Coffeez with Joe Shalaby - Dr. Samantha Harte on Addiction Recovery, Trauma Healing & Purpose Driven Life

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Dr. Samantha Harte shares how addiction recovery, trauma healing, and spiritual growth can transform pain into purpose.In this episode of Coffeez for Closers, Dr. Samantha Harte explains how overcoming addiction, loss, and personal hardship led her to help others build pain-free bodies and purpose-driven lives.With a doctorate in physical therapy and 16 years of sobriety, Dr. Harte combines neuroscience, recovery principles, and spiritual growth strategies to help individuals overcome destructive patterns and live more intentionally.In this conversation with Joseph Shalaby, we discuss:• Addiction recovery and long-term sobriety • Rewiring the brain through neuroplasticity • Turning trauma into purpose • Building a meaningful personal brand through authenticity • The connection between physical health and emotional healing • How spiritual growth influences leadership and life decisionsThis episode is for entrepreneurs, leaders, and individuals seeking clarity, healing, and deeper purpose.Hosted by Joseph Shalaby Coffeez for ClosersAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today we're sitting down with Dr. Samantha Hart. She is a bestselling author. She is a top podcaster. She is also a founder and CEO. And this is a woman on a mission. Please welcome Dr. Samantha Hart. Welcome to another episode of coffees. It's so good to be here.

Thank you. Thanks for coming. And it's been so great just to meet you and know you. You know your vibrant personality. And, you know, you have a mission and you're a woman of service. and a woman who's just really just destined to do great things. So I just wanted to have you on the show, share what you're doing with our folks and help you in any capacity that I can.

So I like to start my show, the same way I start the show with every guest. And what is your morning routine? I wish I could tell you that I had an elevated God consciousness first thing in the morning. But right now my morning routine is, Very, very basic. I have my cup of coffee and if my children are not awake, I try really hard to not touch my phone for everything I know about dopamine and what our phones are doing to the depletion of dopamine in our brains.

So if I can delay that gratification even by 15 minutes and just sit in silence, which is, of course, when I get downloads from God, that's the ideal way to start my mind. morning. It doesn't always go that way because my kids might beat up the sun and tap me on the nose before I get a chance to do that. But I do many spiritual things all through the day if I don't get it done in the morning. I mean, that's powerful, Samantha. Like, you're the first person I heard that really just hit the nail on the head with the, you know, the delayed gratification, the mitigating the dopamine hit immediately. I never even heard that. And I asked everybody that question. So I don't take a conscious effort to delay looking at my phone because it's the only place I have my clock.

Yeah. I mean, this is the world we live in. I don't have a clock either, but it's a new practice for me. And I can't tell you how many times I've promised myself to look at my phone less. If it is near me, it will not happen. They are so highly addictive. And that is now a new. And that is now a new practice to say you can wait. There is nothing that is that urgent for the first 15 minutes of your day where you have to touch your phone first, knowing on a neuroscience level what it is doing to dopamine, which is just giving us these super quick hits, just like drugs, where we are then going to crave it and probably check the phone hundreds of times more than if we waited. Same thing if I want to be more conscious with my children.

If that phone is in the same room as me, there's no way that I'm not going to check it. Yeah. Even though I'm consciously telling myself, please don't. Please be present with your children. So this is a level of mindfulness that I'm practicing right now. Now, why don't you give the audience

just a quick 10,000 foot overview of what is it that you actually do? Today I coach people. And when I say that, the fullest expression of coaching somebody is helping people build pain-free bodies and purpose-driven lives. I have a doctorate in physical therapy. And so for many, many years, I ran a private practice that was all about whole person, whole body. And it's very hard in our healthcare system to see a patient for 60 minutes at a time.

There's almost no practitioner whose time you will get in an undivided way. for that long. And I loved it. But something I noticed clinically over the 10 years I ran the practice was what I came to call the soul sickness in the patient. These underlying emotional cycles of dysfunction or addiction that were not just enhancing the inflammatory process and making their pain worse, but sometimes just getting in the way of them doing the prescribed thing they paid me all this money for that was going to make their pain go away. And it bothered me. But it wasn't something that they paid me to treat.

