Misreading Your Child’s Substance Use: What Parents Get Wrong with Brenda Zane

[00:00:00] Hey friend. Welcome back. I’m so glad to be here with you. While I am telling you about what we’re gonna talk about today, please take your deep breaths. Please breathe deeply. Your body so needs it. I even myself, as much as I kind of preach this, I will find myself. Just barely breathing sometimes during the day. So while I tell you what we’re gonna chat about today, you do your breathing. The topic for today came up because Cathy and I get to witness and hold and interact with hundreds of women every day, and as we see them come into our community in the stream, we’ve noticed over the years that we have people come in at all points of the spectrum of their child’s substance use journey. Some are what we call deer headlights. They’re the really freaked out frazzled like, holy cow, I just found out this 
[00:01:00] information or my kid just got a DUI. Whatever it is, or some kind of big startling, incident that’s happened. And then some are maybe what we would call a little under alarmed. So things are going on, things are happening, and the mom is a little bit under alarmed for lack of better words for that, and neither is right or wrong. Neither is at fault for anything but what we were thinking about is the fact that with substance use, there isn’t really like the stages of cancer. Like when somebody says, oh my, my mom was diagnosed with stage four cancer. You know what that means? And so we were sort of thinking about this idea that, wow, there is nothing similar to that I have even heard of related to addiction and substance use. At least I was never given a framework for that. We talk about the stages of change, which is different than what I’m gonna be talking about today. 
[00:02:00] What I’ve sort of framed up is the stages of addiction. So like with cancer, oncologists have staging systems, they have risk scoring, and like I said, if somebody was diagnosed in a certain stage, you kind of have an idea of what that means. Parents of kids with substance use issues are handed nothing, and we’re expected to assess a situation that, you know, clinicians in other fields have spent years and years and years assessing and learning to read. So today. We are going to borrow a concept from medicine and not because addiction is like cancer. It is not, and this isn’t meant to scare you, but I’m borrowing this because staging is one of the most useful ideas that medicine came up with. It gives us some guardrails, it gives us perspective, and I think that parents of kids struggling with substances deserve the same clarity. So I’m gonna give you a 
[00:03:00] comparison, and I also want to honor the limits of this comparison. So most of us understand intuitively when a doctor says you have stage one versus stage four cancer, it tells you about the level of urgency, the treatment intensity, the prognosis, and what the family may need to expect and to mobilize work. So some of you have heard those words. You know about someone in very close to you and your family, maybe about yourself. And so I want to be very gentle and careful with this comparison because again, I’m not equating addiction to cancer as an experience. What I just wanna do is borrow the concept that a condition exists on a spectrum of severity. So the earlier that you can intervene, that changes the outcomes and the appropriate response 
[00:04:00] depends on where somebody actually is.So it’s less about where we fear they are, where we hope they are. It’s about where they actually are in that spectrum. So the problem in our world, parents are making these consequential decisions. How much should I intervene? When should I intervene? What kind of limits should I set? What kind of professional help do I need with no frame of reference? So there is the DSM five, which classifies substance use disorder on a spectrum. Now most parents don’t have the DSM five book in their on their bookshelf. It’s not something that you’re perusing every night. So I just wanted to lay this out there. There is a classification for substance use disorder, and it is on a spectrum. Mild, moderate, severe, and that is based on the number of diagnostic criteria that are met, 
[00:05:00] and that’s based on the number of diagnostic criteria that are met. Two to three is mild, four to five is moderate, and six or more is severe. Now, this is not just an opinion, this is not just what I think. This is clinical infrastructure. That most parents, again, have never seen. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the DSM five sitting around in my pile of books that I have accumulated over the years. Before we get to those stages though, I just wanna set the landscape because the landscape has changed and there are two things that are true today that were not true 20 years ago. And they really change everything about how you need to assess your child’s situation. The first thing is that substances themselves are categorically different. We talk about this quite 
