Rise Above with Kevin Lanning

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 years while she was made to feel she had to stay silent to keep her family together. That wound shaped everything that followed. By her teens she had found the nightlife, and by adulthood she was self-medicating the trauma with cocaine and, eventually, a devastating Xanax addiction — at her worst taking 15 to 20 pills a day and going through dangerous withdrawals before she finally got clean.

The turning point wasn't just getting sober. It was finding her voice. In the last year Marina has connected with other survivors, spoken publicly for the first time, and become an advocate determined to make sure other people — especially children — don't suffer in the silence she was trapped in. She's candid about the guilt, the complicated relationship with her mother, the long road of recovery, and why service to others has become the center of her life.

This is a hard, brave conversation about surviving abuse, the addiction that so often follows it, and the freedom that comes from finally telling the truth.

Sponsored by Caron Treatment Centers

My recovery journey began at Caron Treatment Centers, and the care I received there changed the course of my life. That's why I'm proud to partner with Caron.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Caron has been helping individuals and families find hope and lasting recovery for nearly 70 years. They are in-network with all major insurance providers, and same-day admission is available.

➡️ Learn more: https://www.caron.org/lp/rise-above

📞 Call Caron today: 855-352-0103

Recovery starts with taking the first step.

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Bob Zbikowski wanted to be one thing his whole life: a cop, like his dad. He got there — nearly two decades in law enforcement, including years as a K-9 handler. From the outside he was living his dream. Underneath, he was a first responder carrying the weight of thousands of traumatic scenes with no healthy way to put it down, and a brain wired for addiction he didn't yet understand.

Bob is open about the two things that took him under. First, gambling — when New Jersey legalized sports betting, what started as a little action turned into compulsively running his account to zero night after night, in debt by morning, doing it all over again. And then, after being prescribed Adderall for ADHD, a shortage left him without his medication — and someone offered him meth, a chemical cousin of the very prescription he'd lost. He describes it as "Adderall times a hundred," and it pulled him into a secret addiction he carried while still on the job.

He's candid about the impossible bind so many first responders face: the fear that asking for help means losing everything — the career, the income, the identity — and the culture that told him to shut up, take the next call, and never show emotion. Eventually it all came apart, and Bob got sober in 2025.

Now he's turned his pain into purpose with the Behind the Badge Project, using his voice to reach cops, firefighters, and first responders who are silently struggling — before self-destruction, before it's too late. Because the first responder suicide rate is staggering, and Bob believes the system has to make it okay to raise your hand and ask for help.

This is a powerful conversation about addiction behind the badge, the cost of carrying trauma in silence, and finding a new identity in service.

Sponsored by Caron Treatment Centers

My recovery journey began at Caron Treatment Centers, and the care I received there changed the course of my life. That's why I'm proud to partner with Caron.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Caron has been helping individuals and families find hope and lasting recovery for nearly 70 years. They are in-network with all major insurance providers, and same-day admission is available.

➡️ Learn more: https://www.caron.org/lp/rise-above

📞 Call Caron today: 855-352-0103

Recovery starts with taking the first step.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This one is different. Addiction is a family disease — it doesn't just happen to the addict, it happens to everyone who loves them. So in this episode, you'll hear both sides. First from Brandon, who nearly lost his life to it — and then from his wife Katelyn, who lived every moment of it beside him.

Brandon Cheek looked like he had it all — a successful business, a family, a life built with his college sweetheart. Underneath was crippling depression and anxiety that a Xanax prescription turned into years of destruction. He walks through the spiral: drinking from the moment he woke up, sipping vodka slowly just to keep it down, multiple trips to rehab, staying merely abstinent without ever doing the deeper work, losing the family business, and the suicidal ideation that convinced him there was no way out. Now two years sober and grounded in his faith, he's honest about all of it — including the damage he did to the people he loved most.

Then Katelyn joins. As she puts it, loving someone through addiction is not for the weak. A self-described fixer and problem-solver, she tried to control and rescue her way through it — hiding it from everyone, white-knuckling his recovery, getting her hopes up and crushed with every relapse — until she realized in therapy that she had become just as sick with codependency. She speaks with staggering honesty about learning to separate "sober Brandon" from "addict Brandon," about mentally rehearsing his funeral, about surviving the betrayals of active addiction, and about the moment unconditional love and real boundaries finally broke the cycle.

