By Mike Bush
Editor
575magazine.com
ROSWELL — There are several residential addiction recovery facilities in Alamogordo, but none in Roswell.
Lorual Peschke and the board of Reflections Ministries want to change that. The faith-based nonprofit organization is in the process of selecting a facility to establish Reflections in Recovery, a residential addiction recovery program based on biblical principles, Peschke said.
Impetus for the program came about three years ago, when a couple of friends asked Peschke, a professional social worker, to help them conduct devotionals at the Chaves County Detention Center.
Specifically, a couple of women inmates said that, while they were free of addiction while in jail and wanted to stay that way because it felt good, they wondered how they could stay away from drugs and alcohol when they would be returning to the same home environment when they got out of jail.
Peschke said inmates would say to her, “It feels good to be out of addiction, but am I supposed to go back in the same house, in the same area of town where my addiction started?”
“And so I keep bumping up against that question,” she added. “And after about a year and a half, the Holy Spirit just moved me to give an answer to that question and the answer is Reflections in Recovery.
“What we’re about is giving people a home, a place to live that is safe and healthy and provide that environment where healing from addiction can occur,” Peschke added. Like the Reflections in Recovery brochure says, “we break the bonds of addiction, and we do that through Christ Jesus, through His power, and through spiritual transformation, and that’s our focus.”
Short-term and long-term goals are developed for each person in seven areas of life, she said: physical heath, mental health, religion and spirituality, education, employment, finances, and relationships.
“All of those are areas that need to be addressed, because if we leave one of those areas untouched, the addiction will come back into a person’s life,” she added.
Peschke has developed her own faith-based program, using the Gospel of Mark to examine “Christ’s walk on this earth” and 1 Peter, which talks about “how to live the good life in Christ Jesus,” she said.
She wants to integrate the biblical material with “the best of secular psychology that’s out there and counseling theory,” she said. “I believe God is the supreme cognitive therapist.
“Cognitive behavioral therapy is something that really works in the area of addiction recovery, “ she said.
She learned cognitive behavioral therapy principles in secular psychology and counseling classes, and discovered, “Unbeknownst to most secular psychologists, they are biblical principles, because in the Bible, when it talks about renewing your mind and changing your mind and reflecting the mind of God, that’s cognitive behavioral therapy, it’s cognitive restructuring.”
The key to the process for the clients is “changing their thinking from what it was as they interacted in their home environment and within the addiction population and then moving them to thinking like Christ, … having the Holy Spirit in them, … and then they’re going to change the way they think,” Peschke said. “And when you change the way you’re thinking, what happens is you change your actions.”
Many people have tried doing it the opposite way, trying to change their actions without changing their thinking, she added. That doesn’t work.
“They say, ‘OK, just say no to drugs.’ Well, I’m sorry, but it’s a little bit more complicated than that. You have to change your thinking to change your actions.”
She said she has her program all ready to go. “We just need some doors to attach to this, and a roof would be nice, too,” she said.
Peschke noted Roswell does not have any halfway houses or residential facilities for people with addiction problems, although Alamogordo, a smaller city, has five she knows of and maybe more.
Roswell does have some excellent short-term facilities, she added, including the New Mexico Rehabilitation Center, which has a 21-day program “that I’ve heard very good feedback on,” and there’s the Sunrise facility at Eastern New Mexico Medical Center for detox and physical withdrawal symptoms.
“But we do not have a time-intensive stay facility that is structured and focused,” she said. “So that’s something we need here in Roswell, that’s something we need in the Pecos Valley, to address this addiction problem that is just overcoming our society. So that our purpose, that’s our thrust, and we are just excited about it.”
But Peschke said this is not something that she can do by herself, or even with her board of directors.
“We need the people of Roswell to come on board with us in this endeavor,” she said.
The ministry is currently looking at possible facilities for phase 1 of the project, which will be a women’s residential center. Phase 2 will be a men’s facility.
The organization is looking at a couple of facilities now, and Peschke said she hopes they have something within the next few weeks, but nothing is firmed up yet.
“If someone else has a facility they wan to throw into the mix, we’ll look at that, too,” she added.
Peschke said the organization will consider expanding further.
“We’re open to new ideas and partnering and ways and means of helping the addiction community,” she added. “Transitional housing is something we’d also like to look at in the future as a possibility.”
But she said that for now Reflections in Recovery wants to stay small.
“One thing we want to be very careful about is it’s better to be small and effective than a large giant that loses focus,” she added. “So we’re going to grow big in correlation to effectiveness…. We feel really strongly about that as a board, so those are things that we’re trying to keep in mind and keep in perspective. Size isn’t always as important as other factors.”
Reflections in Recovery will have a mixture of paid and volunteer staff, although all staff now is volunteer, Peschke said.
Reflections Ministry is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization, registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) corporation. Peschke said she applied for an emergency designation from the IRS and got it in just six days after the request was received, when her volunteer accountants were telling her it would take from three to six months.
She said she filed an expedite request and wrote a letter to the IRS describing the need as an emergency situation, noting Roswell is a city of 50,000 population that does not have a halfway house or residential addiction recovery facility. She told the IRS she gets requests daily from the people with whom she works asking where they can go when they get out of jail.
Reflections Ministries was incorporated in November 2008 and the 5019(c)(3) request was granted in April.
Her board members are representatives of churches in town, and right now Peschke is contacting more churches to get involved. She said she eventually wants to contact United Way and other organizations, but she wants Reflections Ministries to continue to be a faith-based organization.
“This is a community endeavor,” she added. “We need the community on board. This is a faith-based organization, so we really want the believers in God to come on board here and contribute to alleviating this addiction problem in our community.”
The organization will continue to be donation-focused, seeking support from local churches, rather than government funding or other funding sources, Peschke said.
“We feel very strongly that we need to take back philanthropic endeavors and take them back under the auspices of the church, and so that’s what we’re trying to do through this organization is let it be a church endeavor, a matter for the people of God to work out how we’re going to find healing for people who want to get out of addiction,” she added.
Peschke is a licensed social worker who is “a few classes away” from getting her master’s degree in counseling from Denver Seminary. She also has done all her course work to become a licensed alcohol and drug abuse counselor (LADAC) and is “clocking in hours” toward that.
She worked for the Roswell Independent School District for about a decade as a social worker. Her experience with RISD “jump-started” her interest in addiction programs, she said.
“I worked with a lot of children where addiction was the presenting problem in the home and so I did visits and in many of the homes I visited it became very clear that the problem had nothing to do with the child to being able to function in the school and nothing to do with the school but had everything to do with the home environment,” she said. “And so when I saw that need in the home, that starts the wheels of your mind turning and you start thinking about the core source of problem and what we can do to alleviate them.”
Now, Peschke is a full-time volunteer.
“I work about 40 hours a week on his project, at least right now,” she said.
She also teaches seven classes in addiction recovery, four at the CCDC, two at Grace Community Church and one at the Rivers of Life homeless shelter.
Her husband, David Peschke, is a “significant help” in her ministry, she said. He is an instructor in biology and microbiology at Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell.
Peschke is visiting churches seeking support and welcome support from anyone.
“Anyone that sees this article certainly I would love for them to call me and make an appointments and I would love to present to the church as a whole, to elder and deacons boards, just let people know what’s happening here in the town of Roswell and the Pecos Valley for healing in this area,” she said.
Peschke can be reached by phone at (575) 910-2555 or by e-mail at recoveryingod@gmail.com. She has a DVD she shows to churches. It can be viewed at www.youtube.com/imagegroupmarketing#p/a/u/1/geUZ4yQy6N4