Transforming Addiction Counseling with Integrity with Dr. Rob Weiss at Seeking Integrity. Ep.52

Episode Overview

• Episode Topic: Welcome to Mastering Counseling,  we engage in the critical issue of Sex Addiction and Healing Trauma, with Dr. Rob Weiss, from Seeking Integrity, exploring the intricate relationship between addictive behaviors and psychological healing. Our discussion navigates through the complexities of addressing sexual addiction while simultaneously focusing on the trauma that often underlies and perpetuates this condition. We aim to shed light on the transformative journey from addiction to recovery, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and treating the intertwined nature of sex addiction and trauma for holistic healing.
  
• Lessons You’ll Learn: This episode offers invaluable lessons on the multifaceted approach to treating “Sex Addiction and Healing Trauma,” providing listeners with profound insights into the challenges and strategies involved in this therapeutic process. You’ll learn about the significance of asking the right questions in therapy, the importance of understanding the role of sex in addiction and recovery, and the necessity for therapists to be trained and comfortable discussing sexual issues. The discussion also highlights the essential concept of dependence, offering a fresh perspective on supporting partners affected by addiction.
  
• About Our Guest: Dr. Rob Weiss, is the Chief Clinical Officer of Seeking Integrity, an organization dedicated to providing comprehensive treatment for “Sex Addiction and Healing Trauma.” With a career spanning over three decades, Dr. Weiss’s expertise in the field is unparalleled. He brings a wealth of knowledge, having authored numerous books and pioneered innovative treatment programs focused on the intersection of sex addiction and trauma. His empathetic, informed, and forward-thinking approach offers hope and actionable solutions to those struggling with these complex issues.
  
• Topics Covered: This engaging conversation covers a wide range of vital topics pertinent to “Sex Addiction and Healing Trauma,” including the often-overlooked connection between sexual behavior and relapse in substance abuse recovery. We discuss the nuances of recognizing and addressing co-occurring sex addiction and trauma, the challenges faced by therapists in this field, and the innovative treatment methodologies developed by Dr. Rob Weiss and implemented at Seeking Integrity. The conversation also explores the impact of societal and media influences on sex addiction, the importance of specialized treatment programs, and the ongoing need for education and awareness in effectively addressing both addiction and trauma.

Episode Transcript

Rob Weiss: When you come to realize if you ask the right questions, that she relapses over the men she sees that are using, she relapses over her problem with porn. No one asks these questions because who would ask about that? And then you’re missing a whole part of relapse and recovery is by sex is important. Let me just say this therapists are not trained to talk about sex. We’re just not, and we’re uncomfortable with it. So we just skip it. And unfortunately, that’s probably one of the most shameful issues for people is sexual issues. So I’m here to say you got to learn about and you got to talk about it.

Becky Coplen: Welcome to Mastering Counseling, the weekly business show for counselors. I’m your host, Becky Coplen. I’ve spent 20 years working in education in the role of both teacher and school counselor. Each episode, we’ll be exploring what it takes to thrive as a counseling business owner. From interviews with successful entrepreneurial counselors to conversations with industry leaders on trends and the next generation of counseling services, to discussions with tech executives whose innovations are reshaping counseling services, if it impacts counseling, we cover it on Mastering Counseling. So glad to have everyone back on Mastering Counseling. We are thrilled to have Dr. Rob Weiss, who is a Chief Clinical Officer of Seeking Integrity. He has authored 11 books and is coming out with another book. He’s been all over 100 internationally to hundreds of conferences. He also has his podcast, which I’m sure we will hear about. His main focus and the clients that he helps are those struggling with substance abuse and sexual addiction. So thank you for being here today, Dr. Rob.

Rob Weiss: I’m so glad whenever I can tell people about this stuff, Becky. It’s an opportunity to provide healing.

Becky Coplen: We’re very thankful for your time and for the insights that we’re going to gather. So why don’t you go ahead and share with us how you fall into this realm of your practice with these types of addictions?