Together, they're a picture of what's possible on the other side — a marriage that didn't just survive, but rebuilt. If you love someone in addiction, or you're the one struggling, this conversation is for you.

Sponsored by Caron Treatment Centers

My recovery journey began at Caron Treatment Centers, and the care I received there changed the course of my life. That's why I'm proud to partner with Caron.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Caron has been helping individuals and families find hope and lasting recovery for nearly 70 years. They are in-network with all major insurance providers, and same-day admission is available.

➡️ Learn more: https://www.caron.org/lp/rise-above

📞 Call Caron today: 855-352-0103

Recovery starts with taking the first step.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the biggest fears I had before going to treatment — all five times — was the unknown. What is it actually like inside? Will I be comfortable? Will they get to the root of what's really going on? So in this vlog, I'm taking you behind the doors of a rehab to show you exactly what it's like.

I got a full tour of Caron's Keele Center in Delray Beach, Florida — one of their two inpatient facilities — and honestly, it feels more like a five-star hotel than what most people picture when they think "rehab." I'll show you the private rooms, the outdoor space and nature that's so important for healing, and the dining hall (the food genuinely blew me away). But the real difference is what happens on the inside: I sat down with Allie, a clinical supervisor who's also a Caron alum with 12 years sober, to talk about how they treat addiction as a brain disease — using brain mapping, neuro-restorative care, and diagnostic clarity to actually get to the root of the problem instead of guessing.

The thing that's always meant the most to me about Caron is that they treat the patient like family and the family like the patient. You'll hear that firsthand from a staff member who lost her sister to this disease, was cared for by Caron through that grief, and changed her entire career to come work here.

Whether you're thinking about taking that first step yourself, worried about a loved one, or just curious what treatment really looks like — this one's for you. Asking for help is scary. My hope is that seeing what's behind the doors makes it a little less so.

Sponsored by Caron Treatment Centers

My recovery journey began at Caron Treatment Centers, and the care I received there changed the course of my life. That's why I'm proud to partner with Caron.

If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, Caron has been helping individuals and families find hope and lasting recovery for nearly 70 years. They are in-network with all major insurance providers, and same-day admission is available.

➡️ Learn more: https://www.caron.org/lp/rise-above

📞 Call Caron today: 855-352-0103

Recovery starts with taking the first step.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

7-OH is one of the most talked-about drugs in the country right now — a concentrated kratom derivative sold legally at smoke shops and gas stations, often pitched as a natural remedy for pain. Isabella "Izzy" Saravi is a 26-year-old who got caught by it, and she's here to warn other young people what it actually does.

Izzy grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, in a chaotic home — her parents divorced young, her father was, in her words, an abusive narcissist who wanted little to do with her, and she carried low self-worth into a string of unhealthy relationships. She found escape first in alcohol, then Molly and the festival scene, then ketamine — the drug that became her "I've arrived" moment and eventually pulled her into paranoia, psychosis, and daily use. Then a smoke shop employee handed her 7-OH, telling her it was a natural, over-the-counter fix for her pain. She had no idea she'd just been given what amounts to a legal opioid.

She's remarkably honest about what followed: the fast physical addiction, nodding off standing up, the hundreds of dollars a day, and the withdrawals almost no one warns you about — not just the flu-like sickness, but a psychological crash so severe she became suicidal and couldn't be left alone. This episode goes deep on the parts of the 7-OH crisis that aren't in the headlines yet.

Now sober alongside her boyfriend, Izzy is part of a growing wave of young people rejecting the party lifestyle — and putting a face to a danger sitting on smoke shop shelves across the country. If you or someone you love is using kratom or 7-OH because it's "legal," this is the episode to hear.

This Episode Is Sponsored By NOCD

A lot of people who've done the hard work of getting sober still struggle with unwanted, intrusive thoughts that bring guilt and shame and keep coming back. For some people, that may be OCD — and in recovery it often goes unrecognized for years because it can look like anxiety or feel like part of the process.

The good news is it's treatable. NOCD is the world's leading provider of OCD treatment, with licensed therapists who specialize in ERP (exposure and response prevention) therapy through live, face-to-face virtual sessions, plus support between sessions. NOCD is covered by insurance for over 138 million Americans.

👉 Book a free 15-minute call at: https://www.treatmyocd.com/
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