Burnaby recovery centre doesn’t compromise with addiction: By Gerry Bellett, Vancouver Sun May 5, 2011
Theologians will advise you can’t parley with the Devil and remain unscathed and neither, according to the operators of Burnaby’s Charlford House, can you trifle with addiction.
So in this 15-bed Stabilization and Transitional Living Residence for women — the mouthful Fraser Health bureaucrats invented to avoid calling it a recovery centre — there are no compromises with drugs or booze, no softer, gentler way, no harm-reduction cop-outs, just the blood, sweat and tears of abstinence.
And for that, Trish LaNauze, executive director of Charlford House, makes no apologies.
“Our program is traditionally based, rooted in the 12-Step program [of Alcoholics Anonymous] which is 76-years old this year. And there’s a reason it’s successful,” she said.
It’s a philosophy that separates Charlford House from programs that aren’t as demanding on those they seek to help.
Tara Hamilton — three years drug-free, the previous 25 anything but — said the first three weeks in Charlford are known as boot-camp because “it’s so regimented and tough.”
“But it saved my life,” she says.
She had tried all the half-measures, made numerous deals with herself, but years of alcohol, crack and heroin abuse brought her to a night — and it wouldn’t be the last — she had to choose between her daughter and cocaine.
“I chose cocaine.”
She had had bouts of staying clean since her daughter was born in 2002 but they never lasted. Now after a prolonged spell of being drug free she was convinced she could drink.
“I didn’t understand addiction. I started drinking then doing weed and one night I left my daughter with a babysitter, went out and never came back.”
The babysitter called the ministry, the ministry apprehended the baby while its mother was drifting homeless and drug-addled through the Downtown Eastside.
Eventually, she would return, get her child back, promise she’d stay clean but by May 2007, she was in her bedroom doing cocaine while her five-year-old was as the door crying, “Mommy, mommy what are you doing?”
A girlfriend called the ministry and the cycle was repeated.
On Oct. 10 that year, she entered the Salvation Army’s Harbour Light Detox Centre and on Nov. 2, 2007, went to Charlford.
“I went in with a really bad attitude. I hated myself and everyone else,” says Hamilton.
“The first 21 days is like a retreat. You are cut off from everything. There’re no cellphones, no boyfriends. You don’t read newspapers, watch movies. You’re in a bubble.
“We had chores and group [meetings] to go to. I couldn’t get away with manipulating the women there because they’d call me out on all my lies. In other places they’d let me out at weekends but here if you went out it was together and if you were in a public place and had to go to the bathroom, another woman went with you.”
“It’s a good thing it was like that or I would have called someone to come and get me,” she says.
She was there six months and would have stayed longer.
Relieved of 25 years of drug-induced chaos, she was afraid to leave.
“I remember watching the news on TV [in her first week out] and getting nauseous because I hadn’t been exposed to that,” she says.
“Charlford House saved me. I needed structure and rules because I was a master con and could get around anyone. They taught me how to feel. I couldn’t cry when I first went there. But now I cry all the time — they thawed me out.
“I believed I was morally deficient because I’d choose drugs and alcohol over my child but I learned I have a disease, not a moral deficiency.”
With the help of Charlford House she found accommodation, had her daughter, then six, returned, and began to be a mother.
That was three years ago. Since then she has returned to the home as a volunteer and is waiting admission to Douglas College’s two-year community social services worker program at the end of which she will be qualified to work in a number of outreach programs, detox centres or women’s care centres.
She wants to get away from poverty, welfare and food-bank lineups.
“I’d like to be paying taxes,” she says.
Charlford House was founded 41 years ago by Thelma McPherson, who was undergoing her own recovery. She had started by bringing women suffering from addiction and living on the street into her own home.
Then she rented a small house on Charlford Ave., later moving to the present location on Kitchener in North Burnaby. More than 1,500 women have been helped since.
But the demand for its services are growing and staff are seeing more older women, 55 and up, needing help, said LaNauze.
“We’ve had one lady in here who was 70.”
It is time for the society to consider building its own home, she said.
“We need to stabilize; renting is not a long-term solution and it’s been a dream of ours to own our own place,” she says.
“We don’t want to get any bigger here because that would institutionalize the model and we’d lose what we have. We should be replicating this somewhere else.”
But it’s not four walls and a roof that brings about recovery, it’s the relationship that develops between the women and the support they give each other.
“There’s a spiritual bond between 15 people who otherwise would never be friends. They are each other’s best support because when they first come here the only thing they have to change is everything.”
gbellett@vancouversun.com
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