Link to Annual Report soon to come
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Hello! My name is Jessica D., I attended the Vesta program from January to April 2007.
I was just surfing the internet and came across their website - it must be new?? I know it wasn't up a few years ago.
Anyhow I just wanted to say hello. I've been living in Kelowna, BC, since I left Vesta; I'm involved in a program called NOW Canada that provides supportive living, and then long-term housing, for women in this community. Astonishingly, I have now had the same address for four whole years! I never thought that just staying put would be possible. I was pregnant when I moved out here, and my daughter has had the same home her whole life.
I often tell people about my experiences at Vesta. I think description of it on the website as "militant" is pretty accurate! But it's exactly what I needed - I didn't know how to live, and you guys showed me. I had no idea how to follow rules, keep commitments, or make good decisions, and you showed me. I wasn't honestly even all that interested in learning those things, but somehow your program sparked my interest, and it's been strong ever since. I think that the skills I learned at Vesta are one of the biggest reasons I am clean, sober, accomplished, and HAPPY today.
I just finished my third year of university at UBC, majoring in psychology. My goal is to be a clinical psychologist one day (in ten years?!) and will keep working until I get there. Next year I start my first directed study one on one with the prof in the forensic psychology lab, and I'm soooo excited. Who knew I would be good at school?? :) Further to that, I just got an amazing job as a program support worker at Crossroads Treatment Centre, an addictions treatment centre here in Kelowna - my first "career-move" job. I also volunteer, I started an outreach program a few years ago that is still going strong, that services street-entrenched women by handing out personal care items and other essentials.
I have amazing women in my life today and miraculously no men in my innermost circle! These things are amazing because four years ago, when I arrived at Vesta, the idea that I might one day have female friends or feel okay being single was laughable - but as a result of the incredible foundation that was set for me there, I'm happy with the relationships I have and truly appreciate the value and power of women sticking together.
I write these things to you not in bragging, but in gratitude. Vesta was what set the foundation for my entire recovery, and that's no exaggeration. I'm so grateful to you all, to Jackie and Joyce and everyone else that makes that program run as effectively as it does. I arrived at Vesta truly uninterested in recovery, young and pregnant and scared and homeless and hopelessly addicted and just wanting a roof over my head and food to eat. Within a month, I was in love with recovery. By the time I left, I had started falling in love with myself. You guys nursed me through the absolute hardest days of my life - the death of my father. Without your loving arms to hold me up, I fear I might not have made it through that. With your help, though, I grew up through it and in spite of it and embraced the experience, and learned from it.
Sorry if I've rambled! I just wanted to say a quick hello but apparently I had more to say. I hope you are all well and would like very much to hear from you. Congratulations on all the new and exciting things happening over there, like the new second stage home!!! Wow.
P.S. My teddy bear, Jack, who was adopted from your office during my stay, is still a permanent fixture in my bed (despite my daughter's continued attempts to kidnap him).
Heather Kitching (Student Journalist Report 2010)
When Amanda arrived at the door of the Vesta Recovery Program for Women, she was, as she puts it, “a walking nothing.” Severely malnourished and hopelessly addicted to crack, the once-voluptuous Amanda weighed just 111 pounds. She’d been hospitalized for dehydration during her pre-admission detox, and her gums were so diseased that her teeth were hanging loose in her mouth.
Her story was like that of many women who have walked the path to 101 James Street: abandoned at three by a mother who’d had a nervous breakdown, raised by a father who was a violent alcoholic, molested by a step-brother at the age of eight, and further marginalized as an adult by a string of abusive and dysfunctional relationships.
Yet for all the abuse, for all the neglect, for all the insanity she’d endured in the company of – mostly – men, the last place on earth Amanda ever wanted to be was in a feminist woman-only recovery home. Never mind that feminism is about as popular with young women today as conservative clothing and premarital chastity. Amanda didn’t even trust women. She personified a scenario frequently seen by Vesta’s team leader, Joyce Durrette, in which women disempowered by abuse – a good 85% of Vesta’s clientele -- compete for the attention of men, the people with the power. When forced to relate to other women, they feel helpless, because the forces of seduction they have come to rely on to get their needs met no longer function.
Ironically, it is precisely for women like Amanda that those quaint old feminist ideas still have a lot to offer. It was feminism that first analyzed the societal power dynamics that keep women like her powerless and addicted; it was feminism that demanded recognition for women’s distinct psychological make-up; it was feminism that offered a critique of patriarchal religion, and it was feminism that demanded equal respect for women, notwithstanding their differences.
