Tony Dominguez: 'The World's Most Elite Sober Coach'

Tony Dominguez came to our May 2025 Tuesday night session a few months after the Financial Times of London called him the world’s most elite sober coach, a title he told us right away he is not comfortable with. What he gave us in place of a resume was the whole arc: a childhood in Redondo Beach he survived by learning to read rooms, four and a half months in Los Angeles County Jail, sobriety in 2003, and eighteen years since then living inside other people’s worst weeks as a sober companion. If you are in recovery, or you love somebody who needs to be and will not say it out loud, this is the hour to watch.

Before Tony spoke I ran our housekeeping, which is worth repeating here. We have a federal expungement project underway, because a presidential pardon is forgiveness and not expungement, and most states and many countries already do what the federal government still cannot. We have a right to banking initiative aimed at de-banking, the quiet practice of denying financial accounts to anyone with criminal justice involvement. And our group is the subject of a research study run by Dr. Erin Frey at Yale, which had already interviewed 28 of our members by that night.

Why is shame underneath the behavior, whatever the behavior is?

Tony did not open with credentials. He opened in Redondo Beach, California, in a Mexican Catholic family where his mother was 19 when he was born and his father, a year older, resented having to marry her. There was violence at home, and sexual abuse by family members, male and female, running right alongside Bible study, catechism, and his confirmation. God, sex, love, family, basic safety: all of it arrived broken at once, and he sorted it out as a child.

What he built out of it was a survival skill: read the room, read the micro expressions, find the threat, decide whether to avoid it, charm it, or manipulate it. He ran away for good at 15 or 16 and spent three months of one summer in a mental hospital rehab, which helped. Then the consequences stacked. Public intoxication, driving on a suspended license, failure to appear on top of failure to appear, until his mother called to say detectives wanted him. He turned himself in at Los Angeles County Jail in the early 1990s, took a one year sentence, and served about four and a half months.

His son Nico was born when Tony was 21, and he was sure the love would be enough to fix him. It lasted less than a year. Four years later Nico’s mother said somebody had to be the grown up, and she left.

no matter who I’m talking to, um, no matter where they come from, there’s a, there’s a, there’s always something underlying the behaviors. You know, and, and that’s that’s true. And a lot of it is shame.

Tony Dominguez

Shame and self pity fed each other, he said, and the louder they got, the louder he needed the distraction to be. It got loud enough that he ended up homeless and shot at, on a property used for moving weapons and cooking crystal meth, until the frightening man he had befriended there told him he did not belong. He got sober in 2003, after telling Nico at the beach in Santa Monica that he had work to do on himself, and did six months in rehab.

How do you get trust out of someone who trusts nobody?

By 2007 Tony had been a loan officer and then a precious metals broker, and, in his telling, a conscience showed up and ruined his ability to do the job. Every hour outside work already went to service: rehabs, meetings, one on ones, talks like this one. A friend mentioned a luxury rehab in Malibu looking for a counselor. He laughed, said yes two weeks later, and was asked to start right away.

His first shift included a young woman having a seizure, which meant moving a glass table so she would not hit her head. At the end of that same shift a client named Ashley would not leave him alone. She had been to every rehab in the country, with the best psychiatrists her father could pay for, and she wanted to know who he was that she was saying things out loud it had taken those therapists a year and a half to reach. Then she asked if he was coming back. He said he would, and what he meant was that he would come back for her.

when dealing with shame and secrets and self harm for abuse of any sort, we don’t trust ourselves and we don’t trust you

Tony Dominguez

Ashley stayed a friend for years. She kept struggling and she did not make it, and he still says her name. He left the sales money behind for work that paid almost nothing, and could not explain at the time what he was getting instead. What he did have was the childhood skill, pointed somewhere new.

Now I get to utilize it to gain trust, to understand, try and understand a person, uh, not a personality.

Tony Dominguez

Nobody is exempted from any of this by fame or money or the right degrees, and what he hears from notable clients once trust exists is mostly fear about who actually wants to be near them.

What does a sober companion actually do all day?

His first companion job came secondhand from a friend who could not cover a weekend. The briefing took a minute. Here are his meds and when he takes them, here is the doctor’s number, here is mine, security is that number, otherwise stay loose. They ate, went to the beach, talked. Tony handed over the prescribed medication at night and the client thanked him and closed his door.

Then a bang, and something falling over. The door was locked and nobody answered, so Tony put his shoulder through it and found the client halfway out a second story window, with someone already sprinting down the alley carrying a computer. He grabbed him by the clothes and pulled him back inside. The boss said off duty police officers downstairs already had the man and the laptop.

He learned the shape of the job that night. The client was manipulating, keeping secrets, carrying a mountain of shame, all of it familiar to Tony from his own life, and he was not ready to talk about any of it. So they kept it light and the leash short. Timing, he called it.

we would often rent houses because privacy, we want to take a person out of their environment, perhaps because maybe it’s not safe, maybe it’s too tempting for them to be in their neighborhood, so we’d remove them for a period of time and start the work, and then reintegrate them back into their environment

Tony Dominguez

Sometimes there is a whole team around one person: a therapist, a psychiatrist, someone like Tony living in the house. His longest run was about six months in the Hollywood hills with a global figure, her band, her daughter, and a rotating cast he compared to an Andy Warhol film, in a house where John Lennon spent part of his lost weekend. He was mother hen, male mentor, damage control, and eventually personal assistant, because the role bleeds into whatever the day needs. He has worked in ten countries since, for trust fund kids and for people on the street, out of a suitcase.

About Tony Dominguez

Named by the Financial Times of London as the world’s most elite sober coach, Tony Dominguez is a FiA Certified Interventionist and Hypnotherapist. He grew up in Redondo Beach, California, got sober in 2003, and has worked as a recovery coach and sober companion since 2007. He works predominantly with high net worth individuals in entertainment and business, and his approach draws on neuroscience, behavioral psychology, hypnotherapy, and his own long experience of getting and staying sober. His clients have gone from hopeless to high functioning, from estranged to reunited with their families, from rejected to respected in their own communities.

Trust is the ground rule. He holds to strict confidentiality and discretion at every stage, from live-in recovery support and coaching, to liaising with doctors and treatment specialists, to facilitating private detoxes, managing medication protocols, and handling daily scheduling and engagements. That is why he says he works in the shadows, and why most of what he does never has a name attached to it.

He is originally from Los Angeles and now lives in Stockholm, Sweden. He came to us through one of our own members who goes to meetings with him there, after my friend Seth clipped the Financial Times piece out of the paper and mailed it to me, the way my Aunt Sadie used to mail me things when I was a boy at camp. Tony’s own history is what drives his interest in giving people who are still struggling a second chance, and he meets clients where they are, with no judgment in the room.

Related from the White Collar Support Group

Other sessions from the White Collar Support Group that pair well with this one:

• Brian Cuban: Author, Lawyer, Speaker, Addiction Recovery Advocate. A lawyer in long term recovery on how addiction runs through the legal profession.
• Building A New Life After Prison. What the rebuild asks of you once the case is finally over.
• A Guiding Light During My White Collar Prosecution. One member on what carried him through the prosecution itself.
• The Lie We Love to Tell About Recidivism. Why the story we tell about relapse and reoffending does not match the numbers.
• Louis L. Reed: Criminal Justice Reform Advocate. Another speaker whose own history became the work he does now.