On this page you will find powerful personal testimonies of individual change. The support and treatment offered to people at this Project can enable individuals to identify and make major changes to their lives in the way they think, feel and behave.
My name is Julian. I have lived in Bristol all my 39 years of age. I am from a large family: my father was Irish, my mother English, and I am the youngest of ten children. I always struggled as a young boy, I never felt comfortable in my own skin. I thought there was something wrong with me, and there was as I later found out, after 25 years of substance abuse, drinking alcohol, and Class-A drugs.
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This is my story of how I have come to reside at St James Priory. I am 30 years old, born in High Wycombe in Bucks. where I was raised and brought up a Muslim. I come from a close knit family, where the family is very important and you are loyal to each other.
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I came to Bristol 3 years ago from London. I was alone in a city I had never been to and was unbelievably frightened. I had come from a detox centre and had been offered a place in treatment at Walsingham House. I arrived in the same shape as St James Church – tired, sad, in desperate need of lots of TLC and looking for firm foundations.
I am 28 years old and come from Bristol, I have been involved in violent crime for many years due to my addiction to alcohol & drugs. I remember I was 7 years old the first time I had taken alcohol and the feeling it gave me, it removed all my fears I had and gave me great amounts of confidence.
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I was looking for a focus to describe my experience at Walsingham House. I saw this quote above on the St. James Priory website, and knew instantly this was my focus.
I was struggling with maintaining some kind of flow with my first attempt at writing of ‘my time at Walsingham’. The reason? There was just so much packed into a 5-month period.
Well it all started about 15 years ago now. I remember seeing in the Bristol Evening post a bit about a drug and alcohol rehab in the center of Bristol that took in homeless people and that Housing Benefit would pay for your stay. I was only 20 years old but already at that time in my life drugs had become an issue, so after my flat getting taken over by all the local drug users I decided to go to the rehab and see what they said. I was given an assessment the very next day and with in a week I got a call to say I had been accepted.
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