Hopestream: Parenting Kids Through Addiction & Mental Health

ABOUT THE EPISODE:
You might already know what needs to change - or at least that something definitely needs to change in the dynamic with your child. Underneath the crisis calls, the covered debts, the conversations you soften before you have them, there’s a quiet voice telling you, “this has to stop.” But how?
Brook McKenzie says that voice is right, and then says the harder part. You must go first.
Brook is a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor, the CEO of Burning Tree Programs, and a person in long-term recovery. He’s also the author of the field guide parents truly need, “You’re Waiting On You: Why Real Recovery Starts With You - Not Them.”
Brook didn’t find recovery until his thirties, and he’s clear about why. His parents loved him fiercely and did what most of us do. They softened the truth, absorbed the consequences, and kept the peace. He describes what that felt like from the inside, and it’s not what you might expect.
The moms in The Stream talked about Brook’s book for months before I finally read it, in an hour and a half, and emailed him that same day.
What lands here is that Brook does not perform sympathy. He highlights that the things that feel hardest are usually the effective ones, and the things that feel like relief are usually what keeps everyone stuck. He has his own word for what parents are doing when they rescue, and spoiler alert, it is not enabling. He also has an answer to the question that is in the back of every parent’s head, the one that starts with "but what if they die?"
I asked about the sixteen year old you still have to house and feed, and what belongs on the list of what you will and will not do. He answered both without flinching.
If you have been waiting for your child to be ready and change, this one might sting, and then it will help.

YOU'LL LEARN
Why Brook doesn’t use the word enabling, and the word he uses instead
The two things he says sit underneath every ineffective parenting decision, without exception
What he says to parents who tell him they will not put their child on the street
The one change in how you talk to your child that he has watched work in months, sometimes weeks
What you’re really telling your child when you fix their problems, clean up their mess and make decisions for them
The specific thing he wants you to bring to your next therapy session
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Brook McKenzie’s website
Get the book, “You’re Waiting On You, Why Real Recovery Starts With YOU, Not Them”
Burning Tree Ranch website
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:
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
What Darren told himself the day he decided he could sell cocaine and stay sober
The one sentence his mother said on the phone that did what years of crime, jail and chaos never did
Why he says parents are the ones who installed the buttons their kids know how to push
The two things he sees in almost every family who calls him at crisis point
The tool he calls an industry guarded secret for families who cannot get in a room together
EPISODE RESOURCES:
The Firm Intervention and Addiction Consulting, Nashville, TN
Darren on Instagram
Die Sober Podcast, hosted by Darren Hobbs and Zach Livingston: https://www.thefirmaddictionconsulting.com/podcast
The Stream, free two-week trial: https://hopestreamcommunity.org/try
Worried Sick free ebook: https://hopestreamcommunity.org/worried
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:
This week's episode is a Summer Replay originally aired in 2023. 
You have rules. You have said them out loud, more than once. And somehow your kid is still doing exactly what they want, and you are the one lying awake wondering why nothing you say seems to land.
Before I knew the word boundaries, that was my whole life. I felt invisible in my own house. Like a doormat. Like the rules I set were something my son found funny. The anger built until I was short with everyone, and I once yanked the cord out of the wall and threw an Xbox across a room. I'm definitely not proud of that reaction and never thought I'd be that mom.
What changed things for me was learning that a boundary has nothing to do with controlling how someone else behaves. That distinction sounds small but it's not.
Cathy and I sat down for this one because we watch parents struggle with it constantly. Not with coming up with the boundary. The hard part is holding it, and there is one specific reason we see people fold, and it is probably not what you think.
We get honest about our own attempts, including the ones that went badly. Cathy shares the boundary she was too scared to enforce for a long time. I share the one that took therapy to get through; the day the moving pods were packed and my son was in a sleeping bag in an empty room.
Fair warning. When you start holding boundaries after years of not holding them, things usually get more uncomfortable before they get better. We talk about that too.
