From Addict To Advocate

By Kevin Czerwinski

Lisa Gladwell is an addict. That’s not a secret.

Anyone who has spoken to Gladwell knows what the River Edge resident has experienced throughout much of her life, whether it’s the pain, the suffering or the crashes brought on by pills and alcohol. If you know Gladwell, though, you also know about the comebacks and the triumphs and the work she has done to help ensure that others don’t find themselves in the position that she once did.

Hers can be called a traditional redemption story, but this one still doesn’t have an ending. Gladwell, 63, continues to mend fences while helping others, realizing that every day she still must confront the fragility of her addiction. Her work to help others in the recovery community is a never-ending affair, one that takes up most of her time. She remains unstoppable, though, determined to help those find the strength they need to control their addictions while providing them with a safe environment to do so. Gladwell is the founder of New Jersey Recovery Advocates [NJRA], a grassroots organization that endeavors to end stigma, educate and celebrate recovery from addiction. NJRA also holds monthly recovery forums for community leaders in addition to its signature event, the Recovery Walk/Rally that will take place in Liberty State Park on National Recovery Day, Sept. 18.

Gladwell, who will celebrate 20 years of sobriety in November, also owns and operates God Winks, a cooperative sober living home for ladies in Westwood. Additionally, she is involved with the Father Jim McKenna Memorial Fund, which helps those in early recovery. And, she is the chair of Transition Professionals, Bergen County’s re-entry organization based in Hackensack. It’s a lengthy list of responsibilities. Gladwell’s passion about her work comes from her experiences as an addict – events that were often times painful, embarrassing and humbling.

To understand who Gladwell is now and what she does means understanding who she was and what her journey entailed. She was born in South Jersey and moved a great deal because her father, who was an FBI agent, was always on the move. Ultimately, she settled in Bergen County and graduated from Northern Valley High School at Demarest and then St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. She also earned a law degree from Pace University – yes, she also manages to be a practicing lawyer – but it was during her teenage years that her troubling foundation was put down.

“I was addicted to drugs and alcohol and when I say alcohol, that was the primary because it was legal,” Gladwell said. “My preference would be opiates. Opiates are close to alcohol without the horrible taste. In my teenage years

I was defined as an addict but I didn’t know what I was. I thought addicts were people who lived in the Bowery or who were shady people who lived under bridges.

“I didn’t have a knowledge of it,” she continued. “I grew up in a privileged town, I did well academically, participated in sports and did community service. I had a wonderful childhood. I discovered drinking, though, like any other person would but I didn’t know that I was destined to become an addict. Maybe it’s in the genes. Part of it is, I believe. Somewhere along the way I could use substances to anesthetize my feelings and that became my go-to.”

Feelings is the word Gladwell used to describe her pain, which she said included anything and everything from anxiety and insecurities to lack of performance and failures, whether they were emotional, physical, psychological or spiritual.

“Addiction is a big pyscho, social, spiritual disease,” Gladwell said. “The easy part is the biology. That’s becoming sober and taking out the substances. Dealing with the reasons why is the hard work. It’s about getting the much out of your soul. I can be sober now; sobriety is a state. Unless I find a way to sustain it, though, I can be sober now and in an hour I don’t have to be.”

Gladwell credits the 12-step program that she follows as the reason for sobriety and that if she continues to follow that program, she has a better chance of remaining sober. Getting to that point wasn’t easy, though.

She had two young children in the late 1990s as she was continuing to battle her addiction. Gladwell had attempted to recovery programs but admits that the time period is “a little cloudy.” The external forces in her life, her extended family and her children and what was the government agency then known as The Division of Youth and Family Services [DYFS] – today it is the Child Protection and Permanency Office [CPP] – all played a role in her continued downward spiral.

“I had been done a number of times before, thinking I don’t want to do this anymore,” Gladwell said. “The individual, though, has to define whether they have a problem or not. My work life was fine, it was going well, I had a great job but when DYFS became involved, it was about a lot more than me. They told me I was an alcoholic. They forced me into treatment. “My husband is not an alcoholic, but he supported my recovery and my continued attempts at recovery. I would do very well then relapse, do very well then relapse,” she said. “I felt like a failure and the people who don’t understand the disease think, ‘Don’t you love your family or your kids? Why don’t you just stop? You have phenomenal willpower to do whatever you want, why don’t you just do this?’ I was doing it for everyone else rather than myself.”

