Rise Above with Kevin Lanning

From the outside, Allie Serea had it all together — good grades, a masters degree, a corporate job at a major company, an easy way with people, and a reputation as the fun party girl. On the inside, she describes crawling out of her skin, hating who she was, and feeling like an empty shell every Monday after another blacked-out weekend.

Allie was never a daily drinker. She was a high-functioning binge drinker — the kind who could go weeks without a drink, then take one at a party and not stop until 6am. For years that let her tell herself she didn't really have a problem, especially when everyone around her in college and corporate life was drinking exactly the same way. Underneath it was childhood trauma she wouldn't fully face until she got sober, and a body she never felt safe in.

Her story isn't one of arrests or overdoses. It's the quieter, more common one: geographic moves that never fixed anything, a new city and a new relationship that never fixed anything, and the slow realization that the problem followed her everywhere because the problem was the thing she was running from inside. After a decade of trying to moderate, she finally got sober a year and a half ago — and found that the real work, the trauma healing and the rebuilding of an identity, was only just beginning.

Now 19 months sober, Allie is a recovery and healing content creator who talks openly about inner-child work, nervous-system regulation, and building a life so full you don't want to escape it. This one is for anyone who looks fine on paper and is quietly struggling underneath.

Sponsored by Caron Treatment Centers

My recovery journey began at Caron Treatment Centers, and the care I received there changed the course of my life. That's why I'm proud to partner with Caron.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Caron has been helping individuals and families find hope and lasting recovery for nearly 70 years. They are in-network with all major insurance providers, and same-day admission is available.

➡️ Learn more: https://www.caron.org/lp/rise-above

📞 Call Caron today: 855-352-0103

Recovery starts with taking the first step.
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Andrew Gautreau grew up in a middle-class Louisiana family — a dad who built his own business and a mother who worked in child services, sometimes bringing him along as she pulled kids out of crack houses and placed them in foster care. He saw exactly what drugs did to families before he ever touched them. He went anyway.

It started with weed and ecstasy at high school parties, the first time he ever felt comfortable in his own skin. But the twist in Andrew's story is what came next: he became a corrections officer, working the dorms of Louisiana prisons — one guard to 120 inmates — while secretly getting high. He was buying pills at a known trap house, still in his prison uniform after a shift, when a SWAT team kicked in the door and put everyone on the ground. He talked his way out of that one. He was arrested again, still employed as a CO, and finally quit the job when he realized how close he was to smuggling drugs into the prison himself.
From there it accelerated into full-blown heroin addiction and the needle. Andrew describes hundred-dollar-a-day Roxy habits, a string of arrests, work-release programs, and finally total collapse: homeless, living in the backseat of an old Honda Civic, robbing and breaking into houses to keep using. He overdosed in a Dollar General parking lot and woke up in the hospital having lost his hearing from oxygen deprivation. Days later he overdosed again in his parents' house, went septic, and spent two weeks in the hospital hallucinating.

Then one night he walked into his mother's room and said the words he'd said a hundred times before — "I'm ready" — except this time it stuck. His brother had just gotten sober too. On March 1st, nine years ago, Andrew got clean, and he says it didn't just save his life — it brought his entire family back together.

Sponsored by Caron Treatment Centers

My recovery journey began at Caron Treatment Centers, and the care I received there changed the course of my life. That's why I'm proud to partner with Caron.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Caron has been helping individuals and families find hope and lasting recovery for nearly 70 years. They are in-network with all major insurance providers, and same-day admission is available.

➡️ Learn more: https://www.caron.org/lp/rise-above

📞 Call Caron today: 855-352-0103

Recovery starts with taking the first step.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonah Fingerhood had a nearly perfect childhood in New Hampshire — until he was 16 and lost his older brother to substance abuse. A year later, a skateboarding accident and a compound fracture put a bottle of Percocet in his hands, and the pain of that grief, followed by his father's cancer diagnosis, finally had somewhere to go. He describes the first time he crushed and snorted a pill as the moment he'd "arrived" the feeling he wanted to chase for the rest of his life.

That chase took everything. Percocet became heroin, heroin became a needle, and a move to Philadelphia and then Florida accelerated it all. By the summer of 2014 he was homeless on the streets of Miami, sleeping in a chair in Bayfront Park, panhandling every morning just to stave off withdrawal, and calling his father for hotel money he'd spend on dope. He survived an overdose that left him in a coma for a week. He cycled through arrests, rehabs, and relapses, and by October of 2019 — heartbroken, back on the streets, and certain he was too far gone — he had all but given up.

