BREAKING THE CYCLE: THE EXPERIENCES OF JUSTICE-IMPACTED PEER RECOVERY COACHES AND CLIENTS

Abstract

The United States has the largest justice-impacted population in the world, with over 79 million individuals having experienced involvement with the justice system (Prison Policy Initiative, 2026). As a result, there is a growing need for effective programming designed to reduce recidivism and support successful community reentry. One example of this type of programming is wounded healer peer recovery coaching, a distinct form of peer mentorship that encourages previously justice-impacted people to use their lived experience to provide emotional, informational, and instrumental support to clients navigating reentry. Using a case study approach, this project investigates the socialization, emotional, relational, and communicative experiences of wounded healer peer recovery coaches to better understand how coaches learn about and perform their role and how they communicatively build mentoring relationships with clients. Grounded by community reentry, peer mentorship, organizational socialization, and emotion in organization literature, data for this study were collected through 31 semi-structured interviews, 30 hours of ethnographic observation, and 15 arts-based creative drawings gathered from coaches and clients at Hoist Healing, a peer recovery organization. Data were analyzed using Tracy’s (2020) phronetic iterative approach. The findings of this study lead to four important theoretical contributions. First, it advances a relational approach to organizational socialization by conceptualizing socialization as an ongoing, co-constructed, and communicative process. Second, it bridges the wounded healer (LeBel et al., 2015) and peer mentorship (Long; 2025) scholarship to introduce wounded healer peer recovery coaching as a distinct form of peer mentorship within community reentry. Third, it introduces the concept of extreme mentoring to explain the dangers and risks wounded healer peer recovery coach’s experience. Finally, this study examines the role of temporality and emotion in coaching relationships to reveal the emotional risks embedded within wounded healer peer recovery coaching. Practical implications highlight the importance of ongoing relational support within organizations, sustainable infrastructure, and training opportunities that help coaches engage in identity work and narrative reframing.