"This Ends With Me": A Counselor Wrote the Essay Her Own Field Doesn't Usually Publish

Shameka Coleman is a counselor educator at Winthrop University. She is also, by her own telling, the child who grew up watching addiction cycle through her family, learning to read a room for instability before she had a word for what she was doing. In a personal essay published this month in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment, she names the moment that changed the pattern with four words: “This ends with me.”

If you’ve ever watched addiction move through your own family and quietly decided you’d be the one to interrupt it, you already know that sentence isn’t a slogan — it’s a decision made once, and then remade constantly, for years.

Coleman didn’t stop at the essay. She turned the same lived material into something a clinician can actually use: a counseling framework she calls the Coleman Compass, built around five things — safety, dignity, choice, stability, meaning — and explicitly built to affirm medication-assisted treatment rather than treat it as a lesser form of recovery. Her argument, made through her own story rather than around it, is that lived experience and clinical training aren’t supposed to stay in separate rooms; the best counseling happens when they inform each other.

A separate study published in June gives Coleman’s essay a mechanism, in plain science: researchers tracked 36 people with substance use disorders three times a day for two weeks, texting them in the moment rather than asking them to remember later. Craving fully explained the link between mood and use — bad moments raised craving, which raised use; good moments lowered craving, which lowered use. Craving wasn’t a symptom sitting next to the real mechanism. It was the mechanism. The researchers’ conclusion was practical, not abstract: real-time tools that catch craving in the moment it’s rising, before the choice gets made, are a more promising place to intervene than trying to manage mood in general.

Put those two pieces of evidence next to each other and they say the same thing from two different directions. Coleman’s five-part compass — safety, dignity, choice, stability, meaning — isn’t a soft alternative to the craving science. It’s a description, in a counselor’s own words, of what has to be in place before the craving hits, so the moment the data shows is decisive doesn’t have to be fought alone. “This ends with me” was never about willpower in the instant. It was about building the circle around the instant, long before it arrives.