Player/Coach/Healer/Businessman –
March 7, 2018 – “For the past 10 years I’ve had a plan for a place like this,” he says. “I believe there is a void for anyone who is struggling, anyone who is not thriving. The center, he says, seeks to provide resources for prevention, early intervention and a post-treatment foundation to sustain a healthy lifestyle. It also offers the residents (who will stay between 30-120 days) acupuncture, massage therapy, yoga, meditation. There will be a nutritionist assigned to each person, along with a life coach, a personal trainer, and more
He long ago came to realize that one of the big questions is why? Why are you using drugs? Why are you abusing them? Why are you letting them ruin that very special thing that is your life?
But he also came to realize that “why” was one of the questions that didn’t get asked enough, as if it somehow got lost amidst all the hurt and all the pain, too often got lost in the margins.
“A large percentage of parents never ask their kids why?” Herren says.
And it isn’t just your addiction. Inevitably, it becomes your family’s addiction. Your friends’ addiction. Addiction becomes its own little virus, effecting everything around it, everybody around it.
“A lot of young adults are struggling and their parents are witnesses,” says Herren, who lives in Portsmouth. “And a lot of them don’t know what to do about it.”
It’s a world he’s traveled in for years now, since he first went into a treatment in California in his early 20s when he was playing for Fresno State.
“I couldn’t identify back then,” he says. “There was a stigma about it.”
That was two decades ago, and along the way Herren has learned that when it comes to treating drug abuse, “it’s too much about the worst day and not enough about the first day.”
He is coming up on 10 years of sobriety, 10 years of this new life of his, and he started looking for a place to start his own wellness center roughly three years ago. The plan is to start with 12 residents, with a setup that eventually can handle 22, along with a staff of roughly 10 people, plus some independent contractors. It opened this week.
