Within the event from which the highlighted quote is drawn (Kurtz, 1979), the historic visit from a sober friend, Ebby T., to a still drinking Bill W. in November 1934, can be found the origins of what remains today the driving force behind the recovering counselor concept.

But the view from Bill W.'s kitchen table has changed dramatically in the intervening 67 years. Increasingly, the science and business of behavioral health treatment are supplanting the art of one recovering chemically dependent person helping another still caught in the throes of addiction.

As the addiction counseling field becomes more impersonal and phrases like "funding streams" and "product lines" are as common as "working the steps" used to be, many counselors feel as if they are beginning to lose their spirits as helping professionals. The call for a "wise, tribal elder with useful information" (Hettinger, 2000) can be heard.

The "elders" of today's behavioral health field often carry a diploma in one hand and a prescription pad in the other — their wisdom too readily replaced by information gleaned from "significant results" of the latest research study.

There was a time, though, when the elders were not as separate from the community they sought to help, when the wisdom they had gained from the healing of their own wounds was of great value. Certainly, people such as Bill W., Dr. Bob, and countless others had little more than their own experiences to aid them in those early days of AA and certainly they and those they sought to help could have benefited from today's medical advances. But to be sure, these people were nonetheless healers in the truest shamanic tradition, and the wisdom they garnered from their tragic descent into addiction and inspired recovery is something this field cannot afford to lose in its rush into the science-driven 21st century.

Before the marriage of addictions and mental-health gave birth to behavioral health, before chemical dependency or alcoholism treatment; even before the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous and the fateful conversation between Ebby T. and Bill W.; a series of events took place in the early 1930s on two continents among four men, about one topic — alcoholism (Kurtz, pp. 8-9). In hindsight, those events can only be described as synchronistic, i.e.; meaningfully coincidental, which is itself ironic as one of those four men developed a whole theory around that word and is also the man, Dr. Carl Jung, who serves as the professional model and earliest champion of what the recovering counselor has come to personify for the last half century — the wounded healer.

In 1931, Dr. Jung had as a patient a wealthy American named Rowland H. who had come to Switzerland to consult with Jung about his intractable drinking problem. After having earlier spent a year under Jung's care, Rowland had nonetheless relapsed and again was seeking the Swiss psychiatrist's counsel. Jung told Rowland that the medical community had nothing further to offer him and that his only hope lay in some type of religious or spiritual conversion (Kurtz, p. 8). Subsequently, Rowland returned to the United States, remained sober, and a few years later became a catalyst for the founding of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.

As this simple program, born of desperation and hopelessness, became more organized and successful, the few medical and religious institutions that sought to help alcoholics began to notice. It wasn't long before AA meetings were being held in church basements and hospital wards. The next logical step was to hire recovering alcoholics as para-counselors to support the efforts of medical and psychiatric staff with hospitalized alcoholics.

In 1937, Bill W. was offered a similar arrangement by the owner of the hospital where Bill had been a patient years earlier. Bill turned down the offer, the idea of transforming former alcoholic patients into alcoholism counselors — the genesis of the recovering alcoholism counselor as wounded healer — was one that's time had come. It is an idea that has been used as a blueprint for countless counselor training programs worldwide ever since. But why has the concept of one recovering chemically dependent person helping another been so successful for so many years? What well spring of power had these "hopeless drunks" inadvertently tapped into? And why did such a prominent psychiatrist as Jung believe so strongly that "only the wounded physician heals" (Jung, 1961a)

The concept of the wounded healer is centuries old. From the ancient mythical figure of Asklepios (Cotterell, 1996), the original wounded physician, to the shamanistic traditions of numerous indigenous cultures, the image of someone "who has been on an inner voyage and knows how to conduct others on similar journeys" (Smith, 1996) is found by many to be both intriguing and intuitively credible. A person who has taken the "inner voyage" is also described as an initiate, and certainly the addict's journey down and through the hell of addiction initiates him into the fellowship of recovery. There is a great distinction between the person who has survived addiction and continues as before, and the one who, because of the initiation, chooses to use those experiences as a wounded healer in service to others. For these people, ongoing analysis and self-reflection as healing agents are of paramount importance (Sedgwick, 1994).

