Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Buoyancy and 'Nothing wrong'

Last week during Mission Exposure, Ray took us to Buoyancy, a drug counselling place in Richmond. I was pretty amazed that in a lot of ways it seemed to have a similar feel to Credo and Urban Seed - except that I suppose they're professional, whereas we're nonprofessional.
Anyway, a few people from our group were a bit taken aback by the title of this little booklet that Buoyancy have put out:

(If you click on it, there's a PDF version.)
Deborah Homburg (the CEO of Buoyancy) was saying that when they start working with a new client they tell the client that there's nothing wrong with them. Some people from our group reckoned that was a bad thing to say, and that they should be telling people that things are wrong, because they're using drugs.
I think that the Buoyancy people are trying to get across that using drugs is not an unusual way of trying to cope with trauma. I think as well they're trying to get people to look at different kinds of behaviour as helpful or nonhelpful, rather than good or bad.

2 comments:

David said...

Love that attitude. Wish it would spread more. I hope that particularly this attitude will spread to Christians with regards to this and other issues.

nate said...

What an interesting bunch...!