Warrior Stories

A NOTE FROM DAVID

FEATURED STORY

“I learned that other people could really want to help you without an ulterior motive. They can genuinely love you.”

Adrianna Pease, Warriors Center Graduate

Adrianna Pease was sitting outside a Walmart in Memphis with a backpack, four changes of clothes and some hygiene products when Kim Hartman came to pick her up. A friend had dropped her there. He had given her some money to buy what she needed, and now Adrianna was waiting for a woman she had never met to drive her to a recovery center in Helena, Arkansas.

She was scared.

On the drive, Kim played Christian music. Adrianna remembers feeling an unexpected sense of peace, but when they reached the center, sitting in the middle of nowhere, the fear came rushing back.

What have I gotten myself into?

She couldn’t stop crying. Kim didn’t tell her to stop. “You are in good hands,” she kept telling Adrianna. “It’s okay to cry.” Adrianna couldn’t have known it then, but being in good hands was going to take some getting used to. For much of her life, the hands she had reached for had either disappeared or hurt her.

Looking for Love

Adrianna grew up in southeast Kansas. Her mother spent much of Adrianna’s childhood in and out of prison. Her father largely raised her, but by the time Adrianna was in second grade, he had developed a drinking problem. There were good parts of her childhood. Her grandmother helped raise her, and Adrianna went to church with her. Her grandmother taught Sunday school. But something was missing.

“I think ultimately I was trying to find the love that I wasn’t getting from my parents,” Adrianna says. “My dad was there, but he was drunk all the time so he was absent. My mom was in prison most of the time.” At 14, Adrianna started smoking marijuana. At 16, she tried methamphetamine for the first time. By 21, she was using it regularly. Then, in 2021, her mother died from a fentanyl overdose. Adrianna was in jail.

She missed the funeral. As the oldest child, she believed she should have been there to help her family. Instead, grief mixed with anger, bitterness and guilt, and her meth use became more destructive. Eventually she was injecting it.

“It changed everything about me,” she says. “My values, morals, everything.” There were track marks from her neck to her feet. She robbed people. She sold drugs. She prostituted herself. A good job at a state hospital disappeared after she was caught with drugs and charged with intent to distribute cocaine. Then went the house, the car and nearly every meaningful relationship she had.

Eventually, Adrianna says, she wouldn’t see daylight. Her life existed almost entirely around finding meth. Sometimes she would sit in a bathroom crying because she didn’t want to keep living that way. Then she would go find more drugs. One night, Adrianna got into a man’s Tahoe after agreeing to meet him for money. A woman Adrianna considered a friend knew where she was going. Adrianna even texted her from the vehicle to say they were headed toward the river.

It was dark when they arrived. The man began beating her. He threatened to shoot her if she tried to get out, but Adrianna realized something even more frightening: if she stayed in the vehicle, she believed he was going to kill her. The back door was unlocked.

She jumped out and ran.

It was so dark she couldn’t see where she was going. She could hear traffic from the interstate, so she ran toward the sound of the cars. The man searched for her for more than an hour before Adrianna finally made it across the interstate and reached a gas station. Then she discovered that the “friend” who knew where she had gone had simply gone to a casino.

“She hadn’t given me another thought,” Adrianna remembers. For perhaps the first time, Adrianna saw clearly what those relationships actually were.

“These people were not my friends, and they didn’t care about me.” She knew something had to change. But knowing and changing turned out to be two very different things.

“You Are in Good Hands”

Adrianna kept using.

She eventually left Kansas for Tennessee, was arrested in Tipton County and extradited back to Kansas. While sitting in jail, she repeatedly heard people talking about a place called Warriors Center. She served seven months and eventually returned to Tennessee through an interstate compact. When probation wanted to inspect where she was living, Adrianna knew she had a problem.

“They can’t come see me living like this,” she remembers thinking. A neighbor with a clean and stable home offered to help. Then he told her about a place where people could spend a year rebuilding their lives.

Warriors Center.

It was the second time the name had found Adrianna. Her motives were hardly heroic. She figured she could stay for a little while, establish an acceptable address for probation and move on. Instead, she found herself sitting outside that Walmart with a backpack. Adrianna initially entered the Helena women’s center and transferred about a month later to Hardeman County.

Jodi LaRose remembers the woman who arrived there as angry, distracted and not particularly interested in completing a year-long recovery program. Adrianna was still looking for attention and validation in the wrong places. Adrianna remembers Jodi differently.

“She was really hard on me.” Jodi laughs at that characterization.

“I wouldn’t say I was hard on Adrianna. I pushed her.” Jodi saw leadership ability buried beneath the anger and insecurity. She also saw a woman who did not yet understand her own strength. For months, the pushing continued. So did Adrianna’s resistance.

The Broken Tooth

Nine or ten months into her stay, Adrianna learned that a Warriors Center work team would be traveling to California for an Oscars-related event. She desperately wanted to go. Then she was told she couldn’t because she had a broken tooth. Adrianna was furious. She had been trying to do everything right. She had stayed. She had worked. She had followed the program. Now a broken tooth was going to keep her from a trip she had been looking forward to. So Adrianna packed her bag. She was done.

