Why Adult Children Become Estranged From Parents — and What Actually Helps

About this episode

Sally Harris shares her journey through her daughter's addiction and the impact on their relationship, emphasizing the importance of self-care for parents.

Episode 317 ABOUT THE EPISODE: When Sally Harris’s middle daughter started down a dangerous path at 14, she did what most devoted mothers do. She fought hard to fix it. Boarding school. Rehab. Anything and everything she could think of. What she did not expect was that the hardest decade of her life was still ahead, or that the coping mechanism she reached for would quietly become a crisis of its own. Her daughter’s story wound through some of the darkest places a mother can imagine, and Sally will tell you she did not handle it with grace. She handled it the way most of us do: imperfectly, desperately, and often in ways that made things worse. What turned everything around was not something she did for her daughter. It was something she finally did for herself. Ten years later, her daughter is back. They speak together publicly. They laugh about things that were anything but funny at the time. Sally now coaches moms who are somewhere in the middle of their own version of this, and she brings the kind of clarity you can only get from having actually lived it. This conversation goes to places I do not hear enough people talking about honestly: what it does to a mother when her…

People in this episode

Host: Brenda Zane

Guest: Sally Harris

Topics covered

• parenting
• estrangement
• addiction
• self-care
• motherhood
• mental health

Keywords

• estrangement
• addiction
• parenting
• self-improvement
• mother-daughter relationship
• mental health

More episodes of Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction

• The Thing Your Kid Can’t Tell You When They’re Struggling, with Enzo Narciso · June 11, 2026
• 10 Self Coaching Questions for Parents of Kids Who Struggle With Mental Health and Substances, with Brenda Zane · June 4, 2026
• Letting Your Child Struggle and Choosing Love Over Fear, with Dr. Wes Robins · May 28, 2026
• Connect Before You Correct: Breaking Generational Patterns, with Lacey Tezino · May 21, 2026
• Inside Your Kid’s Mind: Hidden Pain Behind Substance Use, with Brad McLeod · May 14, 2026
• Co-Dependency Isn’t What You Think, with Rawly Glass, LCSW · May 7, 2026