Chris – Case Study

I came to Hope Springs because of my studies. I couldn’t progress any further with my course until I had fulfilled the work placement requirement and, to be frank, I thought what a load of shit. Why can’t I just keep progressing through the reading material, researching things online and handing in assignments. Also, it was difficult to find a work placement. After COVID disrupted things, it wasn’t just my enrolment year who was looking for placements, but people from the last 3 years.

At one stage, the devious part of me thought, “Maybe I’ll just make it up and get a friend to sign things off for me”. But TAFE have some very stringent processes in place to sniff out this kind of devious behaviour!

Thankfully, Ken saved me! Even with his huge workload here as the Supreme Overlord to the Supreme Overlord and all his many minions, he gave me this opportunity and I’ll be eternally grateful. Thank you, Ken.

I’ve been in recovery myself for 11 years now, so I understood that the people I would meet here would be good people, not scary or violent or more broken than others. But I was still unprepared for meeting you all, with your huge, generous hearts.

In society, we celebrate and award the people that can kick a football better than others, swim faster than their peers and who look the most beautiful. When the people we should be looking up to and celebrating are people like you. People who are willing to challenge their beliefs, question their thoughts and to sit in the uncomfortable space of really looking at themselves. Good people who want to become even better people.

I think we human beings are intrinsically lazy. We won’t bother making changes until the pain we feel is too great. We’ll just keep doing what we’ve always done, even when that no longer works for us. Even if we can just put a band-aid on our pain, we’ll often call that good enough and go back to old behaviours. But people like you are doing the work. You’re not taking the easy way out. You’re not staying here just long enough to put a band-aid on and then going back to your old ways. You’re staying here and digging deeper, looking closer, creating new healthy habits. You’re challenging your thoughts. You’re sitting in the discomfort, and asking, ‘who am I?’, ‘why am I?’ and ‘who do I want to be?’. It is so inspiring and the admiration I feel for you knows no bounds.

I feel like I’ve had an ‘all access pass’ to this wonderful Community as I’ve wandered between the admin area, the meds room and the community itself, learning about the different functions that make the whole.

The clinical staff have been so generous and patient in sharing their depth of knowledge and experience with me. Thank you – you have given me such a good understanding of the rationale that underpins the TC model, and I will never forget the help you’ve given me.

I also want to thank the support workers who have taken the time to explain what they do and how they do it, along with answering the million questions I asked them. Thank you so much.

And to my tribe, the community. What can I say? I want to thank you for your warmth and your openness. Thank you for sharing your stories and your journeys with me. Thank you for taking me into your lives. I don’t know what direction my life will take from here, but I do know for sure that it has been impacted by you all in a very, very positive way. Thank you.

If I had a magic wand, I would use it to wipe out the many sources of addiction that are part of the human experience. But if that wand wasn’t quite strong enough to do that, I would use it to create a world where the real heroes are celebrated and awarded. The people that have decided that they need to make a change and are willing to doing something about. People like you.

Thank you so much for having me here. I will never forget you.