Joe Siess
Klamath Falls Herald and News
Paul Monteith has been through it all.
Addiction, loss, prison — you name it.
Now, he’s four years clean and sober, a college graduate, and working as a teaching assistant at Oregon Tech in Klamath Falls.
Monteith pulled himself out of his addiction and has flourished since his release from his fourth stint in the penitentiary in 2019. But instead of simply moving on, he decided to help others deal with the same struggles he went through. He wanted to give back.
That’s why he co-founded his own nonprofit peer support organization called Tayas Yawks.
Tayas Yawks means “medicine bag” in the Klamath language. It is an Indigenous, culturally-specific peer support organization that provides addiction support to anyone in the community. The program includes a number of daily activities at the organization’s headquarters, including harm reduction services and peer support assistance designed to help people battling addiction stay on track to recovery.
Alliance against addiction
Tayas Yawks, Transformations Wellness Center and KBBH are hopeful stars in a constellation of local organizations, programs and recovery services dedicated to helping people overcome addiction.
Transformations offers outpatient treatment services, opioid and residential treatment services, and like Tayas Yawks, peer support services.
BestCare Treatment Services is a statewide organization with operations in Klamath County.
Joe Allred, is the clinical supervisor for BestCare, and like many others who have made a career in the recovery world, Allred spent decades battling addiction. About 15 years ago he got sober, and began his career at the Klamath Community Treatment Center, before working his way up to his current position as the supervisor of the 56 bed residential and detox center at BestCare.
Barbara Heath is the CEO at Transformations Wellness Center, and she too went through addiction, recovered and now she has dedicated her life to offering support to others.
Motivated to change by example
Ish Shuey is a certified recovery mentor with Transformations Wellness Center, a nonprofit substance use disorder treatment center in Klamath Falls. Her job is to provide personal support to those struggling with addiction by acting as one-on-one support for people who are working to get clean and sober.
Shuey is not just some clinician in a white coat who studies addicts and addiction for a living — she has lived through many of the same experiences as those she helps. Her job is to use those experiences to guide people to a better place, both by being part of their support system and an inspiration.
Shuey has been clean and sober for about two and a half years. At one point, child welfare took her young daughter from her because she was unable to care for her.
“Towards the end, right before I got clean, I was in and out of jail. I was homeless. I had all of my stuff in a backpack going from trap house to trap house,” she said. “I knew I wanted treatment, I knew I wanted to get better, I was just stuck out there in my addiction.”
The last time she got arrested, something changed. She decided to leave her old life behind. There was more to life than her addiction, and it was up to her to find out what that was.
Related
— Cherokee Nation reaches $75M settlement with drug companies
— As COVID fueled the drug crisis, Native people hit worst
— Tribes reach $590 million opioid settlement
After her release from jail, she spent some time living with her father and staying at the Klamath Falls Gospel Mission before she discovered Tayas Yawks.
Because of her cultural background — Shuey is a citizen of the Klamath Tribes — she is more drawn to spirituality than organized religion, so she gravitated to the culturally specific spiritual approach to recovery offered by Tayas Yawks, rather than the religious orientation of the Mission.
Eventually she entered a recovery house run by Klamath Basin Behavioral Health. Once there, she saw a woman she knew from her time on the streets, Michael Mason, helping run the operation.
“Honestly if it was anybody else, I don’t know if I would have stayed,” Shuey said of Mason. “I don’t know if I would have done as well as I have.”
Shuey said seeing that Mason made it out the other side of her addiction, gave her the hope and motivation to change her own life. Mason works as a Corrections Based Community Services Transitional Housing supervisor for KBBH, which in partnership with Klamath County Community Corrections, administers recovery houses like the one Shuey stayed at.
People like Mason, and organizations like Tayas Yawks, were instrumental in keeping Shuey on track. If she felt lonely or thought she might slip back into her old ways, Tayas Yawks was there to provide support and activities for her to attend to feel connected with others and to keep her mind focused on recovery.
Today, Shuey uses some of the same tactics to help others.
With her current caseload of eight people, she makes sure to keep in touch with them as much as possible and to be available for them when they need someone to talk to. If they can’t meet at home, she’ll invite them to the park. If they can’t drive, she will pick them up or pay for bus fair. No matter what, she will be there. Walking alongside people battling addiction is the most critical way to provide support. It worked for her, and Shuey thinks it works for others.
Being told what to do to change their lives by clinicians or others who have not personally experienced addiction is a good way to lead to a setback, Shuey said. A personal connection with peers eliminates a lot of the shame many recovering addicts face.
“I knew they had been through it and they really just inspired me,” she said. “And that is what helped me the most … just that they understood and they knew me and knew exactly what I was talking about.”
Tayas Yawks
Paul Monteith, co-director of Tayas Yawks along with Tammy Anderson, started his path to recovery after his last stint in the penitentiary.
While he was in prison, his father and his little brother both passed away within a year. The pain he felt from the loss made him realize it was time for him to change his life and recommit to what was important to him.
“To heal as a people is to bring back our culture,” Monteith said. “We focus on culture, on peer support, we focus on recovery and we focus on community and family.”
Tayas Yawks is open to anybody, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who is going through recovery. The program offers people the option to participate in a number of activities such as Wellbriety meetings, drumming, beading and basket weaving. Soon the organization will offer a Klamath Language class taught virtually by a Tribal elder.
