Weston Robins spent seven years in addiction, then twenty helping young people through theirs. He joined Patrick for a Circle Talk and told the story of what he built, and what he had to let go of.The question
He was twenty-four and exhausted. Seven years of it behind him, three arrests, friends he had lost along the way.
One night he was watching a Red Hot Chili Peppers DVD. It was the band he and his younger sister Hannah had loved together, and their singer had written openly about his own addiction. Hannah is six years younger than him. She had watched the whole seven years happen up close.
The question arrived while he watched. Where could he be right now if he had chosen differently at eighteen. And where would his life be if he put all of that energy into himself, and into people, instead.
He stopped. Then he started hiking Kennesaw Mountain, a backpack with water, his music and a journal, four and five hours at a time. Sometimes he cried the whole way up. Alone and outdoors was where he could finally look at what he had spent seven years avoiding.
What he built
He finished his degree, took a master's in counseling and became a licensed professional counselor, without ever being certain he believed in therapy. What kept him going was one thought. If he could meet a young person going through what he had been through, he could sit with them in it.
He spent years working with young people coming home from wilderness programs, residential treatment, every intervention their families could find, and still struggling. In 2020 he opened his own place, Eternal Strength, to try it differently. He ran it for five and a half years.
Alongside it he finished a doctorate, turned it into a book, and recorded an album.
The basement
And then he was sitting in his basement at home, miserable. The book was out. The album was made. His wife and daughters were upstairs, happy and healthy. He could not think clearly about anything.
He was listening to Eckhart Tolle talk about ego and attachment when it landed. The center had become an addiction. His role in it had become something he could not put down, and he did not want to let go of it because he did not know who he was without it.
Underneath that was the thing he calls the biggest addiction of his life. Not drugs. His own thinking.
He closed the center in September 2025, and says he is grateful for the way it happened.
Work on your own flame
What helped was not more effort. Letting go of the wheel is how he puts it. Breathwork with a monk in his eighties who runs a temple near him. Long walks. Enough Epsom salt baths that his daughters started asking whether dad was in the bathtub again.
He describes a flame in each of us. In some people, after enough has happened, it is barely an ember. Like a campfire after heavy rain. Still glowing, not lit.
Nobody can hand another person the will to live. So you work on your own flame, and let people see how brightly it can burn. The people who changed his life were never the ones telling him to change. They were the ones whose fire was going, and he wanted that.
About Weston Robins
Weston Robins holds a PhD in Consciousness and Society from the University of West Georgia and works as a licensed professional counselor in Georgia. He is the author of The Hand of Addiction (Routledge, 2024), which grew out of his doctoral work on his own experience.
His website is docwes.com and his YouTube channel is @drwesrobins.
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Circle Talks are open conversations that widen how we understand recovery, bringing together lived experience, research and practice. They sit alongside our Open Community Gatherings, which are supported by contributions, and our Extended Learning Workshops.