Trust is a very important virtue when seeking help for overcoming addictions and other abusive behaviors.  In order to gain your trust, I am going to provide you with my clinical background and yes, even some of my personal experiences.

I have over 21 years clinical experience of study, research, and counseling practice within the addictions field, where I hold a Bachelor of Arts Degree (BA) from Merrimack College, North Andover, Massachusetts (Class of 1989) and a Master of Arts Degree (MA) from Norwich University, Northfield Vermont (Class of 1993).  Through Norwich University, my area of concentrated study was Counseling Psychology specific to Addiction Theory and Intervention & Counseling Applications.   From 2004-2008, I worked as a consultant and counselor for a small psychological and counseling firm in southern New Hampshire (Silverman & Associates).  Here, I specialized in areas of alcohol and other drug abuse, domestic abuse, and anger-based hostility.

From 1993 to 2001, I buried myself in post-graduate research where I collected hundreds of case studies of people who, while locked in cycles of addiction, committed violent crimes.  Dissecting and analyzing these cases and the individuals involved provided me insight into the compensatory nature to alcohol, drugs abuse, and aggression.  It was through these forensics that I developed and field-tested Select Emotional Alternatives-Cognitive Application Processing (SEA-CAP). SEA-CAP is an efficient two stage, six tier systems approach to not only making practical sense of the process of addiction and other abusive behavior, but more, provides a dynamic application to taking the efficient steps necessary to produce lasting effective behavioral (thoughts, feelings, and actions) change.

In 1999, I became a certified member of the National Federation of Professional Trainers, where, as a Certified Personal Trainer (CPT), I educate(d) and counsel(ed) upon the experience and expression of stress management and emotional competency to helping overcome addictions.  In 2005, I became an alcohol and other drugs of abuse Certified Addiction Specialist (CAS) through the American Academy of Health Care Providers in the Addictive Disorders (The Academy).  Through The Academy, founded by Harvard University’s Medical School Division on Addiction, I am fortunate to be aligned with the most efficient and prominent researchers across the Nation in the field of addictions.  I am also a member of the National Association of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselors, and rostered with the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services as an Alternative Provider.  Understanding the nature of addiction and other abusive behaviors, in 2009, I became a Certified Anger Resolution Therapist (CART)  and Consultant for the Anger Management Training Institute.  I am also rostered through the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services as an Alternative Provider.  Respective of reaching out to the world, I am a member of the International Society for Online Mental Health, and the Society of Emotional Intelligence.  As of recent, I have taken my extensive research, study, and practice and applied my 16,000 plus hours of alcohol and drug abuse counseling toward my Master Licensed Alcohol Drug Counselor (MLADC) licensure though the New Hampshire Board of Licensing for Alcohol and Other Drug Use Professions (2011).

Trust alone does not create therapeutic bonds.  What good is trust if the person to whom you entrust your distress cannot relate?  The ability for me to relate to you as you experience distress and despair is necessary to our forming efficient bonds.  The ability to relate requires experience, but more, it requires insight.  In the world of Martial Arts, insight is as one’s form, it provides the grounding to one’s mastery of skill.  Master of skill, and mental health is a skill to be practiced over a condition to be treated evolves through study and practice.  I have shown you what I have studied.  Now I share with you what I practiced.

For years prior to opening and climbing through my own opportunity to change, I abused alcohol and other drugs.  There wasn’t enough alcohol produced that could take away my personal horrors.  The abuse of alcohol and drugs was my shovel, a delusional shovel.  Through my motivation of avoidance and escape, I tried so very hard to bury the selfless experience I was running from.  The more I drank and drugged, the deeper I imbedded myself to the dark abyss of hopelessness and helplessness.  I wasn’t a part of life; I was apart from life.  I flat-lined mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.  I wanted so desperately to stop digging.  However, nothing worked.  Nothing worked because I was blind to my ignorance and lost to my perspective of what was wrong and how people changed.

In years past, I tried the 28-day and, 14-day programs; I attended the self-help support fellowships, and I met with psychiatrists, therapists, and counselors.  At the time, unlike today, these outlets focused on drinking and drugging behavior.  They ignored the psychology of addiction and other abusive behaviors because quite frankly, it was not cost effective.  Those times were tough, the theme of programming was: “Just Say No, now give me your money.”  Today, for the most part, there are many programs that do not have as their motivation money to be made, rather compassionate service to perform.  I applaud these programs, however, back in the 70s and 80s that was not the case.  That was not the case at all, for the outcome to my experiences were only compartmentalized relief.

Even though I wasn’t drinking or drugging, I had no life, for I anchored myself to a mental, emotional, and spiritual void.  With this selfless, haunting void, each time I quit drinking and drugging, within weeks or months I was back to doing what I knew so well, I was back to abusing alcohol and drugs.

Then in 1989, a person sought me out and said to me, “It is not what you do, it is what you do with what you once did.”  This made no sense to me.  Anchored to sitting in my own shit, I could not see past my own thoughts.  He went on to say, “Don’t deny your self, give yourself permission to think, feel, and experience your pain.”  This made sense!  These words became my Golden Nugget.  For the first time I realized what “I” was doing.  I was allowing myself the opportunity to experience my addiction.  It wasn’t this or that that caused my addiction; I allowed it to happen out of the despair I paid attention to and validated.  In effect, I gave over my power of control to the false security of helplessness and hopelessness.  I realized that my abuse of alcohol and drugs served a purpose, and that purpose was to cope.  My addiction was my comfort zone for coping with what I thought was wrong with me.  As crazy as that reads, the insidiousness of my addiction was not the continued abuse of alcohol and drugs, the insidiousness was in what I paid attention to in my thoughts.

The abuse of alcohol and drugs is what I did in terms of behavior.  Behind my motivation for what I did (e.g., abuse alcohol and drugs), were the distorted misrepresentations of who I thought I was in relationship to my world–My Golden Nugget.  It made perfect sense why I always returned to alcohol and drugs at every attempt I made to stop.  It made perfect sense, because all I did was stop the behavior and continued to nurture my insecurity through my distorted misrepresentations of who I thought I was in relationship to my world.

In the past, I returned to alcohol because addiction developed into a part of me.  At the mere signal of discomfort, I conditioned myself to reach out for my comforting side.  My comforting side was the part of me that wallowed in despair and coped through alcohol and other drugs.  I continued to do what I knew, I denied my self through my comfort zone.  The idea of going it alone without my comfort zone, my comforting side was unimaginable.  However, in order to change, I realized I had to create a healthy separation between my comfort zone and the unbridled insecurity of my humanness.  Therefore, I peeled back the layers of comfort, self-protection, just as one proceeds through the process, the layers of grief.  I allowed myself not to deny my pain, and by so doing, maximized the opportunity to sit in my own shit and realize what I was doing to me.  Denying my potential and wallowing in false security was no longer an option.  I no longer hoped for recovery from what I once was, no, never again.  For the first time in my life, I set out to discover what I could, should, and ought to be.

In effect, I systematically maximized my potential to be open to the opportunity to experience pain not as regret, but as growth.  What I did, I stopped denying myself, focused on myself, and created myself.  Today, I am committed to helping you gain acceptance and change.  As outlined in my graduate thesis (Norwich University Press, 1993) “It is all about discovery!”  Why recover the life you once lived when you have yet discovered the life not lived?