Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction

Episode 330 ABOUT THE EPISODE: There are days in this journey when the weight of it all becomes almost too much to carry. You are still showing up, still trying, still breathing through a kind of pain most people around you will never fully understand. A few years ago, I sat down and wrote something for you, for the mom and the dad and the grandparent in the thick of it, and I tucked it away. Today I pulled it back out. This piece first appeared on Insight Timer, and it became the most-listened-to content there. I dusted it off because I needed something creative, and because I believe these words may land with where you are today. The world I recorded it in and the community we are now are not so different, and what I felt then, I still feel now. This is not an interview. There is no guest, no framework, no five-step plan. It is just me, speaking out loud the things I wanted every struggling parent to hear in a heavy moment. In this episode I ask you to set down, just for a few minutes, the weight you have been carrying. Not forever. Not in denial. Just long enough to breathe, to remember who you are outside of this fight, and to hear something true: this is not your whole life. You are still in there. And you are stronger than this feels right now. If you are exhausted and need someone to remind you that you are not alone, this one is for you.EPISODE RESOURCES: Free ebook Worried Sick Brenda’s content on Insight Timer This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream CommunityLearn about The Stream, our private online community for momsFind us on Instagram hereWatch the podcast on YouTube hereDownload a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and AlcoholHopestream Community is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and an Amazon Associate. We may make a small commission if you purchase from our links.

If you have been watching your child blow up their life and wondering why nothing reaches them, this episode will change how you see what is happening inside them. Brenda Zane's son Enzo Narciso -- founder of Life Strategies Mentors and a young man who survived two fentanyl overdoses -- returns to the podcast with something specific: the things kids who are actively struggling cannot say to their parents but wish they could. The fish love parable: what kind of love are you offering? Enzo opens with a story told by Rabbi Adam Tversky: a man at a river says he loves fish -- yet what he actually does is trick the fish, drag it from its home, and eat it. The question lands: do you love the fish, or do you love yourself? For parents, the parable is not an accusation -- it is an invitation to ask whether their expectations for their child are about the child or about the parent's own need to feel okay. Unconditional love and conditional approval are different things. When a kid reads the signals and concludes that parental love depends on performance, something quietly breaks. 'If you love the fish and you love to fish so much, you would go to the river and you would enjoy the view of the fish passing by, and you would throw some food into the river and feed them and let them enjoy their life.' — Enzo Narciso The one thing your kid most wishes you knew: 'I'm trying' Enzo recently mentored a young man and asked him: if there were one thing you could tell your parents, what would it be? The answer stopped him. The kid said: I'm trying. Enzo recognized it instantly as the same thing he would have said during his own worst years. From a parent's vantage point, a teenager using fentanyl and Xanax does not look like someone trying -- they look like someone self-destructing. But from inside that brain, something different is happening. They have found the one domain where they get consistent signals that they are good at something -- belonging, reinforcement, a sense of being valued. 'I'm sorry that my way is not the way that you guys want, but I'm trying something, and I just don't know.' — Enzo Narciso That is not a defense of the choices. It is a window into the experience. And for a parent who has been certain their child is not even trying, it is a window worth stepping up to. What ADHD actually does to the brain's relationship with substances Enzo describes himself as patient zero for ADHD, and draws a direct line between an unmedicated ADHD brain and the pull toward substances. The ADHD brain is already low in dopamine. When a substance arrives and floods that system, the experience is not the same mild pleasure a neurotypical person might feel -- it is an overwhelming sense of finally feeling right. The reinforcement is instant, massive, and real. This is why warnings don't land. The part of the adolescent brain that projects into the future is not yet developed. A parent can say until exhausted that this will end badly -- the kid genuinely cannot see it. ADHD impulsivity on top of an undeveloped prefrontal cortex makes even the most logical argument nearly impossible to absorb. Dr. Gabor Mate's book Scattered Minds and Dr. Russell Barkley's YouTube channel can help parents understand what is actually happening in their child's brain -- and stop interpreting it as defiance or moral failure. Why your kid listens to a mentor before they listen to you (it's not personal) Enzo describes a concept that reframed everything for Brenda. Adolescents are subconsciously aware that their parents are from a different generation and will die before them. The brain assigns lower weight to parental guidance -- not out of disrespect, but out of a primal drive to gather input from people who will walk alongside them for the rest of their lives. People who are slightly ahead in age -- a cousin, a mentor, a near-stranger who has been through something similar -- carry a naturally higher weighting. W

