Episodes

Raised in a traditional Sri Lankan household, Tania’s education and achievement were everything. Originally on track for a career in medicine, Tania studied microbiology and completed hospital internships in Houston. But mentors encouraged her to explore sales and marketing, recognizing her strong people skills. Choosing to pivot away from medicine caused major conflict at home, and her family withdrew their support, forcing her to become fully independent and build her career from the ground up...

Apurva L. Vanguri-Weeks was the first American-born child in her family — raised by South Indian immigrant parents who didn't let her wear jeans, didn't let her date, and didn't let her cut her hair until senior year of high school. She was supposed to be a doctor. While at William & Mary on scholarship, she started drinking. The night she got drunk for real at a frat party, she came to with a 45-year-old recently-paroled man following her toward her dorm. Her RA got her to the hospital. Shortly...

Edwin Henderson is 45, an Army veteran with one Iraq deployment, and a former Harris County deputy who watched his law-enforcement career end on the ground outside a Houston club. He now works in business development at West Oaks Hospital's Patriot Support Program for veterans and runs Chefs in the City as an executive chef on the side. He grew up the latchkey son of a single mother in north Houston, helping look after an older brother who was born blind while his mom worked hourly jobs and play...

Kimberley Brooke is 19 years clean from methamphetamine and has spent the last twelve of those years sitting across from people on the worst day of their lives. She got there the long way. Raised in Amarillo by parents she calls “hippies practicing free love,” Kimberley was molested by an uncle starting at age five and grew up inside what she calls "the land of the great pretenders" — picket fence, two dogs, upper-middle-class home, none of it close to the truth. By middle school she had decided...

When Judge Juli Mathew took the bench at Fort Bend County Court at Law No. 3 in 2018, she made history twice over — first Indian American woman elected to a bench in the United States, and first Asian American judge in one of the most diverse counties in Texas. Three years later she built something that didn't exist in the state yet: a juvenile court designed around mental health. Born in Kerala, India and raised in Philadelphia after her family immigrated when she was ten, Mathew attended Penn ...

Frank Parisi flatlined during heart surgery on May 8, 2023. He came back. Twenty-six days later he received the transplant that gave him a second chance — a heart from a nineteen-year-old donor. He'd grown up in Little Italy, the son of a father tied to organized crime, and spent a decade hooked on opiates before getting sober in 2011. By 2023 he was thirteen years clean, in the gym every day, and doing national marketing for a treatment company. Four doctors missed what was killing him before s...

Lori Bell was conceived when her father got drunk at a traveling circus, wrestled an anteater, got fired, and was dropped off in the next city — Kansas City, where he wandered into the unemployment office where her mother worked. Her dad was a third-generation Italian Vietnam veteran with PTSD and an eighth-grade education, and her mother was a Midwest farm girl with abandonment issues. Lori grew up in the chaos that followed — kicked-in walls, constant fighting, and a father who eventually disa...

David’s trouble started when the DEA caught him with five kilos of cocaine at the age of 20. On probation, he moved to St. Louis with court approval, finished college in three years, and was released early from probation. He built a subprime real estate business, but crooked deals and market shifts caused it to collapse. Back in Houston, he returned to high-end real estate and relapsed into heavy drinking and cocaine use. When his father died in 2005, his decline accelerated. Over the next few y...

Born in Kansas to Mexican parents, Omar was sent as a baby to live with his grandparents in Mexico. He returned to Kansas around age five where he learned English, was bullied and sexually abused, then drifted into gangs and substance use in his early teens. He became homeless but still finished high school, briefly attended college, and then dropped out as his addiction to pills, K2, cocaine, and eventually meth took over his life. This drug use strained and broke his relationship with his part...

Taylor Cavanaugh grew up in San Diego with drugs and alcohol in the house from early on. His father had substance problems and financial instability, and Taylor was eventually kicked out of high school for dealing ecstasy and somas. At 18, after getting mixed up in a stolen property situation, he checked into what turned out to be a lockdown psych ward in El Cajon — sharing a floor with old women with dementia and a Marine detoxing off heroin. He moved to Boston, where arrests and DUIs kept stac...

Andi gave her son his first iPhone at age 7, a gift that seemed harmless until it slowly devolved into gaming marathons, failing grades, and a complete erosion of his sense of right and wrong. After trying parental controls, the Adlerian free-will approach, and prolonged battles with his school over Chromebook use, Andi reached a breaking point that forced her to shift from rule-setting to values-based parenting. In December 2024, she cleared the house of all devices entirely. But when her son c...

Judge Wayne Mallia went straight from law school into the Galveston County District Attorney’s Office, working there for 13 years and spending nine as First Assistant DA. He was later elected as a district court judge in Galveston County, where he presided over criminal cases, created the county’s first specialty court, STEP, and helped start a drug court. After leaving the regular bench, he became a senior district court judge, continuing to serve as a visiting judge while shifting his focus to...