If you feel like you have lost your footing in your own home, start here.
YOU'LL LEARN
The one reason we see parents abandon boundaries they have already set, and why willpower has nothing to do with it
Why an ultimatum and a boundary can sound identical out loud and do opposite things
The picket fence and the hula hoop, and which one you need for which kind of boundary
The boundary Cathy was too afraid to enforce, and the conversation with her husband that finally made it possible
What it actually cost me to hold the hardest boundary of my life, and who I needed around me to do it
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Setting and Holding Healthy Boundaries workshop
Original episode: Ep. 174  
Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms 
Download a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and Alcohol 
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:
This week's episode is a Summer Replay from 2025.
There is a version of August that has been living in your head since they were small. The car packed to the roof. The drive. Target for the bedding, the sweatshirt, the bumper sticker, the parent barbecue where everybody's kid looks fine. Except it is three weeks out and you are not picturing it anymore. You are watching them.
Cathy and I both know what it costs to send them anyway. The tuition is paid. The housing is paid. Somebody in the family belongs to that fraternity. And underneath all of it sits the thing almost nobody says out loud, which is that you are tired, and you need your house to be quiet again. We understand that. We have both wanted the break badly enough to talk ourselves past our own gut.
Cathy's son told her two weeks before he left that he did not think he wanted to go. They chalked it up to nerves. He was right, and what followed was not one crisis. It was months of them, and eventually two of her kids were struggling under the same roof at the same time.
So we get into what we would each do differently now. The paperwork almost no parent thinks about until they are standing in a hospital hallway being told nothing. What is already sitting on that campus that you could call and ask about before move-in day. Why deferring a year is not the punishment it feels like. And the grief, which is real, of a fall you do not get to have.
If your kid is leaving in a few weeks and something in you has not settled, listen before you load the car.
YOU'LL LEARN
What Cathy's son said two weeks before move-in, and what she and her husband decided it meant
The document most parents never think about until a hospital will not tell them anything
What is already available on most campuses that almost nobody calls to ask for
Why the money you think is locked in probably is not
What Cathy and I both got instead of the college experience we wanted
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Success is Subjective podcast
Treatment locator - AllKindsOfTherapy.com 
Assoc. Of Recovery in Higher Education - Collegiate Recovery Programs
Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms 
Download a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and Alcohol 
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:
Your kid has been to a program. Maybe two. Maybe four. Each one handed back a diagnosis list a little longer than the last, and none of it ever explained why nothing is sticking.
My guest uses a comparison in this one that stopped me cold. If your child had stomach pain, no surgeon would just open them up and look around. They would scan first. And yet with our kids we tend to go straight to treatment, treatment, treatment, without asking who this person actually is underneath the substance use. He calls it treating the problem inside the person instead of the person with the problem, and once you hear it you cannot unhear it.
Dr. Graham Husick is a clinical psychologist in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and the director of clinical assessment at the Lakeside Independence Program, which works with severe and complex mental health cases. Part of his job is reading the evaluations other people wrote about kids like ours, and he can tell you precisely what keeps getting left out of them.
We get into why he includes IQ testing in every evaluation, what your child's preferred substance choice tells him that they could never say out loud, and why he will usually steer a family toward paying out of pocket rather than running a psych eval through insurance. He also names something I had never heard put into words: why a kid who is finally doing well will sometimes walk straight back into the thing that nearly took them out. I did not have any of this intelligence when my son was in it, and I have thought about that a lot since.
If your child has cycled through program after program and you still cannot answer the question "but what is actually going on with them," start here.
YOU'LL LEARN:
Why Dr. Husick recommends not testing in active addiction, and the window he actually wants
What a diagnosis list eight items long tells you, and what it can never tell you
Why he includes IQ testing every time, even when nobody asked for it
What the substance your child reaches for most says about what they may be needing
The recommendation he sometimes has to put in writing that parents least want to read
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Dr. Husick’s website
Lakeside Independence Program website
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.