Chasing Heroine: Addiction Recovery and Sobriety

This episode of Chasing Heroin features John Nettles, host of Recovery Refined and a team member at Refine Recovery in LA. Adopted at four days old and raised in St. Louis, John started using young. Weed at 13, blackout drinking by 15, and a benzo prescription at 16 that fueled an addiction lasting well over a decade. He got into the rave and EDM scene, became a DJ, and started a promotion company...

Elisa Saunders looked like she had it all figured out. A successful teacher, put together, dependable. Nobody saw the drinking that started long before she ever stepped into a classroom, rooted in childhood trauma that set the stage for what came next. For years she functioned. She showed up, she performed, she kept the mask on. Until two DUIs threatened the career she'd built her identity around,...

Barbara Jean Carey is a certified hypnotherapist whose private practice spans both Malibu and Seasons Recovery Center, where she works with everyone from NFL players to CEOs using tools like NLP, guided imagery, past-life regression, and hypnosis. She's been featured on Dr. Phil, TLC, Bravo, Discovery, and The History Channel. In this episode, Barbara breaks down something most of us have neve...

At 8 and 9 years old, Brandon was a fixture on Hollywood sets - a child actor with credits on Bad News Bears and The Courtship of Eddie's Father - and somehow, that was the tame part. What followed was decades of living at full volume. Lead singer of the Dead Kennedys. Smuggling cocaine out of Bali. Shooting acid and landing in a psych ward. A heroin addiction that stretched on for years, fuel...

Jenny Leone didn't plan any of it. She left Canada at 19 with a TV deal and ended up somewhere she never expected. What started as magazine covers became films. What started as a way to cope became a full-blown addiction to benzos, alcohol, and Norcos. And what started in childhood, when she was three years old, set the stage for all of it. Jenny is a former adult film star who has been sober...

In this episode of High Functioning - an off shoot of the Chasing Heroine podcast, I'm sharing my all-time favorite mindset tool, one that has the power to completely change how you experience everything that happens to you. It's Jack Canfield's E + R = O formula (Event + Response = Outcome), and once you have it, you can't unsee it. The core idea is this: you can't control what happens to you, bu...

What starts as a story about a kid from Utah with a promising football career ends somewhere nobody saw coming — including Chad himself. Growing up in Utah, Chad was the guy with a future. Athletics, ambition, a clear path forward. Then a knee injury in high school changed everything. What started as pain management turned into something much harder to put down. Weed and ecstasy in high school gav...

What starts as an Adderall pill shared in a high school hallway on Long Island doesn't look like the beginning of a story about psychosis. But for McKenna, that's exactly what it was. In this episode, we sit down with McKenna Mangan - soon-to-be mom, wife, entrepreneur, and woman with over three years of sobriety — to trace the long and winding road from her ambitious beginnings to her mos...

What happens when a University of Chicago-trained psychologist spends three years at Stanford's bipolar disorders clinic, deploys to four war zones with the Navy, works counterterrorism intelligence with the LA Sheriff's Department - and then lands in a Malibu addiction treatment center asking patients one simple question: where does it hurt? Dr. Matthew Schumacher joins me for a wide-rang...

Dana grew up between New Jersey and New York City with a Vietnam vet father who struggled with heroin addiction. After moving to California, building a career as a celebrity hairstylist, and starting a family, everything fell apart when a back injury led to an opiate prescription. Within months she was buying pills off the street, and eventually that turned into a years-long heroin and meth addict...

If you’ve ever wondered why you can know exactly what’s ruining your life and still keep going back to it anyway, this episode may completely change the way you understand addiction, anxiety, trauma, and even your own personality. In this deeply eye-opening conversation, Dr. Q explains that addiction is often not about pleasure or self-destruction at all. It’s about survival. More specifically, it...

From USC walk-on to cartel middleman to federal inmate rebuilding his life one project at a time, this episode with Owen Hanson feels less like a crime story and more like a masterclass in what happens when ambition runs without guardrails. Known as “The California Kid” and “The Cocaine Quarterback,” Owen shares how a relentless drive for success first showed up on the football field at USC before...

Somewhere between carne asada, french fries, and a paper-wrapped tortilla the size of a newborn meteor ☄️🌯… a spiritual awakening happened. For years, I thought the California burrito that changed my life was just a random late-night meal. But looking back, it became the moment everything cracked open: presence, connection, gratitude, awe. Not because of the burrito itself, but because for a few...