[00:06:00] frequently, in particular when we’re referencing marijuana. So the marijuana conversation that your parents might have had with you or maybe they didn’t, or that you had with your kids even. Five or 10 years ago is not relevant anymore to what’s actually being used and what’s being sold in the marketplace. So just some data. ’cause you know, I love data. The THC concentration in the sixties and seventies averaged about 2% in the flower and then by the 1990s it had risen to about 4% and today, according to NIDA, the average THC concentration in that is seized when they do drug rates and they seize cannabis samples. It exceeds 12% and concentrates, vapes, dabs, shatters, all of that stuff commonly ranges between 60 to 90 to a hundred percent tHC so from 
[00:07:00] a biological standpoint, Dr. Anna Lembke, who I had on the podcast, so make sure and go search her episode. Her research describes how high potency THC accelerates the brains dopamine regulation. That’s the pleasure, pain imbalance that drives compulsive use. It accelerates that significantly faster than low potency cannabis and the chemical hook forms faster. Even if your young person is using at a moderate level, if they’re using daily at a what, that would be considered a high level even worse. The second substance, obviously that I have to mention is fentanyl, we’ve talked about fentanyl quite a bit, so you probably already know, but the contamination in the street drug supply in particular is complete. So anything anybody is buying on the street will have fentanyl in it. It’s in oxys, it’s in Percocet, it’s in Xanax, it’s in everything and according to the CDC, fentanyl is 
[00:08:00] now the leading cause of death for Americans 18 to 45. I mean, that is just unbelievable. So we know that one exposure to fentanyl is not the thing that you’re gonna get addicted to long term. So just one exposure to a fentanyl laced product is enough to cause overdose. So the practical implication of this, if your frame of reference is, my kid is just experimenting like I did. If you’re sort of comparing what you did with what they’re doing today, you’re comparing two completely different chemical realities. Even moderate use of today’s THC since it’s so high potency or something that has fentanyl in it carries huge risk that even the use of 10 years ago does not compare to. So I just wanted to lay that out there first because I think that we have to sort of get that foundational understanding. The other thing is that substance use 
[00:09:00] today often can hide in plain sight. So there is a generation of young people today that are managing chronic anxiety and depression, and it often is going either underdiagnosed or undiagnosed and undertreated. They are kind of quietly at home, self-medicating in their room, maybe with a video game, maybe with their phone. This profile of a young person does not look like what my kiddo looked like. It doesn’t look like sort of the old afterschool special version of addiction where, you know, everybody is acting crazy and running around in the streets. You know, there’s potentially no police calls. There’s no obvious physical deterioration, at least for a while at first. You’re not necessarily missing money, nothing’s getting stolen. Your child is spending a lot of time at home. They seem 
[00:10:00] withdrawn, but they also seem safe because they’re at home. So there’s a dangerous gap here, which is the absence of a visible crisis is not evidence of an absence of a problem. The isolation, I hear this all the time from parents, the isolation that comes with their kids’, anxiety and depression really can cover for escalating use. It is very deceptive. The substances in particular, these high potency, THC vapes and dabs and pens worsen their underlying anxiety and depression over time. They are thinking that it’s gonna help. They think it’s gonna help with sleep. They think it’s gonna help with that anxiety but really what it does from a chemical standpoint is it makes it worse and that just creates this cycle that tightens and tightens and tightens just gripping them in that anxiety. As the parent, may not be seeing those 
[00:11:00] obvious external signals. So I did an episode recently with a therapeutic consultant, and she talked about this concept that what she is seeing is families are waiting longer to engage help because they’re not seeing the external risk and danger, and the police aren’t in the living room and kids aren’t getting arrested and this isn’t because the parents don’t care. It’s because they don’t have a frame of reference or a clear enough signal of how serious things are. Okay, so those were just a couple of precursor things that I wanted to mention before we actually look at these four stages. So these are things that you might observe, things that are happening underneath the surface, and then what some appropriate parental response might look like. So let’s talk about what we might call stage one 