Twice a month, Tayas Yawks hosts Max’s Mission, a Medford-based nonprofit organization that provides community members suffering from addiction with needle exchange services, Narcan kits, fentanyl testing strips and other resources free of charge.
The organization’s founder, Julia Pinsky, started the organization after her son Max’s death from a heroine overdose in 2013.
Pinsky said one of the frustrating things about her son’s death was the fact that at the time Max was struggling with his addiction, medications like Naloxone — which is effective at rapidly reversing an opioid overdose — were not easy to come by. In response to Max’s death, she decided to work to provide Naloxone to others, so they might avoid losing loved ones to an opioid-induced overdose.
Finding a support network, no matter what
Bobby Black is a certified recovery mentor with Transformations. His job is to be the motivation and support for those struggling to escape addiction.
What makes people like Black so effective at their job is the fact that Bobby, like many of his colleagues in the recovery field, has been through it all. He grew up in an alcoholic family and was exposed to drugs and domestic violence at a young age.
“Basically the ingredients for a broken home,” as he described it.
Black became a father early in life and wasn’t ready for that responsibility, partly due to his alcoholism and drug addiction.
“Total self destruction,” he said of his lifestyle as a young father.
Black did manage to get clean for about a decade, but he eventually fell off the wagon and hit what he called his rock bottom: jail. The shock of being behind bars shook him out of his addiction and alcoholism and onto a path toward recovery.
“It was jail time. Jail time. I needed that slap in the face,” Black said.
Black was offered a plea deal: 15 years in prison. It was a wake up call that, if he took it, meant his children would grow up without their father.
Leading up to his trial, he spent three months in jail with that life-changing sentence hanging over his head. While inside, he resolved to change his life to be a better person for himself, and his children. If only he could get out of this, he resolved to be a changed man.
“I didn’t want to miss another minute with my kids, I already threw away enough of that time away,” Black recalled thinking.
The day before his trial, Black was offered 36 months of probation instead of his previous deal, granted he continued to hold himself accountable. And that is what he did. He took full responsibility and changed his life.
“I got to get back and get right and raise at least one kid right,” he figured.
After going through a 12-step program, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, Black turned his life around and now he is helping others do the same.
“My first meeting I walked into, I walked into a room of strangers. I was the new kid at school,” he said. “They had all of these little acronyms and ‘Keep coming back’ and all of that stuff they say. I had no idea what they were talking about. They were laughing and this and that. I was uncomfortable, man I just wanted to walk right back out.”
But Black made a decision to stay, and that uncomfortable group eventually become a big part of his recovery.
“I tell them that room of strangers saved my life,” he said.
Black recalled early on, he went to every meeting he could find. He didn’t have a car at the time, so he would walk to meetings. It didn’t matter how far away a particular meeting was, he was determined to get better. Eventually, he developed a strong network of support.
Now, as a peer specialist himself, he said the first step to recovery starts with housing. Getting off the streets and into a safe, sober environment is crucial to getting right, he said.
The next key, he said is setting up a recovery network. For Black, calling the members of his AA and NA meeting groups — each one down the line until he got an answer — provided a major pillar of support. If he started feeling like he needed help, he was bound to get a hold of someone.
Though it may have been uncomfortable, Black said, people in a recovery network are essential to staying on track. Without them, Black said, a person’s mind will wander, and you think yourself into a bad spot. The relationship goes both ways, he said. He soon found he was getting calls from others in his network who needed his help.
Another important step, Black said, is to change past associations, especially with people who are using or who are addicted themselves. Being in that environment makes it difficult to remain sober, he said.
“You’ve got to walk away from them, they’ve got to be gone,” Black said. “Just walk away from it.”
Once he gets people settled in a sober and safe environment, Black offers support through communication and connection.
“I just try to grab on to them,” he said.
Getting people to open up and have a discussion makes them feel cared for. It also helps give people back control over their lives.
“A lot of people want control. All you can control is not getting loaded, and not getting drunk, and if you need an idea of how to do that, you’ve got to talk to somebody like yourself,” Black said.
Managing the house
Sarah Covert also works for Transformations. She is a house manager at the organization’s Breaking the Cycle Recovery House.
Like her colleagues, she also has a story of addiction, hitting rock bottom and then rising up to create a life for herself and a passion to help others do the same.
Covert is from Bakersfield, Calif., and despite having a normal childhood and a private school education, she became addicted to methamphetamine as a teenager.
She used the drug on and off — holding down jobs and seemingly controlling her addiction — until she turned about 24. What was at first a once-in-a-while kind of vice, Covert’s meth habit became a natural part of every weekend.
She eventually cut it off when she became pregnant with her son, but after her son’s father began using it, it went back downhill into drug abuse. Covert’s son had to live with his grandmother, and at age 34, Covert started to have run-ins with the law.
Her moment of transformation came when she was arrested and placed in the Los Angeles County Jail — an experience she said was so terrible that it jolted her into action.
After seven or eight months behind bars, the federal government picked up her case and granted her rehab in California. She spent four months in rehab and then transitioned to a sober house in Bakersfield. Eventually, she was sentenced to one year in prison.
When she was released, she relocated to Klamath Falls. That is where things started to get better for her.
Covert was offered a job with Transformations and she moved her way up to her current position running the recovery house and offering peer support for others.
“We have our lived experience,” Covert said. “So (our job is) to help guide them and give them support in what they need and let them know they are not alone. A lot of the time they don’t have family or their family has given up, but we don’t want them to feel that way.”
