A 14-week program designed to help people who are recovering from a host of difficulties is being offered in the New Year.
Celebrating Life in Recovery is a free series based on the life experiences of Cheri Peters who, well, wrote the book on the subject.
“As a kid I never saw myself having a life,” Peters told the Advance from her home in Boise, Idaho. “When I stopped using drugs I realized I had all this other stuff that stopped me from enjoying any kind of life.”
Born to teenage parents, Peters said her father was caught molesting her when she was only three months old. She was brutally abused by her mother. At 13 she was living on the streets of Los Angeles.
Over the next 10 years, “I saw and was involved in some incredibly twisted things,” she said. “But they were less damaging than my home life because, by then, I didn’t expect to be loved or cared for.”
Perversely, an introduction to drugs might have saved Peters’ life.
“When I was introduced to drugs, I found for the first time in my life that I didn’t feel like killing myself,” she said. “It was unbelievably powerful. I found that if I took enough drugs I could survive anything.”
Her own recovery began when she faced the wrong end of a gun, and welcomed the relief that a bullet would provide.
“A drug deal went bad and I found myself with a gun in my face. I felt so grateful!” she said. “I’d been trying to kill myself since I was eight years old. Now, in a couple of seconds, all the pain would be over. When I realized he was just trying to scare me I wanted to scream, ‘My next breath scares me! Please pull the trigger!’ But he didn’t.”
The incident triggered a visit to her abusive mom, who had gone back to school to study social work. Peters left the visit angry, but carrying an envelope bearing a paper her mother had written for a course assignment. Later, she felt that God had appeared in her life, a sense reinforced when she read the paper, in which her mom told her own story, and admitted to the abuse that she had inflicted on her daughter. Peters’ life was about to turn around.
She says that addictions, to behaviours as well as substances, “keep us self-focused.”
“I think a lot of us are stuck,” she said. “Unhappy, lonely, but still knowing it’s not how we want to live.”
She describes addictions as “anything that keeps us in bondage.”
When Peters found the strength to tackle her addictions and move toward taking control of her life, she faced another challenge.
“I had to learn to read — I was illiterate at the age of 23.”
She would return to school and begin to connect with a world different than the one she grew up in.
“When you start to wake up, look at who’s around you — you don’t have to like them, but healing is about reconnecting, learning to trust.”
Addicts often deal with their problems in an unhealthy way.
“You can go to a nicer addiction,” she laughed. “But recovery and healing means stepping away from all of it. I needed to create for myself what I wanted my life to look like. …
“The joy is that we are so resilient. It’s like you wake up and say, ‘What if I can step over that line?’ It’s empowering to say, ‘I’m going to make the choice right now!’ ”
The author of several books (including Miracle from the Streets), Peters is a celebrated international speaker and host of a television and radio program. She founded True Step Ministries to help share her experiences, reminding people to “Always remember that God is crazy about you… Me, too!”
Peters’ Celebrating Life in Recovery is being presented as a community service by Creston’s Seventh-day Adventist Church. Pre-register for the series (starting Jan. 5) or get more information by contacting LeeAnn at 250-428-7124 or celebratinglifeincreston@gmail.com.