There are moments in this journey when your coach isn't available, your therapist can't be reached, and the community is quiet. It is just you and whatever is unfolding in your relationship with your child, and you need a way through. In this solo episode, Brenda Zane distills a year of thinking into ten self-coaching questions drawn from CRAFT (Community Reinforcement and Family Training) and the Invitation to Change approach — questions designed to help parents examine their own role, interrupt unhelpful patterns, and become a more effective agent of change. Why self-reflection is the starting point CRAFT and the Invitation to Change both ask parents to look at the whole family system, not just the child. That means examining your own responses, beliefs, and behaviors as contributing variables. This is not about blame; it is about locating the lever you actually control. As Brenda puts it, these questions are uncomfortable on purpose — if they sting a little, they are working. 'What is my role in some of the problems that my child is facing? ITC asks us as parents to look at our own behavior as part of the system, not just our child's behavior.' — Brenda Zane Starting here — with question number one — sets the tone: am I contributing to the dysfunction, or am I helping to calm and regulate it? That single question can shift a parent's entire orientation. Reinforcement, consequences, and the hot stove Questions two and three address one of the most concrete and actionable CRAFT skills: removing positive reinforcers for use and allowing natural consequences to land. CRAFT research is explicit that most parents dramatically under-reinforce positive behavior and over-respond to negative behavior. At the same time, shielding a child from the natural fallout of their choices — out of love, out of fear of their reaction, or because the parent cannot bear to watch — removes the very feedback loop that motivates change. Question four takes a different angle: do you understand the underlying reason your child is using? Brenda uses the hot stove analogy — people do not touch hot stoves unless they are getting something from it. Drawing on Gabor Maté's framing, the question is not “why the addiction” but “why the pain” — and mapping those triggers is the foundation of CRAFT's functional analysis. Modeling, reinforcement, and emotional regulation Questions five through seven turn the mirror more directly on parent behavior. Am I modeling the behavior I want to see? CRAFT includes specific guidance on your behavior as a lever because children watch what their parents do, not what they say. Emotional regulation, distress tolerance, willingness to try new things, engagement in your own life — all of it is visible to a child, even one who looks entirely distracted. 'Your child is watching and they will do what you do, not what you say to do.' — Brenda Zane Question six surfaces a well-researched CRAFT principle: positive reinforcement for non-using behavior. What gets rewarded gets repeated. The shift from a home environment dominated by negativity, tension, and reactivity to one where positive behaviors are noticed and named is not soft — it is evidence-based. Question seven asks whether you are picking up the rope in emotional tug-of-war, and what you are doing to stay calm and respond with intention instead of reacting. Acceptance and self-preservation Questions eight and nine address the interior work that makes all the external tools possible. Acceptance — not approval, not resignation, but the willingness to see clearly where you actually are — is a prerequisite for effective action in both CRAFT and motivational interviewing. You cannot use CRAFT tools effectively if you are bargaining with reality about where your child is. Question nine asks whether you have neglected your own wellbeing by attaching yourself entirely to your child's struggle. Brenda draws a clear line between self-care

If you have ever felt like a failure simply because you could not fix what your child is going through, this episode of Hopestream is for you. Brenda Zane sits down with Dr. Wes Robins, a licensed professional counselor, PhD, and self-described Soul Nurse practicing out of a 1960s ranch house in Alpharetta, Georgia. Since his previous appearance on the show, Wes made the gut-wrenching decision to close the treatment center he built over five and a half years, a loss that became its own kind of portal. What came through the other side is a perspective on parenting struggling children that is honest, grounded, and deeply freeing. You Are Not Here to Fix Your Child Wes wrote a piece at his kitchen table while his daughters worked on art beside him, and Brenda asked him to read it aloud. The piece, titled When the Map Burns: Notes for Parents Walking Through the Fire, opens with a line that stopped Brenda cold: you are not broken. From there it builds into a gentle, fierce refusal to reduce parenting to a set of outcomes to control. 