Some of the most powerful work happens when the person across from you has walked the same road. That's the story of David Glasser, a primary therapist at Prescott House, who first came through our doors not as a clinician but as a client.
David doesn't soften how he arrived. He came because he had run out of road. Years of drinking had cost him his marriage, brought legal consequences, and damaged relationships he cared about. Underneath all of it was trauma and abandonment he hadn't yet faced. He didn't choose recovery so much as run out of every other option. What happened next changed the direction of his life. He got sober, did the work, earned his credentials, and came back, this time to sit on the other side of the room.
He's quick to point out that getting sober and actually doing the work are two different things. For a stretch he was sober and his life was still unmanageable, and he learned the hard way that the steps only work when you work them. He doesn't treat that history as something to hide. It's exactly what makes him useful to the men he works with. He isn't guessing at what shame feels like, or what it's like to be convinced you're beyond help.
Today David is a Licensed Associate Counselor and primary therapist specializing in trauma, intimacy and sex addiction, and betrayal. He's trained in EMDR, the gold standard for trauma processing, and he's an Associate Certified Sex Addiction Therapist and an Associate Certified Partner Trauma Therapist, which means he's equipped to understand what betrayal does to an entire family, not just the person in treatment. What he focuses on is what sits underneath the behavior, because the drinking and the compulsive patterns are usually not the core problem. They're what people reach for when pain has nowhere else to go.
He also brings an unusual background to the work: years in acting and theater. It sounds unrelated until you hear him explain it. Addiction runs on performance and masks, and David wore his for a long time. Knowing that from the inside helps him sit with someone still in the performance and help them set it down.
Ask him what matters most and the answer is simple: the men he sits across from. Watching someone walk in certain they're beyond saving and leave knowing they're not is, in his words, the whole thing.
David was recently featured in VoyagePhoenix, where he told this story in his own words. You can read the full feature here, or learn more about David and the rest of our clinical team on David's profile.