Rob Weiss: Well, if you haven’t noticed, I’m very old. First of all, I am a sex addict, so I struggled with these issues when I was younger, I related to a whole bunch of trauma, and I acted out a lot of my 20s. And right around that time, HIV Aids came along. That’s how old I am. There were no cures and there were no answers. And people were dying all around me. I thought I bet there are people whose sexual addiction drives them into saying yes when they should say no. And I know some of their drug addicts, I know some of them or whatever, but some of them are sex addicts and no one’s talking about this at all. In my training and my recovery, I went to grad school, I went to UCLA, got my master’s in social work, and this was my topic. This is what I went out and taught about and talked about. My experience was if you weren’t a gay man and you weren’t dealing with this all around you, no one wanted to hear from you. So I had a unique opportunity to talk about this issue and wrote a book about it, and that was the start of it all. Interestingly, though, I’ll say this real quick I am a gay man. But even then, 90% of my clients were heterosexual men who were married.

Becky Coplen: Why don’t you talk to us about some of your books that you feel most proud of, or have helped the most people? What are some of those titles and the focus of each book?

Rob Weiss: First of all, I’m a crazy person who writes 11 books, and Lord knows, if you told me that, I’d be like, yeah, I can barely write an article, but it is a passion of mine to write and to really to get the message out, especially about sex addiction and drug and sex addiction, because nobody talks about this stuff. So anyway, I’ve written a number of various versions of Sex Addiction 101 as the years have gone by, I wrote about it when there was no tech, and then I wrote about it when there was AOL. And now I’ve been writing about it with apps, and over the years I’ve had to write books. But Sex Addiction 101 is a basic primer to sex addiction, and my most popular book, interestingly, is a book called “Out of the Doghouse: A Step-by-Step Relationship-Saving Guide for Men Caught Cheating. And what I wrote this for is men who cheat or have cheated and they get caught and they’ve cheated on a woman because men do not understand on any level, no man understands what a woman goes through when she’s cheated on. We think flowers and candy and it’s been two months, aren’t you over it and all of that? We don’t understand what betrayal means to a woman because it’s different for men. So I wrote Out of the Doghouse because men need to understand what empathy and compassion are, and how cheating and drug use affect the family life and women in particular. So I’m very proud that this, of course, is my best-selling book, because all these men are in trouble and they want to read Out of the Doghouse to figure out how to get out of trouble. Just to say this, women buy 95% of all self-help books, 95%. So if I write a book for men, I have to write a book that a woman is going to pick up and throw at her man or her woman, whatever. I think the book that I’m proudest of is called Prodependence. Prodependence is a vision of turning codependency upside down. I don’t believe in codependency. I think it’s a negative label that’s applied to people who are just doing their best. I’ve returned the whole thing on its ear with Prodependence and said, you don’t love someone and stay with a troubled person because there’s something wrong with you. You stay with a troubled person and help them because you love them. And when you start from why you’re really with them, which is love, rather than your repeating pathology of the past, which is co-dependence, it’s driving the field forward, and I feel grateful for that. So I’ve had one thing in’s legacy, it’s Prodependence because I believe that families are coming from love despite how we might look at their behavior.

Becky Coplen: Let’s talk a little bit about how you see the effect of media on the issues that a lot of men are dealing with. And maybe we should clarify, do you only work with men or do you work with both?

Rob Weiss: I run a men’s residential program. You cannot mix male sex addicts and female sex addicts. Not a good idea. And even gay sex addicts with other men will tend to not act out in that environment. But I have run women’s programs, and I think I created the first women’s program in the country for women who have sexual disorders. Interestingly, about women, I’ll just say it they don’t come in saying I’m a sex addict or I must have problems with drugs and sex. They filter into my world by, they have a problem with eating, and it comes up every time they have a broken relationship. They have a problem with drugs, but their partners are always drug addicts and they go from one to the other, so it is often their sexual romantic behavior that has caused other addictions in women. But they don’t talk about that. And I’ll say to you, Becky, one of the main reasons why it’s so important to me about this work, especially if we’re talking to substance abuse counselors, is you have to ask about sex. And you and I were talking earlier about the guy who goes to residential treatment or a woman for substance abuse, and substance disorder, and no one talks to her about her sexual life. And I’m not talking about past trauma. I’m talking about what she’s doing now. And when you come to realize if you ask the right questions, that she relapses over the men she sees that are using, she relapses over her problem with porn. No one asks these questions because who would ask about that? And then you’re missing a whole part of relapse, and recovery is by “Sex is important.” Let me just say this, therapists are not trained to talk about sex. We’re just not, and we’re uncomfortable with it. So we just skip it. And unfortunately, that’s probably one of the most shameful issues for people is sexual issues. So I’m here to say you got to learn about and you got to talk about it.

