About Zac Spowart

No, and it matters that I say so plainly. I hold a master's in Addiction Counseling from Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School and an MBA from Pepperdine. I am not a licensed therapist. Living outside the United States, I let my formal licensure lapse rather than chase foreign credentials that do not apply to the people I actually work with. The training did not go anywhere. I still work from the same evidence-based practices, in a coaching lens rather than a clinical one. What that means in practice: I coach. I do not diagnose, I do not treat, and I am not a replacement for therapy or medical care.

Sobriety, and the life you build on the other side of it. That means finding your actual self underneath the substances, figuring out what you want your life to be about, and learning how to show up in relationships without disappearing or performing. I work with people in recovery, people who are sober curious, and people who are simply tired of who they have been. I cannot do anything medical. No detox, no withdrawal management, no medication. That work requires supervision and it is not mine to do. I can help in the early days, but the work goes deepest with people who already have some stability underneath them.

Bali, Indonesia, at the moment. Originally from Northern California, and I have spent time in over 50 countries. Most of my coaching is remote, so where I am matters less than it sounds. Some of the work is travel based, where we go somewhere and do it in the water or on the move rather than across a desk.

Sometimes, and it depends entirely on where they are. I cannot do anything medical. Detox and withdrawal management require supervision, and withdrawal from alcohol and benzodiazepines can genuinely kill people, so that work belongs with clinicians. What I can do is have the honest conversation before someone is ready, and be there for the part after, when the substance is gone and the real questions show up. If someone is in acute danger, the answer is a medical team first and me later. I will say that plainly rather than take the engagement.

At twenty-one, and with a lot less grace than people tend to imagine. My sobriety date is November 28, 2006. It did not begin with a moment of clarity. It began with handcuffs, a judge who would not cut me a break, and five years of felony probation in Los Angeles, at the point where I had run out of ways to talk myself out of anything. What I say now is that getting sober was not the hard part. The hard part was working out who I was underneath it, and then building a life I did not want to escape from. That is the same work I do with the people I coach, which is why I tell it plainly instead of dressing it up.