Rachel Lawler grew up in a comfortable middle-class home in Cheshire, Connecticut. On the outside, Rachel's parents were successful professionals. They could afford to send her to a private school, give her violin lessons and equipment for sports. They could provide her with things that would help her thrive.

But looks can be deceiving.

Rachel said she grew up around two things that damaged her: mental illness and alcohol abuse.

By the time she graduated from college in 2008, Rachel was pulled into the grips of opioid addiction, fueled in part, she said, by years of family dysfunction. Jump to 2018 and more than 8,000 people in the state sought out recovery treatment for opioid addiction. In the past four years, that number saw a 47 percent increase according to the Vermont’s most recent data.

When the trouble started: Feeling unlovable

"There was a lot of me as a child trying to take care of the people who were my parents," Rachel said.

Among Rachel's earliest memories of her mother, Cathy, is getting tucked into bed at night, getting a hug and a kiss from her. Rachel knows her mother loved her.

As time went on, things deteriorated. Cathy increasingly suffered from paralyzing depression that she said was a result of living in a dysfunctional relationship with her husband, David.

Cathy said things got so bad that she started using alcohol to cope, just to get through the time between coming home from work and waking up the next morning to leave the house again.

Rachel remembers her mom would often just shut down. Sometimes it was Rachel trying to get her mother to bed instead of her being tucked in.

Her father David was the opposite, she said. He would get angry, yell, sometimes throwing things. He would often drink too much, Rachel said, and remembers him threatening to leave one night and then storming out of the house. She recalls wondering if he’d ever come back.

Other times, Rachel said she would leave the house with her mom to escape his alcohol-fueled rage and stay away for hours.

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Rachel's parents tried to fix things between each other. David and Cathy spent more than a decade in counseling. But they both said it just didn't work for a lot of reasons.

"It was difficult to get on the same page... difficult for all of us," David said. He acknowledged most of what Rachel describes, that sometimes he drank too much, and that the drinking turned into anger.

It had all become a vicious cycle, David getting angry, Cathy drinking to cope, making him even more angry. And the cycle went on and on, trapping Rachel in its wake.

“We didn’t do her much justice as parents as a teenager," David said.

At 10 years old, Rachel remembers first realizing how she felt, sad all the time and overwhelmed by a deep sense of dread. By the time she was a teen, Rachel had embraced a core belief: she was unloveable.

This belief was cemented by the the fact that she was adopted. Rachel's parents had brought her from South Korea when she was 4 months old. When she was old enough to understand — Rachel isn't sure when exactly — she was told that her biological mother had loved her so much, she left her.

Watching her parents fight, she sometimes wondered when they would do the same.

And for years, she buried it all deep, deep down.

The descent: Trying to erase her feelings

By the time Rachel entered St. Michael's College in Colchester in 2003, her sense of self-worth was nearly nonexistent. She was accustomed to being miserable, she welcomed it in fact. Because being that way was easy, it was familiar. But given a choice, Rachel said she would have rather felt nothing at all.

So she tried to find a way erase her feelings.

Despite being allergic to alcohol, Rachel says she started drinking. A lot. And every time, she’d get sick almost immediately. She’d barely even get "drunk" before throwing up, she remembers. But Rachel drank anyway, trying to numb her feelings. It didn't work very well.

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In 2008, a trip to the dentist introduced her to something that did: Oxycontin.

She had gotten a prescription after having her wisdom teeth pulled and knew right away that the powerful opioid pain killer was exactly what she wanted.

"It instantaneously took away all my insecurities and all of my fears and for the first time in my life made me feel OK," she said.

She remembers saving two pills from her first prescription and setting them aside to use later. That marked the first time she used opioids to get high. Her teeth no longer hurt by then, but her feelings did, feelings that had been hurting for as far back as she could remember. The pills numbed them to the core.

Rachel tried to fill another prescription with her dentist, but they wanted her to come in for a visit first. It was most likely a safety precaution to prevent patients from abusing the drug.

And it worked, Rachel didn't try to find more. Not yet.

Rock bottom: A syringe-full of heroin

That same year, Rachel graduated college and watched her friends enter careers, start families and do all the things that, for Rachel, felt daunting, even impossible. She did manage to land a job in the legal field and planned to go to law school, still playing the part of a successful person raised in a good family with everything going for her.