[00:12:00] experimentation and early use. So this could look like your young person is trying substances at a party. Maybe they have occasional weekend use. It’s driven by curiosity. It’s very social. At first, they’re not thinking, oh, I have this big problem that I need to solve with substances. They’re doing this mostly in social settings, really fitting in with the other kids that they’re hanging out with. So what is happening underneath the Brain’s Reward system is being introduced to this artificial dopamine spike. Again, please go back and listen to Anna Lembke’s episode. She describes this as the brain beginning to rebalance the pleasure pain seesaw. This is not automatic addiction. Most people who try substances don’t develop a substance use disorder. I think that’s really important to understand. So if you’re listening, you know your kiddo just, you know, smoked 
[00:13:00] pot at a party last weekend or you heard from another mom that they tried some alcohol at their house, please don’t jump to the conclusion that they are addicted or that they are going to become addicted. Most people, again, I’m just gonna restate this. Most people who try substances don’t develop a substance use disorder. However, the younger they begin, the more likely it is that they will develop a problem. So that is really important. So, here’s a caveat though, given what we know about fentanyl in particular, contamination and high potency, THC, even this stage one, the social use, the curiosity, carries a huge risk that didn’t existed a decade ago because they might try one pill thinking, oh, you know, this is exciting. All the kids are doing it, but they get the pill that has too much fentanyl on the left side of that little teeny tiny pill, 
[00:14:00] and it causes an overdose. So the experimentation isn’t the emergency, it is the substances that are being used in the experimentation phase. It doesn’t mean that this phase is consequence free, so what’s the appropriate response if this is where you are? It is not to panic, but it is also not to stay silent. I know that, Ooh, in this situation, you kind of just wanna not say anything and hope that it passes by, but that is not the approach that we would recommend because we want to make an open invitation to allow your child to talk to you, so that when they have questions, when they’re curious, when they’re concerned about a friend, that you will be the person that they go to. So this is the window for connection based conversation. You want to prioritize curiosity over accusations, which means you really need to set aside 
[00:15:00] any judgment, any assumptions that you have in your heart and in your mind about substance use and addiction. So CRAFT research really supports staying in a relationship, staying tuned in, and keeping the communication open as hard as I know that that can be, so one of the common parental mistakes in this phase is catastrophizing. It is running a movie in your head, forward 10 years, and you see your kiddo in an alley with a needle in their arm, and it’s a dangerous place to go. So if you can, don’t go there. If you are catastrophizing, it means you’re probably not going to be able to connect authentically. And in a curious way with your child, and that can really push them away and close doors where you really wanna keep the doors open. Okay, so stage two, this would be what we would sort of make a parallel to in the substance use world of 
[00:16:00] regular use and developing a pattern of use. So your child is using more frequently, more intentionally. They are sometimes using by themselves rather than just socially. You’re starting to notice some mood shifts. There’s changing friend groups potentially their grades or their work performance could be slipping. There’s potentially an increase in the level of secrecy or in sort of shifting the stories about what’s going on. And in today’s landscape for sure. There’s an increasing withdrawal into their room, into isolation. Their sleep is gonna be really disrupted. There’s a huge tendency for kids in this stage to start playing video games maybe at 8:00 PM and they don’t stop until 4:00 AM and then they are sleeping until noon, starting to miss school. So these are some of the
 [00:17:00] patterns that you might start to see with more regular use. Also, just a level of irritability, a level of anger that you weren’t seeing before, really feeling disconnected from them. You know, it’s normal for teens especially to start to pull away, so you’re not feeling as connected, but if you are in your gut feeling like, gosh, I just have lost the connection with this kid, that is a sign of kind of this stage two regular use. So what’s happening kind of beneath the surface, what’s happening in the lower part of that iceberg, right? You’re seeing the tip of the iceberg, which is this behavior, but what’s happening underneath is their tolerance is building and tolerance builds quickly with these substances today. So they’re going to need more of the substance that they’re using to get the same effect, and their brain is adapting. This is just what happens from a physiological standpoint and then this is where that pattern starts to have its 
