Does Personal Growth come from Adversity? The Tyler Foster Story

What happens when silence becomes your survival strategy, but also your prison?

When I sat down with Maggie Young, Chief Recovery Officer at Liberation Programs, I expected to hear about addiction and recovery. What I didn’t expect was how her story would reveal the devastating power of enforced silence, and how breaking that silence became her pathway to freedom.

Maggie’s journey began in 1950s Alabama, where she lived with nine family members crammed into one bedroom of a tin-roof hut. As a five-year-old, she’d lie awake listening to the Ku Klux Klan ride through their neighborhood. “I could hear the horses and I could hear them kind of just galloping through. And the sound that I would hear would be throw throw. And those were the times that they would then throw flames,” she told me. But the rule was clear: children were to be seen and not heard. No questions allowed.

This culture of silence would follow Maggie through sexual trauma at age five, the culture shock of moving to Connecticut at ten, and years of feeling like she was watching other people live life while she remained on the outside looking in.

The Radio Station That Became Her Gateway

After college, Maggie landed what seemed like a dream job at a local radio station. But it became something far more dangerous, the perfect breeding ground for her addiction. “I would go to work and, you know, I would drink with the salesman and then with the newsman, and we would do cocaine and then like, you know, with the program manager like we were I had this relationship with everyone who actually was there,” she explained.

What started as shots of alcohol to feel that warmth in her body, that moment where she could express herself “without any concern for anyone”, quickly escalated to freebase cocaine. The substance that would chase her for the next fifteen years of her life, in and out of jails and prisons.

The tragic irony? Maggie rationalized her drug use because she was still functioning. She graduated college, held jobs, and convinced herself she wouldn’t become like the people she’d seen “sleeping standing up” on street corners as a child in Connecticut. But functioning addiction is still addiction, and eventually, the bottom fell out.

From Rock Bottom to the Red Stairs

Maggie’s turning point came not from hitting rock bottom, she’d been there multiple times. It came from an unexpected source: her public defender, who after representing her year after year, finally said something different. “You deserve better,” the lawyer told her. Those three words planted a seed that would eventually bloom into recovery.

When Maggie finally walked into Liberation Programs, she wasn’t there to get clean. She was there to shorten the trip back to using after her inevitable return to prison. But standing at the bottom of those steep red stairs, with a counselor at the top saying “welcome to life,” something shifted. “If I go up these stairs, I’m not going to be able to come back down,” she thought to herself.

She was right, but not in the way she expected.

The Voice She Never Had

Today, thirty-three years clean (we recorded this interview on her sobriety anniversary), Maggie works at the same facility where she once sought treatment. Her mission is clear: give voice to those who’ve been silenced. Whether it’s children experiencing trauma or adults struggling with addiction, she’s determined that others won’t have to carry secrets the way she did.

“During treatment, I had thought to myself… I kind of want to do what she’s doing, but I think I would rather work with women or maybe I want to work with kids. So that a child me, fucking my five year old would have someone so they can have a voice so they could start to have something to say so that they could use their voice,” she shared.

It’s the ultimate full circle, from a child forced into silence by circumstances and trauma, to a woman whose voice now helps others break free from their own prisons of secrecy and shame.