Leadership · Clinical & operational

The clinicians who carry the weight.

The Atlas Method is held not by a brand, but by people. These are the licensed clinicians who run the three founding anchors and steward the curriculum across them.

Prairie · Lovett Round Top, TX Co-Founder · Chief Clinical Officer
PhD · LCSW-S · LCDC · Co-Founder

Dr. Robert Hilliker

Chief Clinical Officer, Atlas Wellness Holdings

Robert is the clinical architect of the Atlas Method and a co-founder of The Prairie Recovery Center and The Lovett Center. He is driven by a deep commitment to serve others and is passionate about the subject of hope and despair in clinical treatment — themes he has written and lectured on for nearly two decades.

Robert holds a doctorate in social work and is dually licensed as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker–Supervisor and a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor. He has worked in residential and outpatient addiction treatment since the early 2000s and has trained hundreds of clinicians in the integrative, identity-and-meaning-centered model that became the Atlas Method.

In his role at Atlas, Robert holds final clinical authority over the curriculum and oversees the clinical leaders of each anchor. He continues to practice at Prairie and Lovett.

Authored
The Atlas Method · 12-month / 4-season framework
Founding
Prairie / Lovett · 2014 · co-founder
NIRC Crystal Lake, IL VP, Clinical Services
DSW · LCSW

Dr. Caitlyn McClure

Vice President of Clinical Services, Northern Illinois Recovery Center

Dr. McClure leads the clinical team at NIRC, where her work centers on trauma-informed addiction care, family systems, and the integration of measurement-based practice into a residential setting. She holds a Doctorate of Social Work and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Illinois.

Caitlyn brought the Atlas Method to NIRC's residential and outpatient programs in 2025, and now oversees its day-to-day deployment across detox, residential, PHP, and the two IOP tracks. She supervises clinical onboarding, weekly case conferences, and the cohort review meetings that the Arc dashboard now structures.

Her clinical philosophy is grounded in the idea that the body keeps the story — and that real recovery has to integrate body, mind, identity, and community on the same timeline.

Specialties
Trauma-informed care · family systems · measurement-based practice
At NIRC since
Pre-Atlas · led adoption · 2025
Millennium Chicago, IL Executive Director
LCPC · Executive Director

Derek Bylsma

Executive Director, Millennium Counseling Center

Derek directs Millennium's downtown Chicago practice — an outpatient counseling group specializing in complex behavioral health: process and substance addictions, sex and intimacy concerns, gender and identity work, and the co-occurring presentations that don't fit a short-form rehab.

A Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, Derek brings two decades of group, individual, and couples practice to the Atlas continuum. Under his direction Millennium adopted the Atlas Method in 2025 as its long-form continuing-care framework, anchoring the Arc inside an outpatient context that historically lacked one.

Derek's clinical interests sit at the intersection of attachment, identity, and the courage to stay in difficult conversations long enough to be changed by them.

Specialties
Complex behavioral health · couples · long-form outpatient care
Practice
Downtown Chicago · 25 E Washington · The Loop
Millennium Chicago, IL Senior Clinician · CSAT
LCPC · CSAT

Oren Matteson

Senior Clinician, Millennium Counseling Center

Oren is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor and a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Master's in Clinical Psychology, with a focus on the assessment, treatment, and integration of complex compulsive sexual behaviors within broader recovery.

At Millennium, Oren runs intensive individual and group work for clients carrying process addictions alongside trauma, partner-betrayal injury, and attachment wounds. His role in the Atlas continuum is to specialize the Method for clients whose recovery has to address both substance and behavior — a population the field has historically segmented.

Oren teaches, supervises, and contributes to the open-source Arch initiative, where his module work on shame, secrecy, and disclosure has been incorporated into the curriculum's third season.

Specialties
CSAT · process addictions · partner-betrayal trauma
Contributing
Open-source Arch · Season III shame & disclosure modules
More to come

This roster is the floor, not the ceiling.

Each anchor employs a full clinical staff — psychiatrists, nurses, primary therapists, group facilitators, recovery coaches, peer staff, family clinicians, dietitians, somatic practitioners. The leaders here hold the curriculum; their teams deliver it. Full staff directories live on each anchor's site.

See the three founding anchors →