Trapped to Triumphant: Justin McMillen on Breaking Addiction & Finding Purpose in Recovery

Change Your Brain Every Day

Dr Daniel Amen

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Feeling trapped is one of the most painful parts of addiction—but Justin McMillen proves that breaking free is possible. In this episode, he walks through the key turning points that helped him shift from feeling powerless to taking back control. After years of battling his own addiction, Justin McMillen set out to help others recover from addiction. In 2008, he established Tree House Sober Living, an organization dedicated to sheltering those new in recovery without anywhere else to go. After spending years watching people recover only to relapse in an endless cycle, Justin began studying substance use disorder. The sober living residence became a laboratory for his research that would ultimately lead to today's most innovative addiction treatment solution. For Justin, this work is deeply personal and spiritual. He believes that his purpose is to put an end to as much unnecessary suffering in the world as possible during his lifetime. Justin is relentlessly driven to advance the mission of Tree House, to save as many lives as

possible by transforming how addiction is thought about, talked about, understood, and treated

around the world. His focus is on positioning the organization to establish new national

benchmarks for what is possible in substance use disorder treatment.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Addiction in many ways is a poor relationship with pain. If a person's mind is constantly evading
0:05.9	the problem instead of facing it as a challenge, psychological resilience is really maybe the aim
0:11.2	for people of this particular type. But how do we get people to be psychologically resilient,
0:15.8	where they're actually pushing forward and into the trouble to conquer it rather than
0:20.2	hiding or evading or avoiding
0:21.6	it altogether.
0:22.4	Justin McMillan is the founder and CEO of Treehouse Recovery.
0:25.8	A drug and alcohol addiction treatment center.
0:28.0	Dr. Amen, Tanna, and Justin discuss how Treehouse Recovery started and the real issue behind
0:33.1	addiction.
0:33.6	We're not supposed to be living the way we live.
0:35.5	There's a mismatch going on between how we're built and how we currently live.
0:39.3	Addiction is clearly not one thing.
0:42.1	Giving them the same treatment is just irrational because it's like giving everybody with chest pain or fever the same treatment.
0:51.0	You're not finding out why.
1:00.9	Hi, this is Dr. Daniel Eamon. I am so thrilled to talk about our brand new course, Brain Thrive, for preschoolers through grade one. In this course, we're going to teach kids
1:12.4	to love their brain,
1:14.7	to know that it's amazing,
1:16.5	to know that it controls
1:17.7	everything they do
1:19.5	and everything they are
1:22.4	because if they learn to love
	...

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