From Isolation to Overcoming: Meet Stefan

Healing is often talked about as if it’s a gentle process — kind, restorative, a welcome return to whoever you were before.

Stefan would tell you that’s not always the case. For him, healing was brutal. It was reforging, from the ground up.

When Stefan was 14, his father — the most important person in his life — died after a long fight with leukemia. Stefan was placed thousands of miles from home in the care of a family friend who was unprepared to keep up with the weight of trauma and, at 17, he entered foster care.

“So I come into Immerse, and I don’t even know what I’ve got,” recalled Stefan, 30. “I was nothing but a ball of uncontrollable emotion when I first came into the program.”

He was nowhere near ready for connection or accountability, so he moved to a “ramshackle little hut” where he isolated himself for a year in rural Arkansas. He was living on lunch meat and Kool-Aid, with very little money and no support system, hours away from Immerse.

“This was part of the plan,” he said. “I had gone out of Immerse’s range of ability to help me.”

Or so he thought.

David Neale, Stefan’s mentor at Immerse, drove six hours round-trip nearly every week just to spend a few hours with him.

“That was the long arm of Immerse still showing me that I had people who cared about me,” Stefan remembered, “despite the fact that I had cussed them out on multiple occasions, told them, ‘I don’t need you.’”

He added. “For every year you spend going through seemingly irreversible emotional trauma, you have to spend an equal amount of time healing from that trauma. That means Immerse is prepared to get you started on 10, 20 years or more of healing. Who can you say is willing to go that far to be with you for as long as it takes?”

After a while, Stefan reconnected with the program he’d tried to leave behind. At Immerse, he found tools to do the grueling work of completely rebuilding his life — a process he describes as “reforging.” 

“You want to take control of your life,” he said, “you have to start doing some hard things.”

Today, the healing continues.

“I can honestly say I owe Immerse my life, and the path I’m on is fundamentally different than how I was,” Stefan said. “I don’t feel like I’m living a heavy life anymore. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m able to perceive it.”