I wasn't yet a personal growth coach. I was just Sam, the doctor of physical therapy, who could make your body move really efficiently and get you out of pain. And all the while, I'm today 16 years sober from drugs and alcohol. I was living this spiritual life and navigating life on life's terms and finding myself in pits of despair over and over with a new life circumstance that I would be faced with and having to elevate my consciousness again and again and again out from that suffering and into a state of resiliency and hope and joy. And it really wasn't until I lost my sister

three years ago to a drug overdose that I felt the absolute calling to take the spiritual side of wellness and put it at the epicenter of everything that I do. So today, when I coach somebody, I can coach their body out of pain and into preventative movement patterns with my eyes shut. But I am equally, if not more, interested in coaching their spirit out of a place of suffering. And the way that I do that is by using the 12 steps of recovery that are old and a bit antiquity. and taking them as a fresh approach, a modern and trauma-informed approach, which is ultimately in recovery what saved my life. And whatever the pain point is in the person's life, whether it's chronic people-pleasing,

perfectionism, being obsessed with the beauty and body standard, whatever is killing their spirit, we do the 12 steps around that thing. and they have massive amounts of breakthroughs, they have pattern recognition, they have strategies that fit into the picture of their life that they can take with them forever. So at the end of 12 weeks, somebody who coaches with me literally has the tools they need to not get hurt and to feel joyful even in the face of suffering. And I just can't think of more important work than that. That sounds like very, very powerful work that you're doing.

You're making massive moves and changing people's behaviors, their lives. What's one story that really has resonated with you besides what happened to your sister that you can share with the audience? When I was five years sober, I had my doctorate. and I was working for somebody else in a PT practice. There was a dream to maybe have my own practice one day, but I couldn't see my way forward through that. And this guy that I was married to had been with me on the front end of my addiction. And we survived.

We did not go to therapy. We did not do the healing that was really required. But I thought, oh my God, this man stayed with me. and then he started pulling away. And pulling away meant we don't share our finances. We don't share intimacy. In fact, when you try to initiate intimacy, I'm going to turn away from you and reject you.

I'm going to be out of town all the time. I'm going to leave my ring on the nightstand. And in early recovery, the 12 steps are infused with the word God, and I came from a house where God is for the week. and God is for the fool and if you believe in God, you're an absolute idiot and the only person you can count on as yourself. So I was physically sober when this was going on in my marriage, but I was spiritually bankrupt. And what happened to me was I basically went to the brink of insanity in sobriety. Why? Because as this man's love was leaving and his love for me was my higher

power. That was God to me. And if it wasn't there, then who was I? I was nothing and I was no one. And what I was doing was doubling down on childhood patterns that kept me safe. I was trying to control this man at all costs. I will make you love me. I will make you forgive me. And then once you do, I will be okay. Well, I'm sure you know how this story turns out. That doesn't work. and for me, I had accumulated enough time in sobriety to go, this is rock bottom. Because rock bottom is where you don't want to die, but you can no longer go on living the way you've been living.

And I remember a sober girlfriend said, if you're going to stay in this marriage right now, you can't live like this. You need to find a place and sign a lease and start to heal. And when that happened, a woman who was in multiple 12-step programs came into my life and she said, what if we do the steps on your marriage? And I was open, right? Because pain is a circuit breaker. And what I mean by that is you're living a certain way, most of the ways we behave are automatic, right? They're just because

the brain would have to use way too much energy if we were conscious about everything we did. until that automatic behavior or pattern stops working completely and is causing you pain or misery. And then you wake up. So that feedback loop is interrupted. It's like a circuit that literally fries out. And I was in that space where there was this window of opportunity for change. And I was very lucky that this woman was in my life and she had the approach that she did because I said, what do you mean do the steps on my marriage?

Well, step one is I'm powerless over alcohol, whatever the substance is, and my life has become unmanageable. Great. I was pretty clear that substances were not a thing that I should toy around with. I was pretty clear that they would kill me. So then what do we do with that step? Well, I'm powerless over my marriage. Okay, that's become pretty clear.

