Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction

There are moments in this journey when your coach isn't available, your therapist can't be reached, and the community is quiet. It is just you and whatever is unfolding in your relationship with your child, and you need a way through. In this solo episode, Brenda Zane distills a year of thinking into ten self-coaching questions drawn from CRAFT (Community Reinforcement and Family Training) and the Invitation to Change approach — questions designed to help parents examine their own role, interrupt unhelpful patterns, and become a more effective agent of change.

CRAFT and the Invitation to Change both ask parents to look at the whole family system, not just the child. That means examining your own responses, beliefs, and behaviors as contributing variables. This is not about blame; it is about locating the lever you actually control. As Brenda puts it, these questions are uncomfortable on purpose — if they sting a little, they are working.

'What is my role in some of the problems that my child is facing? ITC asks us as parents to look at our own behavior as part of the system, not just our child's behavior.' — Brenda Zane

Starting here — with question number one — sets the tone: am I contributing to the dysfunction, or am I helping to calm and regulate it? That single question can shift a parent's entire orientation.

Questions two and three address one of the most concrete and actionable CRAFT skills: removing positive reinforcers for use and allowing natural consequences to land. CRAFT research is explicit that most parents dramatically under-reinforce positive behavior and over-respond to negative behavior. At the same time, shielding a child from the natural fallout of their choices — out of love, out of fear of their reaction, or because the parent cannot bear to watch — removes the very feedback loop that motivates change.

Question four takes a different angle: do you understand the underlying reason your child is using? Brenda uses the hot stove analogy — people do not touch hot stoves unless they are getting something from it. Drawing on Gabor Maté's framing, the question is not “why the addiction” but “why the pain” — and mapping those triggers is the foundation of CRAFT's functional analysis.

Questions five through seven turn the mirror more directly on parent behavior. Am I modeling the behavior I want to see? CRAFT includes specific guidance on your behavior as a lever because children watch what their parents do, not what they say. Emotional regulation, distress tolerance, willingness to try new things, engagement in your own life — all of it is visible to a child, even one who looks entirely distracted.

'Your child is watching and they will do what you do, not what you say to do.' — Brenda Zane

Question six surfaces a well-researched CRAFT principle: positive reinforcement for non-using behavior. What gets rewarded gets repeated. The shift from a home environment dominated by negativity, tension, and reactivity to one where positive behaviors are noticed and named is not soft — it is evidence-based. Question seven asks whether you are picking up the rope in emotional tug-of-war, and what you are doing to stay calm and respond with intention instead of reacting.

Questions eight and nine address the interior work that makes all the external tools possible. Acceptance — not approval, not resignation, but the willingness to see clearly where you actually are — is a prerequisite for effective action in both CRAFT and motivational interviewing. You cannot use CRAFT tools effectively if you are bargaining with reality about where your child is.

Question nine asks whether you have neglected your own wellbeing by attaching yourself entirely to your child's struggle. Brenda draws a clear line between self-care (a practice for when the boat is mostly stable) and self-preservation (what you do when the boat is tipping). CRAFT treats caregiver self-care as a clinical necessity, not a luxury — there is an entire module dedicated to it, and research shows that caregiver burnout directly undermines the consistency required to help someone with a substance use disorder.

The tenth question is perhaps the hardest: am I able to separate my identity from my child's, or have I lost myself in their story? It is very common for parents to become what Brenda calls “addicted to their child's addiction” — all brain space, all soul, all spirit consumed by the child's struggle. Your child is not your report card. Enmeshment — the “talking in the we” pattern — can feel like devotion but actually reinforces the fusion that makes it harder for both parent and child to move forward.

Used together and revisited regularly, these ten questions give parents a structured way to do the self-examination that CRAFT and the Invitation to Change ask of us — even on the days when no one else is available to help.

If you have ever felt like a failure simply because you could not fix what your child is going through, this episode of Hopestream is for you. Brenda Zane sits down with Dr. Wes Robins, a licensed professional counselor, PhD, and self-described Soul Nurse practicing out of a 1960s ranch house in Alpharetta, Georgia. Since his previous appearance on the show, Wes made the gut-wrenching decision to close the treatment center he built over five and a half years, a loss that became its own kind of portal. What came through the other side is a perspective on parenting struggling children that is honest, grounded, and deeply freeing.

