Dr. Wilson holds a Master of Arts in Human Development from St. Mary's University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Greenwich University, Norfolk, Australia. He has been an Alaska Certified Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselor since 1989 and a Nationally Certified Master Abuse Counselor since 1996. He is a California Registered Addiction Specialist.

Dr. Wilson has worked with clients seeking alternatives to 12-Step programs in Minnesota, Alaska, and California since 1981. His research, experience, and studies have helped to form many of the basic methods Y.E.S. uses.

Dr. Ed Wilson's Story

In 1979 I was a single father living in Minneapolis with my two adopted children after having spent a decade in rural Alaska. In April of that year my daughter was kidnapped and she would remain missing for nearly six years. I coped poorly as the years piled up, drinking more to ease the pain and anxiety, and truthfully - to allow some of the anger to surface. Alcohol grew into a very unstable crutch.

My daughter would reappear in 1985, battered, molested, bereft. Neither of us was in good shape and the next two years were a nightmare for both of us, no Walt Disney happily-ever-afters for us. Not for a very long time.

Of course I also recognized that the alcohol had become more of the problem than the problems it had helped me cope with, and which had supposedly been fixed by her return. But neither the problems, nor I, nor her for that matter, were in any sense fixed, much less healed. It was time to address the drinking which I could do something about and let time ease the rest.

Personally, I found AA and 12-Step "solutions" unacceptable. I wasn't powerless, I had no intention of diminishing myself, had no interest in continuing an alcohol focused life, and had watched countless people go through Minnesota treatment programs only to emerge in worse shape than when they went in. No thank you.

As a consequence I developed my own plan: slowly I adopted new alternative interests; improved my personal relationships and ended a few more; at 45 I enrolled in gradate school and began to bring the experience I had accumulated as a psychology research assistant to bear on my former drinking problems. It was all a long, slow, and difficult transition, but I managed. Along the way I accumulated graduate degrees and counselor certifications based on the experiments I'd run on myself and an increasing number of private clients who were as unwilling as I to accept powerlessness, never-ending recovery, or an alcohol dominated life.

The client work remained a part time avocation, an adjunct to my work in an adolescent psychiatric hospital, until three years ago I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Barnes who had worked through the other half of the puzzle, alcohol abuse and dependence as a problem for those around the drunk. Together we have been able to create a counseling center that addresses all of the complicated issues surrounding individuals and families as they seek to free themselves from both alcohol's destructive effects and treatment models that are ineffective as well as unnecessarily restrictive and dehumanizing.