A New Study Finally Says What Peer Workers Have Known All Along: Having Been There Is a Skill

You already know the difference between a counselor who’s read about withdrawal and one who’s lived through it. You can feel it in the first five minutes — whether someone flinches at the word “relapse” or just nods, because they’ve been the person the word was describing.

Lived experience isn’t a soft skill you tolerate in a hire. It’s the credential the rest of the field has been slow to name.

That’s the plain-language version of what Loren Brener, a professor at UNSW’s Centre for Social Research in Health, found after her team interviewed 36 workers — peer workers, counselors, psychologists, social workers — across Australia’s alcohol, drug, and mental health sector for a study published July 6 in the International Journal of Drug Policy. Every participant, regardless of job title, converged on the same conclusion: lived and living experience functions as professional expertise, full stop — not a nice-to-have layered on top of a clinical degree, and not a checkbox for “consumer voice” that a program can satisfy with one hire on an advisory board.

Brener’s framing is worth sitting with because it’s not sentimental. “They can identify with clients in ways others can’t,” she told UNSW’s newsroom, describing what researchers sometimes call earned credibility — the trust a person extends faster to someone who has actually been where they are than to someone who only studied it. There’s a name for the mechanism underneath that: psychologists call it vicarious mastery, the idea that watching someone who was where you are now get out is more convincing than any clinician telling you it’s possible. The proof is the person, not the diploma on the wall behind them.

The study doesn’t romanticize this. Brener is equally direct about the cost: “If a client has a similar history, it can be triggering” for the worker. A peer worker sitting across from someone mid-crisis isn’t just deploying empathy — they’re managing their own history in real time, every shift, without always having a structure around them built to support that. The paper’s real contribution is refusing to let the field have the upside of lived experience — retention, trust, faster rapport — without also funding the supervision, pay equity, and career pathways that make the work sustainable for the people doing it. Right now, peer roles are disproportionately the lowest-paid, least-protected positions in a workforce that depends on them to function.

Rize’s own Peer Support Matching roadmap runs on the same premise Brener’s data now backs with rigor: pairing someone entering recovery with someone who’s already walked the specific road they’re on isn’t a nice add-on to clinical care — for a lot of people, it’s the reason clinical care sticks. If you’re the person a peer worker helped get through a bad week, or if you’re the peer worker managing your own history while you help someone through theirs, this study is, in its dry academic language, telling your employer something you’ve known the whole time: what you carry with you into that room is not a liability to be managed around. It’s the qualification nobody wrote a job description for yet.