Wes wrote a piece at his kitchen table while his daughters worked on art beside him, and Brenda asked him to read it aloud. The piece, titled When the Map Burns: Notes for Parents Walking Through the Fire, opens with a line that stopped Brenda cold: you are not broken. From there it builds into a gentle, fierce refusal to reduce parenting to a set of outcomes to control.

'You are not here to fix your child. You are here to walk beside them, to meet them in their chaos, not control it, to love without needing to rescue. Your child is not broken. They are an unfolding soul.' — Dr. Wes Robins

This is the frame everything else in the episode hangs on. Your child's pain is not a problem to be solved. It is, in Wes's words, a portal. And when you stop trying to engineer the outcome, something opens up for both of you.

Wes is frank about his own path: from substance use at seventeen through three arrests, then a PhD in consciousness and society, a published book, a treatment center, a breakdown, and a return. He draws on Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, Carl Jung, and Dr. Shefali Tsabary to make a case that is worth sitting with: your child's struggle is not happening to you, it is happening for you.

That reframe does not minimize the pain. It does something harder. It asks parents to recognize that the child's difficulty stirs old wounds and awakens what has been buried. That is not failure. That is invitation.

'Pain and suffering is what teaches us all. It is the great portal of transformation. If somebody took away my pain and my suffering from me, I would be half the person that I am today.' — Dr. Wes Robins

For parents, this means getting genuinely curious about your own fear, rather than trying to manage it into the background while you fix your child.

One of the most practically useful distinctions Wes draws is between empathy and presence. Empathy connects you to another person's experience. But presence is what actually supports healing. Joining in the suffering does not lift it. Witnessing it does.

He borrows from Dr. Shefali: a parent's greatest fear is a child in pain, but a child's greatest disservice is a parent who cannot witness that pain. The difference matters enormously in the room. Your child does not need you to drown alongside them. They need you to stay on the bank, solid and available, so they can find their way to shore.

Wes returns again and again to a simple image: imagine you are on a plane and turbulence hits. The first thing every passenger does is look at the flight attendant. If she is calm, passengers relax. If she grabs the seat and goes pale, everyone panics. Like it or not, you are the flight attendant on your child's journey.

That does not mean pretending everything is fine. It means doing the internal work to stay regulated so that your nervous system does not become another emergency your child has to navigate. This is counterintuitive because it asks parents to prioritize their own grounding at exactly the moment every instinct screams to focus on the child. But a dysregulated parent adds suffering to an already difficult situation, while a grounded parent creates the stable field their child can find their way back to.

The through-line of everything Wes shares is a choice that sounds simple and is anything but: choosing love over fear. Fear swallows you whole. It consumes your presence and turns care into control. Love, by contrast, is not peace or perfection. In his words, love is wild, messy, and showing up again after the slammed door, the silence, the relapse, the shutdown.

He offers parents a short list worth returning to: you cannot control other people, the economy, the past, every thought, every trigger. What you can control is whether you stay, whether you breathe, whether you soften, whether you repair. That is not resignation. That is the hardest and most effective work available to a parent right now.

If you have a daughter and a relationship that feels like it is missing something you can't quite name, this episode of Hopestream may be the conversation you have been waiting for. Brenda Zane talks with Lacey Tezino, founder of Passport Journeys and author of Therapy After Mom Died, about adoption, reunion, generational patterns around alcohol, and the single insight that changed how she parents: you have to connect before you correct.

Lacey grew up being told her biological mother had died. When she was 19 and hungover on another motherless Mother's Day, she called information on a whim. Her mother picked up the phone. What followed was a decade-long relationship she describes as beautiful, heartbreaking, and nothing she was prepared for.

'When she picked up the phone and I heard her voice for the very first time at 19 years old, and me having to say like, "I think I'm your daughter," was like beyond. Like the little emoji with the brain exploding. There's like no words, no explanation for just like telling someone at that point, like, you know, on the phone, "I think I'm your daughter," is wild.' — Lacey Tezino

The reunion gave Lacey something she had never had: a sense of being tethered to a parent. But it also placed enormous expectations on a woman who was unprepared for a daughter to suddenly arrive in her life. They struggled, cycled through the same conversations, and leaned heavily on alcohol to get anywhere honest together.

