Paul Collette MS, LADC
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The new book

No
Bullsh*t
Therapy

What Actually Helps People Change: A Practical Guide to Overcoming Self-Sabotage and Building Lasting Recovery

You did the work. You sat in the circles, sat through the groups, made the promises and meant every one of them, and watched them fall apart anyway. This book says the problem was never your willingness. The problem is the model, and nobody inside the treatment industry wants to say it out loud.

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Cover of No Bullsh*t Therapy by Paul Collette
4.8 stars on Amazon
4.8 / 5Amazon rating, 18 ratings
270Pages
3Formats: Kindle, paperback, hardcover
2026Published June 8, 2026
The problem

The playbook
is broken

Relapse rates have not moved in decades. The approach has not changed either. That is not a coincidence.

For decades, the addiction treatment industry has recycled the same tired playbook: more processing, more insight, more feelings circles, while the results stay exactly where they have always been. It is not that the people running these programs do not care. It is that the model is broken.

Paul Collette spent years working inside that system and watching the same thing happen: clients who genuinely wanted to change, cycling through the same programs, absorbing the same messages, and ending up in the same places. The problem was not the clients. The problem was the approach. This book lays out what actually helps people change, and how to build recovery that lasts instead of recovery that restarts.

Who this book is for

Written for the people
the system failed

01

You have done treatment before. Maybe more than once. You understood everything and changed nothing, and you are done being told the missing ingredient is trying harder.

02

You love someone in the cycle. You have watched them make the promises, mean them, and break them, and you are done waiting for rock bottom to do the work.

03

You work in this field. You run the groups and write the treatment plans, and you have started to suspect the approach is the problem, not the people sitting in front of you.

Paul Collette, MS, LADC

  • Counselor. Licensed alcohol and drug counselor in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont
  • Probation. 24 years in federal law enforcement as a federal probation officer
  • Professor. Runs the drug and alcohol addiction studies program at Naugatuck Valley
  • SAP. DOT qualified Substance Abuse Professional, 49 CFR Part 40
  • Practice. Compass Recovery and Counseling, LLC
About the author

Three careers.
One conclusion.

Paul Collette came to counseling the long way. He spent 24 years as a federal probation officer, supervising people the system kept processing without changing. He then became the therapist on the other side of the desk, licensed in three states and running a private practice, Compass Recovery and Counseling, for people whose lives run on drugs and alcohol and the disorders that travel with them.

He also teaches the next generation of counselors, as an associate professor in the Connecticut State Community College system, where he runs the drug and alcohol addiction studies program at Naugatuck Valley in Waterbury.

Probation taught him what punishment does not fix. The classroom taught him what the field keeps teaching anyway. The therapy room taught him what actually works. No Bullsh*t Therapy is where those three lessons meet.

In the works

Coming soon

The Card Deck

Coming soon

The book, cut into a deck you can work with. One card, one move, no processing circle required.

The Workbook

Coming soon

The companion workbook: the method from the book as work you actually do, page by page.

Watch this space

First word

Both will be announced here and on the book's Amazon page as soon as they are ready.

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Kindle

$0.99

Read it tonight. Also available to read with a Kindle subscription where offered.

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Paperback

$14.99

The copy you can hand to somebody. 270 pages, printed and shipped by Amazon.

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Hardcover

$16.99

The keeper edition, for your shelf or for the counselor on your team who needs it.

Buy the hardcover

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