ABOUT THE EPISODE:

There is a specific kind of searching that happens at 2am when you are a parent in the thick of it, typing symptoms and half-formed fears into a search bar because you cannot say them out loud to anyone in your life. My cofounder Cathy Cioth knows exactly what that feels like, and in this conversation, we sit down to answer the questions we hear most from parents in our community, including the ones that tend to arrive with a quiet residue of shame just for asking.

We start with one that stops many parents cold: does your child actually have to go to formal treatment to get better? The answer is more nuanced than most of us were told, and the data behind it may genuinely surprise you. From there, we get into PAWS, post-acute withdrawal syndrome, the thing nobody warned you about when your child finally got sober and you expected life to start looking better, and it did not. Cathy and I are nine and ten years out from the hardest seasons of our own journeys, both trained in CRAFT (Community Reinforcement and Family Training), and nothing in this conversation comes from a textbook.

This episode is the conversation you may wish you could have had years ago, before you knew what you did not know yet.

You'll learn:

• Why formal treatment is not the only path to recovery, and what the research actually says
• What PAWS is, why it blindsides so many families, and how to recognize it in your child
• How to reward non-using behavior in a way that feels genuine rather than transactional
• Why natural consequences belong to your child, not to you, and what it costs to keep carrying them
• When doing nothing is the most potent intervention available to you

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Jo Collete Episode
• Recovery Research Institute
• Dina Cannizzaro Episodes: 297, 288, 173, 138

This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
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Download a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and Alcohol

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