Hopestream: Parenting Kids Through Addiction & Mental Health

Jaksot

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  Parents: You Change First, Then Them, with Brook McKenzie 10.09.2026 1t 11min

  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 p...
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  His Mom’s Hard Boundary Drove His Recovery, with Darren Hobbs 03.09.2026 1t 21min

  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 surg...
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  What Are Boundaries and Why Parents Need Them, with Cathy Cioth 27.08.2026 48min

  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 every...
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  Sending Your Struggling Kid To College, with Cathy Cioth 20.08.2026 44min

  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. ...
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  Substance Use Isn't the Whole Story, with Dr. Graham Husick 13.08.2026 53min

  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 underne...
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  Becoming Emotionally Sturdy When Your Child Struggles, with Cathy Cioth 06.08.2026 1t

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: There is a version of a house where everyone moves quietly. You time your questions. You read the door slam before you read the room. You have gotten so good at it that you barely notice you are doing it anymore, and somewhere in there, one person's mood started running the whole place. Cathy and I both lived there. I matched my son's emotional state toe to toe and had no skills to separate the two. Cathy handed so much authority over to her kids that her husband walked in ...
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  The Guilt That Helps You and The Guilt That Just Hurts, with Brenda Zane 30.07.2026 18min

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: You have probably rehearsed the apology. I'm sorry I didn't catch this sooner. I'm sorry I wasn't a better parent. I'm sorry this is happening to you. If some version of that speech runs on a loop in your head, this quick solo episode is me asking you to put it down. Real accountability matters. If there is something you actually did that caused harm, owning it is valid and important. But that is not the same as taking responsibility for your kid's choices, their biology, a...
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  Anger: The Emotion You're Not Supposed To Feel But Definitely Do 23.07.2026 29min

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: There's an emotion most of us are carrying that we don't talk about, because we're pretty sure we're not allowed to feel it. Anger. Anger at where our kid's choices have led our family. Anger at what they're doing to themselves. And underneath it, a heavy layer of guilt for feeling any of it at all. In this solo episode, I'm getting honest about it, starting with a distinction that changes everything: anger at your child is not the same as anger at the situation. One of the...
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  THC-Induced Psychosis: What Parents Need to Know Now 16.07.2026 1t 33min

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: This episode is long overdue, and I know many of you have been waiting for it. Over the past two to three years, the conversations in our community have shifted. It used to be all about opiates and fentanyl. Now a huge number of our moms are watching their kids change right in front of them because of high-potency THC products, and it is happening fast. So I brought together three people with very different vantage points on THC-induced psychosis and what it is doing to dev...
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  Practical Ways To Coach Yourself When Your Child Struggles With Alcohol or Drugs, With Cathy Cioth 09.07.2026 1t 5min

  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...
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  Hard Conversations: Have Them Today, with Cathy Cioth 02.07.2026 44min

  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 - bec...
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  After Treatment: What the First 90 Days Really Look Like, with Beth Hillman 25.06.2026 55min

  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 s...
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  A Love Letter for Parenting Kids Through Addiction, with Brenda Zane 18.06.2026 16min

  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 conten...
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  The Thing Your Kid Can’t Tell You When They’re Struggling, with Enzo Narciso 11.06.2026 58min

  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 s...
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  10 Self Coaching Questions for Parents of Kids Who Struggle With Mental Health and Substances, with Brenda Zane 04.06.2026 54min

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: There are moments in this journey when your coach isn't available, your therapist can't be reached, and the community is quiet. It's just you and whatever is unfolding in your relationship with your child,, and you need a way through. This episode has been sitting with me for over a year, and I'm glad it's finally here. What I've seen, in my own experience and in watching parents in our community, is that the biggest shifts come from asking yourself the right question and h...
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  Letting Your Child Struggle and Choosing Love Over Fear, with Dr. Wes Robins 28.05.2026 1t 4min

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: Dr. Wes Robins sent me a text a few weeks ago, and I stopped what I was doing and read it twice. It was a piece he had written at his kitchen table while his daughters worked on an art project beside him, and it was one of the most honest and beautiful things I have read in all the years I have been doing this work. It started with four words: you are not broken. And it kept going from there. Wes has been a guest on this show before, and I have always admired how he shows u...
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  Connect Before You Correct: Breaking Generational Patterns, with Lacey Tezino 21.05.2026 59min

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: Lacey Tezino grew up believing her biological mother was dead. That’s what her family told her in the ‘80s when she was adopted, and she carried that story until she was 19 years old. Hungover on just one more motherless-Mother’s Day, Lacey somehow found the nerve to call ‘information’ to see if that was true. Her mother picked up the phone. That call became a decade-long relationship that Lacey describes as beautiful, heartbreaking, and nothing she was prepared for. The co...
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  Inside Your Kid's Mind: Hidden Pain Behind Substance Use, with Brad McLeod 14.05.2026 58min

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: Brad was 17, sitting in a psych ward for the second time, when a stranger told him about a program in Tennessee. He said no. He ran from a rest stop on the highway, and the police caught him a few hours later. That moment tells you everything about where he was: a kid who had never learned to stay, never learned to feel, and hadn’t yet found anything worth staying for. What followed was more than a decade of trying to outrun himself. Percocet. Heroin. A methadone clinic he ...
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  Co-Dependency Isn’t What You Think, with Rawly Glass, LCSW 07.05.2026 1t 5min

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: Rawly Glass grew up in a home full of violence. At 16, he made a pact that he would figure out how to do things differently. He earned a master's in social work, built a career in private therapy, and by all appearances was doing the work. But something from his history kept surfacing, quiet and persistent. When someone handed him the word codependent, he turned it over and put it back down. It did not fit. And he needed to understand why. What Rawly found was that codepend...
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  Stuck After Treatment: Real Options Parents Overlook, with Will White 30.04.2026 53min

  ABOUT THE EPISODE: Will White has been doing this work since last century, and he means that literally. Licensed since 1989, he has worked in group homes, boarding schools, mental health centers, and in 1996, co-founded Summit Achievement, a wilderness therapy program he ran for nearly 27 years. When he tells you the landscape of behavioral health for young people has shifted more in the last five years than in the previous three decades combined, he knows what he’s talking about. The e...