After 20 years of drug addiction, jail time, health scares, losing custody of their children, and hitting rock bottom, a married couple who met as teens embraced a brand-new challenge together: recovery. Over three years later, they’ve reclaimed their lives, reconnected with their faith, and reunified their family.
Today, Sonya and Steven Johnson, both 37, live in Sarasota, Florida, with their two sons: Nicholas, 14, and Aiden, 12, both attending a military academy. Steven is a fourth-generation plumber and Sonya works for the nonprofit National Alliance of Mental Illness’s “Parents for Parents” program, helping parents navigate custody rights and do what’s best for their kids.
However, for two decades the couple were too consumed by addiction to look far outside themselves and help others.
Talking to The Epoch Times, Sonya said that God is a true “miracle worker.”
“I’m so grateful for the opportunity to do it,” Sonya said. “I get to help parents to get their kids back. It’s yet another miracle. Because I couldn’t even be around my own kids, much less help somebody else who needs to get their kids back.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘how could I ever meet my maker one day, I’m a failure. I’m a horrible person’ ... [but] God rescued me from the darkness that I was living in.”
A Double Life
When they were 16, Steven moved from Augusta, Georgia with his mother to Sonya’s hometown of Sarasota, where they met.“His girlfriend was my friend,” Sonya said. “She and I were moving in together and we wanted to bring our boyfriends at the last minute. So literally, the day that I met my husband, we moved into our first apartment together. We moved in as friends, and we were friends for six years before we ever got together.”
Sonya describes their first apartment with its abundance of drink and drugs as “party central ... we thought we were having fun and that’s what was normal for teenagers to do,” she said. “Little did we know, we were both becoming addicts.”
In 2005, Sonya and Steven both had painful breakups and started a romantic relationship. They decided to “run away” to Georgia, where their addictions took hold. Briefly, Sonya clung to the dream of marriage and babies as a way to escape the lifestyle.
“I was going to live happily ever after,” she said. “Within about two years of us being there, I got pregnant. We had our first child in 2008. In 2009 we got married, and in 2010 we had our second-born son.”
Sonya stayed sober long enough to give birth to two healthy boys. So did Steven, who worked hard to provide for the family while Sonya became a stay-at-home mom. But Sonya hadn’t addressed the childhood trauma to which she attributes her addiction. In 2012, she returned to Florida to visit with her family and realized she was homesick. She convinced Steven to move back to Florida, where familiar habits resurfaced.
“I ran into my old drug of choice. For me, it was off to the races,” said Sonya, who was at the time working at an overnight job. I was living a double life. I was sneaking around, doing drugs on the way to work ... more drugs on the way home, then I would take the kids to school, make dinner, take care of the family, clean the house.
A Downward Spiral
Back in the throes of addiction, Sonya and Steven would “take anything,” from cocaine to crack, methamphetamine, and heroin, eventually using intravenously. In 2013, a neighbor caught Sonya using drugs while her kids were at school and called the Department of Children and Families (DCF).When a DCF representative came to Sonya’s door, Sonya confessed to her drug use and was offered a compromise: if she could pass a drug test in 45 days, they would close her case. Sonya passed the test but she didn’t stop using. Five days after her DCF case was closed, Sonya got into a drunken fight, her case was reopened, and she was issued with a compliance program. It was the beginning of a downward spiral that began with losing her kids and ended at rock bottom.
Sonya said: “I wasn’t able to comply with the substance abuse classes ... my husband was also using with me, we were both falsifying the drug tests. About six months in, in 2014, I decided that the best thing would be to send the kids to live with my mom because I didn’t want them to go into foster care ... that is where they stayed until 2020.”
Numbed by the drugs and in denial, neither Sonya nor Steven could break their habit. But in 2016, Steven had a health scare that shook his wife to the core. Steven was admitted to the hospital with endocarditis and a staph infection in his blood that had reached his heart, lungs, and kidneys. He was placed on kidney dialysis and IV antibiotics for his heart, with chest tubes placed on either side of his lungs to drain fluid.
Sonya was not allowed to visit Steven in the hospital ward because she was still in active addiction.
“I was covered in track marks. I probably looked horrible, probably hadn’t showered in a week ... I can understand now why they didn’t want me to go there,” she said. “I just remember crying and begging God to save my husband, because we really thought that he was going to die.
“The doctors didn’t really treat him like a human because he was an addict. I think they just see so much of that stuff that they just are very dismissive. It was a really hard time,” Sonya said, adding that Steven didn’t qualify for a heart valve replacement because he hadn’t been sober long enough.
