Jill DePhillip, CRNP-PMH has spent years sitting with people at the hardest parts of themselves. As a certified registered nurse practitioner in psychiatric mental health, specializing in ADHD and addiction recovery, she brings something most credentials don’t come with: she’s been there. Six years sober — since April 20, 2020 — she built a clinical practice, a writing life, and a clear understanding of who she is from pieces she once used as evidence against herself. What got her there wasn’t a clean arc. It was a lot of falling down, getting up, and eventually landing on one word that changed everything. This conversation went deep on the ADHD-addiction connection, what it looks like when shame lives in the body, and what it actually takes to rebuild a life you didn’t think you deserved. Show Notes [00:00] Welcome and Introduction * Josh introduces Jill DePhillip, a certified registered nurse practitioner in psychiatric mental health, whose clinical work focuses on ADHD and addiction recovery. * Jill and Josh share a sobriety year — both got sober in 2020 — and they open by acknowledging how many people found the pandemic to be a turning point. * Jill writes Still Growing on Substack, where she covers recovery, neurodivergence, and what it means to become more fully yourself. Key Insight: “Recovering out loud is one of the most powerful things any of us can do.” — Josh’s introduction of Jill sets the tone: this isn’t a clinical conversation. It’s a human one. [02:24] Growing Up, Losing a Father, and Living in Someone’s Shadow * Jill grew up in Maryland, one year apart from her older brother — both raised in a family where drinking was normalized and expected. * They lost their father to addiction in the late 1980s. Her brother was the all-star athlete and academic. Jill spent a lot of her early life in his shadow, fielding the buzzwords ADHD kids hear constantly: apply yourself, pay attention, why can’t you focus. * She didn’t identify drinking as a serious problem until she was 19 or 20, when wine became what she describes as “the answer” to the noise she couldn’t name. * Her brother is also in long-term recovery. The pattern ran through the family. Key Insight: “It sits in the back seat now, just doesn’t drive the car — but it’s still a part of me every day.” — Jill on shame, and how she’s learned to challenge it without pretending it’s gone. [05:52] Years of Relapses and Why It Was Never a Straight Line * Jill’s first attempt at sobriety came at 26 — attending AA meetings far from home so no one would recognize her. * What followed was years of relapses she now understands as deeply connected to undiagnosed ADHD: the impulsivity, the emotional dysregulation, the pattern of falling and getting up and falling again. * She describes her pre-sobriety years honestly: unhealthy relationships, instability, overdependence, wasted opportunities, a lot of shame. * She stayed out of AA for years telling herself her story wasn’t good enough to share. “No one’s going to want to hear my story. It’s not as good.” Key Insight: “It’s a lot of falling down. It’s a lot of getting up. It’s a lot of shame, a lot of messiness, really, like many people.” — Jill, on a recovery story that doesn’t look like the highlight reel. [11:00] The ADHD-Addiction Connection * People with ADHD are two to three times more likely to struggle with addiction — and Jill says we need to talk about it more and study it more. * For neurodiverse people, especially those who went undiagnosed, the shame loop starts early: adults who don’t understand what’s happening say “why are you so lazy” and “why can’t you just pay attention,” and kids absorb it as truth. * When something comes along that quiets the noise — wine, food, anything — it doesn’t feel like a problem. It feels like a solution. * Jill describes ADHD not as the bouncing-off-the-walls version people imagine, but as something internal: “electricity” that runs through the body all day. Key Insight: “ADHD people live with this electricity in their body all the time. So you have... emotional dysregulation and it’s that electricity that you can literally hear and feel all the time. So the alcohol snuffs it out. It calms it.” — Jill DePhillip [17:46] The Invisible Girls: Masking, Burnout, and Getting Overlooked * One of the most overlooked at-risk groups for ADHD: high-achieving girls who are masking so well that no one sees the strain underneath. * Jill tells her teachers who are patients: the kid with ADHD in your class might be your favorite student. Straight A’s. Quiet. A little anxious. Working ten times as hard as the kid next to her to get a B. * These kids go home overwhelmed and overstimulated, but because they perform, no one asks the right questions. * The result is burnout, and in the worst cases, elevated suicidal risk factors among high maskers