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The Dark Side of Recovery Leadership: Integrity, Power, and the Future of Healing

  • Writer: Calliese
    Calliese
  • Jul 11
  • 8 min read

Updated: Aug 26

A memory. A mirror. And a map.

The recovery movement was born from courage.


The Dark Side of Recovery Leadership

Not marketing. Not metrics. Not the polished language of performance. It came from people who lost everything, found healing in places where systems had failed them, and chose to come back, not for applause, but to make the path safer for the next person. It was built on honesty, humility, and humanity.


And yet, today, we find ourselves surrounded by leadership that looks polished on the outside but feels hollow when you listen closely.


This isn’t about one person. It’s about a pattern, a dangerous one.


Recovery was never meant to be a brand.


Something has shifted. In more and more spaces, we find leadership that sounds right but feels off. The language is inclusive, but the decisions are made behind closed doors. The visuals are polished, but the relationships underneath are fractured. The surface speaks of “we,” but the power flows in one direction. People are invited to the room, but not into authorship. Lived experience is celebrated, but not centered.


And all of it is dressed up in the language of service.


What was once sacred is slowly becoming strategic.


This is an observation. One that many of us have felt in our bones but struggled to name because naming it often comes at a cost.


And if we don’t name it, we risk passing it on to those who come after us.


When Performance Replaces Presence

We’ve seen this before. In every liberation movement, there comes a moment when the work begins to shift, subtly, then swiftly, away from the people and toward performance. The same thing that once healed becomes hollow. A few voices become elevated as the face of the movement. The language becomes more strategic. The goals more fundable. The vision more sanitized. And the people who built the foundation begin to disappear from the story.


We hear it in keynote speeches that inspire the crowd but leave the community asking, Where’s the substance? We feel it when people are asked to share their story to “bring a human element” to a report, but aren’t invited into the room where decisions are made. Or when we were used as research to push the pre-planned agenda.


This disconnection mirrors what psychologists call spiritual bypassing, when people use elevated language or ideals to sidestep emotional honesty and relational accountability (Cashwell, Bentley, & Yarborough, 2011).


People are building platforms around themselves, often with sincere intentions, but those platforms become traps. Dashboards, tools, and models are named after individuals. Cultural language is lifted from one community and sold into another. Emotional truths are harvested for research grants or publications. “We” is said out loud, but “me” is what governs behind the scenes.


And when someone challenges it, they’re framed as difficult. Too emotional. Not ready. Not “constructive.” 


Systems reward charisma over accountability. Funding structures prioritize products over relationships. Institutions want the appearance of inclusion without the discomfort of shared power.


Dennis Tourish, in his critique of charisma-driven leadership, describes how such leaders can generate emotional dependency, discourage dissent, and concentrate control in the name of mission and unity (Tourish, 2013). These dynamics, he warns, often go unchallenged because they’re cloaked in inspirational rhetoric and strategic framing.


This happens quietly in recovery spaces. The words might include care and justice, but the structure beneath enforces conformity, not collaboration.


And the result? People stop questioning. People disappear. And the surface continues to shine.


If we don’t pause and name what’s happening, we will unconsciously become part of it. We’ll replicate the very dynamics we claim to dismantle. We’ll hand the next generation a version of recovery that is slick but soulless, strategic but disconnected, impressive but untrustworthy.


We have a responsibility, not just to one another, but to those who come after us.


When Recovery Values are traded for Visibility

This erosion of integrity doesn’t always begin with ego. It often begins with systems.


Funding models reward growth, not grief. Institutions want outcomes, not complexity. Government contracts prioritize scalability over cultural nuance. And in the rush to appear innovative, many organizations compromise the very values that birthed this movement in the first place.


Recovery models are being exported globally without adaptation. One-size-fits-all frameworks are launched in countries with no cultural consultation, translation, or community authorship. This is what global advocates call colonial replication, when models rooted in Western worldviews are imposed elsewhere without consent.


The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) caution against this pattern. Their International Standards for the Treatment of Drug Use Disorders emphasize that recovery-oriented approaches must reflect diverse contexts:

“It is possible to implement broad-ranging recovery-orientated services and interventions across different domains, in various settings and at different stages of treatment of drug use disorders” (UNODC & WHO, 2020, p. 24).

And that “effective service provision… requires close coordination between different sectors (health, social, justice, etc.)” (UNODC & WHO, 2020, p. 25).


Yet far too often, we see the opposite.


A toolkit developed in one region is exported as “best practice,” while the wisdom of local recovery leaders is treated as anecdotal or unscientific.


We are being asked to choose between relational models vs scalable systems, between care and control.


We see professionals have their frameworks, projects, and work denied, only to later find their language reflected in someone else’s initiative. This isn’t collaboration. It’s extraction.


And it violates the very principles recovery was built on.


This disregard for cultural wisdom in recovery reveals how quickly systems dismiss what they can’t standardize.


Shaping the Future of Recovery: What We Inherit Matters

What makes this moment so urgent is not only what’s happening now, but what we are unconsciously passing forward.


