The Recovery Guide

Nikki Soda was 22 when she realized her drinking and drug use had gotten out of hand. After spending an entire paycheck on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Key West with a friend, she called her mom for help, and her mom refused. So Nikki did something few people do on their own: she walked into her boss's office and admitted she thought she had a problem. He told her she was fine, since she drank and used "just like he did." That was the real red flag—a 22-year-old young woman keeping pace with a grown man wasn't a sign she was fine. It was a sign she needed help.

Since then, Nikki has spent more than a decade working on the other side of treatment. She earned a master's in addiction policy from Georgetown and most recently served as Director of Membership and State Advocacy for the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers, a role that took her to treatment centers across the country. Today, she runs her own consulting firm alongside her husband.

That inside view has given her strong opinions about what's working in treatment and what isn't. "Meet them where they're at" is a common approach that lets a person's own goals guide their care, but Nikki questions how far it should go in the early stages. Someone in active addiction is making decisions with an impaired brain, she explains, and if her care in detox had followed what she wanted at the time, she would have chosen to keep using.

She also wonders whether money is shaping too much of the industry, pointing to the people on the front lines, and she shares her concern about the shift back toward criminal penalties for substance use, including funding being pulled from treatment programs in jails.

It's a candid look at what people in treatment really need, and what's at stake when recovery becomes a business.

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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.

In the '60s and '70s, Gary Stromberg co-founded Gibson & Stromberg, the PR firm behind names like The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Doors and Elton John. He later co-produced "Car Wash" and helped found the legendary Rainbow Bar & Grill. Through all of that success, he was convinced drugs were what made him so creative, because getting high made him feel like he could really think and create. Looking back, he calls it a "false god," since the talent had been his all along. He just couldn't see it.

That changed 14 years ago, when Gary walked out of a hospital with one realization that has guided him ever since: there's nothing left he needs to get out of life, only something to give. Now 84, he gives back through recovery advocacy, mentoring young people, and the books he's co-written about addiction and second chances.

In his conversation with Michael Herbert, Gary opens up about life inside the music industry, the myth that drugs fuel creativity, and the two words he hopes will define his life: kindness and curiosity.

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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.

Kyle "Rapps" Sutton had a solid foundation in recovery and a creative career starting to take off. Then he moved to New York City with some money in his pocket, and his old patterns found a new way in.

It wasn't drinking or using this time. It was women, one hookup after another, and he got deep into it. He stopped leaning on his recovery, started isolating, and never really dealt with the grief he was carrying. By the time he hit an emotional bottom, he didn't like who he'd become or how he was treating people.

He also tells Michael Herbert about a night he was at soundcheck before a show, with friends from his recovery community on their way, and he could barely get through it. That's when it hit him what he'd be giving up for a little escape. In his words, it "wasn't even close anymore."

It's an honest conversation about the addictions people don't always talk about, why you can't coast on the foundation you built early on, and how getting sober opened up a creative life Kyle never saw coming. 

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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.

Thatcher Shivley's first sponsor told him he had no idea what recovery had in store for him. Part of him thought it sounded cheesy. The other part was intrigued.

Sober since 2005, Thatcher spent ten years building a solid foundation before turning his experience into a career. Today he's a certified Recovery Coach with professional intervention training, and interventions are the part of the work he loves most. 

He's also a husband, a new dad, a former classically trained percussionist and jazz drummer, and someone whose latest obsession is pickleball. None of it was part of his plan.

But recovery hasn't spared him loss. Thatcher lost his mother to a drug overdose in 2010 and his brother in 2017. He's open about holding both at once: deep gratitude for the life he's built, and the survivor's guilt that comes with losing family members to overdose. 

Thatcher sits down with Michael Herbert to talk about building a life worth living, the grief that can live alongside gratitude, and why being an active participant in life matters so much. As he puts it, a pursuit isn't really about the outcome. It's about who you become along the way, and that's parallel to the recovery process.

Recovery doesn't erase loss, but it can give you a life you never imagined, and a chance to help others do the same.

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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.

Erik Coleman would dominate on the field. Then he'd come home and throw up.

The stress of what was happening at home followed him everywhere. He was getting an ulcer as a young athlete, and almost no one knew. He put on a front for everyone, and he got pretty good at hiding it from the world.

Football took him all the way to a nine-year NFL career. But the league that hyped him up for years didn't let him leave on his own terms. At 31, he was a veteran whose minimum salary rose every season, and a team could pay three young players for the price of one of him. On his day off in Detroit, security was waiting at his parking spot. They walked him into the building, told him he was being fired, and said to grab whatever he could. They'd send him the rest. That was the end of his career.

Erik sits down with Michael Herbert to talk about the side of sports fans never see: the pressure, the hiding, and what it feels like to be discarded by the game that defined you. Movement and community can be powerful tools in recovery. One sober active community, The Phoenix, found that 87% of members stayed sober after three months of active participation, and a study of 1.2 million Americans found that people who exercise report 43% fewer days of poor mental health each month, with team sports showing some of the biggest benefits. Erik's story is a reminder that the same game can also be where the pain begins.

Professional athletes are people too, with the same emotions and the same feelings as anyone else. At the end of the day, what lasts isn't the stat line. It's your faith, your focus, and the way you carry yourself.

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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.

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

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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.