Hopestream Community

In this solo episode, Brenda Zane speaks directly to one of the most common struggles she sees among parents in the Hopestream community: the painful disconnect between setting a boundary and actually holding it when your child pushes back. After seven years of running The Stream and the podcast, she says boundaries — how to set them and how to hold them — are still the skill parents ask about more than any other.

The pattern Brenda describes is familiar to many parents. You listen, you validate, you say the compassionate and true thing, you name the boundary — and your child looks at you like you never understood or cared about them at all. That reaction, she explains, creates a nagging pull to soften the boundary, explain it one more time in different words, or just give in.

'This I label as exhausting. 100% exhausting.' — Brenda Zane

Brenda draws an important distinction: being understood and being agreed with are two different things. Validation tells your child that you see what they are feeling — and your answer can stay the same even if they are not happy with it. Most parents were raised to treat those as the same thing, so when a child says 'you don't get it,' it can land as proof that you got it wrong. That feeling sends parents into a loop of re-explaining until everything falls apart.

She also points out that every extra sentence you offer becomes an opening for negotiation. If pushing you until you give in has worked for your child before, it makes sense they will keep trying it. It is simply a human pattern.

One of the specific tools Brenda introduces is what she calls the 'but eraser.' When you say 'I hear you, but...' that 'but' erases everything before it — and children are experts at hearing only what comes after it. Her recommendation is to swap 'but' for 'and.'

She also names the lip clip — the thing you didn't say because you paused and thought first — as a skill the moms in The Stream are already strong at using.

Brenda highlights the power of intentional silence right after naming a boundary. She references a quote from Jefferson Fisher, a trial lawyer and author of a book called The Next Conversation: 'Silence can never be misquoted.' If your child is a skilled negotiator and talker, silence gives them nothing to argue with, twist, or misquote.

She pairs this with the acronym WAIT — Why Am I Talking? — as a tool to catch yourself when you are over-explaining, over-justifying, or repeating the same boundary in yet another way.

'When you choose silence on purpose, it really shows that you have an intention for your communication versus hesitation or feeling unsure of yourself.' — Brenda Zane

Brenda describes a practical approach she calls 'see it, and it, and then stop.' First, you name the specific feeling you observe in your child. Then you use 'and' — not 'but' — to connect that to what you will do. Then you stop. No re-explaining, no answering the same argument again.

She offers a few example scripts parents can use:

She also offers an anchor sentence for when a child is upset: 'I understand you're upset, and you don't agree with me, and I'm comfortable with my decision.' For parents who feel that word 'comfortable' is a stretch, she suggests alternatives: 'I'm okay with my decision,' or 'I stand by my choice.'

Brenda is honest that this kind of calm, measured boundary communication does not come naturally to most people. She is equally clear that confidence comes after practice — not before it. She encourages parents to start with low-stakes moments, like a dinner plan or a ride somewhere, well before they need these skills for the bigger, harder boundaries.

'The confidence that it takes to deliver this kind of boundary and communication and follow-up, it really shows up after you practice something, after you practice doing it, not before it.' — Brenda Zane

She also shares a personal story of caving — going to the ATM to give her son money to pay back a dealer, knowing in her gut it was likely not the real story. She describes ending up feeling like 'the biggest sucker in the world.' Her point is not shame but honesty: caving happens, and it does not erase your progress. You can ask for a do-over.

Brenda is emphatic on this point: if a situation is escalating, if your child is under the influence and becoming aggressive or unpredictable, that is not the moment to hold a boundary. Safety is always the priority. In those moments, she says, confidence looks like calling for help — 911, 988, a neighbor, a friend, or a co-parent. You can always step away and return to the boundary when the situation is safer.

Tara Norbeck spent her career as a level one trauma ICU nurse — someone trained to evaluate a problem, figure out what intervention was needed, and fix it. Then the script flipped. Her son began struggling with drug addiction and mental health issues, and she found herself on the other side of the hospital bedside, holding his hand, with nothing she could do.

