologically embedded. ACEs explain part of the vulnerability, but not all of it. Genetics, environment, generational trauma, and the emerging research on epigenetic effects add other layers that we are still learning to understand.

Self-medication can become part of the progression: I have seen young people who were first prescribed medication for mental health issues begin taking it outside of how or what was prescribed. Sometimes it becomes a way to self-medicate. Then cost or access can change, and the person shifts to illicit substances. This is not everyone's path, but it is a path I have seen.

SAMHSA's 2025 national survey counted 978,000 young adults who misused prescription stimulants, 582,000 who misused tranquilizers or sedatives, and 733,000 who misused prescription opioids. These categories overlap, but those are still sobering numbers.

The consequences can compound quickly: Once illicit substance use becomes chronic and acute, mental health issues can escalate. Then the consequences can metastasize into justice involvement, institutionalization, homelessness, lost relationships, and falling away from school or work. Those consequences further exacerbate both the SUD and the co-occurring mental health issues.

The adolescent brain is still developing through all of this: NIDA notes that the circuits responsible for judgment and self-inhibition are still maturing and that substance exposure can interfere with cognitive development and important social milestones. A young person can be derailed from the successful completion of that development by both the SUD and the negative environmental factors surrounding it.

Even the best clinicians need time: During early stabilization, it can be very difficult to understand whether the co-occurring mental health issues predated the SUD, were caused or intensified by illicit substance use, or will be pervasive into recovery, for how long, and to what extent. SAMHSA's guidance on co-occurring disorders recommends observing symptoms over time and reevaluating them as recovery progresses.

Our publicly funded system is too focused on fragmented, short-term fixes: The 2025 NSDUH found that among young adults ages 18 to 25 with both SUD and mental health issues, 43.9% received neither substance use nor mental health treatment in the past year. Only 9.9% received both.

Those numbers are symptoms. They are not as helpful if we treat each one separately and do not holistically address the underlying causes and conditions bringing them about. Too much focus on the symptoms is also emblematic of the holes in our publicly funded behavioral health system.

A brief treatment episode here. A mental health appointment there. Temporary housing someplace else. A justice response when it all spills over. The young person is living one interconnected condition, while the help is too often delivered as a series of fragmented, short-term fixes.

Stabilization is the beginning. Lasting healing requires enough continuity to address the immediate crisis, the underlying causes and conditions, and the hard work of learning how to live.

I have heard a line in 12-Step rooms that captures the progression: substances taught me how to fly and then took away the sky. What first feels like freedom eventually makes the world smaller and smaller.

Recovery has its own ancient story. Joseph Campbell called the larger pattern the hero's journey. Robert Bly explored a related passage through initiation in Iron John. I also think of a phoenix rising from the ashes. A person enters the unknown, faces trials, accepts guidance, and returns changed. In recovery, the return is service. We help the next person.

Learning not to pick up a drink or a drug is only the beginning. A young adult may still need to learn how to show up, keep a commitment, tell the truth, regulate emotion, repair relationships, work, and ask for help before acting on another destructive impulse. None of that happens in thirty, sixty, or ninety days.

Over ten years at Awakening Recovery, I have watched men and women arrive after several attempts to stabilize. Some know the language of recovery very well. Consistently living by those principles once the immediate crisis passes is a much deeper process.

Philosophically, a process like Awakening Recovery treats recovery as something practiced. We often say that you act your way into right thinking. Through a holistic, peer-mentoring-driven process, people uncover, discover, and discard the thinking and behavior that sustained their addiction. In the 12-Step tradition, substance addiction is understood as a three-fold disease of mind, body, and spirit, with the goal of a spiritual awakening and a sustainable new way of living. A community of people with lived experience carries that work day to day, paired with integrated and care-coordinated clinical support that is aligned around the person.

One size does not fit all in recovery. Clinical treatment, appropriate medication, safe housing, peer support, family healing, work, and spiritual growth may all be part of the path. The mixture will be different for each person. What remains constant is the need for enough time, structure, and community for new thinking to become new behavior.

The NSDUH shows us the symptoms and the gaps left by a system too often built around fragmented, short-term fixes. The underlying causes tell us what sustainable recovery must address: enough time to rebuild mind, body, and spirit within a lived-experience community, with coordinated clinical support woven in. The hero's journey reminds us that being lost does not have to be the end of the story. It is never too late to begin the return.

In a recent article, David van der Velde explores what Los Angeles County's 2026 Unhoused Count really reveals beyond the topline numbers. He points to a troubling drop in exits from interim to permanent housing and a rise in returns to the street, arguing that true progress means expanding options like affordable Phase 2 Recovery Apartments for people further along in recovery so that higher structure beds open up for those who need them most.

Read the entire article on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/los-angeles-can-build-fuller-path-from-homelessness-van-der-velde-kyyhc/.

In a recent article, David van der Velde explores San Francisco's new ordinance prioritizing drug-free rules in city-funded permanent supportive housing, and why real choice in recovery housing matters.

David argues that people experiencing homelessness who want a sobriety-supportive living environment deserve that option in publicly funded systems, not just as a privilege tied to wealth or family resources, and he points to recent research showing recovery housing outperforming usual continuing care on abstinence, employment, and cost effectiveness, while cautioning that the evidence base remains narrow and calls for careful expansion paired with better transition planning for residents who relapse.

Read the full article on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/recovery-supportive-housing-should-real-choice-david-van-der-velde-kh9pc/.