'You are not here to fix your child. You are here to walk beside them, to meet them in their chaos, not control it, to love without needing to rescue. Your child is not broken. They are an unfolding soul.' — Dr. Wes Robins This is the frame everything else in the episode hangs on. Your child's pain is not a problem to be solved. It is, in Wes's words, a portal. And when you stop trying to engineer the outcome, something opens up for both of you. Your Child's Struggle Is Your Spiritual Teacher Wes is frank about his own path: from substance use at seventeen through three arrests, then a PhD in consciousness and society, a published book, a treatment center, a breakdown, and a return. He draws on Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, Carl Jung, and Dr. Shefali Tsabary to make a case that is worth sitting with: your child's struggle is not happening to you, it is happening for you. That reframe does not minimize the pain. It does something harder. It asks parents to recognize that the child's difficulty stirs old wounds and awakens what has been buried. That is not failure. That is invitation. 'Pain and suffering is what teaches us all. It is the great portal of transformation. If somebody took away my pain and my suffering from me, I would be half the person that I am today.' — Dr. Wes Robins For parents, this means getting genuinely curious about your own fear, rather than trying to manage it into the background while you fix your child. The Difference Between Empathy and Presence One of the most practically useful distinctions Wes draws is between empathy and presence. Empathy connects you to another person's experience. But presence is what actually supports healing. Joining in the suffering does not lift it. Witnessing it does. He borrows from Dr. Shefali: a parent's greatest fear is a child in pain, but a child's greatest disservice is a parent who cannot witness that pain. The difference matters enormously in the room. Your child does not need you to drown alongside them. They need you to stay on the bank, solid and available, so they can find their way to shore. The Flight Attendant Principle Wes returns again and again to a simple image: imagine you are on a plane and turbulence hits. The first thing every passenger does is look at the flight attendant. If she is calm, passengers relax. If she grabs the seat and goes pale, everyone panics. Like it or not, you are the flight attendant on your child's journey. That does not mean pretending everything is fine. It means doing the internal work to stay regulated so that your nervous system does not become another emergency your child has to navigate. This is counterintuitive because it asks parents to prioritize their own grounding at exactly the moment every instinct screams to focus on the child. But a dysregulated parent adds suffering to an already difficult situation, while a grounded parent creates the stable

If you have a daughter and a relationship that feels like it is missing something you can't quite name, this episode of Hopestream may be the conversation you have been waiting for. Brenda Zane talks with Lacey Tezino, founder of Passport Journeys and author of Therapy After Mom Died, about adoption, reunion, generational patterns around alcohol, and the single insight that changed how she parents: you have to connect before you correct. A reunion nobody was prepared for Lacey grew up being told her biological mother had died. When she was 19 and hungover on another motherless Mother's Day, she called information on a whim. Her mother picked up the phone. What followed was a decade-long relationship she describes as beautiful, heartbreaking, and nothing she was prepared for. 'When she picked up the phone and I heard her voice for the very first time at 19 years old, and me having to say like, "I think I'm your daughter," was like beyond. Like the little emoji with the brain exploding. There's like no words, no explanation for just like telling someone at that point, like, you know, on the phone, "I think I'm your daughter," is wild.' — Lacey Tezino The reunion gave Lacey something she had never had: a sense of being tethered to a parent. But it also placed enormous expectations on a woman who was unprepared for a daughter to suddenly arrive in her life. They struggled, cycled through the same conversations, and leaned heavily on alcohol to get anywhere honest together. How alcohol became the bridge and the barrier Both of Lacey's biological parents were daily drinkers. Drinking was the connection point she and her mother shared from the start. Margaritas on Friday nights, wine over hard conversations, tequila lowering the barriers so they could finally say what they meant. When her mother received a stage four lung cancer diagnosis, urgency replaced alcohol as the catalyst for honesty. Sitting through chemo appointments, they finally asked the hard questions. Lacey found herself wondering: why did it take running out of time to get there? That question became the seed of her life's work. What parents model without realizing it Lacey describes a Friday night ritual she could not unsee once she saw it. She and her husband both had high-pressure jobs. Every week they would pick up the kids, head to the Mexican restaurant, hand the children toys to keep them busy, and order margaritas. As the drinks arrived, the tension left their bodies. The kids watched every bit of it. 