David became a father at 18, finished college while working full-time, entered Nissan's executive training program, and then built a successful marketing agency serving plastic surgeons. As his success grew, so did a hard-partying lifestyle driven by cocaine and alcohol addiction, and he drifted from his faith. After suffering a severe stroke and grand mal seizure in 2015, he was put in a medically induced coma and told he likely would not survive. Experiencing a decisive spiritual turning point...

Frustrated by an education system Aaron viewed as compliance-driven and devoid of meaningful agency, he left teaching to work in trauma and addiction recovery. Over 20 years teaching high school, Aaron observed that his students' lives and trajectories were effectively set by the time they graduated. He began noticing recurring patterns: victim thinking, codependency, and a clinical culture that prioritized diagnosis over genuine identity change. He became deeply interested in story, narrative, ...

Although Curtiss was sexually abused as a child, he did well in school and football until a humiliating pep‑rally incident in seventh grade led him to quit sports and start smoking marijuana. Drifting into fights, he landed in alternative schools and eventually dropped out. While his mother used crack and his father cooked meth for the Bandidos, he lived mostly with his grandparents while stacking up arrests and DWIs. For two decades, he cycled through probation, prison, and the SAFP program, ma...

Jessica's childhood fractured early. Her alcoholic father went to prison for a DWI, and by the time she was six, her parents had divorced. Her mother remarried, folding the family into a blended household with an adopted stepsister who had split personality disorder. That stepsister would go on to accuse both her own father and Jessica's stepfather of molestation, and eventually began self-harming in front of the family. When the situation became untenable, they cut the stepsister off and fled t...

Rachel’s parents divorced when she was just a baby, and she lived with her mom, who struggled with alcoholism and mental health issues, while her older sister went to live with their dad. By ninth grade, she was rarely at school, drinking heavily, and immersed in the punk scene. She blacked out a house party and assaulted her cousin who called the police, leading her to hide out in a friend's basement for 2 months before fleeing to Dallas on Greyhound bus. In Dallas, Rachel dropped out of schoo...

Craig “Bubba” Norton was first exposed to addiction when his mother died from alcoholism in 1982. His father later entered treatment, and during a family program Craig realized at age 20 that he was also an alcoholic. After moving from North Carolina to Texas, his drinking escalated, leading to three DWIs and jail in 1987, where he decided to seek help. He found early stability through work and AA but later stopped going to meetings, believing he was cured. Although he stayed abstinent for a tim...

Nikki grew up in a small town with a mother who struggled with alcoholism and periods of abuse but was also loving and devoted. As a teen, she began using substances like weed, pills, and whippets. At 19, she sought help from a doctor but felt dismissed, and at 21, she entered her first treatment program. Three months later, she met Curtis at an AA/NA club. Both had histories of alcohol addiction and drug use, along with legal issues. They married in 2015 and ran several businesses together, inc...

Richard Galvan began stealing, getting arrested and drinking vodka alone in sixth grade. He snorted and sold his Ritalin, stole his mother’s pills and drank cough syrup. By his early teens, he was selling pills, using meth, and became well known to the police. Born in 1982 in the San Fernando Valley, by 10th grade, he started using heroin and spending time downtown near Skid Row. He was kicked out by both parents, lived with relatives, friends, and on the street, and entered juvenile hall at 16....

Judge Katrina Griffith grew up wanting to be a lawyer, encouraged by her mother during arguments with her older brother in "mom's court." As a teenager, she saw the juvenile system affect family members. After college, she entered the University of Houston Law School focusing on juvenile criminal defense. In her 2L year, she joined the juvenile defense clinic. In her final semester, she took Professor Ellen Marrus’ child dependency clinic and shifted to CPS and child welfare law. After graduatio...

Born and raised in East Texas, Randy Grimes grew up in church with an older brother and sister and played football and baseball. He attended Baylor University, where he had a strong football career and met his future wife on his first day. They married after his junior year. In 1983, he was drafted in the second round by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and moved to Tampa with his wife in a U-Haul. He soon began taking large amounts of opiates from a team drug safe to manage injuries. By 1990, he experi...

Jenifer grew up in a home marked by physical and verbal abuse, which shaped how she viewed trust and relationships. She got pregnant at 18 and had her son, Hunter, at 19, raising him mostly on her own. At 28, she married, but the relationship was unstable and ended in divorce due to her husband’s alcoholism. Jenifer built a 20-year career as a dialysis nurse but battled major depressive disorder. She developed an alcohol addiction and turned to alcohol to cope, which led to a drunk driving accid...

Doug experienced abuse in early childhood, and at age 12 when his father left, he spiraled into severe depression, suicidality, and repeated psychiatric hospitalizations. As a teenager, he discovered alcohol and used it to manage his symptoms while earning a master’s degree in social work and working at a suicide hotline, even as hospitalizations and heavy drinking continued. In his mid-30s, after a suicide attempt and abruptly quitting alcohol addiction, Doug was introduced to crack cocaine, tr...