Meet The Man Who Helps Hollywood Stay Sober

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He has a 20-year credentials as a aptness tutor and used to be an actor — though now when he gets a phone call and finds himself on an aeroplane twin hours after streamer to a film set, he isn’t going there to act.

Instead, Crimi is a veteran solemn manager who works with some of Hollywood’s many chosen and others struggling with piece use disorders. He has been solemn himself for 15 years.

“The best solemn coaches are a ones who had a lot of knowledge struggling with sobriety,” he told The Huffington Post in an speak in Los Angeles. “The serve down a ladder you’ve left and a some-more things you’ve been through, a some-more we can assistance people.”

Crimi is 5 feet 11 inches tall, fit and has eyes so blue that we consider he strait be wearing colored lenses. He is not. Crimi stands adult straight, is gentle in his physique and has that kind of a grin so deeply grounded that he radiates certainty though a fragment of cockiness.

But a unequivocally initial thing we notice about him is that he has no eyebrows, eyelashes or hair, due to adult-onset alopecia. His Boston accent pokes out during times — generally when he’s enormous a fun during his possess responsibility — that is a lot of a time. “I got kicked out of Catholic school. we had a training disability, it was called ‘Fuck You,’” he joked, adding that he couldn’t lay still in propagandize and always felt uncomfortable.

Crimi during his childhood.

“There is a large doubt symbol about what causes drinking. Is it hereditary? Is it inlet contra nurture? we consider it’s both,” he said. “My fun is I’m Irish, Italian and Scottish. Which means we like to splash a lot, we don’t wish to compensate for it and afterwards we wish to start a fight. I’m also from Boston, and that kind of means a same thing.”

Crimi grew adult in a severe neighborhood. He was jumped frequently and, in one case, stabbed. Looking behind now, he marvels during how infrequent he was about it. The stabbing was critical — he got 41 stitches in his conduct and scarcely died from blood loss. Crimi, afterwards 19, was out during a celebration celebration a unequivocally subsequent night with his conduct wrapped in a bandage.

“Somebody said, ‘Didn’t we get stabbed final night?’ And we was like, ‘Yeah. But what’s going on with you?’”

Crimi with friends in his early 20s.

He mislaid a lot of friends to drugs and ethanol while flourishing up. Six of them. “Overdoses, suicide, automobile crashes. It was unequivocally hard,” he said. The people around him didn’t speak about their feelings much. He had twin DUIs before a age of 21. But his best crony had four. “We call it reduce companions. We find people around us who are worse off than we are. That approach we don’t have to demeanour during ourselves,” he said.

Crimi says he didn’t know how to routine all that had happened to him. “I didn’t have any collection to understanding with it. My usually apparatus was to splash around it. If there was a bad feeling, we drank or used drugs,” he said.

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“There was one stage where someone was stabbing me and we had to stop. Processing all that in an behaving category was a terrible idea.”

He began to notice bald rags all over his head, arms and legs and his alloy told him a hair detriment was brought on by highlight and trauma. He was put on high doses of steroids and was given agonizing shots in his eyebrows and conduct — infrequently 75 or 100 during a time. He began to take Vicodin to assistance with a pain.

“I was 23 years aged and during a rise of my life. we was perplexing to be an actor and my looks were all to me. That was all being nude away,” he said.

Crimi’s headshot as an actor.

To make a vital during behaving school, Crimi lerned clients and managed sales during Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach — a famous end for bodybuilders around a world. He was good during his pursuit and started to waylay adult some prestigious Hollywood clients. They helped him get some-more auditions.

But a high doses of steroids done him benefit weight and bloat. “I was this fat trainer, perplexing to be an actor, bald rags everywhere, penciling in my eyebrows and going to auditions. we was eating Vicodin all day and celebration all night.”

His business was growing, though he was a mess.

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“Alcohol and drugs aren’t a problem. I’m a problem. The ethanol and drugs are my resolution to a problem — that is how we feel about myself when we don’t have anything in there. Until we repair that, you’re going to keep going behind to it,” he said.

He sought out a therapist for a initial time and she suggested he go to a 12-step liberation program. Crimi scoffed during a suspicion and attempted even harder to get solemn on his own. After a few months, it all came crashing down.

“Finally we bottomed out. we mislaid another unequivocally tighten crony and we went on this large bender, jumping a bridges of a Venice Canals dipsomaniac in my car. The subsequent day, my stripper roommate told me to get help.”

He listened. When he walked into his initial 12-step meeting, he satisfied he had been wrong. He saw young, successful people around him, observant things that he had always felt in his heart though had never pronounced out loud.

“It rocked me to my core. we thought, ‘Wow. This is what’s wrong with me. we have alcoholism.’ It was a tough moment. But we also knew that we was in a right place for a initial time in my life,” he said.

Talking about this creates Crimi throttle up, even 15 years later. His eyes dampen and a rims of his eyes though eyelashes get generally red. But he also exudes a low clarity of thankfulness for where he is today.

“If you’re peaceful to ask for help, afterwards people will take caring of you,” he said.

