Rev. Lisa Yerby-Bryson, a minister, licensed therapist, substance abuse counselor and founder of a faith-based addiction recovery program, describes herself as “beautifully broken.”
At first glance at the polished, confident woman, it’s hard to see what she means.
Growing up as a “P.K.” — a preacher’s kid — in Baltimore, she was raised by what she calls an “amazing” family, guided by a faith she readily embraced. Yerby-Bryson sang in the choir, studied the Bible, kept her virginity until marriage. She and her husband recently celebrated their 41st anniversary.
“I had a relationship with God,” Yerby-Bryson said.
Things changed in an instant, and almost irrevocably, when she was sexually assaulted by a church leader inside of the church.
Plagued by self-blame, Yerby-Bryson told no one — a fateful decision that left hurt, anger and doubt festering inside of her. It ultimately led Yerby-Bryson down a long, dark path of substance abuse, incarceration and a crisis of faith.
That painful experience, along with the hard work of recovery and the insights she gained on her journey from addiction to sobriety, led Yerby-Bryson to found Praising Through Recovery. The Baltimore-based program is specifically geared towards helping women deal with and recover from addiction
Its website describes PTR, as it’s known, as “an outreach ministry and organization providing spiritual and recovery support to adults seeking to overcome their dependency on drugs and alcohol.” But Yerby-Bryson herself works with what she calls “next level” women: those with careers, families, even church homes.
If the stereotypical image of addiction is someone who’s poor, formerly incarcerated or homeless, “my women are already successful,” Yerby-Bryson says. Their addiction often happens, she says, when “they’re finding it challenging to experience that same success in balancing different aspects of their lives.”
“For these women, their professional life may be working, but they have no idea of their need to have fun. Or they have no idea how to navigate healthy relationships.”
Yerby-Bryson goes wherever her “clients” may be: Across town, across states and, most recently, overseas, including countries like Rwanda. But her journey of healing began only when she first healed herself.
Yerby-Bryson said she descended into a downward spiral of guilt and shame, her mind and spirit both in turmoil. It began, she says, “first with passive-aggressive separation from church and family, combined with too much work,” and alcohol to deal with the pain.
“But ultimately the alcoholic beginning quickly morphed into full scale addiction,” she says, including crack cocaine and heroin. Then came the typical behaviors, with the typical outcomes: estrangement from her family; embracing street life; then incarceration.
Yerby-Bryson’s family eventually found a high-quality treatment facility, in a predominantly white, affluent community that would take her in. She was the only Black patient, and had to teach the staff to deal with a culture they had not experienced.
“Now, I’m gonna be honest: I really struggled because I was the only Black person there, and they had never had a Black person in their program” she says “Not only had they never had a Black woman in their program, they did not know how to build a relationship with me.”
That included staff not considering her aversion to swimming as well as Yerby-Bryson’s suspicion and defensiveness early on.
She began teaching diversity and trying to build a bridge to her fellow patients. It also gave Yerby-Bryson an unusual path back to her faith.
“The first woman God used at this point in my life was a white gay woman, who legitimately didn’t have a relationship with Jesus, with the church or with God,” she says.
he woman, Yerby-Bryson says, “actually despised church and God. And He used her to lead me back to Him,” causing her to reconsider her break with the church.
Having become a minister herself, Yerby-Bryson works with a large group of women at PTR, and because of where they are in life, they choose the kind of help they want.
“I walk my life with people. They’re busy, they got stuff,” said Yerby-Bryson.
“Most of them will come to the eight-week Bible studies because it’s a life group and it’s a fellowship amongst a bunch of other broken women. We are just our beautifully broken selves.”
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