Oklahoma Gazette December 5th, 2007
A metro program based in a house, not a hospital, offers a beacon of hope to families of young men struggling with behavior patterns.
BY LAURA PARAJON
Kris Bratton still remembers the pleading in his parents’ voices when they woke him up early one Saturday morning last month.
“Kris, you need help. We don’t want to force you. It’s your choice.”
Bratton rubbed his sleep out of his eyes and tried to make sense of what he was hearing. Then, he sighed, defeated.
“Yeah, I’ll go. I know I have a problem.”
That was the day the 16-year-old heroin addict packed his bags and headed to Justin’s Lighthouse and Leadership Academy—a decision that changed his life.
“My addiction was getting way too outrageous. Too many people were noticing it, and I was having legal problems.” Bratton said. “I was overdosing and everything else.”
Bratton realized that in his position, he had only three options: jail, death, or recovery.
“And I’d already been to jail,” he said.
The leadership academy is a therapeutic community program that strives to enhance and improve the quality of everyday life for teenage males struggling with any number of behavior patterns.
“We deal with adolescents not only with drug abuse, but with other kinds of behaviors and trauma crises,” said Winston Lewis, the program’s community outreach director. “Pretty much anything that brings conflict in the family and results in school dropout, parent teen conflict, substance abuse, anger management and things like that.”
Winston Lewis and his brother the Rev. Miles Lewis came up with the idea of the residential-based therapeutic center after their younger brother, Justin, died of an accidental overdose almost nine years ago, just two weeks after he was released from a drug treatment facility.
“We realized these hospital-based treatment programs weren’t working, and we wanted to try something different,” Winston Lewis said.
So they did. They created a program that would teach the young men the importance of leadership and acceptance of authority, and instill a stable decision making process that they could use in their everyday lives.
Bratton had been in and out of treatment facilities, and assumed Justin’s Lighthouse wouldn’t be ay different than those.
“I figured no matter where I was going, I wasn’t going to like it,” Bratton said. “And I wasn’t sure what the other guys would be like, Would they be rude?”
Much to his surprise, the other young men shook his hand and welcomed into the cozy, four-bedroom house nestled on a three-acre plot in northwest Oklahoma City.
“Within a week, I had completely changed my mind,” Bratton said. “I came here with spirituality problems, mental problems, and drug problems all at the same time. All three have gotten better and I’ve only been here a month, and I’m planning on staying longer.”
An important part of the recovery process is the family involvement. Parents are invited every weekend to a family therapy session, which the young men are in charge of leading.
“My parents were just here yesterday, and they were so proud of me they didn’t know how to explain it,” Bratton said. “And that felt really good, because I’m so used to being a disappointment to them.”
Throughout the program the residents are given tools they need to live their life in recovery, so that even if they do relapse, they will have the resources they need to take a step in the right direction.
Katie Henson, former program director at the academy, said she could tell Justin’s Lighthouse is changing lives.
“one day, after one of the boys was discharged, his mother hugged me and whispered, ‘Thank you for giving me my boy back.’ And that meant so much,” Henson said. “They just want to know that that precious kid they know is in there somewhere is still in there, and that’s what we do.” OKG
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