I told her later that it broke my heart to hear her talk about herself in this way. You may have done bad things when you were addicted, I said—we have all done bad things, by the way, whether we had an addiction or not—but that was because you were in terrible pain, and you deserved love then, and you deserve love now. I also implored her to not communicate the notion that addiction makes you “evil” to the very vulnerable people coming to her for help.
