Welcome to the final episode of Season One of Beyond the Storm. This episode I step out of the host seat and hand the mic to someone who knows this work and isn’t afraid to press into the hard truths. That is my friend and recovery professional, Sarah Kates.

In this episode, Sarah turns the questions toward my story with my son Steven. We talk about the systems that failed him and the people who used his vulnerability for their own gain. We go into the reality of a young man trying to survive trauma, addiction, catastrophic injury, and isolation, while the world around him kept pulling him under.

We talk about what it is to be a mother watching her child disappear in pieces, fighting to keep him anchored when everything around him was designed to unravel him. These are the chapters that scorched our lives and permanently shaped the woman I am.

This platform was built for others to tell their truth. Today I tell mine. It is raw. It is painful. It is honest. And sharing it is both difficult and necessary.

I am grateful Sarah was the one guiding this conversation.

Let’s begin.

In this next stretch of her interview, Jill speaks about the part that cracks her voice a little. Her son. His turn with addiction. His turn with the system. Watching him struggle the way she once struggled. Knowing the script because she wrote some of it. Knowing exactly where the road leads and being powerless to drag him off it.

She does not talk like a victim or a villain. She talks like a woman who understands generational trauma from both sides of the table. She talks like someone who knows recovery is not just sobriety; it is trying to build a life sturdy enough that your kids do not inherit your ghosts.

Jill does not dress it up. She does not smooth it out. She says the part most people swallow:

I got clean. I did the work. But trauma does not vanish just because you survived it. It echoes in your children until somebody stops and turns around to deal with it.

Her hope lives in the fact that she is here saying it. That she is breaking the silence around cycles so someone else can break the cycle itself.

And in that honesty, she gives other mothers permission to speak without shame. Permission to love without delusion. Permission to hold both grief and hope in the same tired hands.

Because families do not need perfect stories. They need real ones.

In the second phase of her interview, Jill Hanlin confronts the family fallout of her addiction, the mistrust, the fractures, and the generational trauma that reshaped her home long after she got clean. She makes clear that addiction never belongs to one person; it trains the entire family to live in crisis.

Jill also speaks to the painful reality that her son eventually entered his own path of active addiction and incarceration, reflecting the very cycles she once lived. She names this not for shock or shame, but to show how untreated trauma reproduces itself across generations. By saying it out loud, she hopes other families can see the pattern before it repeats.