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Episode 312
ABOUT THE EPISODE:
When Campbell Manning’s middle son entered detox the day before Valentine’s Day, she genuinely believed he’d be “fixed” and home within a week. What followed instead was a years-long journey through both of her sons’ addiction cycles that would ultimately transform her from a completely naive parent into a trained addiction counselor who now helps hundreds of families navigate the same treacherous terrain.
Campbell brings both the raw authenticity of lived experience and the clinical expertise she’s gained through extensive education plus real-world training with Amber Hollingsworth (Put The Shovel Down YouTube Channel) at Hope For Families Recovery Center.
In this potent conversation, she speaks directly to the particular torture of watching your child actively harm themselves while grappling with decisions that feel impossible, like when her 14-year-old daughter confronted her about how much more “time, emotion, money, and energy” she was going to give to addiction.
What I love is that Campbell’s wisdom isn’t theoretical; it’s forged from setting boundaries that ended up with her sons leave home at 17, refusing to enable behavior that was metastasizing through her entire family system, and learning that “over-loving” your child can actually be the most deleterious choice you make. Her message offers genuine hope grounded in reality: both her sons are in long-term recovery, and she’s built a thriving coaching practice helping parents understand that their child’s willingness to change often arrives in fleeting moments, which means your preparation and readiness matters profoundly.
You’ll learn:
- How Campbell navigated the brutal reality of having two sons in active addiction, including the crucial difference between heartbreak (first son) and fury (second son) in her emotional responses
- The concept of “tagging it on” and why your child must truly understand there’s no one coming to rescue them before lasting change becomes possible
- Why disenfranchised grief – the kind that receives no casseroles, no sympathy cards, no community support, coagulates within families dealing with addiction and impacts every member, especially siblings
- How Campbell’s daughter’s confrontation about “how much more are you going to give addiction, Mom?” catalyzed her understanding that setting strong, healthy boundaries isn’t abandonment, it’s the most loving thing you can do when your child is drowning
EPISODE RESOURCES:
- Hope For Families Recovery Center website
- Put The Shovel Down YouTube Channel
Campbell Manning
[00:00:00] Campbell, welcome to Hope Stream. This is an exciting conversation for two folks who do somewhat similar things and just mom to mom. It’s wonderful to have you. Mm-hmm. So thanks for joining me. Gosh, thank you. This is a treat. Yeah. We finally got the tech gods on our side and all of that stuff working, and I wanted to really have you a, because you know, I love having a good family story where folks can really hear the real deal mm-hmm of like, here’s somebody who’s been through on the rollercoaster ride through the trenches. Gets what I’m going through, but also, you know, how it changed your life and your career and what you’re doing now. So why don’t you just give us some background on your family.
I know you told your whole story on Amber’s video channel. Mm-hmm. Which I got to see, but that was a while ago, wasn’t it? I feel like, oh gosh. That was, yeah, I probably told that story
[00:01:00] eight or nine years ago. Yeah, it’s been a while. So, yeah. And I told you before, I actually stopped it halfway through because I knew I wanted to immediately, I’m like, I’m getting her on the podcast, and I didn’t want to hear the rest of the story.
So it would be more fun to talk about with you. So, fill us in on your story, what happened with your kiddos, and then we’ll kind of go from there. Okay, so we have three kids, our oldest was two and a half years older than our middle, who’s four years older than our youngest, and is the middle son who initially brought us into this wonderful world of addiction.
He was a high school junior and he just started to like I mean, actually it kind of started the year before, just like not be interested in being at home. He actually missed my surprise for 50th birthday party, he just, we didn’t know his friends anymore. But I am completely naive and I’m just not getting that we have a problem.
I just think this is teenage behavior, right. So
[00:02:00] anyway, it all comes to a head in the fall of that year, which was I think oh eight and I realized we have a big problem, but I couldn’t name it. I just could not name it. Eventually after a series of questioning him on a particular day, he admitted he had a drug problem.
Mm-hmm. So I’d looked up deep for drugs in the Yellow Pages because that’s what one does, and got absolutely nowhere for like 10 phone calls, but eventually ended up in the right place and took him in, he did the assessment call. They took him in for detox and my husband was outta town and I actually, he said, do you need me to come home?
I’m like, no. I just dropped him off. It was horrible. But I’m gonna go home and we’re making lasagna. It was the day before Valentine’s Day, and he’ll be back next week and this will all be behind us. I was be fixed. So freaking naive. It was scary. So when I talk to parents now and they’re like, you know what?
I know you think I’m stupid. I’m like, Hmm, no I don’t. Nope. I do not.
[00:03:00] So anyway, that he detoxed, he was supposed to start IOP, which he did, which is how I met Amber. ’cause she was running IOP. He was kicked out several weeks later for trying to buy drugs from someone in the group. ’cause apparently that’s a no-no, of course.
And so that’s how they do it. But my husband and I had joined the family group and amber’s encouraged us to continue to come to that. She’s like, I would highly encourage you to do this, which we did, which we continued to do and over that spring, we learned sort of how to let it get worse, and it did get a lot worse.
And then we actually took him somewhere, amber said, he says he is ready. He’s not. So take him somewhere that’s free. So we picked a very fundamentally Christian place. It was free. He made it four days. But I didn’t expect more because. It was really fundamentally Christian, but like as in you could only take the Bible to read.
Oh, like seriously. Wow. But anyway, so he came home and somewhere shortly after that I just had had enough, like there were drug dealers coming in and out of the
[00:04:00] yard. I would go down to wake him up to go to school and the window was open and he was gone and you know, he had a younger sister who was
13 at the time. Yeah. So I just snapped and said, dude, you can’t live here. These are the conditions to live here and he was like, well, that’s not working for me and off he went, which is really scary and poor husband mean by the time he got home from work. I was like, good news and bad news. We’re having, steak is the good news, but only four because the other person doesn’t live here anymore.
And he was like, okay. Wow. And he was sorry to do that. He was 17. 17, okay. Yeah. Brand new 17. Right. So anyway, he was off doing God knows what. I seriously do not wanna know. I heard stories from his brother every now and then, and just was like, I can’t process this but we got a call in July and he said, I need help.
I’ll do anything. I’ll go anywhere. I cannot handle this anymore, please and I was like, absolutely.
[00:05:00] So took him back to detox and at that point Amber and the team there was like, okay, we’re finding this kid a place to go and at the time, 17 year olds in South Carolina were adults and I was like, I don’t wanna take him to an adult program ’cause he can leave and I want him somewhere where he can’t leave.
So we took him to Georgia, ’cause of Georgia, he was an adolescent, so he couldn’t leave. He stayed 32 days and somewhere in the middle of that they were like, Hmm, this kid needs, he needs sober living. He needs long more help. So we began the process of researching sober living, which is near and dear to my heart because there’s so much bad sober living out there, which I talked to 25 of them and finally, finally found this place right near where he was in Atlanta, Georgia, called Purple.
And I knew immediately this is it and they didn’t take 17 year olds, so I just begged and finally, the Joel, the dad said, well, how 17 is he?
[00:06:00] I said, he’s 17 and seven months. He goes, oh, he is on the dark side of 17. We’ll take him. Right. And he was the first person that’d ever taken. I just think Joel felt so bad for me.He was like, I gotta work with this woman. So anyway, that was that. It was a scene getting him in there. But once he was there, he just got it. He liked it, he embraced it. He has been sober since. That he will be 34 years old, December 16th, so Wow, that’s, it was 17 years ago, so that was fabulous. Meanwhile, his older brother had broken his back and we were in and outta the hospital for eight weeks.
