Growing Up in Foster Care, Injecting Family with Drugs as a Teenager, Living in Trap Houses in High School, a DUI at 20 and More with Karissa FosterGrowing Up in Foster Care, Injecting Family with Drugs as a Teenager, Living in Trap Houses in High School, a DUI at 20 and More with Karissa Foster
Chasing Heroine: Addiction Recovery Podcast
Karissa Foster recounts her path from foster care, trap houses and teen drug use through panic attacks, a DUI and AA to long-term sobriety and parenting twin boys. Her story focuses on concrete experiences, tough choices and the gradual shift from chaos to a sober life.
1:16:13•22 Oct 2026
From Foster Care and Trap Houses to Sobriety with Karissa Foster
Episode Overview
- Foster care moves, group homes and constant upheaval can shape a deep need for control, which often shows up through early substance use.
- Alcohol and drugs may feel like the only thing that cannot be taken away, but they bring exploitation, danger and increasing self-loathing.
- Panic attacks, mental health crises and legal problems such as a DUI can act as turning points towards seeking structured help.
- Finding a sponsor who is respected and slightly intimidating, and committing to women’s meetings, can provide crucial accountability and support.
- Rigorously honest sobriety, even when it means resetting a date, can lay the foundation for long-term recovery and being present as a parent.
“"Pitiful, incomprehensible demoralisation – that is my existence."”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol after so much chaos? This episode tracks Karissa Foster’s journey from a childhood in foster care and group homes to long-term sobriety and parenting twin boys. You’ll hear how Karissa was first taken into care at nine, separated from her younger brother, and handed a black bin bag whenever she was moved on.
She describes group homes that "looked like inmates" and the feeling that everything could be taken away at any moment.
By 13, alcohol and cigarettes felt like the only thing that was truly hers: "The feeling can't be taken from me… the secret can't be taken from me." Karissa talks bluntly about being a "full-blown coke head" at 15, living in trap houses, learning scams with her dad, babysitting for a crack dealer in a motel, and later realising he was a pimp who tried to break her down and control every aspect of her life.
Her account of escaping that house, running to a payphone and calling her boyfriend is raw, but she sticks tightly to what actually happened rather than dramatising it. The episode also traces her mental health crash: daily panic attacks after heavy ecstasy use, calling an ambulance convinced she was having a heart attack, and eventually checking herself into a dual diagnosis crisis centre.
A DUI at 20 forced her towards AA, where one phrase landed hard: "Pitiful, incomprehensible demoralisation – that is my existence." Even then she kept drinking, but slowly the pull of a different life grew. Karissa explains how getting a tough, no-nonsense female sponsor, going to women’s meetings, and finally choosing a sobriety date in August 2012 allowed her to build a new life.
Now she’s a sober mum of five-year-old twin boys, with a history in behavioural health and treatment work, and a stack of lived experience that busy people in recovery might relate to. Ready to hear how someone goes from group homes and trap houses to raising kids sober – and what that might mean for your own path?
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