Our member Amy Heilman shares her substance abuse and spinal cord injury journey. If you find yourself struggling with any mental health issues, please reach out to our Community Supports team to be connected to resources in your area.
Since her C6-7 SCI in 2004, Amy Heilman has made her way through addiction as well as a divorce. This trying path has led her to a place where she’s been able to find moments of peace in the simple things in life, as well as develop a creative outlet through her art. A renewed connection with her religious faith has also helped her find strength and happiness.
I talked with Amy over a video call just before Thanksgiving to discuss SCI and her experiences with mental health. She wore a blue apron, presumably to protect her clothing from the paints she was working with. Behind her hung a few completed pieces: a pencil sketch, a mountain at sunset, and a painting with subtle blue gradations.
“My favorite project from class was that one,” she said, swinging the video frame around to show me a different piece. “It’s a graphite sketch of two fruits, a glass object, and a metal object. Then I decided to put sheets behind it. That was my fun playing with graphite powder.”
Not Connected at the Heart
When Amy was younger, she dealt with her emotions by keeping busy with work and school and looking for a lot of fun. “I didn’t try to connect with my family,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that I was in a healthy mindset before my accident, but I wouldn’t say I had anxiety or depression.” Amy believes she was a wild teenager who was not connected to her feelings. “I don’t know if any teenager is,” she said. “I was not a very connected-at-the-heart person.”
“I thought I was fine, but I was obsessed with my boyfriend, who lived in Reno. I would go see him all the time. I was taking meth for fun, and he was doing it so he could work a lot,” Amy said. “I guess I was getting pretty addicted to it.”
When Amy got into the car accident that left her paralyzed, she was speeding down the highway at over 100 mph, wanting to surprise her boyfriend by arriving early for a visit.
“When I got into my accident, I was exhausted and probably coming down [off of meth]. I don’t even remember the first three weeks,” she said. “The rehab I was in put me on an antidepressant right away. It was called ‘the booster’ or something. They put everyone on it when you come in because you’re obviously going through trauma. Also, the psychologist was on the schedule – everyone went to her.”
On top of the spinal cord injury, Amy acquired a traumatic brain injury that robbed her of her ability to swallow – a skill that took her a month to relearn.
Living With the Pain
Amy credits her mother for helping her come back to the world post-SCI. “When I came home, my mom kind of carried me along back into life,” she said.
After attending college, Amy worked as a speech pathologist assistant. It was during this time that she found herself falling once more into addiction, meeting up with a man who introduced her to opioids.
“I got addicted to Oxycodone, lost the job and ended up coming home,” she said. “Got off the oxy and got another job. I ended up at one point doing both meth and heroin while at my parent’s house.” Unlike taking meth pre-SCI, though, this time, she wasn’t taking the drugs simply for pleasure. “I was really doing it because of the stomach and nerve pain.”
Amy’s mother eventually helped her find a drug counseling center. However, the first addiction counselor she saw didn’t work out for her.
“He said it was OK if I used once in a while. My parents came with me to one session when he said that, and they were like, ‘OK, no, you’re not going back to that guy.’”
Challenging Her Viewpoint 
Fortunately, she did find a counselor at the center that was a good fit for her. “He gave me these two books I remember in particular: The Buddha and the Terrorist and The Four Agreements.” Both works focus on changing one’s viewpoint towards suffering and the possibility of cultivating compassion for the forces that bring it into one’s life.
“They gave me a different perspective on how to live in my body and how to accept it and live with the pain,” Amy said. There are still times, however, when she feels like it’s all too much. Again, she draws on things she learned in the counselor’s office.
“He told me that when I feel like I’m going to break and can’t handle it, to focus on something, anything around me,” Amy said, breathing deep, her voice wavering. “Like when I would feel myself start to cry, I found myself staring into the sky and saying, ‘OK, it’s pretty,’ or ‘That tree is beautiful.’ You know, cry within, focus on the beauty around me, and just breathe. I still do that. It’s like living with the pain.”
A Different Situation
Some years after attending the drug counseling center, Amy met and married her husband, Aaron [name has been changed]. When they began to experience difficulties in their relationship and decided to seek marriage counseling, they went to see the counselor who had helped Amy previously with her pain and addiction. Unfortunately, they did not experience the same support Amy had gotten when she had seen the counselor on her own.
“It was pretty ridiculous how he approached counseling and marriage,” she said. “He was like, ‘Act like dogs who are really happy to see each other when they get home.’” Amy said the counselor did teach them about a few useful things, such as love languages, but overall, both she and Aaron found the sessions to be “too goofy.”
“It was just a different situation, and I guess I had grown,” she said. “I wasn’t this fragile thing anymore. One counselor might work for one thing at one time in life, but not another – you might need different things.”
