How I Sustained Remission From Substance Use Disorder

July 29, 2025

Nicole Currivan, Author 

Tom O’Connor, Editor & Publisher

Author Nicole (Nikki) Currivan recounts her difficult path to overcoming a substance use disorder, ultimately achieving lasting remission. Nikki encountered many challenges with substance abuse as her Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) repeatedly moved her from one treatment center to another.

PPO provides healthcare coverage for individuals and families through a network of contracted healthcare providers, including doctors, hospitals, and other medical professionals. These providers have agreed to offer services at discounted rates to members of the network.

Nicole’s Story

My journey started in the quaint and affluent town of Greenwich, CT. Let’s put it this way: I was in preschool with the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers' grandson, and my best friend's family owned approximately 300 Toyota dealerships throughout the United States. 

I am the youngest of five children my mother had within seven years. I was the baby, and I was cute, but I was also the most neglected. I received attention when I would say a funny swear word taught by my oldest brother, but I wasn’t paid enough attention for anyone to realize I had mono, which is why I slept for an entire month and missed school once.  

My Food Addiction Surfaces Early

My first real addictive symptoms began to show themselves with food. Anything sweet made me happy and filled that little space in my childhood heart that I was not getting elsewhere in my household. 

My parents were not bad; they noticed the weight I was gaining, but knew that food made me happy, so they just kept buying it for me. They would watch me crying in the Limited Too dressing room when the bikinis didn’t fit. To make me feel better, they’d get me a pretzel and a slushy on the way out of the mall. Makes sense, doesn’t it? 

They also tried putting me in a fat camp, and my dad got me a personal trainer. I was so embarrassed about the way I looked, and nothing ever happened quickly enough for me, so I ended up quitting those things before the results could show. I was embarrassed about doing anything in front of anyone, like working out with a trainer, because I felt judged in every single room I walked into. I felt like everyone was disgusted with my body and that they just wanted me to get out of their sight.

Middle School was when my weight became a significant problem. Not because I was pre-diabetic or anything, but because where I grew up, you had to be skinny or nothing. 

I was bullied by my siblings, children at school, and even those children’s parents. I would go home every day and look at pictures of models on MySpace at the time, and I would just cry. I would follow that cry up with a full heaping of ice cream to make the feeling go away for a little while. The bullying persisted; while I watched all my friends getting their hands held by boys and getting their first kiss, I became the fat comic relief girl at school. I would do anything to make anyone laugh for the slightest bit of attention. I even remember dressing up as my male teacher one day for no reason so that I could stand out and get some attention.

In High School, I decided to be a cheerleader, just like my sister, Tara. The strenuous workouts made me strong, and I started to lose about 30 pounds. Now I’m 5'6’ and about 150 pounds, which is pretty standard, and I was still eating like a pig. I was still mocked and told I was fat by every single person around me. 

My Magic Ticket to Substance Abuse

The first time I ever got drunk was the first time I ever felt I could be social, and no one cared to look at my body. My high school classmates were all laughing and smiling with me because they were on a nice buzz, too. This was it… this was the magic ticket to me being cool. 

From that point on, when everyone was gathering for a party, they were thinking about which cute boy would be there. I was thinking about hoping there would be enough alcohol for me to black out. It quickly became a problem. I would yell and scream and make a fool out of myself with alcohol. I would do this every single time I drank, no matter the situation. I always needed more and more and more! 

My parents would give me the wagging finger, but they chalked it up to me being a teenager and would tell me NEVER do it again. The drinking persisted; I even mixed that in with Adderall so I could stay up longer, drinking. 

I started losing friends and being known as the girl who drank too much and acted like a fool. This all stemmed primarily from my self-hatred of the way I looked and the way I felt inside. I needed something to numb the pain that wasn’t just more food. 

Opiates Became The Love of My Life

Finally, I graduated from high school, and while all the good kids were going to prestigious colleges, I was on my way to Norwalk Community College because I had fucked around so much that my graduating GPA was like 2.1 - this is where I met the love of my life, opiates. 