‘I was Running From God’
Steven never stopped doing drugs and was arrested.“He took this thing they call Comprehensive Treatment Court down here in Sarasota,” said Sonya. “Basically it meant he could stay out of jail as long as he didn’t use. But he wasn’t able to stop.”
Steven would do the drugs when he was out of jail and then would be arrested again and eventually taken to rehab. And then he would get out of rehab again, and the cycle would continue. He was trapped in this vicious pattern for the next 18 months. During this time, Sonya and Steven were barely together, and she was buried by guilt and self-hatred for losing her kids and then her husband.
“I'd gotten to this point in my life where I felt, how am I ever going to face God one day? Everything that He’s ever given me, I have completely failed it. I failed at being a mom, I failed at being a wife, I failed at being a daughter, and I failed at being a woman,” Sonya said. “When I look back on that, that was the enemy oppressing me and making me feel like I was worthless and irredeemable. But I was redeemable.”
On Sonya’s birthday in 2018, she was arrested and charged with four felonies and a misdemeanor. She lost custody of her kids after using meth on probation and spiraled lower than ever before. Enraged at the time, she now looks back with gratitude.
“My life was unmanageable and I couldn’t stop using, even though I wanted to,” she said. “I was just in a really bad way, all this shame and guilt and condemnation. I felt like I was a horrible person and that I didn’t deserve my kids, that they would be better off without me. I was just running from myself, I was running from God.”
July 1, 2019, was the date of Sonya’s final arrest and the first day of her sobriety. Facing up to 20 years in prison, Sonya accepted a plea bargain of just 20 and a half months. She had no contact with her kids, her mother would not accept her calls, and she had no access to drugs to numb the pain. For the first time, she could not run.
Stable and Strong
Sonya had one place left to turn: the jail’s “recovery pod,” a faith-based meeting spot for healing and self-reflection. It was there that Sonya rediscovered hope.In court, Sonya prayed a prayer of surrender, recalling: “The lady in the [recovery pod] meeting the day before was in the courtroom. She got me accepted into treatment overnight. Instead of going to prison that day, I got graced an opportunity to go to treatment.”
During Sonya’s rehabilitation at a Salvation Army treatment center, Steven, also in recovery, showed up for visits with Sonya’s mom and their sons and had a heartfelt message: he wanted to be a family again.
“I wanted that more than anything in the world ... but we knew that if we were going to do that, we had to work on ourselves first,” Sonya said. “That’s really where our journey to sobriety began. I went to a halfway house because that’s what they suggested I do when I got out of treatment. My husband also went to a halfway house.
“We literally started from scratch. Fighting against the odds, we just tried to overcome our situation so that we could become stable and strong enough to bring our kids home.”
Slowly but surely, they got jobs. Sonya showed up for every probation and DCF appointment and attended parenting classes and visitations with her sons. She and Steven saved up enough money to move into an apartment together on Valentine’s Day, 2020.
God’s Perfect Timing
Once back home, the couple knew they seriously needed to rebuild their relationship with their children.“We had to prove our trust to them again. We just had to prove that we were trustable,” she said. “They didn’t know if they wanted to give us another chance in the beginning. But today, things have gotten so much better. I’m so proud of my boys.”
Today, three years and seven months sober, Sonya marvels that her husband’s clean date is just six weeks after hers. “It’s God’s perfect timing, to bring my family back together,” she said.
Sonya claims faith has always played a major role in her life. She used to sing Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” to Steven before they married, since his mother is a pastor, and his love for God is what helped cement her love for him.
Sober and stronger than ever after 14 years of marriage, Sonya and Steven have learned to lean on one another in a healthy way and communicate with love and respect. In April, they bought their first home. They go to church, they still attend recovery meetings, and they spend time together as a family.
Steven is thriving and has defied his five-year prognosis.
“He’s gonna live as long as God says he’s gonna live, because my God is a miracle worker,” Sonya said. “Now when I look back ... those prayers not only saved his life, but they saved my life too.”
“It just blew up, so I decided to keep going,” she said. “When I was in my addiction, I would sit and scroll on my phone for hours and hours and hours. Now, somebody who might be in their addiction, or a family member ... or somebody who’s new in recovery, might be scrolling on their phone in their moment of darkness.
“You’re not hopeless. You are worthy of recovery, and you might just be the one that’s going to help thousands of others turn their life around. God has a plan for your life ... All you have to do is to surrender to God, and He will show you the way.”