Both of Lacey's biological parents were daily drinkers. Drinking was the connection point she and her mother shared from the start. Margaritas on Friday nights, wine over hard conversations, tequila lowering the barriers so they could finally say what they meant.

When her mother received a stage four lung cancer diagnosis, urgency replaced alcohol as the catalyst for honesty. Sitting through chemo appointments, they finally asked the hard questions. Lacey found herself wondering: why did it take running out of time to get there? That question became the seed of her life's work.

Lacey describes a Friday night ritual she could not unsee once she saw it. She and her husband both had high-pressure jobs. Every week they would pick up the kids, head to the Mexican restaurant, hand the children toys to keep them busy, and order margaritas. As the drinks arrived, the tension left their bodies. The kids watched every bit of it.

'Was I modeling to them that I needed that to bring the day down, to now be able to have this fun connection with them? And I was just like... it started making me really sad, to be honest. It made me super sad, and I had a lot of guilt.' — Lacey Tezino

She also recalled coming home from a stressful day and telling her kids, oh my gosh, mom needs a glass of wine, and then I can deal with blah blah blah. It never occurred to her in that moment that this framing might be quietly teaching her children something about what alcohol is for. Seeing her own parents through this lens had already given her a preview of where that road leads.

Through Passport Journeys, Lacey now works with mothers and daughters using an eight-question relationship scale that measures trust, respect, and quality time at the start of a program and again at three and six months. The pattern she keeps finding is both surprising and painful.

On the question I feel like I understand my daughter, mothers almost always score themselves high. On the mirror question, I feel understood by my mother, daughters score it low. They are passing ships, each convinced the other has the full picture, each missing the other entirely.

The teen years are particularly damaging: hormonal, identity-laden, and almost impossible to navigate without some outside support. But the clients who show up most often at Passport Journeys are 30- to 40-year-old daughters who want to revisit those years with a therapist present. They are not there because love is absent. They are there because healing never happened.

The principle that anchors everything Lacey does came from one of her therapists. A lot of parents try to fix or correct their child, the therapist explained, but they are not connected to their child first. The structured bonding activities Passport Journeys assigns between therapy sessions are not just busywork: they are building the safety that makes correction possible.

You have to connect before you correct, the therapist said. And Lacey heard it as both a parenting truth and a generational one. Her mother could not correct what she did not understand. Lacey could not heal what she could not name. Therapy, structured connection, and the courage to ask hard questions before time runs out: that is the through line of this episode, and of Lacey's work in the world.

If you have ever watched your child go through treatment and wondered whether anything was actually landing, this episode of Hopestream will feel like a permission slip. Brenda Zane speaks with Brad McLeod, host of Sober Motivation, a top 0.5 percent podcast globally with over five million downloads. Brad was seventeen when he sat in a psych ward for the second time. He ran from a rest stop on the way to treatment. He accumulated a felony conviction, a methadone dependency, and ultimately a deportation to Canada with a lifetime ban from the US. He tells none of it as a cautionary tale. He tells it as someone who finally understands what his brain was looking for, and what it actually took to stop running.

Brad grew up in Canada, moved to Waco, Texas at six, and spent his childhood quietly trying to figure out where he fit. Undiagnosed ADHD drove suspension after suspension. Therapists, psychiatrists, and a rotating roster of medications filled his calendar, yet the one thing missing was any language for what he was actually experiencing inside.

'I think I was just in a, trying to figure out who I was. I never knew who I was. I never felt comfortable from the outside looking in, you probably wouldn't notice that but the behavior started this kind of spiral out of control.' — Brad McLeod

When Brad first tried cocaine in college, the attraction was immediate and logical from his perspective: the world stopped feeling so heavy. The substance was not the problem. It was the first solution that worked. Every parent who has heard a child say it just made sense will recognize this. Substances solve a real problem, even when they create far larger ones.

Brad's relationship with ADHD medication is a thread worth pulling for any parent navigating similar terrain. He was diagnosed young and placed on Adderall. At sixteen he deliberately stopped taking it, hiding the change from his family, because going off it made him feel socially alive for the first time. The risk-taking escalated. The dopamine gap widened. Within a couple of years he had moved from Percocet to heroin, not because he sought danger but because heroin was cheaper and the need kept growing.