'Was I modeling to them that I needed that to bring the day down, to now be able to have this fun connection with them? And I was just like... it started making me really sad, to be honest. It made me super sad, and I had a lot of guilt.' — Lacey Tezino She also recalled coming home from a stressful day and telling her kids, oh my gosh, mom needs a glass of wine, and then I can deal with blah blah blah. It never occurred to her in that moment that this framing might be quietly teaching her children something about what alcohol is for. Seeing her own parents through this lens had already given her a preview of where that road leads. The gap between what moms believe and what daughters feel Through Passport Journeys, Lacey now works with mothers and daughters using an eight-question relationship scale that measures trust, respect, and quality time at the start of a program and again at three and six months. The pattern she keeps finding is both surprising and painful. On the question I feel like I understand my daughter, mothers almost always score themselves high. On the mirror question, I feel understood by my mother, daughters score it low. They are passing ships, each convinced the other has the full picture, each missing the other entirely. The teen years are particularly damaging: hormonal, identity-laden, and almost impossible to navigate without some outside support. But the clients who show up most often at

If you have ever watched your child go through treatment and wondered whether anything was actually landing, this episode of Hopestream will feel like a permission slip. Brenda Zane speaks with Brad McLeod, host of Sober Motivation, a top 0.5 percent podcast globally with over five million downloads. Brad was seventeen when he sat in a psych ward for the second time. He ran from a rest stop on the way to treatment. He accumulated a felony conviction, a methadone dependency, and ultimately a deportation to Canada with a lifetime ban from the US. He tells none of it as a cautionary tale. He tells it as someone who finally understands what his brain was looking for, and what it actually took to stop running. Why kids turn to substances before they know they're struggling Brad grew up in Canada, moved to Waco, Texas at six, and spent his childhood quietly trying to figure out where he fit. Undiagnosed ADHD drove suspension after suspension. Therapists, psychiatrists, and a rotating roster of medications filled his calendar, yet the one thing missing was any language for what he was actually experiencing inside. 'I think I was just in a, trying to figure out who I was. I never knew who I was. I never felt comfortable from the outside looking in, you probably wouldn't notice that but the behavior started this kind of spiral out of control.' — Brad McLeod When Brad first tried cocaine in college, the attraction was immediate and logical from his perspective: the world stopped feeling so heavy. The substance was not the problem. It was the first solution that worked. Every parent who has heard a child say it just made sense will recognize this. Substances solve a real problem, even when they create far larger ones. The ADHD piece parents often miss Brad's relationship with ADHD medication is a thread worth pulling for any parent navigating similar terrain. He was diagnosed young and placed on Adderall. At sixteen he deliberately stopped taking it, hiding the change from his family, because going off it made him feel socially alive for the first time. The risk-taking escalated. The dopamine gap widened. Within a couple of years he had moved from Percocet to heroin, not because he sought danger but because heroin was cheaper and the need kept growing. This is not an argument against ADHD medication. Research consistently shows that properly managed ADHD medication lowers the risk of later substance use. Brad's own story loops back to this: at 38, recently re-starting medication, he finally began to understand the full shape of how his brain worked, and how much energy he had been spending managing it without support. Sobriety is the starting line, not the finish line Brad uses this phrase deliberately, and it lands hard for parents whose entire focus has been on getting the substance out of the picture. He points out that he got sober many times involuntarily: running out of money, landing in jail, or cycling through detox. The substance was never really the problem in isolation. 'Getting sober was never my problem anyway. I mean, I would run out of money, I'd be in jail. Like I would sober up. How could I stay sober? And I think that's what I had to zoom out a little bit and figure out like how do I begin to build a life that is more valuable than the alternative life?' — Brad McLeod What changed was not sobriety itself but the construction of what he calls recovery capital: things worth losing. Relationships. A sense of identity. Work that connected to purpose. Once there was something to protect, the calculus shifted. Parents waiting for a clean drug test as the sign that everything is resolved are looking at the wrong metric. What it means when treatment doesn't seem to stick Brad spent time in a wilderness program outside Knoxville, a locked residential facility, jail, and multiple detox programs. Looking back, he is emphatic that none of it was wasted, even the stretches where he was not

