Tag: marcus shumate

Meet our Clinical Outreach Director: Marcus Shumate

Posted on March 29, 2021 - 12:59 pm by

Could we get some biographical information from you? Where you’re from, academic history, professional history, experiences in recovery, family life etc?

I was born and raised in Nashville, NC. It’s a small town in Eastern NC. I went to a small liberal arts University called Gardner-Webb University where I majored in Psychology and Religious Studies with an emphasis in Philosophy. I returned there to get my Masters of Arts in Mental Health Counseling. I came from a family that hadn’t previously had anyone graduate from college so my dad put a pretty big emphasis on getting my brother and me through school.

What made you want to work in a) the clinical field generally and b) substance abuse specifically? And what made you decide to change your focus to working in Outreach?

Honestly, I grew up around a lot of heavy and problematic substance use and had no interest in working in the field of substance abuse. It felt “too close to home.” However, as I was set to graduate from my Master’s program, I got an offer to interview for a case manager position at a residential program and I had no other offers available to me. I knew that I liked to have food on the table and had no real prospects for how I was going to make that happen so I figured I’d take the job until something else opened up and, well…I ended up loving it.

Around about eight years into my clinical career I had become involved in some outreach efforts and found that I enjoyed the challenge of finding ways to best represent the ideals and practices of the program. This felt invigorating for me and opened up challenges that I hadn’t previously experienced. Additionally, I started to recognize that I had developed artificial constraints in my head about what I could and couldn’t do and switching to Outreach fulltime gave me a way to challenge those.

The other reason I changed my focus to Outreach was it gave me a chance to join the Green Hill team and I believe I’d be hard pressed to find another environment that relished it’s team members questioning assumed constraints as much as Green Hill does.

What precisely does a Clinical Outreach Director do?

I view the role of a Clinical Outreach Director as being able to distill complicated ideas into readily graspable concepts and narratives that can help others figure out if our program is a good fit for them or their clients. I also view it as my job to make sure we have healthy relationships with various resources and that I can translate what they do and what we do for different people.

What keeps you coming to work back day after day?

The culture of Green Hill is what keeps me coming back. It’s a culture from the top down that prioritizes personal and professional growth and operates off the sincerely held belief that cultivating this sort of culture will impact and challenge our clients. Getting to be a part of that sort of culture is invigorating for me and feels like we are continuing to build something that can be transformative.

What do you believe makes Green Hill stand out in its field, and why?

I think I run the risk of sounding like a broken record, but it’s our culture. Our leadership team has frequent conversations about cultivating a vibrant and growth-oriented culture amongst ourselves. It’s our sincere belief that if we foster this amongst ourselves and create a system by which that becomes the norm all the way down to our most frontline staff, then we can create a healing environment full of cues that are constantly pulling our clients in the right direction.

What’s the one message you’d like the parents and loved ones of our residents and clients to know?

I’d want them to know that growth comes from failure. We have a saying amongst ourselves that we want to create an environment where it’s ok for our clients to “skin their knees without cracking their heads.” When dealing with substance use disorders and mental health struggles it’s easy to forget that part of young adulthood is failing and absorbing the lessons from those failures.

I think back to when I was in my late teens and early twenties and I’m sometimes surprised I am still alive. The funny thing is, I think most of us are like that regardless of our relationship with substances and somehow that truth gets lost on us when substance use disorders and mental health come into play.

We hear you are an avid Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai practitioner. How does your martial arts practice impact your life, your approach to things, your perspective, etc.?

You’ve probably heard that because, in typical fashion to anyone that trains this stuff, it is like one of the four topics that occupies most of my mental space and talking. When you train this stuff you become a zealot and talk about it all the time in the hopes that some other obsessed person will hear your siren call and come to exchange techniques and stories.

One of the reasons I continue to train is because it intimidates me. It’s physically grueling and I never walk into the gym without a flash of anxiety. I’ve been involved in a lot of martial arts over the years and when I first started training things like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai weren’t readily available in most places. As such, most martial arts had a playacting quality to them in which one person initiates a prescribed technique and the other person responds with a scripted technique. It leads to a sense of confidence that all but the most delusional feel is a bit hollow.

