I never worked in the treatment field without working one-on-one with clients. From the very beginning, my work wasn’t about systems, policies, or theories—it was about sitting across from a real person and figuring out what they actually needed. I didn’t know it at the time, but that perspective would shape everything that came next.

In 2012, I was studying drug and alcohol counseling and doing therapeutic companion work for Intent Clinical. My job was hands-on—intensive 1:1 work, sourcing programs, and coordinating care. I had also lived in a traditional, “get a job and go to meetings” sober living myself. It worked for me, and I assumed that meant the system I’d inhabited also worked, more or less.

But then I started paying attention.

Survival Bias & the Missing Middle

I saw plenty of people struggle in traditional sober living. Some got kicked out for minor infractions. Others were lost in the shuffle, overlooked by undertrained staff. Many simply weren’t given the right kind of support. And yet, the field, myself included, often blamed them for not making it.

I realized I was looking at survival bias in real time. The people who made it through the system were the ones who fit into its structure—not necessarily the ones who needed help the most. And the ones creating and running these programs? By default, they were the ones for whom that particular system had worked. It made sense to them because they had succeeded within it. But that left out an entire group of people who didn’t fit neatly into those models.

The industry had rigid, institutional-style programs on one end and loose, minimally structured sober houses on the other. But what about the people in between? What about the ones who needed both real accountability and human-centered flexibility?

Building What Didn’t Exist

In 2013, I set out to fill that gap. No outside funding, no investors—just a commitment to doing things differently.

For me this wasn’t, and still isn’t, about competition. It’s about cooperation and rounding out a field full of amazing and dedicated professionals.

BTN isn’t about replacing existing models. It’s about offering something new—an approach where the right kind of attention mattered more than rigid rules, where people weren’t just surviving recovery but building real lives.

That’s the story I want to tell in this blog series—how BTN started, what we’ve learned, and why rethinking recovery isn’t just important, but necessary.