General Hospital star Maurice Benard sat down with Fresh Start of California Program Director Lindsey Centanni, an Orange County Detox and Rehab Facility, to hear her story of addiction, self-sabotage, and her long journey to healing on this week’s episode of his video podcast, State Of Mind. The actor’s channel is climbing closer to 120,000 subscribers.
Lindsey Centanni: Racing To The Bottom
Maurice Benard (Sonny, GH) met Lindsey Centanni through his daughter Cailey. She referred to Centanni as the best boss that she had ever had. Benard was intrigued and wanted to learn more. The petite blonde may not be a familiar name or face, but her story is an all-too-familiar one by today’s standards. Divorced parents, rebellious, feeling alone and abandoned, Centanni began numbing the pain at the early age of 14 when she first started drinking.
That was just the beginning of her downward spiral. “From there, every opportunity to drink, I would use it.” But it didn’t end there. The young girl began sampling anything that would numb her pain. “And then there was smoking weed. That was big. I had a much older boyfriend who would pick me up from the bus stop, and he smoked weed, and we would both smoke weed on the way to school. Those feelings of escaping were enough that that is all I wanted to do was escape.”
Her escape tactics only led to worse issues. “I was in so much trouble all of the time that nobody knew what to do with me. I was suspended. I thought it would be fun to take a bunch of mushrooms at midterms to see how that worked out.” She described how it began shaping and overtaking her entire life. “I was that party kid. I was the kid that instead of playing sports or focusing in on my academics, I was arranging all of the parties and making sure that we got all of the beer.”
Fighting with her father escalated to an all-out war, ending with her in foster care, worsening matters. Centanni soon found herself in a group home for girls, where she was placed on an antidepressant. Eventually, a judge felt that living with her mother would be better, but that only gave the young girl a license to party even harder.
“I don’t know if that made me feel like I was invincible or if [it] just inflated my ego or something, like, ‘I won!’ My addiction took off at that point.” She explained what came next. “I just kept going. It was partying and fake ID, then nightclubs and ecstasy, amphetamines and cocaine, and then it was Oxy, Oxytocin. Did you ever see those programs like Netflix’s Painkillers? I lived that.”
The Turning Point
Her self-sabotaging behavior seemed to know no bounds, leading the troubled girl to add Crystal Meth to her drugs of choice. Centanni soon found herself jailed and then imprisoned, and a homeless mother of two. A parole officer warned it would only get worse if she didn’t clean up her act. And that seemed to work for a time. She married, stayed clean for a while, and got custody of her children. Then addiction soon reared its ugly head again.
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“For me, I just can’t have a beer. I can’t just take a pill,” she explained and shared the allure of drugs. “I need to get to oblivion. It doesn’t matter what that costs me. It doesn’t matter where I end up. I need to be gone from reality. As much as you possibly can. That’s just how I have been.”
Her husband was the catalyst for change by coming clean himself and challenging her to do the same…or lose everything. “And, he took the kids that night and left me the number of a woman to call who was going to help me.” That didn’t put the fear of God into her, but contemplating suicide did. “Instead, I just wanted to die. I just wanted to die. I thought the world, everyone, my children, would be better off without me. I thought that this wasn’t for me. But I didn’t, obviously, I am sitting here.”
She made that call, ending her rocky relationship with addiction, and learned to love herself enough to stay clean. She revealed her recent anniversary. “I just celebrated eight years. Who is sitting in front of you today is not the same girl eight years ago, 10 years ago. I am not the same person.”
Find out more details about her incredible journey with bits of her story that many people can identify with. Benard peeled back the layers of how she turned her life around and used her experience to help others. She shared the details of her parents’ early divorce when she was 2 years old, how her grandparents hold a special place in her heart, the times she ran away, hitchhiked across the country, lived with strangers, and ended up living in Mexico for a time.
Centanni talked candidly about her estrangement from her mother, who suffered from her own mental health issues, the loss of her grandfather, her time behind bars, ending up homeless for some time, and losing custody of her kids. She talked about how she earned a guest spot on the Sharon Osbourne Show before spiraling out of control and, finally, how she used her experience to help others learn to love themselves, warts and all. Watch the full episode here.
Find out more about FSC Detox (Fresh Start of California). If you suffer from addiction or know someone who does, find out more from the National Institute of Health on Drug Use (NIH).
To learn more about and follow Lindsey Centanni, you can follow her on Facebook and Instagram. To follow State Of Mind and subscribe, go to YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. Fans can now purchase inspirational merchandise for Maurice Benard’s State Of Mind. Check it out.
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