Liane Berry is a survivor in the truest sense of the word. She survived more than 30 years of drug addiction, drug dealing and smuggling, dysfunctional relationships, bouts in prison and rehab, while trying to raise a family at the same time in order to give them some semblance of a normal life.
However, Ms. Berry has risen from the ashes of drug addiction (she has been clean and sober for nearly 10 years), and is currently paying it forward. First in the role as Executive Director of LI-BER-T House, an organisation which empowers women who want to reintegrate into society by offering housing, services which help them into addiction recovery, living in sobriety and escape from the vicious cycles that go with dependence and criminality. Second, by telling her sobering, yet brave story of how she rose with her captivating memoir Seven Times Rise.
“Writing this book was very therapeutic for me. I did all of the writing and rereading of the manuscript. I wasn’t alone on the editing process but I did a lot of it myself,” she said during a recent phone interview.
Born in the Montreal suburb of Brossard and raised in NDG, Ms. Berry admitted that she always used some form of illicit drugs between the ages of 12 and 47, whether it was weed, cocaine, alcohol or crack. During that difficult period in her life, she stopped using six times, but got back into this dangerous habit six times as well, which inspired her to choose Seven Times Rise as the book’s title. “It recalls the six significant times in my life when I stopped using drugs, but didn’t stay up long enough to totally stop, signifying the seventh time I rose up from using drugs, the seventh time I stayed up,” she said. “I never tried to pinpoint why I did drugs. It was the choice I made; I chose to use. It made me feel cool and that I would fit in much easier.”
“Using all those different combinations of drugs always kept my mind altered, because before I was in high school, I couldn’t process my emotions; I never learned how to properly process them,” she added. “Also, I was in a dysfunctional family situation. Everyone has some sort of dysfunction in their lives. The only difference is how we deal with it. My defence mechanism was to hide from it. Drugs were the best way for me to deal with it, because they numbed my feelings. It not only stunted my emotional growth, but my mental health, too.”
All of the agony of her drug addiction and the heartache that went along with it (including the violent death of her oldest son Devon) is painstakingly chronicled in the book. As well, she recalls in that same painstaking detail her step-by-step road to her seventh (and final) road to recovery through the journaling she did as a patient at Sentier du Nouveau Jour, a rehab/therapy house located 90 minutes from Montreal. This is the most revelatory part of the book, as we witness her physical and emotional rise to recovery from all those years of drug addiction and the illegal means she used to obtain them. And those passages are just as brutally honest and frank as the autobiographical portion of the book.
For example, the opening paragraph from her first set of Sentier journals that she wrote in May of 2014:
“At the age of twelve I became a criminal. At nineteen, an addict. Crack cocaine was my drug of choice. I’m forty-seven now and in rehab. My third time. Three strikes and I’m out. Out of the addiction game that is. I quit. Rehab is for quitters and now I am a quitter.”
Since she completed rehab at Sentier and her book got published, Ms. Berry’s life has taken a turn for the better. She became closer with her family (especially with her brother Sean, who was a constant supporter of her throughout her rises and falls), and she is on the path to give back to her community and to addicts who want to stop using drugs. She does regular speaking engagements at schools and rehab facilities, as well as her job at LI-BER-T House.
“When I wrote Seven Times Rise, the objective was to help people who had the same problems as me through telling my story. At LI-BER-T House, that’s where the real work takes place, in which we help to alleviate poverty and homelessness in women, plus drugs and all types of addictions, by offering complete treatments that empower them and give them a sense of integrity. That’s when I am ready to go full force,” she said.
Seven Times Rise is a roller coaster ride of a memoir that’s also filled with courage, honesty and resilience about someone who lived on the edge through drug addiction, and had the gritty determination to try and rise above it … seven times. Liane Berry knows about the weakness of drug addiction, and the strength to realise that she could conquer it. If it weren’t for those seven times of rising above the ashes, she would have seen everything in her life melt away, like a small rock of crack cocaine melting in a lit pipe.
Seven Times Rise is available for purchase on Amazon. For more information about Liane Berry and LI-BER-T House, go to lianeberry.ca.
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