'I learned the hard way that there were just some things that were beyond my ability to fix or control, and that was with my son. Faced with his drug addiction and mental health struggles, I couldn't fix it, and that took me a long time to reconcile.' — Tara Norbeck

She describes believing, as many parents do, that if she researched enough, prayed enough, or loved hard enough, she could solve it. Coming to terms with the fact that she couldn't was, she says, one of the hardest things she has ever had to do.

One of the most striking things Tara shares is what she calls placing hope in the healer rather than in her son's healing. After going through a period of deep anger — including, she says, shaking her fists at God — she arrived at a shift. When she began to do that, she says, she began to heal herself.

'You can hold hope and heartbreak at the same time. It doesn't mean that you don't care about your child, and it doesn't mean that you are grieving deeply for what they're going through.' — Tara Norbeck

She is also direct about something many parents carry silently: the belief that they can only be as happy as their unhappiest child. Tara says she understood why parents say that — she used to say it herself — but she came to see it differently.

A therapist at the rehab facility Tara's son attended told her something that changed how she showed up. When she arrived at visits crying, her son would tell her to leave. The therapist explained that when a parent shows up visibly devastated, it places an unfair burden on the child — communicating that they are responsible not only for their own happiness but for their parent's too.

'Addiction doesn't get to take two lives. It's not gonna take them and me. I had a husband I needed to show up for who deserved to have a wife that was present. I had other children that deserved to have their mother present.' — Tara Norbeck

Tara says she also recognizes what she describes as enmeshment — becoming so tangled up in trying to fix her son that everyone and everything else was ignored. She draws a pointed comparison: her preoccupation with fixing him was, she says, its own kind of addiction.

Tara describes several things that helped her begin to heal: therapy, Al-Anon, sharing with trusted friends and a pastor, and connecting with other moms who understood without judgment. At Al-Anon she encountered what she calls the three Cs — that she didn't cause it, can't control it, and can't cure it. She says that when she began to release those things, she began to experience the first bit of healing.

She also talks about the difference between happiness and joy, describing joy as something quieter — a sense of peace and contentment she could find in ordinary moments, like sunlight or a child's laugh. She was clear that finding those moments didn't mean she stopped caring about her son. It meant, she says, that she wasn't going to let addiction steal her joy too.

Tara shares that years after the hardest period, her younger daughter came home from a sleepaway camp and told her: 'Mom, you're not gonna believe it, but guess what I found out at camp? I found out that my brother's addiction is not my fault.' Her daughter had silently carried that belief for years, thinking she had somehow caused it.

Tara says this was shattering to hear, and that it illustrated how thoroughly addiction creates a ripple effect through the whole family — including the children parents believe they are protecting. Her advice: have open, honest, age-appropriate conversations with siblings. Ask them what they are feeling and what they need. Get them into counseling or age-appropriate support groups. Don't assume they don't know what's happening, because they almost certainly do.

Tara wrote Dear Mom of an Addict: 10 Truths You Need to Know to Parent Your Addicted Child and Reclaim Hope because it was the book she desperately needed at 2:00 AM when she was lying awake searching for answers. She started with a blog in 2013 — mostly to process her own experience — and began hearing from people around the world saying 'me too.' Over time, she felt what she describes as a calling to share her hope with other moms, in the same way the 12th step calls those who have found healing to share it with others.

'I wrote the book that I needed at 2:00 AM when I was searching for answers. I wrote it for that mom that's up in the middle of the night waiting for the phone to ring, but dreading what's gonna be on the other end if it does ring.' — Tara Norbeck

The book is structured around truths rather than chapters. The first truth, she says, is: you are not alone.

Kim's path to parent coaching started when her oldest son, in his early 20s, developed a dependency on alcohol — very likely, she said, as a result of anxiety, depression, and diagnosed OCD. The family moved through detox, an IOP program, and eventually residential treatment. Along the way, Kim went back to college and finished a psychology degree, originally intending to become a licensed chemical dependency counselor working with teenagers. But somewhere in that process, she realized she wanted to work with the parents instead.