He had a staph infection and got hooked on opiates, so he was not living here, he was attending college locally, but he was obviously using and stealing from us and by the time I figured that out, he was knee deep into it
[00:07:00] and that actually is a funny story in and of itself. ’cause I had known he had done it. We had gotten everything back from the pawn shop. I’d had serious conversation like, you don’t have the key to this house anymore. Like, this is not happening. But somehow he did it again and I was out of town on business trip and Frank figured it out and called Amber and they drew straws and Amber got the short straw and she had to call me in the Chicago hotel and tell me, and I was livid.
I was, there was with my first son. I was heartbroken and with this son, I was just like, you have got to be kidding me. I cannot do this again and then he stole all my things and I love things as you know, I dropped the diamond earring down the drain today and almost lost my crackers. So anyway, I said he cannot, he’s gotta be in treatment.
Like I cannot deal with this and she said, we are working on that. I said, well, okay. So when I got here back flew home, he was in detox,
[00:08:00] I picked him up. I drove him to purple. Luckily they were like, we would love to have another manning and so speak to him. You’re on the, the family plan now, didn’t what? You’re on the family plan now? Not, not just yet. It’s gonna come not then. Oh, oh. I was so mad. I didn’t even speak to him. I would just, I know I slowed down ’cause he didn’t break his legs getting outta the car. But I don’t know that I parked, I was done. Yeah and he did it. He did fine. He’s had a couple little hiccups and ended up back there and that’s where the family plan came back in. ’cause he negotiated that. ’cause I said, I’m not paying for it. Like, this is, you gotta work this out buddy and ultimately as those little relapses, I finally learned by my own, like something I teach clients all day long, which is these guys have got to get the message of tag on it.
Like there’s no not, there’s gonna keep fixing this. There’s no not that’s gonna keep paying for this like, tag on it. When they get that message and when he got that message is when he figured this out and got it together.
[00:09:00] So that, that has been, and both of them have stayed in the Atlanta area? They just have their people there. Yeah. They know what to do. My husband, I mean, my son married a girl in recovery and so it’s all been, luckily it all worked out. Yes, but what a wild ride to be on. Mm-hmm. For a while. What was the span of time that you were navigating all of this? Oh, eight to 10 is when I took the second one to purple and then I started graduate school to be, to do what I’m doing in January of 11.
And I think I had to tag your IT message. Somewhere in 12. Wow. So you really learned with your feet in the fire of how things work. Mm-hmm. And what people respond to and of course, every kiddo
[00:10:00] is different, but I agree that there tends to be, and I was this way, I only went through it with one, so I didn’t have the second lesson.But I think in the beginning, and I’d be curious what you see with this, with your coaching clients, there’s, I don’t know if it’s a, like a wish or a dream or a hope that we think if we’re. We’re just like, oh, but, you know, but they’re gonna come around and mm-hmm You know, I’m gonna keep doing this.
That somehow it’s just magically going to self-correct, and I think it’s holding onto the old dream and avoiding the grief. I think that’s sort of the combination. I say this all, I use this phrase a lot, which is addiction is a loss of dream. This is not what we envisioned when we got pregnant, when we adopted them, when we reared them as they grew up.
We envision our children, you know, doing nice things, being lovely. So you really have to grieve that and then you have to learn and figure out
[00:11:00] what in the fly to do now and then you have to pray that the future is going to work out and that’s just a lot of emotions to navigate and I find in with couples. We don’t navigate it simultaneously. My husband kept saying, oh, boys will be boys. He’s just a teenager. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill and I was like, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But I think it’s just we’re naive. Yeah, we’re naive and we don’t want it. Like I’ve had clients say, I think my child is bipolar and that would be better.
And I’m like, no, really, addiction would be better ’cause we can cure, you know, in that we cannot end bipolar. Right. And so I think there’s that naivete is that addiction is this and it is a horrible, horrible thing, but it’s, and it can’t possibly happen to us. I mean, I think there’s that too. Like I was one of those people like that when I would hear about it, I’d be like, they must not have a very good family life.
[00:12:00] Yeah. What’s going on in that family? Yeah. Then what’s wrong with those parents? Yeah. It’s the, I agree. I think it’s the kind of the shame and yeah also I think there is an element of the, like, this couldn’t happen in my family. Not necessarily from the standpoint of like hoity-toity, superiority of like, oh, not my family, but it’s more of just, it feels so foreign. Mm-hmm. Especially if you come from a family that doesn’t have addiction in it. Right, right. Which we didn’t, so it was less about, oh, I’m like better than that, and more of just like, you might as well just send an elephant to stand in my bathtub, because that would seem more normal than having my kid using drugs. Right. Absolutely. Well, and also back then, I mean, or I didn’t even, it never occurred to me that kids, like I knew something was up, but I, he never smelled like liquor or a pot. So I was like, well, then it can’t be, it did not occur to me that there were opiates
[00:13:00] available all over, including the school.Right. It just didn’t occur to me. Right. No. ’cause you have this, you have this mental picture of what a, either a drug addict looks like or a drug dealer looks like, and holy cow, now they’re like, you know, it’s Uber Eats as delivery the drugs. So there’s your drug dealer is the Uber. Apparently you could get it through the number 62 at the Taco Bell in Greenville. Oh yeah we had a McDonald’s that where, you know, if you order a certain combination, that was the special combo, which I did not know. You did not know. That’s why I don’t go to Taco Bell and it’s not Taco Bell’s fault. It’s not their fault. Yeah. It’s wild and so what was your younger son thinking when your older son started with this? Because he, was he in recovery by then? Mm-hmm. Oh, tell me about that. I think he, at first he was like, dude, you just watched this movie. You
[00:14:00] know how it’s gonna play out? Like, what are you thinking? But then I think because of the way it happened through the back injury, there was a lot of, I mean, they were, they were really close and they were really good close brothers. And so I think they were, he was very supportive of him but by this time, I think he was in college, so he was very, very busy and kind of focused on his life. He’s also very self pre like I am, so he sort of takes care of his little nuclear world. Right. I know we went to visit him and talk to him every now and then, but I don’t think there was a lot of interaction.
Yeah. Now I think with the relapses, he was like, dude, get it together. Like very, I’m not having this because it hadn’t happened to him, you know? I think for whatever reason he just got it now just remember that from February to July he was in and out of our home living very dangerously, so. Right. Maybe he got it because of that versus the other one.
[00:15:00] Yeah. Really just got caught and was sent. Yeah. It’s really interesting the back injury because you often hear that, and I know there’s a huge amount of people, especially earlier on, I think less so now because opioids have been so much more controlled, but earlier on, and it just frustrates me when I hear people say, mm-hmm Oh, that’s just an excuse. They didn’t get addicted ’cause their doctor prescribed it and well, yes you do. I think there’s a fascinating statistic and I am not what sure what it is, but it’s a large number of people who have been in the hospital for longer than two weeks and on opiates are addicted already. Yes. It’s just not known because we’re managing it. Right. That if you start to space that out, those people act just like addicts. Yes and they send them home with a bottle of 80 or whatever. Mm-hmm. Oxy thirties or Oxy age for sure. And yeah and at the time, you know, that was
[00:16:00] normal. I think now it is. It’s much not. Yeah. Yeah. So, which is good also I know that’s also a challenge for some people, but I just wanted to say that, ’cause I think people, it’s easy to roll your eyes and be like, oh yeah, okay, there’s a good story and it’s very real because there are certain people who, like if I take an oxy, I hate that feeling.
