Sara K. never thought she’d end up at Beit T’Shuvah. A lawyer, a mother, a woman with a five-bedroom house in Santa Barbara—rehab wasn’t exactly on the vision board. But addiction doesn’t care about resumes. It doesn’t care about nice houses or the fact that you once had a plan. Like a leopard in the night, addiction waits. And when it finally pounced, it took everything.
Growing up in Beverly Hills certainly sounds nice. On paper, Sara’s childhood looked idyllic. Her mom was a social worker, her dad was a lawyer. She and her brother always found great respect for her parents. Her mom worked with teens who had cancer—inspiring Sara’s compassion and her dad taught her ethics and analytical thinking. Sara learned how to be self-sufficient at a young age, but the one meal she couldn’t feed herself was attention. So, she chased it. She chased it by acting out. First, it was food. Then, it was boys. Then, it was cigarettes, and eventually, harder drugs. She recalls a wedding she went to when she was 13. “I remember blacking out—wait that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it?”
High school was a blur of trying to be cool. “I always wanted to be the bad girl,” she admits with a guilty grin. “Rolling cigarettes, sneaking out, pushing the limits. I don’t know why, but it was in my nature.” Then she found coke. And just like that, she was in. The popular crowd. The surfers. The beautiful girls who got invited to everything. She was one of them. It wasn’t just about the high; it was about belonging.
Then came meth. “A friend introduced me to it, and I thought I’d found heaven. It hit on all receptors.” It wasn’t just about feeling good—it was about feeling connected. Somehow, through all of it, she kept her grades up. Senior class president, speech at graduation, a ticket to UC Berkeley. An overachiever with a pookie in her mouth. Two lives, both somehow living in harmony…for now.
College was a reset. Sort of. Meth disappeared for a while, but an eating disorder took its place. After a breakup, she dove deeper into her binging and purging. “We just broke up and then all my friends kind of sided with him. I was isolated. I was upset with myself for some of the things that went down.” So she controlled what she could—food. Eventually, she got help. Took a year off, did outpatient treatment, and then finished her degree. History major. Moved back to LA, and took a couple of years off before law school.
Pepperdine Law was a grind, but, with the help of Adderall (which is just prescription meth), she made it through. “Adderall in law school is like steroids in baseball. You’re at a real disadvantage if you don’t take them.” Eventually, she passed the bar, got a job in workers’ comp, and moved to Santa Barbara.
Why Santa Barbara? Because the guy she was with wanted to move. She told him, “If you want me to come with you, you better put a ring on my finger.” …and he did. So, she had the husband, she had the lavish five-bedroom house—the only thing left on the checklist was the baby. The first child came easily. Her daughter. Her miracle baby. But Sara’s dream was to have three and that proved incredibly challenging. They tried IVF and even a specialist from Africa that her husband flew out. Nothing seemed to work. “I was grieving the loss of children I didn’t even have.”
Infertility treatments. Failed pregnancies. Disappointment. “Every time it didn’t work, I would start drinking. Santa Barbara is just a drinking town. There are wineries everywhere, breweries, all that stuff. So it’s very accepted.” At first, it was just to take the edge off. To numb. To make the failed pregnancies hurt less. But it grew, as these things do.
It was easy to convince herself she was just like the other moms. “A lot of activities, even a kid’s birthday on a Saturday or Sunday, there’d be champagne and mimosas.” But she wasn’t like the other moms. “My drinking is different than other people’s drinking. I’d go home and open all the nicest wine, take all the pills in the house, and call a coke dealer.”
“I felt like a failure for not being able to provide another kid. I didn’t realize I was enough. My daughter didn’t need a sibling. She needed her mom.”
After her husband tried to get her help, the marriage collapsed under the weight of her addiction. “I was in denial at that point.” Her now ex-husband took custody of their daughter. She lost the house. The job. The husband. Herself. And somewhere in the wreckage, she met a guy. A guy who would cosign her desire to go back to using meth. A guy who, for some reason, made sense at the time. “It was high school all over again,” she says, shaking her head. “I thought they were so cool.”
Her downfall wasn’t slow—it was immediate. One minute, she was a respected attorney with a life. The next, she was a daily meth user, clinging to whatever scraps of normalcy she could pretend still existed. When she finally realized she had nowhere to go, she did what any rational addict would do: she called her brother and set up her own intervention. “I told him, ‘If you do an intervention, I’ll go.’ And he said, ‘Where are you? I’m coming now.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, not now, not now!’” She laughs at the memory. But the truth is, she knew it was time.
When she got to Beit T’Shuvah it wasn’t easy. She wanted to leave every day. Every. Single. Day. She’d pack her bags, get ready to walk out, and then someone—staff, a resident, a voice in her head—would convince her to stay just a little longer. One more day. She struggled socially. Coming from a meth haze, her brain had to rewire itself. She had to relearn how to trust, how to communicate—how to just exist in a room full of people without assuming they were stealing her stuff or scheming against her. It was slow. Painfully slow. But she stayed.
Then, something shifted. She stopped talking to the people from Santa Barbara. She changed her number. She even ran the LA Marathon with Beit T’Shuvah’s Gilberg Family Running 4 Recovery team. “Running the marathon really got me focused on goals and finish lines and helped me change the way I think about everything.” I would be foolish not to add the fact that for the entire marathon, she was listening to AA podcasts and speakers on her headphones.
Today, Sara’s slowly reconnecting with her daughter. Her ex-husband, once furious and heartbroken, is now proud. Her parents are pivotal members of the community, who love Beit T’Shuvah just as much as she does. “My Parents love this place so much. They know it saved their daughter’s life.” She’s moving into a women’s sober living home, going back to work, and—for the first time in a long time—believing in herself. “If I could tell my younger self anything, it’d be to be grateful,” she says. “I had so much, and I didn’t see it.”
A few weeks ago, Sara took her one-year sober cake. If you knew her a year ago, or even before, you know that she has undergone some of the most monumental change that Beit T’Shuvah has ever seen. Sara K. is a fighter—a warrior. Someone who has gone from surviving to thriving. Sara K. never thought she’d end up at Beit T’Shuvah…but she’s grateful she did.
And so are we.