COLIN GARNETT’S JOURNEY TO RECOVERY

Hi, I’m Colin. I sat in a Group Therapy Session in a Private Sector Treatment Clinic in 1989, sent there by a Crown Court Judge because prison no longer worked as a punishment, and as I experienced that clinic, from somewhere deep inside of me, I knew.

I regularly watched how the Clinical Director ran his team, how he handled individual addicts and alcoholics, how he ran his group sessions and how he interacted with confused family members, and somehow, I knew.

Then one day I watched him in a group session and as I paid particular attention to how he dismantled the destructive dynamics within the worldview of a dying alcoholic lady, in some deep chamber of my being, I just knew: ‘I can do what he does.’

Then in 1993, back in prison due to a relapse from trying to make too much progress too quickly, I got clean.

So, today, close to 30-years clean and sober from a 13-year intravenous heroin and amphetamine addiction and a life of violence and crime – I’m a Co-founder and Clinical Director of The Bethesda Addictions Treatment Clinic in Plettenberg Bay South Africa.

Over the coming weeks and months, God willing, I’d like to share this ridiculous journey with you, from my final months of my final prison sentence with homelessness ahead of me, to cycling to work with a song in my heart in the cold, dark English winter mornings, so that I could work in a very hot, very dirty and very noisy Iron Foundry, carrying an unrelenting knowledge simmering within me: ‘I’m being refined for something and it’s just a case of when’.

In these days of individual, family and social decay relating to addictions, I’d love to become your Hope Dealer.

Maybe you have family members or friends who may also need to tune It would be a privilege for me if you could join me.

This journey of recovery is going to take us to the highest of substance free highs and the lowest of substance free lows.