Drew’s story sounds less like a straight line and more like a lit fuse. Raised mostly in Utah, what started as early oxy use quickly escalated into heroin, methadone, benzos, and a life built around the chaos of selling drugs. But selling soon bled into something darker: robbing local heroin dealers at gunpoint, high-speed car chases, police raids, and eventually fleeing to California while living...

After addiction, divorce, losing a career, or any season that leaves life looking like a house after a storm, self-esteem can feel less “broken” and more…evaporated. In this episode, I am giving you three free, practical ways to rebuild confidence without needing a total life makeover, a 5 a.m. ice bath, or a personality transplant. We get into why keeping tiny promises to yourself matters more th...

After walking away from football, Dan Brody felt like he had lost the identity that had defined him for years. What started as partying and social connection slowly evolved from alcohol and weed into ecstasy, cocaine, and eventually oxy’s. An overdose in his childhood bedroom became the moment that changed everything. In this episode, Dan shares the psychological vacuum that can follow the loss of...

What if the very thing you’ve been taught to hide is actually your edge? In this episode, we flip the script on addiction and recovery by exploring a counterintuitive idea: addicts often develop strengths that many people never have to learn. One of the biggest? The ability to ask for help. While “normies” can spend years white-knuckling life solo, repeated relapse has a way of humbling us into se...

Dave Marquess grew up inside a reality most people only glimpse in headlines. Raised by a meth cook and heroin addict, his childhood was less about homework and more about survival. By eighth grade, violence had already entered the story. By his teens, he was moving through a world of escorts, hustles, and whatever could be stolen, stripped, and sold. PCP showed up early. Heroin followed. At one p...

Listen ad free on Patreon . In today's episode, I sit down with Dr. Tiffany Towers, Clinical Director and licensed clinical psychologist at Seasons Malibu. Dr. Towers studied psychology and theater at Barnard College at Columbia University and earned her Doctorate in Clinical Forensic Psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Her work pairs her strong clinical training with a...

What happens when someone everyone counted out becomes the one who builds it all? In this episode, I sit down with Rob C, whose story starts in chaos and lands in clarity. From early drug use and crime to serving time in prison at just 20, Rob’s path didn’t exactly point toward success. But after getting sober in California, everything began to shift. Rob opens up about the real work of rebuilding...

Step into a conversation that feels less like an interview and more like opening a hidden door inside yourself. In this episode, I sit down with Audrey Hope, the renowned “Soul Healer” and Doctor of Divinity at Seasons in Malibu, whose work has quietly transformed the lives of celebrities, CEOs, and individuals searching for something deeper than traditional recovery. For over 15 years, Audrey has...

TRIGGER WARNING: pregnancy loss and sexual assault 4:50:00 - 15:60:00 Jennifer Gimenez had the kind of life people dream about. Named one of Maxim’s 100 Hottest Women on Earth, the youngest model to grace the cover of American Elle , and starring in films like Blow , Charlie’s Angels , and The Sweetest Thing - on the outside, it looked like pure glamour. But behind the camera, a very different sto...

Bryan’s story starts in New York, where skateboards, weed, and the raw energy of rebellion shaped his early identity. But what looked like typical teenage experimentation quickly became something others labeled as “a problem.” In the height of the 90s and early 2000s, Bryan was sent away to behavior-modification boarding programs meant to “fix” kids like him. Instead of changing him, those experie...

Today is Part Two of our interview with NodPod member, Joey Rakisits. Joey's story is SO inspiring - he did the rounds of alllll the things dope fiend, modifying cars, getting involved in criminal activity, staying in motel rooms, basically running amok in all the ways we addicts can run amok - and now he's CLEAN! Multiple prison terms, county time, again - ALLL the things. Today we pick u...

Today's episode originally aired on August 24, 2023 Today Jeannine and Narcan Nate interview Nod Pod member, Joey Rakisits. Joey's story is SO inspiring - he did the rounds of alllll the things dope fiend, modifying cars, getting involved in criminal activity, staying in motel rooms, basically running amok in all the ways we addicts can run amok - and now he's CLEAN! Multiple prison te...