Carlton Hill felt something break inside him when he stood in front of the congregation of his Washington, D.C., church and confessed his addiction to cocaine and alcohol. Adding to his shame, he and his wife Saundra were both ministers in the church.

“When the church rejected me, I figured that God had rejected me, and if God rejects me, everybody rejects me,” Hill said. That sense of rejection was intensified by childhood trauma, and his pain drove him to the streets, where he stayed because he felt he deserved to be there.

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