Becky Coplen: I did see on your website too, that for people who have been betrayed, you offer support for them and empower them. Talk to us about that side of it.

Rob Weiss: I think being betrayed, if you’re a woman and I’m going to speak from a heterosexual perspective because that is the most frequent client, and mostly it is women who are married to men who are cheating. And I think we’ve just begun in the last, at least in my world, and I think we’re pretty leading in this area, probably, the last 20 years is looking at the pain of the partner. And again, in codependency, you say, what did she do that is driving this addiction? What she’s nagging, she’s complaining, and that’s how we used to look at the partners as they were a problem. They were contributing to the problem. And I think what came out of my field was some woman who said, how could I possibly be responsible for my husband seeing 300 sex workers? And it was like, oh, yeah, you could never be responsible for that. That’s when the whole switch to looking at partners as coming from love, and not in any way supporting the problem came out of. But in any case, it’s been a real refocusing on partners in the last 20 years, and a lot of us have taken that up because the focus is always on the addict. They go to treatment, and we deal with their issues. We bring the spouse in and say, here are some things you can do or shouldn’t do, and out they go. And let me just say this the addicts have been treated for addiction, which is very directed, very clear. You need to do this, don’t do this, Accountability-based, the spouses need the opposite. They need to grieve. This isn’t the relationship I thought I never thought he would start drinking and any of this would happen. They feel violated and are in some ways by the circumstance. If you had cancer at 35 and we had two kids, I think the whole family would feel victimized by this horrible illness. But for some reason, if I’m drinking like a fish and I’m an addict, they don’t feel bad about me and call me an angel, they see me as part of the problem. And so we’ve turned it in a very compassionate way to spouses and said, what is your experience? And found it to be very different than the sort of popular ideas about that.

Becky Coplen: Can we talk about your podcast and who’s coming on there? What things are you focusing on? What is the purpose of it?

Rob Weiss: I was mentioning you earlier, Becky, that I, about four years ago, was thinking about doing a podcast. And I thought one of the reasons is all I heard were things about fashion and things about movies and things about those lighter topics. And I thought people do want to learn more things. So I started a podcast called Sex, Love, and Addiction. And, you know, I thought a few people would listen, it might be interesting. And we’ve had over a million downloads, The people that are going to be listening to it are my husbands and cheating on me multiple times, or I’m struggling with my porn problem. I don’t understand it. Why can’t I keep my commitment to my partner? How could he love me and do this to me at the same time? So I think the spectrum is from people who are dealing with cheating and trying to understand that too. I’ve been married for 30 years, and I just found out that my spouse is doing all this stuff, and I had no idea. And what do I do now? And everything in the middle. So the people are on there are, I think, some sort of top tier professionals, Sue Johnson and Harville Hendrix and Stan Tatkin and people who understand the work from an intimacy and relationship perspective and I interview them and we sit and talk. What saves a relationship? What causes problems in the relationship? How do you look at it from a psychological way? How do we help couples heal to portrayal? We’re talking about all that stuff, and I like interviewing people like you probably do what I hear and I’ll just say this people go to sex, love, and addiction and they write me and they say, I never understood what was wrong with me, and now I get it. Or a spouse says, I always suspected this, but now that I’m listening to this, I know what it is. And then they go, watch me on YouTube. And then they find me on Wikipedia, and eventually, they call what I consider podcasts a free educational service or an opportunity for people who may never go to therapy, never get support groups for whatever reasons. And they get to learn healing from this process and I love doing them.

Becky Coplen: Can you talk to us about Seeking Integrity? Are you the sole practitioner? Are there others? How has it changed and evolved over the years or has it stayed the same?

