Esin Pinarli was double majoring in English literature and psychology when her own life started to look like the kind of story she was studying—the one where the character you're rooting for can't get out of her own way. She was anxious, fearful of her future, and going through her own addiction. 

She almost became a professor. Instead, her pain redirected her entire life.

She went through the full course of treatment and experienced firsthand what it feels like to sit in that chair and wonder if any of it is going to work. That experience became the foundation for everything she built after. She started her career as a primary therapist at an inpatient facility, learned from every clinician and client she worked alongside, and eventually became a clinical director before launching her own practice.

Today Esin is a licensed clinical social worker, holistic psychotherapist, and wellness coach. She treats anxiety, depression, trauma, and addiction, bringing her own recovery into the room not as a credential but as an ethos: I've been where you are, and I know what it takes to get to the other side of it.

Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/

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.

Matt Williams had a wake-up call over a decade ago that changed the direction of his life. What he did with the years that followed is the part most people don't see coming.

Today he's a performance coach, entrepreneur, personal trainer, and recovery mentor based in Boca Raton, Florida. He founded FROPRO Snack Bar, a nationally distributed wellness brand built on the principles of healthy living and second chances, and he runs a private training facility where he works one-on-one with clients on their physical health, mindset, and the personal and professional challenges that come with rebuilding your life from the inside out. His background spans education, counseling, fitness, and behavioral health.

Sobriety didn't just change Matt's life, it gave him something to do with it. He talks about what he had to let go of before anything could change, what it actually looks like to keep showing up for the life you're building years into sobriety, and why the work doesn't stop just because things start going well.

Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/

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.

Michelle DeMicco was in and out of rehab six times before she turned 21. Nearly 19 years sober now, she'll tell you the sobriety was just the beginning.

What came after—the mindset work, the spiritual growth, learning to sit with herself without running—that's the part nobody warns you about when you put the substance down. And it's the part Michelle built her entire life around.

She's a mindset coach, speaker, sales leader, and author of The Journey to Source Journal. She founded All Is Well Vibrations to help people reconnect with who they actually are underneath all the noise—the stress, the fear, the constant feeling that you're falling behind. Through journaling, meditation, and intentional daily practices, she helps people break old patterns and start trusting themselves again.

But before she was any of those things, she was someone who kept ending up in the same place—and didn't think there was another version of her life available.

She found power in realizing she wasn't stuck. Service became the thing that kept her grounded. And the work didn't stop when the substance did. As she puts it, it's a lifetime process, not something you graduate from. It's a commitment to change your life and continue working on yourself for the rest of it.

🎙️ The Recovery Guide Podcast by Guardian Recovery

Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, Guardian Recovery can help. Visit guardianrecovery.com or call 888-721-3790 for confidential support and guidance.

David Niknafs, was born with Cystic Fibrosis, a chronic illness he was told he might not outlive. Growing up, people didn't ask him what he wanted to be. They asked when he was going to die. He formed friendships with other kids living with CF, grew close to them, and then had to watch them pass one by one. 

Today, at 39, he's the oldest person with Cystic Fibrosis he currently knows of.

That reality shaped his relationship with addiction in ways most people never have to think about. For a long time, it kept him from pursuing recovery altogether. He prayed to end the pain. He didn't think he'd make it to another detox. And in one therapy session, the therapist told his parents plainly that they didn't know what to tell their son. In David's words: "Why would I want to get sober and die?"

He chose recovery anyway. And looking back, he calls treatment the single best time in his life—not because of the substance or the setting, but because of the growth that happened inside of it. He describes early recovery as a window most people can't fully understand unless they've been through it: "You're in this window of a growth that is impeccable, remarkable. Don't ever lose that."

Host Michael Herbert brings his own experience to the conversation, sharing how he sought a mental health evaluation before getting clean, hoping someone would tell him he was mentally ill so he could make sense of everything. It wasn't until the substance use was addressed that he could finally confront what had been present the whole time: depression he didn't even recognize while he was still using.

Between the two of them, this one stays with you.

Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/

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.

Celeste Bowman was 23 when she was diagnosed with HIV. In the early years, the diagnosis felt less like a medical reality and more like a verdict—she says plainly that it was hard for a 23-year-old to grapple with something so tied, in most people's minds, to death. For a while, it was almost like the diagnosis had a voice of its own, telling her she'd never even cared about living before it showed up.

She didn't let that be the end of the story. Celeste became a licensed therapist and addiction professional—the person other people call when their world is falling apart. She's spent nearly three decades doing that work: as a family interventionist, a counselor, someone clients trust with the hardest parts of their lives.