This is not an argument against ADHD medication. Research consistently shows that properly managed ADHD medication lowers the risk of later substance use. Brad's own story loops back to this: at 38, recently re-starting medication, he finally began to understand the full shape of how his brain worked, and how much energy he had been spending managing it without support.

Brad uses this phrase deliberately, and it lands hard for parents whose entire focus has been on getting the substance out of the picture. He points out that he got sober many times involuntarily: running out of money, landing in jail, or cycling through detox. The substance was never really the problem in isolation.

'Getting sober was never my problem anyway. I mean, I would run out of money, I'd be in jail. Like I would sober up. How could I stay sober? And I think that's what I had to zoom out a little bit and figure out like how do I begin to build a life that is more valuable than the alternative life?' — Brad McLeod

What changed was not sobriety itself but the construction of what he calls recovery capital: things worth losing. Relationships. A sense of identity. Work that connected to purpose. Once there was something to protect, the calculus shifted. Parents waiting for a clean drug test as the sign that everything is resolved are looking at the wrong metric.

Brad spent time in a wilderness program outside Knoxville, a locked residential facility, jail, and multiple detox programs. Looking back, he is emphatic that none of it was wasted, even the stretches where he was not cooperating. The skills and frameworks he encountered kept surfacing years later, once he was finally ready to implement them rather than simply accumulate them.

For parents who have watched a child walk out of a program and immediately relapse, this matters. The knowledge went in. The timing was wrong, not the intervention. Brad also noted something about the question he asks guests on his podcast: the night before they got sober, did they have any idea it would be their last night? Almost universally the answer is no. Change can arrive without announcement, and previous treatment is part of what makes it possible when it does.

The identity work Brad describes is the unglamorous part of recovery that rarely gets discussed. He graduated as an addiction counselor, worked with teenagers in a residential setting for eight years, and eventually launched Sober Motivation from his basement not because he had the answers but because he knew what it felt like to be alone in the question. Community, purpose, and accountability that he did not expect all played a role in the shift.

For parents, the invitation here is a reframe. Rather than focusing exclusively on abstinence, the deeper question is: what does your child have to live for? What are they building that they would not want to lose? Helping create conditions for that, even incrementally, is some of the most powerful work a parent can do alongside the more visible interventions.

If you have ever been handed the word codependent and felt it didn't quite fit, this episode of Hopestream will feel like a relief. Brenda Zane talks with Rawly Glass, LCSW, a therapist and parent educator who spent years turning the codependency label over in his hands before setting it down and looking for something truer. What he found reframes a concept most of us were handed without enough context, and it has real implications for parents trying to support a child through substance use without losing themselves.

Glass grew up in a home full of violence and, at sixteen, made a pact to do things differently. He earned a master's in social work and built a career in private therapy, yet something from his history kept surfacing. When someone handed him the codependent label, he turned it over and put it back down.

'I'm looking at codependency, it doesn't quite fit, and I start trying to figure out what else is out there... that's the beginning of what I ultimately began to call external dependency.' — Rawly Glass

His instinct is worth sitting with, because the codependency framework, as commonly taught, is a behavioral label, a list of things people do. Glass became convinced the behavior was the surface, not the source.

The reframe Glass offers is external dependency. Rather than describing a person who loves too much or can't stop helping, the term names a pattern in which we orient almost entirely outward, trying to manage and control what we can see, because we have lost reliable access to what we feel inside.

This is the part that lifts shame rather than adding it. Codependency, taught as a behavioral defect, can pathologize one of the most beautiful things about people: the capacity to be gentle and caring. External dependency locates the problem differently, not in the caring itself, but in a disrupted relationship with the self underneath it.

Glass draws on Terry Kellogg and on Dan Siegel's work on the developing brain to make sense of this. When a child is chronically focused on where the next blow is coming from, the developmental machinery that builds a relationship with the self doesn't get to form the way it should.

