Brunner tells Ozarks at Large's Daniel Carruth that decoupling religion from recovery can be a lifeline for many people struggling with addiction.

Yeah, so it's super common where people with religious trauma or people that just want a more science-based approach to addiction and recovery, they walk into a 12-step meeting and they see the word God all over the wall and they're in a church and they're like, well, this isn't for me.

And then they go back out into the world and there's nothing else except the arms of their drug dealer or the open doors of the liquor store.

So it just became so apparent to me that something else needed to happen.

And so we especially serve all of these forgotten people, these historically marginalized populations, like there's a lot of religious trauma within the LGBT community, which I'm a part of and which we welcome with open arms.

There's not a lot of focus on taking care of people with disabilities and honoring their unique needs.

So we have a lot of folks, including myself, that are neurodivergent that feel much more comfortable within our program.

From your perspective on the recovery side, have you seen it change? Have you seen people's perspectives and understandings and even stigma around it change? And maybe what more needs to happen?

I know this isn't really the place for these kinds of posts, but I feel like many people in this community have been in similar situations."

Yeah.

This one, when I first read it, I mean, my heart sunk because I, in my life, have had so many close experiences with suicide.

In my life personally, I was involuntarily hospitalized because of plans to commit suicide, and it's something that, in the worst days of my addiction, I thought about a lot because it seemed like the only solution, 'cause I thought I'd tried everything else.

And it felt like shit to be involuntarily hospitalized, but it also saved my life.

And then later, like as I worked on the ambulance as an EMT, I had to talk to a ton of people that were feeling suicidal, and I had experiences where we had people that had already done it, and I had to talk to their families.

And I've had loved ones, close friends that have also killed themselves.

You know what? I'll let you respond to that before I get to the last two.

So how, so what did you do with the pounds?

We, like...

We were trying to figure out, like, vacuum sealing them so they wouldn't smell or whatever, so we vacuum sealed them a bunch, and then we're like, "Where do we put them?" Like, I had this $500 Honda Civic that looked like a fucking tweaker mobile, and I got pulled over all the time.

And I'm like, "Where the fuck are we gonna put these?" So we literally got, like, a contractor bag that had a bunch of disgusting trash in it, and we hid them in the, like, nasty, disgusting trash in a contractor bag in the trunk.

And we're like, "Well, if we get pulled over and they search, like, they're not gonna wanna, like, look through a stinky trash bag," and that was our logic.

But the person I was dating at the time was a weed addict, and I was like, "Can you not smoke weed for, like, the drive home?" And he was like, "No, I have to." So we're, like, pulling over, like, to the, like, off roads or whatever so he can get out of the car and walk into the woods and go, like, get stoned 'cause he fucking has to or whatever.

And I'm like, "Oh my God, if we ever get pulled over, like, it's gonna smell, and they're gonna search us." You know what I mean? But luckily we didn't fucking get pulled over the whole time.

We'd have to smoke crack behind the Bacardi, behind the Bacardi sign.