Seth Berglund, VP of Corporate Strategy at Freeman Recovery Center

serves as Director of Compliance at Freeman Recovery Center in Tennessee, where he oversees regulatory compliance, risk management, and the governance systems that help keep a treatment organization accountable to the people it exists to serve. He brings more than a decade of experience in the behavioral health field, having served as a counselor, program coordinator, and operations leader before stepping into his current role.

What sets Seth apart is not his credentials or his title. It is where he has been. His own experience with substance use disorder and recovery is the foundation of everything he does professionally.

He understands what true hopelessness looks and feels like. He also knows what hope feels like. He has lived the distance between isolation and fellowship, between self-hate and something closer to peace. That distance is what he shows up to work for every day.

That perspective shapes how he sees treatment itself. Substance use disorder is a disease that tries to convince a person they do not have a disease. It thrives in silence, shame, and separation. At its best, treatment offers a way through that fog: structure, honesty, clinical care, human connection, and the possibility of a moment of clarity that changes the direction of a person’s life.

Some of his most vivid memories from earlier in his career are the discharge ceremonies, where he watched rooms full of strangers become something closer to a community. People who had arrived wounded, guarded, and unsure began to find their voices, their humor, and their place among one another. Those moments still stay with him.

Outside of work, Seth is a homebody at heart. He enjoys family dinners, weekend soccer, quiet evenings, and the occasional Netflix spiral. He keeps the phrase amor fati close: the love of fate. To him, it means learning to meet life as it comes, including the difficult parts, and allowing even the hardest moments to become something a person can grow through rather than escape. It is less a motto than a way of moving through the world, one that makes sense to anyone who has found their way back from somewhere dark.