Two things pulled him back: seeing a friend he'd been homeless with return from rehab completely transformed, and a fifty-something man in a state-funded rehab who had been coming back to that same program since before Jonah was born. Jonah decided he refused to become that man. He got sober on January 10th, 2020 — a date that, unbeknownst to him at the time, was the same day he'd later mark as the anniversary of his father's death.

Now 6 years sober, Jonah went from being turned down by every employer because of his felonies to building a career, starting as a driver's helper at UPS the same day he left rehab. This is a story about grief, hitting the absolute bottom, and the hope that finally broke through.

#RiseAbove #HeroinRecovery #FentanylRecovery #6YearsSober #RecoveryIsPossible #AddictionRecovery#SoberLife #OpioidRecovery #HomelessToHopeful #MensRecovery #SobrietyJourney #MentalHealth#RiseAbovePodcast #KevinLanning #JonahFingerhood #OverdoseSurvivor #GriefAndRecovery #SecondChances #NeverTooFarGone #OneMoreThing
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Chris Broby grew up in Sarasota, Florida, in a good middle-class home — hardworking parents who built a furniture business, no trauma, no abuse. But he always felt a little like the black sheep, a small kid looking for a way to fit in, and when alcohol showed up in his early teens it filled that space instantly. By his senior year of high school, a Roxy at a party made him feel, in his words, the way he was always supposed to feel — and that was the beginning.

What followed was a fast, brutal slide into opioid addiction, made worse by a string of deaths in a matter of weeks — a close friend killed crossing a road, his uncle, his old rowing coach — that piled grief on top of a young man already numbing everything he felt. He details a decade-plus odyssey through the pill mills of Florida, wilderness programs and Hazelden, sober livings full of unforgettable characters, Suboxone and Xanax, spice and kratom, and the self-corrected relapses in between. It culminates in a harrowing night during COVID — drinking beyond recognition, his memory in pieces — when police showed up at his door at four in the morning and his gun went off. No one was hurt, he was never charged, and dropping to his knees in his apartment afterward, he knew something had to give.

The redemption is the best part. Chris turned the exact thing that nearly killed him into his purpose, building a career in medical and toxicology sales in the drug-testing world — his hard-won knowledge of addiction becoming, as he puts it, the first time he saw God working in his life. This is a raw, funny, wide-ranging conversation about grief, identity, and finding meaning on the other side.

Sponsored by Caron Treatment Centers

My recovery journey began at Caron Treatment Centers, and the care I received there changed the course of my life. That's why I'm proud to partner with Caron.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Caron has been helping individuals and families find hope and lasting recovery for nearly 70 years. They are in-network with all major insurance providers, and same-day admission is available.

➡️ Learn more: https://www.caron.org/lp/rise-above

📞 Call Caron today: 855-352-0103

Recovery starts with taking the first step.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michaela DeGier grew up in a close, loving family just outside Cambridge, Ontario — high school sweetheart parents still together after decades, three tight-knit siblings, summers in the forest behind the house. Her little brother was the baby of the family: the uncle who'd sit at a tiny table and have tea parties with his two-year-old niece, present at every birthday and holiday.

Today he's in his early thirties and has been in active addiction for over a decade.

This is a conversation about what addiction does to the people who love an addict — the family members Michaela calls the silent sufferers. She talks with unflinching honesty about the guilt she still carries from being the one who first smoked weed with him, the slow-dawning realization that her sister's missing Percocets meant something was wrong, the chaos of the family scrambling to force him into rehab, the relapses, and the heartbreak of watching him choose the street over the family that's right down the road.

Most of all, it's about her own healing: learning that she couldn't shame him or love him into recovery, that tough love and boundaries aren't the same thing, and that the only thing she can be for her brother right now is his sister — with boundaries firmly in place, and the door still open.

Sponsored by Caron Treatment Centers

My recovery journey began at Caron Treatment Centers, and the care I received there changed the course of my life. That's why I'm proud to partner with Caron.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Caron has been helping individuals and families find hope and lasting recovery for nearly 70 years. They are in-network with all major insurance providers, and same-day admission is available.

➡️ Learn more: https://www.caron.org/lp/rise-above

📞 Call Caron today: 855-352-0103

Recovery starts with taking the first step.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices