Comments on: Recovery Coaches: What Exactly Does A Recovery Coach Do?

By: kelly

kelly — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 20:55:46 +0000

this is my opinion.. and that’s all it is.. take it or leave it.

if you have not suffered the pain, misery, depression, anxiety, loneliness of addiction, you cannot understand what the addict has gone thru.

if you have not been in the unbearable desperate state and traveled the journey from addiction to recovery there is no way that even the most educated, long time practiced therapist can claim they are more qualified to treat addiction. medical treatment is a must, but they cannot provide a support group to meet with daily, this is a must in the early days. if you think seeing the patient once a week will work, then i know you don’t understand. i struggled for years – rehabs – more psyhcologist, psychiatrist, therapist, not one was able to help, they all thought they knew what to do – wrong. 2 psyhciatrist had their office assistant call me and tell me they no longer felt comfortable providing me treatment. in one case i had decided rehab was need – he dropped me, the second – i was being admitted to a psyc ward, i was seriously thinking about suicide – so what a crock saying only trained therapists are qualified to treat addicton. i finally found a psyhciatrist that admitted up front that he cannot possibly know what i was going thru, but he was willing to work with, promised not to abandon me. together we made a decision to work on my depression as a 1st step – we started to make progress, there is much more, but i know he is one of a kind. he helped with my journey, he supported me – i found most therapists to be cold self important snobs, who because of their wonderful background knew what was best – wrong.

By: jennifer

jennifer — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:43:09 +0000

With all due respect…. I had to have a bachelor’s degree and 7 years of experience working with people with mental illness and drug related problems to become a recovery coach…. there are such high demands for recovery coaching in the job market, NO ONE WITHOUT several years experience and WITHOUT an undergraduate/graduate degree in my particular area is EVER going to get that kind of position. We work in conjunction WITH therapists, doctors, etc etc to ensure prolonged recovery but we are recognized to not be these things… which is why we make significantly less, are not in control of prescribing meds, and not in control of therapy. We are given access to a wide variety of RESOURCES provided by the foundation (a database of information, mixed with COMMON SENSE and knowledge from our EDUCATION) to help participants make the best out of their recovery and we don’t do this alone: we share recovery ideas with other coaches/participant’s families if so permitted/the more experienced within the foundation to make treatments as tailored and appropriate as possible. It’s really an amazing career and participants often find success in the program since it gives them positive incentives to continue with the process of recovery by discovering other more constructive outlets than drug or alcohol abuse.

By: Jana Magee

Jana Magee — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:56:02 +0000

With respect to:
“To be honest, the idea of recovery coaches scares me. Let’s see, if I needed help would I really want a person who is not qualified to diagnose and treat me? There are some real questions and considerations when considering sobriety coaches: ”

Let’s be honest here, traditional addiction treatment modalities don’t have a stellar success rate. My personal choice of 12 Step programs says, “we believe that one addict can best help and understand another addict”. I believe this. I think a recovering addict, with experience living clean and involved in a recovery program, with professional training as a recovery coach, might just be the answser to higher success rates in long term recovery.

I’m more scared by the notion that what we’ve got now, in terms of addictions treatment, is the best we can offer or hope for. All the degrees in the world have not really proven to be the secret to getting people clean and keeping them that way.

By: kristen@anxiety coaching

kristen@anxiety coaching — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:18:16 +0000

Life coaching is about helping people to change every aspect of their lives to make their life better overall. If the person is dealing with an addition issue then they have already failed in their life since they do not have the capacity to love themselves. Recovery coaches are a great concept for those people to be able to make it past that first major stumbling block. Only then will they be ready to take control of their life and make the small changes that add up to a big difference.

By: Johnny

Johnny — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 05:37:33 +0000

In today’s society, self-confidence is hard to obtain and maintain, especially among young people and women.

By: Self Esteem

Self Esteem — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 05:16:22 +0000

THANK YOU!! Great post, everyone should have a Recovery Coach.. sobriety is the key