We are not just shaping today’s programs. We are shaping tomorrow’s systems.

And whether we realize it or not, someone we love will one day walk into a system we helped build, or helped ignore.


The more “respectable” recovery becomes, the more memory it loses.

William White, one of the leading historians of the modern recovery advocacy movement, warned us of this drift. In his 2008 reflection on the cultural evolution of recovery, he wrote:

“With successive generations of leadership, the original vision of a movement can be diluted or lost entirely.” (White, 2008, p. 49)

He reminded us that many of today’s celebrated models exist only because earlier systems had failed people. His work wasn’t nostalgic, it was instructive. He named what could happen if recovery lost its roots. If the original circle became a hierarchy. If the torch of community care was passed to those more interested in visibility than in values.


We are now living at the edge of that warning.


If we now replicate the very dynamics that excluded people, only dressed in more acceptable language, what exactly have we changed?


If we want to shape the future of recovery with integrity, we must confront the patterns we’ve normalized.


The Weight of Silence and the Power of Memory

Harm in these spaces doesn’t always scream.


It whispers.

It hides behind polished branding.

It wears the language of care.

It disappears people through silence.


Many of us have witnessed systemic harm in recovery spaces, when systems speak healing but act in self-preservation.


You know it when you feel it:

  • When you’re asked to share, but not to shape.

  • When inclusion means obedience, not ownership.

  • When honesty is framed as “drama.”

  • When critique is dismissed as “unprofessional.”


We hear from coaches, facilitators, and community leaders who feel this tension. Who wonder if they’re imagining it. Who question if they belong in this field anymore, or if they’re “not professional enough.”


You’re not imagining it.

You’re not too much.

You are not alone.


We cannot call that progress. We cannot call that recovery.


Honoring personal experience in leadership means moving beyond tokenism, it requires shared power, authorship, and accountability. Not just on panels but in governance, otherwise we remain trapped in the very dynamics we claim to transform.


When we center recovery around personalities and platforms, we build structures that can’t hold the weight of real human healing. When we ignore critique in favor of cohesion, we breed environments where harm goes unnamed and unresolved.


And when we trade relational wisdom for scalable systems, we risk erasing the very essence of recovery.


So we must remember what made this movement powerful in the first place.


It was the relationships. It was truth-telling.


We all have a choice.


We can keep replicating models that center visibility over vulnerability. Or we can build something deeper, slower, more human. Something that remembers its roots.


Something that our grandchildren will one day recognize as home.


Let us be the Ones who Remember: The Future of Ethical Leadership

This work is not just about us.


It’s about our children. Our grandchildren. Our clients, and colleagues. It’s about the people who will one day enter recovery spaces shaped by the choices we make now, our courage or our silence, our clarity or our compromise.


Those who will inherit the frameworks, organizations, and cultures we create now.


What will they find?


Will they find spaces built with integrity, or systems they’ll have to recover from?

Will they find sanctuaries or stages?

Will they find systems built on truth?

Systems created with Care?


Will they see leadership that protects the fire, or one that performs near the flame?


Don Coyhis, founder of White Bison, once told me: “It’s called a recovery movement, and it requires movement.”


This movement was meant to be disruptive, not digestible. And yet, we’re watching the edges be smoothed out to make it more palatable for policy, funding, and corporate partnerships.


Movements evolve, but they also repeat. If we don’t choose differently, we may one day look into the eyes of the next generation and realize we taught them how to perform healing, but not how to live it.


We are not just shaping programs. We are shaping the future.


So if you’ve felt this in your bones, keep going, this is your confirmation.


To those who’ve spoken the truth and been shut down: you’re not alone.


To those building something rooted, real, and relational, know that your work matters more than you can see.


To those holding the sacred fire, not for show, but for warmth: you are needed more than ever.


  • Let us be the ones who didn’t replicate harm with new language.

  • Let us be the ones who align the values that called us here in the first place.

  • Let us be the ones who ensure what we leave behind is worthy of trust.

  • Let us be the ones who decided to turn inward, evaluating our motives and intentions before causing harm externally.

  • Let us be the ones who return to the circle.

  • Let us be the ones who restored what was sacred.

  • Let us be the ones who remembered.

  • Let us be the ones who remember why we started.


Not just for ourselves.


But for those who will come after us.


For our families. For our friends. For the future. For the gift of Recovery.


We must shift from performance-driven leadership toward ethical leadership in recovery, where care, consent, and community shape our systems.


This is about remembering. This is about Honoring.

So we must ask:

What kind of recovery culture are we handing down?


  • Will it be grounded in relationship, or built on performance?

  • Will it be led by love, or controlled by image?

  • Will it welcome complexity, community, and co-creation, or only what can be packaged, polished, and sold?


If we don’t stop and ask these questions now, we’ll find ourselves watching a sacred movement become another system people need to heal from.


So I ask you, not just as individuals, but as future ancestors:

  • What will you be remembered for?

  • Who will inherit the system you’re building?

  • And what do you still have time to make right?


Calliese Alexandra Conner,


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