Oh God, I threw up one time I took it and that was the end. I threw it. I just called the doctor. I said, I’m bringing these back. Right. But for other people, they take it and it’s like, oh, this is good here. It is the key to the kingdom. Yes. And did your son feel that? Like did he get that? I don’t know, because he was not with it. Like he was so injured and I don’t know. I guess so. He was super happy as he got better. Yes. As we were in the hospital for all those weeks, he’d stay up all night. We watched all the seasons to the office all night long, and he was quite happy. Now
[00:17:00] that you asked that question. That was miserable, right?You’re like, wait a minute, why am I the one who’s in more pain? You’re in the hospital with a broken back. Right. With a wound vac and PICC lines and, oh gosh. So yeah, you’re, yeah actually that’s a really good question and the answer is, yeah, he was, he liked it. Yeah and that seems to be the case. I don’t know anybody that’s kind of like, Hmm, ho-hum on opioids. It seems like they either make you sick and you don’t like them, or you really like them. You know? Mm-hmm. That kind of, yeah, I think you’re right. So you go through this. You’ve met Amber, who we just had on the podcast a while ago. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That was super fun and what what were you doing before? Like what was your career before and how did you decide like, I am gonna go into coaching marriage? Yeah. Since you were struggling. So, before that I was the executive director for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Okay. So I was fundraising and before that I’d done a lot of selling and
[00:18:00] I’ve been an entrepreneur. I’ve done a million things. Yeah. But, so I was doing that, joined the parent group, really liked that and that parent group ran really nicely because you got a mentor couple and I really liked our mentor couple. We became friends and I had been, and they lived like 40 minutes from us, so I had been through their pool for the afternoon. She and I had just been talking wonderful day, and I’m just driving on the highway home and I was like, I really like being a parent by now. I am a parent mentor, right? And so I’m like, I really like this like, I wonder what it would be like to do this full time and then I was like, wait, I wonder what i’d like to be a counselor. So I called Amber. I remember I was on the ramp coming into our downtown and I said, Hey, I’ve had this thought. What do you think? She’s like, oh God, yes. You’d be so good. I said, well, what do I have to do? She said, we gotta take the GREs. . You gotta pass the GREs. And I’m like, Hmm. College is like a long way to go. So I
[00:19:00] decided I would get the book outta the library, and I studied all summer long, the math and the science, I was fine on the rest of it, but I mean I have flashcards at the you know, my geometry and I took them and I did really well. And so then I was like, well snap and so I applied to Clemson, which is about an hour from here, and it’s a K Crep school, so that was a leg up in the counseling world. They were highly accredited. You did better. I got in, they took 14 people after the big interview and I was like. Oh my God. And I was like, okay, I guess I’m going to grad school, going back to college. I loved it. I’m, oh man. Frank gave me a gift certificate to Staples that year and right before school started in January and I was like a kid in a candy store. I think they’re still talking about me ’cause I’m over there with the spiral notebooks and the pens and I’m just like, oh. I was a nerd all the way through. All the way through grad
[00:20:00] school. I know those other kids were like, God, I hate old ladies being in school. Right. What? I loved it. I drew cartoons for all the theories, like I was in it and I was working full time still for JDRF. Wow. It was insane. And so after the first year I quit JDF and just went to school and we’d lift off student loans, like as, and learned how to have hotdog without buns ’cause we had no money. And then I was, had done my first internship, you have to do three. And I was in the summer getting ready. I started to apply to other ones and Amber called me one day and said, Hey, can you have lunch? And I was like, sure. So we had lunch, she had a new baby and we met for lunch and she’s like, so you do your next two internships with me and then help me start a private practice. And I was like, what? What? How amazing I was like hell to the, yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:00] So that’s what I did. And I learned at her knee, I was in every session six days a week, just lived with her basically. Wow. On this little tiny black Dr. Rollie stool while she sat in this big red soft chair and I’m like a giraffe. This just this picture in my mind. Oh yeah. ’cause I’m like nothing but legs and arms. I’m five 10, like just right. And she is like really short and so I’m just like, but it was just fabulous. I loved every minute of it. Didn’t get paid a dime. Wow. Then yeah, and then we, then we started Hope for Families and I guess actually the semester before I graduated, I did start seeing clients for a very low rate and that’s where it was born. Incredible and you guys help not only family members, but also people who are struggling mm-hmm with substance use disorders, which I think is amazing because you’re seeing the whole elephant. We try to see the whole system whenever possible so a spouse and a spouse or parents and
[00:22:00] child, or sibling and brother, you know, whatever it is. We try to see a system so that we can actually get more knowledge that we need. Yeah and then move where we need to go faster. Right. Instead of listening to a bunch of lies and lies and lies. Well, yeah. It’s hard to know what you’re dealing with. Mostly I think the parents are upfront. I do think that there’s. Whenever I’m coaching somebody, I’m like, I wonder what they’re not telling me. I wonder what? I wonder what I’m not hearing or not seeing. Oh, yeah. I hear a lot of minimization and I have a lot of clients that like, I’ll say, I think you have a problem. Like, and they’re like, no, I just, and I’m like, first of all, why did you book an appointment? It’s super expensive and you know what we do? If you didn’t think you have a problem, I’m kind of confused why you booked this session. Yeah. But they, I think they want me to say, yeah, I think you’re right. It’s nothing. And I’m like, mm, I think you have a problem. Yeah. You came to the wrong place if you, yeah.
[00:23:00] Yeah. So when you’re working with parents, I would love to just hear from another, I’m not a counselor, but from a coaching perspective, the things that I see most parents struggling with are three things.Control. I wanna control this. I’m gonna fix this. Allowing natural consequences. Mm-hmm. Because it’s so scary. And then, figuring out what do boundaries look like? Like what do you boundaries safe and healthy boundaries look like? Well, I think the bigger thing I see is a lot of people that can’t have a boundary, and that I think that’s the number one thing people need to worry to think about when we’re even beginning this journey is, am I going to be able to do what this person might tell me to do? Am I going, do I have that? I just talked to a client and I identified her husband can’t, and I said, it’s like they have an extra vein in their heart that keeps too much blood going to the heart, and so they can’t hold a boundary versus I don’t have that
[00:24:00] vein, and so I can, which she was like, well, I feel better that he’s just not a bad dad. I said, no, I think he just has a soft spot for her and he believes that what he’s doing, that this will be the last time she asked for money or this will be the last time she uses. Mm-hmm. So I think boundaries are a huge, huge, huge thing. In fact, that’s why Kim and I developed that course, is because you need to know your relationship with yourself. Mm-hmm. Then you can be told what to do if you have that ability. I think the bigger problem I see is just lack of knowledge of what to do.
