Push Each Other to the Top

Content warning: This episode includes frank discussion of child neglect, IV drug use, sex work for drugs, incarceration, and child sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised. If you or someone you love is struggling, call or text 988, or SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357 (free, confidential, 24/7). 

Heather grows up in a home shaped by loss, addiction, and the lights going out. There are extension cords run from a neighbor’s apartment and homework done by candlelight. She takes her first drink at eleven, and for the first time in her life she feels confident. 

By nineteen she is a mother, and by twenty-one she is chasing a high that makes the pain disappear. Shoplifting, a car seat that becomes her son’s whole world, and a sister-in-law who shows up within fifteen minutes when Heather finally calls for help. She walks out of treatment after fourteen hours. A warrant, a motel peephole, and a gray Bulls hat bring it all to a stop. 

What comes next is not a straight line. It’s a judge, a drug court, a group of eleven people who get sober the same year, and a question her son asks at daycare that she answers in a way she never could before. 

Heather sits down with Brent and Jonathan to tell it all, including the part she says carries her through on the hard days. Her advice to the newcomer is simple: give it 30 days.

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No guest tonight, just Brent and Jonathan with the mic and a season’s worth of stories to look back on. 

The conversation starts with a Facebook clip about smiling when you’re out of options, and moves to a question every guest seems to answer the same way: what happens in the moment you finally ask for help? Brent talks about the sponsor who never let him call recovery “hard.” Jonathan shares what happens when the twelve steps are read aloud in a detention center, and how one quiet man’s response to a single Bible verse changed the room. 

Along the way they revisit some of the voices that have shaped the show. Sarah, Stefan, John and Ryan come back through the lines that stuck with them. A golf-course run-in shows that even after 37 years, the rules still feel like suggestions. And there’s a plain truth about why some people call their sponsor every day and most never do. 

It’s an unscripted hour about surrender, willingness and the people God puts in our path. Whatever you’re carrying, you don’t have to carry it alone. 

Stay through the end for a behind-the-scenes moment after we stopped recording.

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Brian spent thirty years with one goal every day: get drunk. He grew up in a well-to-do Massachusetts home where there was money but no love, and he feels like an outsider in his own family. He learns early to stay defiant, stay angry and never let anyone see him hurt. At fifteen he finds the thing that finally makes him feel confident. By seventeen he's driving west with two six-packs, a pack of cigarettes and five dollars to his name. 

In this episode, Brian traces the long road from Boy Scout campouts and county jail to the back row of an AA meeting, where one man keeps waving him forward a row at a time. He talks about wrestling with a God he argued against his whole life, the first prayer he could barely get out, and a sponsor who showed him what letting go actually looks like. 

Brent and Jonathan find more in common with Brian's story than they expected, including one very specific ritual Brent thought was his alone. Twenty-three years sober, Brian is living proof that if a guy like him can find it, anyone can. 

Stay through the end for a behind-the-scenes conversation after the episode wraps.

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The day after she gets out of detox, Chrissie walks into an AA club and tells the woman at the desk that she has a friend who needs some paperwork. The woman hands it over, wraps her in a hug, and tells her to come back. For the first time in years, Chrissie feels like she's home. Twelve years later, on the anniversary of her sobriety, she sits down with Brent and Jonathan to tell the rest of the story. 

She talks about the boxed wine that turned into a handle every other day, the afternoon shakes she couldn't explain, and the day her mom and daughter showed up at her door. She describes a year of meetings without a sponsor, the stranger who walked into her family's pawn shop with something to smoke, and the moment she finally admitted to herself, and only herself, what she was. Then comes Heather, who met her every Thursday for five years over cups of tea, and the community she built from nothing after pushing everyone away. 

Brent and Chrissie dig into what it means to find what works for you, why sponsees teach more than they learn, and how a bishop's daughter who grew up afraid of a disappointed God found a loving one after fifty years in a church. Home, it turns out, was a room full of strangers who loved her before she could love herself. 

