One of the things I’m most proud of in my professional life is an organisation most people have never heard of. In 2017, I sat down with six other practitioners and we founded the European Association of Recovery Specialists — EARS. Seven people who might reasonably have regarded each other as competitors, choosing instead to build something together. This is why we did it, and why I believe it mattered.
The problem we all shared
By 2017 I’d been working in addiction treatment for fourteen years. I’d founded Sober Services in 2008 and been among the first professional interventionists working outside North America. I’d founded Sober Academy in 2015 to train the next generation properly. And from that vantage point I could see, with total clarity, the structural problem at the heart of our sector: it was unregulated.
Anyone in Europe could call themselves an interventionist, a recovery coach, a sober companion. No licence, no register, no enforceable standard of training or ethics. And the clients — families in crisis, often at the worst moment of their lives — had no reliable way to tell the trained professional from the enthusiastic amateur, or the amateur from the exploitative. The seven of us who came together had each, independently, watched the damage that does. We’d each spent years trying to raise standards inside our own practices. And we’d each arrived at the same conclusion: individual excellence wasn’t enough, because the market had no way to see it.
Why an association?
When a sector has no statutory regulation, there are only two honest options. Wait for governments to act — in a niche field few politicians have heard of, that could mean waiting decades — or build the structures yourselves. We chose the second.
An association of practitioners can do the things a lone practitioner cannot. It can define what good practice actually looks like, in writing, in public. It can create a visible standard that families, treatment centres and referrers can check. It can connect serious professionals across borders — and recovery work is inherently cross-border, because families travel for treatment and specialists travel to families. And it can say, collectively, something no one member can say credibly alone: we hold ourselves to account, and here is the proof.
That was the founding logic of EARS: if the state won’t regulate us, we will regulate ourselves — openly, collegially, and with the families’ interests rather than our own at the centre.
Why seven competitors said yes
I want to be honest about this part, because it’s the part I find most hopeful. The six practitioners who founded EARS with me were not my employees, partners or protégés. They were experienced professionals with their own practices and reputations — people I respected precisely because they were good enough to be my competition. Every one of us had something to lose from greater transparency and shared standards. Every one of us said yes anyway.
Why? Because people who do this work seriously share something deeper than rivalry: we’ve all sat with families after bad practice has hurt them. Once you’ve seen that, “the sector needs standards” stops being an abstract position and becomes a moral one. The founding of EARS was seven people acting on it at the same time.
What it changed
EARS gave European recovery specialisms something they’d never had: a professional identity with a collective voice. It connected practitioners who’d previously worked in isolation, created a forum for sharing best practice, and gave the outside world — families, treatment providers, the wider sector — a meaningful signal in a market that offered very few.
It also reinforced a principle I’ve built everything else on. Sober Academy’s external accreditation through OCN Credit4Learning — the first of its kind in the UK sector — came from the same conviction as EARS: standards should be set and verified by people with no stake in the outcome. And when our accreditation lapsed during COVID because we refused to dilute the training by moving it online, it was the same conviction that made us accept the lapse rather than compromise the standard. Re-accreditation is now in progress as the Academy relaunches.
The lesson I take from it
Recovery taught me long ago that I can’t do anything worthwhile alone — I got sober in March 2001 because other people carried a message to me. EARS was the professional version of the same truth. Standards, like sobriety, are easier to keep in fellowship than in isolation.
If you work in this sector and believe in what I’ve described, get in touch — these conversations are always worth having. And if you’re a family trying to find trustworthy help, my book It’s Not About Me! — Confessions of a Recovered Outlaw Addict is free to download from this site; it’s the best introduction I can offer to how I think about this work.
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Every message lands with me personally. Whether it’s about your own situation, a loved one, or a professional enquiry — start the conversation. I read everything, and I reply myself.