When you step on to the mats to train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Muay Thai, there are no self-deceptions that can abide. It’s a combat sport where you are actively trying to best your training partner. Any delusions you may have are immediately brought into contact with reality and the better practitioner often wins the match. If you get lucky, you know that you got lucky. It’s remarkably vulnerable and exposed and it never ceases to make me anxious.

You know what? I need that in my life. It gives me something that lets me constantly be mindful of my own insecurities and recognize them as automatic and transient. This practice gives me the opportunity to generalize it into every other area of my life.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? How has that advice affected your day-to-day?

This is a good one. I am not entirely sure, but I’ll cheat the question and try to marry two pieces together. First piece of advice: don’t take yourself too seriously. Second Piece of advice: don’t marry yourself to your ideas. I feel comfortable with these two pieces of advice being married, because I think they’re pretty similar. I think the world is a remarkably complicated place and requires mental models that are fluid and ever evolving. I also think that’s what is fun about living. It’s a constant process of evolution that will be happening with your willingness or not. We can engage with that process with a sense of curiosity and playfulness or have tightly bound fists that stay clinched until our departing breaths.

I’m not the best at applying this, but I find that when I am able to abide in it a bit I tend to feel lighter, more balanced, and think more clearly.

What’s one memory you’ll always take with you from your time here in Green Hill?

It’s not a memory per se, but an impression. I was at my first yearly leadership team meeting and had this overwhelming impression of how dedicated the team and organization was to personal and professional growth. It left me intimated and excited. I think it would be entirely too easy for me to be a part of many organizations and be able to float by, but I don’t think that’s remotely possible for me on our team and it’s intimidating in all the right ways.

When you’re not at work, what do you do to recharge your batteries?

It could be any number of things, but it’s usually a combination of training Jiu Jitsu, cooking, meditation, time with friends, and being outdoors. Also, I love to watch football and could lay comatose on the couch for entirely too long watching games I only have a passing interest in if I am not careful.

What does your ideal day look like?

My ideal day would likely look pretty simple. First, I’d wake up, make some coffee, and get the dogs up and fed. From there, my next move would be to sit on the couch and drink my coffee with the dogs, and then meditate.

Next I’d do a light workout, probably go to Jiu Jitsu and spar with teammates. Having worked up an appetite I’d head home and get into the kitchen and start cooking with my lovely wife. When I’m cooking I love to either listen to music or have some sort of sporting event on in the background. After eating, I’d get back to where I started, on the couch chilling with the dogs… or a friend, until I head to bed. That’d be a good day!

What makes Raleigh a superb environment for young people in recovery?

It’s a city that is full of play and opportunities to build a life. In my past job I was a referring clinician and noticed that a lot of programs were based in really cool cities and places that our clients could go to for aftercare, but couldn’t do much besides play in those places. It was always tough for them to start building a career or exploring interests that were more broad.

What’s one message you wish our residents at Green Hill would always take with them?

Find something to work at that you will fail at and don’t take yourself too seriously.

QUICK FACTS ABOUT MARCUS

Undergraduate School: Gardner-Webb University

Desert Island movie: Easy. Shawshank Redemption

Favorite Book: East of Eden

Favorite Album: Jason Isabell’s South Eastern, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, anything Sam Cooke

Favorite Podcast: The Joe Rogan Experience, Your Mom’s House, Making Sense, and the Knowledge Project.

What’s One Thing Your Hometown Could Be Known For: George’s BBQ Sauce

Dream Vacation: Backpacking around Thailand.

Favorite spot to visit in Raleigh: Transfer Co. Food Hall

Dream job as a child: Chef or Fireman.

Guiltiest pleasure: Peanut Butter. I could eat an entire jar in a sitting.

What is the Community-Reinforcement Approach (CRA)?

Posted on December 7, 2020 - 12:09 pm by

By Marcus Shumate, LCMHC, LCAS, Clinical Outreach Director, Green Hill

Community-Reinforcement Approach (CRA) is one of the more interesting clinical models for treating substance use disorders. It may lack the notoriety of other models, but it makes up for its lack of notoriety in its effectiveness. In the research arena, CRA has a strong evidence base to support its utilization (Resources: 1, 2).

What is the Community-Reinforcement Approach exactly? And, if it has such good outcomes, one could ask, why haven’t I heard of it? Hopefully this blog post can clear up some of those questions and introduce the approach to you. 

What is the Community-Reinforcement Approach (CRA)?