I started stealing from my parents, my siblings, and anyone who was dumb enough to leave their purse around me. I began to get scared when I was fired from Cold Stone Creamery for stealing $2,000 from the safe, which was caught on camera. With the cost of these little pills, my life was starting to spiral.

Heroin

That’s when my friend, whom I called “Mink,” introduced me to a little brown powder in wax paper called Heroin. Now, when I had heard about heroin growing up, I thought it was for homeless men who wore leather jackets and slept on park benches. Without hesitation, I took the powder and snorted a fat line of it without even giving it another thought. 

I finally had to tell my parents what was going on, and my mom made me start an Intensive Outpatient (IOP) treatment program at Greenwich Hospital. 

Cops Called and Suicide Warning

By this point, my parents wanted me out of the house and out of their way because I was again “a problem child who needed too much attention.” One morning, when my mom wouldn’t give me her purse or car so I could get more drugs, I pushed her, and my sister called the cops. 

I said I wanted to kill myself. I did want to die, but I didn’t have the guts to do it. They took me to the psych ward, and while I was waiting to get booked in, I had an ex-boyfriend who texted me telling me that I could go to Florida using my parents' insurance and not pay for anything. I  could go to a tropical setting, sit on the beach, and get off drugs for free? Let’s fucking go. 

A New Beginning in Sunny South Florida

After I was discharged from the Nut House, I completed my pre-assessment over the phone and provided my dad's Aetna PPO information. He was salivating after he ran my benefits and booked me a plane ticket to my new future. I went home and packed two duffel bags, kissed my mom on the cheek, but my dad didn’t even look at me. I had to ask a kid I had met once for a ride to the airport. I was off to a new life and a new beginning in sunny South Florida - so I thought.

As we pulled up to the Palm Partners detox building, I looked for any semblance of a beach… all I saw was garbage and a kid with his bags already on the side of the road. I did my check-in, and they gave me a bowl of spaghetti, telling me, “I never have to feel this way again.” If I had learned the first time, they would have been right about that. I spent the next three weeks there, flirting with boys, not paying attention in groups, getting massages, and listening to this whacked-out couple talk about how they both got off drugs by completely reprogramming their minds. This was funny to me because the couple’s husband was high every day; it takes one to know one.

Detox Call with Mom 

The one thing from the treatment stay that made me have any semblance of wanting to stop what I was doing was when I called my mom from detox for the first time after pushing her. She cried on the phone to me and told me she missed me. This woman, whom I had terrorized, stolen from, and kicked in the stomach a few days before, still had love for me. That was something I will never forget from that first stay.  

IOP Brief Stop Next

I graduated from detox with a little coin, a backpack with the company logo, and a picture. I was then sent to an IOP program where I did the same thing as an inpatient. I flirted with boys, laughed, and joked in groups, and my therapy sessions often turned into gossip sessions. I had no desire to get clean, but I did have a desire to get tan and meet a cute boy. I was quickly kicked out of that program after I sneaked a boy into the girls' house for a brief romantic encounter. 

I was so depressed that I had to leave my newfound love, so I went and found a heroin dealer at the 7-11 down the street. Only this heroin was white, and it made me nod out in one position for 3 hours. This, I later found out, was Carfentanil. This is the content that had been causing all those “RIP” posts for my Facebook friends that I had made over the last couple of months. 

The Detox Game

So I called my marketer because I was homeless and had no more money. Detox, here I come! I used one. I was not sick, but I was out on a full opiate detox taper while I was there. I was placed in a private room and informed that I could extend my taper for as long as I needed. Why, you may ask?  Because my insurance covered 100% of the out-of-network services, as billed by the facility. I was also told I had to take four urine tests a week, which made no sense because they were sending the second urine test off before the first one’s results even came back. 

This became a cycle. I became known to marketers as a gold mine client because I couldn’t stay clean; I always called them for “ help,” and I had a fantastic insurance policy through my father's business. 

