“At the diner, d’you mean?” This was my baffled response to the phrase “meeting people where they’re at.” Silly me. It’s metaphysical, not logistical. (What did I know, a decade or more years ago?)
“But we don’t leave them there.” Was I talking to a car service?
Reliable Meghann Perry – herself an experienced trainer – tells me that the phrase “meeting people where they’re at” originates with Jim Wuelfing, principal author of the influential CCAR Recovery Coach Academy, and the late Art Woodward, beloved soul and spirit of the Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery. Can’t get more honorable or recovery-committed than the colleagues Perry characterizes as “brilliant humans who moved our field forward immensely.” I agree.
Given this provenance, I am in no doubt that the phrase’s origins were not at all paternalistic. However, pushing twenty years later, it may be outdated.
“What is it about the ubiquitous phrase ‘meeting people where they are (at)’ that gives me the cringe?” I asked in July 2025. Exploring my own question, I continued, “My sense [is] that it’s condescending and ego-driven.” https://sobriety-together.com/index.php/on-meeting-people/
Digging myself in even deeper, I suggested that “The mantra’s self-aggrandizing formulation situates the speaker as the only agent in the engagement. The heroic ‘I’ who orchestrates the relationship and determines the outcome.”
This piece attracted a positive response among addiction/recovery professionals. “I never liked the phrase as the assumption is that I need to interact with the person in a way different then I normally would,” writes Colleen Frawley, cutting to the chase. “It feels like a condescending reminder.” (https://tinyurl.com/LinkedIn-blog-meeting-people)
On the same thread, Perry continues: “As with so many things, this saying was well placed within its time, but our understanding of how the change process works, as well as the social and cultural contexts we operate within today, call for different aphorisms.”
Her observation about change gets to what Wuelfing and Woodward likely had in mind back in the day – that is, that (contemplation of) change is the stuff of the “peer” conversation. We might even argue that their phrase anticipated the SAMHSA definition of recovery as “a process of change . . . “ (2011). Non-clinical role training, meanwhile, includes exploration of the Stages of Change model (Prochaska/Di Clemente), a forensic dissection of how any change happens.
As we know, the non-clinical professional’s role is to facilitate clients’ clarity of purpose and mindful action through skilled communication. We meet as fellow human beings: as a coach, I bring you my presence and my curiosity, no assumptions or agenda, no condescension. I ask only how I can help you with your recovery today. Thus, the locus of power remains with you, the client; our purpose in this conversation becomes whatever you say it is. In this way, we remove any opportunity for (however well-intentioned) patronization on my part. You leave me when the conversation reaches its conclusion, whether in an agency consultation room or a coffee shop.
As we also know, language itself lives, and its usage and meanings evolve over time, the better to address whatever the communications needs of the present. In this evolution, we invent new words and phrases even as we shed what no longer serves.
At this time, and in our professional practices, I would strongly recommend that – with all due regard and gratitude to its original formulators – we lose this pervasive but problematic phrase and the paternalism coded within it.
Instead, we may now say that, in recognizing our common humanity and human potential, we strive to interact as helpful with our clients, colleagues, and the public, on the basis of compassionate curiosity, lived humility, and deepest respect.