The Community Reinforcement Approach (CRA) is a psychosocial intervention for individuals with alcohol and other drug use disorders that focuses on helping individuals find healthier, more adaptive ways to meet their social and emotional needs than using substances.

Source: Recovery Answers – Community Reinforcement Approach

At the risk of removing some of the more interesting nuance about CRA, I’ll try to go beyond just a brief overview of what it is and how it works. That said, CRA is absolutely worth additional time and exploration so feel free to reach out to me or check out online resources to learn more about CRA (Such as 1, 2). Frankly, I believe more people in the substance use disorder treatment field should know about it and utilize it. 

Community-Reinforcement Approach relies heavily on assumptions found in behaviorism. Behaviorism is essentially the theory that human behavior is shaped by the environment through a process referred to as conditioning. CRA runs on the notion that a client can obtain sobriety through creating an incentive-rich environment that reinforces sobriety. It relies heavily on a tool called the Happiness Scale, which helps a client rate his/her level of satisfaction in various life areas (education, vocation, relationships, recreation, spirituality, etc.) during their initial sessions. From there a treatment plan is formed in which the client and therapist agree to focus on improving the level of satisfaction in agreed upon areas. 

How is Community-Reinforcement Approach (CRA) Different?

Unlike other modalities for addressing substance use disorder, CRA prioritizes improving quality of life independent of a person’s ongoing substance use. The great benefit in this difference is that, at some point, a natural tension is created where a client’s desire to keep using substances begins to interfere with his/her agreed upon life goals. In this way, an organic desire for change can begin to emerge while the client has been improving his/her life. 

Here is an example – imagine a scenario where a client rates their “overall satisfaction” with their education progress as “low”, and then working with them to identify the necessary skills that would allow them to elevate their satisfaction. However, their satisfaction here will likely meet an artificial ceiling if they can’t stop drinking excessively which leads to failing to complete assignments, or showing up to class hungover. Eventually, something has to change if they’d like to do better. On the other side of this process, they will have all the more reason to keep working on their sobriety because they are doing well in school and wouldn’t want to jeopardize that. 

The Community-Reinforcement Approach (CRA) Reward System

On a personal note, one of the reasons I love CRA is that I am skeptical about the amount of free will a person actually has. If you’ll indulge the notion that free will may be rather limited, I’ll build my case on why CRA does a good job of accounting for this. As humans we’re heavily driven by activities that we find rewarding and don’t have control over what we do find rewarding. 

In the case of addiction, that experience of “reward” can drive a person to ongoing and problematic use because of how intense the reward sensation can be. Over time, this can lead to a narrowing of priorities where a person’s brain is almost exclusively focused on obtaining that reward sensation through substances. 

CRA creates a system by which a client can focus on building other pathways for obtaining those reward sensations. Once an environment has been created that provides other rewarding experiences, substances start to lose some of their inherent appeal. 

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, CRA is focused on building a life that is more rewarding and meaningful than substance use. This meaningful and rewarding life then in turn helps pull someone towards a more sober life.

This emphasis on building a meaningful life is ultimately why this clinical model fits so perfectly with Green Hill’s approach to treatment and recovery. We remain focused on what we’re most passionate about: the work of helping our clients find purpose and flourish.

Culture Is Why I Joined Green Hill – by Marcus Shumate

Posted on October 19, 2020 - 12:53 pm by

I am currently writing this entry from the comfort of my home office. That strikes me as an odd sentence to write; I never envisioned myself as the “home office” sort of fella. I am almost one month into this new career path and I think I may have finally gotten some footing so it seems like now would be a good time to reflect further on what pulled me to join the Green Hill team. 

Clinical work in recovery and after-care settings is unique in that you can really feel as though you are joining a client’s family system in some capacity for a short period of time. When this happens, it is natural to feel some allegiance to the client and family that can make referring them to a different program, at least for me, an anxiety-provoking experience.  But that said, I was uniquely interested in Green Hill as a referring clinician from my first meeting with their staff. It was truly exciting to make my first few referrals to them. 

Almost immediately, I found my anxiety alleviated by the amount of thought and care Green Hill put into building individual “scaffolding” around each client we referred to them. The anxiety was further removed by watching those same clients begin to flourish.  We loved hearing the positive feedback from the clients and their families about Green Hill. 

