About the Creator — Toy Burks
Toy Burks
Founder & Creator, VICARIOUS™ - BEHIND CLOSED DOORS™
Toy Burks is the creator of VICARIOUS™: Domestic Violence Behind Closed Doors™ and VICARIOUS™: Recovery Behind Closed Doors™, two trauma‑informed digital simulation programs designed to deepen awareness, strengthen empathy, and support healing for individuals, groups, agencies, and educational institutions.
Toy is a survivor of domestic violence, a mother, a woman of faith, and a community engagement specialist whose lived experience has become a testimony of resilience, transformation, and divine intervention. Her ongoing journaling collection — My Survivor Journals: Man Proposes, God Disposes — My Misery, My Metamorphoses, and My Miracles — documents the emotional, spiritual, and miraculous phases of her journey.
For nearly two decades, Toy lived what appeared to be a beautiful, stable, faith‑rooted marriage. But behind closed doors, emotional abuse, manipulation, abandonment, and escalating aggression slowly dismantled the life she built. As she writes in her journals,
“My wonderful marriage became my source of grief, gloom, and despair.”
Her children witnessed the chaos. Her home became unsafe. Her mental health and faith were tested. She endured financial collapse, police involvement, restraining orders, and even wrongful incarceration — all while trying to protect her children and hold onto hope.
The Turning Point
But her story did not end in misery. It transformed.
Through divine intervention, community support, counseling, and her own courage, Toy rebuilt her life. She became a Crisis Response Team volunteer, then a Community Engagement Specialist, helping survivors navigate the same systems she once needed herself. Her lived experience became her calling.
Today, Toy uses her voice, her testimony, and her creativity to build tools that help others understand what abuse and recovery look like from the inside — not through statistics, but through lived experience.
Toy’s connection to addiction is through her lived experience as the spouse and family member of an alcoholic, who was also her domestic violence abuser. This dual‑impact experience — domestic violence combined with alcohol misuse in the home — shaped her understanding of how substance use disorders affect families, relationships, safety, and emotional wellbeing.
Professional Background in DV & Addiction Treatment
To deepen her professional knowledge and better understand the addiction‑related behaviors she witnessed in her marriage, Toy pursued specialized work in both domestic violence response and addiction treatment.
She volunteered and later worked for Womanspace (now Younity) in Lawrenceville, NJ as an Outreach and Crisis Response Team Specialist, supporting victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
She later joined Beachway NJ Mental Health and Addiction Treatment Center, serving as a Recovery Advocate, Case Manager, and Client Services Liaison Coordinator, where she gained deeper insight into how addiction impacts individuals, families, and relationships.
Toy is also a CADC Intern, actively training in addiction counseling to better understand the clinical, emotional, and behavioral dynamics of substance use disorders.
Clinical Alignment
This professional background ensures that Recovery Behind Closed Doors™ is grounded in accurate, trauma‑informed, and clinically aligned understanding — while clearly reflecting that Toy herself is not in addiction recovery.
My Survivor Journals
Man Proposes, God Disposes: My Misery, My Metamorphoses, and My Miracles
My Survivor Journals are a developing collection of reflective writings that chronicle the phases of my life that shaped me as a woman, a mother, a survivor, and ultimately, the creator of VICARIOUS™. These pages are not a published memoir — they are my ongoing journaling collection, written over years of navigating domestic violence, spiritual awakening, and divine intervention.
Each journal entry is part of a larger arc I call My Misery, My Metamorphoses, and My Miracles — three phases that reveal how God carried me through the darkest moments of my life and transformed them into purpose.
My Misery
This phase captures the years when emotional abuse, manipulation, abandonment, and escalating aggression shattered the life I once cherished. Behind closed doors, my marriage became a place of fear, confusion, and spiritual warfare.
My Metamorphoses
This phase reflects the spiritual awakening that emerged from the chaos. My despair exposed me to God’s endless love, and He began reshaping my perspective, my faith, and my understanding of myself.
My Miracles
This phase documents the divine interventions that carried me through — moments when God showed His power, His protection, and His intentionality. These miracles are the reason I began writing. They are the reason VICARIOUS™ exists.
Why VICARIOUS™ Was Created
VICARIOUS™ was born from Toy’s desire to turn her pain into purpose.
During her healing journey, Toy realized that most people — including professionals, students, advocates, and even survivors — struggle to fully grasp the emotional, psychological, and spiritual realities of domestic violence and recovery. Abuse is often invisible. Recovery is often misunderstood. And the decisions survivors must make are rarely simple.
Toy wanted to change that.
She wanted to create a safe, guided, digital experience that allows participants to “step inside the story” — to feel the weight of choices, the complexity of emotions, and the impact of trauma in a way that fosters empathy, insight, and meaningful conversation.
“The more God showed His power, the more the attacks came — but every attack revealed another miracle.”
This lived reality became the foundation for VICARIOUS™.
Core Programs Overview
Domestic Violence Behind Closed Doors™
Created to help DV agencies, shelters, universities, advocates, and community organizations understand the emotional landscape of domestic violence — not through lectures, but through immersive experience.
- Survivor-created framework
- Trauma-informed scenario branching
- Designed for institutional facilitation
Recovery Behind Closed Doors™
Created to help treatment centers, sober‑living homes, counselors, peer‑support specialists, and recovery groups understand the emotional landscape of addiction from the perspective of the family member, not the addict. This program reflects Toy’s lived experience as the spouse of an alcoholic and her professional training in addiction treatment.
- Faith-rooted recovery principles
- Daily decision & trigger mapping
- Individual & group remote access
// Universal Framework Characteristics
Survivor-Created
Built directly from firsthand lived experience.
Trauma-Informed
Safely manages psychological triggers and responses.
Faith-Rooted
Anchored in spiritual resilience and divine grace.
Educational & Experiential
Moves beyond theory into active emotional practice.
Flexible Facilitation
Optimized for group, individual, and remote settings.
Catalyst for Insight
Built to spark conversation, empathy, and healing.
Toy’s mission is simple:
To help others understand what happens behind closed doors — so they can better support those who live there.
“I created VICARIOUS™ because God turned my misery into miracles. My Survivor Journals are not just a record of what happened to me — they are a record of what God did for me. And now, I want to use my testimony to help others heal, advocate, learn, and transform. If VICARIOUS™ can open one heart, shift one perspective, or help one survivor feel seen, then every part of my journey has purpose.”
Toy Burks
Creator & Visionary, VICARIOUS™