I would go to detox at least once a month for the next two years. There were a lot of bonuses made off of my last name; I’ll tell you that. By that same token, I watched places that spoke about “just wanting to help the next addict “, pack people up and kick them out on the street before their taper was done because their insurance had expired. 

The Constant State of Relapse

I watched countless people die under the age of 30, and I watched their parents grieve from afar on Facebook in whatever northern state they were from. I was in a constant state of relapse, recovery for 90 days, relapse, recovery for 30 days, and so on. I did not want to be clean. 

I learned just how callous and ugly the owners of these treatment centers could be when I saw the way people who wished to help were treated. They told people to “get the fuck off the property” while they pulled away in their brand new Mercedes, which was bought with their fraudulent insurance billing. 

Once, I had a bill for a urine test that was $8,000. My mom called me. She said, “What are you peeing fucking gold?!” (She was the only person speaking to me from my family at this point ) Yes, to these treatment centers. Over the course of five years, I had been in and out of approximately 60 different centers in four other Florida counties. 

And that is not counting the ones that I had gone to multiple times. I was put on countless medications that I did not need, and I got addicted to suboxone because a doctor INSISTED I needed to be on it. He was recently indicted on a $120 million insurance fraud scheme. 

Throughout this journey of living out of a duffel bag, I had overdosed, gotten MRSA from a dirty needle, and lost all of my friends to overdose deaths.  As unscrupulous as the treatment center owners were, it was ultimately my actions that caused my problems.

Homeless Time

In 2021, after six years of being in Florida and not having two days of sobriety to rub together. I was homeless on the side of the street with a crack pipe and a plastic bag with about five outfits in it that were donated. 

I looked at myself in the front camera of my phone, and I just cried. This is not who I was meant to be; this is not who I want to be. I had three months left on my parents' insurance. They had already blocked my number because I had made their lives hell enough, even from states away. I looked for one last place to help me and pick me up on the side of the road. I was gonna try this thing one last time, or I was gonna kill myself. They came and picked me up and took me to detox. 

When I got there, I IMMEDIATELY did what anyone there told me to do. If my bed was to be made at 8:30, it was done by 8:20. If I was told to be in a group and listen, I listened. I had seen time and time again that my way didn’t work in the past, and these people supposedly had clean time and good lives, so they know some shit about shit, right? Every day. Even when I was still dope sick, I felt better. I felt like I had some sort of purpose that I was training to fulfill, like a Roman soldier training for combat. 

Healing Myself From the Inside Out

Every day, I was healing myself from the inside out. There were days when I cried and sat in regret, but those were shattered quickly by someone saying, “Nikki has 80 days!” And the applause surrounded the room. For the first time, those days mattered, and I made them count. I journaled my feelings instead of venting my problems to everyone around me. I sat in prayer and thanked God for another day here on earth. With my morning coffee and cigarette, I played the names of the loved ones I had lost to this disease over and over. They were by my side, pushing me day by day.

We have only one life here; let’s make the most of it. Every day at my job, I speak to people who are depressed, hopeless, and feel like giving up. I share a bit of my story with them, and they decide to visit our small, in-network facility, which is beautiful. If they don’t, hey, I’ll be here for you when you are ready, and I hope you make it to the day you are ready. 

Every day, I pray, it doesn’t have to be to Jesus. There are things bigger than us that we can pray to. I try to do something selfless for someone else every day. Every day, I get outside and spend some time in nature. One of the biggest lessons I learned is not to talk badly about the next addict or anyone. That could be you or me, just by one decision to pick it up again. You are not cured; you are in recovery. I am not healed; I am in sustained remission. 

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Nicole was an Admissions Supervisor at Mandala Healing Center in West Palm Beach, Florida (https://mandalahealingcenter.net/). You can contact Nicole Currivan through email at Nicolecurrivanxx@gmail.com or by phone at 203-258-6507.

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