The Workit Health Podcast

As the seasons change, fall can be a time to reflect, reset, and make room for something new. For October's community voicemail episode, we asked: What are you ready to let go of this fall?

Members of the Workit Health community called in to share what they're ready to leave behind. From old habits and expectations to fear, guilt, and shame, their responses explore what it means to release the things that no longer serve us and make space for something different.

Recovery isn't just about what we gain. Sometimes, it's also about what we choose to put down. The pressure to be perfect. The weight of the past. The belief that we have to carry everything on our own. Letting go isn't always easy, but it can open the door to growth and healing.

These voices remind us that recovery looks different for everyone, and so does the process of letting go. There's no single timeline, no perfect way to move forward, and no requirement to have it all figured out. Sometimes, recognizing what we're ready to release is a meaningful first step.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.

Demetrius never imagined that a medical emergency would lead him down the path of opioid addiction. After undergoing extensive dental surgery, he was prescribed pain medication that quickly became something he struggled to live without.

In this episode, Demetrius shares his journey through addiction, the challenges of confronting his past, and his determination to build a different future. He talks about the people who motivate him to keep going and the role recovery has played in helping him find purpose again.

Music is a big part of that purpose. With more than 200 songs to his name, Demetrius uses songwriting to tell his story, express his emotions, and make sense of everything he's experienced. Featuring clips of his original music, this episode is an intimate look at resilience, second chances, and the power of finding your voice.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.

Jessica Danger spent nearly ten years estranged from her father after his alcoholism turned violent. When he was dying of liver failure, she came back to care for him.

That experience became No Heroic Measures, a memoir about addiction, family trauma, and the complicated work of forgiving someone who has deeply hurt you. Now sober herself, Jessica joins Max to talk about how recovery helped her see her father as more than his addiction.

Together they explore how addiction travels through generations and how recovery can interrupt the pattern. Jessica shares why sobriety made her a better writer, why forgiveness doesn’t mean giving up boundaries, and how her own healing has changed life for her children and grandchildren. Whether you’ve lived with addiction yourself or grew up around it, you’ll likely recognize something in her story.

Jessica Danger
Website

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.

Shawn spent years caught in a cycle of addiction that brought him to some of the darkest moments of his life. In this episode, he talks about where that path took him and what it has meant to find a way forward through recovery.

Shawn’s story is part of Worth It, a Workit Health video series featuring real members sharing their experiences with addiction and recovery, in their own words. His story is raw, deeply personal, and a reminder that recovery doesn’t erase what came before it — but it can make room for a life that once felt impossible.

Watch Shawn’s full Worth It story
YouTube

Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions of loss, a suicide attempt, and explicit substance use. If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text at 988.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.

For Recovery Month, we asked one simple question: Recovery gave me _____. Nearly 40 people called in with their answers — and together, they paint a picture of recovery that’s much bigger than just stopping drugs or alcohol.

Again and again, people told us recovery gave them their lives back. But what that meant was different for everyone: relationships with their children, trust from their families, careers they thought they'd lost, freedom, confidence, peace, creativity, second chances, and the ability to actually be present for the life happening around them. One caller talks about becoming a mother and breaking generational cycles. Another shares how medication-assisted treatment changed their understanding of what recovery could look like. And one puts it beautifully: recovery didn't rewrite their story: "it handed them the pen back."

These voices come from people in different places, at different stages, and with different definitions of recovery. Some found meetings. Some found medication. Some found spirituality, family, art, work, or simply the chance to start over. There isn't one right way to recover — but across these stories, one thing comes through loud and clear: recovery can give us the chance to build a life we want to stay for.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.

Amy Dresner has been sober for 13 and a half years, but her new episode isn't about pink clouds and gratitude lists– it's about what actually sustains recovery once the honeymoon phase is long over. The author of My Fair Junkie talks with Max about the shame that can resurface even a decade-plus into sobriety and the slow, unglamorous work of learning to be self-sufficient after years of being taken care of by other people.

