About Duane

How I got here

This is my second career.

I owned restaurants for nearly thirty years. When I sold the businesses I needed to reinvent myself, and I chose to do addiction counseling first. What I found was that so many of the issues and addictions were rooted in mental health, so I went and trained for that as well.

Thirty years of staff, suppliers, long nights and people at the end of their patience teaches you a fair amount about what human beings do with stress and frustration, and I did not learn any of it from a textbook. I also spent twelve years on a school board, which teaches you something different: how to sit in a room with people who disagree with you and still get somewhere.

Then there were ten years working with three county drug courts. Most of the people I sat with in that stretch had not chosen to be there, and a fair few had no interest in being helped by me specifically. That is where I learned to be useful to someone before they are convinced, which is probably the single most useful thing I know how to do.

These days I am a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor and a Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor, working with adults across Minnesota by video. Holding both licences matters more than it sounds like it should. The drinking and the depression are usually the same conversation, and being sent to two providers who never speak to each other means telling the whole story twice.