It’s philosophies like these that lay at the core of Vesta’s three-month residential treatment program. Amanda credits it with saving her life.
Vesta is named for the Roman goddess of hearth and home, and her statue stands next to the fireplace in Vesta’s bright, airy living room, surrounded by poofy brown leather sofas and alternating turquoise and white walls. It’s a serene space for a woman coming in from the chaos of addicted life, but one ought not to be fooled by the pale pink corridors and abundance of stuffed animals. Vesta is no gentle New Age retreat. There, recovery is serious business.
The moment Amanda walked in the door, staff asked her to change into a robe while they laundered her clothes and searched her belongings for an array of verboten items – including books, ipods and other entertainment devices. She was then introduced to Vesta’s regimented daily routine: up at 7am, coffee, breakfast, clean-up, chores, morning support group, and then class. Lunch is served at mid-day, followed by more chores, class, free time, dinner, chores, more free time, evening support group, and bed.
“It’s militant,” Amanda recalled.
In “class,” residents learn how drugs and alcohol affect their bodies and how to wrestle with the consuming desire to use. They also learn about anger management, stress reduction, family dynamics, and “the budding cycle,” the escalating series of behavioral changes that signal when one is in danger of relapse. During chore time, the women clean the house, do the laundry and prepare the meals. And no, it’s not some creative way of making ends meet given Vesta’s modest $369,136.00 a year in provincial funding. It’s part of a program to teach life skills like meal planning to women who’ve either lost or never learned them. So is imparting communication skills like how to stand up for oneself without getting into a fight. When Amanda felt bullied by a fellow resident, staff made her confront the woman during a group meeting and tell her how much her behavior upset her. Next, the two women were put on kitchen duty together so they could bond over their mutual hatred of the chore. Before long, they were getting along so well, they became roommates.
“Weird,” is how Amanda describes her burgeoning friendships with her housemates. “You’re not used to being friends with women and trusting women and knowing that when they’re giving you feedback, that it comes from a kind place.”
Vesta’s uniqueness, though, is not in its life skills program or its drug education classes or relapse prevention work. Those are all well-established best practices in the treatment of addictions. Where Vesta departs from traditional programs is in its steadfast commitment to women’s empowerment and spirituality.
Traditional recovery programs used confrontational tactics to break down addicts’ defenses in an effort to get them to feel shame for their actions. Vesta executive director Jackie Lloyd-Rai says, that doesn’t work with women, because women are already broken. Women, she says, spend so much time trying to be the wives, caregivers and sex objects that others expect them to be that some have no idea what they want or need. She helps them beat addiction by looking inside themselves at the feelings they’ve been trying to submerge in booze and drugs. When Lloyd-Rai holds a session on shame, for example, she asks women about the distressing things that have happened to them and how they feel about them. Invariably, anger is the one feeling that’s never brought up. It’s in asking women how they express their anger that the stories of drinking and sleeping around emerge. And it’s in asking women how they feel about their behavior that they begin to reckon with their shame.
The last thing Lloyd-Rai wants during these sessions is for women to confront each other with judgment like in traditional programs. She wants them to be part of a supportive healing circle, like the circle of life from Aboriginal tradition, in which spiritual energy emerges from well-intentioned togetherness.
“If you ever get in a circle, and somebody’s really having a hard time, and another person starts to pick on them, somewhere in the circle, someone will say ‘no,’ and that person becomes the messenger of the spirit greater than us,” says Lloyd-Rai, who is of Mi’gma’w ancestry.
Spirituality has always played a role in recovery – the third step of the 12 steps is to turn one’s life over to God – but it can be a challenge for a woman who associates God with picketing abortion clinics.
“The neat thing about spirituality in a circle is that nothing has to be god,” says Lloyd-Rai. She tells women to connect with the sensations of safety and wholeness they encounter sitting in circles with fellow recovering women. That, she says, is what you can put your faith in. That is what to look for in a spiritual home.
For Amanda, that energy was transformative. “When I got 30 days clean,” she recalls, “something happened for me when I thought to myself, ‘I’m done.’ In Vesta, listening to these women, even as hard as it was, you start to feel safe, like these people care. … Some people come in there older and still aren’t done, but for me, I don’t know what it was, but by the grace of god, I was done.”
Of course, for women like Amanda, abstaining from drugs and alcohol is just the beginning of a longer healing journey, one that Vesta is increasingly involved in. Vesta has always helped women with abuse issues by teaching them coping skills to reduce the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and introducing visualization techniques like imagining a box in which they can store their difficult memories for future processing. When Amanda was in the program, staff told her to wait several years before unpacking that box, fearing the heavy emotional baggage would overwhelm a woman who had just learned to get through an ordinary day without using. However, with research now showing that women fair better when they start trauma recovery in conjunction with addiction treatment, Vesta is responding with a new weekly meeting. “Seeking Safety,” for graduates of its residential program, starts women on the first stage of trauma therapy from the moment they are three months clean.
