NPORTC Magazine

A Place To Lay

Their Head

N nenna Ezeh started New Place of Recovery Treatment Center to offer housing and support for those recovering from addiction. She’s highly educated in addiction, but it wasn’t always so. Back home in her native country of Nigeria, Nnenna didn’t understand what it meant to be addicted

to drugs or alcohol. “It was just accepted. Everybody was doing it. I lost a lot of relatives and family members to drug and alcohol abuse.” It wasn't until she moved to the United States in 2007 that her eyes were opened to the idea of treatment. She got her bachelor’s degree in social work and became a case manager in a drug rehab program. And then she saw for herself what relapse was. She helped clients get

master’s in social work, she changed her master’s to addiction. During her internship, as she sat in group therapy, she heard their stories and wanted to help. Nnenna became an CSC-AD (Supervised Cert. Alcohol & Drug Counselor) with her Master in addiction Counseling, She is working towards getting her Ph.D. in health psychology, so she could clearly understand the disease. The day she finished her internship, she was offered a position there as an addiction counselor. Over ten years, she worked for different agencies and became a consultant, helping people to open up treatment programs and maintain COMAR regulations. She felt that care was lacking in certain centers and decided to open up a place of her own. She chose the name “New Place” because she wanted people to know there was a new place where clients would get treated with love and care.

housing and employment, only to see them return months later in the same predicament. Nnenna was worried she’d done something wrong

and asked her supervisor about it, who responded, “It’s their addiction.” At first, she didn’t understand. And then she realized it was the same pattern she’d seen back home. It came to her “like a trauma and a flashback.” Though she had planned on getting her

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