Tell me more. I'm powerless over what happened between us before we got married, that I cheated in my active addiction again and again and again and again and that he's really angry, that we didn't stop and heal and do the work first. I'm powerless over whether he is cheating on me or not. I'm powerless over the future of the relationship and that I was so sure he was going to be the father of my children one day and it's all collapsing. And when I try to exert power over him and by the way, any other person placed thing or situation, my life becomes unmanageable in the following ways. I'm obsessed with what he is or isn't doing.

My happiness is literally contingent on someone else's behavior, someone else's perception of me, which means I have no worthiness that's birthed from inside of me. Very dangerous way to live, right? And if all of that is true, then what do I have the power to change? So all of a sudden the steps, if they were once an accordion packed with information,

but it all sounded religious and patriarchal. This woman took the edges of the accordion and just expanded it. So I could see myself inside of them. And the most amazing thing that happened to me, this is when my healing began, is when we got to the ninth step, which is making an amends. And I was five years sober,

and so I had made tons of amends to people. I had made tons of amends to my husband, who I had cheated on, before we got married and she said, have you ever made an amends to yourself? And I hadn't. And we hear this kind of thing all the time in the world of self-help, you know, forgive yourself, love yourself, forgive yourself. I was run by a voice in my head that said, do better, try harder.

You're not smart enough, you're not pretty enough, you're not fit enough. And that voice helped me accomplish great things in my mind. house when I was young that kept me safe in the world culturally that gave me a ton of accolades and dismantling all of that and being able to have someone give me permission to say not just when you were little but in this marriage what would it mean if you forgave yourself if you actually believed that you were a person who didn't deserve to be punished for something that happened between your husband in you five years ago. If you were a person that deserved love and fulfillment and forgiveness, what would you say to yourself instead? Well, I hadn't even considered it. I didn't even know

I was allowed to consider it. As I started to do that kind of work, which meant that for days and weeks and months, I was consciously listening to the way I was speaking to myself. And when it was not nice, which was all the time, I stopped and said, what would somebody who loves themselves say instead? And then I had to think of that and practice saying it. In that work, I heard the whisper of God, the whisper of my intuition. And that has been the love of my life. That has been the thing that nudged me to wrap my arms around myself

in those lonely days in that apartment when we were separated because no one else was there and I would just cry myself to sleep. That was the one that said, oh, I know you picked purple flowers for your wedding, but you also didn't know who you were when you did that. Your favorite color is actually blue. So you should make your business cards blue. My book is blue now. My furniture was accented with blue.

It makes me feel a certain way. Oh, and by the way, this woman you're working for in the clinic, she doesn't see your value. And there's a whole need in the healthcare market that isn't being met, which is all these patients who are 60% better, that insurance is like, yeah, we're done paying for this, but they want to be 100% better. You're going to fill that need. You're more than qualified. You don't need to be a doctor making $33 an hour anymore.

Go get what's yours. Go help people in a meaningful way. And so Strongheart Fitness was born. Every good thing in my life has been from the whisper of my intuition. So that marital crisis literally saved my life. And sometimes it's those wake-up calls for people that really, is what they need, you know, marital, whatever crisis people are in. Now, you manage to rewire your brain.

Now, let's be real, like a lot of people don't buy into rewiring their brain. What part of your brain, when you rewired it, really refused to be healed? Well, let's address the first thing that you said, which is not buying into it. I mean, there's so much science about the neuro. plasticity of the brain, right? That the brain is malleable. It gets harder as we get older. The longer we practice certain thoughts, actions, and behaviors, the harder it is to change them. But science has proven to us that we can. Yeah, I'm actually going to bring on a doctor called Dr. Rewire to this show. Oh, I know him. Yeah. He's amazing. Yeah, he's coming on. First off, I'm doing his test,

and then he's going to come on after. Yes, I want to do his test too. The DNA test. Yeah, it's pretty wild. what's out now and what we can unpack. You know, it's so funny that you're asking this question, right? I recently sat down with David Guillaume. Do you know who that is? No. He's an unbelievable businessman, but I think beyond that, spiritual advisor.

