Sharon knows this truth better than anyone does: healing never happens in isolation.

Healing happened for Sharon through expressive art therapy. She learned to express with paint and clay a truth too bitter for words. Guided by C4 art therapists, Sharon began to expose the pain of her childhood incest. And she began to heal.

For more than ten years, Sharon participated in art therapy programs, directed by C4 staff who helped her explore new mediums as she dug deeper into a painful past.

It’s the simple things in life that count most. For Jim, it was hugging his six-year-old son at his family reunion, his first in 20 years.

His drug addiction had put Jim on the streets and into the state penitentiary. For almost two decades, Jim’s life had been a relentless cycle of homelessness, treatment, recovery, and then return to using.

Sometimes healing comes wrapped in a few threads of yarn.

While hiking the Appalachian Trail as a teen-ager, Linda and three friends was viciously gang raped, beaten, and left for dead. After the horrific attack, it was the silence that brutalized her the most.

“Our testimony was on the front page every day, yet no one acknowledged that it happened,” recalls Linda. “The silence said, ‘You don’t matter.’”

When Ed finally visited with his eight-year-old daughter at McDonalds, it was bittersweet.

After several years of court battles, he had finally obtained visitation rights to see the brown-eyed girl he had not laid eyes on since she was a newborn.

“It was very hard not to run over and hold her in a big bear hug,” recalls Ed, “but I didn’t want to overwhelm her. “ Instead, the 34-year-old father took the advice of other parents and coordinator at a C4 parenting class he had just enrolled in. He simply looked at his beautiful daughter and said hello.