The specific institutional context of Trejo’s recovery from addiction is worth examining in some detail, because it is different from the recovery story that the culture has developed standard narrative templates for.
His recovery began inside the California prison system, through exposure to 12-step programming. The 12-step approach — developed by Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s and adapted for substance addiction in various forms — was present in California prisons in the 1960s as part of the rehabilitation programming that the system, at that historical moment, was attempting to provide. Trejo encountered it in this institutional context, not through the more common contemporary pathway of a treatment facility or a community support group entered from civilian life.
The 12-step framework is built around a specific set of ideas about recovery: that addiction involves a loss of control that cannot be corrected through willpower alone, that recovery requires acknowledgment of the problem and commitment to change, that sustained recovery is supported by community and ongoing practice rather than achieved once and maintained automatically, and that the act of helping others in recovery is itself a component of maintaining one’s own recovery.
This last element — the helping of others as a component of personal recovery — is the direct theoretical link between the 12-step framework Trejo encountered in prison and the community service work he has maintained for more than five decades. When he says that “everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else,” he is not simply offering a general philosophical observation. He is describing the specific mechanism of his recovery as he understands it: the helping is not an optional addition to the recovery, it is constitutive of it.