But this conversation is also genuinely about joy: Amy's rescue cat Bucky, her accidental succulent garden, an iced peppermint tea habit, and a spontaneous midnight trip to the beach with a friend who needed her there. She talks about pushing through her own agoraphobia to reconnect with people, why she's stopped chasing happiness and started chasing purpose instead, and the second book she's working on — about grief, chronic illness, and what it really looks like to keep going.

Amy Dresner
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Workit Health Presents: A Dopey Interview of Amy Dresner
Amy Dresner: Radical Resilience

Content Warning: This episode includes a candid discussion of suicidal ideation in the context of long-term sobriety, as well as references to grief, chronic illness, and past substance use. Listener discretion is advised.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.

Tracy spent decades fighting addiction, cycling through six treatment centers that never stuck. Chronic pain pulled her into the opioid crisis, and after a frightening hospital stay last January, she was getting by on borrowed Suboxone until her doctor pointed her toward Workit Health.

In this member testimony, Tracy talks about what it means to recover without performing it for someone else — no judgment, no mandatory meetings, no pressure to spill her secrets to strangers. Fifteen months in, she says she feels more like herself than she ever has. "A better version of Tracy," as she puts it.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.

Marc Lee Shannon spent 25 years touring with the Michael Stanley Band while climbing the corporate ladder in sales — all while hiding a drinking problem that eventually landed him in the ICU three times. In this episode, Marc talks about growing up in a working-class Akron family full of secrets, and the difference between being high-functioning and just being good at hiding it.

He shares the moment that changed everything: his son telling him, "I don't worry about you anymore." For Marc, recovery eventually distilled down to a simple philosophy — do good, be good — a lesson he now carries into his work as a recovery coach. He's also a musician and author of Sober Chronicles.

Marc Lee Shannon:
Website
Substack
Instagram
Facebook
Marc Lee Shannon: Live in Concert with Workit Health

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.

Jeannine Coulter once sat in jail facing $100,000 bail and the possibility of prison, and realized she'd become the person she always thought she could never become.

Jeannine, creator and host of Chasing Heroine, sits down with Max for a candid, funny, and deeply personal conversation about addiction, homelessness, shame, and relapse. She shares the long arc of her addiction — from heavy drinking and cocaine while still holding her life together on the outside, to homelessness, heroin, meth, and arrests — and how her relationship with that past has changed. The shame she once carried began to fade as she realized addiction had forced her out of what she calls a "half life" and toward a fuller version of herself.

Along the way, Max and Jeannine talk about why attempts at recovery are never wasted, finding gratitude for the experiences that brought them to their knees, and how telling the truth — with plenty of humor — can become its own form of connection.

It's a conversation about going all the way down, finding your way back, and discovering that the parts of your story you once wanted to hide might eventually become the parts that help someone else.

Jeannine Coulter:
Chasing Heroine Podcast
Instagram
Facebook

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.

Randy's mother was incarcerated at his birth. He was raised by his great-grandparents in a small town where drugs were part of daily life. In 2005, he lost both parents and two brothers to overdose within weeks of each other.

In this member testimony, Randy speaks candidly about decades of chaotic use — weed, pills, crack, heroin — including a rock-bottom moment interrupted, almost absurdly, by a bank's opening hours, and the circumstantial relapses that followed. Two years ago, he found Work It Health. Suboxone treatment and consistent, judgment-free support gave him the foundation to finally stay off opioids, even through two surgeries.

Today Randy lives in sober living, is mending relationships, is training to become a certified peer support specialist, and just marked six months of consistent sobriety. He credits telehealth recovery's privacy, accessibility, and a team that's always a phone call away. His message for anyone still struggling: log on, make the connection, give it a try.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Workit Health offers compassionate, evidence-based treatment for alcohol and opioid use disorder, all from the privacy of home. Learn more at workithealth.com.