Rob Weiss: I’ve been clinically licensed for 30 years as a social worker. I have a PhD in human sexuality, which means I have known a lot about sex for about eight years, I have opened a number of treatment centers over the years, and opened them in residential, in treatment, in a hospital, and I’ve opened them outpatient. We’re doing intensives and workshops. I’ve always been interested in working in a team. I think that everyone has something to contribute to solo practice, I always found it lonely, and I’m also not getting the feedback that I want about cases that we’re sharing in our own experiences. And I wanted to launch with people. This is hard work, and so I’ve always created and worked in group environments. So Seeking Integrity hopefully is my last program. Yes, just because I want to have some fun time for myself. But it was created for two reasons. It’s an eight-bed residential “You Come, Live Here” program in California that is focused on men who are sex addicts and men who have a combined problem with sex and drugs. In particular, I am interested in the population of sex and drugs because no one says this is my specialty. We see people for two weeks, three weeks, and four weeks, we involve their spouses. It is a 24-over-seven opportunity for them to take a deep dive into themselves. And we’re holding up a mirror, which is what treatment is, and saying, oh, you said you wanted to be a good family member, you want to love your kids, you’re involved in your church. But look how you’re living and you’re doing this and you’re doing that. And the kind of therapy we do, and I think addiction therapists do, which is cognitive behavioral is very much about what are you thinking and what are you doing, what are your goals, and yet how are they being undermined by your behavior and continuing to show the person their distortions and their denial. The other piece I think we do at Sexual Integrity, sorry, Seeking Integrity is about sex, we’re looking at trauma. Every man I work with had bad things happen to them, and usually the same kinds of things, which was a whole other subject. That is not the focus of treatment. Because healing trauma, and I want everyone to hear this, you can heal someone’s trauma, you can work through their issues. You can look at the past, they can look at a whole movie about their whole life, but it’s not going to stop them from drinking. It’s not going to stop them from sexually acting out. And that requires a different form of treatment. Then how are you doing? What’s going on? I’m sorry your mom did that. Tell me more about that. When I’m being a little sarcastic, but the truth is, it’s this kind of work is specific, it’s very directional, it’s very accountability-based, there is structure and things they need to do and follow through on. And the trauma is kind of a reflection of, wow, I can see how you got here rather than being the primary focus. Because again, looking at past issues raises anxiety for people and anxious people use and act out. So I have to find a platform for them to stay sober, and stay stable for a while, and then they can look at the past and their relationship issues. I don’t think anybody stops drinking or using or sexually acting out or gambling because they understand their past. If you don’t mind my saying, I had a guy in a group the other day and I said something about, what are you going to do when you are passing a massage parlor and you’ve had a couple of drinks or whatever? And he said, my mother did this and this happened to me. And I’m like, but you’re walking into a massage parlor and you’re drunk. Do you think you’re going to stop there and say, oh, my mother, that’s not it? How are you going to protect yourself? How are you going to all of relapse prevention? But you also have to do mental health work. I have to know if that person is bipolar. I have to know if they have OCD. I have to know if they have ADHD. Not necessarily that is driving the problem, but it may make the problem harder to resolve unless we look at it. That’s another thing I think addiction programs miss is the mental health piece. They’re so focused on drugs and alcohol that they don’t notice that this person has a personality disorder. So I think we do is Seeking Integrity is a very holistic look at relapse prevention, stopping the behavior, and dealing with spouses who have their therapists looking at the past. And there’s a reason the word integrity is there. I want these people to integrate their lives and be one person whose beliefs match their behavior. Let me say, Becky, that a good therapist who’s trained well, the first thing we look for in anybody is the medical. Is there anything we’re going around? This person has emotional problems. They have brain problems. So we always have to think just because someone comes in for a mental health problem, are they physically healthy? That’s the first thing we should look at. And then it goes down the block. So you’re right, there should be blood tests. There should be, with my folks, it’s STD. Oh, you’ve had sex with 25 people in the last year. And you were snorting coke during that. Do you think you have a disease? What were you doing during COVID? All those kinds of things. So the medical in certain circumstances for sure has to be addressed. And then the mental health.

Becky Coplen: This episode is brought to you by mastersincounseling.org. If you’re considering enrolling in a master’s level counseling program to further your career, visit mastersincounseling.org to compare school options via our search tool that allows you to sort by specific degree types, tuition, costs, online flexibility, and more. Let’s talk just a little bit about it, since your main form of therapy was Seeking Integrity as a residential with eight beds, how does that work? A little bit on the business side, I assume you have cooks that you hire or clean. Talk to us about that angle and the center and all of that.