She became a Jai Institute for Parenting certified parent coach in 2016 and started out working proactively with parents of teens. What she found was that parents will readily invest in tutoring, therapy, or special coaching for their kids — but rarely invest in their own parenting. When her first book came out in 2021, parents of 18- to 30-year-olds started coming to her in droves, and that became the niche she works in today.

Kim's new book is titled Lost in Place, and the phrase itself came from a friend and coach of young people who shared it with her. When she heard it, she said, it immediately clicked. 'Failure to launch' — a term she hears constantly — feels to her like a final, negative verdict. 'Lost in place' carries something different.

'If you're lost, you can be found. Failure to launch is, to me, a very negative and final term. Like, how do you come back from that?' — Kim Muench

She uses delayed independence to describe what's actually happening with many young adults — whether the cause is substance use, mental health struggles, or a creeping sense of hopelessness about the future. She also pointed to the amount and kind of information young people encounter online as a real contributor to their anxiety and their difficulty trusting the world.

One of the most grounding parts of Kim's work is helping parents get honest about what they can and cannot control. She is direct: parents of adult children cannot control whether their child goes to school, goes to work, or what they put in their body. What they do have control over, she says, comes down to three things.

First, how they show up in the relationship. Second, what they are willing to provide — because once a child is an adult, parents are not obligated to keep providing for them. Third, how they respond to their young adult's words, shutdowns, explosive behavior, or choices. Kim works with parents to concentrate on these three areas rather than spinning their energy trying to control outcomes they cannot reach.

Under the umbrella of 'how you show up in the relationship,' Kim teaches what she calls the four C's.

Clarity means getting very clear on what you will and will not support. Calm means practicing staying regulated even when your child is triggering you — because a calm parent has a better chance of helping a dysregulated young person return to a logical state than a parent who escalates with them. Kim described how she personally knows she's being triggered by prickles up the back of her neck, and that physical cue is her signal to pause and consciously decide how she wants to show up.

'Fear smells like control to their kids, and they will push back against being controlled. It also breeds disconnection, so parenting from fear breeds disconnection, and you have no influence in the situation.' — Kim Muench

Confidence is the third C, and Kim noted that by the time most parents come to her, they have lost a great deal of it. Parenting from fear, she explained, doesn't just feel bad — it actually drives disconnection, which removes any influence a parent might have had. The fourth C is consistency: following through on what you say, modeling the behavior you want to see, and not making commitments you won't keep. She noted that when family contracts fall apart, the breakdown is often on the parent's side — not as a reason to assign blame, but as a place to start getting honest.

Kim offered a clear way to think about the line between support and subsidy. Helping, she said, is occasional, done out of love, and in a family context tends to be reciprocated — you pick up your daughter's dry cleaning, she unloads the dishwasher without being asked. Enabling is different: it's when you repeatedly do something for someone that they can and should be doing for themselves, and it tends to flow only one direction and build resentment over time.

She encourages parents to look honestly at everything they are providing — emotionally, financially, physically — and ask which category each thing falls into. One story she shared landed hard: a mother whose adult son was living at home arranged for the family dog to stay at a neighbor's house while the parents traveled, because she didn't trust her son to wake up in time to care for it. Kim's response was to ask whether the son loved the dog. He did. So why not let caring for the dog be his purpose and responsibility for that week?

'You're basically just telling him that you don't believe he is capable.' — Kim Muench

The gap Kim talks about creating — the space left when parents pull back what they've been providing — is not about punishment. It's about leaving room for a young person to step in. Whether or not they do, and how quickly, tells you something important about what might need to happen next.

Episode 346

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

It's the green powder in the shaker bottle, the little blue shot by the register, the "herbal supplement" your kid bought for focus. If you've been quietly wondering whether kratom is something to worry about, drop everything and tune in.

