The Recovery Guide

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 with addiction in ways most people never have to think about. For a long time, it kept him from pursuing recovery altogether. He prayed to end the pain. He didn't think he'd make it to another detox. And in one therapy session, the therapist told his parents plainly that they didn't know what to tell their son. In David's words: "Why would I want to get sober and die?"
He chose recovery anyway. And looking back, he calls treatment the single best time in his life—not because of the substance or the setting, but because of the growth that happened inside of it. He describes early recovery as a window most people can't fully understand unless they've been through it: "You're in this window of a growth that is impeccable, remarkable. Don't ever lose that."
Host Michael Herbert brings his own experience to the conversation, sharing how he sought a mental health evaluation before getting clean, hoping someone would tell him he was mentally ill so he could make sense of everything. It wasn't until the substance use was addressed that he could finally confront what had been present the whole time: depression he didn't even recognize while he was still using.
Between the two of them, this one stays with you.
Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/
This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help. Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.

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 the end of the story. Celeste became a licensed therapist and addiction professional—the person other people call when their world is falling apart. She's spent nearly three decades doing that work: as a family interventionist, a counselor, someone clients trust with the hardest parts of their lives.
She's just as honest about what that role has cost her. She talks about carrying dozens of clients at once, about telling herself she'd do "anything for anyone," about how easy it is for someone in her position to cross a line while telling themselves they're just trying to fix the world. She's candid about the boundaries she didn't hold early in her career, and about the ongoing, intentional work of holding them now.
With host Michael Herbert, she moves between two hard-won truths: how she survived being told her life was already over, and how she learned, sometimes the hard way, that being everyone's helper isn't the same as taking care of herself.
Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery
This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help. Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.

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 always had it together. He calls it being "Superman." Not a compliment. A cage.It took his family staging an intervention to get him into treatment. There, for the first time, Adam started separating who he actually was from the role he'd been playing since he was a kid. He got sober in 2006 and never looked back, but the real work wasn't recovery. It was learning to take the cape off.Years into his sobriety, success found him anyway: a business he helped build and sell, rooms full of multimillionaires who wanted what he had. And that's when he learned the harder lesson—the achievement never fills the hole. He's watched people with everything he once thought he wanted still feel like it's not enough, because "enough" was never something money could buy in the first place.With host Michael Herbert, Adam gets into what it took to stop being everyone's hero and start being human. It's a conversation about what's really underneath the armor high-achievers build, and why taking it off is the only way anything actually gets better.Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help. Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.

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 alcohol.
By summer 2023, her health finally caught up with her. A doctor's visit confirmed it: her bloodwork came back elevated across the board, her liver enzymes higher than they'd ever been. Her doctor laid out the usual next steps—medication, local AA meetings. Melissa took neither. She started walking instead, filled the silence with sober podcasts, and stumbled into an online sober community that gave her the support of meetings without the room. Within three weeks, she started to feel like herself again.
Three years later, Melissa's still alcohol-free, and she's turned what she found for herself into something she now offers to others. Through coaching and sober retreats, she's built her own version of that community, helping people who are sober curious or ready for a change find a path that actually fits them, instead of the one they're told they're supposed to take.
With host Michael Herbert, Melissa gets into why she doesn't call her sobriety journey "recovery," why she doesn't identify with the word "alcoholic," and why none of that matters nearly as much as the life she's built without alcohol in it.
Her take: there's no single right way to get sober, and the people who've found their own way there tend to be the most supportive of someone else finding theirs.
Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/
This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help. Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.

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 a problem at all. And for generations, the church has been the cornerstone—the first and often only place a family brings anything difficult. That shapes more than where someone goes for help...it shapes how the problem gets named and what gets blamed for it.
These are natural barriers, built into how difficulty gets talked about rather than obstacles anyone put there on purpose, which is why they're so easy to miss. Rick has had this conversation with clinicians deeply committed to helping anyone who walks through the door, and found many of them genuinely surprised the barriers exist.
None of it dismisses cost. Plenty of people are kept out of care by their circumstances. But a program built around money alone will keep missing the people who never make the call.
With host Michael Herbert, Rick talks through what he learned taking outreach and community education directly into African American communities.
Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery
This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help. Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.

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 his healing happened in that stretch.
 
The start was its own problem. Kevin didn't get sober because he believed he could. He'd been someone who thought they can't recover. So he took the leap of faith without the belief and let it catch up. His verdict now: he was wrong the whole time he told himself it wasn't possible.
 
What eventually moved the rest was purpose. Two years ago he started the podcast, and giving back reached something the first five years hadn't.
 