Rob Weiss: In some ways, I run a hotel. We have a nice house, nicer than mine, by the way, and there was a full-time chef in California, you’ve got fancy chefs that I don’t have at home either. The goal of residential treatment in terms of the environment and the hotel part is I want them to be comfortable. We’re not talking about massages and facials and going on spiritual journeys, although they may have one internally. I’m interested in the issues. I don’t want them to be distracted by the house is dirty. I don’t want it to be distracted by the food is terrible because then they’re coming into treatment, they’re complaining about that rather than dealing with the issues. The thing I love about residential treatment is someone is literally in treatment all day long, and I think treatment has to be very structured every single day. So they have a group here, they have an educational session here, they have psychodrama there, they have some kind of processing. Because what makes people feel safe is structure. They want to not have to worry about what it’s my next group or whatever. So we’re running them through that. But then they go back to the house. And what they may not fully know is everyone’s watching. All the staff is watching. Did this person who was upset in treatment that day, are they isolating in the house? Are they staying in their room? Are they talking to someone? So we’re watching 24/7. My favorite story about this is when I did have an outpatient practice, and my clients would come to see the receptionist and they’d do whatever they do, and they would often say, where is he and why is he late? And this is unacceptable. And then I’d open the door, it’d be like, hi, Dr. Weiss, how are you? Nice to see you. So that receptionist came to me and said, it’s interesting to me because he was such a jerk to me, and he was so nice to you. That’s what residential is, I get to see the pieces that you might not ordinarily see, that I can then pull into the work.

Becky Coplen: That’s what you’re fully doing and Seeking Integrity. Or are you doing weekly clients as well?

Rob Weiss: What we do is we give away 90% of our work. So if you go to the Seeking Integrity website, which is seekingintegrity.com, you will find out that there are about 15 groups that have volunteer therapists, so have volunteer betrayed spouses groups. I have a volunteer addicts group. I have volunteer groups that are being run for men who are divorcing or women who are considering it. So what is sex addiction? I have a sex and drug problem. There are support groups for all of those people. There are tons of webinars and training, and not everyone has the opportunity or the resources to ever really get to therapy. Then there are people who are in therapy for an hour, but they don’t have the opportunity to learn all this stuff because what can you get in an hour? We have tons and tons, far more than we charge a free stuff. Then we do work groups. So if you have a sex addiction problem, there’s a six-week course with a workbook and homework. And if you’re betrayed, partner, there’s how do you figure this out? How do you work through it? What is betrayal? We’re doing support stuff for free. We’re doing education stuff for free. We’re doing education stuff that we charge for, and then we’re sending people to residential treatment. So the big answer to your question is, “No, we are not an outpatient center.” I’m more interested in the client who comes from Asia, who comes from Africa, who comes from South America. We get those folks all the time. There are plenty of local outpatient therapists, but they don’t have the platform, the podcast, the books, the YouTube, the opportunity to educate on a larger level. And I have the opportunity because of my work, to make a global impact. How’s that? That sounds arrogant.

Becky Coplen: One thing that I was thinking about was the addiction to sex and everything, do you find yourself in the realm? I used to do work against human trafficking. Do you feel you have any angle in that where the guilt and clients or I don’t know, is it connected? Is it part of your work or not?