And I paid a small fortune to sit down with him and do a coaching session. And I remember we were unpacking some parts of my story. and he looked at me and he said, what are you getting out of suffering? And it was so startling because consciously I'm like, what? I don't want to suffer. I've had so much suffering in my life. My whole life's work is to overcome my suffering and to help others do the same. And I've been thinking about it for weeks because one of the things that was coming up was my relationship with money.

and I grew up in a house where there was never any, and when there was money, you spent it because you never knew when it was coming back. Right? And in the wake of losing my sister, I did the most healing work I've ever done in terms of leaning into my pain. But still, I was running a little.

Because if you're an addict, the thing you're avoiding is, feeling pain and uncertainty and lack and fear. It just feels like too much. And there's no question when she died that I was like, this pain could literally kill me. It could lead me to a relapse, which would kill me. It could kill my spirit from wanting to just be here on earth in any kind of joyful way. And so in the pockets of time where it felt too hard, what did I do? I spent money. And I didn't think a lot about it.

My husband makes a lot of money. He was supporting me while I closed my clinic down to write my book and do this whole rebrand. And it became an issue. And only in the last few months have I gotten to this belief system, which is, haven't I suffered enough? Why can't I just fucking spend the money? Right? Why not? You try losing your sister to a drug overdose.

You try having your husband cheat on you for five years with the same woman and gaslight you for two until you he's not. You try losing your dad in a state of anger with him and then running and feeling regret and shame. You have miscarriages. You have postpartum depression. You. You. And this business of self-entitlement and self-pity that's baked underneath that and how dangerous that can be. Because, yes, I've suffered.

We all have suffering to contend with. But what am I going to do with it now? What am I going to do with it? So I think, you know, interestingly, back to the beginning of this conversation about the cell phone and the instant gratification, even in sobriety, everywhere you turn, there's instant gratification. There is a quick way out of your suffering. and it really comes down to choosing your hard because there's almost nothing as an adult that if you have a choice to make that's either easy or hard it's two hearts and you have to choose which one are you going to choose the one where in the short term it's easy but in the long run

it will create suffering or lack or unhappiness or are you going to do the opposite are you going to do what's harder in the short term for the sake of long-term happiness, just like the phone. And my work from now until the end of time, which I don't think is unique to the addict, but it is especially true for me, is that even when something as horrible as losing my sister happened, can I turn toward what is the hardest in the short term, which is feeling it all? in exchange for long-term contentment. And when you say feeling it all, you're talking about not embracing any sort of addiction.

Correct. Not running from your pain for immediate gratification. Correct. And just sitting there in doing the hard work, which is all the feelings of everything you don't. Okay, and after you feel it all, then what steps do you take? you know the thing about feeling it all is that it's the most natural thing in the world you know

emotions are just energy inside of us right and so when we run from that not only does it not go away and it just goes somewhere else and manifest differently it if we feel it it runs through us it discharges and we literally go from a sympathetic state in our nervous system to a parasympathetic which is where we have more access to god consciousness So the very nature of letting yourself scream, cry, rage, whatever it is, and getting to the other side is not only do you now have evidence that you survived, that very painful thing that you didn't want to feel, but you have clarity of mind, which is going to be the thing that births the new idea, the next right thing. It's where everything is born. Not running is where everything good is born. But it's so scary for so many of us.

We're also not taught to do any of this, right? We're taught to push and grind and get the thing outside of ourselves, get the money, get the house. I mean, everything we're conditioned to believe is the opposite of that. And then life has its way with us and we're going, I don't understand. I did everything I was told to do. Why am I miserable?