With host Michael Herbert, Kevin also gets into the anxiety and depression he was carrying early on and the three pillars—mental, spiritual, physical—holding the whole thing up today.
 
Follow Guardian: @guardianrecovery
 
This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help. Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.

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 overdose, and the "true PTSD" that lives underneath a parent's fear when addiction has already taken someone once.
 
But the heart of this conversation is something more personal: learning she can't put her own life on hold, waiting for everyone around her to be okay first. As she puts it, if she waits until everybody "lands," she'll be her mother's age before she ever finds happiness.With host Michael Herbert, Keesha opens up about parenting in recovery, the slow work of forgiveness, and why the hardest conversations are so often the ones that set us free.
 
Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/
 
This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help. Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.

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 from the start about sobriety coming first. That honesty cracked open her own codependency: the control, the resentment, the belief that if she just managed everyone else's life well enough, she'd be safe. In this conversation with host Michael Herbert, Shon traces her path from unprocessed childhood trauma to marriage counseling, "Codependent No More," and the slow work of becoming an equal partner instead of a parent. Today she's a professional chef at a rehab facility, where she's learned that a plate of food can be its own form of dignity, love, and healing — for her clients and for herself.
Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/
This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help.Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com  or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.
0:00 Cold Open1:03 Welcome to The Recovery Guide Podcast1:23 Meet Shon: Chef Since Age 162:04 Growing Up in a One-Room Shack3:14 Becoming the Family Caretaker3:30 Addiction Nobody Called Addiction6:18 Feeding the Homeless: Selfish or Self-Caring?7:22 The Time She Didn't Want to Be Here10:00 Meeting Her Husband in Recovery12:34 Realizing She Was Codependent13:11 Marriage Counseling & Codependent No More15:33 How Recovery Changed Her Marriage16:58 Chef Inside a Rehab Facility20:25 Heal Your Care Bear

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 explains how recovery became more than simply staying sober—it became a blueprint for building a successful business, raising a family, and giving others the same second chance he was given.
This conversation explores addiction, resilience, entrepreneurship, discipline, faith, and the power of consistent action. Whether you're in recovery, love someone who is, or simply need encouragement to keep moving forward, Derek's story is proof that your past does not determine your future.
Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/Learn More About Dereks company: https://www.instagram.com/razorbackelectric/ 
This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help.Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com  or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.
00:00 Introduction02:00 Early Addiction & Legal Trouble06:45 First Experience in Recovery09:20 Returning Home & Relapsing10:45 Prison Changes Everything15:15 A Second Chance in Florida18:20 Losing Four Years of Sobriety20:10 Rock Bottom & Starting Over22:30 Building Razorback Electric28:05 Success, Leadership & Giving Back30:30 Marriage, Family & Fatherhood33:00 Redefining Recovery35:20 Faith, Business & The Future40:00 Final Thoughts

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 often requires humility, honesty, and a willingness to let go of old ways of thinking.
Craig and Michael also unpack the difficult role families play in recovery, especially when love turns into enabling. They discuss why setting and holding boundaries can be one of the most loving things a family can do, even when it feels painful in the moment. The conversation also dives into the Marchman Act, how it works in Florida, who may qualify, and why it can be a critical legal tool when someone is impaired, unsafe, and unable to recognize their own need for care.
Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/Learn More about the Marchman Act: https://robinsoncasey.com/Follow Craig: https://www.instagram.com/thecraigr/ 
This episode is sponsored by Guardian Recovery. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian can help.Visit https://www.guardianrecovery.com  or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.
00:00 – Introduction01:57 – Early exposure to AA, NA, and recovery05:13 – How addiction and substances have changed10:27 – Why recovery opens life back up13:47 – Treatment, ego, and being challenged17:13 – Boundaries, consequences, and enabling20:15 – When someone chooses jail over treatment22:31 – Recovery is not about perfection23:10 – Living an exciting life in recovery25:57 – Why earning things builds self-esteem28:22 – Finding purpose through recovery30:29 – Honesty, shame, and personal growth36:01 – Success, humility, and imposter syndrome39:23 – Therapy, natural strengths, and helping others42:18 – Addiction in high-functioning professionals44:29 – Blending law, recovery, and social work49:13 – Addiction as an equal opportunity illness53:19 – The future of the Marchman Act56:27 – Does involuntary treatment work?59:14 – Hitting bottom and finding humility01:02:27 – Why clinicians need to understand the Marchman Act01:05:00 – Treatment length and early recovery01:07:03 – Who is the Marchman Act for?01:16:42 – How to connect with Craig Robinson01:18:02 – Closing thoughts