Cory Rutledge

Review of Florida House Experience

FHE helped me regain clarity and put me back on th...

FHE helped me regain clarity and put me back on the right path after having relapsed with 5 years sober. Scott G and Dr. Tucker are incredible. If you go to FHE and have one of them as your therapist, consider yourself extremely fortunate. Julia, Dr. Castellon, and at least 5 other employees saved my life after they found me unresponsive in my first 24 hours there. I can t express the amount of gratitude I have for so many of these people. I strongly recommend FHE for detox, residential, PHP, and IOP.

With that being said, I do have a grievance about the director of the sober skills program. If I could rate SS I would give it one star. Art Jacob doesn t have a problem divulging private information about previous clients to other patients. There are people on the bottom of the payroll who are ten times more professional than this man. Sober Skills is a cash pay ONLY program (usually for people without insurance) and also only accepts male patients, where they take people through the 12 steps of either AA or NA. While I think the concept is wonderful, the way Art forces the program goes against AA traditions. Tradition 6- An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.

Art guilt trips vulnerable people into spending their last few thousand dollars on this program by telling them there s an 88% success rate, as well as telling clients the exact names of previous people who have gone out after the residential and PHP program that have relapsed. If I had any executive authority over FHE, I certainly wouldn t want a staff member preaching how the program that IS covered by insurance doesn t work.
Art is upset that I told him no to sober skills and has been trying to slander my name. Thankfully, people know me better than the vile things Art tried to speak of me. They also know that I worked the steps three times in my five years sober, and I discharged from FHE and got right back to my meetings and found a sponsor my first day out.

If anyone is considering rehab just to dry out, of course it won t work. The 12 steps are free to work, but you must be willing to go to any length for your sobriety. Going to meetings, getting a sponsor, working the steps thoroughly, and eventually sponsoring others and taking them through the steps WILL keep you sober. Once I stopped doing that, I relapsed after multiple years of sobriety. Thank God I was given another chance, and thank God for the people at FHE who played a significant role in helping me establish my foundation again