LYNN – Last month, peer recovery coach and Lynn native Latisha Goullaud was honored at the TD Garden during a Jan. 27 Boston Celtics game through the team’s Heroes Among Us Program. As she stood at center court in front of thousands, smiling and waving, she couldn’t help but think about her journey, and how she was once in the same position as many of the women she helps on a daily basis.
Goullaud grew up in a family where a number of her relatives suffered from substance use disorders. As a young teenager, it was something that she wasn’t sure how to cope with, and for the most part it was pushed under the table.
“It was very hush-hush and something we didn’t really talk about a lot,” Goullaud said. “I always had a lot of big emotions as a kid and I didn’t know how to deal with them.”
As a teenager, Goullaud started experimenting with alcohol. At first this seemed to be little more than a teenager getting herself into a bit of mischief. However, she described drinking alcohol as “coming up for a breath of fresh air” while the emotions she was dealing with were “drowning” her on a daily basis.
Though Goullaud was an excellent student, her substance abuse worsened as she went from high school to college. She had attended a small boarding school in New Hampshire, where she was introduced to worse drugs than she had previously seen. Although she was accepted to Boston College, she soon dropped out of school and completely fell into the grip of addiction.
“Next thing I knew I was homeless, I was doing anything and everything to get the next substance that I wanted,” she said. “I was doing things that I really didn’t want to be doing.”
As a homeless woman with no direction, things began to change when she became pregnant.
Goullaud had tried recovery a few times before, but nothing seemed to work. This time was different, however, as another life was now in her hands.
“That was really the first time I thought about recovery,” Goullaud said. “When I found out I was pregnant I was like ‘Oh, I have to think about recovery, it’s not just about me anymore.’”
She entered long-term rehabilitation when she was seven months into her pregnancy. However, Goullaud was hit with another reality check two days after she gave birth, when the Department of Children and Families took custody of her daughter.
“It felt like in that moment, someone had come into the room and stuck their hand physically in my chest and ripped my heart out,” she recalled.
Goullaud was beyond devastated, but all hope was not lost.
She failed to receive the proper support system to complete her recovery after giving birth, but finally found a facility that worked for her. She was reunited with her daughter six months later.
After years of battling addiction, Goullaud is now helping women who have been or are in the same position as her, and has been instrumental in helping over 80 pregnant women and mothers overcome addiction in the last four years.
She became a peer mom through a grant that the Lynn Community Health Center was hosting, which focuses on supporting pregnant, postpartum, and parenting women with a history of substance use disorder. Her role was to provide support for the women as someone with shared experience and help them find recovery pathways that worked for them as individuals. Goullaud said the grant is where she found her calling as a peer recovery coach.
“I really feel like it’s what I was meant to do,” she said. “I found myself being really passionate about anti-stigma training that we were doing in the birthing hospital and just really trying to bring the voice of the patient into the room.”
Driven by her passion, Goullaud didn’t stop at the ground level. She became involved in a number of committees centered around creating policies at the state level to assist pregnant and postpartum women. Her work inspired a trauma-informed care curriculum at Tufts School of Medicine, which she now teaches once a month.
Goullaud stressed the importance of educating students and health professionals about trauma-informed care. She said that it can go a long way when the curriculum is taught by someone who experienced substance abuse trauma.
“I tell my story, talk about how doctors can provide more trauma-informed, compassionate care for people with substance abuse disorder,” said Goullaud. “It’s been awesome to get doctors in that learning field. We’re training a whole new generation of doctors to think about substance use disorder in a different way.”
Goullaud is continuing to help women who struggle with addiction find their own path to recovery. She is also still fighting to destigmatize substance use disorder, both in general and in the medical field, through state policies.
She says her main focus is to lift up patients’ voices to make them feel heard and seen, while building better relationships with medical professionals.
“When you’re dealing with someone who is getting high in the bathroom in the hospital room right after giving birth, as a nurse you don’t understand that,” Goullaud said. “You’re like ‘Why would you ever do that?’ and to be able to be like ‘This is my lifeline, this is how I survive in the world,’ it gives them that different perspective so they’re able to approach patient care in a different way which makes for a better experience across the board, not just for the patients but for the nurses.”
“I’m really happy with the move I made, just bringing the patient voice to a new level,” she added.