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
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:

Maya Kruger grew up knowing, in a way children simply know things, that mothers die. Her own mother had lost her mother suddenly at 26, and the shadow of that loss shaped everything, including the fierce, almost desperate closeness Maya and her mother shared. She was so convinced that by leaving nothing unsaid, she could somehow protect what they had. Then, the evening after a morning hike together, her mother was killed in a car accident. Maya was 18, not yet fully formed, and suddenly on her own in a way she had spent her whole childhood bracing for and still could not have prepared for.

What followed was not a clean grief. It was the kind that gets woven into everything, into the acting conservatory she attended in Tel Aviv, into the plays she wrote for the national theater, into a one-woman show called Hand Me Downs where she played her grandmother, her mother, and herself all at once. She got into Juilliard and could not go. She got into drama programs in the States and found herself, over and over, cast as other people's mothers, which she describes as both a wound and a doorway. It was not until she was sitting alone for three days on an Outward Bound solo in the Utah desert, nine crackers a day and a whistle around her neck, that something cracked open.

She is now a psychotherapist, trauma specialist, and founder of Overture Therapy in New York, where she works with anxious moms navigating the ways that a child's crisis can bring every old wound roaring back to the surface.

This conversation goes somewhere I was not entirely prepared for. Maya reframes anxiety in a way that stopped me cold, and she has a way of talking about the guilt and shame that lives in a mother's body when her child is struggling that made me feel genuinely seen. She says something about what anxiety is actually asking for that I keep returning to.

If you have ever felt like your child's struggle has cracked open something in you that you did not know was still there, this one is for you.

You'll learn:

• Why Maya grew up believing mothers disappear, and what she tried to do about it
• What maladaptive behavior actually is, and why context changes everything
• The reframe she offers for anxiety that makes it something other than the enemy
• What she means by parking next to yourself, and why it is so hard to do
• The message an anxious mom is actually passing to her kids, and how to change it

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Free, 15-minute consultation with Overture Therapy
• Overture Therapy website
• Hear Brenda Zane on Maya’s podcast, “How Did You Get Here?” episode 22

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:

Hunter Clarke-Fields was a painter. She had a graduate degree in art education, a high school teaching job, and what looked from the outside like a creative life. What nobody could see was that she was white-knuckling her way through it, cycling between intense highs and pits of despair she could not explain, having panic attacks in the hallways before she had any tools to handle them. She reached for yoga, then for books on mindfulness, and read about it for years before she finally, at 27, sat down and actually tried.

She set a timer for 10 minutes and sat there thinking the whole time. She was certain she was doing it wrong. But two months in, she looked back and realized she had not fallen into a single pit. Not one. For someone who had been cycling into darkness every couple of weeks for most of her adult life, that was not a small thing. It was everything. And it sent her down a path she never expected, one that eventually turned her into the Mindful Mama Mentor, a podcast host, a mindfulness teacher, and the bestselling author of Raising Good Humans.

Hunter now teaches mindfulness to parents all over the world, with over 20 years of meditation practice behind her and two daughters who, she will freely admit, grew up slightly allergic to the whole thing.

I wanted to have this conversation because I think mindfulness gets written off as vague or soft, and Hunter makes it anything but. She explains what is actually happening in your brain when you blow up at your kid, why longer exhales are not just a cliche, and what she calls the Three R's, a framework so simple you will remember it in the worst moment. She also says something about feelings being like toddlers that I keep coming back to.

If you have ever thought that mindfulness is not for you, or that you are too far gone to start, this one is for you.

You'll learn:

• Why Hunter spent two months certain she was meditating wrong.
• The part of mindfulness most people skip that changes everything.
• Her Three R's for the moments you most want to lose it.
• What she says feelings are like, and why it reframes everything.
• The one thing she would tell a struggling parent to try today.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Hunter Clarke-Fields website
• Raising Good Humans Book
• Mindful Mama Podcast

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.