The Recovery Guide

In the '60s and '70s, Gary Stromberg co-founded Gibson & Stromberg, the PR firm behind names like The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Doors and Elton John. He later co-produced "Car Wash" and helped found the legendary Rainbow Bar & Grill. Through all of that success, he was convinced drugs were what made him so creative, because getting high made him feel like he could really think and create. Looking back, he calls it a "...

Kyle "Rapps" Sutton had a solid foundation in recovery and a creative career starting to take off. Then he moved to New York City with some money in his pocket, and his old patterns found a new way in.

It wasn't drinking or using this time. It was women, one hookup after another, and he got deep into it. He stopped leaning on his recovery, started isolating, and never really dealt with the grief he was carrying. By the time he hit ...

Thatcher Shivley's first sponsor told him he had no idea what recovery had in store for him. Part of him thought it sounded cheesy. The other part was intrigued.

Sober since 2005, Thatcher spent ten years building a solid foundation before turning his experience into a career. Today he's a certified Recovery Coach with professional intervention training, and interventions are the part of the work he loves most. 

He's also a hu...

Erik Coleman would dominate on the field. Then he'd come home and throw up.

The stress of what was happening at home followed him everywhere. He was getting an ulcer as a young athlete, and almost no one knew. He put on a front for everyone, and he got pretty good at hiding it from the world.

Football took him all the way to a nine-year NFL career. But the league that hyped him up for years didn't let him leave on his own terms. At...

Esin Pinarli was double majoring in English literature and psychology when her own life started to look like the kind of story she was studying—the one where the character you're rooting for can't get out of her own way. She was anxious, fearful of her future, and going through her own addiction. 

She almost became a professor. Instead, her pain redirected her entire life.

She went through the full course of treatment an...

Matt Williams had a wake-up call over a decade ago that changed the direction of his life. What he did with the years that followed is the part most people don't see coming.

Today he's a performance coach, entrepreneur, personal trainer, and recovery mentor based in Boca Raton, Florida. He founded FROPRO Snack Bar, a nationally distributed wellness brand built on the principles of healthy living and second chances, and he runs a pr...

Michelle DeMicco was in and out of rehab six times before she turned 21. Nearly 19 years sober now, she'll tell you the sobriety was just the beginning.

What came after—the mindset work, the spiritual growth, learning to sit with herself without running—that's the part nobody warns you about when you put the substance down. And it's the part Michelle built her entire life around.

She's a mindset coach, speaker, sales le...

David Niknafs, was born with Cystic Fibrosis, a chronic illness he was told he might not outlive. Growing up, people didn't ask him what he wanted to be. They asked when he was going to die. He formed friendships with other kids living with CF, grew close to them, and then had to watch them pass one by one. 

Today, at 39, he's the oldest person with Cystic Fibrosis he currently knows of.

That reality shaped his relationship wi...

Celeste Bowman was 23 when she was diagnosed with HIV. In the early years, the diagnosis felt less like a medical reality and more like a verdict—she says plainly that it was hard for a 23-year-old to grapple with something so tied, in most people's minds, to death. For a while, it was almost like the diagnosis had a voice of its own, telling her she'd never even cared about living before it showed up.

She didn't let that be ...

By the time Adam Jablin was 30, he had the life he was supposed to want. A family business he'd spent his life stepping into, a wife, a home, a body he'd sculpted through years of competitive bodybuilding. From the outside, he was the guy who had it figured out. Inside, he was drowning. Alcohol and pills had become the only way he knew how to keep playing the role everyone needed him to play—provider, protector, the one who ...

For years, Melissa McGovern tried to get sober on her own terms—cutting out alcohol for a while, feeling great, then slowly letting it creep back in under the guise of moderation. The cycle repeated more than once.

Then one of the worst things imaginable happened: she lost her best friend, who had spent years cycling in and out of rehabs and homeless shelters. Melissa coped the only way she knew how: by binging food and alcoh...

The assumption is almost always money. If someone in a Black community isn't getting access to treatment, the reason "must be" that they can't afford it.

Rick Hubbard has a hard piece of evidence against that. There was a nonprofit, state-funded treatment center where care cost nothing at all, and the problem existed at that level just the same.

What's actually in the way is often shame and stigma attached to acknowledging there's ...

Eight and a half years into recovery, and Kevin Lanning puts most of his healing in the last two.

For five of those years he stayed sober and did the work as it was handed to him—made amends, kept commitments, sponsored others. And was still, by his own description, mentally all over the place. He estimates about ten percent of hi...

Keesha Scott knows addiction from the inside. As an author, a podcast host, and the co-founder of Guardian Recovery, she's built her life's work around helping others navigate parenting and addiction, but her own story runs deeper than her title.

A mother in recovery herself, Keesha has spent years loving a child through the very disease she's fought firsthand. She gets candid about the grief of losing her son's father to an overd...

Shon Tripp grew up in a one-room shack with an outhouse in unincorporated Johnson County, one of five kids in a family where addiction and mental illness went unnamed — just "dysfunction." She became the family caretaker before she understood why, and found her calling in the kitchen, turning whatever was in the cabinet into a meal for her siblings.

Years later, Shon met her husband, a man in recovery who was honest with her ...

What happens when someone loses everything... and decides to rebuild from the ground up?

Derek Lewis shares his remarkable journey from addiction, multiple arrests, and prison to becoming the owner of one of South Florida's largest electrical companies.

Derek opens up about the denial that kept him trapped, the relapse that nearly cost him everything after four years of sobriety, and the mentors who refused to give up on him. He ex...

In this episode, Craig Robinson shares how his own recovery journey reshaped his life, gave him a deeper sense of purpose, and ultimately led him to help families navigate one of the most painful situations imaginable: watching a loved one struggle with addiction while refusing help. The conversation explores why intelligence, success, and problem-solving skills can sometimes work against someone in addiction, and why recovery ofte...

In this episode of The Recovery Guide Podcast, we sit down with Marc Kantor for a powerful conversation about addiction, intervention, family support, enabling, food addiction, and what long-term recovery really requires. Marc shares his personal recovery journey, including what led him to treatment 21 years ago and how addiction had left his life, marriage, health, and career in shambles. What started as a desperate need for relie...

Today, Danielle Sharpe shares her powerful story of addiction, trauma, survival, and recovery in this deeply honest conversation about rebuilding a life from the ground up.

Growing up around addiction and chaos, Danielle found herself trapped in a cycle of alcoholism, drugs, survival mode, and self-destruction that eventually led to arrests, suicide attempts, and rock bottom moments.

But through recovery, therapy, self-discovery, a...