Ottawa’s House of Hope and Healing fills a unique niche

Addiction counsellor connects faith with conventional therapy

OTTAWA (CCN)

Rita Hughes believes God instructed her to found the House of Hope and Healing 25 years ago, and as she prepares to step down, she and her community are praying for fresh vision.

Hughes was working as an addiction counsellor at an Ottawa psychiatric hospital in the late 1980s when she began to encounter stories of sexual abuse, including some stories of abuse by priests. She approached the archdiocese about what she had heard, but a lingering question remained.

“I wanted to know where the healing power of Jesus was in the Church, and I couldn’t find it,” she said.

She began to see that many of her clients suffering with addiction also had experienced sexual abuse in their families or in schools. Many had several psychiatric problems intertwined, such as eating disorders, addictions, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

While the hospital used 12-step programs to help addicts, Hughes wondered how many of her colleagues, who were not relying on God themselves, really understood the steps, which involved realizing one was helpless over one’s problem; coming to believe in a higher power; and turning one’s life over to God as he understands him.

She would go regularly to an Adoration chapel and pray for her clients, since bringing up religious matters at the workplace was not something she could do freely. She was in an institution where she was not allowed to say, “Let’s go talk to Jesus,” she said.

Though the 12 steps did allow for an opening to ask about people’s spiritual lives, often to uncover hurts, she felt limited in guiding people to faith in Jesus Christ. The Catholic Church with her sacraments seemed to offer so much more, but the question of how to connect the faith with conventional therapy continued to dog her.

Then, during a period of intense prayer in the Adoration chapel, she sensed God giving her the name, “House of Hope and Healing.” At first she thought it was a name of a place that already existed, but she eventually realized God was calling her to establish it.

The pull was so strong she resigned her well-paying job with benefits to discern God’s direction.

After a period of unemployment, she began to work for Spofford Hall, an American treatment centre, to assess teenaged patients for possible referral and to look after their follow-up care. She registered the name House of Hope and Healing, and began working as a consultant from her home while her children were still attending school.

Her practice and her reputation grew. Then, she received a phone call out of the blue from Neil Shapiro, CEO of United Psychiatric Hospitals in the United States, who invited her to work for him.

He invited her to visit their facilities in Ohio and Kansas. She was struck by how professional, caring, spiritual and well-put-together their programs were, so she agreed to take the job. She considers Shapiro’s phone call, out of the blue, a miraculous intervention.

Shapiro financed the rent for an office, offered Hughes a good salary, and the House of Hope and Healing was officially launched in February 1991. During this time, Ontario’s health insurance program, OHIP, financed U.S. treatment programs for Canadians.

These years with United Psychiatric Hospitals also gave Hughes a good income while her children were finishing school and helped put the House on a solid footing. But the Lord warned her to create a “slush” fund, to save for a rainy day, so she began to save part of her earnings.

By 1996, OHIP cut funding for American treatment programs, even though they charged about $350 a day compared to the $880 a day a Canadian treatment hospital charged, she said.

Her experience with The United Psychiatric Group gave her insight into how interrelated psychiatric issues could be treated. The programs not only used a medical approach, they had adapted the 12 steps for use in healing the trauma of sexual abuse. “You could use the power of Jesus if that was your faith,” she said. “Then I saw what was possible.”

Hughes was also studying the works of Paula and John Sanford and the Christian healing ministry of Elijah House.

With the OHIP funding cut off, and no longer needed by the American hospitals to direct patients to their programs, Hughes faced a dilemma. Though she had paying clients, there weren’t enough of them to pay her salary and any staff, so the House of Hope and Healing began living on Divine Providence.

For Hughes, it meant a substantial pay cut, and poverty-level earnings much of the time, but her children were on their own by then. She received help to apply for charitable status. And a $50,000 donation from a family member, and later an inheritance from an aunt of $300,000 allowed her to invest money to provide income to support the healing venture.

The House of Hope and Healing and its cheery suite of offices with a conference room that is used for various support groups that meet during the week now faces a crossroads.

Hughes is well past retirement age and has already been planning for her succession. She and another counsellor provide the counselling. But the well-invested legacies and donations from the 1990s will run out by 2017. On June 11, the wider community will celebrate anniversary for the House of Hope and Healing June 11 with “A Night of Hope” marking the successes of the previous years, and looking ahead for fresh vision.

In Hughes’s counselling office, there’s a small table by the wall holding items clients have left behind that contain a story of their healing journey: a red boxing glove, a brightly coloured plastic rooster, a framed picture of Jesus, dolls, a clock, a sculpture of a circle of people embracing, and other items. On the floor underneath and beside are stuffed animals, an assortment of rag dolls, and a child’s bike.

While she has been able to talk about Jesus in her counselling, she has not pushed her faith on her clients. In fact, she had one patient who refused to allow any mention of God during her counselling sessions because of the association of that word with childhood abuse she’d suffered from a family member.

But then, sitting in the office during a counselling session near the table of mementos of suffering and healing with her eyes closed, the patient sensed Jesus present. She felt she heard Him say to her: “Give Me those burdens, My child. I have been waiting for you to ask Me to heal you all those years.”

At the House of Hope and Healing, Jesus has had a way of showing up.