But that good family was falling apart.

In 2009, Cathy left David. Rachel said that, despite the fighting, the dysfunction, the pain, the idea of belonging to a family as an adopted kid was one of the few sure bets in her life. And now it wasn't.

The emptiness that had developed inside Rachel as a child was now a massive void and she had no idea how to fill it. Alcohol wasn't working. So Rachel thought back to what did work: those two pills from the dentist.

Street shopping was easy and, for months, she got what was she was looking for and slipping deeper and deeper into addiction.

"I started to have consequences," she said. Rachel's friends started to notice, people at her job too. She saw what was coming and tried to get out. She was scared.

Rachel checked herself into rehab for the first time in December of 2009 at Valley Vista, a 97-bed inpatient addiction treatment program in Bradford. She managed to stay sober for about three months, but then relapsed.

Rachel's addiction was now being reinforced by the guilt of not being able to stop, of her parents' divorce, of the feeling that her life was flying apart. Pills were becoming harder to get. The street price was getting more expensive. And so was Rachel's addiction. A single Oxy pill was costing her $80 to $100. She was getting desperate.

But then Rachel found a solution, an even more powerful and cheaper opioid: heroin.

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Whatever had survived of Rachel’s normal life outside of her alcohol and Oxy abuse quickly died by a syringe-full of heroin. Her employer, who had been understanding up to that point because of her efforts at rehab, had run out of patience. She quit rather than wait to be fired.

For the next two years, all Rachel cared about, day and night, was shooting up. Her father, despite knowing what was going on, continued to support her the only way her knew how. He paid her rent, her bills, paid for rehab and an onslaught of emergency-room and hospital bills. David estimated that he spent tens of thousands of dollars in what he characterized as a fight to keep his daughter alive. But when Rachel would ask for money, he would send it, providing her the very means by which she was slowly killing herself.

More and more, Rachel was surrounded by unsafe situations, unsafe people, all in the name of getting high.

Rachel said she was raped.

It happened more than once. Each time, Rachel defended herself in the only way she knew how. She shut down just like her mother had, she detached, turning off every sense she could in order to survive. She never called police. The addiction didn't care about being violated. It only cared about the needle in her arm.

Fighting back: Rehab, relapse, repeat

"I overdosed a few of times and ended up in the hospital," Rachel said. "By that point, I didn't think I would live past 30."

She checked herself into rehab. After a two-week stay, like many suffering from opioid addiction, she quickly relapsed. Another time, Rachel enrolled in medication assisted treatment, was prescribed Suboxone, but relapsed again.

During a brief period of sobriety, she asked her father to stop sending her money when she asked.

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She would attempt rehab over and over with roughly the same results. The onslaught of emotions when she was sober, even for a short time, was so painful that Rachel said she tried to kill herself. One way or another, she thought, it was all going to end.

Then, on the ninth attempt, it did.

Rachel Lawler marks May 4, 2012, as the day she got sober and stayed that way.

For the first time, Rachel said, she sat with her emotions and started, little by little, to work through them, gaining a small sense of peace each time.

She found a sponsor and started going to meetings. She started talking about the years of trauma growing up and, for the first time, confronted those feelings instead of numbing them with drinking or Oxy or heroin.

Her thoughts of suicide diminished.

David said that year was a really good time. Rachel came to visit and for the first time they didn't fight.

Rachel started processing a lifetime of grief, of guilt, of hating herself, blaming herself. Through that process, she started to create a positive image of herself. But those breakthroughs created something else. She became more open, and more vulnerable.

Then, she met a man.

At first, Rachel says the relationship was caring, loving, everything that was missing in her parents' marriage. That long-standing belief that she was unloveable suddenly wasn't true anymore.

They got married and had a daughter.

But Rachel started to realize that something wasn't right. What she thought had been love was twisting into something else, she said. Control, confinement, isolation, even threats.

It was her parents' relationship all over again, but now it was hers. And she was not about to relive her parents' mistakes.

The example of her mom leaving her dad gave Rachel the courage to do what she did next.

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Rachel filed for and was granted a relief from abuse order from a judge. She divorced, was awarded custody of her daughter, and in the months to come fought off her ex-husbands attempts to bring her back under his control.

For months, when Rachel would come home after picking up her daughter from school, she would make her wait outside and search their home to make sure her ex hadn't broken in and was waiting inside for her.