'It's actually the absence of a relationship with self, and when I first read that, I'm like, what in the world? That doesn't even make any sense to me. How can you not have a relationship with self?' — Rawly Glass

It took Glass years to absorb the idea. Trauma, even the quiet kind, interferes with that inward orientation. When the inside feels inaccessible or unsafe, controlling the outside becomes the only available strategy, and that is exactly the pattern parents recognize when a child is in crisis.

This reframe also explains why so much standard advice falls flat. Parents are told to practice self-care, but if the relationship with the self has been disrupted, bolting on bubble baths and yoga doesn't reach the actual gap. Glass argues that real change starts further upstream, by rebuilding the capacity to orient inward, notice what is happening in your own body and emotions, and stay with it.

For parents, this is not abstract. The same external-dependency pattern that drives constant monitoring, fixing, and controlling of a struggling child is the one that leaves a parent depleted and disconnected from themselves.

Recovery, in this framing, is less about stopping a list of 'codependent' behaviors and more about building a relationship with yourself, the developmental work that got interrupted. Glass describes aspects of that relationship most of us are missing, and frames healing as a gradual return to inward orientation rather than a one-time fix.

For a parent walking alongside a child's substance use, the invitation is gentle but significant: the goal is not to care less, but to stop outsourcing your entire sense of okay-ness to whether you can control your child's choices, and to begin coming home to yourself.

If your young adult has been through treatment and come home only to stall, not ready for college, not ready to live independently, but clearly not thriving on the couch either, you are in one of the most disorienting places a parent can occupy. In this episode of Hopestream, Brenda Zane talks with Will White, a licensed clinical social worker who has worked in behavioral health since 1989, co-founded the wilderness-therapy program Summit Achievement, and helped launch a trades-based program for young adults called The Trade. His view of the bigger picture, built over nearly four decades, is that the young people who are struggling today are different from those of a generation ago, and that the help they need looks different too.

White describes a clear change in who shows up needing help. The young person of the 1990s and early 2000s was often an externalizer, someone expressing anger, frustration, or pain loudly by breaking things, slamming doors, or walking away. Today he sees far more young people who are anxious, inward, and frozen, who won't leave their room or the house at all.

'The young residents there, a lot of them had become so overwhelmed with anxiety that they were no longer leaving their homes.' — Will White

He points to several forces behind the shift: the rewiring effect of always-on screens and social media, the aftermath of COVID, and a steady diet of alarming news that raises anxiety for parents and kids alike. Notably, he points out that overall drug use among adolescents is actually lower than in past decades, even as anxiety diagnoses have climbed.

White borrows the term 'the polycrisis' to describe an era in which many traditional models are breaking apart at once. The wilderness-therapy field, he notes, contracted sharply in a short span, and behavioral health moved rapidly online during COVID. None of this is purely good or bad; his point is that the old assumption of a single standardized program that fits everyone no longer holds.

He is candid about his own evolution. Trained as a licensed clinician who once dismissed coaching, he now uses a coach himself and sees the value of matching the right young person to the right kind of help, whether that is licensed clinical care, coaching, or something experiential. The throughline of his career is a conviction that doing alongside people often helps more than talking at them across an office.

One of the most useful ideas in the conversation is what White calls over-accommodation. Loving parents of an anxious young person often try to keep the peace by quietly rearranging family life around the anxiety, and that instinct, however caring, can backfire.

'Parents would over-accommodate in trying to be a caring parent, and at the same time it would backfire, because it would get worse and worse.' — Will White

His counterintuitive guidance is that an anxious young person usually needs encouragement to do hard things, not protection from them. Spending time outdoors or taking on real activity tends to lower anxiety, even though every parental instinct says to shield the child from discomfort.

That philosophy is the foundation of The Trade, the nonprofit program White helped launch in rural New Hampshire for young adults of all genders, roughly ages 18 to 30. It is deliberately not a primary treatment program. Many participants, called apprentices, have already been through treatment and don't need more talk therapy; what they want is experience, structure, and a path toward independence.

Apprentices are exposed to many trades rather than just one, mentored about 40 hours a week by skilled tradespeople, and supported by full-time staff who live alongside them. White frames the goal as learning to be both independent and interdependent, knowing when to ask for help and when to rely on your own skills. The lessons, he argues, are lifelong: how an engine works, how to paint a room, how to show up and work hard.