who look, from the outside, like they have everything together. Key Insight: “We reward the performance, right? We’re performing well so you get straight A’s — good job, that means you’re worth it. Questions about emotions, we’re not asking. About executive functioning — how are you functioning, are you resting, is this hard.” — Jill DePhillip [29:30] Regulating a Nervous System That Doesn’t Fit the Template * Cookie-cutter advice — “just go for a walk” — doesn’t account for the task paralysis, task initiation difficulty, and demand resistance that come with ADHD and autism. * Jill’s approach is individualized: find what you already love, then build your regulation tools around that. If you love Pilates, Pilates becomes your nervous system regulation strategy. * The neurodiverse brain needs interest, emotion, and connection to move. When you build from desire instead of obligation, the resistance drops. * She’s clear: there’s no one answer, and the overwhelm of information out there can actually make it worse for people who are already overwhelmed. Key Insight: “The neurodiverse mind needs novelty... Interest, emotion, connection. All of that needs to be there.” — Jill DePhillip [35:00] Five Weeks in the Mountains and the Word That Stuck * In 2020, during COVID, after missing two days of work from a relapse, people showed up from every corner of Jill’s life and said: go to rehab. She agreed. * A car came and drove her eight hours to the mountains of Pennsylvania. She left her kids, went into a week of isolation — Valium, a bird feeder outside the window, and the Transformer movie Bumblebee on a DVD player slid under the door. * She stayed five weeks. She was afraid to come home, so she asked for a sixth. * What she carried out with her was one word: willingness. Key Insight: “You have to have that 100% willingness to do whatever it takes to be sober and put that first, always, every single day, the next right thing. And that’s what I wasn’t doing all these times I fell on my face. So that was the shift for me.” — Jill DePhillip [41:30] Building a Life Worth Coming Home To * Recovery wasn’t just getting sober. It was a divorce, a period of loneliness, learning what boundaries were, and removing relationships that were harmful — family included. * Jill tells her own kids: you have no obligation, family or not, to stay in a relationship that hurts you. * The rebuilding process is slow and awkward. Your relationship skills aren’t great at first. But if you hold the boundaries, the right people show up. * Today she has a practice she loves, a closet office with a ceiling fan, and a 12-year-old daughter she says is essentially her — five steps ahead of everything Jill did. Key Insight: “The real people that want to stay and love you for you will show up. But they won’t if you’re hiding from it, or in your own way.” — Jill DePhillip [45:50] What Jill Is Working On Now * Coming September: an ADHD cohort. Eight to ten people, class format, eight weeks of 90-minute sessions focused on executive functioning skills. * Originally designed for college students, but now open to anyone in transition: coming out of rehab, navigating divorce, or any life change that’s hard on a neurodiverse brain. * Jill is also writing on Substack (Still Growing) and describes it as cathartic: “Whatever’s that theme, I’m writing about it, and it’s amazing.” Key Insight: “All I can do is plant seeds. That’s about all I can do to help people. We can’t do anything else. We don’t have any control over anything other than the power that that is — is planting a seed.” — Jill DePhillip Key Quotes “It sits in the back seat now, just doesn’t drive the car — but it’s still a part of me every day.”— Jill DePhillip “ADHD people live with this electricity in their body all the time. So the alcohol snuffs it out. It calms it.”— Jill DePhillip “We reward the performance, right? Questions about emotions, we’re not asking. About executive functioning — how are you functioning, are you resting, is this hard.”— Jill DePhillip “You have to have that 100% willingness to do whatever it takes to be sober and put that first, always, every single day, the next right thing.”— Jill DePhillip “All I can do is plant seeds. That’s about all I can do to help people.”— Jill DePhillip Resources Mentioned * Jill’s Website: PlantingSeedsBH.com — including details on the September ADHD cohort * Jill’s Substack: Still Growing — recovery, neurodivergence, and becoming more fully yourself * Jill on Psychology Today and Pedway * September ADHD Executive Functioning Cohort: Eight-week course, 90 minutes per week, for anyone in life transition (divorce, rehab, neurodivergent adults building new scaffolding) * AA / 12-step programs — referenced throughout as part of Jill’s recovery foundation Where to Find Jill Website: PlantingSeedsBH.comInsta