"I didn't want her to see him hurt me," she said.

Rachel survived her parents' relationship, survived her addiction, survived her recovery and an abusive relationship that threatened to take it all away.

She had protect herself, protected her daughter, and even re-established a relationship with her mom, who was now living in Ohio. Cathy married her high-school sweetheart, Kevin Whitby. After losing touch for more than 40 years, they reconnected and picked up right they left off, she joked.

They were all happy, and not just on the outside.

For the first time in years, Rachel started thinking about her career. But she feared that her lack of job experience or professional accomplishments, her history with addiction, with failed recovery attempts, would look less than impressive of a resume. She feared that her past would be considered a liability.

What she didn't realize was that one employer would look at her experiences with mental health challenges and addiction as an asset.

In February 2018, the Howard Center hired Rachel as a member of the Community Outreach Program.

Inspired by Burlington’s Street Outreach model, the Community Outreach Program connects people facing mental health, substance use, homelessness, or other social-service challenges with help. The program partners with police departments in South Burlington, Colchester, Williston, Winooski, Essex, and Shelburne.

Rachel works alongside officers, responding to calls when someone is suffering a mental health or addiction crisis, domestic abuse and more.

Shelburne Police Chief Aaron Noble said that, before the program, officers would go back time and time again to the same call for the same person suffering from the same problem.

"We were putting bandaids on things and that was a good as we could do," he said. "More often than not, we knew we'd be back dealing with the same people."

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Now, Rachel and other outreach staff are able to connect those same people with the services they needed and follow up with them later to make sure everything is going ok. Chief Noble says that the number of repeat calls for the same person in Shelburne has dropped significantly.

Although she continues to work on her own recovery, Rachel said she sometimes see herself in the people she helps. That, she said, reminds her that no one is alone. There's help out there.

"It feels like my way of flipping my role in the community, from being someone who was in a mode of self destruction and hurting a lot of people along the way, to trying to help others who are in a similar situation," Rachel said.

Recovery: 'Anything can be walked through in sobriety'

Looking back on it now, Rachel doesn't blame her parents for what happened. They were both fighting their own battles, she says, and that they did the best they could.

"I used that as an excuse for a very long time for the choices that I made," Rachel said of her fall into addiction. "It was much easier to blame other people rather than take responsibility for myself."

Shortly after they reconnected, her mom was diagnosed with cancer. Rachel was devastated. After everything her mom had been through, after all the things Rachel had been through, now this. It's the kind of thing that triggers relapse in some. But not for Rachel, not anymore.

"Anything can be walked through in sobriety," Rachel said, a phrase she uses frequently.

For now, Cathy is stable and said she is doing well. But there have been a lot of close calls and as painful as it is to watch, Rachel is thankful for so many things in her mom's life.

Rachel does not have a relationship with her father anymore. She said that, in many ways, David was a good dad. But he also had his own demons. After she got sober in 2012, things were good for a while, she said, but then the old patterns came back. To take care of herself, Rachel said she just couldn't be around him.

In 2013, Rachel called the police on her father. She said he was threatening to shoot himself. David disputes that. He was admitted to the hospital and called her from there, leaving her a voicemail that she provided to the Free Press:

"If you ever, ever, ever call 911 on my behalf again, I will shoot you. This is ridiculous, I am not self injurious... leave me alone, thank you very much. I do love you."

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Now, when Rachel puts her own daughter to bed, she calls on memories of her mom, remembering how she felt when she kissed her goodnight. Happy memories from before things got bad. She recreates those moments for her daughter, who frequently asks for bonus hugs at bed time, when one — or three — aren't enough.

Rachel takes comfort in the fact that her mom has found happiness.

Cathy said she is incredibly proud of her daughter and everything she has overcome. At 71 years old, David said he only has a few good years left and hopes that, maybe someday, Rachel with reconnect with him. But he knows that the scars are still there for both of them. Still, David said he has never stopped loving his daughter.

Looking at her daughter, that empty space that Rachel grew up with, the one that her addiction tried to fill, is occupied by other things now. A love for her child, for her mom and her dad too.

And maybe most important of all, a love for herself.

Contact Ryan Mercer at rmercer@freepressmedia.com or at 802-343-4169. Follow him on Twitter @ryanmercer1 and facebook.com/ryan.mercer1.