Rob Weiss: I think that the men I work with are so caught up in the fantasy of what they’re doing. If your daughter was doing this, your 19-year-old daughter, or your 22-year-old daughter, how would you feel about that? How would you feel about the people who are looking at her? How would you feel about the people who are paying her? Okay, so how is it you could feel that way about your daughter who’s 20, but you’re sitting here talking to a 20-year-old who was trafficked for five years, and now she’s doing this, she’s on drugs and she’s the money for her kids. And I’m not looking at the end, which you are, which is probably the more macro end, meaning what’s going on in the world, what are the groups. I’m more looking at the individual, which is how can you have these values of respect or integrity or spirituality, and yet do you realize who these women are? Do you think that most women want to stand there and strip in a closet in South America and be paid a dollar an hour? Or do you think they’re having fun? I think for me, it’s really about humanizing these women and helping them understand. Also, for the guys, you’re being used. Do you think you’re so special? Do you think you’re so important? Do you think that’s a pertinent thing, and you’re amazing? I know that there are so many of the women I run into online are being trafficked and men, but that’s not how somebody who has the problem is looking at it. They’re looking at it in terms of what they get out of it. Now, I do want to say, and I think it’s important for me to say I’m not anti-sex. I’m not anti-orientation, I don’t care about fetishes, I don’t have issues with who you have sex with as long as it’s legal and consensual. But those aren’t the people I’m working with. I’m not working with people who are ashamed of their sexuality or hate themselves for what they’re interested in. I work with people who have a compulsive, addictive problem. They’ve had seven affairs, and in between the affairs, they’re seeing sex workers, and while they’re seeing sex workers, they’re doing porn. And so they have issues across the board. The problem is not what they do. The problem is the way that they’re approaching what it means to them. I’m not saying that some guys don’t go to a bachelor party in Vegas and see strippers, but my clients see them every week, see them twice a week, and then they go home from work and they take a shower and they go, hi, kids, how are you? And they have split lives, compartmentalized lives, is how they live.

Becky Coplen: As we think about our listeners, who could be someone who’s 21 and has decided they’re going much like you had a path early on and went right into it. A lot of people evolve in there who they’re supporting and being trained in. Would you have any words of advice for people just delving into this? What would you share?

Rob Weiss: I don’t know if people are going through bachelor’s levels or master’s levels or whatever it is that they might or two-year degrees. But number one, I didn’t go directly into this. I worked on myself, I went to graduate school, and throughout graduate school, I thought, do I want to work with older people? Do I want to work with kids? This just evolved as I realized I knew so much about this and others didn’t. But I think, and I really mean this, to go to school and say, this is my agenda. I wonder why this population is to miss what school is all about. As part of my school training, I had to work with kids. I never really wanted to work with kids. I don’t want to work with kids now, but to understand what someone who’s abused goes through when they’re nine or they’re 11, what it’s like for someone to have a mentally ill parent. I’ll tell you one more thing. I work with therapists who are like, oh my God, this person is so troubled. Oh, they can’t get along with their husband, and they’re fighting all the time and they lose jobs. And I’m like, yeah, that’s trouble. But we’re going to a mental hospital where people are throwing shit at walls, and then you understand what crazy is. What I’m saying to folks is what I do is interesting. I think many people say, oh, I want to do that. Get your basic education. It is essential and have an open mind you may find in school and I did too. I love this population one of my interests was pediatric cancer wards. I wanted to work with parents who were dealing with the potential loss of a child, and that sounds painful, but part of it is for us, all of us, I think, what can you tolerate? I can do things. I can talk about sex like I’m talking about the weather. I can talk about death in ways other people. It’s not just how a therapist, how do you not take it home. That’s a general question, but a larger question is, can you support and help this population and still be okay with yourself and be able to do it? And I think that leads us into the areas of our work too because that’s interesting. But I could never do that. Okay. That’s not what you’re going to do. But the main message is to get the basics down. If you don’t understand the difference between the needs of someone who is 19 versus the needs of someone who is 30, then you can’t properly place the issue in terms of where that belongs in that person’s lifespan. You have to understand development. So get the basics and then think about where I want to specialize. And not everyone specializes, by the way. You have people who just see people. And again that’s can I be a therapist? I have to be someone who can go home and put that there and then live my life. I can’t have it haunting me at home. And I hear stories about something that happened to an eight-year-old, and they’re pretty horrific, and I have to find a place to put that. By the way, that’s why I like working in a team because we can sit around and talk about it and even and I, please don’t be offended, joke about it, because sometimes we just need to get it out. I think that in practice, sometimes people are lonely and they don’t even realize it, and they’re not learning as much as they could be.

Becky Coplen: No team is huge for sure. Anything else that you feel you want us to know about the work that you’re doing or anything else our listeners should hear?