Sam Gayden, then the Executive Director at Hardeman County, asked where she planned to go. Adrianna didn’t know. She figured Warriors Center could put her in a hotel, as it sometimes did when someone left. Sam’s husband, Richard, got behind the wheel. But Richard wasn’t ready to take her to the hotel. First, he told her, he needed gas. Then they started talking.

Richard told Adrianna that he normally didn’t try to talk women out of leaving. But Sam was upset. She cared about Adrianna and didn’t want to watch her throw away everything she had worked for. Sam remembers being angry herself because she thought Adrianna had been treated unfairly. Richard and Adrianna discovered they had things in common. The conversation continued. Richard offered to help her get a dental appointment. Adrianna began to calm down.

Then she agreed to go back.

A local dentist eventually fixed the tooth. To an outsider, it might look like a story about a woman nearly abandoning a year of recovery over a dental problem. To the people who knew Adrianna, something much more important happened that day. Jodi says Adrianna realized that people truly had her back and genuinely loved her. Sam saw the difference afterward.

“It was as if her heart softened,” she says. Adrianna began to understand that she did not have to control everything and started taking life’s disappointments more in stride. Adrianna describes the lesson another way.

“I learned that other people could really want to help you without an ulterior motive,” she says. “They can genuinely love you.” After a lifetime spent looking for love, Adrianna was beginning to recognize it.

What the Fight Was For

Recovery did not make Adrianna less stubborn.

Sam still describes her as strong-willed and hardheaded. She was kind and loving, Sam says, but she was also a fighter with a powerful sense of right and wrong. What changed was what Adrianna fought for. Jodi began putting her into positions of responsibility, including Bootcamp, where Adrianna could help women who were just beginning the same journey.

“I could see leadership skills within her,” Jodi says. The woman who had spent years seeking other people’s validation began discovering that she didn’t need it. Jodi watched the way Adrianna spoke change. She watched the way she treated the other women change. Adrianna noticed smaller things. She showed up on time. She held herself accountable. She didn’t explode every time something went wrong.

“I had lost all my values and morals,” she says. “Now I was finding them again.” Her faith changed too. Adrianna had grown up knowing God, but at Warriors Center she says she “really found a friend in Jesus.”

“He loved me through the most horrific time in my life,” she says. “I didn’t think it was possible to heal from the things that I had done.” The hardest person for Adrianna to forgive turned out to be herself. Then other relationships began healing. Her father came to visit at Thanksgiving and told Adrianna he was proud of her. She hadn’t heard that from him in years.

After graduation, her brother invited her to his wedding. She hadn’t seen him since before their mother’s death. He forgave Adrianna for not being there, and Adrianna says his forgiveness helped her finally forgive herself.

Her family wasn’t asking for the old Adrianna back. They were getting to know the woman she was becoming.

“We Did This”

By graduation day, Sam and Richard had moved to Texas.

They came back.

Sam had watched Adrianna fight through too much to miss the finish. “This is why we do what we do,” she says. Adrianna’s family couldn’t attend in person, but they joined by video to tell her they were proud. Women from the program surrounded her. Even men from the Memphis center came to celebrate. Adrianna looked around at what she had done.

“I did this,” she kept saying. Then she reconsidered.

“We did this,” she told God.

Adrianna receives her graduation certificate from Destiney Baskins (left), then Assistant Director, and Jodi LaRose (right), then Executive Director.

The woman who had originally planned to stay just long enough to solve a probation problem had finished the program. And she wasn’t finished.

A Normal Life

Adrianna stayed at Hardeman County for more than a year after graduation while she continued building a life outside the protection of the program. Today, she works two jobs. She works at a Warriors Center thrift store and at a local restaurant. She completed training to become a dental lab technician and is pursuing work in that field. She has a home of her own. She bought a car. Her family is back in her life.

Those are significant accomplishments for someone who once lost virtually everything she owned. But ask Adrianna what part of her life today would most surprise the woman who arrived at Warriors Center, and she doesn’t mention the house. She doesn’t mention the car. She talks about being normal.

“I can just be okay with myself,” she says. She can get up and go to work. She can arrive on time. She can pay her bills. She can live an ordinary day without needing to escape from it.

“I never thought that I would ever get back to that,” Adrianna says. “I knew that I would be stuck in addiction and in a dark place. But God set me free from all of that and has allowed me to live a happy normal life…and be okay with me.” Sam sees the same fighter she knew at Hardeman County. The fight simply has a different purpose now.

“She has channeled all of that fight and strong will toward God,” Sam says. “She is just so strong…the kind of person that you always want on your side.” Adrianna believes there is a reason she went through what she did.

“Endurance is part of my story,” she says. “Perseverance. Learning to love myself and never giving up.” Now she can pass those things to the next person. Maybe that is the final measure of how far Adrianna Pease has come. The girl who spent years looking for someone to make her feel loved became a woman who knows she is loved. The woman who once couldn’t trust the people around her became someone other women can trust.

And the woman who arrived at Warriors Center frightened, crying and carrying almost everything she owned in a backpack now knows exactly what she would say if she could sit beside that version of herself again.

“You matter,” Adrianna would tell her.

“God has some amazing things in store for you that you could never understand. You will help some people who need you.” Then she would tell her one more thing.

“Just don’t give up.”

By the Numbers

Behind every story is the daily work of recovery, accountability, and rebuilding lives across all Warriors Center locations. Bootcamp is twenty-eight days. The full program takes most residents a year.

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