Right? And so this work in the world that I'm trying to bring to people is a way to return people back to themselves again and again and again. So that if and when everything is taken away, they are still whole. Yeah. Now, we're now in this like world where people are buried with self-help noise. It's like everywhere you turn, there's like, I'm coaching you for this or I'm doing this. And even if you're, you and I had this discussion like how does your platform of improvement self-help improvement inner seeking improvement how does it differ from all the other noise that everyone hears all day long on social media yeah I mean what I can't besides yours is really hard I think though if if we numb the dark we numb the light so for for as hard as someone's willing to work as deep as someone's willing to go, that's as good on the other side as their life is going to get, right? So that's what I'll say to challenge what you just said. And believe me, Joseph,

walking away from just branding myself as Dr. Hart, you know, expert at body mechanics and injury prevention, which was really, after a while, an easy sell. Because my sessions looked a lot like a personal training session, right? So don't train with your trainer, train with your doctor. Oh, yeah, I want to do that. And now I'm entering the land of life coaches, right? Talk about an identity collapse, an ego collapse, and a very saturated market. And all I can say is I have had to ask myself, one of my great core wounds is, codependency.

And in the work I'm doing today, I'm like, oh, so is this your latest way to fix and save everybody else to validate your experience here on Earth, Samantha? Is this now the way you're doing it? And the truth is, I don't think so, because I was a living, breathing embodiment of working the 12 steps in a new world. and how it changed and saved my life. And it didn't save my sister. Right?

And I don't have regret or guilt about that. I can only speak to what changed and saved my own life. And when I work those steps in that modern way around my marital crisis, and I have been working the steps again and again around every other really hard thing that's happened, and it's given me a pathway through my pain, I can speak to that, right? That is my experience. So there are millions of coaches.

There are not millions of coaches who have a doctorate in physical therapy, who have a best-selling book, and who have 16 years sober. And there's not one other coach that has my story. And my story can help at least somebody else, and I know that because I've experienced it. Yeah.

And it makes my pain worth something. My story is my differentiator. And that's what I want to ask now. It's like you turned your story into your brand, which you then turned into a business. You know, what do you think the hardest truth is about monetizing trauma? That's a fascinating question. The hardest truth about monetizing. Not a lot of people could just turn their hardships into a business.

And you did that. You walked away from a successful business. And now you're coaching people on the most traumatic problems in their lives. I think if I'm understanding your question correctly, one of the hardest spiritual concepts that I've been wrapping my head around, is did my sister die so that I could be this dialed in to my purpose? Did the fact that her soul's correction and that it was unable to happen here on earth become the very thing that gave my soul the path to its destiny?

and making sense of that loss in a way that doesn't feel like I springboarded off of the back of her death to have my name known around the world and being able to coexist with the loss and say, I'm going to do everything I can to learn everything I can about how to navigate a loss of this magnitude and many others to help as many lives as I can without necessarily going. She died so that I could live. So sometimes there's this strange relationship around how good I feel with who I've become, how sure I feel about the mission that I'm on because it would not have happened.

At least I can't see how without her dying. And so did one have to happen for the other to happen? It's strange. It's a very deep, big question, right? It's God's timing, though. Right. It's like we can't change that. God has a series of traumas happened to us

it just really refine us. Yep. Unfortunately, you had one major trauma that really molded who you are now. The flip side of that is that what a gift of the dying that we can learn how to fully live. Fully living to me is never, ever ignoring the whisper of our intuition. and my intuition leading up to her death had been saying these patients you're treating are soul sick and you should be doing something about that too

but I didn't know what that meant I didn't know what that looked like and her dying just put the nail down and said well now you don't know you definitely don't know the way forward but you know you can't ignore this anymore right And so there's an urgency to my message. There's an urgency to my life every single day. Who am I going to help today? Who am I meant to serve?

How can I become more like the creator, whoever that is? Now, a couple last questions I have for you. This is a three-prong question. And it's about goals. What's a personal goal that you have for yourself? A goal that you have for your family and then a goal that you have for your business. A goal I have for myself is elevating my God consciousness every day and I'm doubling down on it, which means that the prayers and mantras I'm saying are very specific to the things that I know I need to work through.