She's just as honest about what that role has cost her. She talks about carrying dozens of clients at once, about telling herself she'd do "anything for anyone," about how easy it is for someone in her position to cross a line while telling themselves they're just trying to fix the world. She's candid about the boundaries she didn't hold early in her career, and about the ongoing, intentional work of holding them now.

With host Michael Herbert, she moves between two hard-won truths: how she survived being told her life was already over, and how she learned, sometimes the hard way, that being everyone's helper isn't the same as taking care of herself.

Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery

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.

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.

For years, Melissa McGovern tried to get sober on her own terms—cutting out alcohol for a while, feeling great, then slowly letting it creep back in under the guise of moderation. The cycle repeated more than once.

Then one of the worst things imaginable happened: she lost her best friend, who had spent years cycling in and out of rehabs and homeless shelters. Melissa coped the only way she knew how: by binging food and alcohol.

By summer 2023, her health finally caught up with her. A doctor's visit confirmed it: her bloodwork came back elevated across the board, her liver enzymes higher than they'd ever been. Her doctor laid out the usual next steps—medication, local AA meetings. Melissa took neither. She started walking instead, filled the silence with sober podcasts, and stumbled into an online sober community that gave her the support of meetings without the room. Within three weeks, she started to feel like herself again.

Three years later, Melissa's still alcohol-free, and she's turned what she found for herself into something she now offers to others. Through coaching and sober retreats, she's built her own version of that community, helping people who are sober curious or ready for a change find a path that actually fits them, instead of the one they're told they're supposed to take.

With host Michael Herbert, Melissa gets into why she doesn't call her sobriety journey "recovery," why she doesn't identify with the word "alcoholic," and why none of that matters nearly as much as the life she's built without alcohol in it.

Her take: there's no single right way to get sober, and the people who've found their own way there tend to be the most supportive of someone else finding theirs.

Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/

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.

The assumption is almost always money. If someone in a Black community isn't getting access to treatment, the reason "must be" that they can't afford it.

Rick Hubbard has a hard piece of evidence against that. There was a nonprofit, state-funded treatment center where care cost nothing at all, and the problem existed at that level just the same.

What's actually in the way is often shame and stigma attached to acknowledging there's a problem at all. And for generations, the church has been the cornerstone—the first and often only place a family brings anything difficult. That shapes more than where someone goes for help...it shapes how the problem gets named and what gets blamed for it.

These are natural barriers, built into how difficulty gets talked about rather than obstacles anyone put there on purpose, which is why they're so easy to miss. Rick has had this conversation with clinicians deeply committed to helping anyone who walks through the door, and found many of them genuinely surprised the barriers exist.

None of it dismisses cost. Plenty of people are kept out of care by their circumstances. But a program built around money alone will keep missing the people who never make the call.

With host Michael Herbert, Rick talks through what he learned taking outreach and community education directly into African American communities.

Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery

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.

Eight and a half years into recovery, and Kevin Lanning puts most of his healing in the last two.

For five of those years he stayed sober and did the work as it was handed to him—made amends, kept commitments, sponsored others. And was still, by his own description, mentally all over the place. He estimates about ten percent of his healing happened in that stretch.

The start was its own problem. Kevin didn't get sober because he believed he could. He'd been someone who thought they can't recover. So he took the leap of faith without the belief and let it catch up. His verdict now: he was wrong the whole time he told himself it wasn't possible.

What eventually moved the rest was purpose. Two years ago he started the podcast, and giving back reached something the first five years hadn't.

With host Michael Herbert, Kevin also gets into the anxiety and depression he was carrying early on and the three pillars—mental, spiritual, physical—holding the whole thing up today.

Follow Guardian: @guardianrecovery

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.

Keesha Scott knows addiction from the inside. As an author, a podcast host, and the co-founder of Guardian Recovery, she's built her life's work around helping others navigate parenting and addiction, but her own story runs deeper than her title.

A mother in recovery herself, Keesha has spent years loving a child through the very disease she's fought firsthand. She gets candid about the grief of losing her son's father to an overdose, and the "true PTSD" that lives underneath a parent's fear when addiction has already taken someone once.

But the heart of this conversation is something more personal: learning she can't put her own life on hold, waiting for everyone around her to be okay first. As she puts it, if she waits until everybody "lands," she'll be her mother's age before she ever finds happiness.With host Michael Herbert, Keesha opens up about parenting in recovery, the slow work of forgiveness, and why the hardest conversations are so often the ones that set us free.

Follow Guardian: https://www.instagram.com/guardianrecovery/

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.