In 2007, with the blessing of Metropolitan Evlogii of Vladimir and Suzdal, a public organization to combat drug addiction and alcoholism was established. This organization was called Awareness.
Valentin Markov - head of the rehabilitation center.
Father Valentine says that every person has a task in this life and the opportunity to fulfill it. In simple terms, the main goal of man is to prepare for eternal life.
Back to reality
In general, a person is designed for eternal life, we have no time limit, we are immortal. But people with drug and alcohol addiction do not understand this, they begin to live from one dose to another and, in fact, lose themselves. Valentin Markov believes that it is the rehabilitation center that helps a person to return himself, to acquaint him with who he is, to return him to reality.
That is, an addicted person must see himself as he became as a result of drug or alcohol consumption. And all the efforts of the Awareness center are aimed at teaching him to live already on this basis. Not with the illusion that he will someday stop drinking or injecting, but to live with understandingthe fact that he is chronically ill and you need to be careful to complete the main task in life, learn to keep yourself in suspense.
Valentin Markov: conversations with co-dependents
The ability to hold tension is the main component, so the center teaches you to contain this tension in yourself, direct it and manage it. For this, the center has consultants and psychologists. Programs are designed in such a way that they help a person gradually, step by step, learn to manage himself. The Center directly cooperates with the Russian Orthodox Church, as it relies on its experience, asceticism, developed over the centuries, and on its experience of communicating with God as a person, and not as a simple force, faceless energy that you can call on and not know: she will come or not.
Priest Valentin Markov talks to the parents and relatives of people who ended up in this center, whom he calls co-dependent. They depend on their sick relatives, they think that they can help them with something, but in fact they only interfere with their recovery. Father is talking about this.
The rehabilitation center uses the knowledge and methods of dealing with sin that are stored in the church and that have been honed and practiced over the centuries. And when this experience is applied to modern practical psychology and understood from the point of view of science, it becomes alive, active and quite suitable for the rehabilitation of people, even secular, not ecclesiastical and, perhaps, not even spiritual yet.
New life
Valentin Markov considers the main task of the center to return a person to God, and notin church. To acquaint a person with the spiritual side of life and make this side attractive to him. The Diocese of Optina and Bishop Varnava directly help in this "Realization".
With the blessing of the bishop, Optina priests take care of the sick children and teach them an understanding of church life so that every parish, wherever a person goes after the Center, can become a point of support for him. This is one aspect.
Second - a self-help group of anonymous alcoholics and drug addicts and the Twelve Steps program, which students get acquainted with directly in the rehabilitation center.
All people working in the center believe that drug and alcohol addicts are not the dregs of society. Valentin Markov is convinced that this phenomenon is a special providence of God, because such a person, having gone through hell, the experience of pain and suffering, completely gets rid of all sorts of illusions, and for God he is the most valuable. The Lord wants to help such people, and all the employees of the center are trying their best to help them in this. They support people who really find it very difficult to turn to a clean and bright life from pain and suffering. The Center helps to make this transition and directs all the forces to this.