In one recent survey (Stoffelmayr, Mavis, & Kasim, 1998) of 575 staff members from 51 substance-abuse treatment facilities, 30 percent of them reported being in recovery from drugs and/or alcohol. That is a significant number of people who are presumably using their own experiences — their wounds — at least to some extent, in a therapeutic setting. Those who are not familiar with, or are opposed to the wounded healer concept and its present day manifestation, the recovering counselor, may ask; "What's this idea of using your own "wounds" to help your clients? "What wounds"?

To a certain extent, the answers to those and similar questions depend upon one's beliefs about the therapeutic process and their role as a facilitator of that process. There are myriad questions and answers to be addressed in this regard: Does who I am as a person affect who I am as a therapist? Do certain aspects of my personal life enter the therapeutic setting, consciously or unconsciously? Think of questions from your clients' perspective. For example:

• If I have unresolved traumatic childhood issues I need to work on, do I want a therapist whose knowledge of those issues is theoretical only? Experiential? Both? Do I care one way or the other?
• If I'm having trouble with my teenage son, do I want a therapist who is also a parent?
• Do I want a therapist who has never been married to help me through my current marital difficulties?

There is no way that anyone can become a therapist and somehow manage to separate his personal life, his upbringing, attitudes, feelings and beliefs from his therapeutic life. And even if such perfect compartmentalization were achievable, how many of us, especially those of us who have been dragged through the degrading quagmire of addiction, would want to be pulled out of it by someone who is so tidy, removed and "clean"? Likewise the therapist who is unwilling, or afraid, to examine his own wounds and use his inherent wisdom to help others is discarding a storehouse of therapeutic gold.

The wounds of our life, those injustices, psychic blows and scars, with their attendant pain, anger, fear and shame can be the riches of our life as well. When properly looked at, cared for and learned from, they offer a wisdom that can in turn enrich the lives of others. Someone said; "Knowledge is the gift of memory, given to many — wisdom is the gift of experience, given to only a few," But when are a person's wounds healed enough to become a gift to self and others? And how does that process of transformation of experience into wisdom take place? Sedgwick mentions that; "First was the idea that the analysand (patient) could progress only as far as the analyst himself had been analyzed". In therapeutic vernacular, that's the same as the old saying; "You can't take the patient any further down the road than you've been yourself."

For recovering people in a 12-step program, the ongoing analysis Jung and Sedgwick speak of comes in the form of what AA calls the maintenance steps — particularly steps 6, 7, 10 and 11, where the emphasis is on continuous self- reflection in order to maintain abstinence. But how does this recovering counselor as wounded healer remain conscious of her own healing process, and more important, because her own experiences are in great measure what are being used in the therapeutic setting, how does she determine whether those wounds are aiding or impeding work with clients? Jung's prescription for this many years ago was, "Every therapist should have a control by a third person, so that he remains open to another point of view."

Whether that third person is another therapist, as would have most likely been in Jung's day, or whether that role is filled by a clinical supervisor and fellow staff members in today's treatment setting, one of the best ways for a therapist to remain open and conscious of his/her own issues and their potential effects on clients is through ongoing feedback from trusted colleagues. This monitoring is vital for the recovering counselor/wounded healer as this therapeutic approach is filled with difficulties that must be carefully and consciously negotiated.

Countertransference — attitudes and emotional reactions that originate in the therapist's own experience and manifest in the therapeutic setting — is a potential danger for a therapist using the wounded healer model, although certainly a danger shared by all therapists. Transference and countertransference have been the subjects of studies over the past 40-50 years (Jung, 1946; Fordham, 1957; Gordon, 1968; Masterson, 1983; Sedgwick, 1994). But, because the therapist who uses the wounded healer approach consciously works within the landscape of his own experience, he is at greater risk for therapeutic damage as there could still be unexploded land mines lying around of which he is not fully conscious.

Within the wounded healer concept, especially as it relates to a recovering counselor who personally and professionally espouses belief in a 12-step approach to recovery from addiction, there is the possibility of countertransference reactions being triggered by a client who does not agree that such an approach is best for him. Such disagreement can hit the therapist where he lives, so to speak. This is a common, if not much discussed, problem in the behavioral health field.

It is essential for the therapist who invites clients into that landscape to be as clean and safe as possible. Jung refers to this metaphorically as; "the clean hands" of the therapist and adds "patients somehow look into the soul of the analyst, thereby finding out how the analyst himself handles his own problems and if he practices what he preaches (Jung, 1913).

