The Black Box Movement: Addiction, Estrangement, and Silent Recovery

This is the episode I didn’t want to record — but had to.The relapse didn’t happen all at once. It started slow. Quiet. Hidden behind the kind of silence that comes after you lose your kids and no one’s answering your messages.In this episode, I walk through the final days before I called 911 on myself. The truth about what led me back to alcohol. The therapist who never even spoke to my children. The moment I realized I wasn’t just losing access to them — I was being erased.This isn’t a polished story about recovery.This is what collapse actually looks like when you’re an estranged parent trying to hold on.No redemption arc. No performance. Just the raw moment where everything fell apart — and what happened next.Part of The Black Box Movement podcast.Sober. Estranged. Still here.

What does alienation actually look like before it’s obvious? In this episode, M walks through the quiet unraveling of shared custody, the emotional dependence on parenting time, and the collapse that followed Christmas 2022.This is not a legal breakdown. This is not an addiction recovery step list. This is the record of a father who reached out for help — and watched that vulnerability get turned against him.If you’ve ever wondered what the early signs of estrangement feel like from inside the house, this is it.If you’ve been through family court, addiction recovery, or post-divorce grief — you’ll hear yourself in this.Topics:Parental alienation, addiction recovery, mental health, estrangement, co-parenting, custody, fatherhood, emotional collapse, sobriety, grief

In the early days of sobriety, I started writing a letter to my kids. Not to fix anything. Just to survive.That letter became a lifeline. I rewrote it almost 200 times across a full year — through relapse, recovery, and total estrangement. When a reunification therapist finally read it to my children, they said it didn’t sound like me. They didn’t believe I wrote it.This episode walks through that rejection, the early emotional chaos of parental alienation, and how that letter — and their disbelief — became the foundation for something bigger: this podcast, and The Black Box Movement.Read the original letter reflection:https://blackboxmovement.substack.com/p/they-didnt-believe-it-was-mineLearn more about the project:https://theblackboxmovement.carrd.coTopics: parental alienation, estrangement, relapse, early sobriety, reunification therapy, emotional repair, letter writing, family court, addiction recovery, fatherhood

Addiction. Estrangement. Sobriety. Silence. This is the first episode of The Black Box Movement — a podcast for estranged parents, recovering addicts, and anyone rebuilding after collapse. Based on the memoir of the same name, this episode explores what it means to be erased, to relapse, and to start over — even when no one’s watching. If you're facing alienation, grief, or recovery in silence, you're not alone.📘 Memoir → theblackboxmovement.carrd.co🎧 Audiobook coming soon.