What makes the model unusual is that apprentices are paid from day one and expected to work a real 40-hour week, with onboarding and even retirement-account options, like any new job. For many, it is the first paycheck of their lives.

'I did that. First of all, I didn't know how to do it, then I learned how to do it, I did it, and I got money for it.' — Will White, on what a first paycheck does for a young person

That sequence, learning a skill, doing the work, and being paid for it, is a profound self-esteem builder, especially for young people who are anxious or neurodiverse and arrive with little confidence. White's closing message to exhausted parents is gentle and grounded: this too shall pass, stay connected to a safe community, lead with love, get outdoors, and take it one day at a time.

If you are a parent trying to figure out how serious your child's substance use really is, you are making one of the most consequential assessments of your life without a reliable framework. In this solo episode, Brenda Zane borrows a powerful concept from medicine, staging, to give parents the clarity they have never been handed. The result is a four-stage map that helps you stop reacting to incidents and start responding strategically.

Medicine has long used staging to give patients and families a shared language for urgency and appropriate response. Parents of children who use substances have received nothing comparable. As Brenda puts it, parents are expected to assess a situation that clinicians in other fields spend years learning to read. This episode is an attempt to close that gap by borrowing the staging concept, not because addiction is like cancer, but because staging is one of the most useful ideas medicine ever produced.

Before walking through the four stages, Brenda sets the landscape with two facts that are categorically different from twenty years ago. First, substances themselves have changed. THC concentration in cannabis averaged around 2% in the 1960s and today commonly exceeds 12% in flower, with concentrates reaching 60 to 90 percent THC. Second, fentanyl contamination of the street drug supply is now essentially complete.

'If your frame of reference is, my kid is just experimenting like I did, you're comparing two completely different chemical realities. Even moderate use of today's THC or something that has fentanyl in it carries huge risk that even the use of 10 years ago does not compare to.' — Brenda Zane

Brenda also flags a dangerous and counterintuitive pattern: the young person who is quietly at home, withdrawn, self-medicating anxiety and depression in their room. The absence of a visible crisis is not evidence of an absence of a problem.

Drawing on the DSM-5 spectrum of mild, moderate, and severe substance use disorder, Brenda maps four stages parents can actually use.

Stage 1: Experimentation and early use. Social, curiosity-driven use at parties. The brain's reward system is being introduced to artificial dopamine spikes, but most people who try substances do not develop a disorder. The appropriate response is connection-based conversation, not panic, not silence.

Stage 2: Regular use and developing pattern. More frequent, more intentional use; sometimes alone. Mood shifts, changing friend groups, disrupted sleep, withdrawal to a room. Tolerance is building. This is the stage where parental approach matters most, because influence is still significant and CRAFT-based skills can alter the trajectory.

Stage 3: Problematic use and moderate to severe SUD. Substance use is now organizing your child's life. They may be using just to feel normal, not to feel good. Professional support is no longer optional. As Dr. Gabor Maté frames it, the question is never why the addiction but why the pain.

Stage 4: Severe SUD and crisis. Medical risk is real. Overdose, withdrawal complications, complete breakdown of functioning. Safety comes first, but the relationship is not abandoned.

Unlike cancer staging, which is largely linear, addiction staging is not. People move in both directions. Early and long-term recovery are real: SAMHSA data shows 72% of Americans who have ever had a substance use disorder are in recovery. This is also the stage where the cancer comparison earns its keep: the intensity of the response must match the reality of the situation.

'94% of the time, they don't believe they have a problem, or they don't know, or they're too ashamed, or they just think that they don't need help yet. So this is where your role as a parent becomes very important, uniquely important, because you, my friend, are the biggest and most influential factor in your child's willingness and ability to get help.' — Brenda Zane

Brenda walks through a practical assessment process: look at observable markers, not just at the substance itself or the absence of obvious crisis. Track functioning, frequency, consequences, secrecy, isolation, and mental health. Map communication strategy to the stage your child is actually in, not the stage you hope or fear they are in. And do not wait for a crisis to get your own support.

The stream community, one-on-one coaching, and a personal therapist are not luxuries at this point. They are the infrastructure that keeps a parent ready to move when the window of opportunity opens.