The wounded healer must pay close attention to maintaining proper therapeutic distance and objectivity with clients, while maintaining a sense of compassion for them. From the Latin, cum, meaning, with, compassion in a therapeutic sense means sharing the suffering, the "passion" of your clients. In the sixth edition of his excellent primer on counseling, Corey makes this point clear; "... rather, empathy is a deep and subjective understanding of the client with the client. Therapists are able to share the client's subjective world by tuning into their own feelings that are like the client's feelings, yet therapists must not lose their own separateness" (Corey, 2001).

For the therapist willing to use his own wounds in the healing process with clients, this tightrope act of, "...tuning into their own feelings..." while maintaining his/her own separateness can be difficult. For example, what if a counselor's client has unresolved issues with her parents, which are causing her much, pain and anger?

The recovering therapist empathizes and meets the client emotionally by disclosing that he had a similar situation with his own parents but that they died before any resolution could be achieved. It can be tempting and easy for the therapist who is not on guard for the highly charged dynamics at work in such a scenario to encourage the client to resolve her parent issue in a way that might not be in her best interests but would, in a vicarious manner, achieve relief for the therapist.

This is another common situation therapists can find themselves in and one which Corey and others envision when they advise counselors to maintain their separate identity.

The previous scenario also illustrates one of the main therapeutic tools used by recovering counselors, self-disclosure. The practice comes directly from the old, smoke-filled, AA meeting rooms where in those early days one recovering alcoholic after another, usually the old-timers, would stand up and recite what it was like, what happened, and what's it's like now.

The reasons that AA members would repeat their stories to newer members was to instill a sense of hope in an otherwise hopeless person and to engender a sense of trust in the AA program of recovery.

Another reason for retelling the "then and now" stories was to give the old-timers a degree of credibility that they could then use to get the newcomers to take those first few difficult and frightening steps toward recovery.

This tried and true, "I've done it; you can do it; I'll show you how; you follow" formula is part of recovering counselor's approach with a client — complete with the professionally measured portions of self-disclosure.

The pitfall is of course abuse of power — the greatest danger for any therapist. This danger is what Guggenbuhl-Craig refers to as the "shadow" of the therapist (Guggenbuhl-Craig, 1991).

The therapist who falls into this trap is most likely the wounded healer because the client's belief and trust isn't in some clinical theory or professional opinion, but is invested directly in the therapist.

Adequate training, clinically sound foundations and ongoing monitoring insulate the therapist from such direct infusions of powerful energy.

Although the issues of countertransference, empathy and self-disclosure have been discussed within the context of the recovering counselor-as-wounded healer, they apply to any therapist, formerly addicted or not. And although the recovering person is the natural candidate for such a model, simply being in recovery is not qualification enough.

Some of the most notable psychological minds of the 20th century, people like Freud, Jung, and Viktor Frankl, for example, whose professional theories and ideas were forged in the crucible of their own personal life tragedies and troubled childhoods, were nevertheless people with academic training and who believed in the science of healing as much as the art.

Perhaps the greatest pitfall for the recovering counselor as wounded healer is his own insubstantial belief that those initiatory wounds he carries are, in scientific language, "a necessary and sufficient condition" for being an effective therapist.

If one looks at Freud or Jung or Frankl, though, it becomes evident how the fusion of personal wounds and professional training, the marriage of personal and professional experience, yields the type of rich insights and wisdom that one or the other alone can never achieve.

The behavioral health field of 2001, perhaps more now than ever, needs the wisdom and compassion that only a true wounded healer embodies. But without adequate training and without the necessary balance that the best of 21st century technological and medical advances can bring to the equation, such a healer will remain unbalanced.

In the preface to Dr. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, written in nine consecutive days shortly after his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Gordon Allport describes the essence of the wounded healer when he writes of Frankl; "His father, mother, brother and his wife died in camps or were sent to the gas ovens, so that, excepting for his sister, his entire family perished in these camps."

A psychiatrist who personally has faced such extremity is a psychiatrist worth listening to. He, if anyone, should be able to view our human condition wisely and with compassion (Frankl, 1959). Frankl's is indeed a model worth aspiring to, and one that brings the best of behavioral health science into the "kinship of suffering."

James Jensen, MA, MS, has worked in the addiction field since 1974, both in the United States and abroad. He is currently a trainer, consultant, and surveyor for CARF, The Accreditation Commission and is author of The Treatment Planning Source Clinical Documentation Workbook.

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