Episode 44: Sloan (Part 1) —No One Told Her She Was Too Young To Get Sober

Sloan is our very first guest whose story couldn’t fit into just one episode—because it’s that powerful. She got sober at only 16 years old and will celebrate 14 years on November 1st, 2025. Growing up in Wisconsin, there weren’t any adolescent treatment programs, so her parents did what they could—putting her in hospitals to detox. But even there, something sparked. She picked up the Big Book and saw the word sponsor—and in her young, addicted mind, she thought it meant someone would pay her. She told her parents she had to go to these “meetings” to find a sponsor, thinking she’d stumbled onto a get-rich-quick scheme.

At 15, she walked into her first meeting—a flooded church basement women’s meeting—after having her parents drop her off around the corner. The women there welcomed her with warmth and kindness. Someone got her a cup of coffee, someone offered her a cigarette, and no one told her she was too young. Sloan says what kept her coming back was that “we don’t shoot our wounded”—and that no one ever told her there was a time limit on being an addict or alcoholic.

But it wasn’t a straight line. Sloan did the 30, 60, 90-day dance for a while, facing five felony charges at just 15 for lying about where she was getting pills to sell—“I’ll lie when the truth would’ve served me better.” After being expelled, she ended up at a sober high school where she had to take drug tests to stay enrolled. She managed to get nine months sober before relapsing for two weeks—and she couldn’t drink enough to drown out what she’d learned in recovery. Her last blackout came on Halloween, ending with her stomach being pumped in the hospital. Ironically, her lowest bottom wasn’t the chaos—it was losing her job at KFC. That’s when she surrendered, even if she didn’t recognize it yet.

In early recovery, Sloan was wild—she admits she wasn’t doing the inner work, just showing up and fellowshipping. Her addiction shifted forms: sex, love, validation. Within her first year, she got kicked out of her sober high school after breaking a boy’s nose and managed to get herself blacklisted from all the men’s sober living homes. But she kept showing up—and the women in the program never gave up on her.

By three years sober, her untreated mental health nearly took her life. She put a gun in her mouth, and her mom walked in on her. That moment changed everything. Her sponsor—who had also gotten sober young—started bringing meetings to her in the hospital every week for over a year. Slowly, Sloan began doing the real work: healing, surrendering, and finally building a relationship with God. Her sponsor told her she wasn’t fully in God’s will until she was giving it away—helping others still in the psych ward, just like she once was.

This episode is raw, real, and full of hope. Sloan’s story shows that recovery doesn’t always look pretty—but grace finds us anyway.
🎧 Tune in to Part 1 of Sloan’s journey as we talk about getting sober young, surviving chaos, and finding purpose through pain. (And yes… we end on a cliffhanger that involves a titty twister—Part 2 coming next week!)