There is a specific kind of searching that happens at 2am when you are a parent in the thick of it, typing half-formed fears into a search bar because you cannot say them out loud to anyone in your life. In this episode of Hopestream, co-founders Brenda Zane and Cathy Cioth sit down to answer the four questions they hear most from parents in the community, including the ones that arrive with a quiet residue of shame just for asking. Both are nine and ten years out from the hardest seasons of their own journeys, and both are trained in CRAFT (Community Reinforcement and Family Training). Nothing in this conversation comes from a textbook.

This question stops many parents cold. The answer is more nuanced than most families were told. According to the Recovery Research Institute, roughly 60% of people who have resolved a significant substance use disorder did so without any formal treatment at all. That figure does not mean treatment isn't valuable, but it does mean it is not the only door.

'There are so many ways to get better. Does it involve thousands of dollars and a big intervention? That's what we imagine in our minds, but the beauty of this recovery world right now is so great because there are so many different options.' — Cathy Cioth

Brenda also recalls Jo Colette, a guest who became an IV heroin user as a teenager, drove cross-country in active withdrawal, and never set foot in formal treatment. She simply reached her gift of desperation and stopped. The data and the stories together tell the same story: the path to recovery is wide. Your job as a parent is to maintain connection and stay ready for when your child is willing to accept help, in whatever form that takes.

Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome, known by the acronym PAWS, is the thing nobody warned you about when your child finally got sober and you expected life to start looking better, and it did not. PAWS shows up as brain fog, low motivation, irritability, poor sleep, and anxiety, all symptoms that look a great deal like using behavior. That confusion is exactly what makes PAWS so dangerous, for the parent who fears relapse and for the young person who may not understand what is happening inside their own body.

Brenda and Cathy note that PAWS can persist for a year or longer and is simply a reflection of a body actively trying to heal. The brain, which bore the chemical brunt of substance use, does not snap back in a week. Physical support matters here: nutrition, sleep, access to a doctor with a good bedside manner around addiction, and gentle physical activity can all help the brain heal faster.

Neither Brenda nor Cathy had heard the term self-care when they were in the thick of their own journeys. Cathy remembers pulling into quiet neighborhoods and sleeping in her car for two hours because the exhaustion was absolute. Brenda recalls losing weight she could not afford to lose, fighting pain that radiated down both legs, and barely being able to walk around the block.

'When your child says they need some help, you want to be at the ready. Healthy. You've had breakfast, you've had water, you've walked around the block, so that when that moment comes you can step in grounded, not freaking out, with a plan.' — Cathy Cioth

If thinking about self-care as a gift to yourself is too abstract, try this frame instead: you are the most valuable asset in your child's life right now. Shoring up that asset is a strategic act, not a luxury. Start impossibly small. A five-minute walk. A glass of water. One real meal. Those tiny steps build the consistency that will hold you when the moment arrives and your child needs you grounded.

Warrior Moms, the Hopestream group for parents of adult children, is consistently the most active in the entire community. The reason is not hard to understand: having a 20-something or 30-something in active addiction who may barely be in contact is a mentally excruciating situation. Every rare interaction feels loaded with urgency, as if you must spill every fear and resource and plea before the window closes again.

The CRAFT approach says the opposite. Keep it neutral, warm, and brief. You are building a bridge, not crossing it all at once. Positive reinforcement still works at a distance: notice when they show up for work, acknowledge a healthy relationship, send a picture of the dog. And allow natural consequences to do their work. Those consequences belong to your child, not to you.

One of the most misunderstood CRAFT procedures is rewarding non-using behavior. It sounds counterintuitive: why be warmer and more connected when your child is not using? Because what gets rewarded gets repeated. When life with you feels better, more connected, lower friction during periods when they are not using, you are quietly shifting the cost-benefit math and making sobriety more attractive, not through lectures or ultimatums, but through your presence.

The flip side is equally important. When a child is using or is aggressive or oppositional, that is not the time to make dinner, offer a ride, or engage in a long argument. Even conflict, Brenda and Cathy remind us, is a dopamine hit. Picking up the rope in a tug-of-war is a reward for the behavior you are trying to reduce. The hardest and most effective thing you can do is sometimes to simply put down the phone, step away, and let the world deliver its own lessons.

