Intervention

Before an A&E television show made the practice famous, Tom Gilbert went through a very public intervention of sorts. Now he assists others to stage them with love and care.

By Patrick Sullivan | Aug. 17, 2019

It starts with a phone call from someone who needs help for someone they love. That leads to a meeting in Tom Gilbert’s office, if the person can get to Traverse City. If they live too far away, they talk by phone.

Gilbert gives them the book “Love First: The Family’s Guide to Structured Intervention” by Jeff and Debra Jay, and he helps them assemble a team of three to eight people who love and care about the person who needs help. Although the person doesn’t know it yet, these loved ones will be his intervention team.

Next, the team schedules a conference call — they rarely live in the same town — in which they talk about their loved one’s drug or alcohol problem in great detail. Gilbert teaches them how to write an intervention letter. They explore what they anticipate will be the objections to treatment, and they come up with answers to those objections. They agree upon a preferred treatment option.

Finally, they agree upon a date.

Gilbert, an attorney, substance abuse counselor and former district court judge, knows something about interventions that might make him particularly suited for this kind of work: In 2002, after a local woman reported she saw him hit a joint being passed through the audience at a downstate concert, he endured an intensely public intervention led by the media, angry constituents, the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission, and even America’s late night talk show hosts.

As Gilbert recalled: “It did go viral — before there was viral.”
 
INTERVENTION DAY
When the date of an intervention arrives, Gilbert and the loved ones meet the night before to fine-tune their strategy. Everyone reads, out loud, the letter they’ve written. People offer feedback. At Gilbert’s direction, blame, shame, and anger are redlined.

The next morning, the intervention takes place.

It happens in the morning, Gilbert said, because that’s when they are most likely to catch the person at their most sober. Also, if the person agrees to go into treatment, Gilbert will accompany them, and that usually requires travel time.

As Gilbert describes them, interventions are by nature intense and confrontational, but they’re also cathartic.

“What happens is almost like a eulogy. There is no other experience in life where people that really matter to you are saying some really amazing things about you, to you, and then asking you to get help. I mean, a eulogy is as close as it comes, but you never hear that because you’re dead,” he said. “A lot of times, you don’t hear it in the intervention either, because your mind’s going a million miles an hour and it’s hard to concentrate and whatnot. But the goal is to get to an emotional level to crack that armor of denial.”

Gilbert said the success rate of his interventions — defined by whether or not the person agrees to go into treatment — is 85 to 90 percent.

“They almost always go, because this is a game changer,” he said. “I’m actually training Mom and Dad, or I am training the family, not to play the game the same way ever again.”

Gilbert said it took him a lot of time and training to learn how to oversee successful interventions.
“A lot of people think they can do it, but it’s not an entry-level position, let’s put it that way,” he said.

It was a long road that led Gilbert from the judge’s bench to founding Touchstone Intervention and Professional Services and becoming an intervention leader a decade ago.

Gilbert’s own intervention was not carefully planned and choreographed, and it did not unfold over one morning.
 
“TOTAL PUBLIC HUMILIATION”
Gilbert graduated from Cooley Law School and became a lawyer in 1987, eventually moving to Traverse City, where he worked as an assistant prosecutor and went on the become a defense attorney. In 2000, Gilbert was elected judge for the 86th District Court serving Antrim, Grand Traverse, and Leelanau counties. Later, he would admit that, throughout this period, he drank too much and habitually abused marijuana.

The course of Gilbert’s life would forever change on Oct. 12, 2002, when he puffed on a joint at a Rolling Stones concert in Detroit. Someone in the crowd, a woman from Elk Rapids, witnessed that act. She also knew who he was. She informed the court. Chief Judge Michael Haley decided it would be best to go public with the controversy rather than to try to sweep it under the rug.
At first, even after the initial firestorm of outrage and bad press, Gilbert didn’t think his life was going to change that much.

“I remember at the beginning of all of it was the thought that public officials get in trouble, it blows up, and then it dies down, and then it goes away. And this did not follow that scenario,” he said. “From my perspective, it was the beginning of doing that to a lot of other people that were in power. I mean, there was no precedent for what I went through. I mean, it was a year and a half, and as I say it, of total public humiliation.”

Indeed, Gilbert’s saga unfolded beneath 18 months of screaming headlines and earned him the moniker “the pot-smoking judge.”

As he was initially suspended by the district court, as he took time away from the bench to attend rehab, as he returned to preside over an at-first limited docket, as the Judicial Tenure Commission silently mulled over what to do about him, and as the commission finally handed down a six-month suspension, Gilbert chugged along, and the Traverse City Record-Eagle continued to report every detail and followed that with an editorial that demanded he resign.

(Editor’s note: The author of this story, Patrick Sullivan, reported most of the news articles about Gilbert that were published in the Record-Eagle.)

Gilbert refused to resign, though, and because of that, the relentless cacophony of bad press went on unabated until, finally, Gilbert announced he would not seek reelection, and he stepped down when his term ended at the end of 2004.

“I mean, it was terrible,” Gilbert recalled. “And there’s my wife in a public job, too, standing by me. [Gilbert’s wife, Marsha Smith, was then the executive director of Rotary Charities.] There’s a scene in one of the movies, I can’t remember, where the lady came out in the morning, and she saw the bad headline, and she started running around the neighborhood picking up the papers. Well, you can’t do that.”
 
