Breaking the Chains

Some people grow up in homes. Brian Kolb grew up in a house.

There's a difference — and he learned it the hard way.

Raised in the shadow of a mother whose addiction and cruelty shaped every room she entered, and a father who chose to manage the chaos rather than protect his children from it, Brian became an expert at surviving. At disappearing. At folding up his anger and putting it somewhere dark because there was nowhere safe to put it.

By his late teens, he was repeating the cycle. Drinking to escape the very wounds that drinking was creating. Until a Tuesday morning in September 1997 — broke, lost, coming to on the floor after days he couldn't account for — when he hit his knees and prayed the most honest prayer of his life:

God help me or I am f****d.

He meant it. And something answered.

Nearly thirty years later, Brian Kolb is sober. Married to the woman who showed him what unconditional love looks like. Father of daughters he raised at a dinner table where the phones stayed in pockets and everyone actually showed up. Grandfather to little girls who will grow up with a reference point for what safe feels like.

The chain broke. And in Breaking the Chains, he shows you exactly how.

This is not a polished recovery story. It is raw, unfiltered, and completely honest — about the Christmas morning his mother took back every gift after he'd already opened them, about the halfway house and the black trash bag and the man named Don F. who gave him the first real choice of his life, about learning to receive love from a woman whose steadiness he didn't believe in for years.

It is also a practical guide. Because Brian didn't just survive — he built something. A home. A life. A different legacy. And he shares the tools, the faith, and the hard-won wisdom that made it possible.

If you grew up in a house like his — this book is for you.

If you've looked in the mirror and seen one of your parents looking back. If you've spent years trying to earn love from someone incapable of giving it. If you've wondered whether the cycle can actually stop.

It can. He is living proof.

Breaking the Chains is for every adult child of addiction and abuse who is still carrying what was never theirs to carry — and who is ready, finally, to put it down.