User:Rainmaker09

Jonathan Marsh

Jonathan Marsh (1964 - ) author and founder of Recovery Nation, a web-based active recovery and healing community that provides free information and assistance to those seeking to change the role that addictions to sex, love or pornography have played in their life. Marsh serves as its primary recovery coach. Marsh is the author of each of the site's workshops and has written extensively on addiction and recovery. He has presented at the 2006 International Conference on Marriage and Family and has given numerous media interviews on the subject of sexual addiction. Marsh's autobiography work, He Danced Alone, is a raw and harrowing look into Marsh's struggles with sex and love addiction. Marsh distributes He Danced Alone free on the Recovery Nation web site as an educational tool for select audiences. He has also authored Health Based Recovery: A Couple's Guide due for release in 2008. A married father of four, Marsh experienced a twenty-year sex and love addiction before making the transition to a healthy life. In the eighteen years since this transition, he has openly shared his experiences with the sex and love addictions, as well as his health-based path through recovery. He has facilitated more than seventy-five clinical workshops in addiction assessment and treatment throughout the United States and has coached over three thousand online workshop participants. Marsh has worked in such renowned clinical/behavioral treatment and personal development settings as the Menninger Clinic, the Salvation Army and Boys Town. He has held various positions working hands-on with the chronic mentally ill and the homeless. From 1997 to 2005, Marsh held the position of Director of Health Education & Training with an addiction assessment firm committed to improving the efficacy of mental health/addiction treatment and clinical services through technology. Marsh coordinated a five-year, federally-funded addiction treatment project that involved teaching a philosophical shift from the historically ineffective medical-based addiction treatment model to a culturally-oriented/value-based treatment model for indigenous communities across the United States

Marsh utilizes a process know as Health-Based Recovery to overcome sex, love and pornography addictions. Marsh’s focus is on value development, life management skills and emotional maturity, as opposed to the more traditional disease-based model geared towards managing addiction. For a discussion of sexual addiction, go to Sexual Addiction. In Marsh’s view, health-based recovery as a means to overcome addiction allows a far greater audience to apply their own values to recovery. It expands recovery from the common perception of a single transition (active addiction to lifelong recovery) to a much more robust and effective two transition process (active addiction to recovery; recovery to health). Marsh’s Health Based Recovery involves a functional awareness of addiction, including the role of addiction as a life management tool, the finite role of emotions, understanding compulsive rituals and more. Marsh guides those in recovery to seek, ongoing awareness of one's values, boundaries, skills and identity. In Marsh’s view, isolating the addiction from one's core identity is an essential part of developing the tools to permanently end the pattern of addiction.