YANA (You Are Never Alone) – Nashville, Tennessee

SOB are not the most flattering initials to carry around with you for life. Not if you're an American. And especially not if you are an American woman.

Susan O. Binns was given her moniker by her mother more years ago than you would guess looking at her, and she tells the tale of her grandmother sewing the initials onto her school uniform with the obvious result that she was tormented by her peers and classmates. Whether that traumatic start, or the drunken and abusive family background that followed in childhood, Susan was well on her way into alcoholism by her early twenties when she found herself the victim of more  domestic violence, this time from her husband, while trying to bring up her family. She finally had to throw in the towel and went into rehab more than 30 years ago.

Such a background, that she recounts with openness and sardonic humour, makes her the ideal person to run YANA, which she brought into being in 1996 with the help of the Music City Recovery Resources Foundation in Nashville. Susan understands the particular pressures that women face in recovery, not least the all too common dilemma of them wanting to return to the place where the children are living, which is also where the source of the domestic violence (and often drugs/drink) is located. YANA does not accept children, because as Susan tells me, ‘‘We believe women need time to heal and will not focus on themselves if the children are with them 24 hours a day in the beginning.’’

Susan designed a programme of ongoing support and structure for the initial 6 women who moved into her first safe sober recovery house which she ran with volunteer staff; and so successful has it been that she has recently opened her fifth house and has a roll of approaching 20 women living there today.

The houses are small and made of wood and sit in a cluster close to each other and a picturesque stream in a quiet western suburb of Nashville, and there is a lovely, cosy, log cabin feel to them all. Pictures produced in art therapy are on the walls, and big bean bags sit on the floor in the therapy room where I would expect to find chairs.

YANA today demands that the women have completed a detox or primary programme in a rehab before coming to the community, and once there, they are offered bi-monthly counselling, relapse prevention and process groups, art therapy and yoga, as well as help in developing general life skills.

The primary goal of YANA is to provide a safe and substance-free living environment from which to work towards reintegration into the world of work and healthy positive relationships, and under the watchful, challenging and caring eye of this unlikely ‘mother superior’ this goal is being achieved one day at a time.