Dean Francis's son Cameron was an elite college runner, closing in on a sub four-minute mile, when he found kratom online, sold as a plant-based boost for energy and focus. For a few months it did exactly what the marketing promised. Then his running slid, the anxiety showed up, and nobody in the family connected any of it to the powder he was shaking into his water bottle every day. It took an ER doctor in 2021 to say it plainly: this is an opioid, he’s addicted, and it's serious.

Dean got mad, and then he got busy. He founded End Kratom Addiction, and he showed up to this conversation with a mountain of knowledge (and a few products to hold up on camera, so the YouTube version is worth a watch). We talk about what kratom actually does in the body, the forms kids are buying it in, why the "safe natural leaf" story isn’t all it’s been touted as, and the Billion-dollar business keeping it on gas station shelves. He also gets honest about what treatment looked like for Cameron, and the gap in care that cost him more than anyone expected.

This is an educational episode, and it's also the wake-up call I think every parent needs, whether or not your child is struggling right now. What's sold at the corner store down the street may not be what you or your child thinks it is.

YOU'LL LEARN

EPISODE RESOURCES:

This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream CommunityLearn about The Stream, our private online community for momsFind us on Instagram hereWatch the podcast on YouTube hereDownload a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and Alcohol

Hopestream Community is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and an Amazon Associate. We may make a small commission if you purchase from our links.

Brenda and Cathy opened this conversation by naming something that often gets overlooked: the acceptance and non-reactivity piece of the Invitation to Change approach — which combines CRAFT, motivational interviewing, and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) — tends to get 'lobbed off and forgotten about.' The focus often goes to boundaries, natural consequences, and self-care. But Cathy described non-reactivity as something different: a tool you can think about ahead of time, almost premeditate on, so that when a charged moment arrives, you already know what to reach for.

What makes it so powerful, they explained, is that it does not require you to memorize a script or follow a set of steps in the heat of the moment. It is more about how your body feels and being mindful of that — which is something you can begin practicing right now, even in low-stakes situations.

One of the clearest frames from the episode: chaos needs two participants. There is a reactor and a reactee. When a parent stops supplying their reaction, their energy, their drama, the escalation simply cannot continue — there is no second part to it.

'I can't think of a single time with my son where it benefited both of us for me to come and match his level of energy and escalation and drama and chaos. Can't think of a single one.' — Brenda Zane

Cathy added that this is also true in situations involving manipulation or gaslighting — not just loud, escalating conflict. Matching the other person's intensity in any of those situations just leads to co-escalation, and as both hosts observed, everyone walks away feeling awful. Even kids, they noted, do not actually want that outcome.

Both Brenda and Cathy described the same physical experience when they are about to react: what Brenda called a 'butterfly convention' happening high in the chest, followed by a pounding heart, and then a kind of disassociation — almost an out-of-body experience of watching yourself lose control. Cathy described it as feeling like the reaction is almost frightening in how physical it becomes.

The reason it matters to recognize these signals is that your body gets there first. Before you have consciously decided to react, your nervous system is already signaling. That is the moment to pause. And deep breathing — especially with a longer exhale — was described as a surprisingly effective way to start regulating the nervous system in real time, even when it seems too simple to work.

Brenda shared a story from a day when her son was supposed to help pack the house during a move. He was disengaged, and when he asked if they would be done soon, barely half an hour in, she felt the escalation start. She matched his energy — and they went at it for hours. Then something shifted. She stepped back, looked at him almost the way she would watch a two-year-old throw a tantrum, and said quietly: 'I'm not doing this. You can go. Just go.'

'That was, for me, I think the start of me realizing the power of my response was a lot more than I thought it was, 'cause I saw the instant change in him.' — Brenda Zane

Cathy shared her own moment — a screaming argument with her daughter about writing a thank you note to her grandparents. In the middle of it, she stopped, looked at her daughter, and said 'I'm walking away.' And she did. She described that as the beginning of her own 'very uneven recovery' — because it was not long after that things started to change in her home. She realized she had been contributing to the dynamic by always engaging.

