Adventure Therapy & Recovery Care

Personal and professional experience allows Gary to understand the array of barriers that prevent clients from defining, joining, and remaining in healthy environments. These barriers may be internal to the client (low motivation or emotional, medical, mental, or spiritual problems). There may also be external barriers that prevent clients from safely meeting their needs related to housing, employment, nutrition, socialization, and transportation.

In addition to specialized, individualized goal-setting and skill-building, Gary can provide an invaluable service for those resistant to remaining abstinent from drugs and/or alcohol, but who must do so due to legal, medical, family or contractual obligations.

Working with other treatment professionals, Gary determines client needs, defines boundaries, and explores how community, family, and business supports can best be utilized to maintain ongoing recovery. 

 Gary understands the relationships between these various barriers to the client’s recovery. He will collaboratively develop a plan of action to address these barriers. Having a working knowledge of community resources that help remove barriers – and strong personal experience in having such barriers removed. He has a great network of these resources and their various strengths and weaknesses.

A key service component is matching the client with the best resource for their individual needs. Gary provides accountability for the client to follow through with all areas of the plan of action.

    •    If you're freshly out of treatment or detox, what are you supposed to do to protect the investment you have made in yourself?

    •    Structuring daily activities can be a lot harder than one might anticipate.

    •    Peace of mind, fun, and happiness are hard to achieve in recovery without the necessary life skills. A Sober Coach helps you build those skills.

    •    A Sober Coach helps support the individual in catching up with missed time and building up life skills, which are either forgotten or were never learned.

    •    Adolescents in early recovery benefit greatly from having a professional relationship outside the 12-Step rooms, especially when that someone is a Sober Coach who has been there before.

Each client sets weekly goals to fit his/her personal strengths and challenges. An empowerment approach is used to build self-esteem and confidence.

Gary will work with individuals at all stages of recovery, whether you are leaving residential treatment, currently in sober living, in an outpatient/day-patient program, in your own home, or recently relapsed.

Some cases require a few meetings each week, for a few hours at a time. Some cases require many hours, seven days per week. Frequency and length of sessions are evaluated monthly. Meeting locations will vary depending on where the client is in their recovery, and what the person is currently working on. In addition, the sober coach is on-call by phone 24 hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week. This service alone can help prevent relapses and supports individuals with crises that come up in between sessions.