I began this journey to support my own recovery.
A long-standing interest in how people actually change led me to academic pursuits in addiction counseling, meditation and mindfulness, mind-body medicine, stress physiology, and integration of these modalities into my recovery experience. Sharing what I have learned is my passion.
More than ten years in addiction treatment and recovery counseling.
I am a Texas Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor and have spent more than a decade working with adults affected by alcohol and other substance-use problems.
My experience has included residential treatment, outpatient care, individual counseling, group counseling, and telehealth. Much of my current work focuses on people who have moved beyond the immediate crisis of stopping and are trying to build a recovery that can actually hold up in ordinary life.
I have always been interested in what happens below the level of “just think differently.”
I hold graduate degrees in Mental Health and Wellness Counseling and Mind-Body Medicine. I am a certified clinical hypnotherapist. My training and experience include mindfulness, psychophysiology of stress, biofeedback, HeartMath-based self-regulation, hypnosis, meditation, and other mind-body approaches.
That background is one reason I pay close attention to the relationship between thoughts, emotional patterns, physiological state, and behavior rather than treating them as separate problems.
Recovery is not merely the successful removal of a substance.
Stopping alcohol or drugs can save a life. But eventually recovery asks for more.
I am interested in what helps people become more psychologically flexible, more aware of the patterns that drive them, better able to regulate stress, more connected to their values, and more capable of building lives they genuinely want to inhabit.
That is why my work draws from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, mindfulness, schema-informed approaches, positive psychology, recovery capital, and practical stress-management methods.
A practical integration rather than a collection of acronyms.
Acceptance & values
Learning to make room for difficult internal experiences while choosing actions that reflect what actually matters.
Mindfulness
Developing the ability to notice thoughts, urges, and emotional states before automatic reactions take over.
Stress management
Using breath, HRV, body awareness, and other methods to strengthen the capacity to recover from activation.
Schema awareness
Recognizing old “background programs” that continue to shape present-day expectations, emotions, and behavior.
Recovery capital
Strengthening the relationships, resources, routines, meaning, health, and environment that make recovery more sustainable.
Positive psychology
Moving beyond symptom reduction toward wellbeing, engagement, resilience, connection, meaning, and growth.
Counseling, regulation work, and recovery education.
FreemanLCDC is the professional home for my counseling and Safe and Sound Protocol work. Soberado.life is becoming the broader education and membership side of the same larger project.