Nationally Recognized Addiction Recovery Specialist: R. Dr. Lynn Kesselman, Addiction Specialist, Psychotherapist, Author.
Dr. Kesselman and his late wife Corrine
Dr. Kesselman began his professional career as a research mathematician, age 20, at Douglas Aircraft in 1960 where he worked four years on developing computer based models of laminated reactor shielding for organic cargo in outer space. After four years at Douglas Aircraft, Aerospace Div. he realized this was not the career he wanted.
Lynn then turned his interests to computer applications in science and business, eventually founding his own software company Compumedia, Inc. in 1967. He remained a computer entrepreneur and consultant until 1978. In 1978, Lynn founded a real estate investment and redevelopment company in Dallas, Texas, Appletree Construction, Inc., which was not successful.
He relocated back to New York City in 1981, where he purchased in its bankruptcy a fashion design and manufacturing company, Marvela Tennenbaum Designs, which he turned around and sold in 1982.
In 1985, Lynn founded Kesselman Consulting Group, which he operated in New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida, his base, until he suffered debilitating depression 1993-1995.
Lynn’s severe depression was brought upon him by a combination of factors. Looking back upon this experience, Lynn feels that he was progressively ground to despair by five long years of tireless but useless effort to save his business, and his realizations that his marriage could not provide him with the emotional support he needed and that his wife would surely leave him, as she did.
Addiction Specialist, Psychotherapist, Author Rabbi Dr. Lynn Kesselman
Suffering from his intense despair, on July 15, 1995, Lynn was ready to end his life. At the last possible moment, he suddenly realized that he was emotionally ill and needed help. This help came from a 12-step recovery fellowship which gave him the opportunity to talk about his feelings as he also tried to work the 12-step program of recovery. The comfort of being able to learn from those who had repaired their lives was very helpful to him, but it seemed to him that the 90% failure rate for the 12-step recovery program was no accident. Lynn resolved that if he ever truly understood the 12-step program of recovery he would write a book that would logically and simply explain it in a step-by-step way. In 1998 he accomplished this.; he wrote the acclaimed book “Recover With Me. ”
Lynn began his recovery on July 15, 1995, and restarted his broken professional life in March 1996 when he returned briefly to management consulting in Orange County, California. A few months later he was appointed President of DEAP International, a research and development company in the petroleum mining field. He then made the decision that his true interest was to help other people with broken lives recover and to learn the true causes and best treatment modalities for anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder including addictions.
In 1996 Lynn established New Hope Village, a halfway house for alcoholics and drug addicts. He had attended 1,500+ classroom hours at the American Psychiatric Association Symposia (1984-1998) as well as his studies of Bible. In 1998, Lynn’s book Recover With Me, now regarded by experts to be a classic on 12-step recovery, was published. Lynn completely removed every bit of superstition, judgmentalness, and lack of logic and transformed the 12-step program into a user-friendly action-oriented manual for the use of others suffering as he had. But to him this was not enough because at its best the 12-step recovery program was leaving too many people still unhappy, unproductive, and relapsing. Lynn resolved to find a better program. Leading medical and other authorities have stated that he accomplished this as well.
Lynn has always been fascinated by psychology and Bible studies, in addition to his life long professional development as a scientist. He was forced to accept that very few depressed people became emotionally well by any method he could find and turned his attention to taking the best of all that was available to start his new recovery program. Suddenly, he had a breakthrough. This breakthrough which is today called the Five Gates Program. He considers himself blessed to be able to bring healing to nearly 80% of his clients, most of whom are hard-core addicts, severely depressed and anxiety ridden people and sufferers of OCD, PTSD, ADD and bipolar disorder.
Because he is not an M.D. or a Ph.D in clinical psychology only those who were given up as hopeless by all the other treatment options were those with whom he built, refined, and ultimately successfully developed and demonstrated the power of the Five Gates Program.
Another remarkable, actually hard to believe fact is the speed with which his clients get well. Lynn attributes this to his complete rejection of the traditional peel the onion form of psychotherapy and the ineffective 1 hr sessions which help therapists structure their practices. Intensive event driven psychotherapy was the answer. Longer and more intense is the answer.
He discovered that if he could help suffering people uncover and reinterpret the events in their lives which cause their present problems, the “inverted pyramid ” effect would clear the fear-producing core beliefs that were holding his clients prisoner and ruining their lives.
Mayor Daly for the city of Chicago invited Dr. Kesselman to demonstrate his Five Gates Program for his staff in Chicago; the demonstration was a complete success. He also briefly had his own recovery Television show on NBC.
- As he became more acknowledged as an authority in this field, and especially after the publication of his critically acclaimed “Five Gates, the Science of Healing the Spirit ” Dr. Lynn Kesselman took 20 interns to learn the Five gates Program and become fellow practitioners. He was very disappointed that only one of them was able to successfully apply the program to his own patients. Lynn has always resisted the opinions of others that this healing ability is a personal gift.
- Over the years, Dr. Kesselman has served as a consultant to drug, court and law enforcement agencies.
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