Deanna Howell didn’t have great experiences with love. She lost her sister to a motorcycle accident, and her father withheld affection unless he was drunk. 

Left to her own devices, Howell found her own way to cope. “I turned to unhealthy relationships and drugs as a way to cope and perform and get acceptance and love,” she said.

As a teen, she got pregnant and started using methamphetamine, ultimately spending 18 years fighting addiction. During that time, she ended up in jail multiple times and had two more children. When she eventually lost custody of her children, she was told she would never regain it.

Howell knew she wouldn’t survive without help. She was on the waitlist for Blue Monarch, a faith-based, long-term residential recovery community for women and their children in Tennessee. But she feared she wouldn’t make it. 

Desperate, she called the nonprofit.

“I was like, ‘Please, can I share a room with somebody? My kids aren’t coming with me. If I don’t come, I’m not going to make it; I’m going to die,’” she said. “And so they made an exception. They made a way.”

At Blue Monarch, Howell found the support and love she needed to start seeing herself differently. 

“We just come in so broken,” she said. “I don’t know a word strong enough to describe how much we hate ourselves. We run from that, and we hide from that, and we do drugs. To have people that love you where you’re at and encourage you and believe in you and help you believe in yourself — they let you borrow their strength until you can find your own. It’s absolutely beautiful.”

Today, Howell is the executive director of Blue Monarch, where she helps other women find the redemption she once thought impossible. The best part? She’s reunited with her children, who now admire and respect her for the work she put into transforming her life and becoming the mother they needed.

Her message to other women: “Don’t give up before the miracle happens.” 

Substance use ends when the need for escape does

Howell’s story mirrors many others — addiction, incarceration, losing custody of her children, recovery, and relapse. But even a familiar story is deeply individual. 

“We can have 10 women walk in the door, and each one of them would have started using drugs for a different reason,” said Susan Binkley, founder of Blue Monarch. “There’s a sense of hopelessness when you treat it as a disease that can never be healed, but what we like to do is focus on what caused you to start using drugs in the first place.”

For Howell, it wasn’t just the drugs or alcohol — it was the years of unresolved trauma, her feelings of brokenness, and the belief that she didn’t deserve better. 

At first, Howell thought she would just go through another program, regain custody of her children, and return to her life. That didn’t last long. 

“I finally realized that my best choices had gotten me to lower than rock bottom,” she said. “So it was time for me to listen to other people who obviously knew better than I did.”

Blue Monarch doesn’t just focus on overcoming addiction. It views substance use in the context of the person’s life — as an individualized problem that can only be addressed when the person no longer feels they need the escape they get from substances. 

“We have a very holistic approach,” said Binkley. “We don’t just try to get people sober. We want the women who come here to find complete and total freedom from their addiction. We don’t want them to white-knuckle it for the rest of their lives. We want them to be completely free of it.”

This meant Howell had to honestly examine every area of her life: emotional struggles, boundaries, home responsibilities, time management, parenting, and relationships — with others and between herself and God.

She was building a new life with tools and a community to hold her accountable. The pivotal moment in her recovery came while praying with other women in the community. 

“I cried out one day when we were doing prayer and worship,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Lord, even if I never get my kids back, I will serve you for the rest of my life.’ It all changed in that moment because I wasn’t working towards a selfish end or goal that I thought I deserved or needed. I was working towards what was best for them and God’s perfect will. That’s when I started grabbing hold of everything they were teaching me.”

‘This is who we’re fighting for’

Howell’s parental rights had been terminated because of her repeat convictions, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever be reunited with her children.

“Every person that we talked to said there was no hope for me to get my kids back,” she said.

Binkley believed it, too, and she’d almost given up. “I was going by what I’d been told,” she said. “I’d been told by an attorney. I’d been told by a staff member that this had gone too far. ‘Her rights were terminated. We can’t do anything about this.’  I will never believe that again.” 

One day, Howell walked into Binkley’s office with photos of her children. “I just want you to know that this is who we’re fighting for,” she said. 

That moment changed everything. “It hurt me that I had not gotten in there to fight harder sooner,” said Binkley, who connected with an attorney who agreed to take on Howell’s case. 

The journey was long, beginning with limited visits with her youngest daughter. Howell persevered, however, and in the end, she was reunited with all three of her children. 

“I can honestly say that I have a deep-rooted friendship with my kids,” said Howell. “They trust me today, they rely on me, they look up to me, and they respect me. They see the hard work that I put in to change for them, and it’s changed the way that they face problems and trials and difficulties today. There’s nothing better in this world than my relationship with my kids.”

Howell’s victory has transformed Blue Monarch. Binkley said that she now believes reunification is possible. “We’ve had other women who have been in the same shoes that Deanna was in, and I don’t think we ever just give up and decide, ‘Hey, that can’t work,’” she said. “We don’t believe that anymore.” 

“We have over 350 children now who have been reunited with their mothers who had lost custody,” she continued. “There’s no way to estimate this, but I’m certain that a good portion of those would never have happened because the mother wouldn’t have had the support or the wherewithal to make that happen. It can be complicated even with our entire team on it.”

Don’t stop until the miracle happens

Binkley loves having Howell at the helm. “Not only does she understand how we operate, but she also understands the journey of the women that we serve, and she understands it in a way that I never will,” Binkley said. “She understands how they feel throughout every step of that painful journey. There’s great value to that.”