Ultimately, Gladwell asked her sister to take her children for 30 days while she entered an outpatient treatment center. What should have been a point in her life where she could actually work on herself, knowing that her children were safe, turned out to be one of the worst experiences of her

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life. Gladwell’s sister initiated court proceedings to have Gladwell and her husband’s parental rights terminated in an effort to gain custody of the children.

It began a multi-year saga that cost Gladwell her children and helped put her on the path she currently travels.

“It was a long, very costly, three- to four-year battle that we took to the Supreme Court,” Gladwell said. “My husband and I actually separated for about five years during this because they said he was not autonomous. He supported my recovery and they said he would allow me back in the kid’s lives. Our rights were terminated seven months after I got sober.

“The judge said I didn’t have the psychological capacity to maintain a meaningful recovery,” she continued. “The judge decided I was not wired correctly. George [her husband] also had his rights terminated because he supported me. This is what I went through that led me to advocacy work.”

Gladwell said that her family didn’t respect her husband because he drove a truck and didn’t have a college education. They tried to strong arm her into getting him to terminate his rights with the promise that she could relocate with the boys and “start a new life.”

“They said so they can have a father that was not morally

or spiritually bankrupt,” Gladwell said. “I loved him. We weren’t married when he had kids, but he was their father. My family had a lot of connections and when I said no, they started the process. We appealed it; we had attorneys; we separated so he could get the kids back. It failed. The Supreme Court of New Jersey refused to hear it. Our kids were three and four when our rights were terminated.

“We weren’t allowed to see them,” she continued. “They lived in South Jersey. We showed up at their communions and confirmations because they were in public places, and they knew who we were, but we couldn’t see them. I thought how could this happen? No one wants recovery more than me. I was trying to do what I needed to do and that there is a cesspool of corruption with a ton of money going into the child welfare system that incentives removing children from vulnerable families while creating an income stream for state bonuses given to take children away from a family.”

Gladwell never got her children back. She and her husband had no contact with them until they were 18. While they have a relationship with both children now, it hasn’t been easy to repair years of psychological damage. Her youngest child told her that he always knew they would be coming back for him but, according to Gladwell, the oldest child has abandonment issues that haunted him through childhood. “He [the oldest] is 25 now and we do have a relationship with him, but the trajectory is very different than what it would have been had he been with us,” Gladwell said. “The folks who raised them, my sister and her family, that’s their family. That’s where they were raised. They have both told me separately, though, that they were treated differently than her own children. But that’s between them, those who raised them and God.”

Gladwell continued to work on herself and “get the muck” out of her life after losing her children while also working for others, determined to not let what had happened to her happen to anyone else. She immersed herself into becoming the best person she could be, working to prove to the judge that took her children away that he was wrong.

“I truly believe what happened to my family should not have been in vain,” she said. “It was the worst time in my life. I had two choices. I could have wasted myself to death, numbed myself and agreed with that judge or I could have said I am different and I will show you. It was at that crossroads I decided to be the best mom I could be even though I wasn’t going to see them. I immersed myself in becoming the best person I could be and an advocate for others.”

Since the judge’s decision that changed her life, Gladwell

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has testified before Congress four times [three times in writing], including 2004 when she spoke before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Human Resources in relation to her family’s experience with the Child Welfare System. Additionally, she addressed the federally appointed New Jersey Child Welfare Reform Panel. Gladwell also graduated from Pace University’s Law School in 2010.

Gladwell founded NJRA in 2014 and hasn’t slowed down in her attempt to provide services for everyone in need of help during their recovery period. Her latest venture is the sober-living house, which originally was supposed to be a café.

“My husband and I wanted to create the Rise Up Café, hire folks who were in early recovery and give people a safe place to congregate and socialize,” she said. “It would be a place for people to go, not just people in recovery. For some of the employees, it would give them job skills and a living wage that would allow them to move on with their lives.

“This particular house that we own, my husband and I bought it, used all of our savings with the idea of the café,” she continued. “But after spending all of our money to buy the place and rehab it, my husband suggested, ‘Why don’t we rent it out and then use that money to build the café?’ He said, ‘Why don’t we make it a sober living house for ladies?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘A house full of chicks like you.’ He was right.”

They purchased the house in 2018 and the first person moved in in 2019. Currently it has three residents who are required to get or have a job, stay sober, do community service and regularly attend meetings.

All of Gladwell’s work and endeavors are non-profit and volunteer-related. Therefore she is always looking for help or other volunteers. If you would like to help out or work with Gladwell, she can be reached at Lisagladwell@newjerseyrecoveryadvocates.org.

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