Brenda and Cathy were clear that non-reactivity is not something you can white-knuckle your way into in a moment of crisis. It requires what they called a rewiring of your whole system — an update to your operating system — so that calm becomes the default rather than the exception. Here are the practical suggestions they offered:

And when it all falls apart — because it will — Cathy and Brenda both said the same thing: give yourself grace, treat it as a teachable moment, and remember that the do-over is always available. You can go back to your child and say you did not like how you handled something. Another opportunity will come. It always does.

Janice didn't have the typical teenage warning signs many parents describe. Her son's struggles with substance use emerged during and after COVID, and the moment of clarity came when she found something she Googled and confirmed was crystal meth. She describes having two choices in that moment: feel sorry for herself, or get educated. She chose education.

What she didn't realize yet was how much of that education would turn out to be about herself. Before she found the podcast and the Stream community, she had been, by her own account, really negative with her son — on his case, yelling, without a kind word. 'I just didn't understand what was going on,' she said. 'The fix-it mom, and then when I realized I can't fix this really quickly, I shifted into get-educated mom.'

Several years after her son began his path toward sobriety, her daughter also began struggling — with depression and drinking. By then, Janice handled it completely differently. Her daughter's path moved quickly, and she is now sober.

One of the most important things Janice unpacks in this conversation is what people actually mean when they say 'do the work.' She remembers hearing that phrase early on and being confused and frustrated — she was consuming every podcast, video, and book she could find. What more was there to do?

'You're not gonna get through this without changing yourself. And that was a real lesson, because the work is really knowing that you're part of this dynamic.' — Janice

She was careful to say she didn't cause her children's struggles. But her communication style, her tendency toward judgment, her rushing in to fix things and prevent consequences — all of that was part of the picture. Owning that, she said, took a long time to figure out. And it was the real work.

When Brenda asked her to talk about what it actually looked like to shift from negative to positive communication, Janice split her answer into two things: energy and communication. She said the two are connected, and energy comes first.

She described being obsessed — almost, she said, like an addiction — with thinking about her son. Every second thought was about him. The shift came when she started asking herself: if you're not thinking about your son right now, what could you be doing with that mental energy? What could you be doing to improve yourself?

'I then could distance myself a little bit and arrive or come to the situation where I saw my son struggling and just be neutral. And I just arrived with neutral energy.' — Janice

She also described self-care not as bubble baths or leisure, but as creating enough space inside yourself to actually hold your child — non-judgmentally, without flooding them with worry or reaction. 'If you don't take care of yourself, your cup is full. You can't create any space. You're overflowing.'

For anyone new to the phrase 'drop the rope,' Janice offers a very grounded explanation using a real example from her own home: she and her son disagree constantly about the air conditioning. At some point, she asked herself — is air conditioning going to kill me? Is this really about the air conditioning, or is this about control?

That question — what is this really about? — is at the center of how she thinks about letting go. She describes the grippy feeling of wanting to challenge or hold your position, and suggests getting curious about it rather than acting on it automatically.

She also went back into therapy during this period, tracing her own communication patterns back to her family of origin, including a father who was an alcoholic. 'You can't change something until you can face it and accept it,' she said — and acceptance, as Brenda noted, is not the same as approval.

Janice says she meditates for about ten minutes a day — nothing elaborate, just a simple app — and has recently started checking in with herself by asking what she is feeling and what she is afraid of. She also talks about visualizing the kind of person she wants to be and trying to prioritize showing up that way.

'I was always quite tough on myself and everyone around me. I wasn't the model of empathy. I was a model of get it done... And now I think people view me differently. I have totally changed.' — Janice

Her daughter has noticed. She told Janice directly: 'Mom, I can totally come to you now. You're a different person. I see that you have changed.' The two of them lived together for six months in close quarters without conflict — something Janice says would have been impossible before.

