Novemeber 27, 2012
Where The Rich And Famous Go For Addiction Treatment
Richard Taite is a bit of an incongruity. For the CEO of one of the world’s most successful addiction treatment facilities (financially and in treatment success rate), he’s refreshingly down-home and modest, in an industry that’s often not so. Part of his humility might come from the fact that he was an addict himself for 20 years before getting clean, becoming professionally successful, and founding Cliffside Malibu. So he understands his patients’ plights in the most intimate way.
“If you had told me twenty years ago that I would one day get sober,” Taite says, “marry an amazing woman who consistently inspires me to be a better man, have a child who is the love of my life, and become the founder of one of the leading addiction treatment centers in the world, I would have laughed in your face. Then I would have taken another hit of crack.”
In the throes of his addiction, Taite was smoking crack every day, going for a week or more without sleep, and eating a Big Mac once a week just to stay alive. He was homeless at one point, too. He ultimately managed to pull himself out of addiction in a sober living facility and a lot – a lot – of therapy. Today he says that the core issues with addiction for most people come from long held and erroneous beliefs about oneself that begin in childhood. Abusing alcohol or drugs, he explains, is often an addict’s attempt to cope with these beliefs that develop early but, unfortunately and destructively, stick around and shape us as adults. His treatment facility’s methods center around helping the patient get to the bottom of their “issues,” which has to happen first for a person to surface from their addiction.
“I’m the worst CEO on the face of the Earth, FOR SURE,” Taite jokes. Some would say he hasn’t always made the best financial decisions with the organization, spending out-of-pocket money to help clients in unconventional ways. “If,” says Taite, “you run a business like a love call, you are a ‘bad businessman.’ But you get to help a lot of people, and in the end that’s exactly why we are so successful.”
The fact that his facility looks much like a luxury resort is somewhat of an accident. He bought the house that would later become Cliffside Malibu to live in himself, and thought he would spend the rest of his life there. That did not happen, however, as the house quickly evolved into his treatment facility – the Ralph Lauren furnishings and ultra-modern flat-screen TVs that he handpicked for his own use now remain for the comfort of his patients.
“It’s funny,” says Taite. “The therapists I interviewed and who toured the site, were disgusted by having a flat-screen in every room. I said to them, ‘You want me to teach these people how to fall asleep in 30 days?’ If you’re a therapist with little experience, you don’t know addicts. An addict doesn’t know how to fall asleep: he passes out. If I can help him pass out watching MSNBC on a big-screen TV, instead of using his drug of choice, then we’re doing pretty good.”
To be sure, treatment comes with a hefty price tag. Depending on the length of the stay, which can range from 30 to 120 days, the cost of sobriety can cost many tens of thousands of dollars. Taite has brought in the most highly skilled staff he could find to support his integrative treatment approach, he says, and has a guarantee on clients’ treatment success. “My staff are top-notch people, and they are not desensitized to the process, which is what you often find in addiction treatment. They’re here because they love what they do, and never lost that.” Taite and his team use a theory of behavior change, originally developed by Dr. James Prochaska, in their treatment, which he credits for the facility’s high success rate.
Getting into the head of an addict who’s a bigwig is a particular challenge since there is so much at stake, and so much power and ego involved. As with other individuals, helping the high-powered recover is not a switch that happens over night, it’s more like a very gradual dial, says Taite, which takes time to turn. “The exec, the CEO – he’s so successful at making money, you can’t tell him anything, you can’t talk to this guy. With the ‘dial,’ though, you can win his heart over, even if you can’t win over his head right away. He thought the first day of treatment is going to be worst day of his life, that all the fun is over. When you win his heart, you have this guy; and it’s not what he expected.”
Taite adds that at the end of the day, the goal is to create a shift in his clients’ heads so that existence “is no longer driven by the trauma, the anxiety of your past. Everything in your childhood, every story you developed when you were 8 is now running your 45-year-old life and creating wreckage. A lot of these high-functioning guys don’t have the tools; that’s why they use. Once you replace the trauma and the stories with the truth, you realize what’s real and what’s not. We addicts have a built-in forgetter, however, so you have to do constant maintenance and constant reminding.”
There is, of course, an extra degree of privacy at Cliffside Malibu because many of his patients are highly visible in their normal lives. “The fear is, ‘it can’t leak it out that CEO is a drunk and that we might lose billions in stock,'” says Taite. “These guys get a little bit of perspective while they’re here. They stop creating wreckage; they stop self-sabotaging, and start to actually begin to take in and be present for their children, their wives. And, of course, they become volumes more productive at work.”
In answer to the question of whether he has to turn people who can’t afford treatment away, Taite says, “That’s a bad deal. That’s a really bad deal. That’s why I wrote the book [Ending Addiction for Good] – because 99% of people can’t afford good treatment. This was the global way I could address that problem. We do turn people away; that’s why my staff won’t let me answer the phone, because I have a very hard time doing that. Sometimes we have to make recommendations about other places for treatment. What do you do when someone has no money?
“What I’m doing is putting something out there that has worked for us and, hopefully, based upon our reputation in the community, the directors, clinical directors or program directors of the 1150 or so nonprofit treatment centers in California and in places just like that around the country will say ‘wow, this is what they do at Cliffside Malibu, I want to try this.'” So Taite’s book was his way of disseminating the models he uses to other treatment facilities around the country, and perhaps the world. “It doesn’t cost anything to become better educated in your craft and to better serve the people who you’re charged with helping.”
As to how Taite is able continue his “love call” with the same enthusiasm with which he began, he says this: “The reason I do this every day, and continue to love it every day, is because I’ve got a three year old daughter and wife who is 42 about to have our second baby. We got it together just in time so we didn’t miss out on that. We’ve got intense love and gratitude for something that saved our lives. I understand what successful treatment takes, because I lived it and have helped so many others achieve it. And if you know how to do something – like treat a person for addiction – and you don’t do it… well, then you’re a *&^$%^#$@ idiot.”
