You Are Not
Your Struggles.

Externalise the problem

Separating who you are from what you are facing — addiction is not your identity.

Identify unique outcomes

The moments when you resisted, challenged, or stepped outside the influence of the problem.

Re-author your life story

Building a richer, more empowering narrative about who you are and who you are becoming.

Connect with your values

Anchoring recovery in what truly matters to you — not a set of rules handed down by someone else.

Dignity

Every person deserves to be treated with deep respect, regardless of their history.

Curiosity

We approach every story with openness, never assumptions.

Collaboration

You are the expert on your own life. We walk beside you, not ahead of you.

Hope

We hold hope on your behalf, even on the days you cannot hold it yourself.

Community

Recovery does not happen in isolation. It grows in relationship.

Dr Jo Viljoen

Programme Director · Narrative Therapist · PhD

"I have sat with people who have been told — by others and by themselves — that they are beyond hope. I have never once believed it. My work is to hold that hope long enough for people to find it in themselves again."

jo@simcharecovery.co.za

There was a time when Jo walked hospital corridors as a psychiatric nurse, watching people be reduced to their diagnoses — labelled, categorised, filed away. Something in her resisted that. She knew, even then, that the person in the bed was always more than the condition on the chart.

When Jo encountered Narrative Therapy, it was less a discovery and more a recognition — this is what I have always believed. That people are not their problems. That identity is not fixed. That every person, no matter how lost they feel, carries within them stories of strength, wisdom, and resilience that have simply gone untold.

Jo completed a PhD to go deeper — to understand more fully how the stories we are handed about ourselves shape who we believe we are, and how new stories can open entirely new ways of living. She later completed the Advanced Apprenticeship in the Art of Narrative Therapy alongside world-leading practitioners David Epston, Tom Carlson, and Kay Ingamells.

Today, Jo co-directs Simcha Recovery — a programme she helped build from the ground up because she believed South Africans deserved recovery spaces rooted in dignity, not diagnosis.

Nonka Byker

Director: Pretoria · Narrative Therapist

B.Psych, University of Pretoria
M. Narrative Therapy & Community Work
University of Melbourne

"I am not interested in the version of your story that the problem wants to tell. I am interested in you — the person who has survived, resisted, and kept going even when it was hardest. That person has always been there. I am here to help you find them again."

nonka@simcharecovery.co.za

Nonka has spent most of her life paying attention to stories — the ones communities tell about themselves, the ones systems impose on people, and the quieter ones that survive underneath, waiting to be heard.

She began with a psychology degree at the University of Pretoria, curious about people and what shapes them. But it was her years working in community development and social impact that gave her something textbooks rarely do — a deep understanding that people do not struggle in isolation. Struggle lives in contexts. In histories. In relationships. In the ways society sometimes tells certain people that their stories do not matter.

When Nonka found Narrative Therapy, she found a practice that matched her convictions exactly. She completed her Certificate in Narrative Pastoral Counselling at Coram Deo — graduating with Distinction — and then pursued a Master's in Narrative Therapy and Community Work at the University of Melbourne, one of the global centres of narrative practice. She graduated with Honours.

At Simcha, Nonka works with individuals navigating substance use and process addictions, and holds a special place in the Warrior Woman programme — a space created for women living with the effects of betrayal trauma, where stories of survival are reclaimed as stories of strength.

Gerda Visser

Director: West Rand · Narrative Therapist

Certificate in Narrative Pastoral Counselling
BA · HED

"I am here to witness how, by telling your life's story, you can heal."

gerda@simcharecovery.co.za

In the aftermath of her husband's passing, Gerda found herself confronted with a question she could not avoid: what now, and for whom? The silence that grief leaves behind is particular — it does not just take; it also asks. It asked her what value she still had to offer, what she could bring to others who were writing their own difficult chapters. It was in that space of honest searching that she found Coram Deo's course in Narrative Therapy, and enrolled.

The principles of narrative therapy felt immediately familiar. For years, Gerda had worked as a school librarian at an ELSEN school for children with special needs, and she had learned something quietly profound: stories are never just stories. A child who cannot find themselves anywhere in the world will often find themselves first in a book. There was always a story ready for every situation — and she had always known, instinctively, that the right story at the right moment was a kind of medicine.

Studying at Coram Deo from 2022 to 2024, Gerda came to understand that the same is true of our own life stories. As Susan Wittig Albert wrote, "As we become aware of ourselves as storytellers, we realise we can use our stories to heal and make ourselves whole." Gerda completed her Certificate in Narrative Pastoral Counselling with Distinction — and during those years of study, she also encountered, for the first time, the stories of people navigating life alongside addiction, and the work of Simcha Recovery.