AFTER THE DELUGE
As the bad press subsided and Gilbert’s life quieted down, he decided he wanted to return to Hazelden in Minnesota, where he’d gone to rehab, but this time for the one-year master’s program. In 2006, Gilbert graduated with a master’s degree from the Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School of Addiction Studies.

“It was an amazing experience. I mean, it was every bit as academically rigorous as law school,” he said.

After he graduated with his new degree and returned to Traverse City to reunite with his wife and start a new career, Gilbert was at a loss; no employer wanted to touch him.

“I looked for a job around here and couldn’t find one,” he said.

Perhaps the substance abuse counseling providers didn’t want bad press; perhaps they were worried about Gilbert’s well-publicized history.

He decided to strike out on his own and began looking more closely at the various specialties within substance abuse recovery work. There was something about interventions that piqued his interest.

“There’s not a lot of people that do it, and there’s even less that do it well, but I got an idea that I would like to try this, I would like to do this, and there was a fairly large intervention company in Minnesota. They flew me out,” Gilbert said. “They were interested in picking my brain about how to capitalize on the legal system.”

It didn’t take long for Gilbert to realize that that particular company wasn’t going to be a good fit for him. For Gilbert, spirituality is at the center of his recovery; others in recovery focus less on spirituality or avoid it altogether. Gilbert said he realized that he and the leaders of the company weren’t in sync.

Next, he turned to Jeff and Debra Jay, the authors of that book that he gives to intervention clients today. The couple live in Gross Pointe and are well regarded in the intervention community.

“I was down there doing an advocacy training … and on a whim, I called them up. And he came down and had lunch with me,” Gilbert said. “I wanted to ask him the same question [about spirituality], but he’s the kind of guy that five minutes into the conversation, you don’t have to ask, you just know.”

Gilbert became more confident that his calling was to do interventions, and he said that he became determined that he wanted to learn how to do them with the Jays.

The only thing holding him back, though, was that he wasn’t technically qualified, according to the Jays’ requirements.

“So, I asked him, [told him] I want to do intervention work,” Gilbert recalled. “’Oh,’ he said. ‘Um, you’ve got to be sober for so long, you’ve got to have a master’s degree, and you’ve got to have a minimum of — I don’t remember what the number was — two or five years of clinical experience.’ And I was a little panicked. I went into persuasive lawyer mode and just said, ‘Well, how many former prosecuting attorney-defense attorney-judges in long-term recovery with a master’s degree from Hazelden do you have on staff? He thought about it for a second, and he said, ‘I’ll just do a little extra supervision with you.”
 
“IT SAVED MY F-----G LIFE”
Eventually, Gilbert set off on his own, working under the organization name Touchstone from a small office on Racquet Club Drive in Garfield Township. He still considers the Jays his mentors and said he calls them on tough cases.

In the meantime, the practice of interventions has taken on a life of its own in pop culture.
Interventions, Gilbert said, are similar but different from what’s depicted in that now-cancelled hit A&E series Intervention.

“It’s overly dramatic. It’s television, right? You’ve got to sell it. Initially, I thought that TV show [would allow] me to not have to explain what intervention is to people all of the time,” Gilbert said. “But it went past that to, ‘No, that’s not what we do.’ That is confrontational, frequently violent, very dramatic. That’s not what I do at all. … We surround people with love and dignity and respect for absolutely everybody, or else I’m not involved, right?”

Today, at Touchstone, Gilbert’s practice goes beyond interventions. He also offers substance abuse counselling, and he said he still, on rare occasions, takes on legal cases. He has maintained his law license.

“I still practice law ‘that much,’” he said, holding a thumb and finger an inch apart. “Usually I am pretty particular about who I am going to take on as a client. I’m not interested in fighting the fights anymore. I’ve done over 250 jury trials. But I can really make a difference if somebody’s got a drug and alcohol issue associated with their legal matter, because, as I tell them, I know what the court wants to do with you before they know they’ve got a case.”

But his passion, he said, is overseeing interventions.

He said he’d like to conduct a couple dozen each year, so that he has at least two each month to work on; in reality, he said he does 10 to 20 per year.

“So, I am flying around the country and helping families,” he said.

He said he gets calls from around the country because he’s developed relationships with treatment centers across the U.S., and they refer cases to him. He’s also got a website and a listing on the Psychology Total website. He said he is not sure whether his notoriety as “the pot smoking judge” is good or bad for business.

“I’m willing to give 20 minutes of free phone consultation to anybody anywhere, and generally, I can help them,” he said. “Sometimes, all they need is somebody to listen to them.”

Today, Gilbert said he harbors no hard feelings about what happened to him in his public “intervention.” He even collected all of those bad press clippings — every news article, every editorial, every letter to the editor, even, in one case, an ad taken out by another attorney calling on him to resign — into a binder he keeps in his office. He’s said he’s tried to track down a recording of the monologue when Jay Leno made a joke about him on The Tonight Show, but he hasn’t had any success.

Those months of scathing press coverage, though, might have been a blessing.

“Hey, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if I hadn’t lived through what I lived through then,” Gilbert said. “It saved my f-----g life. You know, I got elected to the bench. I was ready to put in my 25 years. I’d have been a miserable son-of-a-bitch, I think, eventually, because the disease of addiction would have kept progressing and, you know, nobody says ‘boo’ to a judge. [laughs] You know, rarely.”