Like I think the misconception out there is that a 28 day treatment, it will fix it. And it just will not, in and of itself, it will not and so I feel like I’m constantly bursting the bubble of what treatment center should I send my child to? I’m like, Hmm, I think we need to look at long-term sober living. That’s the bigger issue and that’s a big pill to swallow because like me, with the first week
[00:25:00] of detox when I thought naively, oh, this will all be done. They want this to be done in 28 days so that they can grab their dream and have it back. Right. Right. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The whole 28 day thing is just, I’m so glad you said that because I also am like, I hate to tell you this, especially with an adolescent ’cause, and it’s even harder for them because there is no, like sober living for Ities. There’s not, you’re so host if you have a 15 or 16-year-old, which is tragic. I know it is heartbreaking and the, you know, I mean, there are places for them obviously. There’s residential treatment, there’s therapeutic boarding schools that cost a billion dollars a month, a billion dollars. And then eventually even, I mean, I’ve got one now, he’s, and he’s a 10th grader. And even those things are like, unless you’ve got 500 gram to keep him in high school the whole time
[00:26:00] even that they’re like after you. Well he’s ready to come home like, well, no, he is not, like, he cannot go back to this high school. No, if there was a solution for that, I just, my heart goes out to the parents of adolescents. Mm-hmm. And that’s extra hard. But yeah, the boundaries thing, I think first of all, we have trouble, some of us with boundaries just in life in general, right? Like, we don’t know where our boss’s boundaries should end, or we don’t know where our mom or her cousin or whatever and then when you have to apply a boundary to your own child who is often under the influence of very strong substances. Mm-hmm and not being themselves. It’s not like you’re working with a sober, rational person. It gets so complicated, which is like you said, like, when you’re working as the coach or the counselor, you don’t have that emotional right umbilical cord. So you can be much more objective. You can be much more in tune with what’s
[00:27:00] really going on because you can see it with a clear lens sure versus the parents who see it through that rose colored love lens, which is wonderful. Which is, yeah. That’s how it should be. Yeah. What are some of the situations that you see come up over and over, maybe with adolescents and then also with young adults that you see parents getting tripped up with the most? Getting the parents on the same page is a huge one. There’s usually like I always say, there’s someone with a softer heart and we always have to work with a softer heart. We I’m always like, we are not gonna push against the soft heart because if something were to go south, this will ruin your marriage.
So we just gotta wait till we get on the same page and we have to be patient and sometimes that takes months and months and months or longer, which is very really difficult. So I end up seeing the one that’s got the harder heart individually ’cause they’re so frustrated. So they stay well. We let the soft heart
[00:28:00] figure it out. But I see that a lot. I see the concept of I cannot possibly hold a boundary that my child cannot live in this house. That’s probably number one. Number one, yeah. Is, and these are like often like 24, 25 year olds who have just not launched due to substance abuse but the parents are like, well, I can’t tell him he can’t live here.I’m like, then he’s gonna live there but the situation isn’t going to change because until his life becomes unmanageable as defined by him. He’s not gonna change and that’s a really difficult concept to sell because they do exactly what you said at the beginning, which is if I can control this, if I could cajole this, if I could punish this, if I could yell this, if I could limit this, if I can drive him to and from work, like none of that’s gonna work.But it takes them a long time to figure out and then I think it’s the concept of they really need to go somewhere about two hours from your home, ideally for six months to 24 months. Which
[00:29:00] then means they kind of need to live there for a while, ’cause that’s now their world. Yes. But addiction loves change and you send it somewhere for two months or three months and you bring it home.That’s not enough change and the brain is just beginning to recover at two months. Oh yeah. It’s no brain recovery at 28 days, zero. No, all we’ve done is limit access to substances. I mean, I could go to rehab for Fritos for 28 days and I wouldn’t eat a Frito. They’re not there. I’m not gonna eat ’em. But then I come home and they’re at the grocery store, or God forbid, in my pantry, and definitely at the office, I’m gonna have a freedom. Mm-hmm. Within a week or two. Yes. Yeah. That is, that aligns exactly with what we see and I think the message, I can’t remember if it was you or Amber that I heard say this, which I thought was just really true and beautiful, but also, impactful, which is as you are working onfiguring out your boundaries and you’re working on your relationship with the
[00:30:00] co-parent, it’s really, we’re just gonna be in this longer. Mm-hmm and that’s okay but somebody is suffering a lot right our kiddo and sometimes it doesn’t look like they’re suffering. It looks like they’re having a hundred percent. Yeah. They’re miserable and I mean, at the beginning obviously they’re not but when we get into stage three and four addiction, they’re not happy. I’ve had so many clients tell me over the years and one of my kids, like I actually had a young guy’s like 30 who said I would actually be angry if I woke up in the morning.
He said I wasn’t trying to kill myself, but I was using with so much abandon that I didn’t care and then when I would wake up, I’d think, damnit, I have another day where I’m gonna do it even though I don’t want to. Oh, and that shame and that suck of pride and connection with yourself that’s what
[00:31:00] addiction feeds on like Pacman points. It loves isolation and people that don’t like themselves and shame. Yes. It’s like, there it is. That’s now I’m gonna do it because I have all these negative things going on. Yeah. I say it’s the only disease that guarantees it’s gonna happen because it makes it happen. Oh wow. Yeah, that’s very true. Yeah, I think that can, it can be a motivator to say, you know, yes, this is uncomfortable for you as a parent to have to hold these boundaries, to have to make these very painful, excruciating decisions and it’s a gift to your child because it is not really very compassionate and empathetic to leave them in the state they’re in. I say it’s over loving. You’re over loving. I get it. Is that a fear? It is anxiety. It is that grief. I understand it. I’m not condoning it or you know, shaming you for it, but that’s what’s happening but your over parenting is over loving is gonna kill your child. Yeah. Yeah. It’s because your child’s
[00:32:00] like doing a bunch, bunch of fentanyl. Yeah. It’s such a twisted thing, right? It’s like, it’s such a cruel disease because of that. I mean, when people, they say it’s a family disease, that’s part of it is that it’s so, it’s cruel to the parents. It’s cruel to the kids. It’s just cruel. It’s cruel to the siblings. It’s just cruel and it just keeps getting crueler and endless. It’s endless. And it’s like lava. Yes, it is. Yeah, it is. You know and I don’t have a child who’s ever had cancer or any other horrible thing like that. I just think there’s a difference in addiction because you are watching your child do it to themself, right? And it is that torture of, but I’m watching him put this into his body, which I know could kill him, and I cannot do anything about it.I call it disenfranchised grief because like if you have a child with cancer. Well, your mom dies. There
[00:33:00] are cards and people bring casseroles and churches help you and your neighbors rally around you and so the grief can dissipate but with addiction, none of that happens. There aren’t any cards. There’s nothing you didn’t get a casserole on your friend did not get one Campbell lip in. I did not get one flipping cash. I did not have, I had no friends at the end. Like I, we got dropped like crazy. But I guess I didn’t have any friends to be in with, if that’s the truth. If, I mean, that’s not, I do have friends, but not many. But yeah. But so that’s disenfranchised grief ’cause it has nowhere to go, but right here. So it’s in me. If I’m a single parent or a spouse, it’s within us. If it’s just a couple, like it’s just right there and so it’s spreads all over the family. Like my daughter, she doesn’t anymore because she’s 29, but all through high school she’s like, and do you remember the, you did not decorate for Halloween. I’m like, I know, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. But it was a bad, bad fall. That was a
[00:34:00] bad Halloween. She was just scarred and we did not, we had a pumpkin period. Right. Bless her heart. Bless her heart. Oh my gosh. Wow. She actually is what got me to, her words got me to realize the tag your IT concept, because he had called during one of his relapses and I was, I remember being downstairs on the patio and I must have looked grief striking or whatever my sad face was, and she came out on the deck and she was like, what? I mean, she’s like 14 at the time, maybe 15. And I said, blank blank, you know, so and so relapsed. And she was like, she literally put her hands on her skinny little hips and she said, how much more time, emotion, money, energy are you going to give addiction mom? And she just turned around and spun on her little heel and closed the kitchen door.And I was like.