On the question of whether focusing on yourself means abandoning your child, Janice offers the clearest reframe in the episode: ask yourself what your stepping in actually does. Does it help your child learn, or does it teach them that you will always be there to cushion the consequence? 'If you can answer that question in a way that makes you understand the consequences of your actions, then there's your answer.'

She closes with a metaphor that captures the whole conversation: climbing a mountain, wanting to turn around and extend your hand to the person behind you. Not to the top — she'd never suggest that — but higher. And then turning around to help the next person up.

Episode 343

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

You’ve heard some version of it: Leave me alone! I know what I am doing! You don't understand me!” Ciara Fanlo said all of that to her mother, but what her mom didn’t know was that those statements were hiding a plea…please help me.

Ciara was a sensitive kid in San Francisco, the kind who felt everything the world hurled at her at full volume before she had language or coping skills for it. Her parents divorced and she started self-harming by age ten, before she’d ever seen anyone else do it. She just knew she needed to displace the emotional pain she felt.

By high school she had been through therapists, medications, and a residential program. She came home on a contract and broke every rule on it in one afternoon, which ended with a wrecked car, police, and her mother angrier than she had ever seen. On the drive home they passed a church, and her mom pulled into the parking lot.

That stop at the church led to a life-changing wilderness therapy experience where she spent three months getting to know and love herself. One night in the wild of Colorado she looked up at the moon and felt something she had never felt in her life, and it changed what she thought was possible. Today she mentors teen girls through her practice, Homing Instinct.

This is a recovery story, and it is also the closest thing to a translation I can hand you. Ciara says out loud what our kids cannot, including one line about hope that will especially resonate if your child currently feels out of control and beyond reach.

If your child is pushing you away with both hands, this one is for you.

YOU'LL LEARN

EPISODE RESOURCES:

This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream CommunityLearn about The Stream, our private online community for momsFind us on Instagram hereWatch the podcast on YouTube hereDownload a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and AlcoholHopestream Community is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and an Amazon Associate. We may make a small commission if you purchase from our links.

Brook McKenzie's journey into addiction began around age 13 or 14. By 15 he needed treatment, and he went through three adolescent treatment programs between 15 and 17. His brother took a very different path — college, career, marriage — while Brook's life looked nothing like that through his adolescent years and well beyond. He did not get into long-term recovery until he was in his 30s.

Reflecting on that time, Brook says the suffering his family experienced may have been greater than his own. 'The terror, the confusion, the guilt, all of the fear that my mom and dad and brother and extended family experienced defies description.' His family made decisions in isolation with no real community or guidance available to them.

What finally changed things, he says, was that the people who loved him most eventually allowed him to fully experience the consequences of his own decisions. 'They finally took a loving step back and said, you know what, we're gonna allow Brook to experience fully the consequence that he creates.' Until that happened, he was always waiting on them to solve the problems he created.

Brook describes a cycle where both the addicted loved one and the parents are each seeking relief. The loved one reaches for a substance. The parents reach for what he calls their own lever — doing something, fixing something, paying something — to get relief from the fear or guilt they feel in the moment.

'Everyone's just trying to feel better. Everyone's trying to feel relief. Everyone's trying to feel and access more comfort. In my experience, as long as my family was pursuing that, I was never getting better.'

— Brook McKenzie

He describes fear as having just two faces: being afraid of losing something you have, or being afraid of not getting something you want. Any parent, he says, can look back over the past 48 hours and recognize one or both of those at work in a recent decision.

Brook has seen parents do a great deal of talking and telling — explaining to their child why they need to change, trying to find the right words to inspire them. He says he has worked with thousands and thousands of families and has never, not even once, seen that approach produce a good result.

What he has seen work is parents shifting to simply stating what they will do and what they will not do, and leaving it there. When parents start doing that, he says, the results can come in weeks or months, not years.

