A voice in the dark: From the wreckage of his life as an addict, Thuan Nguyen found a way to heal others

Thuan Nguyen Photo courtesy Mountainside
Thuan Nguyen, the wellness manager at addiction treatment center Mountainside in North Canaan, has remarked that an addict’s journey from a life of addiction to a life of service and spiritual fulfillment is a testament to the transformative power of the human spirit.
Nguyen created Mountainside’s signature Spirituality in Recovery curriculum, which many of the treatment center’s alumni have said helped them begin their own journeys to the peace of mind and self-knowledge necessary for sober living.
Nguyen’s own life began in tumult. Born in South Vietnam during the war, he was just 11 months old when his father, a pilot for the South Vietnamese air force, received word that Saigon was on the brink of falling.
Nguyen’s mother fled via motorcycle with her four children and “just the clothes on their back,” said Nguyen. The men were destined for mainland Thailand, but in a desperate bid to be with his family, Nguyen’s father and a friend stole a plane off the air force base and deserted. Reunited, the family ended up in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania, received sponsorship from a church in Pleasantville, New York, and finally came to settle in Westchester County.
“I’ve been told that I thrash at night sometimes, so I think it’s still in my body somewhere,” Nguyen confided. “I probably have some trauma from it, but I don’t know consciously.”
Struggling against social anxiety, Nguyen began drinking in high school. “I’d been so anxious, and I used it as a tool,” he said. “I wanted to fit in. I was an introvert. I was really shy. But when I drank, it was like, ‘OK. Now I can be like everybody else.’ And I wanted to be like everybody else.”
In sobriety, Nguyen has come to realize that at the time, he simply didn’t like who he was, and alcohol offered him the illusion of transformation.
Asked if alcohol eventually “stopped working,” as many alcoholics report, Nguyen laughed: “I don’t think it ever stopped working. It was the crystal meth that took me down.”
A driven and successful student, Nguyen went from high school to Vassar College to Cornell University into a successful professional life in New York. One night out at a club with colleagues, a work friend’s dealer offered him crystal meth. “The sense of euphoria was unbelievable,” said Nguyen. “Crystal meth made me feel like Superman. I felt like I could do anything I wanted.”
And for a time, he was indeed Superman. In a turn of events that many people with addiction experience, promotions and raises flowed.
“I thought, ‘No one needs to know as long as I can control it,’” he said. “I controlled it for a good three years, and then the last year was just horrendous. I was doing it at work, around the clock. I thought people didn’t know, but people knew.”
He was fired. “I couldn’t stop,” he explained. “I kept telling myself I’d stop if my partying life got in the way of my professional life, but when it actually happened, I was like, ‘Well, I can’t stop now.’”
He moved to Seattle, hoping that, in a more relaxed life, he would be able to stop drinking and using drugs. But he couldn’t.
In the throes of his addiction, convinced he would die, with the police showing up at his door, no job, and the threat of homelessness looming, Nguyen finally checked in to High Watch, a 12 step-based treatment program in Kent.
I remember walking into the dining hall and seeing the 12 steps on the wall and thinking, ‘Oh god. I’m in one of those places. How did I get here?’” Nguyen decided he’d get through the 21-day program, get his family off his back, and get back to his life.
“That was the plan,” Ngyuyen explained, “Until I realized I couldn’t live without drugs and alcohol.”
One night at High Watch, a blizzard came through the area. The campus was covered in crystal rock salt to prevent slipping. Alone in his dorm room, Nguyen mistook a chunk of rock salt for crystal meth and thought this must have been a test of the program.
It was then that he realized, “‘I am obsessed. When I’m not doing drugs, I’m thinking about doing drugs.’”
This total acceptance is what people in recovery sometimes describe as “surrender”—and for Nguyen, it enabled him to commit to his recovery and to Alcoholics Anonymous. He found himself surrounded by a community of people who were spiritual and peaceful, and he shared, “I wanted what they had.”
Three years since he had last held a job, Nguyen left rehab and secured a position in housekeeping at High Watch.
