10/08/2026
Great article on Heather Hayes’ blog that raises an important issue: people providing services beyond their credentials and training.
Calling a service “family coaching” doesn’t remove the responsibility that comes with intervening in a family system. In my view, a Certified Intervention Professional (CIP) credential should be the minimum for intervention work. A licensed clinician with training in family systems would be an even better fit.
Clinical case management should be provided by qualified clinicians who understand family dynamics, recognize risk, and practice within their scope.
Unfortunately, treatment programs have little incentive to question these arrangements when referrals keep coming. But admissions should never take priority over competence, ethics, and family safety.
My concern is that meaningful oversight will come only after serious harm occurs. Families in crisis deserve accountability before that happens.
For those of us in recovery, this is also a question of integrity. How does misrepresenting our qualifications, or allowing families to believe we are clinicians when we aren’t, align with the honesty and accountability our recovery asks of us?
Families deserve transparency about our credentials, our capabilities, and our limits.
When a family reaches out for help with a mental health or substance use crisis, they are usually reaching out after the situation has reached a critical stage. Someone has overdosed, or has stopped eating, or has not slept in four days and is talking about things no one else can see. The family is frightened and worn down, and they are being asked to make serious decisions quickly with very little information. In that moment, anyone who speaks the language of recovery with confidence can look like exactly the help they need, especially if there are a few letters after their name.
Confidence and personal experience matter a great deal in this work. They are also different from education and supervised practice, and neither one grants the legal authority to provide clinical care. Before hiring an interventionist, recovery coach, sober companion, or any other behavioral health professional, a family deserves to know what that person has been trained to do and where that training stops. They also deserve to know who will hold that person accountable if something goes wrong.
I want to be clear from the start that I am writing in support of peer work. People who have lived through addiction and recovery bring something that a clinician without that history often cannot, which is living proof that change is possible. Many families find that the first person to truly get through to their loved one is someone who has been there. The question I am raising is narrower and more practical: does the service being offered match the training and the role of the person offering it?
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