Cristy De La Rosa.
LMFT-A, LCDC, ADHD-CCSP. Cristy advises Ranch House Recovery and reads the education pages on this site before they publish. She has spent fifteen years in substance use treatment. She was a client in it first.
Cristy De La Rosa · Advisor, Therapist
Cristy has held nearly every seat in a treatment organization. Counselor. Case manager. IOP director. Director of operations and compliance. Clinical director. Executive director. She has worked at intensive outpatient, residential and detox levels of care, and she has been a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor since 2011.
She studied sociology at the University of North Texas, which turns out to be a useful way into this field, because it trains you to look at the structure a man is standing inside before you draw conclusions about the man. In 2025 she finished a Master of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy at Touro University Worldwide, summa cum laude, and she now practices as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Associate.
Years of treating men and the people who love them convinced her that the unit of recovery is rarely one person. A husband stops drinking and a marriage has to learn a new shape. A son goes into long-term care and a mother has to decide what she will and will not carry anymore. Cristy works the whole system, because that is where change either holds or quietly comes apart six months later.
She is also a certified ADHD clinical services provider. A fair number of men arrive having failed at plans they meant sincerely, and the reason is not always character. Sometimes it is executive function, unnamed since childhood, and naming it changes what a man is willing to believe about himself.
Someone can hold the hope for you until you can hold it yourself.
Cristy was a client before she was a clinician. For a stretch of it she called herself a chronic relapser, and she says so plainly, because she has watched what happens in a room when the person holding the license turns out to have sat in the other chair too.
It is also why she is careful about what gets published here. Almost nobody reads a page about withdrawal out of curiosity. They read it at eleven at night, about someone they love, and they make a decision from it before morning. A sentence that overstates what a program can promise, or understates what a body does when it is cut off from alcohol, is not a writing problem at that hour.
So the arrangement is simple. Ranch House Recovery writes the pages. Cristy reads them, and her name goes on the ones she is willing to stand behind.
Fifteen years, in order.
Sociology, University of North Texas.
Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor in Texas. Every year since has been spent inside substance use treatment, not adjacent to it.
Counselor and case manager, then IOP director, then director of operations and compliance, then clinical director, then executive director. Intensive outpatient, residential and detox.
Master of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy, Touro University Worldwide, summa cum laude.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Associate, and an ADHD-Certified Clinical Services Provider. Advisor and therapist to Ranch House Recovery.
The pages she reads hardest.
Every guide in the Recovery Library and every recent post carries her name and the date she read it. That is not decoration. It means a licensed clinician went through the page and was willing to attach her license to what it says.
The ones she reads hardest are the pages where being wrong is physically dangerous. Stopping alcohol or benzodiazepines abruptly, after heavy long-term use, can kill a person, and no amount of willpower changes that. So the alcohol withdrawal page and the benzodiazepine page say it near the top, and they send the reader toward a physician or an emergency room rather than toward our phone number. The same rule governs the tianeptine material, including what is actually being sold at gas stations and what withdrawal from it looks like. Nothing on this site carries a dose, a taper schedule or a place to buy anything, and that is a standing instruction, not a case-by-case call.
The pages about money get read for a different failure. A family in the first week is unusually vulnerable to a confident number, and the industry knows it. So the page on paying for treatment explains how coverage tends to work instead of quoting a price we cannot stand behind, and the page on insurance claims is written to make a caller harder to sell to, including by us.
She also holds the line on what this place is. Ranch House Recovery is a long-term residential recovery program for men. It is not a detox, a hospital or a psychiatric facility, and a man who needs medical detox needs that first and somewhere else. Any page that could blur the distinction gets corrected, which is why the comparison of detox, rehab and long-term care is blunt about where each one ends.
Her family systems training shows up most in the pages written for the people around the man, like how addiction reshapes a whole family and what it means when someone relapses days after detox. Those pages are allowed to be honest about exhaustion and resentment, because a mother who reads a page that pretends she is only worried will close it and trust nothing else on the site.
None of it diagnoses anyone. The library exists so a man, or the person carrying him, can walk into a real conversation already knowing the words. That conversation still has to happen with a clinician who can see the person in front of her.