[00:18:00] own momentum and this is often where kids, young people will talk about this. You know, I started to lose control of it. I thought I had it under control. I thought I could control how much I used, but I just couldn’t. Now this what I sort of call this hidden and plain sight profile. This is a kid who’s at home seemingly safe, but they are regularly using and they’re using alone, and this is a young person whose anxiety and depression is both driving the use and at the same time, again, this is the cycle. It’s also being worsened by the use. So that is a really tricky spot to be in for them because they start to lose their ability to really maintain control over their use. There are approximately 46 million Americans who are 12 and older that meet the criteria for substance use disorder. Out of 
[00:19:00] those, there are 11 million young people, 12 to 25, who have met the criteria for a substance use disorder and the majority of the adults. So if you go to the 25 plus, the majority of them started showing problematic patterns in adolescence. So this goes back to what I was saying earlier about, you know, most people don’t develop a substance use disorder, however, the earlier they start, the higher the odds are. So this is really the stage where your approach really matters. You still have significant influence and that’s a point I really wanna drive home today in this conversation is that you have significant influence as the parent. You may have been told that you were helpless, you may have been told that there’s nothing you can do that is categorically not true. You can do things like learn motivational 
[00:20:00] interviewing, learn about the invitation to change, learn about CRAFT. These are all approaches that teach you how to alter your behavior, your words, your approaches in order to influence how somebody else responds. So these are not lectures, they’re not ultimatums. They are strategic conversations, and I really love this in particular because I know I did not feel strategic at all. I felt like I was at the whim of my son’s behavior, and if I had known back in the day that there were strategies that I could apply to my conversations, to my actions, that would absolutely impact him. I would have jumped on that in a heartbeat. So know that there are things that you can do. They’re very structured, they’re very clear, and that’s what we teach in the stream 
[00:21:00] community. So common parental mistakes in this stage are. Whew. A lot. But what we see is swinging between this sort of like, I’m gonna put my head in the sand and ignore it and hope that it goes away because maybe this is just a phase and getting into big explosive emotional confrontations and trying to punish, trying to enact consequences, trying to take things away, and all those things will just produce shame. They will produce secrecy and disconnection. So Cathy and I say often, we ran the experiment for you and we can tell you with 100% certainty that confrontation, yelling, screaming, shaming, blaming, negotiation, all those things don’t work, so you don’t have to run the experiment because we did it for you, which is why we teach the CRAFT 
[00:22:00] approach. We teach invitation to change. We teach motivational interviewing. We talk about learning about your own attachment style. All of those things factor into how you are going to interact with your child and therefore how they are going to interact with substances. Stage three. This is problematic use and moderate to severe substance use disorder. So what this looks like in stage three is that substance use is now really organizing someone’s life. There’s a guest I had on recently that said, he used to think about substance use as, do I have it or does it have me? This is where it starts to have them. They’re missing obligations, whether that’s 
[00:23:00] school or work. Their relationships are fracturing probably with you in particular because you are the one who cares the most about them being healthy. You’re starting to see legal issues, financial chaos, health consequences. All of these things that we think from the outside looking in are obvious signs that something needs to change. This is also where your child might start using just to feel normal rather than to feel good. So it has gone from, oh, I’m using the substance ’cause it makes me feel good. I have fun. I party, I’m with my friends to now I’m using it on my own or secretly so that I can just get to the base point of normal to homeostasis, just so that I can function through the day. So y’all know that I love Dr. Gabor Maté. He was also on the podcast, so take a listen to that if you haven’t. But what he talks about is the 
[00:24:00] question is never why the addiction, but why the pain. So this is again, where we go underneath the tip of the iceberg and we have to realize that the substance is now serving a function. It is helping your child manage something, whether that’s anxiety, trauma, an emotional dysregulation, a learning difference, their A DHD, and if they’re managing those things without addressing what’s underneath, this is why they continue to use and also why relapse rates are high. So maybe they have tried to stop, they’ve gone a week, or they’ve gone a week and a half or two weeks, and then if they haven’t addressed these underlying issues, they’re going to go back to the substance because it works immediately for them. So this is the moderate to severe substance use territory on the DSM five spectrum. This, my friend, please understand is not a willpower 