“I couldn’t exactly pick and choose,” he said of his then-new position. “It taught me humility.” He told himself, “‘I’m just like everyone else here. I’m just gonna do my job and be okay with that.’”
Through his work at High Watch, he became a 12-step coach. Fueled by a deepening connection to spirituality through meditation and yoga, Nguyen became a certified yoga and reiki teacher, in Yoga of the 12 Steps, and special training in qigong.
This path eventually led him to Mountainside, where he could explore an array of healing modalities. Here, he revels in the opportunity to share his journey and the wisdom he’s gathered with clients.
“I think self-love is the holy grail of the entire program. Because if you can learn to love yourself, you will never do anything to harm yourself,” said Nguyen. He said that working at Mountainside helps to keep him sober day to day, and to find immense gratitude for his journey.
“Most of it is knowing how hard it is to get sober, how painful the beginning is and getting to be a voice for people because there were voices of hope for me,” he said. “I want to be around to help somebody when they finally say, ‘OK, I’m done. Now what do I do?’ and to be one of those people that gets to help.”
SHARON — Sharon Dennis Rosen, 83, died on Aug. 8, 2025, in New York City.
Born and raised in Sharon, Connecticut, she grew up on her parents’ farm and attended Sharon Center School and Housatonic Valley Regional High School. She went on to study at Skidmore College before moving to New York City, where she married Dr. Harvey Rosen and together they raised two children.
Sharon’s lifelong love of learning and the arts shaped both her work and her passions. For decades, she served as a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History and the Asia Society, sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm with countless visitors. She also delighted in traveling widely, immersing herself in other cultures, and especially treasured time spent visiting her daughter and grandsons in Europe and Africa.
She was also deeply connected to her hometown, where in retirement she spent half her time and had many friends. She served as President of the Sharon East Side Cemetery until the time of her death, where generations of her family are buried and where she will also be laid to rest.
She is survived by her husband, Harvey; her children, Jennifer and Marc; and four beloved grandchildren.
Claire and Garland Jeffreys in the film “The King of In Between.”
There is a scene in “The King of In Between,” a documentary about musician Garland Jeffreys, that shows his name as the answer to a question on the TV show “Jeopardy!”
“This moment was the film in a nutshell,” said Claire Jeffreys, the film’s producer and director, and Garland’s wife of 40 years. “Nobody knows the answer,” she continued. “So, you’re cool enough to be a Jeopardy question, but you’re still obscure enough that not one of the contestants even had a glimmer of the answer.”
Garland Jeffreys never quite became a household name, but he carved out a singular place in American music by refusing to fit neatly into any category. A biracial New Yorker blending rock, reggae, soul and R&B, he used genre fusion as a kind of rebellion — against industry pigeonholes, racial boundaries and the musical status quo. Albums like “Ghost Writer” (1977) captured the tension of a post–civil rights America, while songs like “Wild in the Streets” made him an underground prophet of urban unrest. He moved alongside artists like Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen but always in his own lane — part poet, part agitator, part bridge between cultures.
“I think what I tried to do with the film, wittingly or unwittingly, was just to show that we all have these lives and they don’t often meet our dreams of what we think we’re entitled to, we’re talented enough to get or whatever,” said Claire. “We all have these goals, but we’re sort of stymied. Often, it’s partly circumstance and luck, but it’s also very often something that we’re doing or not doing that’s impeding us.”
This is not the typical rock-and-roll redemption story. There are no smashed guitars, no heroic overdoses, no dramatic comeback tour. What we get instead is something quieter and more intimate: hours of archival footage that Claire spent years sorting through. The sheer effort behind the film is palpable — so much so that, as she admitted with a laugh, it cured her of any future ambitions in filmmaking.
“What I learned with this project was A, I’m never doing it again. It was just so hard. And B, you know, you can do anything if you collaborate with people that know what they’re doing.”
Claire worked with the editing team of Evan M. Johnson and Ben Sozanski and a slew of talented producers, and ended up with a truthful portrayal — a beautiful living document for Garland’s legions of fans and, perhaps most importantly, for the couple’s daughter, Savannah.