Vesta’s commitment to women’s healing doesn’t end with it’s programming, though. It permeates every aspect of the organization. It begins with the culture of respect that’s provided to every women from the moment they walk through the door.
“Nobody eats anything until the cook sits down,” recalls Amanda, by way of example. “You’re taught to respect how much work we put in, so you wait ‘til the woman sits down before you eat.”
It’s also reflected in Lloyd-Rai’s management style, which mirror’s that supportive circle she creates for her clients.
“This is the healthiest place I’ve ever been,” says program staffer Kim Cox, who praises Lloyd-Rai’s open, supportive communication. “Jackie falls behind what the program itself is, which is empowering, so she deals with us as staff in the same way.”
Even that seemingly macho militaristic daily routine Lloyd-Rai puts her residents through has a woman-centric purpose: to allow women to experience limits so they can learn how to set them for themselves.
Vesta isn’t the only women’s recovery program in Ottawa. In fact, it’s the relative new kid on the block, founded as it was just 13 years ago. Jackie Lloyd-Rai wasn’t even in Ottawa during International Women’s Year 1975, when a group of addictions professionals formed the Task Group on Women and Chemical Dependency, the precursor to the city’s first women-only treatment facility. Nor was she present in 1978, when a co-ed group of Alcoholics Anonymous members formed Empathy House, Ottawa’s first women-only – though emphatically non-feminist – recovery home. Truth be told, she was probably out drunk some place.
Between 1975 and ‘78, the army brat from New Brunswick was still living in Angus, Ontario, drinking to the point of black-out and waking up in strange hotel rooms with even stranger men. She sobered up in 1979, the year the Task Group opened the Amethyst Women’s Addiction Centre near the old fire hall on Parkdale. She didn’t dry up at Amethyst, though. She did it at AA on an army base in Kingston, where, about a year into her sobriety, she heard the Forces were thinking of starting an addictions program. Figuring she knew a thing or two about addiction, she applied for and got the job – and an education paid for by the military. By the early ‘90s, she had earned a degree in social work, done a quest with Aboriginal elders, worked at Toronto’s Jean Tweed Centre for women with addictions, and done time in the prison system – as an employee, that is.
It was then that she started as a counselor at James Street Recovery, the co-ed program that used to inhabit Vesta’s grand, four-storey house. At the time, professional pressure was mounting to shut down facilities like James Street because of evidence that women faired better in women-only programs. Executive director Bernie Boyle was fine with this idea, having seen at least two cases of sexual impropriety on his own watch. With the board of James Street’s blessing, Boyle formed a partnership with an all-male recovery home called Gateway, took his office and a pair of staff-members over there, and left James Street to go all-woman with Lloyd-Rai as the program coordinator. Two years later, the partnership with Gateway dissolved, and Lloyd-Rai was named executive director of the program, now called Vesta.
Though she concedes that her first two years in the role nearly burned her out, Lloyd-Rai has clearly realized her vision of an empowering, woman-centred environment. She hasn’t lost a staffer – except to retirement – in more than five years, a rare feat in the addictions field, and she’s earned the respect of some formidable peers. Addictions consultant Virginia Carver, who was a member of the 1975 Task Group, and later, of the boards of both Amethyst and Empathy, now serves on Vesta’s programming committee and praises Lloyd-Rai’s innovation. And though no scientific studies have ever measured Vesta’s success-rate – that research is far too costly and the funding for it far too non-existent – there is plenty of evidence of the program’s effectiveness.
The last Friday of every month, the staff and residents of Vesta gather in its downstairs rec room, settle into red vinyl sofas and chairs – which look like they too may have been rescued from a bar – and listen to one of their success stories share her journey of recovery. This past August, it was Amanda’s turn.
To see her today, it’s hard to imagine she was ever the disoriented waif she describes shuffling into Vesta five years ago. She is a healthy-looking, vivacious, who is clearly in command of her own life. She works in retail management and will soon move up to the position as an officer manager – and to care for the ailing mother with whom she’s now close. Perhaps most remarkably, the woman who once despaired of attending an all-woman treatment program now considers women her best friends.
“You learn to really care about each other,” she says of her time at Vesta, “and realize the bonds that you have with women are like bonds that you can’t get anywhere else.”