In a recent article he posted to LinkedIn, David van der Velde explores why Los Angeles County's encouraging decline in overdose deaths — nearly 30% from its 2022 peak — should be celebrated as a starting point, not a finish line.

David argues that while saving lives from acute overdose is sacred work, survival and recovery are not the same thing, and a serious public strategy must measure the whole person: mental health, housing stability, treatment engagement, family connection, and long-term wellbeing.

Read the full article on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fewer-overdose-deaths-great-news-now-we-need-holistic-van-der-velde-w0bjc/

In a recent article he posted on LinkedIn, Awakening Co-Founder and Executive Director David van der Velde explores why court-mandated treatment and alternatives to incarceration can create the opening for recovery, but cannot substitute for the internal readiness that sustains it.

Drawing on his own experience with a DUI in the late 1980s and decades of service work in recovery, David argues that external pressure — from a judge, a sentence, or a recovery housing placement — must eventually become genuine willingness, or the door the court opened will close again.

Read the full article on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/court-can-open-door-recovery-still-requires-readiness-van-der-velde-pgptc/

David van der Velde reflects on Sam Quinones' recent piece about Los Angeles, using it to argue that the city's response to addiction and homelessness hasn't kept pace with how dangerous fentanyl and methamphetamine have made the street environment. He frames this as a human suffering issue, not a partisan one.

David acknowledges real progress, including LA County's reported 22% drop in overdose deaths in 2024, but argues that citywide gains don't reflect the experience of people still cycling through encampments, ERs, psychiatric crises, and jail without reaching lasting stability.

David urges for solutions that use speed and continuity: move people into structured support quickly, then sustain that support long enough for real stabilization, not just temporary removal from public view.

Read the entire article on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fentanyl-meth-changed-street-our-response-has-move-van-der-velde-yqblc/

David van der Velde recently published an article that shared his observations on the healing that happens within families during the recovery from addiction by one of its members. In his article, he explores why family repair isn't a byproduct of recovery - it's part of the work itself. David has a well-informed insight into this issue as a cofounder and Executive Director of Awakening Recovery.

Addiction damages family systems in ways that are hard to name: years of fear, broken trust, emotional volatility, and exhausted love. SAMHSA and NIDA both recognize that thoughtful family involvement improves treatment engagement and long-term outcomes. But family involvement isn't the same as family rescue. Real repair often begins with boundaries, honest conversations, and time.

That's why the length and structure of recovery housing matters. A year-plus process, like what is offered at Awakening Recovery, gives residents (and their families) ample time to witness something deeper than abstinence: humility, accountability, consistency, and growth.

Read David's full article on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/family-repair-side-effect-recovery-part-work-awakening-recovery-xg1yc/.

In a recent post on LinkedIn, Awakening Co-Founder and Executive Director David van der Velde makes a clear distinction: spirituality isn't a replacement for treatment, but for many people it's one of the most powerful forms of recovery capital they'll ever develop.

Clinical care handles stabilization, symptom reduction, and relapse prevention. But long-term recovery also demands meaning, moral repair, humility, and a reason to live differently once the crisis has passed.

Whether expressed through faith, the 12 Steps, service, or a Higher Power someone defines on their own terms, spirituality addresses what addiction often destroys most deeply: the connection to self, community, truth, and conscience.

Read David's full post on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/spirituality-substitute-treatment-recovery-capital-van-der-velde-pgjsc/.

In a recent article David van der Velde explores why relationships with others matter as much as clinical care in sustaining long-term recovery. Research backs what recovery communities have always known: social support is often the single most important factor in initiating and maintaining sobriety. But brotherhood and sisterhood aren't just feel-good concepts — they're lived environments where people practice honesty, accountability, and showing up for others consistently over time.

The path looks different for men and women. Men often have to unlearn the belief that strength means going it alone. Women frequently have to rebuild trust and safety after histories of betrayal and trauma. But the deeper work is the same: learning to live without hiding, and finding community where compassion and accountability exist together.

Read David's full article on LinkedIn to explore why belonging, not just treatment, is where lasting recovery begins: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/brotherhood-sisterhood-end-isolation-recovery-david-van-der-velde-pzttc/.

Awakening Recovery's Executive Director David van der Velde has written a new article arguing that addiction policy has gotten better at saving lives — but still hasn't figured out how to build them back. Read it here on LinkedIn.

David's post makes a pointed distinction between crisis interruption and actual recovery, calling out the "missing middle:" the months and years after stabilization where people rebuild housing, employment, relationships, and identity — and where public funding largely disappears. He also addresses the "multiple pathways" debate head-on, arguing that protecting access to medication-assisted treatment and supporting drug-free recovery housing aren't mutually exclusive — they're both essential parts of a continuum that policy still hasn't fully funded or measured.

You can read the full article on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/missing-middle-addiction-policy-david-van-der-velde-mowjc/.

Awakening's Co-Founder and Executive Director David van der Velde has written a new article about recent reports that teenagers are drinking far less than previous generations — and why that good news deserves a more complicated read.

David points out that while the decline in adolescent substance misuse is worth celebrating, the emotional struggles that drive young people toward addiction haven't gone away. They've shifted into isolation, mental health crises, and other forms of escape. The goal needs to be more than just a reduction in substance use, it should be more young people building lives they don't need to escape from.

You can read the full article on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lower-teen-drinking-good-news-not-whole-youth-health-van-der-velde/