"I Was Superman for Everyone Except Myself"

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.

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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.