Two Sugars Please

In the past few years I have received several phone calls from many areas of South Africa, people asking the same question: “How do we begin with starting a rehab programme”? Intially I have to try and dissuade them, to see if they are dissuade-able. Working with addicts is like preaching, if you can avoid it then you have to.

Many of us who have ended up in addictions had difficulty expressing our feelings or even realising we have them. For fair reason or foul at some point we learned how to harbour some deep emotional pain. Maybe it was an abuse issue or the death of a much needed parent and the feelings were simply too much to allow. We suppress.

As users, abusers and addicts of chemicals, the dynamic of control is far more involved than anyone can truly imagine. On a regular basis we at Bethesda are coming alongside our clients who have come out of hectic life-styles, and whose families are left at home licking their wounds.

At Bethesda one of the aims we have for our clients and their families is to offer them ‘empowerment through understanding’.  We are dealing with some clients from very high-functioning backgrounds.  Men and women with very high academic levels, trapped in addictions, depressions and eating disorders, simply because they are emotionally and spiritually dysfunctional.

Did you ever find yourself in a heated conversation with someone from work, to the point of your getting hotter and hotter under the collar?  You get more and more angry; to the point of your emotions actually causing you to sit up in bed!  In bed! What on earth are you doing having a conversation/argument with someone from work, in bed?  Then you look at the clock and it tells you it’s 3:00am!  The other person is at their home, in their own bed, snoring away in blissful ignorance of the third-world-war taking place in your head and in your emotional field.

One of our clients this week, having spent years trapped in multiple-addictive disorders, started to see and unpack the lies he had grown up with.  Lies he received from family members who truly loved him too:

The term ‘self-will run riot’ is a very well known phrase used by Alcoholics Anonymous to describe those newcomers to their fellowship who insist on doing it their way.  Bethesda experienced this phenomenon last week, and had to invite one client to leave because of it.

As we sail past the middle of the first month as a functional rehabilitation home for abusers of alcohol and drugs, and a home for Christians in Crisis, we as its founders are in touch with many stresses and anxieties. Accountancy issues, legal issues, food stocks, further furniture needs, staffing, and then there is the absence of all the alcoholics and drug addicts! Where is every one? Is no one going to turn up?  But then we see how these are all born in the lack of faith.