In 2007, with the blessing of the Metropolitan of Vladimir and Suzdal Eulogy, a public organization was created to combat drug addiction and alcoholism. 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 ability to fulfill it. In simple terms, the main goal of a person is to prepare for eternal life.
Back to reality
In general, man is designed for eternal life, we have no term, 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 just the rehabilitation center helps a person to regain himself, to acquaint him with who he is, to return to reality.
That is, a dependent person should see himself as he has become as a result of drug or alcohol consumption. And all the efforts of the "Awareness" center are aimed at teaching him to live on the basis of this. Not with the illusion that he will someday quit drinking or injecting himself, but live with the understanding that he is chronically ill and need to be careful in order to fulfill the main task in life, to learn to keep himself in suspense.
Valentin Markov: conversations with co-dependents
The ability to hold tension is the main component, therefore, they are taught in the center to contain this tension, direct it and control it. For this, the center has consultants, psychologists. Programs are designed so that they help a person gradually, step by step, learn how to manage themselves. The Center directly cooperates with the Russian Orthodox Church, as it draws on its experience, austerity developed over the centuries, and on its experience of communicating with God as a person, and not as a simple force, a faceless energy that you can invoke and not know: she will come or not.
Priest Valentin Markov conducts conversations with parents and relatives of people who have fallen into this center, whom he calls co-dependent. They depend on their sick relatives, think that they can help them with something, but in fact they only interfere with their recovery. This is what the father says.
The rehabilitation center uses the knowledge and methods of the fight against sin that are stored in the church and which have been honed and practiced for centuries. And when this experience is applied to modern practical psychology and is understood from the point of view of science, it becomes lively, active and quite suitable for the rehabilitation of people, even secular, non-church, and maybe even not yet spiritual.
New life
Valentin Markov considers the main task of the center to return a person to God, and not to the church. To acquaint a person with the spiritual side of life and make this side become attractive to him. The Optina diocese and directly the bishop of Barnabas helps in this “Awareness”.
With the blessing of the bishop, the Optino priests feed the sick children and teach them how to understand church life so that every parish, wherever a person goes after the Center, can become a foothold for him. This is one aspect.
The second is a mutual assistance group of anonymous alcoholics and drug addicts and the Twelve Steps program, which pupils get to know directly at the rehabilitation center.
All the people working in the center believe that drug and alcohol addicts are not the scum 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 kinds of illusions, and for God he is most valuable. The Lord wants to help such people, and all the employees of the center try their best to help them in this. They support people who are really very difficult from pain and suffering to turn to a clean and bright life. The center helps to make this transition and directs all forces precisely to this.