Ananda entered recovery via Al-Anon after wanting to end her own life.   Growing up in a home with alcoholic and drug-addicted parents, Ananda believes her  “hippies” parents intended to love her but really couldn’t deliver on that parental promise.  They often left her alone in her crib as they smoked marijuana with their friends in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Fransisco.  Both of Ananda’s parents would later become cocaine users and eventually dealers, using an eight-year-old Ananda to traffic the drugs.  Following her parents’ divorce, Ananda’s mother married a man who would sexually abuse her, and her mother would often be too high to care.