Rise Above with Kevin Lanning

Carrie has 26 and a half years of sobriety — and a story that shows just how far this disease can take someone, even after years clean. Adopted at birth and carrying a deep fear of abandonment, she took her first drink at ten and felt instantly invincible. By 17 she was a daily drinker, and her father loved her enough to sell his own life insurance policy to get her into rehab. She got sober at 24...

Ben Brown has seven years of sobriety and one of the most layered stories we’ve had on the show. Born in Brooklyn and raised between two completely opposite households, he grew up never feeling like he belonged — and found that the things that finally got him acceptance, weed at 14, then alcohol, cocaine, and above all sex, became the very things that ran his life for the next two decades. He’s re...

Mac Chase had one goal growing up in the Annapolis area: become a Division 1 All-American lacrosse player. He got there — a scholarship to UMBC — but his drinking, which started around age ten, already had its grip on him. Within two years the scholarship was gone, and what followed was a decade-long slide through cocaine, pills, OxyContin, and eventually shooting heroin. He talks openly about it...

Holly Hiles has six years of sobriety and a story that’s almost hard to believe. Growing up she bounced through twelve schools, leaned on her twin brother, and lost her footing at fourteen when she got pulled off her cheer squad and fell in with a rougher crowd. What followed was a lifetime shadowed by loss — her grandmother, her father, her first love, and eventually her twin brother, a death she...

Cadence came on Rise Above with a story that breaks the mold most people picture when they hear “sober.” She never drank in high school, never craved alcohol, and to this day doesn’t call herself an alcoholic — but her relationship with drinking still cost her plenty. She talks openly about the blackout years in Scottsdale: bartending and partying, hiding her boyfriend’s BMW from the valet after s...

Tiffany Mercer flew across the country to tell a story most people in recovery have never heard put into words. She’d already done the hard work — sober from alcohol, years of meetings, treatment at Hazelden Betty Ford, rebuilding her life as a mom. Then, in the middle of a brutal divorce, a friend handed her what everyone called a harmless, non-addictive herbal supplement for anxiety and sleep: k...

Amanda Lee grew up a privileged, straight-A overachiever in Birmingham who dreamed of becoming a nurse — but by 10 she was gripped by crippling anxiety, and her very first drink at 12 unleashed something she couldn't control. By 14 she was shooting Dilaudid and addicted to the needle; by her twenties she'd flunked out of college, written dozens of fraudulent checks, and fled across the country wit...

Lauren Latterell grew up moving from home to home around Palo Alto, never quite feeling like she belonged — and by middle school, she'd found that alcohol and drugs could finally quiet the chaos in her head. What started as sneaking drinks and lying for a thrill spiraled fast: by 8th grade she was spending her days drinking and using with homeless people in downtown parking garages, and her teenag...

From the outside, Riley Jensen was living a life a lot of people fantasize about — a successful adult-film career, thousands of dollars a week, flying around the world, the "life of the party" everywhere she went. But underneath the money and the image, cocaine and whiskey were quietly taking over. What started as "just part of the lifestyle" in her early twenties grew into years of benders, hidde...

Jonathan Gale was a 17-year-old athlete in small-town Wyoming when one lunchtime car ride changed the course of his life. His cousin, driving, inhaled air duster, passed out at the wheel, and their car accelerated into two kids holding hands in the school parking lot before slamming into the gym wall. Everyone survived — but the fallout didn't spare Jonathan. Shunned by his coaches and community a...

Allison Doss grew up in a tiny, divided Louisiana town, in a home ruled by fear — and from a young age she learned she could survive anything and bend the world to her will. That drive took her everywhere it shouldn't: robbing the very bank she worked at as a teenager, running away to Washington D.C. at 17 with a single suitcase, and stepping onto a stage that began a stripping career that would l...

Ray Rapaglia had the life most people chase — a six-figure-a-month Wall Street career, a nightclub he owned with other brokers, celebrity parties, models, Ferraris. But none of it was ever enough. Over 34 years, his drinking and drug use progressed from beer and cocaine to a decade of smoking crack, and finally to a crushing OxyContin addiction that cost him everything: four marriages, his relatio...