[00:25:00] problem. This is not that your child just doesn’t have enough willpower to not use. It’s serving a purpose, and what you have to do is to be able to understand what purpose is it serving. So at this point, the appropriate response from you as the parent would be to engage professional support. Likely this is not something that you are going to be able to help parent them out of. We reached that point when my son was 17 years old, so this doesn’t, you know, if you have a teenager and you’re thinking, oh well this probably is like when they’re in their twenties, not necessarily. So professional support really isn’t optional, if you can engage some level of support, and that could be a therapist or that could be actual, formal substance use disorder treatment. So good conversations, good communication probably aren’t gonna be enough at this point because of 
[00:26:00] the chemical hooks that, these substances have in your child. They really need to be assessed by an addiction specialist. If you can get in for an assessment a treatment program might be the right place, and your role here is to stay connected and to provide options. So depending on how old your child is, if they’re 18 or older. Your role here is to keep that connection, keep the bridge of connection between you and let them know that you are there to help. If they want help, you might even provide a few options for them to say, Hey, when you’re ready for this to be different, here are some options that might be helpful. So this is when you want to be taking really good care of yourself so that you are ready. When what we talk about in CRAFT, the window of opportunity opens up and they are willing to accept some help. You need to be ready to run through that window. There is a common 
[00:27:00] parental mistake in this stage of believing that if you could just say the right thing, if you could just send the right podcast episode for them to listen to, if you could just get them to understand how dangerous this is for their brain or their body, that they will stop. The other way you might go with this is completely detaching, waiting for them to hit rock bottom and none of the research today supports that this is a good or reliable strategy, especially because of the danger of the substances in particular fentanyl and high potency, THC. Okay, so that was stage three. Stage four is severe substance use disorder and crisis. Now, believe it or not, we have quite a few moms come into our community in this stage. As they describe their child, we would say that they’re in the stage and they really are not aware. They’re kind of mentally 
[00:28:00] back on stage two. If some of this sounds familiar and you’re like, oh, gosh, I didn’t know that this was so severe. That is not uncommon, and please don’t berate yourself for that because there really aren’t any guidelines. So you may not have had a frame of reference of how this of what this might look like. So in this stage, medical risk is real. Overdoses may have been happening. There are a lot of complications from withdrawal. There could be seizures, all kinds of things from withdrawal complications, a complete breakdown of functioning, so could be DUIs, probably have lost their job, probably have lost their housing if they’re using opiates or alcohol heavily. You know, withdrawal can be life threatening. So this is not a situation to be lied about. This is really clinical emergency territory. So N IDA describes this addiction as 
[00:29:00] chronic. This is a chronic brain disorder. The prefrontal cortex that’s responsible for making decisions and controlling impulses has been compromised, so your child is not choosing this over you. I think that is really important to understand at this stage. Your child’s brain is not their own. The substances have taken over. So if they’re lying to you, stealing from you, all the things that we hate and we get really hurt over because we take them very personally and it’s understandable to know why we would do that. Your child is not choosing this over you. They are choosing survival. So in this stage, the appropriate parental response I always say is relationship Second. Now you’re gonna wonder, what am I talking about? Relationship second, because safety comes first. In this stage, you have to first consider their safety.
[00:30:00] And importantly, your safety. Kids in this stage when they’re so addicted, when their brains are not their own, they don’t have that prefrontal cortex working, do things that we would not expect them to do. So keep yourself safe first, but don’t abandon the relationship. Now that is a tricky balance to get. I know. So this is where we really encourage you to be working with not just a coach, but also a therapist if you can, because this is probably. The most difficult part of the relationship to navigate because you have to protect yourself and you also want to be able to have strategies to help your child. This is the stage, obviously, you have to have Narcan in your home. I would say that actually from stage one, but you have to know how to use it. Have it in your home, give it to your child, keep it in the car, keep it everywhere. 
