Hopestream: Parenting Kids Through Addiction & Mental Health

You find the vape pen, or the pills, or the empty bottle at the bottom of the laundry basket. You take it, because that was the boundary. Within minutes your house goes from zero to two hundred: threats, slammed doors, a kid you barely recognize. Every instinct says respond right now, and if you are like Cathy and me, you do. Then you spend the next day trying to undo everything you said.
This episode is the practical companion to the self-coaching questions I shared in episode 328. Cathy and I walk through what we are calling Stream Vignettes, composite scenarios pulled from years of coaching calls, community posts, and our own homes. The confiscation that explodes. The natural consequence you have to sit through with your heart in your throat. The suicide threat that arrives attached to a demand for money. The family vacation you keep hoping will fix things.
For each one, we get into the questions that slow you down before you react, starting with the one we ask first every single time. We also cover what these questions are not for, which is a conversation I clearly needed about fifteen years ago.
What stayed with me most is something we kept circling back to: there is no expiration date on your response. Nothing requires you to handle the worst moment of your week at three in the morning. Cathy and I both have stories about what happens when you try.
If your home has a moment like this coming, and most of ours do, keep this one where you can find it.
YOU'LL LEARN:
The question Cathy and I ask first in every single scenario, before anything else
What your child's explosion over a confiscated substance is actually telling you
The advice therapists gave us about suicide threats, even when you’re pretty sure it’s a negotiation tactic
Who you are really rescuing when you cannot let a natural consequence play out
Why there is no expiration date on your response, and what to say while you figure it out
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Hopestream podcast ep. 328 - 10 Self-Coaching Questions - Part 1
Rawly Glass on Hopestream podcast 324 - consequences don’t work
This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms
Find us on Instagram here
Watch the podcast on YouTube here
Download 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.

Trigger Warning: this episode discusses loss of a child due to substance use. Please decide if this is the right time to listen. 
A few weeks before this episode was recorded, one of the moms in our community lost her son. He had been through treatment, through sober living and had the most supportive family. His parents had done everything possible, with grace and with love, and he still lost his battle with addiction. Cathy and I went back and forth about whether to talk about it - because we never want to add to the fear that already lives in your chest every single day.
But we’re asking you to do hard things, and that means we have to do the same. This is the reality of what our kids are facing. High-potency THC is not the weed of twenty years ago, and we are talking to parents every week whose kids are in crisis from it, not from fentanyl, not from meth, but from what many still consider the ‘safe one’. 
We also talk about something we haven’t directly addressed on this show: vicarious trauma in our kids. The bullying on their phones where we can’t see it. The friend who overdosed in front of them. The violence at school they never mention. These are often the invisible fire under the behaviors that make no sense to you.
One thing stayed with me after we finished recording: the idea of speaking to your child as if every word might be the last they ever hear from you. Not in a morbid way, but as a filter. As a way back to what matters most.
If you have been putting something off because it feels too hard, or not quite urgent enough yet, this one is for you.
YOU’LL LEARN:
Why Cathy and I almost did not share what happened, and what changed our minds
What high-potency THC is doing to adolescent brains and why parents shouldn’t dismiss it as ‘safer’ than other substances
The invisible traumas your kid may be carrying that explain the behaviors you can’t make sense of
How to not pick up the rope when every instinct tells you to
What one parent said about speaking to your child that might change your next interaction with them
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Stages of Addiction: Hopestream podcast episode 322
This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms
Find us on Instagram here
Watch the podcast on YouTube here
Download 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.

