Our Founder · Gernot Holtz · Costa Rica Treatment Center
Built from the inside out. By someone who lived it.
Most treatment centers are built from business models. CRTC was built from lived experience. Gernot Holtz founded Costa Rica Treatment Center because he went through addiction and recovery himself. He sat where clients sit now. He experienced the gaps, the fragmentation and the programs that almost worked. And he made a promise to build something that actually did.
Patient, then builder. Costa Rica, 2016.
CRTC began in 2016 as a sober living and recovery support environment.
As patient needs became clearer, informed by the founder's firsthand experience navigating fragmented systems of care, the model steadily evolved.
In 2018 it formally launched as a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, evidence-based addiction and mental health treatment program.
What makes Gernot's perspective different from most treatment center founders is that it is not academic or institutional. It comes from inside the experience. He understood the disconnection between recovery phases because he lived it. He knew what families needed to hear on the first call because he had been the person whose family was making that call.
Years after founding CRTC, Gernot entered his own clinic as a patient. It worked. And it reminded him of the power of the methodology he had built and of how much helping others matters in a recovery process.
Authority that no academic credential can replicate
Our founder has been on the other end of that first phone call himself.
When a family calls CRTC for the first time they are often talking to Gernot directly. He answers admissions calls personally.
He does this because the first conversation matters. Because families in crisis need to feel that the person on the other end of the phone genuinely understands what they are going through. Not from a textbook. From life.
His lived authority shapes everything about the program. The no-expulsion philosophy. The commitment to staying with clients through the hard moments. The belief that recovery is something you practice, not just something you talk about in sessions. The guarantee that backs the work with something concrete.
Four phases, one experience. A methodology built to close the gaps he experienced.
Our founder designed the program around the gaps that almost cost him his own recovery.
The 4 Phases 1 Experience methodology is the core of everything at CRTC. It was designed specifically to address one of the biggest weaknesses Gernot observed in addiction treatment: fragmentation.
Programs that handle only one part of the process and then hand the patient off somewhere else, losing momentum and continuity along the way. The methodology guides clients through a full continuum of care from medical detox through residential treatment, outpatient and aftercare, all under one roof, one team and one treatment philosophy.
Everything about who we are
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Our story
How CRTC began and what we set out to build.
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Clinical team
The doctors, therapists and staff who run treatment.
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Accreditation
Our licensing, credentials and clinical standards.
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FAQ
The questions families and clients ask most, answered directly.
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The first conversation costs nothing
You do not have to have everything figured out. You just have to be ready to start talking. We are here. Day or night.
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