[00:31:00] This is when you just never know what might happen. So harm reduction, I have to mention here is important and it is not an endorsement for their use. Harm reduction looks like giving them Narcan, making sure they know what services they can call but not demanding abstinence from them because, like I just mentioned, abstinence in this stage can be very dangerous if it is not done in a medical situation. Parents are often the last to know how acute things have become because two reasons. One, our kids are brilliant and they’re often very good at hiding what is really going on, this especially true if you have a young adult, they don’t live with you. Maybe they’re away at college, maybe they’re away working somewhere in a different city or a different state, and you’re not seeing them every day, so you may not know that this is how acute things have become. The other 
[00:32:00] reason why that is true is because you have gradually become acclimated to this escalating situation. It’s that proverbial frog in the heating water, which again, I don’t even know if that’s a true proverb, but anyway, you know what I’m talking about, where you have acclimated to so much chaos and so much mayhem and so much lying and so much danger and risk, and all the things that you aren’t really aware that things are very, very acute. So this is where the cancer comparison does earn its keep. You would not treat stage four cancer with the same approach as you would treat stage one, right? The intensity of the response must match the reality of the situation. Okay. Those were the four 
[00:33:00] stages. Now I wanna talk about the critical difference between cancer and addiction staging. So cancer staging is largely linear. You typically, I’m not saying this never would happen, but you typically don’t go from stage four back to stage one, especially like not in the course of. I don’t know, six months to a year. Addiction staging isn’t linear. People move in both directions all the time, and you probably know this if you’ve been at this for a while, which I’m guessing you have. Early recovery is real, right? We know what early recovery looks like. Maybe your child’s been in treatment, or maybe they’ve started going to AA meetings. They’re in early recovery. We know what that looks like. Long-term recovery is common. I know that that might not sound true right now for you, but just from a data standpoint, 
[00:34:00] SAMHSA’s data shows that 72% of people who have ever had a substance use disorder, this is US data, 72% who have had a substance use disorder are in recovery. Okay, so it is common. So this is where things you know from the cancer, stages depart because people often do go through these various stages of addiction. So just because stage three is where your child is today. Doesn’t mean that they have to even go to stage four. That is what is awesome, and the younger they are, when they start to get help, the less likely they are to ever get to stage four because that window for recovery is always open. There is another difference, which I think is worth naming between the Cancer and Addiction diagnoses, and that is that in cancer, a patient’s typically motivated to get treatment. You don’t often hear about 
[00:35:00] people getting diagnosed with cancer and they’re like, yeah, I’m okay. I don’t really think I need treatment. In addiction, especially with young people, especially under the age of 25, the person usually, the data is 94% of the time, they don’t believe they have a problem or they don’t know, or they’re too ashamed, or they just think that they don’t need help yet. So this is where your role as a parent becomes very important, uniquely important because you, my friend, are the biggest and most influential factor in your child’s willingness and ability to get help. So we have to stay engaged. That’s why we have to work consistently on keeping the relationship. There’s also this idea of radical acceptance, and you may know Tara Brock. She is a very wildly, popular meditation teacher, and she talks about 
[00:36:00] radical acceptance as accepting the reality of where your child is right now without judgment. Accepting it without judgment is not the same as approving of it. This is just the starting point from where you can respond effectively rather than reactively. So how do you use this? How do you use this? I think you have to take this information. You have to assess it honestly, right? You have to sort of take off the blinders, do the radical acceptance thing, and really honestly assess where is your child, not out of hopes. Not out of fear. You can look at some of those observable markers that I talked about. How are they functioning? How often are they using, what are some of the consequences that they have experienced? Is there secrecy involved? Are they using socially? How is their mental 
[00:37:00] health? What is their friend group look like? So you wanna look at the observable markers, not just the substance itself or the absence of an obvious crisis. So that means you’re gonna be looking at their functioning, their frequency of use. What kind of consequences are they seeing because of that? Are they using in secret? Are they using alone? Are they isolated in their room? How is their mental health doing? So craft builds this kind of clear-eyed observation into what you are going to be using as the foundation of your approach and before you can respond strategically, which is the awesome thing, is that you can respond strategically. You’ve gotta have an accurate picture of what you’re actually dealing with. So it means that you’re gonna be tracking patterns, looking at impact, and not just reacting to incidents because that’s the easiest thing to do, right, is you sit back, you kind of you 