Rob Weiss: Just refer to some resources and we get stopped there. But before I do that, I guess I want to say that when I first started, I was working as a teacher with disturbed kids, and it wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to have more individual contact, not be that person in front of the classroom. And I thought, oh, I have these skills I work with all the time. I can just cancel these kids. I have the skills, I know what I’m doing. And I had a wise psychiatrist say to me, that may be true, but you still have to go to school. You still have to have that degree. You still have to have the letters after your name, because that is, first of all, you’ll learn things you think you know, but you don’t. And second of all, no one’s going to look at you twice if you’re like, oh, my mom was alcoholic, and I’m going to Al-Anon for years. And I get this. And I have I’m a sponsor, whatever that means to you, if you’re involved with 12 steps and now I’m ready to help people in the larger world. No, you’re not. First of all, these things you don’t know, and second of all, people are going to say, that’s nice, but where’d you go to school? If you want to specialize in any area of medical or mental health, you have to be trained and you have to have those letters after your name. And I was like, I don’t want to do that. And she said, maybe you don’t want to be in the field. So that’s how it goes. And I got my PhD at 55. I don’t think you stop learning. One more thing, in this field of mental health, no one is ever bored. Every person who comes in the door has a different story, comes from a different arena, and has different needs for me as a therapist from day to day, even people I was seeing for a while, I don’t know who they’re going to be that day, I don’t know what they’re going to come in with that day. I’m not their friend. I’m not their family member. And to me, it is always fascinating work because it’s not like I’m doing the same thing every day. Who I have to be and how I use my skill set changes with every client I meet.

Becky Coplen: Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Rob, and go ahead and share the resources you wanted to share. We talked about some of the books, but what else did you want to say?

Rob Weiss: If you type in Dr. Rob Weiss in Google or whatever, and you put the word sex next to me, you will find a lot of stuff. But my books are on Amazon. I have an Amazon channel thing. They give you a lot of my stuff and full training actually, I’ve done for schools and stuff on YouTube. If you’re interested in listening to professionals who are talking about their field and their work, Sex, Love, and Addiction is a great place to start. But all roads for me lead to seekingintegrity.com because that’s where the free stuff is. That’s where the work groups are. That’s where we talk about treatment and it might be good to learn. By the way, I’ll just say this, who needs to go to residential treatment? Who can do well in going three nights a week in a program? Who does well just in outpatient therapy? You know, everyone who calls, I don’t say, well, come on over to see us. It’s a constant evaluation of what that person needs and how they will best be served. My job is to be in the service of that person who’s in front of me. That is my job. It’s one of the reasons why I have to do my therapy, and I think any good therapist does because I need to understand in every moment what is my motivation for saying this. People think sometimes I’m paying this therapist and all they’re doing is sitting there and listening. If we’re a good therapist, I’m not just sitting there and listening. I am 100 miles an hour in my head. Should I say this? Shouldn’t I say this? Oh, they said this last time. What does that mean? It is a constant process inside, and it’s completely based on what meets the needs of that particular person. And again, every person is different, they change with every person. You do need to know the difference between regular therapy and addiction work because they are very different kinds of work. And anyway, as I said before, by the way, I answer emails, unbelievable. I am Rob at seekingintegrity.com, you can write me any time and I will answer you, with resources, and information. I know a bunch of therapists around the country who do work with these issues. I’m glad to make referrals. I want people to get what they need wherever they can get it.

Becky Coplen: Thank you so much for your time today.

Rob Weiss: Becky. It’s a pleasure. And I just want every person who’s interested in the field to have the opportunity to make a difference. And you may make a difference working with each person. One of the things I learned in graduate school, and this is my last message to you guys, is that here’s the deal. People are falling in a river and they’re floating down the river and some are drowning. There are people like me who stand at the end pulling people out and trying to save their lives. And then there are other people at the other end trying to figure out why they fall in. And all of that is therapy. Whether you’re helping the system find more health and resources for people or you’re down the other end helping people individually, the whole thing is work that’s available to do.

Becky Coplen: All right. Thank you so much for all your insights and resources. To our listeners, please leave us comments. Check out Dr. Rob’s work and continue to tune in on Mastering Counseling for future episodes in the world of mental health and therapy. Have a wonderful day! You’ve been listening to the Mastering Counseling podcast by mastersincounseling.org. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the counseling industry.