Valentin Markov. The main thing - to return a person to God

In 2007, with the blessing of Metropolitan Vladimir of Suzdal and Evlogia, a public organization was created to combat drug addiction and alcoholism. This organization called "Awareness" was called.

Valentin Markov - head of the rehabilitation center.

Father Valentin says that every person has a task in this life and the ability to fulfill it. In simple terms, the main goal of man is to prepare for eternal life.

Back to reality

In general, a person is meant for eternal life, we have no time, we are immortal. But people with drug and alcohol addiction do not understand this, they start living from one dose to another and, in fact, lose themselves. Valentin Markov believes that just the rehabilitation center helps a person to regain himself, to acquaint him with who he is, to return to reality.

That is, a dependent person should see himself as he became due to the consumption of drugs or alcohol. And all the efforts of the "Awareness" center are aimed at teaching him to live on this basis. Not with the illusion that he will someday quit drinking or pouring, but live with the understanding that he is chronically ill and needs to be careful to perform the main task in life, to learn to keep himself in suspense.

Valentin Markov: conversations with co-addicts

Ability to keep tension - this is the main component, so the center learns this tension to contain, guide and manage it. For this, there are counselors and psychologists in the center. Programs are designed so that they help a person gradually, by steps learn to control themselves. The Center directly cooperates with the Russian Orthodox Church, as it relies on its experience, penance developed over centuries, and on its experience of communicating with God as a person, and not as a simple power, faceless energy that can be invoked and not know: it will come or not.

Priest Valentin Markov talks with parents and close people who are in this center, whom he calls co-dependent. They depend on their sick relatives, they think that they can help them in some way, but in fact they only interfere with their recovery. This is what Father says about it.

The rehabilitation center uses those knowledge and methods of struggle against sin, which are stored in the church and which have been honed, worked through centuries. And when this experience is applied to modern practical psychology and is understood from the point of view of science, it becomes alive, active and quite suitable for the rehabilitation of people even secular, not ecclesiastical, and maybe even not spiritual yet.

New life

Valentin Markov considers the main task of the center to return a person to God, and not to the church. To acquaint the person with the spiritual side of life and to make this side attractive for him. In this "Awareness" helps the Optina diocese and directly Bishop Barnabas.

With the blessing of the bishop, the priests of Optina feed the sick children and teach them understanding of church life so that every parish, wherever a person goes after the Center, could become a foothold for him. This is one aspect.

The second one is a group of mutual help of anonymous alcoholics and drug addicts and the "Twelve Steps" program, with which the students get acquainted directly in the rehabilitation center.

All people working in the center believe that drug and alcohol dependent people are not the scum of society. Valentin Markov is convinced that this phenomenon is a special providence of God, because such a person, having gone through hell, experience pain and suffering, completely gets rid of all illusions, and for God he is most valuable. The Lord wants to help such people, and all the servants of the center are trying their best to help them in this. They support people who are really very difficult from pain and suffering to turn to life clean and bright. The center helps to make this transition and directs all forces to this.