A Humbling and Challenging Experience
The second marriage counselor that Amy and Aaron saw had an inaccessible office. This resulted in an unusual solution: they met their counselor at a nearby Starbucks for their sessions. “That was hard,” Amy said. “How do you talk to a counselor when people are around?” It wasn’t as if Amy hadn’t tried to find a counselor’s office that worked – she remembers calling many places. “Placerville has a lot of inaccessible buildings.”
When Amy was asked if it was ever important to her if the mental health professionals she worked with had disabilities themselves, she had a practical answer. “Well, I think most people don’t have a physical disability like ours. So, I didn’t have hope that I would find someone who would understand. I’m already under the belief that I’m going to have to try to communicate very well – which is not easy,” she said.
“Honestly,” she continued, “I don’t know if I’d even want someone who had a disability.” Amy feels that there’s something about making a nondisabled person see things from a different perspective that she thinks can be a humbling and challenging experience for them. “I think I kind of like that.”
It’s not just humbling for the nondisabled person, though. “They can teach me how to get over myself. Which, honestly, I think is the biggest thing I am trying to learn in life,” she said. “Having the other person talk to me about how they see me, and how it’s not the way that I think they see me … I think it’s a better way of seeing how you’re perceived in the world by all these people who are walking. You can connect with a lot more people than you realize.”
Needing a Change
At one point during their marriage, both Amy and Aaron were smoking marijuana daily. “I was doing it mostly for my stomach so that I could eat,” she said. “But it was like, sure, it helps me eat, but it doesn’t really help me mentally.” She also noticed a sharp change in her husband’s personality when he smoked – a change she didn’t find enjoyable to be around. Aaron did not respond positively to Amy’s suggestion of no longer having marijuana in the house.
“He said, ‘I can’t live that way, I can’t do that lifestyle.’”
“I knew I needed a change,” Amy said. “I knew I couldn’t come home and veg out and have a high husband. So, I left that. When I moved in with my parents, I couldn’t smoke. It changed everything for me.”
Once Amy divorced her now ex-husband and started living with her parents, she began swimming and going to the gym more often. She did have a few wild times going out to the bar. But soon, she began going to church with her parents again, as she had when she was younger – a decision that proved to be transformative in ways she didn’t expect.
Falling In Love Again
For Amy, her church has become a place where she has found a safe space for herself and a way to give back to her fellow parishioners.
“I’ve started to fall in love with Adoration,” she said. Eucharistic Adoration is performed when certain Catholic churches have designated times when they put out the Eucharist (the body of Christ in the form of bread or a wafer), and the chapel is open for any parishioners to come and pray, read the Bible, or hymns, or otherwise spiritually commune with God. One parishioner volunteers to sit and be present with the Eucharist so that others may do their praying. “I’ve recently signed up to be one of the people who sits in there for an hour,” Amy said.
“I’ll sit in the chapel and say the rosary, which I’ve found to be very comforting,” she said. Amy will sometimes dedicate the rosary to her sister or mother or to someone she knows is struggling.
“I’ve found that I’m trying to pray for others more,” she said. “Focusing on others has been known to be good for you. It’s also very healing to sit in the silence.”
Every Mass is Like Therapy
“I think going to church has been very therapeutic for me,” Amy said. “I’ve been to a few churches, and each one is very different, but they all bring the same message.” She feels every mass is like a therapy session. “They talk about life and what we’re created for. I truly feel like it solidifies what I’ve been through and what I’ve felt in my life.”
“And it applies to everyone, nondisabled or disabled,” she continued. “It brings older and disabled people into mass, life, and the way you think.”
In addition to mass, at times, Amy also finds herself in the confessional or in conversations with the priest – places she feels secure talking about any issues she might have related to her disability. “I’m like, ‘I feel bad bringing my powerchair [to church] because it clicks every time I move!’ I don’t like that because it draws me out – people look,” she said.
“And the priest said, ‘Well if anybody is annoyed with it, they need to learn to be patient with people who are older or disabled. They’re in church! They need to learn to be gracious.’”
The Power of the Mind
Accepting advice from nondisabled people in her life hasn’t always been easy, though – particularly when it comes to the phrase, “Think about what you can do.”
“When I first heard that, I thought, ‘Seriously?’” Amy said. “My dad would always say ‘mind over matter,’ and that would kill me because of my nerve pain – I can’t control this at all! That one frustrated me a lot.”
Nowadays, Amy feels like since her mind has become more powerful, she’s been able to find meaning in that phrase. “I’ve done drugs, and I’ve quit drugs. I drank excessively, and then I quit that. I feel like my mind is very strong, and I’ve proven it to myself in these ways, and I’m like, Oh, I get it.”
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