[00:35:00] Wow. I just got schooled and I think I need to listen. Mm. How powerful. Yeah. Oof. Well, that seems like a really great place to leave people and let them kind of noodle on that. What I love, and I’m gonna put a link in the show notes directly to the page where folks can work with you. Oh, thank you. You work with folks on the phone, but also email, which is awesome or Zoom. We do a lot of Zoom. Yeah, zoom. But yeah, you can do an email consult, which is much cheaper, or you can join the membership and ask a question on the live call every Wednesday, and a lot of people do that ’cause that’s, you know, for $40 a month you can ask questions. Yes, yes. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you for going through, going back to college, doing what you’re doing. I love that and you know, I say
[00:36:00] all the time, I’m so sorry it happened to the boys. I really am heart stricken about that, but I’m not sorry it happened to me. Yeah. I’m just not, I love my new life. I love everything about my life. That’s so amazing. Well, we are so fortunate that you do what you do and yeah, just keep at it, keep helping the parents and we just appreciate it so much. Thank you for joining me. Thank you so much. It’s been delightful.
[00:00:00] Campbell, welcome to Hope Stream. This is an exciting conversation for two folks who do somewhat similar things and just mom to mom. It’s wonderful to have you. Mm-hmm. So thanks for joining me. Gosh, thank you. This is a treat. Yeah. We finally got the tech gods on our side and all of that stuff working, and I wanted to really have you a, because you know, I love having a good family story where folks can really hear the real deal mm-hmm of like, here’s somebody who’s been through on the rollercoaster ride through the trenches. Gets what I’m going through, but also, you know, how it changed your life and your career and what you’re doing now. So why don’t you just give us some background on your family.
I know you told your whole story on Amber’s video channel. Mm-hmm. Which I got to see, but that was a while ago, wasn’t it? I feel like, oh gosh. That was, yeah, I probably told that story
[00:01:00] eight or nine years ago. Yeah, it’s been a while. So, yeah. And I told you before, I actually stopped it halfway through because I knew I wanted to immediately, I’m like, I’m getting her on the podcast, and I didn’t want to hear the rest of the story.
So it would be more fun to talk about with you. So, fill us in on your story, what happened with your kiddos, and then we’ll kind of go from there. Okay, so we have three kids, our oldest was two and a half years older than our middle, who’s four years older than our youngest, and is the middle son who initially brought us into this wonderful world of addiction.
He was a high school junior and he just started to like I mean, actually it kind of started the year before, just like not be interested in being at home. He actually missed my surprise for 50th birthday party, he just, we didn’t know his friends anymore. But I am completely naive and I’m just not getting that we have a problem.
I just think this is teenage behavior, right. So
[00:02:00] anyway, it all comes to a head in the fall of that year, which was I think oh eight and I realized we have a big problem, but I couldn’t name it. I just could not name it. Eventually after a series of questioning him on a particular day, he admitted he had a drug problem.
Mm-hmm. So I’d looked up deep for drugs in the Yellow Pages because that’s what one does, and got absolutely nowhere for like 10 phone calls, but eventually ended up in the right place and took him in, he did the assessment call. They took him in for detox and my husband was outta town and I actually, he said, do you need me to come home?
I’m like, no. I just dropped him off. It was horrible. But I’m gonna go home and we’re making lasagna. It was the day before Valentine’s Day, and he’ll be back next week and this will all be behind us. I was be fixed. So freaking naive. It was scary. So when I talk to parents now and they’re like, you know what?
I know you think I’m stupid. I’m like, Hmm, no I don’t. Nope. I do not.
[00:03:00] So anyway, that he detoxed, he was supposed to start IOP, which he did, which is how I met Amber. ’cause she was running IOP. He was kicked out several weeks later for trying to buy drugs from someone in the group. ’cause apparently that’s a no-no, of course.
And so that’s how they do it. But my husband and I had joined the family group and amber’s encouraged us to continue to come to that. She’s like, I would highly encourage you to do this, which we did, which we continued to do and over that spring, we learned sort of how to let it get worse, and it did get a lot worse.
And then we actually took him somewhere, amber said, he says he is ready. He’s not. So take him somewhere that’s free. So we picked a very fundamentally Christian place. It was free. He made it four days. But I didn’t expect more because. It was really fundamentally Christian, but like as in you could only take the Bible to read.
Oh, like seriously. Wow. But anyway, so he came home and somewhere shortly after that I just had had enough, like there were drug dealers coming in and out of the
[00:04:00] yard. I would go down to wake him up to go to school and the window was open and he was gone and you know, he had a younger sister who was
13 at the time. Yeah. So I just snapped and said, dude, you can’t live here. These are the conditions to live here and he was like, well, that’s not working for me and off he went, which is really scary and poor husband mean by the time he got home from work. I was like, good news and bad news. We’re having, steak is the good news, but only four because the other person doesn’t live here anymore.
And he was like, okay. Wow. And he was sorry to do that. He was 17. 17, okay. Yeah. Brand new 17. Right. So anyway, he was off doing God knows what. I seriously do not wanna know. I heard stories from his brother every now and then, and just was like, I can’t process this but we got a call in July and he said, I need help.
I’ll do anything. I’ll go anywhere. I cannot handle this anymore, please and I was like, absolutely.
[00:05:00] So took him back to detox and at that point Amber and the team there was like, okay, we’re finding this kid a place to go and at the time, 17 year olds in South Carolina were adults and I was like, I don’t wanna take him to an adult program ’cause he can leave and I want him somewhere where he can’t leave.
So we took him to Georgia, ’cause of Georgia, he was an adolescent, so he couldn’t leave. He stayed 32 days and somewhere in the middle of that they were like, Hmm, this kid needs, he needs sober living. He needs long more help. So we began the process of researching sober living, which is near and dear to my heart because there’s so much bad sober living out there, which I talked to 25 of them and finally, finally found this place right near where he was in Atlanta, Georgia, called Purple.
And I knew immediately this is it and they didn’t take 17 year olds, so I just begged and finally, the Joel, the dad said, well, how 17 is he?
[00:06:00] I said, he’s 17 and seven months. He goes, oh, he is on the dark side of 17. We’ll take him. Right. And he was the first person that’d ever taken. I just think Joel felt so bad for me.He was like, I gotta work with this woman. So anyway, that was that. It was a scene getting him in there. But once he was there, he just got it. He liked it, he embraced it. He has been sober since. That he will be 34 years old, December 16th, so Wow, that’s, it was 17 years ago, so that was fabulous. Meanwhile, his older brother had broken his back and we were in and outta the hospital for eight weeks.
He had a staph infection and got hooked on opiates, so he was not living here, he was attending college locally, but he was obviously using and stealing from us and by the time I figured that out, he was knee deep into it
[00:07:00] and that actually is a funny story in and of itself. ’cause I had known he had done it. We had gotten everything back from the pawn shop. I’d had serious conversation like, you don’t have the key to this house anymore. Like, this is not happening. But somehow he did it again and I was out of town on business trip and Frank figured it out and called Amber and they drew straws and Amber got the short straw and she had to call me in the Chicago hotel and tell me, and I was livid.
I was, there was with my first son. I was heartbroken and with this son, I was just like, you have got to be kidding me. I cannot do this again and then he stole all my things and I love things as you know, I dropped the diamond earring down the drain today and almost lost my crackers. So anyway, I said he cannot, he’s gotta be in treatment.
