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Hired Power: A Bridge to Recovery
The Organization's Personal Recovery Assistants Help Artists, Executives and Other High-Profile Clients Make the Transition to Sober Living
By Simon Glickman
These days, many entertainment professionals have personal assistants, personal trainers, personal stylists, personal nutritionists – even personal psychics. But when it comes to navigating something as challenging, painful and complex as addiction recovery, too many try to handle the process single-handedly.
Getting treated for addiction is one thing, but taking the tools of recovery back to everyday life is quite another. The temptations afforded by wealth, privilege and access often militate against sober living outside the formal constraints of treatment centers.
Enter Hired Power, Inc. Headquartered in Seal Beach, Calif., the organization furnishes personal recovery assistants who help mediate between recovering artists and professionals and their networks of physicians, therapists and outreach groups. By acting as the "eyes and ears" of the recovery program, these assistants help keep the process on track.
Director of Private Staffing Nanette Zumwalt describes Hired Power's role as a bridge. "Transition is key to living in recovery," she insists. "We help our clients get the support they need in their own living environment. Wherever they are, we assist them in getting to the next destination – whether it's a 12-step meeting or a business meeting."
Employers, managers and agents regularly send afflicted staff and clients to Hired Power, which uses PRAs to assist as briefly as a day or as long as needed. Sometimes the treatment begins intensively and is scaled back to allow clients to "self-empower," as the language of recovery has it, but sometimes the treatment ramps up in intensity.
The private organization's staff has some 38 years of collective experience, and its areas of expertise include alcoholism, methamphetamine and prescription-drug addiction, and eating disorders. PRAs are thoroughly screened and profiled, and certified in CPR and First Aid.
These aren't sponsors, live-in therapists or "sober buddies." PRAs are addiction-recovery specialists who, in tandem with a treatment coordinator, cater to high-powered people who have floundered in the traditional treatment environment – or struggled to resume their careers while maintaining their sobriety.
These assistants are well acquainted with the kind of lifestyle that has trapped their clients. I have a large number of staff that grew up with these kinds of environments," she asserts. "Some of the shininess has worn off." While she acknowledges that "there's always an artist or entertainer or athlete who will awe anybody," she maintains that Hired Power's people are never too impressed to be effective.
Though the paid service's clients are people with means, they also face unique challenges, such as entourages and the excesses of touring. "A lot of relapse happens before the drink or drug is ever used," Zumwalt declares.
"People go into a treatment center, where they're very structured and insulated, and they have these new thoughts, skills and behaviors," she notes. "Then they walk out the door and it's over. Maybe once in a while someone will call and ask how you're doing. But how do you go back on the road, with people using and drinking every day? What do you do, as an artist, when you've had a beer and a shot before walking on stage every night for 15 years?"
How does it all work for, say, a musician about to go on the road? Higher Power will locate a therapist who understands the lifestyle. The therapist and Higher Power conduct separate consultations with the client; they then prepare a treatment framework in tandem. The result is what Zumwalt describes as a "therapeutic protection plan."
Zumwalt – who describes her own expertise as her ability to "connect the dots" in the treatment regimen – is at pains to point out that Hired Power's approach is "relationship-based." Though the organization is frequently brought in by managers or other members of the client's business team, the PRA works hard to earn the client's trust. "We're showing them their choices," she explains. "We don't come in with a gun, saying, 'Put down the vodka.' We're not the police, and we're not threatening them with incarceration or hospitalization."
She also emphasizes the importance of verbal intervention. "We'll say, 'OK, the craving is bad, and we could give in and drink or use. Or we could go for a walk, or write – let's hold off for 10 minutes,'" she relates. "Sometimes it's not one day at a time. Sometimes it's about getting through the next 10 minutes and reevaluating."
For Zumwalt and her associates, Hired Power represents a way for high-profile people to navigate the maze of living in recovery without backsliding or becoming tabloid fodder. "This is the gold standard of care," she says. "This is not the old theory that an addict needs to fall down and lose his front teeth and then pull himself up by his bootstraps. This is a resource that can change people's lives – so they don't have to suffer."
www.hiredpower.com |
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