Freedom Model Coaching

All FM Coaching is completely non-judgemental and not prescriptive. We will not judge your behaviors, choices, relationships, lifestyle, past actions or habits, nor will we tell you how you should live your life. We value an individual’s personal autonomy and free will. It is not our job to judge, and we know that amplifying guilt, shame, or regret can only hamper the learning process. With this in mind, we do not coerce, manipulate or increase fear, anxiety or shame to drive our students’ behavior-change as so many “coaching” disciplines do.

All FM Sessions are based on the Socratic Method. Meaning, we will ask a lot of questions as a means to problem-solve issues. As Mark Scheeren, Freedom Model’s Co-Founder says when working the first few sessions with a student, “We will need to build your puzzle. Try to remember, you’ve lived with yourself, well, since your beginning – I’m here just learning about you. So I’ll have to ask a lot of questions to build the puzzle. And then I’ll ask more questions that will facilitate self-discovery. This is known as the Socratic Method, and it works.” In a Socratic Method session the student and teacher build a comfortable dialogue that allows for the student to learn by his/her own cognitive processes, not by the teacher leading, coercing or manipulating. 

By providing the researched facts about actual, objective drug effects and also debunking the massive amount of addiction and recovery lore and misinformation through the 470 page Freedom Model text/curriculum, all Freedom Model Coaching provides the student necessary facts and information to devalue the drug experience. This then makes the desire for heavy use less appealing. In short, providing facts helps to devalue a strong preference for heavy use, making the process of solving the problem and moving on much easier and more fulfilling. 

When we combine all three coaching components, it builds a discipline we call Cognitive Behavioral Education. To understand CBE, we must briefly explain its forebearer, CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a means of comparison. CBT as a therapy has become all the rage over the last twenty years – it’s become a buzzword that many flout to bolster their professional therapy resumes and round out a description of their therapeutic practices. While relatively new on the scene, CBT’s results as a solid performer to help people transform their lives is well known in therapeutic circles. While CBT has been shown to be highly effective for people struggling with depression, anxiety, OCD, and other mental health issues, it has not been effective at helping people to solve substance use issues and other behavioral “addictions”. This is largely due to it being combined with addiction disease/disorder mythology and misinformation, as well as the personal judgments and biases of the therapist. It’s important to understand that the goal of therapy is for the therapist to change the client/patient’s thoughts and beliefs to what the therapist deems as correct. 

In 1989 when we began the first coaching method for a substance use problem, we looked at the various mental health therapies as a model to emulate. After much research and development, we ended up rejecting all of them in favor of an educational model. We found education to be far more effective and non-judgmental, and the research at the time demonstrated real promise. In light of our discoveries at the time, the first coaching model we developed was called The Educational Initiative. 

This coaching model soon went through a number of name and programmatic improvements and changes over the 20 years that followed as our research staff and projects grew. In the midst of all this, in the early aughts we learned about CBT’s effectiveness as a therapeutic model, and brought CBT’s ideals together with our educational approach to create the Cognitive Behavioral Education discipline. This has since been the macro-moniker for our coaching method. Since that coining, CBE as a coaching discipline has stood the test of time as the most effective method in the world for coaching people with substance use problems and other behavioral issues. 

Simply put, CBE is cognitive in that we discuss changing and adapting one’s thoughts and mind, which then changes behaviors, which then changes a life. All of this is facilitated through data, facts, research, and a Freedom Model Coach who educates (i.e. provides factual information). Hence, Cognitive Behavioral Education and Freedom Model Coaching.