Like I cannot deal with this and she said, we are working on that. I said, well, okay. So when I got here back flew home, he was in detox,
[00:08:00] I picked him up. I drove him to purple. Luckily they were like, we would love to have another manning and so speak to him. You’re on the, the family plan now, didn’t what? You’re on the family plan now? Not, not just yet. It’s gonna come not then. Oh, oh. I was so mad. I didn’t even speak to him. I would just, I know I slowed down ’cause he didn’t break his legs getting outta the car. But I don’t know that I parked, I was done. Yeah and he did it. He did fine. He’s had a couple little hiccups and ended up back there and that’s where the family plan came back in. ’cause he negotiated that. ’cause I said, I’m not paying for it. Like, this is, you gotta work this out buddy and ultimately as those little relapses, I finally learned by my own, like something I teach clients all day long, which is these guys have got to get the message of tag on it.
Like there’s no not, there’s gonna keep fixing this. There’s no not that’s gonna keep paying for this like, tag on it. When they get that message and when he got that message is when he figured this out and got it together.
[00:09:00] So that, that has been, and both of them have stayed in the Atlanta area? They just have their people there. Yeah. They know what to do. My husband, I mean, my son married a girl in recovery and so it’s all been, luckily it all worked out. Yes, but what a wild ride to be on. Mm-hmm. For a while. What was the span of time that you were navigating all of this? Oh, eight to 10 is when I took the second one to purple and then I started graduate school to be, to do what I’m doing in January of 11.
And I think I had to tag your IT message. Somewhere in 12. Wow. So you really learned with your feet in the fire of how things work. Mm-hmm. And what people respond to and of course, every kiddo
[00:10:00] is different, but I agree that there tends to be, and I was this way, I only went through it with one, so I didn’t have the second lesson.But I think in the beginning, and I’d be curious what you see with this, with your coaching clients, there’s, I don’t know if it’s a, like a wish or a dream or a hope that we think if we’re. We’re just like, oh, but, you know, but they’re gonna come around and mm-hmm You know, I’m gonna keep doing this.
That somehow it’s just magically going to self-correct, and I think it’s holding onto the old dream and avoiding the grief. I think that’s sort of the combination. I say this all, I use this phrase a lot, which is addiction is a loss of dream. This is not what we envisioned when we got pregnant, when we adopted them, when we reared them as they grew up.
We envision our children, you know, doing nice things, being lovely. So you really have to grieve that and then you have to learn and figure out
[00:11:00] what in the fly to do now and then you have to pray that the future is going to work out and that’s just a lot of emotions to navigate and I find in with couples. We don’t navigate it simultaneously. My husband kept saying, oh, boys will be boys. He’s just a teenager. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill and I was like, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But I think it’s just we’re naive. Yeah, we’re naive and we don’t want it. Like I’ve had clients say, I think my child is bipolar and that would be better.
And I’m like, no, really, addiction would be better ’cause we can cure, you know, in that we cannot end bipolar. Right. And so I think there’s that naivete is that addiction is this and it is a horrible, horrible thing, but it’s, and it can’t possibly happen to us. I mean, I think there’s that too. Like I was one of those people like that when I would hear about it, I’d be like, they must not have a very good family life.
[00:12:00] Yeah. What’s going on in that family? Yeah. Then what’s wrong with those parents? Yeah. It’s the, I agree. I think it’s the kind of the shame and yeah also I think there is an element of the, like, this couldn’t happen in my family. Not necessarily from the standpoint of like hoity-toity, superiority of like, oh, not my family, but it’s more of just, it feels so foreign. Mm-hmm. Especially if you come from a family that doesn’t have addiction in it. Right, right. Which we didn’t, so it was less about, oh, I’m like better than that, and more of just like, you might as well just send an elephant to stand in my bathtub, because that would seem more normal than having my kid using drugs. Right. Absolutely. Well, and also back then, I mean, or I didn’t even, it never occurred to me that kids, like I knew something was up, but I, he never smelled like liquor or a pot. So I was like, well, then it can’t be, it did not occur to me that there were opiates
[00:13:00] available all over, including the school.Right. It just didn’t occur to me. Right. No. ’cause you have this, you have this mental picture of what a, either a drug addict looks like or a drug dealer looks like, and holy cow, now they’re like, you know, it’s Uber Eats as delivery the drugs. So there’s your drug dealer is the Uber. Apparently you could get it through the number 62 at the Taco Bell in Greenville. Oh yeah we had a McDonald’s that where, you know, if you order a certain combination, that was the special combo, which I did not know. You did not know. That’s why I don’t go to Taco Bell and it’s not Taco Bell’s fault. It’s not their fault. Yeah. It’s wild and so what was your younger son thinking when your older son started with this? Because he, was he in recovery by then? Mm-hmm. Oh, tell me about that. I think he, at first he was like, dude, you just watched this movie. You
[00:14:00] know how it’s gonna play out? Like, what are you thinking? But then I think because of the way it happened through the back injury, there was a lot of, I mean, they were, they were really close and they were really good close brothers. And so I think they were, he was very supportive of him but by this time, I think he was in college, so he was very, very busy and kind of focused on his life. He’s also very self pre like I am, so he sort of takes care of his little nuclear world. Right. I know we went to visit him and talk to him every now and then, but I don’t think there was a lot of interaction.
Yeah. Now I think with the relapses, he was like, dude, get it together. Like very, I’m not having this because it hadn’t happened to him, you know? I think for whatever reason he just got it now just remember that from February to July he was in and out of our home living very dangerously, so. Right. Maybe he got it because of that versus the other one.
[00:15:00] Yeah. Really just got caught and was sent. Yeah. It’s really interesting the back injury because you often hear that, and I know there’s a huge amount of people, especially earlier on, I think less so now because opioids have been so much more controlled, but earlier on, and it just frustrates me when I hear people say, mm-hmm Oh, that’s just an excuse. They didn’t get addicted ’cause their doctor prescribed it and well, yes you do. I think there’s a fascinating statistic and I am not what sure what it is, but it’s a large number of people who have been in the hospital for longer than two weeks and on opiates are addicted already. Yes. It’s just not known because we’re managing it. Right. That if you start to space that out, those people act just like addicts. Yes and they send them home with a bottle of 80 or whatever. Mm-hmm. Oxy thirties or Oxy age for sure. And yeah and at the time, you know, that was
[00:16:00] normal. I think now it is. It’s much not. Yeah. Yeah. So, which is good also I know that’s also a challenge for some people, but I just wanted to say that, ’cause I think people, it’s easy to roll your eyes and be like, oh yeah, okay, there’s a good story and it’s very real because there are certain people who, like if I take an oxy, I hate that feeling.