He also describes what he calls an ineffective contract that families get locked into — an unspoken arrangement where fear and guilt on one side produce rescuing and enabling on the other. 'The families that do the best, I mean there's no comparison, are the families that make a decision and say, you know what, I'm willing to feel. I'm willing to feel the discomfort, the trepidation, the pain, the guilt, and the fear. I'm willing to walk through it.'

Brook prefers the word disabling over enabling, because he says it more accurately captures what happens over time. When families continuously do things for the loved one that the loved one could do for themselves, they are sending a message — not an intentional one, but a message all the same — that they do not believe the loved one is capable.

'Every time someone who loved me did something like that for me, they were demanding that I acknowledge I'm not capable of doing these things. I'm not capable of basic responsibilities. I'm not capable of accountability. I'm not capable of being responsible for really any aspect of my life.'

— Brook McKenzie

He also talks about how the bar drops for the addicted loved one while staying in place for siblings. The goal, he says, is to get that bar back up as quickly as possible and to be honest with the loved one about what is expected and what the family will and will not do.

When asked what ends up in the two columns — what we will do and what we will not do — Brook keeps it simple. What parents will do is support access to recovery and treatment. What they will not do is lie, make excuses, or pay debts the loved one created through their own choices and decisions.

He also encourages parents who are in therapy to go in with a specific purpose: to explore how fear and guilt are shaping their parenting decisions. 'Go in, be honest, authentic, and say, hey, I've become very curious about how my fear and my guilt is influencing my parenting decisions. Can you help me with that?'

For parents wondering why their child pushes back or threatens or withdraws love the moment a parent starts holding firmer, Brook has a clear answer: 'They do that because it works. That's the only reason.' And the good news, he says, is that once the loved one sees that tactic no longer works, they stop doing it almost immediately.

His final message to parents: you must go first. The families waiting on their loved one to change are, in his experience, unlikely to see results. The families who make changes in their own behavior, get into community, and are willing to feel the discomfort of doing harder things — those are the families he sees get good outcomes.

Episode 341

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

You‘ve probably watched your child make a decision so obviously terrible you could not understand how it made sense to them. Darren Hobbs can tell you exactly how it looked, because he made that decision. He had done treatment. He had a sponsor, a home group, a year chip. Then he took some cash he made, drove back to his old dealer, and fully believed he could be the sober cocaine dealer in a small college town.

His story starts at 14, with a Vicodin prescription after surgery and the discovery that with substances in him, everything was better, easier and more fun. It runs through years of drinking and cocaine, wrecked cars, stolen money, and parents who kept trying to love him out of it. It ends, or maybe begins, on the floor of a Nashville bar with undercover detectives on top of him, staring at 20 years in prison.

What changed him was not the arrest. It was a phone call from his mother, and one sentence she said that I know broke her heart - and drove his recovery.

Darren is a Certified Intervention Professional, founder of The Firm Addiction Consulting in Nashville, and a cast member on A&E's Intervention. He has taken hundreds of families through interventions, and he is blunt about what parents do that keeps their kids stuck. He also told me the most extraordinary story of divine timing I have heard on this show. If you watch on YouTube, you will see the goosebumps on both of us.

This is the first of four recovery stories this month, and I started here because Darren says out loud the things our kids cannot.

If you are watching your child choose the things that will hurt them and cannot make sense of it, this one is for you.

YOU'LL LEARN

EPISODE RESOURCES:

This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream CommunityLearn about The Stream, our private online community for momsFind us on Instagram hereWatch the podcast on YouTube hereDownload a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and AlcoholHopestream Community is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and an Amazon Associate. We may make a small commission if you purchase from our links.

Before she understood what boundaries were, Brenda described feeling invisible — like a doormat — with rules that nobody followed and no way to enforce anything. 'I felt like I was invisible, like I was a doormat, like none of my rules were being followed,' she shared. That frustration didn't stay contained. It boiled up into anger, resentment, and eventually moments she wasn't proud of — like unplugging an Xbox and throwing it across the room.

