Helping a Loved One Heal: The Truth About Recovery Placement with Jeanne FootHelping a Loved One Heal: The Truth About Recovery Placement with Jeanne Foot
Families Navigating Addiction & Recovery
Jeff Jones and Jen/Jeanne Foot talk about how therapeutic placement can better match people to the care they truly need. They share lived experience, critique cookie-cutter rehab, and highlight trauma-informed, family-inclusive approaches to building a life worth staying sober for.
51:35•9 Oct 2026
Helping a Loved One Heal: Smarter Recovery Placement with Jen/Jeanne Foot
Episode Overview
- One-size-fits-all rehab and 12-step approaches may not suit everyone; each person’s care plan needs to be matched to their history, readiness and context.
- Families benefit from a guide or concierge who understands treatment options and can hold clinical information and emotional support in one place.
- Trauma work is best sequenced after stabilisation; starting intensive trauma processing too early can increase shame and dysregulation.
- Structured daily routines, including sleep, movement and clean eating, can quietly protect recovery more than occasional big efforts.
- Recovery is a multi-year process for both individuals and families, and aiming for a life you never want to escape from can shift the whole goal of treatment.
“There is the ability to have a life that you'd never want to escape from.”
Get ready to be moved by real-life accounts of recovery and family resilience. This conversation brings together host Jeff Jones and guest Jen/Jeanne Foot, CEO and founder of The Recovery Concierge, to talk frankly about what it really takes to help a loved one heal.
You’ll hear Jen share her own story of growing up in three generations of addiction and trauma, then being “forced into recovery at the age of 33 in 1993" when rehab and 12-step were basically the only options on the table. She explains how that experience — and later, her son’s suicidal crisis at 15 — pushed her into the specialised work of therapeutic placement.
Instead of pushing a one-size-fits-all rehab model, Jen lays out why “cookie-cutter approaches to addiction recovery" can miss the mark. She talks about matching each person to the right level of trauma-informed, holistic care, whether that’s wilderness therapy for teens, an intensive at-home programme for a high-functioning professional, or structured residential treatment with a strong family component.
Families in crisis will relate to her story of being told to take her suicidal son home and "keep him in front of you" with no real guidance. From there, she describes the relief of finding a therapeutic consultant who became "the guardian of all our information" and emotional support — the inspiration for The Recovery Concierge model.
Along the way, the discussion covers stigma, harmful language, the danger of doing trauma work too early, and why structure, sleep, movement and clean eating can quietly transform recovery more than any grand gesture. Jeff brings a family-systems lens, challenging the idea that the person using substances is "the whole problem" and stressing that healing is a three-to-five-year journey for the entire family.
If you’re wondering how to choose treatment that genuinely fits your loved one instead of just ticking boxes, this conversation might be the nudge you need to ask deeper questions and aim for a life they never want to escape from.
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