“She’s been in the audience with me maybe three or four times,” said Claire. “The last time, I could tell that she was beginning to feel very proud of the effort that went into it and also of being a part of it.”
Savannah pursued a career in music for a while herself but has changed tracks and become a video producer.
“I think she couldn’t quite see music happening for herself,” said Claire. “She was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to struggle the way I saw my dad struggling and I’m going to get a job with a salary.’”
The film doesn’t just track the arc of an underappreciated musician, however. The music, always playing, is the soundtrack of a life — of a man navigating racial, musical and personal boundaries while balancing marriage, parenthood, aging, addiction andrecovery. Garland and Claire speak plainly about getting sober in the film, a life choice that gave them both clarity and shows Claire as a co-conspirator in his survival.
“I did some work early on with a director,” said Claire. “He wanted the final cut, and I didn’t feel like I could do that — not because I wanted so much to control the story, but I didn’t want the story to be about Alzheimer’s.”
Diagnosed in 2017, Garland, now 81, is in the late stages of the disease. Claire serves as his primary caregiver. The film quietly acknowledges his diagnosis, but it doesn’t dwell — a restraint that feels intentional. Garland spent a career refusing to be reduced: not to one sound, one race or one scene. And so the documentary grants him that same dignity in aging. His memory may be slipping, but the film resists easy sentimentality. Instead, it shows what remains — his humor, his voice, his marriage, the echo of a life lived on the edges of fame and at the center of his own convictions.
The Moviehouse in Millerton will be screening “The King of In Between” on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. Peter Aaron, arts editor of Chronogram Magazine will conduct a talkback and Q&A with Claire Jeffreys after the film. Purchase tickets at themoviehouse.net.
The Haystack Book Festival, a program of the Norfolk Hub, brings renowned writers and thinkers to Norfolk for conversation. Celebrating its fifth season this fall, the festival will gather 18 writers for discussions at the Norfolk Library on Sept. 20 and Oct. 3 through 5.
Jerome A. Cohen, author of the memoir “Eastward, Westward: A Lifein Law.”Haystack Book Festival
For example, “Never Take the Rule of Law for Granted: China and the Dissident,” will be held Saturday, Sept. 20, at 4 p.m. at the Norfolk Library. It brings together Jerome A. Cohen, author of “Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law,” and Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong King’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic” in dialogue with journalist Richard Hornik to discuss the rule of law and China.
The Council on Foreign Relations stated, “Few Americans have done more than Jerome A. Cohen to advance the rule of law in East Asia. He established the study of Chinese law in the United States. An advocate for human rights, Cohen has been a scholar, teacher, lawyer, and activist for sixty years.”
Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law and director of its U.S.-Asia Law Institute, revealed his long view on China: “We are now witnessing another extreme in the pendulum’s swing toward repression. Xi Jinping is likely to outlive me but ‘no life lives forever.’ There will eventually be another profound reaction to the current totalitarian era.”
Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”Haystack Book Festival
In “The Troublemaker,” Clifford chronicles Lai’s life from child refugee to pro-democracy billionaire to his current imprisonment by the Chinese Communist Party. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. He was the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Standard (Hong Kong and Seoul).
Journalist Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.Haystack Book Festival
Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center, will moderate the discussion. Hornik is the former executive editor of AsiaWeek, news service director of Time magazine, and former Time bureau chief in Warsaw, Boston, Beijing and Hong Kong.
Betsy Lerner, author of “Shred Sisters,” is giving the 2025 Brendan Gill lecture at the Haystack Book Festival.Haystack Book Festival
The Brendan Gill Lecture is a highlight of the festival honoring longtime Norfolk resident Brendan Gill, who died in1997. Gill wrote for The New Yorker magazine for fifty years. Betsy Lerner, New York Times-recognized author of “Shred Sisters,” will deliver this year’s lecture on Friday, Oct. 3, at 6 p.m. at the Norfolk Library.
Visit haystackbookfestival.org to register. Admission is free.