Oh God, I threw up one time I took it and that was the end. I threw it. I just called the doctor. I said, I’m bringing these back. Right. But for other people, they take it and it’s like, oh, this is good here. It is the key to the kingdom. Yes. And did your son feel that? Like did he get that? I don’t know, because he was not with it. Like he was so injured and I don’t know. I guess so. He was super happy as he got better. Yes. As we were in the hospital for all those weeks, he’d stay up all night. We watched all the seasons to the office all night long, and he was quite happy. Now
[00:17:00] that you asked that question. That was miserable, right?You’re like, wait a minute, why am I the one who’s in more pain? You’re in the hospital with a broken back. Right. With a wound vac and PICC lines and, oh gosh. So yeah, you’re, yeah actually that’s a really good question and the answer is, yeah, he was, he liked it. Yeah and that seems to be the case. I don’t know anybody that’s kind of like, Hmm, ho-hum on opioids. It seems like they either make you sick and you don’t like them, or you really like them. You know? Mm-hmm. That kind of, yeah, I think you’re right. So you go through this. You’ve met Amber, who we just had on the podcast a while ago. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That was super fun and what what were you doing before? Like what was your career before and how did you decide like, I am gonna go into coaching marriage? Yeah. Since you were struggling. So, before that I was the executive director for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Okay. So I was fundraising and before that I’d done a lot of selling and
[00:18:00] I’ve been an entrepreneur. I’ve done a million things. Yeah. But, so I was doing that, joined the parent group, really liked that and that parent group ran really nicely because you got a mentor couple and I really liked our mentor couple. We became friends and I had been, and they lived like 40 minutes from us, so I had been through their pool for the afternoon. She and I had just been talking wonderful day, and I’m just driving on the highway home and I was like, I really like being a parent by now. I am a parent mentor, right? And so I’m like, I really like this like, I wonder what it would be like to do this full time and then I was like, wait, I wonder what i’d like to be a counselor. So I called Amber. I remember I was on the ramp coming into our downtown and I said, Hey, I’ve had this thought. What do you think? She’s like, oh God, yes. You’d be so good. I said, well, what do I have to do? She said, we gotta take the GREs. . You gotta pass the GREs. And I’m like, Hmm. College is like a long way to go. So I
[00:19:00] decided I would get the book outta the library, and I studied all summer long, the math and the science, I was fine on the rest of it, but I mean I have flashcards at the you know, my geometry and I took them and I did really well. And so then I was like, well snap and so I applied to Clemson, which is about an hour from here, and it’s a K Crep school, so that was a leg up in the counseling world. They were highly accredited. You did better. I got in, they took 14 people after the big interview and I was like. Oh my God. And I was like, okay, I guess I’m going to grad school, going back to college. I loved it. I’m, oh man. Frank gave me a gift certificate to Staples that year and right before school started in January and I was like a kid in a candy store. I think they’re still talking about me ’cause I’m over there with the spiral notebooks and the pens and I’m just like, oh. I was a nerd all the way through. All the way through grad
[00:20:00] school. I know those other kids were like, God, I hate old ladies being in school. Right. What? I loved it. I drew cartoons for all the theories, like I was in it and I was working full time still for JDRF. Wow. It was insane. And so after the first year I quit JDF and just went to school and we’d lift off student loans, like as, and learned how to have hotdog without buns ’cause we had no money. And then I was, had done my first internship, you have to do three. And I was in the summer getting ready. I started to apply to other ones and Amber called me one day and said, Hey, can you have lunch? And I was like, sure. So we had lunch, she had a new baby and we met for lunch and she’s like, so you do your next two internships with me and then help me start a private practice. And I was like, what? What? How amazing I was like hell to the, yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:00] So that’s what I did. And I learned at her knee, I was in every session six days a week, just lived with her basically. Wow. On this little tiny black Dr. Rollie stool while she sat in this big red soft chair and I’m like a giraffe. This just this picture in my mind. Oh yeah. ’cause I’m like nothing but legs and arms. I’m five 10, like just right. And she is like really short and so I’m just like, but it was just fabulous. I loved every minute of it. Didn’t get paid a dime. Wow. Then yeah, and then we, then we started Hope for Families and I guess actually the semester before I graduated, I did start seeing clients for a very low rate and that’s where it was born. Incredible and you guys help not only family members, but also people who are struggling mm-hmm with substance use disorders, which I think is amazing because you’re seeing the whole elephant. We try to see the whole system whenever possible so a spouse and a spouse or parents and
[00:22:00] child, or sibling and brother, you know, whatever it is. We try to see a system so that we can actually get more knowledge that we need. Yeah and then move where we need to go faster. Right. Instead of listening to a bunch of lies and lies and lies. Well, yeah. It’s hard to know what you’re dealing with. Mostly I think the parents are upfront. I do think that there’s. Whenever I’m coaching somebody, I’m like, I wonder what they’re not telling me. I wonder what? I wonder what I’m not hearing or not seeing. Oh, yeah. I hear a lot of minimization and I have a lot of clients that like, I’ll say, I think you have a problem. Like, and they’re like, no, I just, and I’m like, first of all, why did you book an appointment? It’s super expensive and you know what we do? If you didn’t think you have a problem, I’m kind of confused why you booked this session. Yeah. But they, I think they want me to say, yeah, I think you’re right. It’s nothing. And I’m like, mm, I think you have a problem. Yeah. You came to the wrong place if you, yeah.
[00:23:00] Yeah. So when you’re working with parents, I would love to just hear from another, I’m not a counselor, but from a coaching perspective, the things that I see most parents struggling with are three things.Control. I wanna control this. I’m gonna fix this. Allowing natural consequences. Mm-hmm. Because it’s so scary. And then, figuring out what do boundaries look like? Like what do you boundaries safe and healthy boundaries look like? Well, I think the bigger thing I see is a lot of people that can’t have a boundary, and that I think that’s the number one thing people need to worry to think about when we’re even beginning this journey is, am I going to be able to do what this person might tell me to do? Am I going, do I have that? I just talked to a client and I identified her husband can’t, and I said, it’s like they have an extra vein in their heart that keeps too much blood going to the heart, and so they can’t hold a boundary versus I don’t have that
[00:24:00] vein, and so I can, which she was like, well, I feel better that he’s just not a bad dad. I said, no, I think he just has a soft spot for her and he believes that what he’s doing, that this will be the last time she asked for money or this will be the last time she uses. Mm-hmm. So I think boundaries are a huge, huge, huge thing. In fact, that’s why Kim and I developed that course, is because you need to know your relationship with yourself. Mm-hmm. Then you can be told what to do if you have that ability. I think the bigger problem I see is just lack of knowledge of what to do.
Like I think the misconception out there is that a 28 day treatment, it will fix it. And it just will not, in and of itself, it will not and so I feel like I’m constantly bursting the bubble of what treatment center should I send my child to? I’m like, Hmm, I think we need to look at long-term sober living. That’s the bigger issue and that’s a big pill to swallow because like me, with the first week
[00:25:00] of detox when I thought naively, oh, this will all be done. They want this to be done in 28 days so that they can grab their dream and have it back. Right. Right. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The whole 28 day thing is just, I’m so glad you said that because I also am like, I hate to tell you this, especially with an adolescent ’cause, and it’s even harder for them because there is no, like sober living for Ities. There’s not, you’re so host if you have a 15 or 16-year-old, which is tragic. I know it is heartbreaking and the, you know, I mean, there are places for them obviously. There’s residential treatment, there’s therapeutic boarding schools that cost a billion dollars a month, a billion dollars. And then eventually even, I mean, I’ve got one now, he’s, and he’s a 10th grader. And even those things are like, unless you’ve got 500 gram to keep him in high school the whole time
[00:26:00] even that they’re like after you. Well he’s ready to come home like, well, no, he is not, like, he cannot go back to this high school. No, if there was a solution for that, I just, my heart goes out to the parents of adolescents. Mm-hmm. And that’s extra hard. But yeah, the boundaries thing, I think first of all, we have trouble, some of us with boundaries just in life in general, right? Like, we don’t know where our boss’s boundaries should end, or we don’t know where our mom or her cousin or whatever and then when you have to apply a boundary to your own child who is often under the influence of very strong substances. Mm-hmm and not being themselves. It’s not like you’re working with a sober, rational person. It gets so complicated, which is like you said, like, when you’re working as the coach or the counselor, you don’t have that emotional right umbilical cord. So you can be much more objective. You can be much more in tune with what’s
[00:27:00] really going on because you can see it with a clear lens sure versus the parents who see it through that rose colored love lens, which is wonderful. Which is, yeah. That’s how it should be. Yeah. What are some of the situations that you see come up over and over, maybe with adolescents and then also with young adults that you see parents getting tripped up with the most? Getting the parents on the same page is a huge one. There’s usually like I always say, there’s someone with a softer heart and we always have to work with a softer heart. We I’m always like, we are not gonna push against the soft heart because if something were to go south, this will ruin your marriage.
