Coaches

Iron Ridge coaches are men who have done the work themselves and who operate under a clearly defined non-clinical scope, in ongoing collaboration with our clinical team.

Coaching at Iron Ridge is not a role someone stepped into because they liked the idea of it. Every coach on our roster brings lived recovery experience with compulsive sexual behavior, works inside the CSAT-informed framework our clinical director uses, and reviews active client progress with the Iron Ridge clinical team on a weekly cadence. This is deliberate. Recovery coaching is a young field, it is unregulated by most state boards, and the industry is full of people who bought a certification online and hung a shingle. That is not what we do, and it is not who we hire.

What "CSAT-informed" means, precisely

CSAT — Certified Sex Addiction Therapist — is a clinical credential issued by IITAP (the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals) that requires a graduate mental-health license, hundreds of hours of specialized training in Patrick Carnes’ task-based model, supervised clinical hours, and an ongoing continuing-education requirement. Only a licensed clinician can hold the full CSAT designation. Our clinical director, Ian Birdwell, is a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist.

Our coaches are CSAT-informed, not CSAT-credentialed. That distinction matters. It means the coach has completed structured training in the CSAT framework — the task model, the arousal template, the trauma-egg work, the cycle of addiction, the concepts of shame reduction and healthy sexuality — and has been supervised applying that framework inside a non-clinical scope. It does not mean the coach can diagnose, treat, or provide therapy. That line is firm and it is not crossed.

Being CSAT-informed rather than CSAT-credentialed is the appropriate designation for a coach. A coach is not a therapist. Claiming otherwise, or blurring the line, is one of the ways this industry gets men hurt. We do not blur it.

What our coaches actually do

The coach’s job is to run structure. Two coaching calls per week, on cadence, over a defined engagement. Between sessions, reasonable phone-and-text contact when something spikes — a trigger, a slip, a partner conflict, a relapse fantasy — so that the client is not sitting alone with a compulsion for six days waiting for the next call. Written between-session assignments: behavior logs, boundary reviews, values inventories, urge-mapping exercises. Weekly accountability against the client’s own stated behavior plan. Regular check-ins on partner disclosure work if the client is in that phase of recovery. Progress reviews at defined intervals — thirty days, sixty days, ninety days — where we look honestly at what is working and what is not.

What our coaches do not do is therapy. They do not treat depression, do not treat trauma, do not process childhood attachment work in any clinical sense, do not prescribe anything, do not diagnose. They are not licensed for any of that and they do not pretend to be. When a coaching client presents with material that belongs in therapy, the coach coordinates with the client’s therapist — or helps the client find one if there isn’t one yet.

How our coaches work with the clinical team

Every coach on the roster has:

• Weekly case review with the Iron Ridge clinical team. Coaches bring their clients’ updates and progress to the clinical team on a scheduled cadence and receive direct guidance on life skills, resources, emotional and behavioral regulation, and healthy-lifestyle work to focus on next. Any presentation that raises a clinical question is escalated to the clinical team the same week.
• Continuing education in the specific issues coaching clients bring — betrayal-trauma dynamics, disclosure work, healthy sexuality frameworks, attachment repair, and current research on compulsive sexual behavior.
• A background check and reference check completed before the coach ever meets a client.

The ongoing accountability to a clinical team is what makes a coaching engagement safe. A coach working in isolation from clinical oversight is a coach working outside the container we built. That is not how Iron Ridge operates.

How a coach is matched

We do not assign coaches at random and we do not put you on a list. In the discovery call, the clinical intake team asks about your recovery history, current stability, the shape of your life, what has worked before and what has not, whether a partner is involved, and what your goals are for the engagement. Based on that conversation, we match you with the coach whose background, style, and availability fit. If the first match is not right after two sessions, we adjust. We would rather change the match than lose the client to a fit problem that could have been solved by a conversation.

The scope line — one more time, because it matters

Coaching is a non-clinical service. Our coaches do not diagnose. They do not treat mental illness. They do not provide psychotherapy. They do not bill insurance. They do not create clinical records. If your presentation requires clinical care, coaching is not the right container and we will tell you so directly and help you find what is. If clinical care and coaching can run together well — which they often can, as an adjunct to weekly therapy — we coordinate with your therapist rather than working around them.

If you are considering coaching, the next step is a discovery call. We will describe the coach we would match you with, explain how the engagement runs week to week, and answer whatever you want to ask. If coaching is not right for you, we say so.

The consultation is a clinical conversation, not a sales call.