When Beth Hillman's son came home from wilderness treatment, the first crisis didn’t come from him. It came from her. Standing in the driveway, anxious and spiraling, she watched her teenage son look at her calmly and say, "Mom, look at me. I'm gonna be okay." Her first thought was not relief. It was, oh! I’m in big trouble.
Her son had come home with more access to his thinking brain than she had. He also came home to a mother who had not yet done her own work and was carrying expectations she could not even name. When he finally told her, "Mom, your expectations of how this is gonna go are going to wreck me," Beth had to get honest about what she was really asking of him.
Today Beth is a double certified life and parent coach, host of the Parenting Post-Wilderness podcast, and a familiar voice in our community, where she leads sessions and groups for parents in the fragile season after treatment.
In this conversation, we get real about the first 90 days after a child comes home, from both sides. Why kids may agree to everything just to get home, why pushback on a home plan might be the best sign you can get, and what your child is actually walking back into when they return to the house where the holes in the doors are. Beth names the piece most home plans are missing, and I think it will change how you prepare.
If your child is coming home from treatment soon, or is already home and wobbling, this episode was made for you.
YOU’LL LEARN:
The driveway moment that convinced Beth she was the one in trouble
Why kids check every box to get home, and why that is not manipulation
What her son said about her expectations that stopped Beth cold
The green flag most parents mistake for defiance
The almost too simple practice Beth reached for when her brain went offline
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Beth’s website - www.bethhillmancoaching.com
Beth’s podcast, Parenting Post Wilderness
Beth on Hopestream podcast episode 279
Information on PAWS (post-acute withdrawal syndrome)
This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms
Find us on Instagram here
Watch the podcast on YouTube here
Download 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.

ABOUT THE EPISODE:
There are days in this journey when the weight of it all becomes almost too much to carry. You are still showing up, still trying, still breathing through a kind of pain most people around you will never fully understand. A few years ago, I sat down and wrote something for you, for the mom and the dad and the grandparent in the thick of it, and I tucked it away. Today I pulled it back out.
This piece first appeared on Insight Timer, and it became the most-listened-to content there. I dusted it off because I needed something creative, and because I believe these words may land with where you are today. The world I recorded it in and the community we are now are not so different, and what I felt then, I still feel now.
This is not an interview. There is no guest, no framework, no five-step plan. It is just me, speaking out loud the things I wanted every struggling parent to hear in a heavy moment.
In this episode I ask you to set down, just for a few minutes, the weight you have been carrying. Not forever. Not in denial. Just long enough to breathe, to remember who you are outside of this fight, and to hear something true: this is not your whole life. You are still in there. And you are stronger than this feels right now.
If you are exhausted and need someone to remind you that you are not alone, this one is for you.

EPISODE RESOURCES:
Free ebook Worried Sick
Brenda’s content on Insight Timer
This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms
Find us on Instagram here
Watch the podcast on YouTube here
Download 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.

When my son Enzo was using fentanyl and Xanax and blowing up every structure I tried to build around him, I kept asking the wrong question. What I wasn’t asking was what was happening inside him that he couldn’t put words to. He was a teenager with an unmedicated ADHD brain, getting more reinforcement and belonging from the drug world than anywhere else in his life, and he had no way to tell me that.
Enzo is back on the podcast today with something specific: the things kids who are actively struggling can’t necessarily say but really wish their parents understood. When I asked what he would have wanted me to know back then, Enzo told me about a kid he recently mentored who, when asked the same question, said the only thing he wanted his parents to know was, “I’m trying.” And Enzo realized that was exactly it. Not that the drugs were working. Not that his choices were okay. Just that from inside his brain, he was doing something that felt like trying.
Enzo is now the founder of Life Strategies Mentors, a mentoring program for young men navigating recovery and reintegration. He’s in his late-twenties, expanding his team, building a life that not long ago did not seem survivable.
This conversation covers a lot of ground, from the fish love parable that reframed how I think about parental expectations, to what ADHD does to the brain’s relationship with substances, to why kids sometimes listen to a near-stranger before they will listen to their own parents. That last one is not a failure of the relationship. It is biology. Knowing that changes something.
If you have been watching your kid and thinking they are not even trying, this one is for you.
YOU’LL LEARN:
The fish love parable, and the question it forces you to ask about your own parenting
Why “I’m trying” is the one thing a struggling kid most wishes their parents could hear
What ADHD actually does to the brain’s relationship with substances, and why warnings don’t land
The biology behind why kids listen to mentors before they listen to parents
The one skill Enzo says made the biggest difference when he was finally ready to change
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Life Strategies Mentors website
Fish Love story on YouTube
Enzo on Hopestream podcast episodes #251 and #185
ADHD Resources:Dr. Gabor Mate’s book, “Scattered Minds”
Dr. Russell Barkley on YouTube
Dr. Ned Hallowell on Hopestream episode 99 (ADHD as a Superpower)

This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms
Find us on Instagram here
Watch the podcast on YouTube here
Download 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.