And I'm saying them out loud repetitively until my body complies. And my mind and heart and spirit are in alignment. And that has been shifting everything Because now I'm not coming from lack at all When I'm in that space I'm just attracting what I want to attract And that's very, very powerful So basically having certainty beyond

I love that. My logical mind And that's the goal everybody should have Elevate your God consciousness Yep And you do that by Identifying your mantras Saying them out loud

How many times do you say them aloud Until I believe them until I believe them. You know when you feel resistance to something? A lot of people hate saying their goals out loud because they're like, they don't believe them. So when you just speak them into existence, you're like, I'm not believing them.

Now when you keep saying them and keep saying them and keep saying them, then you eventually convince yourself. I myself don't do that. I'd like to do that. Well, here's another layer to that. When you say something and you don't believe it, you need to talk to the part that doesn't believe it. it and pray for the certainty that you can overcome that limiting belief.

Because now you're tackling the problem. You're not pretending that you're fine with something that you're not. Although that might eventually work. If you double down and say it enough times, you might be like, okay, okay, okay, I believe this. But I'd rather speak to the part of me that doesn't believe it. Right? So, God, please prepare my vessel for all of the blessings it's meant to receive.

Instead of, I know I'm meant to receive all this, where is it? Where is it? It means I'm not prepared yet. I'm not ready. Please prepare my vessel for all of the blessings that I am meant to receive because I know I am meant to receive them. Right? And now the work's on me.

Okay. How do I become more prepared in this conversation, in this interaction, in the way that I view money? am I thanking the money that I have or am I going $1,000? It's not going to move the needle. Prepared or not prepared? Which one? In my family, I try to be a mindful mother.

My kids have a sober mom, which is such a huge blessing. And even still, like back to the phone, right? I can sit with my children but be checking my phone because my business is run off of my phone, right? And I think the goal there is the kids are getting to an age where we can start to travel with them. We can start to have real experiences. We have more secure finances as a family. And to not just set those up, I have, you know, Jesse Itzler's big ass calendar on my wall so I could really see the whole year and plan trips out, which has been super helpful in a tactical way. but then when I'm on those trips, am I really there with them?

Because those are the moments of our life. And I'm saying that as a mother, you don't have to be a parent. But if you are a parent, you know, you understand what I'm saying, right? Despite all the stress, the craziness of being a parent. We will always talk about triggers and self-help, trigger, trigger, trigger, I'm going to say the opposite, glimmers, glimmers. glimmers, glimmers. And even in the worst day, there's going to be one moment, and it's probably going to be with your kid,

that is such a glimmer of hope, a radical shot of joy and love. Like you just want to burst open. It was so good. Am I there for that? Am I paying attention to those moments every single day on the trip or not on the trip? That is the goal looking for the glimmers in my family. And in my business, I mean, Joseph, I want to sell out stadiums one day.

I mean, I want to become with the greatest desire being to impact lives, not the money of female Tony Robbins. I want to speak on stages about what I've lived through and what I've learned and give people a blueprint for how to get through their hardest things. So everything I do is heading toward that goal. And I visualize that goal. You know, we talk about manifestation. We've heard this before. I feel it in my bones.

Actually, you speaking that just reminds me to, you need to collaborate with Forbes Riley, who is technically the female Tony Robbins. She was at the masterminds. And she, she, did you meet her? I think I did meet her. You guys have similar stories, not like her. She's went through some crazy stuff.

Does she have that husband that's very buff? No, no. Yeah, yeah, that's her. Yes, okay, we totally connected. I need to follow up with her. Thank you for saying that. I'll put you guys on a thread. You guys would sell the stadiums together, and that'll help catapult the track to doing that.

Just because she has that kind of same aura, and she is doing it now. Amazing. I love your story. I love what your goals are. Last question. When you're in front of the pearly gates, what do you think God's going to tell you? I'm so proud of you. Samantha Hart, how do people find you if they want to connect with you? Social media and my website are both Dr. Samantha Hart, and that's H-A-R-T-E. And my favorite thing for people to do is book a discovery call. because there's nothing like unless I can meet you in person which is the dream but the second

best thing is to actually look you in the face and speak to you speak straight to your heart love it and no you know it's so fitting for your last name I know I know it's amazing so it worked out God has a big plan for you I hope you hit all your goals God bless you your family and keep winning people