[00:38:00] know, grit your teeth and hold on and then as these different incidents happens, you react to them. We wanna get you into a more strategic place where you are leaning back and observing and tracking patterns. Then what you’re gonna do is you can use this information that you’re seeing to map your communication strategy. So CRAFT is explicit that the way you talk to your child should match where they are in their use. So if your child is in stage one or two, you’re gonna be using a lot of positive communication. That’s one of the procedures that you can learn in CRAFT and using positive communication, this is where you’re more likely to be able to have a solid and productive conversation. It lowers defensiveness and it gets your child into a more receptive stance. So this is not minimizing what you’re 
[00:39:00] seeing, you’re just timing your approach and your communication so that you can maximize the chance that your child will actually hear you. Imagine that a conversation that you have here, like in stage two that goes well, is infinitely more valuable than a confrontation or a battle that you have in stage three. You also wanna factor in the new landscape when you are assessing. So if your child is using any THC product that isn’t low potency now, that would probably, in today’s world, mean. Just flower that they are buying and rolling up in a joint, or if they’re using any kind of pills or powders or anything that came from the street. The risk profile is extraordinarily higher than what their behavior might suggest. So what I’m saying there is you may have an idea of what they’re 
[00:40:00] using and at the same time, their behavior isn’t super crazy or doesn’t look really risky, that those two things are not tied together. So even if you’re not seeing crazy behavior, even if you’re not having big incidents like overdoses or anything like that, it doesn’t mean that the substances they’re using are safe and this really matters in terms of how you approach this, because what we’re asking you to do is to look honestly at the consequences and the consequences might not look too crazy yet. So we need you to remember that the landscape of substances today is much more dangerous than it may appear on the surface. It is also important to understand that your response to using versus not using matters. One of CRAFT’s most researched and supportive procedures that we talk about a lot in our community is allowing natural consequences when your 
[00:41:00] child is using and actively reinforcing the moments when they’re not using. So this is a very strategic move, this kind of pull back and lean in and this isn’t punishment and rewards in sort of a very black and white simplistic sense. It’s about making the non-using version of their life much more appealing and much more connected and much more satisfying than the version of life that they know when they are using. And so knowing what stage your child is in can help you identify what those reinforcers can actually look like for your specific child in your specific situation. Also, we don’t want you to wait for the obvious crisis before you get your own support. If you are listening here, it means that you are probably worried enough to need some support. It probably means that you could use a community around you or you can ask 
[00:42:00] questions about what’s going on with your child, things that you’ve noticed, things that you have found in your home in a safe place where you don’t have to be embarrassed about that. So we would love to have you get supported in the stream. We highly recommend that you have your own therapist and also a parent coach. Super important for wrapping around you at a time when things probably feel very uncertain. The ground underneath you might feel very shaky, and you really need a reliable team that you can lean on. So if we go back to the two moms I talked about in the beginning where one came in, sort of deer in headlights, very freaked out, very worried. The other came in a little maybe you know, under concerned, you can understand why that would be and how neither one is right or wrong. Neither 
[00:43:00] one of them is wrong to be scared. Neither one of them is wrong to feel like this is too overwhelming to deal with but both of their kids really deserve a parent who understands what they’re dealing with. I think that’s the biggest gift we can give to our kids, is to really try to understand where they are on this spectrum. Now, you may have been operating without a map in this journey, right? You’re on the journey, but there is no blue line like there is in your car when you’ve got your navigation on. That would be amazing, and if that’s where you’ve been, it’s not a failure that is just a gap in the support that’s available for families, which is why Hope Stream exists. So you don’t have to have this all figured out. You don’t have to know exactly what stage your child is in. You just need that clarity, and hopefully this episode is giving you a little bit of clarity of where they might 
[00:44:00] be so that you know how to take the right next step. That’s it. Don’t get too overwhelmed by all of this. Just know that you have a little bit more information now than you did an hour ago, and that you can start to be more strategic as you learn. Where’s your child on the spectrum, and then how can you align some of the craft skills so that you can take advantage of those and bring your child a little bit closer to understanding for themselves what’s going on and why they may wanna make some positive change. Okay, that wraps it up for today. If you want any of the resources that I mentioned today, they will be in the show notes. You can go to Hope Stream community.org, click on podcast that gives you everything related to the podcast. We also have a ebook that you might wanna grab. It’s called Worried Sick. For obvious reasons, because that may be where you are today, 
[00:45:00] worried sick. If you go to Hope Stream community.org/worried, you can get that. It’s free. It’ll help you understand a little bit more about the CRAFT approach, an approach that leads with compassion and kindness and science is actually gonna move you forward a little bit better. All right, my friend, you are amazing. You’re a SEAL Team parent. If you’re here, you are doing the hard work. I appreciate you. Your child appreciates you, and I will meet you right back here next week.