On a personal level, I knew from my first meeting with Tripp Johnson and some of the other members of the team that we shared a lot of mutual interests. Some of these interests were podcasts, books, and contemplative practices; but the interests were also things more intrinsic. I recognized a deep interest for innovation, curiosity, and willingness to “live on the cusp of failure.”

The early interactions with Green Hill offered an opportunity for serendipitous conversations with Tripp and others at Green Hill that continue to this day. I got to watch from outside the Green Hill leadership team innovate and build clinical models with which I was deeply aligned. I have long found it curious that the substance use treatment field has such little risk tolerance when it comes to helping young adults in addiction and mental health treatment. No one arrives in our care because they are having their best moment or making the best decisions. As such, I think we as a field tend to focus entirely too much on “symptom-reduction” in the form of chasing silly power struggles. I believe this has the unfortunate effect of defocusing on helping a client truly flourish and limits the ability to help a client achieve something truly meaningful.  

The clinical model at Green Hill is totally focused on helping a client achieve his respective goals and start to explore paths of deep meaning and substance. It is not simply about being sober. That part, while difficult, is doable.

The part that is really tough is figuring out how to build a life filled with passion, curiosity, and meaning. The fact that Green Hill is in downtown Raleigh, NC and surrounded by career and educational opportunities is a reflection that it is not simply about “symptom-reduction.” The clinical model is designed to help a client explore and develop his passions and curiosities that can provide a lifetime of meaning. 

Leaving my former place of employment was a remarkably difficult decision for me. I loved the team that I worked with. We spent years building close relationships that were a daily source of enjoyment and laughter for me. Yet, when the opportunity to join Green Hill became an option, I could not resist. At the end of the day, there was just too much alignment and too much opportunity for personal and professional growth. I am a big believer in the significant personal growth that can happen through a developed professional culture.

Before I joined, I sensed a chance for growth at Green Hill. Now that I am on the inside, I have experienced a culture that exists all the way from clients to the leadership team, and which is focused on flourishing –  personally and professionally. I am excited about all that the culture of Green Hill can bring to me, and those that we serve. 

And if you couldn’t tell, my favorite co-worker is equally excited about getting into the work.

Marcus Shumate Joins the Green Hill Team as Clinical Outreach Director

Posted on August 31, 2020 - 5:17 pm by

Green Hill is excited to announce that Marcus Shumate is joining the team as the Clinical Outreach Director. For the first time, Green Hill has created a position dedicated to educating referents, family members, and potential clients about Green Hill’s programs. Marcus brings intimate knowledge of our organization from his time as the Director of Pavillon’s Young Men’s Program, which many of our clients have attended prior to joining Green Hill. 

As the Clinical Outreach Director, Marcus will build strategic relationships for Green Hill throughout the country with a clinically-informed approach. Marcus is passionate for innovation in the field of substance use disorder treatment and promotes the idea that practitioners should be challenging assumed constraints. Given his interests in all things related to human flourishing, Marcus was drawn to the alignment he experienced with Green Hill’s mission.

“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Marcus to the team,” says Green Hill CEO Tripp Johnson. “Marcus and I have been friends and colleagues for the past few years and I always knew we’d work together sooner or later. Marcus’s passion, intellectual curiosity, and commitment to the field make him a natural fit for the team.”    

Marcus was previously the Director of the Young Men’s Program at Pavillon, a residential treatment program in North Carolina. Marcus holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Gardner-Webb University and a Master’s Degree in Mental Health Counseling from Gardner-Webb University. At Pavillon, he began as a Continuing-Care Coordinator, transitioned to a primary therapist in various programs, and then developed and implemented the Young Men’s Program. As the Director of the Young Men’s Program, Marcus led the development and implementation of clinical programming, provided direct clinical care, and provided clinical supervision to a team of clinicians and program staff. 

Development Director Jake Summers said “We were really trying to find a way to build an outreach department focused on education that was grounded in our values and mission. There are many programs in this field who take more of a sales approach, and that just isn’t who we are.”

Marcus brings nearly a decade of experience helping young men in recovery as a clinician and the Director of Pavillon’s Young Men’s program. His broad experience and background as a clinician makes him extremely well suited to build strategy relationships for our organization. 

Keep an eye out for the upcoming Meet the Team feature of Marcus for an opportunity to learn more about him as an individual and why he thrives in this field. 

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