Hopestream: Parenting Kids Through Addiction & Mental Health

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 complications didn’t end with the reunion. Lacey’s mother had her own life, her own rhythm, and her own relationship with alcohol. So did Lacey. And when her mother received a stage four lung cancer diagnosis, the urgency it created forced them both into a kind of honesty they had never quite managed before. They sat through chemo appointments and asked the hard questions. They talked about what they’d each been holding. And Lacey has spent the years since wondering why it took running out of time to get there.
Lacey is the founder of Passport Journeys and the author of Therapy After Mom Died. She now works with mothers and daughters to help them heal together before a crisis forces their hand, matching them with therapists, building structured connections, and asking the eight questions that reveal exactly where a relationship has come apart.
This conversation goes somewhere I don’t hear talked about often enough: the way our kids watch us reach for a drink at the end of a hard day, and what they quietly absorb from that. Lacey tells the story of her own Friday night ritual, margaritas that offered tired parents decompression, the moment she realized her children were watching all of it, and what they might be learning. 
If you have a daughter - or son - you love and a relationship that feels like it’s missing something you can’t quite name, this one is for you.
YOU’LL LEARN:
What Lacey said when her mother, who she thought was dead, picked up the phone
The unhealthy Friday night ritual she couldn’t unsee once she saw it
The gap she keeps finding between what moms believe and what daughters feel
Why, as a parent, you have to connect before you correct
What it took for Lacey and her mother to finally be honest with each other
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Passport Journeys website
Therapy After Mom Died - Lacey’s book 
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:
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 drove to every morning with no car and no money. A felony conviction at 18. A deportation to Canada with a lifetime ban from the US. Brad doesn’t tell his story like a cautionary tale. He tells it like someone who finally understands what his brain was looking for, and what it took to stop running long enough to build something worth keeping.
Today he hosts Sober Motivation, a top 0.5% podcast globally with more than five million downloads, and runs an online community for people in recovery. He started it from his basement not because he had the answers, but because he knew what it felt like to be alone in this.
This conversation is for every parent who has watched their child go through treatment and wondered if anything is actually landing. Brad says something I’ve believed for years but have rarely heard said plainly: sobriety is the starting line, not the finish line. What he built after that line, and why it held, is what this episode is really about.
If you’ve done everything right and it still isn’t working, this one is for you.
YOU’LL LEARN:
How Brad went from two psych ward stays and a felony to host of a top recovery podcast
Why sobriety was never his problem, and what the real work looked like
The question he asks every person about the night before they get sober
What getting back on ADHD medication at 38 finally showed him about himself
What it means to build a life you have something to lose in
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Sober Motivation Podcast
Sober Motivation Community
Brandon Novak Memoir, Dreamseller
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:
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 codependency, as commonly taught, is a behavioral label for something much deeper. It has pathologized one of the most beautiful things about people: the capacity to be gentle and caring. Underneath the behavior there is almost always a more fundamental disruption. Trauma, even the quiet kind, interferes with the development of what he calls a relationship with self. When that gets interrupted, we stop orienting inward and start orienting entirely outward, trying to control what we can see because we cannot access what we feel. He calls it external dependency.
Rawly is a therapist and parent educator who has done this work on himself over decades. He brings research, clinical observation, and a deeply personal story to a question most of us have been handed without enough context: what is driving the behavior, and what does real recovery look like?
If you have ever felt like the codependent label did not quite fit but had no other words for it, Rawly Glass has words for it.
You'll learn:
What Rawly means by external dependency, and why it fits better than codependency
The rotten potato story, and what it revealed about looking for the source
The 15 aspects of a relationship with self, and why most of us are missing some
Why self-care often fails, and what has to come first
What co-regulation actually looks like when your child is escalating
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Rawly Glass website
Rawly Glass on YouTube
Brainstorm - book by Dan Siegel
Broken Toys, Broken Dreams - book by Terry Kellogg
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:
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 externalizers of a generation ago, the kids who broke things, slammed doors, and announced their pain loudly, have largely given way to a different kind of struggling young person. One who is anxious, inward, and frozen. Who won’t leave the room, won’t leave the house, and whose parents keep quietly rearranging life around them in an effort to keep the peace. Will has watched this pattern closely, including at Mountain Valley Treatment Center, where young residents had become so overwhelmed by anxiety that the outside world felt completely out of reach. The treatment models that worked before are not always the ones that work now, and the gap between what young people need and what is actually available to them is widening.
That gap is exactly what Will set out to address when he helped launch The Trade, a new nonprofit program in rural New Hampshire for young adults (all genders) ages 18 to 30. It’s not a therapy program in the traditional sense and if you have a young person stuck in that uncomfortable in-between of not ready for college, not ready for independence, but also not well-served by just being home, it may be exactly what you did not know to look for.
I wanted Will back on the show (he appears way back in episode 14) because his view of the bigger picture is one I trust. In this conversation, we talk about the seismic shifts in behavioral health, what is driving the rise in anxiety, and why less talk and more doing might be what this generation actually needs. If your young person is stuck and none of the usual paths seem to fit, this one is for you.
YOU'LL LEARN:
The shift Will has watched from externalizing kids to anxious, frozen ones, and what he believes is behind it
What The Trade is and who it’s built for
Why apprentices get paid from day one, and what receiving a first paycheck does to a young person
The over-accommodation pattern Will kept seeing in parents, and when caring starts to make things worse
What Will leaves exhausted parents with, from someone who has been doing this work for four decades
EPISODE RESOURCES:
The Trade website
Will White on Hopestream episode #14
Trish Ruggles, Therapeutic Consultant at Pathfinder Consulting
Mountain Valley Treatment Center 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:
I have sat with hundreds of moms who came to me at completely different points in their child's substance use, and the gap between them has always struck me. One mom is barely breathing, convinced the worst is already happening. Another is quietly telling herself it might just be a phase. Neither one is wrong, exactly. What they both share is that they are navigating one of the most consequential situations of their lives without a real map.
That gap, between what parents fear and what is actually happening, is exactly what this episode is about. Medicine has always used staging to give patients and families a language for urgency, for appropriate response, for what comes next. Parents of kids with substance use issues have never been handed anything like that. We are expected to assess, decide, and respond without the framework that clinicians spend years building.
So in this episode, I am borrowing that idea because staging is one of the most useful concepts in medicine. It tells you where you are, how serious things actually are, and what kind of response fits the moment. I walk through four stages of substance use, what you might see on the surface, what is happening underneath, and how your role as a parent shifts at each one.
What I want you to hear in this conversation is that you have more influence than you have probably been told. There is a 94% chance your child does not believe they have a problem yet. That is not a reason to give up. It is actually the case that makes you, the parent, the most important factor in whether they ever get help. This framework is not meant to frighten you into action. It is meant to give you the kind of clear-eyed picture that lets you stop reacting and start responding strategically.
If you have been operating without a map, this one is for you. 
YOU'LL LEARN:
The four stages of substance use and what each one actually looks like from the outside
Why a quiet kid at home can be at a higher risk level than you think
How today's substances change the risk math at every stage
What your role as a parent is, and why it matters more than you have probably been told
The shift that moves you from reacting to responding strategically
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Dr. Anna Lembke episode 
Dr. Gabor Maté episode
Worried Sick free ebook
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.