Rise Above with Kevin Lanning

Justin Gurland grew up the oldest of four in a close, loving New Jersey family — family dinners every night, a dad who was a doctor and coached his teams, a childhood that looked idyllic from the outside. But Justin always felt a little different, a little black-sheep-ish, and from the very first time he drank at 13, he'd found the feeling he didn't know he was missing.

By college at the University of Vermont, the partying had curdled into something darker. His whole crew got hooked on opiates, and Justin moved seamlessly from OxyContin to heroin. He moved to New York City telling himself the problem was geographic — that he'd learn to "drink like a gentleman" — and instead spent the next few years in the darkest, most isolated stretch of his life, secretly using IV heroin while keeping up appearances just enough to avoid the alarms.

It all came down when his sister walked into his bedroom and found his works out in the open, and weeks later, when his doctor father spotted the abscess on his hand. In one of the most powerful scenes he shares, Justin describes grabbing his dad by his white coat and telling him he needed him more than he ever had in his life. He detoxed that night and got sober in 2008.

Eighteen years later, Justin has spent more than 15 years working in behavioral health — and recently took a leap of faith to build something that didn't exist: The Maze, a first-of-its-kind alcohol-free membership club in New York City, a place to find community and connection without alcohol at the center. This is a story about isolation and belonging, the families who love us through it, and building the thing you always wished existed.

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

Lauryn Boorstein grew up in the Poconos in a home full of chaos — a painful divorce, a father she loved who struggled with his own demons, and an autistic brother she appointed herself the protector of before she was old enough to protect anyone. She fell in love with the lifestyle — the fighting, the adrenaline, the not-caring — long before she understood she was an addict. By her early twenties, crack and heroin had taken over.

Her story is one of hard crashes, literal and otherwise. A stolen-car wreck as a teenager. A later accident where she describes her body shutting down at the wheel, crashing into a tree, and walking away convinced God had spared her. Multiple treatment stays, a devastating injury that left her unable to walk for years, and the losses that piled up — including a boyfriend early in her sobriety who overdosed the night she begged him to get help.

But this is ultimately a story about what recovery makes possible. Lauryn got sober in 2017, and in one of the most bittersweet gifts of her life, her father — sick himself — got to watch her pick up her one-year medallion before he passed away the very next day. In the years since, she's become a devoted single mother to her daughter, worked the steps, sponsored other women, and built a thriving national business from the ground up.

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

Danny O'Connor was an Olympic-team boxer and professional fighter from Boston who spent ten years chasing a world championship. From the outside, he was elite, disciplined, relentless. What almost no one knew was that the same all-or-nothing drive that made him a champion was also fueling a secret, life-threatening eating disorder.

It started when he was a teenage wrestler, learning to manipulate his body to make weight, with no education about nutrition and no idea what he was doing to himself. That same pattern followed him into a pro boxing career fought entirely in one weight class — and over the years it grew into a full-blown, medically diagnosed eating disorder, one of the deadliest mental illnesses there is. Danny is unflinching about what it cost him: his health, trips to the ICU, and ultimately his shot at a world title in 2018, when his body finally gave out on the biggest night of his life.

He also opens up about the chaotic period after he lost wrestling as a teenager — leaving home, a string of arrests, and a judge's warning that stopped him cold — and how he found his way back through boxing, and eventually into recovery.

Today Danny is a keynote speaker, an author, and a devoted husband and father who brings his kids along on his book tours. His story is a powerful, rarely-told look at eating disorders in men, the hidden cost of elite sports, and what it takes to finally choose your life over the thing you built it around.

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

⚠️ The views in this episode are Dr. Teralyn Sell's professional opinions and personal experience. This conversation is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Never start, stop, or change a prescribed medication without consulting your doctor — stopping some medications suddenly can be dangerous.

Dr. Teralyn Sell is a psychotherapist and PhD with a background that spans maximum-security prisons, addiction treatment, and nearly 15 years in private practice. In this wide-ranging conversation, she shares a perspective the addiction and mental health worlds are only beginning to reckon with: that many people leaving addiction behind are being moved straight into long-term dependency on psychiatric medication — and that no one is being told the full cost.

Drawing on her own seven years on antidepressants and her clinical work, Dr. Teralyn digs into the emotional numbing and sexual side effects that often go unmentioned, why she believes the popular "chemical imbalance" explanation for depression isn't supported by the research, why she considers coming off SSRIs harder for many people than detoxing from heroin, and how the same "you'll need this forever" message shows up in both psychiatric medication and long-term Suboxone use. She also shares what she's seen actually help the brain heal — nutrition, sleep, movement, connection, and trauma work — and why she believes in the brain's capacity to recover.

Whether you agree with all of it or none of it, it's a thought-provoking conversation about questions worth asking your own doctor.

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

On paper, Emma Gray had every advantage — a New York City upbringing, elite schools, a spot at Harvard, and eventually a six-year finance career. Underneath it, she was a person who, in her own words, couldn't sit with an uncomfortable feeling for more than a moment without needing to escape it.

Emma started with alcohol, which never agreed with her, and then found the thing that did: first weed, then the downers that would take over her life — Oxy and Xanax. She describes the exact mechanism of her addiction with unusual clarity: the second she felt relief from a drug, she was already terrified of losing it and reaching for more. That pattern followed her to Harvard, where she partied instead of studying, plagiarized her way through assignments, looked administrators in the eye and denied it, and was ultimately asked to leave.

Her rock bottom came quietly — 72 hours in bed, not answering her phone, her family convinced she was overdosing. She got sober in 2015 after treatment at Caron and an intensive therapy program that, as she puts it, rewired her. The first year was small and hard: sober living, meetings, reality TV, knitting, learning to read a full page of a book again, waiting for the joy to come back. It did. Emma went back to Harvard, graduated, built her career, and recently left it to pursue what's next — all on the foundation of a sobriety she's had for nearly a decade.

This is an honest, self-aware conversation about high-functioning addiction, the delusion that keeps us sick, and what it actually takes to build a life worth staying sober for.

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