Things could have played out very differently for Leonard Lee Buschel. A powerful combo of early-childhood trauma, a “professional” opportunity, and luck combined to foster a 27-year drug dealing career that might have gone disastrously wrong. In fact, a great many things did go wrong, which became undeniably clear when Leonard looked at the Top […]

I met my guest for this episode a few years ago at a meeting of the We Agnostics AA group in Kansas City. She had been attending meetings at another 12-Step Fellowship, so AA wasn’t a foreign experience. However, an AA group that was specifically tailored to meet the needs of atheists and agnostics was […]

Today, I want to talk about recovery. What is it anyway? To answer the question, I am borrowing heavily from the pamphlet “SAMHSA’s Working Definition of Recovery” published in 2012 by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. I start each episode introducing Beyond Belief Sobriety as a podcast and community for people who […]

Can you become addicted to a person and if so, how can you become unaddicted? With her book, UnAddicted to You: Loving Yourself Through the Darkness, Etel Leit answers these questions through the sharing of her own personal story and the lessons learned. Etel is a PhD. candidate, a best-selling author, motivator, public speaker, and […]

In this episode, I speak with Sam Arsenault Wilson, the Chief Quality Officer, and Co-founder of Confidant Health, an app-based hub of resources and clinical providers that help people with mental health and substance use problems. I was happy to feature Confidant Health on this podcast because I believe their model, which is grounded in […]

Danny grew up in a religious household and drinking was considered a sin. When he was around sixteen, he began to question the teachings of his religion. One question: Where does it say in the bible that you can’t drink? He waited until he was twenty-one before he has his first drink. In this episode, Danny […]

In this episode Ben and I had a conversation about how to navigate Alcoholics Anonymous as an atheist, agnostic, freethinker, or otherwise secular person. We briefly touched upon what a person can expect to experience at their first AA meeting, and how to handle the overtly religious nature of most AA meetings. Topics covered in […]

In this episode, we meet Robert Stump who has been the Executive Director of LifeRing Secular Recovery since 2012 when the founder, Marty Nicholas stepped down. In this episode Robert shares his personal story of recovery and how he found LifeRing to support him in his sobriety. His journey began in 1997 when the only […]

For this episode, I had a conversation with Jack J. from Bristol England. Jack is a recovered sex addict who has created a new peer support group called Secular Organizations for Sexual Sobriety (SOSS). In this interesting conversation, Jack explains how his experience with other mutual aid groups inspired him to start this new secular […]

Kimiko values inclusion and believes the best way to help people is to meet them where they are. Though, she may prefer a more secular and practical approach to recovery for herself; she can easily adjust and relate to someone who values spirituality, and who is comfortable using spiritual language to describe their experience. As […]