Polly Pierce spent nearly three decades lost in alcoholism — and from the outside, she kept up the appearance of a churchgoing mom who had it together. Underneath was a life unraveling: a toxic boyfriend who was a bookie, the afternoon she opened her door to a gun pointed at her face, fifteen years in an abusive relationship, two DUIs, a drunk-driving crash that nearly killed her, and jail. She bu...

Elena Sanders grew up anxious, highly emotional, and feeling like she never quite fit in — a sensitive kid carrying far more than any child should. By the time she was a teenager, she'd found the one thing that finally quieted her mind: alcohol. She drank alone, blacked out from the very first time, and never had an "off switch." What started as escape spiraled through weed, psychedelics, pills, a...

From the outside, Mike Cavallaro had the blueprint: prep school, college athlete, investment banker with the title and the money. But a career-ending back injury stripped away the only identity he'd ever known, and in the years that followed he chased that sense of self through fraternities, bartending, and the high-pressure finance world — numbing the emptiness with weekend benders that got longe...

From the outside, Mike Van Holderbeke had no reason to end up where he did — a two-parent home, food in the fridge, gifts under the tree, a successful older brother. But addiction doesn't discriminate. What started with weed in seventh grade and a single oxycodone he calls "the warm blanket" spiraled into a full-blown fentanyl and benzo addiction — crushing pills behind the wheel, surviving multip...

Ingrid Casares lived through the cocaine-fueled Miami of the 1980s, multiple trips to treatment, relapse, fame, the height of the South Beach nightclub scene — and even a federal investigation that brought the FBI to her door. In this episode of Rise Above with Kevin Lanning, Ingrid opens up about discovering cocaine as a teenager, how quickly addiction consumed her life, running away, treatment a...

From the outside, Victoria Treadwell was the picture of the all-American girl — raised on a 295-acre dairy farm in upstate New York, a crowned dairy princess and beauty queen, an honor-society athlete who seemed to do it all. What no one saw was the addiction underneath. Chasing acceptance and drawn to the "bad boy," she was introduced to heroin in a Walmart parking lot as a teenager, and within a...

William Ellis was 14 years old, a freshman in high school, when gas splashed onto him near a smoldering fire and he went up in flames from the waist up. He survived second- and third-degree burns, skin grafts, and months in a burn unit — but the narcotics that came home from the pharmacy with him started an addiction that would last most of his life. What began as prescribed painkillers turned int...

Paris Bazley had her first drink at 13 — and blacked out that very first night. From the outside, nothing looked wrong: she was a straight-A student in AP classes, graduated high school two years early, joined a sorority at UCF, and became the bartender everyone loved. Underneath it, she was blacking out almost every time she drank, chasing the next party, and using alcohol and cocaine to fill a h...

Delonte West lived a dream millions of kids chase — a standout at Saint Joseph's, drafted into the NBA at 21, and years in the league alongside legends like Paul Pierce, Gary Payton, and LeBron James. He was, by his own description, sheltered inside the business of professional sports, growing as a player while the rest of life stayed on pause. When the game ended, everything he'd built his identi...

Cody Ellis grew up as the youngest of three in a small Georgia town, and by the time he was a teenager, addiction had swallowed his entire family. It started when his older brother was severely burned in an accident at eight years old — the pain pills that followed pulled his parents in, and the household never came back from it. Cody watched his mother forge prescriptions, watched his family lose...

From the outside, Zac Spowart had every reason to be fine — loving parents, a disciplined home, good grades, a heart-surgeon father. But from around 13, he was being crushed by an anxiety so severe he was physically sick, throwing up before school with no idea why. Then he found alcohol, and for the first time the chaos in his head went quiet. That relief became the problem. Zac is honest that his...

Jerod Thomas grew up in what he calls a "house of horrors" — two alcoholic parents, a father who drank a fifth of vodka a day and turned violent, and weekends spent walking on eggshells. He was dyslexic in an era when no one caught it until his second year of eighth grade, bullied relentlessly, and told by his own father that if he didn't learn to fight, he couldn't stay in the house. Football bec...

Marina Lacerda is a survivor, an advocate, and a mother who spent most of her life carrying pain she was told to keep quiet. Now 6.5 years sober and one year into publicly breaking her silence, she sat down with Kevin to talk about all of it. Marina was born in Brazil and raised largely in New York. From around the age of nine, she was sexually abused by her stepfather — abuse that continued for y...