He worked all a stairs and found a clever village of people around him. Unwisely, he continued operative while he detoxed. “That’s never a good idea” he said. “I head-butted a co-worker and they let me go. The man was kind adequate to let me stay and sight my personal clients.”

He built his business around his recovery. Sobriety became some-more critical than clients and some-more critical than creation money. It’s a biggest mistake he sees people make today.

“You get sober, we start working, we get a partner and go, ‘Oh, I’m good now.’ They contend anything we put in front of your liberation we will lose.”

Stitan in a universe of recovery

Crimi knew Timmins privately and attributes a birth of a attention to a multiple of factors. “People wanted to have their careers and play their music, though being out on a highway is a one hardest places for an alcoholic or addict.” Crimi said. “There’s too many enticement and they indispensable someone with them for support.”

The song attention is where Crimi started too. But after a integrate of years of furloughed around a world, that Crimi says marinated his stone star fantasy, he began to work with actors. It’s a business with a ticking clock: When he gets a phone call for a job, he is approaching to collect adult and go roughly immediately.

Many of his solemn coaching jobs are 24/7. He lives with a customer on set and they eat together, work out together and even infrequently nap in a same room.

But many of a time, no one else on plcae knows who Crimi is. “I’m a trainer, I’m a assistant, I’m a imagining clergyman or I’m a bodyguard. I’ve been everything.”

It gets some-more difficult when a customer doesn’t wish him there. Many times, he is hired as a strait of a film’s word policy. He has had people try to remove him by airfield security, use in front of him, turn verbally violent and physically confrontational.

He is a initial to contend that he can't force clients to stop using. What he can do is assistance route their concentration by removing them out of a room to go on a travel or take them to a meeting. He is there for support. He competence assistance them by a imagining practice or a thankfulness list. His credentials in aptness helps, too. Exercise can be a large partial of recovery.

“You can miscarry a disease. Even if someone is using, we can help. Some contend we have to let people bottom out,” he said. “But I’ve seen people who don’t wish to get solemn eventually get solemn since they had somebody there ancillary them, in their ear articulate to them.”

Crimi’s coach of 15 years, Irwin Feinberg, put it best. “Jon Paul has worked with a lot of guys who other people had given adult on. He is a man who got them into recovery,” he told HuffPost. “But it all began with him jumping into his possess liberation with both feet.”

Part of Crimi’s pursuit is borne out of a stipulations of reconstruction facilities. “It’s a cushy bubble,” he said. “Then they go home and all of their triggers come adult that done them wish to splash or do drugs before. It’s about assisting them in their sourroundings though it’s also about assisting them re-create their lives.”

A good series of his clients have been celebration or regulating for many of their lives. They don’t know what to do sober. They don’t know how to hoop Christmas or New Year’s sober. They don’t know how to hoop a genocide in a family. Crimi helps them exercise new habits.

But a many absolute apparatus in his possess liberation and what he stresses a many with clients is to concentration on assisting someone else. That’s because when he was initial sober, he assimilated a Big Brother module and became a mentor.

“I had unequivocally low self-respect when we got sober. It was my initial excellent act. It builds we up. When we am assisting someone who is going by something, we can't be in my problem. The faster we can do that, a improved off we are,” he said.

John Hanney has worked with Crimi for a final 9 years and says that his life has been re-created as a outcome of their relationship. “I was utterly presumably one of a misfortune cases that anybody had ever seen,” Hanney told HuffPost over a phone. He attempted to get solemn for 17 years.

“Jon Paul has helped me redeem from this illness one day during a time. we could trust him and could divulge my deepest, darkest secrets to him. It took time though he instilled certainty in me,” he said.

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Crimi with his daughter, Mika.

But Crimi is a exception. He has been married for 6 years and has a 2-year-old daughter. He is on a highway reduction and less, and is building his association to sight solemn coaches to take a out-of-town work so that he can be home with his family. Being a father has presented a new list of hurdles for him.

“I worry about genetics. Am we going to pass this on to her? we see her doing things like spinning around and around in circles and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, she’s perplexing to get high!’”

His wife, Nomi, tells him it’s only a toddler thing. “My mother is not an addict. She’s a totally normal person. She calms me down.”

Crimi and his wife, Nomi.

Aside from being grounded by his family, Crimi’s deepest source of strength eventually comes from profitable it forward. It’s what connects him many entirely to a clarity of spirituality. “For a longest time my spirituality was simply assisting other people. we don’t know anything some-more devout than assisting someone and awaiting zero back,” he said. Being exposed and vouchsafing clients see who he unequivocally is can be only as absolute a tool.

“That’s what puts people during palliate with me. When we open your heart to someone, they see that. They bond to you,” he said. “That’s spirituality to me. That’s God. That’s love. And for an East Coast former tough man to contend something like that is a supernatural thing.”

Jon Paul Crimi’s association also works with twin diagnosis clients, such as those with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, basin and dire mind injuries. More information can be found on his website

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/29/sober-coach-jon-paul-crimi_n_7641416.html?utm_hp_ref=los-angeles&ir=Los+Angeles