Journey Malibu Bella La Vita LLC UNETHICAL PRACTICES Malibu, California

As a client, I witnessed many unethical and possibly illegal things going on at Journey Malibu. The entire time I stayed at Journey Malibu, I got to lay out by the pool, golf, watch movies, go shopping, go out to dinner.  That was nice but after I got home and started drinking again, I realised that I just wasted $50,000 to basically go on a 30 day "vacation".  They did not help me at all. I eventually got sober somewhere else.

Journey Malibu has unqualified people running their rehab.  People who have no formal education or licenses, or experience or credentials.  Journey Malibu isolates their clients. Journey discouraged us from going to Smart Meetings or AA meetings. The head of Journey Malibu (Cindy) didn't want us to get sponsors when we went to AA meetings; because I witnessed one of the other clients getting in trouble for trying to get a sponsor.  Journey wouldn't allow the client to communicate with her sponsor and they said she could talk to her sponsor only after she left Journey Malibu.

I saw other clients getting high on pills they snuck in with them and Journey Malibu seemed to turn a blind eye to it.  The clients got away with it, and had their drug dealers sneaking more over the fence. I became close with some of their techs and kept in touch with them.  Techs told me that when clients start showing interest in going to a sober living after treatment, the tech are supposed to "redirect" the clients away from the sober living and to instead convince them to stay longer at Journey Malibu.

They told me other things about how it was to work there, like: Journey Malibu constantly paid their employees late and sometimes not at all. Journey Malibu did not pay some of their therapists/doctors. Journey Malibu made false statements/declarations about their employees to hurt them. Journey Malibu uses non qualified and improperly uneducated employees to provide therapeutic services. I felt very bad for their techs.  They tiptoed around with their heads down always like they were afraid someone was going to yell at them.  When we got away on outings, the techs always opened up to me and seemed more at ease.  There were more complaints but I can't remember them right now.

Journey MAlibu was not the first rehab that I went to, so I have others to compare it to.  In my opinion it was the least organized, least structured, least amount of substance, and the most waste of my time.
For the money I spent, I could of gone to the Four Seasons 5 times over.
This is all my opinion that got by my own experience staying there, and derived from the information told to me by my tech friends.