Stay through the end for a behind-the-scenes moment after we wrap the episode.

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"How do you deal with the hangovers?" Todd P.'s answer: he never had one. He never quit drinking. By his early forties he's drinking 20 hours a day, sipping through the night to hold off the DTs, with a fraud case hanging over his head and everything else already gone: wife, family, house, business. 

It didn't start that way. Todd grew up charmed in a tiny Idaho town on the Salmon River, raised in a religious, sports-minded family. He played football at Oregon and built top-tier sales careers, barely drinking until his late twenties. Then ego met alcohol, and the slide began. 

On his 77th day of sobriety, a judge hands down his sentence, and four days later he's shackled on a bus headed to the Idaho State Penitentiary. What happens inside changes everything. Todd co-founds an AA meeting behind prison walls, works the steps by mail with his sponsor, and walks out to rebuild from nothing, re-entering college as a freshman at 45. Now 23 years sober and a therapist, Todd shares hard-won wisdom on honesty, felonies on job applications, and why the worst thing that ever happened to him changed the trajectory of his life. 

Stay through the end for a few extra minutes behind the scenes with Todd.

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Lance shows up on short notice and delivers one of the season's most complete stories. Third-generation Japanese-American, raised in Fruit Heights, drinking from his parents' liquor cabinet before junior high — he walks us through decades of beating the system through court-ordered therapy, jail stints, and the moment in a treatment center bed when Bill's story in the big book tells him for the first time that he isn't alone. From a 0.7 GPA and a felony charge, he rebuilds: a master's in accountancy, a CPA license he refused to quit on, a tax practice with 200 business clients, his dad's survey company, and a treatment center in Centerville opened two weeks before the world shut down. Brent, his longtime sponsor, fills in the parts Lance is too humble to tell — the club in Bountiful he's quietly kept alive, the kidney transplant he walked through with his head up. Along the way: a dead side-by-side in the Island Park backcountry, a prayer, and the four-wheelers that came thirty seconds later. Twenty-plus years of proof that recovery is a lifestyle, and that the opposite of addiction is connection.

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🙏 If this episode spoke to you, share it with someone who needs a little hope today.

Sarah thought she was holding everything together. She was managing the business, running carpool, keeping the calendar full — doing everything right. What she didn't know was that her toddler had already figured it out. In a video found years later on an old iPad, her youngest daughter is pretend-talking to a friend, casually explaining why they can't come over: "Today's a day you can't talk to Mom. It's one of those days." 

That's the moment Sarah realized the addiction in her home hadn't just affected Ryan — it had changed her too. 

In this episode, Sarah shares what it's like to be the spouse of an alcoholic, how she slowly lost herself trying to control the uncontrollable, and what finally cracked her open enough to ask for help. She talks about walking into her first Al-Anon meeting with tears streaming down her face, sitting in the corner, convinced she could never come back — and what kept pulling her through the door anyway. 

Sarah is a co-owner of Reprieve Recovery Center, a women's residential treatment facility in Mountain Green, Utah, where she runs family support every week. 

Stay through the end for a candid behind-the-scenes conversation about what comes next.

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Brock was a Mesa police officer chasing a guy over a stolen 24-pack when he blew out his knee. His doctor handed him opioids with a promise: "You're a cop. You'll never get addicted to these things." Ten years of addiction later, he was medically retired, alone in a bathroom in Show Low, seven days into a cold-turkey detox with nobody coming to save him. 

Brock walked out of that bathroom 16 years ago and hasn't relapsed since. Today he runs the Fentanyl Project Arizona — boots on the ground, connecting people on the street to people and resources, one degree at a time. 

In this episode: losing your identity when the badge comes off, why he doesn't believe in rock bottom, the five-stage addiction cycle (trigger → thought → craving → use → remorse) and how to break it, the "king voice" vs. the voice that tells you to take the easy path, what xylazine is doing to the drug supply, and why you can love someone to death but can't get them sober for them. 