If you have ever been handed the word codependent and felt it didn't quite fit, this episode of Hopestream will feel like a relief. Brenda Zane talks with Rawly Glass, LCSW, a therapist and parent educator who spent years turning the codependency label over in his hands before setting it down and looking for something truer. What he found reframes a concept most of us were handed without enough context, and it has real implications for parents trying to support a child through substance use without losing themselves. Why 'codependency' never quite fit Glass grew up in a home full of violence and, at sixteen, made a pact to do things differently. He earned a master's in social work and built a career in private therapy, yet something from his history kept surfacing. When someone handed him the codependent label, he turned it over and put it back down. 'I'm looking at codependency, it doesn't quite fit, and I start trying to figure out what else is out there... that's the beginning of what I ultimately began to call external dependency.' — Rawly Glass His instinct is worth sitting with, because the codependency framework, as commonly taught, is a behavioral label, a list of things people do. Glass became convinced the behavior was the surface, not the source. What 'external dependency' means The reframe Glass offers is external dependency. Rather than describing a person who loves too much or can't stop helping, the term names a pattern in which we orient almost entirely outward, trying to manage and control what we can see, because we have lost reliable access to what we feel inside. This is the part that lifts shame rather than adding it. Codependency, taught as a behavioral defect, can pathologize one of the most beautiful things about people: the capacity to be gentle and caring. External dependency locates the problem differently, not in the caring itself, but in a disrupted relationship with the self underneath it. Trauma and the lost relationship with self Glass draws on Terry Kellogg and on Dan Siegel's work on the developing brain to make sense of this. When a child is chronically focused on where the next blow is coming from, the developmental machinery that builds a relationship with the self doesn't get to form the way it should. 'It's actually the absence of a relationship with self, and when I first read that, I'm like, what in the world? That doesn't even make any sense to me. How can you not have a relationship with self?' — Rawly Glass It took Glass years to absorb the idea. Trauma, even the quiet kind, interferes with that inward orientation. When the inside feels inaccessible or unsafe, controlling the outside becomes the only available strategy, and that is exactly the pattern parents recognize when a child is in crisis. Why self-care often fails This reframe also explains why so much standard advice falls flat. Parents are told to practice self-care, but if the relationship with the self has been disrupted, bolting on bubble baths and yoga doesn't reach the actual gap. Glass argues that real change starts further upstream, by rebuilding the capacity to orient inward, notice what is happening in your own body and emotions, and stay with it. For parents, this is not abstract. The same external-dependency pattern that drives constant monitoring, fixing, and controlling of a struggling child is the one that leaves a parent depleted and disconnected from themselves. What real recovery looks like for parents Recovery, in this framing, is less about stopping a list of 'codependent' behaviors and more about building a relationship with yourself, the developmental work that got interrupted. Glass describes aspects of that relationship most of us are missing, and frames healing as a gradual return to inward orientation rather than a one-time fix. For a parent walking alongside a child's substance use, the invitation is gentle but significant: the goal is not to c

If your young adult has been through treatment and come home only to stall, not ready for college, not ready to live independently, but clearly not thriving on the couch either, you are in one of the most disorienting places a parent can occupy. In this episode of Hopestream, Brenda Zane talks with Will White, a licensed clinical social worker who has worked in behavioral health since 1989, co-founded the wilderness-therapy program Summit Achievement, and helped launch a trades-based program for young adults called The Trade. His view of the bigger picture, built over nearly four decades, is that the young people who are struggling today are different from those of a generation ago, and that the help they need looks different too. The shift from acting-out kids to anxious, frozen ones White describes a clear change in who shows up needing help. The young person of the 1990s and early 2000s was often an externalizer, someone expressing anger, frustration, or pain loudly by breaking things, slamming doors, or walking away. Today he sees far more young people who are anxious, inward, and frozen, who won't leave their room or the house at all. 'The young residents there, a lot of them had become so overwhelmed with anxiety that they were no longer leaving their homes.' — Will White He points to several forces behind the shift: the rewiring effect of always-on screens and social media, the aftermath of COVID, and a steady diet of alarming news that raises anxiety for parents and kids alike. Notably, he points out that overall drug use among adolescents is actually lower than in past decades, even as anxiety diagnoses have climbed. Why traditional treatment models are breaking down White borrows the term 'the polycrisis' to describe an era in which many traditional models are breaking apart at once. The wilderness-therapy field, he notes, contracted sharply in a short span, and behavioral health moved rapidly online during COVID. None of this is purely good or bad; his point is that the old assumption of a single standardized program that fits everyone no longer holds. He is candid about his own evolution. Trained as a licensed clinician who once dismissed coaching, he now uses a coach himself and sees the value of matching the right young person to the right kind of help, whether that is licensed clinical care, coaching, or something experiential. The throughline of his career is a conviction that doing alongside people often helps more than talking at them across an office. The over-accommodation trap for parents One of the most useful ideas in the conversation is what White calls over-accommodation. Loving parents of an anxious young person often try to keep the peace by quietly rearranging family life around the anxiety, and that instinct, however caring, can backfire. 