Ashley York: From Rockbottom to Your Worth
In Rabun County, addiction has a familiar face. Ashley York knows what it can take from a person, what it asks of a family, and what becomes possible when a community makes room for recovery.
There is a particular kind of fear that comes with loving someone who is using drugs. A phone rings late at night. They promise they are done, and you want to believe them. Then money goes missing, another call comes from jail, or days pass without word. You begin to dread the news while hoping each morning might be the one when things change.
In a small community, that struggle can feel especially lonely. People know one another. They also know how quickly a story travels. A family may keep quiet because they are ashamed or because they want to protect someone they love. The person using may be hiding just as much—from neighbors, from family, and eventually from themselves.
This is part of life in Northeast Georgia, too. In 2023, Georgia’s North Health District Opioid Overdose Report, which includes Rabun and 12 other counties, recorded 123 opioid-involved overdose deaths among its residents and 454 emergency department visits for opioid-involved overdoses. Those figures measure overdoses involving opioids; they do not count every person living with drug addiction, every other kind of substance use, or every family affected.
Ashley York knows the distance between a statistic and a life.
Before drugs, she was a girl growing up with pain she did not know how to name. Both of her parents struggled with addiction. She remembers love in their home, but also dysfunction and childhood trauma. As she grew older, she carried insecurity, difficult relationships and a need to feel accepted.
“I never felt good enough,” she says. “I never felt chosen.”
Ashley believes those wounds mattered long before she first used a drug. Substances gave her temporary relief from feelings she could not manage. Then the relief became something she felt she could not live without.
“What felt like an escape became a prison,” she says.
It is tempting to imagine addiction as a series of choices that would be easy to reverse if a person simply understood the cost.
Ashley understood the cost. She watched consequences gather and told herself she would put her life back together tomorrow.
“Tomorrow keeps moving.”
She went in and out of jail. She stole, sold drugs, lied and put herself in dangerous situations. People who loved her watched her become someone they hardly recognized. Some had to step back because loving Ashley could not mean protecting her from every consequence.
The most painful loss involved her children. When Ashley could no longer provide the care they needed, they were adopted. She believed she was doing what she could to keep them safe. Losing everyday life with them broke her heart, and instead of reaching for help, she used more to escape the pain. For families living through addiction, this is where love can become almost unbearable. They see the person they know beneath the behavior. They also live with the harm the behavior causes. They may set a boundary and spend the night wondering whether they should have done more.
Ashley understands those boundaries now. She also knows that shame alone did not make her well.
ONE DECISION, THEN ANOTHER
Ashley’s sobriety date is December 3, 2015. Before then, she knew she needed to change. What changed was her willingness to accept help, tell the truth about her life, and take responsibility for what she had done.
Getting sober did not return her children’s lost years or immediately repair trust. Saying “I’m sorry” could not undo years of hurt. She had to learn how to live differently and keep showing, through her actions, that she meant to.
At first, she could not picture the future. She could make the next right decision. Then another. Recovery grew through thousands of those decisions.
When Ashley returned to Rabun County in 2016, she thought about the help she had needed during her 12 years of addiction here. She wanted people in her hometown to have a place to turn. Her father, Joel Winchester, founded Freedom Ministries Lighthouse, which began with a Saturday night ministry and later grew into a residential recovery ministry for men. Ashley volunteered for four years before becoming paid staff.
As she worked beside people in recovery, she learned that care requires patience, structure, and accountability. She also studied addiction, earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a specialization in addictions and recovery and becoming a Certified Addiction Counselor Level II. She brought both her education and her own experience to the work.
In 2024, Women of Worth Recovery opened. It is a structured, long-term residential program for women, built around far more than stopping drug use. Women work on life skills, employment, relationships, boundaries, faith, and the daily responsibilities of rebuilding a life.
Ashley knows that a woman walking through its doors may believe her mistakes are all anyone will ever see. Ashley once feared the same thing.
“I don’t judge her by the condition she is in when she arrives,” she says. “Someone once saw more in me than what my circumstances showed.”
A WAY FORWARD, CLOSE TO HOME
Ashley wants families to know they can love someone without funding their drug use, hiding their behavior, or rescuing them from every consequence. They can hold a boundary and still help that person find recovery when they are ready to take a step toward it.
She wants the rest of us to consider what happens after that first step. A person working to rebuild may need treatment, a stable place to live, a job, and people willing to let trust grow over time. An employer can expect the same reliability and effort from a person in recovery as from anyone else—and give them the chance to demonstrate it.
None of this makes the harm of addiction disappear. Ashley lives with the knowledge of what happened to her children, her family, and herself. But she is also living proof that a person’s worst years do not have to be their last chapter. In the community where she once struggled to find help, she now opens a door for women who remind her of who she was. On the other side of that door is work, accountability, and the possibility of a life they may no longer believe they deserve.
Someone believed change was possible for Ashley. Now she asks Rabun County to believe it can be possible for the people we know.
A Place to Remember Your Worth and a Place You Can Turn to for Help.
THE CALL SHE COULDN’T IGNORE
After 12 years of addiction in Rabun County, Ashley York recognized her own pain in women seeking recovery at Freedom Ministries Lighthouse. Beyond addiction, they carried trauma, broken relationships, and shame. She wanted a place where they could rebuild their lives.
At church, a man told Ashley she would one day lead a women’s recovery home—words that felt like a glimpse of a future she couldn’t yet see. Three weeks later, Clayton Rotary called, offering to help fund one. To Ashley, it was a sign. That calling became Women of Worth Recovery
MORE THAN SOBRIETY
The name speaks to what Ashley believes addiction can take from a woman: the ability to see herself as someone worth saving. Women may arrive believing their mistakes define them—as mothers, daughters, partners, and people. Ashley knows recovery requires taking responsibility for the harm caused. She also wants women to understand that neither their actions nor the harm done to them erases their worth.
Women of Worth is a structured, long-term, Christ-centered residential recovery program. Its work includes accountability, employment, life skills, healthy relationships, boundaries, faith, and the daily responsibilities of rebuilding a life. For Ashley, this work is deeply personal. She is helping create the support she once needed in the community where she struggled.
A community can be part of that work, too. Contact Women of Worth to ask about current needs, ways to contribute, and opportunities to support women rebuilding their lives.
WOMEN OF WORTH RECOVERY
706-782-9761
5989 US Highway 441 North, Tiger, GA 30552
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