Cathy recognized the same pattern in herself. She called herself 'the marshmallow.' The harder her husband got with their kids, the softer she became. And she was honest about why: fear. Fear that if she said 'no drugs in this home,' her kids would walk out and never come back. 'The reality was that's happened without me setting that boundary,' she said. They left anyway.

'There's so much resentment. Not only with your kids, but seems like with everybody. That just like you said, that anger, to me, it overflowed to everything.' — Cathy Cioth

Both hosts were clear that this kind of overwhelm is common and worth naming directly. When you don't have boundaries, resentment builds. Anger spills onto everyone. You find yourself trying to hold together a version of yourself that looks fine on the outside while everything at home is falling apart. And sometimes, you snap.

The most important thing both hosts wanted listeners to understand is that a boundary is not an ultimatum. An ultimatum is an attempt to control what someone else does. A boundary is about what you need and how you will respond.

Cathy described her mental image of a white picket fence around a small plot of green grass. 'Your boundaries are for you,' she said. 'What you need to be safe, what you need to feel healthy.' There is a gate in the fence — people can come in, and you can go out — but the terms for entering are yours to set.

'When you learn how to create a boundary, when you realize who they're for, and once you do it and you have a little bit of success, it feels so good. And then you want to keep doing it, you want to build on that. It's like you're exercising this amazing muscle and it gets stronger.' — Cathy Cioth

Brenda added that boundaries always start with 'I' — 'I need this,' or 'I feel this way, and therefore this is what I'm going to do.' They are not 'you can't do this.' That distinction matters.

Cathy shared how she and her husband addressed finding drugs in their home. They called drugs 'software' and the implements used to take them 'hardware.' After talking it through together — not in the middle of a confrontation — they decided: no drugs in the home. If found, they would be disposed of, and their son would not be able to stay the night.

'Oh boy, that was such a tough one for me, honestly,' Cathy said. Her son stayed out of the house many times. It felt defeating. But she and her husband had agreed on it together, communicated it calmly in advance, and held it. 'When we first set out that boundary, my son took it really well.'

Brenda shared a boundary she held for herself first — stopping herself from waking her son up for school. She knew the only way to break her habit of going downstairs to check on him was to physically remove herself: a walk with the dog, or a shower. 'At first, it was just painful. I'm in the shower, just did it feel so forced,' she recalled. But eventually he started getting himself up.

The harder boundary came during a family move. Brenda had set conditions for her son to move with them — going to therapy, not using in the home, packing his room, being out by eight in the morning for showings. He did none of them. On moving day, with the pods in the driveway and the house empty, he was in a sleeping bag in the corner of his room saying he wasn't leaving. She had to bag up his childhood belongings and tell him he could not come with them — and could not know their new address because she was scared of the people he was involved with. 'That took a lot of therapy to be able to do that,' she said.

'If you are at the point where you have to hold a boundary that severe, get yourself some support. Don't try to do that alone.' — Brenda Zane

Brenda was clear that boundaries aren't only about your child — they are also about protecting your own emotional state. These include things like deciding not to scroll social media during prom season or graduation if it's painful, setting aside time to exercise, or arranging meals so you can actually nourish yourself when you don't have the mental bandwidth to cook.

Cathy spoke specifically about setting a boundary around social media during hard seasons: 'Give yourself that grace, set a boundary around social media or whatever that is that might be affecting you because I think it's just so important. Those are some really tough times emotionally.'

Brenda also walked through how boundaries extend to siblings, extended family, and even well-meaning relatives who always have an opinion about what you should do with your child. She described the example of a sister who brings up your struggling child every time you're together: you might set a boundary that says, for a while, that topic is off the table when we see each other. If she can't do that, you may need to spend less time together in person.

Cathy added that boundaries don't have to be all-or-nothing. 'Maybe you could say to your sister, hey, look, five minutes we could chat about it. But after that, I just really want to enjoy this holiday with the family.' Tweaking a boundary so it still works for you is completely allowed. And boundaries can change over time — what worked or felt necessary a year ago may not need to be the same today.