Most recovery work addresses behavior first: stop using, follow structure, learn coping skills, reduce risk. That work matters. The Institute exists because behavior change without identity change often collapses under the weight of an older verdict.
Educational resource
Identity is the battlefield.
Broken Halo Institute is an identity-centered recovery practice project built for counselors, programs, and people the standard model often misses. It brings lived experience, clinical discipline, harm reduction, and direct language into one controlled public platform.
Educational resource. Not a treatment provider.
Behavior change matters. The Institute starts from a harder claim: when the verdict someone lives under stays untouched, skills alone often do not hold.
Philosophy
What the model argues
The working stance is direct but bounded: accountability without humiliation, harm reduction without pretending the setting is safe, and confrontation aimed at the pattern rather than the person. Nothing here is diagnosis, treatment, or crisis care.
About
Who is behind it
Eric Lee Sanders is a California-certified substance-use counselor, SUDCC II, and founder of Broken Halo Institute. The work draws from counseling practice, leadership experience, harm-reduction exposure, and lived experience with addiction, incarceration, relapse, and rebuilding.
The Institute is kept separate from Broken Halo Co. on purpose. The company carries story, brand, and merch; the Institute carries doctrine, educational tools, and future growth into training and program-development work.
Book
The foundation text
Broken But Breathing is the memoir underneath the model. It supplies the lived-experience spine behind the Institute's language about addiction, incarceration, trauma, relapse, and the identities people build to survive.
Institute / Resources
Practical tools for your work
Guilt & Shame Processing Worksheet — Guilt tells you what you did. Shame tells you who you think you are. This five-page printable tool helps separate facts from the shame story, identify accountability without identity collapse, and choose a next repair action.
Identity Work Handout — The identity I inherited, built, and can rebuild. A printable handout that names the label you carry, what that identity protected, and the daily practice that builds new evidence.
Contact
Work with Broken Halo
Broken Halo Institute exists to challenge the idea that recovery is only about stopping a behavior. Lasting change also means understanding the identity built around survival, addiction, shame, and the stories people learned to believe about themselves.
The work combines lived experience with practical recovery principles to create resources, conversations, and training that are direct, usable, and grounded in dignity without avoiding accountability.
Interested in collaboration, speaking, training, or using Broken Halo resources in your organization?
Broken Halo Institute is an educational platform. It does not provide treatment, diagnosis, crisis intervention, or individualized clinical services.
Non-negotiable boundary: this is an educational resource — not a treatment provider, not emergency care, not a source of diagnosis, and not a counselor–client relationship.