“[Being out on the streets] was very traumatic,” she says. In addition to the drugs, she’d been selling sex, hustling in what women like Sophie call, simply, “the life.”
“At certain points, I wanted to hurt the men,” she says. “I thought of seriously hurting them. I’d rob them. I had no respect for any of them. None of them.”
"Not even the man who dropped her off at the hospital—who, for a long time, was the only person who visited her there.
“He was just a sugar daddy,” she says. “He had a lot of insecurities … He almost lived vicariously through me, ‘cause he was too scared to do anything. He liked watching me get high.” Ultimately, she says, she saw him much like the rest of the men she encountered on the streets: “Everybody uses everybody. I used them, they used me, and it was all because I was using [drugs]. It’s all a using thing … I don’t care how nice they were. Still, in my eyes, they weren’t, you know?...
“We need to understand that this is a physical injury to the brain and to the sympathetic nervous system,” says [leading traumatologist Dr. Frank] Ochberg. “There are ways to encourage people who have that component of PTSD to recover joy and bliss and love and pride, but that’s a tough slog. And there aren’t any pills that can really give you that.”
"There are, however, progressive places like Interim House, a women-only recovery center that sits on a tree-lined street of Philadelphia’s Mt. Airy neighborhood. It’s respected around the country as an innovative leader in the use of trauma-informed therapy. It’s here that I met Sophie and Ann Marie, the former of whom was in the tough slog—the latter of whom was working there...."
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