Plus Brent on interventions, permission to get well, and the young man in the Walmart doorway. 

Find Brock: The Fentanyl Project Arizona on Instagram and Facebook. If you're struggling, you're not alone. Follow the show wherever you listen, and if this one hit you, share it with someone who needs it.

🔗 Stay Connected & Keep Climbing
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts
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🙏 If this episode spoke to you, share it with someone who needs a little hope today.

Ryan grew up the "designated driver" — the holier-than-thou kid who swore he'd never touch drugs or alcohol. Then a snowboarding accident shattered three vertebrae, a doctor friend sat him down at a Ruth's Chris lunch, and a Purdue Pharma rep promised the new painkiller was "non-addictive." Four years later Ryan was hurling two fresh bottles of pills into Lake Powell, praying to die as he detoxed alone on a houseboat full of family. 

That was only the beginning. Ryan tells Jonathan and Brent about the sake he drank in a liquor-store parking lot at 32, the years of day-drinking behind a white-picket-fence facade, the cocaine he used just to sober up enough to drive home, and the "Superman" ego that survived a heart attack in Central Park and a .38 DUI. The turn comes from a neighbor he'd written off — John Redd — and four words that cracked the whole thing open: "Okay, cool. Me too." 

The heart of it is a spiritual turn most people never talk about out loud. By the time he got to treatment, Ryan had gone agnostic — sure that if there was a God, He'd doomed him to this. So he fired that God. He wrote a firing letter to the higher power that had cast him into hell, and a hiring letter for a new one built from the qualities he most wanted as a dad. From there — writing his fourth step twice, working a fifth step, and the moment the cravings simply lifted and "the sky got bluer" — Ryan walks through the surrender that gave him back his marriage (26 years to Sarah), his business, and a calling. Today, five and a half years sober, he and Sarah run Reprieve, a women's recovery center they never planned to build — and Ryan is careful to draw the line between working in recovery and working his recovery. 

Plus: the screwdriver he was handed to build a house, the wisdom that we're all the same distance from grace, and why the suffering was worth it. And stick around for the behind-the-scenes — a very heated debate about whether soccer is the dumbest sport ever invented. 

If you or someone you love is struggling, this one's a reminder: if Ryan can do it, you can too. Reach out. You're not alone.

🔗 Stay Connected & Keep Climbing
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts
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🌐 Visit us at PushEachOtherToTheTop.com

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🙏 If this episode spoke to you, share it with someone who needs a little hope today.

What does it take to finally change? For Matt, it was losing his dad, his second wife walking out, and 30 years of alcohol — all colliding at once. He checked himself into a hardcore six-month program in the Arizona mountains, fought it every step of the way, relapsed, and got back up anyway. Eight years later, he's sitting in detention centers telling his story to men who are right where he used to be. 

In this episode, Matt, Brent, and Jonathan get real about the things nobody wants to talk about — the rage that's just as addictive as the bottle, the childhood wounds that don't show up until you're sober enough to feel them, and the difference between being clean and actually being at peace. Matt opens up about deep therapy work he only started this past year, and what he's still uncovering about himself nearly a decade into recovery. 

They also talk about what it's like to walk into the most hopeless place in the world and try to sell hope — one conversation, one lost sheep at a time. And Jonathan, the self-described "normie" of the group, shares why he keeps showing up, and the friend he lost to addiction that he'll never stop trying to honor. 

If you've ever wondered whether it's too late, or whether change is even possible for someone like you — this one's for you.

🔗 Stay Connected & Keep Climbing
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts
🎧 Also on Spotify
📺 Watch full episodes on YouTube
🌐 Visit us at PushEachOtherToTheTop.com

📧 Email us - we would love to hear from you!

🙏 If this episode spoke to you, share it with someone who needs a little hope today.