'Parents would over-accommodate in trying to be a caring parent, and at the same time it would backfire, because it would get worse and worse.' — Will White His counterintuitive guidance is that an anxious young person usually needs encouragement to do hard things, not protection from them. Spending time outdoors or taking on real activity tends to lower anxiety, even though every parental instinct says to shield the child from discomfort. What experiential, trades-based programs offer That philosophy is the foundation of The Trade, the nonprofit program White helped launch in rural New Hampshire for young adults of all genders, roughly ages 18 to 30. It is deliberately not a primary treatment program. Many participants, called apprentices, have already been through treatment and don't need more talk therapy; what they want is experience, structure, and a path toward independence. Apprentices are exposed to many trades rather than just one, mentored about 40 hours a week by skilled tradespeople, and supported by full-time staff who live alongside them. White frames the goal as learning to be both independent and inter

If you are a parent trying to figure out how serious your child's substance use really is, you are making one of the most consequential assessments of your life without a reliable framework. In this solo episode, Brenda Zane borrows a powerful concept from medicine, staging, to give parents the clarity they have never been handed. The result is a four-stage map that helps you stop reacting to incidents and start responding strategically. Why parents have been navigating without a map Medicine has long used staging to give patients and families a shared language for urgency and appropriate response. Parents of children who use substances have received nothing comparable. As Brenda puts it, parents are expected to assess a situation that clinicians in other fields spend years learning to read. This episode is an attempt to close that gap by borrowing the staging concept, not because addiction is like cancer, but because staging is one of the most useful ideas medicine ever produced. Two things that change everything about today's substances Before walking through the four stages, Brenda sets the landscape with two facts that are categorically different from twenty years ago. First, substances themselves have changed. THC concentration in cannabis averaged around 2% in the 1960s and today commonly exceeds 12% in flower, with concentrates reaching 60 to 90 percent THC. Second, fentanyl contamination of the street drug supply is now essentially complete. 'If your frame of reference is, my kid is just experimenting like I did, you're comparing two completely different chemical realities. Even moderate use of today's THC or something that has fentanyl in it carries huge risk that even the use of 10 years ago does not compare to.' — Brenda Zane Brenda also flags a dangerous and counterintuitive pattern: the young person who is quietly at home, withdrawn, self-medicating anxiety and depression in their room. The absence of a visible crisis is not evidence of an absence of a problem. The four stages of substance use Drawing on the DSM-5 spectrum of mild, moderate, and severe substance use disorder, Brenda maps four stages parents can actually use. Stage 1: Experimentation and early use. Social, curiosity-driven use at parties. The brain's reward system is being introduced to artificial dopamine spikes, but most people who try substances do not develop a disorder. The appropriate response is connection-based conversation, not panic, not silence. Stage 2: Regular use and developing pattern. More frequent, more intentional use; sometimes alone. Mood shifts, changing friend groups, disrupted sleep, withdrawal to a room. Tolerance is building. This is the stage where parental approach matters most, because influence is still significant and CRAFT-based skills can alter the trajectory. Stage 3: Problematic use and moderate to severe SUD. Substance use is now organizing your child's life. They may be using just to feel normal, not to feel good. Professional support is no longer optional. As Dr. Gabor Maté frames it, the question is never why the addiction but why the pain. Stage 4: Severe SUD and crisis. Medical risk is real. Overdose, withdrawal complications, complete breakdown of functioning. Safety comes first, but the relationship is not abandoned. The critical difference between cancer and addiction staging Unlike cancer staging, which is largely linear, addiction staging is not. People move in both directions. Early and long-term recovery are real: SAMHSA data shows 72% of Americans who have ever had a substance use disorder are in recovery. This is also the stage where the cancer comparison earns its keep: the intensity of the response must match the reality of the situation. '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,