So we just gotta wait till we get on the same page and we have to be patient and sometimes that takes months and months and months or longer, which is very really difficult. So I end up seeing the one that’s got the harder heart individually ’cause they’re so frustrated. So they stay well. We let the soft heart
[00:28:00] figure it out. But I see that a lot. I see the concept of I cannot possibly hold a boundary that my child cannot live in this house. That’s probably number one. Number one, yeah. Is, and these are like often like 24, 25 year olds who have just not launched due to substance abuse but the parents are like, well, I can’t tell him he can’t live here.I’m like, then he’s gonna live there but the situation isn’t going to change because until his life becomes unmanageable as defined by him. He’s not gonna change and that’s a really difficult concept to sell because they do exactly what you said at the beginning, which is if I can control this, if I could cajole this, if I could punish this, if I could yell this, if I could limit this, if I can drive him to and from work, like none of that’s gonna work.But it takes them a long time to figure out and then I think it’s the concept of they really need to go somewhere about two hours from your home, ideally for six months to 24 months. Which
[00:29:00] then means they kind of need to live there for a while, ’cause that’s now their world. Yes. But addiction loves change and you send it somewhere for two months or three months and you bring it home.That’s not enough change and the brain is just beginning to recover at two months. Oh yeah. It’s no brain recovery at 28 days, zero. No, all we’ve done is limit access to substances. I mean, I could go to rehab for Fritos for 28 days and I wouldn’t eat a Frito. They’re not there. I’m not gonna eat ’em. But then I come home and they’re at the grocery store, or God forbid, in my pantry, and definitely at the office, I’m gonna have a freedom. Mm-hmm. Within a week or two. Yes. Yeah. That is, that aligns exactly with what we see and I think the message, I can’t remember if it was you or Amber that I heard say this, which I thought was just really true and beautiful, but also, impactful, which is as you are working onfiguring out your boundaries and you’re working on your relationship with the
[00:30:00] co-parent, it’s really, we’re just gonna be in this longer. Mm-hmm and that’s okay but somebody is suffering a lot right our kiddo and sometimes it doesn’t look like they’re suffering. It looks like they’re having a hundred percent. Yeah. They’re miserable and I mean, at the beginning obviously they’re not but when we get into stage three and four addiction, they’re not happy. I’ve had so many clients tell me over the years and one of my kids, like I actually had a young guy’s like 30 who said I would actually be angry if I woke up in the morning.
He said I wasn’t trying to kill myself, but I was using with so much abandon that I didn’t care and then when I would wake up, I’d think, damnit, I have another day where I’m gonna do it even though I don’t want to. Oh, and that shame and that suck of pride and connection with yourself that’s what
[00:31:00] addiction feeds on like Pacman points. It loves isolation and people that don’t like themselves and shame. Yes. It’s like, there it is. That’s now I’m gonna do it because I have all these negative things going on. Yeah. I say it’s the only disease that guarantees it’s gonna happen because it makes it happen. Oh wow. Yeah, that’s very true. Yeah, I think that can, it can be a motivator to say, you know, yes, this is uncomfortable for you as a parent to have to hold these boundaries, to have to make these very painful, excruciating decisions and it’s a gift to your child because it is not really very compassionate and empathetic to leave them in the state they’re in. I say it’s over loving. You’re over loving. I get it. Is that a fear? It is anxiety. It is that grief. I understand it. I’m not condoning it or you know, shaming you for it, but that’s what’s happening but your over parenting is over loving is gonna kill your child. Yeah. Yeah. It’s because your child’s
[00:32:00] like doing a bunch, bunch of fentanyl. Yeah. It’s such a twisted thing, right? It’s like, it’s such a cruel disease because of that. I mean, when people, they say it’s a family disease, that’s part of it is that it’s so, it’s cruel to the parents. It’s cruel to the kids. It’s just cruel. It’s cruel to the siblings. It’s just cruel and it just keeps getting crueler and endless. It’s endless. And it’s like lava. Yes, it is. Yeah, it is. You know and I don’t have a child who’s ever had cancer or any other horrible thing like that. I just think there’s a difference in addiction because you are watching your child do it to themself, right? And it is that torture of, but I’m watching him put this into his body, which I know could kill him, and I cannot do anything about it.I call it disenfranchised grief because like if you have a child with cancer. Well, your mom dies. There
[00:33:00] are cards and people bring casseroles and churches help you and your neighbors rally around you and so the grief can dissipate but with addiction, none of that happens. There aren’t any cards. There’s nothing you didn’t get a casserole on your friend did not get one Campbell lip in. I did not get one flipping cash. I did not have, I had no friends at the end. Like I, we got dropped like crazy. But I guess I didn’t have any friends to be in with, if that’s the truth. If, I mean, that’s not, I do have friends, but not many. But yeah. But so that’s disenfranchised grief ’cause it has nowhere to go, but right here. So it’s in me. If I’m a single parent or a spouse, it’s within us. If it’s just a couple, like it’s just right there and so it’s spreads all over the family. Like my daughter, she doesn’t anymore because she’s 29, but all through high school she’s like, and do you remember the, you did not decorate for Halloween. I’m like, I know, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. But it was a bad, bad fall. That was a
[00:34:00] bad Halloween. She was just scarred and we did not, we had a pumpkin period. Right. Bless her heart. Bless her heart. Oh my gosh. Wow. She actually is what got me to, her words got me to realize the tag your IT concept, because he had called during one of his relapses and I was, I remember being downstairs on the patio and I must have looked grief striking or whatever my sad face was, and she came out on the deck and she was like, what? I mean, she’s like 14 at the time, maybe 15. And I said, blank blank, you know, so and so relapsed. And she was like, she literally put her hands on her skinny little hips and she said, how much more time, emotion, money, energy are you going to give addiction mom? And she just turned around and spun on her little heel and closed the kitchen door.And I was like.
[00:35:00] Wow. I just got schooled and I think I need to listen. Mm. How powerful. Yeah. Oof. Well, that seems like a really great place to leave people and let them kind of noodle on that. What I love, and I’m gonna put a link in the show notes directly to the page where folks can work with you. Oh, thank you. You work with folks on the phone, but also email, which is awesome or Zoom. We do a lot of Zoom. Yeah, zoom. But yeah, you can do an email consult, which is much cheaper, or you can join the membership and ask a question on the live call every Wednesday, and a lot of people do that ’cause that’s, you know, for $40 a month you can ask questions. Yes, yes. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you for going through, going back to college, doing what you’re doing. I love that and you know, I say
[00:36:00] all the time, I’m so sorry it happened to the boys. I really am heart stricken about that, but I’m not sorry it happened to me. Yeah. I’m just not, I love my new life. I love everything about my life. That’s so amazing. Well, we are so fortunate that you do what you do and yeah, just keep at it, keep helping the parents and we just appreciate it so much. Thank you for joining me. Thank you so much. It’s been delightful.
