Keep It Real wrote: I remember shouting out "I'm the most precious weapon on the planet!"

Bloody recurring nightmares on this theme now - 4 nights in a row so far

Make that 5 nights....this is agony

Keep It Real wrote:

Fallible wrote:Is there an Addaction or anything near you? I think there's one in Stratford and something in Tewkesbury.

There's a CGL

Went there this morning. This complete tool who is supposed to be an addiction councillor started trying to proselytise at me. He started saying "your substance abuse problems are because you're running from something"...I said I didn't know what, and couldn't afford psychoanalysis to find out, if indeed he is right. He kept hammering on about it - that I'm running away from something. I actually thought he might have been suggesting I was a repressed homosexual at first lol but no; eventually he gave a clue and I said "I'm guessing you're a Christian?". Yup - he'd meant I was running from God. Needless to say I gave him both barrels - Abiogenesis; hydrothermal vents; 4.28 billion years ago; the big bang; mixed fabrics; no shellfish; who made God; the inability to choose what one believes so why reward/punish believers/non-believers, the suffering of the innocents...he ended up flapping his arms around and storming off in a humph. And these are the people caring for our vulnerable drug/alcohol addicts.

His job is to help you get better not force his belief system on you so he is bang out of order
You went there to receive counselling and instead of that he is trying to convert you and the
fact that he started doing it immediately without any hesitation tells me his real motivation

There should be a rule preventing counsellers or therapists from even mentioning their belief systems to clients
since it has absolutely nothing to do with the treatment they are getting and any doing so should be sanctioned

Either that or to avoid conflict of interest they only treat clients with the same belief system as them

I know Fallible refuses to treat evangelicals and fundamentalists for this very reason although the
client attempting the conversion rather than the counsellor or therapist is probably more unusual

I had a look at the link to see if there was any implicit reference to Christianity
The name Change Grow Live sounds very evangelical but there was nothing else

Their mission statement says

We work hard to ensure that our services always offer excellent standards
and are accessible to everyone who needs them irrespective of their religion

So wonder if they know that one of their counsellors or therapists is trying to proselytise clients
Even though as a registered non religious charity they are not actually supposed to be doing this

If they knew, he would be out the door if the organisation works like it should. Their explanation of what they do seems a bit woolly and evasive to me.

Incidentally I don't refuse to treat 'fundamentalists'. You rarely see them in counselling though, as they think the church has all the help they need. I have a born again Christian at the moment, as it happens she suffers from schizoaffective disorder.

surreptitious57 wrote:His job is to help you get better not force his belief system on you so he is bang out of order

He tried - he failed; miserably.

surreptitious57 wrote:You went there to receive counselling and instead of that he is trying to convert you and the fact that he started doing it immediately without any hesitation tells me his real motivation

I was there because that appointment was a condition of my bail. I no longer have an alcohol or drug problem IMO.

surreptitious57 wrote:There should be a rule preventing counsellers or therapists from even mentioning their belief systems to clients since it has absolutely nothing to do with the treatment they are getting and any doing so should be sanctioned

It was so distasteful and manipulative the way he tried to draw me in I tried to send the central hub a complaint message from their website reporting him but fucked up the form and lost my long paragraph by accident I think I'm going to go there again today and terrorise investigate further.

surreptitious57 wrote:Either that or to avoid conflict of interest they only treat clients with the same belief system as them

He might be a lone rogue bad apple. I'll find out today if the covert Christianity is ubiquitous within the organisation and if so I'll report them to the council. Mission.

Keep It Real wrote:He might be a lone rogue bad apple. I'll find out today if the covert Christianity is ubiquitous within the organisation and if so I'll report them to the council. Mission.

I've been recommended CGL on multiple occasions by psychiatrists, other mental health workers and police alike - it is the primary treatment facility for substance abuse in my town and if it is a cover for evangelicalism it needs to be exposed/ended/replaced.

surreptitious57 wrote:We work hard to ensure that our services always offer excellent standards
and are accessible to everyone who needs them irrespective of their religion

I couldn't find their mission statement on their site - but this snippit rings alarm bells to me - even Obama acknowledged "those of no faith" and that's America...

Fallible wrote:Their explanation of what they do seems a bit woolly and evasive to me.

Yup; I'm getting that vibe too...

I remember he told me he commutes 2 hours a day from Oxford. "Very polluting" I said and he said "well; there's always problems" and I nearly said "you don't have to worry about climate change though because god will take care of it right?" but held my tongue....wish I'd said it now.

He might be trying it on with everyone who comes to see him given that they will be quite vulnerable
The site says they recruit from a variety of backgrounds so him being a Christian does not surprise me
Maybe he thinks he has a licence to proselytise but if this is his goal he should join a Christian charity

I remember that Christian counsellor who refused to treat any gay clients because of his beliefs
His contract of employment would not have made provision for such a discriminatory exemption
Christians expecting special privilege based on nothing more than prejudice is just unacceptable

Imagine if every counsellor treated clients according to their particular belief system or world view
All that is left at the door not openly brought into session because counsellor has an ulterior motive

Fallible : I am glad you are prepared to treat Christians even if not many come your way so well done
If I ever required therapy I would happily use a Christian counsellor as long as they did not proselytise

So I went there as I said I would. Coleman wasn't working that day so I spoke with a different staff. "Is this a secular organisation?" I asked. "No." he replied. "So it's a Christian organisation?" "no." "so is it religious?" "no; I'm not religious, for example" "do you know what the word secular means?" "tell me what you think it means" I did - he then said CGL is a secular organisation. It seems Coleman is indeed simply a singular bad apple - although not the only one working there with a profound education deficit.

Keep It Real wrote:

Keep It Real wrote: I remember shouting out "I'm the most precious weapon on the planet!"

Bloody recurring nightmares on this theme now - 4 nights in a row so far

lol this is getting ridiculous now. Every dream I have/can remember revolves around this theme. I wouldn't call them nightmares anymore though really - I'm kinda used to them now.

RE the OP; there has been a significant development on this issue. If anybody want to know I will of course KIR.

Keep It Real wrote:RE the OP; there has been a significant development on this issue. If anybody want to know I will of course KIR.

I'm interested.

For about the last year my family has been dealing with a memeber who seems to suffer from an issue were too much alchol sometimes leads to psychosis. The last time resulted in serious felony charges. Looking back another serious life altering incident the person had after too much alchol also seemed to have triggered psychosis. Nobody connected the dots until jail time was on the table. And he's had therapists and such at various point of his life. It's now obvious that he can't drink alchol anymore, there's no way to know when one drink will lead to too many drinks to unacceptable behavior. He's also taking some kind of medication. And getting a lot of behavioral therapy. It's very difficuilt to overcome denial mechanisms in this sort of situation. Not just from the person who has the problem but my family contributed to the problem by our own denial systems which didn't take serious issues seriouslly enough - even though we put a lot of pressure on him to get mental health care from time to time. Even now, there's a tendency in the family to blame the police for overreacting with the seriousness of the charges. In the US it's not so easy to get compitent mental health care - hopefully he's in better hands now.

Yup; I of course think that I am not the only one who suffers from this condition. Hope he manages to stay off the sauce John.

So I decided to go back on the antipsychotics around 5 days ago - got arrested yet again for AIP - another night in the torture chamber and multiple medium level physical injuries. I thought "I can't go on like this" so gave them another try. Unfortunately I've had to stop taking them again however because the side effects are just unbearably dreadful for me these days - chief amongst them are akathisia, anhedonia and a kind of nauseating, spinning perceptual anomy which is frankly agonising. I'm at a loss as to how to proceed.