When you're parenting a child through substance misuse or addiction, the focus naturally turns to their recovery, their treatment, their next steps. But what about you? Therapist Maya Kruger, who works with mothers navigating these exact challenges, offers a refreshing and compassionate perspective: your healing doesn't have to wait.

One of the most striking insights Maya shares is how parents can develop their own form of addiction in response to their child's substance use. She explains,

'We become addicted to our kids' addiction. Yep. We become addicted to trying to control everything in our world around us.' — Maya Kruger

This isn't about judgment - it's about understanding. When your child is engaging in dangerous behaviors, anxiety is completely appropriate. The challenge comes when that anxiety becomes a loop you can't exit, a pattern that feels as compulsive as any substance use disorder.

Maya offers a perspective that can lift tremendous shame from parents who feel like they're failing: your responses, even the ones you're not proud of, made sense at some point.

'Any behavior when we look at the context is brilliant because it serves a purpose, doesn't have the best consequences.' — Maya Kruger

Those controlling behaviors? They were adaptive survival strategies. The constant monitoring? It came from a genuine need to keep your child safe. Understanding this context doesn't mean these patterns are working now, but it does mean you can approach changing them with self-compassion rather than self-criticism.

When anxiety feels overwhelming, Maya suggests a deceptively simple practice: get curious and create distance. She recommends observing your anxiety like you're reporting the weather - noting it, naming it, but not becoming it. This practice of 'parking yourself next to yourself' allows you to sit with difficult feelings until they pass, rather than being consumed by them.

Perhaps the most liberating message Maya offers is this:

'It's never about fixing. It's about presence, and I think it's for inner parenting and for outer parenting as well.' — Maya Kruger

This applies both to how you show up for yourself and how you show up for your child. The impulse to fix is understandable, but presence - the simple act of being with someone in their struggle - is often more powerful and certainly more sustainable.

Maya encourages parents to give language to their emotions in front of their children instead of hiding their struggles. This isn't about burdening your child with your feelings, but about modeling that humans experience difficult emotions and can work through them. When you show your child that you're working on your own healing, you demonstrate that recovery and growth are lifelong processes, not destinations.

A central theme in Maya's work is the concept of inner parenting - tending to the younger parts of yourself that may be asking for attention when anxiety gets loud. She asks parents to consider: what younger part of you needs care right now? This isn't separate from parenting your child through addiction; it's essential to it. As Maya notes,

'I think postpartum is for life. You know? A hundred percent. You're not the same person.' — Maya Kruger

The transformation of becoming a parent, and especially of parenting through crisis, changes you fundamentally. Healing isn't about returning to who you were before - it's about caring for who you are now, with compassion and presence.

Episode 319

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Hunter Clarke-Fields was a painter. She had a graduate degree in art education, a high school teaching job, and what looked from the outside like a creative life. What nobody could see was that she was white-knuckling her way through it, cycling between intense highs and pits of despair she could not explain, having panic attacks in the hallways before she had any tools to handle them. She reached for yoga, then for books on mindfulness, and read about it for years before she finally, at 27, sat down and actually tried.

She set a timer for 10 minutes and sat there thinking the whole time. She was certain she was doing it wrong. But two months in, she looked back and realized she had not fallen into a single pit. Not one. For someone who had been cycling into darkness every couple of weeks for most of her adult life, that was not a small thing. It was everything. And it sent her down a path she never expected, one that eventually turned her into the Mindful Mama Mentor, a podcast host, a mindfulness teacher, and the bestselling author of Raising Good Humans.

Hunter now teaches mindfulness to parents all over the world, with over 20 years of meditation practice behind her and two daughters who, she will freely admit, grew up slightly allergic to the whole thing.

 I wanted to have this conversation because I think mindfulness gets written off as vague or soft, and Hunter makes it anything but. She explains what is actually happening in your brain when you blow up at your kid, why longer exhales are not just a cliche, and what she calls the Three R's, a framework so simple you will remember it in the worst moment. She also says something about feelings being like toddlers that I keep coming back to. 

If you have ever thought that mindfulness is not for you, or that you are too far gone to start, this one is for you.

You'll learn:

EPISODE RESOURCES:

This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream CommunityGet our free, 4-video course, Hope Starts Here, and access to our Limited Membership hereLearn 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.