When Teens Turn to Drugs: What Parents Need to Know - Brenda Zane

0:00Hunter Clarke-Fields:Hi, it's Hunter Clarke-Fields, author of Raising Good Humans. If you've ever thought, I wish I could help other parents the way I've been helped, this is for you. The Mindful Parenting Teacher Certification Program is now open for enrollment. You'll deepen your mindfulness, learn to lead powerful parenting groups, and join a supportive, heart-centered community. Are you ready to make a difference? I only take a very limited number of people into this program, so apply now. Visit mindfulparentingcourse.com slash teach. You're listening to the Mindful Mama podcast episode number 593. Today we're talking about when teens turn to drugs with Brenda Zane.

0:41Hunter Clarke-Fields:Welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have. And when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clark-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting course and teacher training, and I'm the author of the international bestseller, Raising Good Humans, Raising Good Humans Every Day, and the Raising Good Humans It's a guided journal.

1:20Hunter Clarke-Fields:Hi, welcome back to the Mindful Mama podcast. So glad you're here. Welcome if you're brand new. Hey, if you don't have a kid who has substance abuse issues, then this is a really important episode for you to learn how to parent in such a way so that you can help maybe prevent this from happening. But also, if you have a kid with substance abuse issues, then you're going to really appreciate Brenda Zane, TEDx speaker and podcast host who co-founded Hope Stream. She gives parents of teens with substance abuse help, you know, after nearly losing her son to two fentanyl overdoses. you're going to hear about them and you're going to see and understand that you know you are not the cause of your child's substance abuse but you can also have a tremendous positive influence on your child's life and motivation to change so there is so much here if you've been struggling with this I hope this episode helps you so let's dive in join me at the table as I talk to Brenda Zane.

2:42Hunter Clarke-Fields:Brenda, thank you so much for coming on the Mindful Mama podcast. Thank you so much for having me. This is great to see you. Yeah, it's good to see you too. Now, we're going to be talking about substance abuse, and we're going to be thinking about what are some ways we could prevent it, maybe especially if we're thinking ahead and your kids are younger now. So I know a lot of parents, when something bad happens like this, parents are asking themselves, like, how did we get here? And from what you've seen and what you've lived, what are the most common reasons that tweens and teens begin experimenting with drugs and alcohol?

3:22Hunter Clarke-Fields:And what do you wish parents understood earlier about this phase? The thing that I hear over and over and over from parents and from all the experts that I talk with is our kids, some of our kids feel very uncomfortable in their bodies, in their environment. So something is making them not fit in, not feel okay. And that could be a learning difference. It could be a mental health condition. It could just be social awkwardness. It could be a lot of different things, trauma. And so what happens is, unfortunately, sometimes they will reach out to find something to make them feel better. And substances tend to do that really well and really quickly.

4:12And our kids are very smart. And so they might experience that relief for, oh, my ADHD doesn't feel so bad, or I can finally sleep, or hey, I kind of fit in with the cool kids now because I'm doing this thing. And it's great that they are thinking about finding solutions. Unfortunately, the solution that they usually find if it's substances is going to be a disaster down the road. So that's typically what we see, is there's some sort of friction internally where the young person is just not feeling okay. And like my son told me at one point, Mom, the only time I feel normal is when I'm high. And that was heartbreaking and also very enlightening for me to understand really what was going on underneath the surface.

5:05Hunter Clarke-Fields:And you guys have talked very openly about his struggles with addiction. How did it start for him? It started kind of just like that. He was diagnosed with ADHD when he was in third grade. Also, we had him tested for giftedness. So he has that combination of being highly ADHD and highly gifted. And then he was really shattered by his dad's and my divorce. Although we didn't know that on the outside because at the time he was 10 and everything kind of looked okay on the surface. He seemed happy. He was always very social, had tons of friends. And so what we weren't seeing was on the inside, he was just imploding.

5:53So this combination of feeling very different at school, school was such a struggle. We were fighting, crying every night. By the end of the night, I would be crying with his homework. He would be crying about his homework. and then layering on the divorce and the impact of that really led him to seek something and other people who could really fill the need for him to feel better about himself, for him to be able to focus, for him to be able to sleep at night. So there's both sort of those emotional reasons. You know, my parents got divorced and often with kids, especially on the autism spectrum or kids with ADHD, there's a lot of black and white thinking.

6:40And so in his mind, my parents got divorced. I don't have a family anymore. Even though we were both there, it was an amicable divorce, you know, we were both very present in his life. In his mind, he didn't have a family. And so he sought out people who would come around him, be his partners and his family. And unfortunately, those people were not good people. So it was this combination of some physical discomfort with ADHD and all the things that came with that, and then an emotional trauma layered on top. And those two things combined when you have a very smart kiddo who is a little thrill seeking, loves the risk, kind of, you know, that profile, they find substances and it works for them for a little while.

7:33And so we have to, we have to kind of look underneath the behavior to see what's going on.

7:40Hunter Clarke-Fields:So it sounds like, like it was this combination of like this, this, you know, his, his ADHD, his difficulties, this story he was telling himself, and then falling in kind of with a bad crowd is kind of the way we say it's sort of like in the old fashion. I mean, it's funny to think about this in some ways, because like that was, I mean, I mean, I didn't, I mean, that was in some sense, myself, like I got like probably the most drunk I've ever been the summer before ninth grade here. And I was with a bad crowd who did a lot of partying and did a lot of pot smoking and hallucinogenic drugs, all kinds of stuff in the woods, partying in the woods and and there were kids yeah and there were kids that could really really fall through the cracks with this like there were um there were kids who ended up in treatment centers and kids who ended up hurt and you know etc um what what was what happened from your perspective like how did this problem for him come to light from your perspective what did you see first?

8:53Well, I saw at first, I saw a little bit of him distancing from the neighborhood friends. We lived in this small suburb with a really tight-knit community. There were 10 boys his age who grew up together from the time they were in second grade, so they were like brothers. And I saw that kind of pack, kind of distancing a little bit from him, and then I, you know, got a phone call from the principal in the middle school saying, oh, we just found marijuana. And, you know, he had it in art class or whatever. So there were some, I think they were yellow flags at the time because never in my wildest dreams would I've ever imagined it would have become a problem.

9:41I just thought, oh my gosh, these kids, right? Of course they have weed at school.

9:46Hunter Clarke-Fields:and you don't want to overreact right like yeah I mean kids experiment so I was concerned for sure but I wasn't freaking out like taking him to treatment in eighth grade it was like okay we need to make sure that you understand the impact of this and he had to go to drug and alcohol school which by the way is where he was introduced to several of the key dealers and people in his world later. Oh, no. Because they all end up together in these classes where they spend all day learning about the impact of drugs and alcohol. And at the same time, they're texting each other their phone numbers because obviously this is the cool crowd, right?

10:28So there's a lot wrong with that. But those little things started to happen. And then there was school refusal. you know I was getting that robocall from school every day your student was absent for you know periods one three five and I'm like huh that's three of the four classes of the day so things like that started happening more I saw a lot of anger in him just being really angry all the time and it was it felt like it was always really directed at me I was also newly married so I was doing this with his dad, my ex, and a brand new husband, which was very tricky. And then we had a very serious incident where he did a multi-cross state from Washington state all the way down to California, a drug run where he went with some older guys.

11:23He was 16. He was with 20, 21-year-olds driving to California to buy in bulk kind of wholesale amounts of marijuana. and of course being 16 that's a problem that's not something a 16 year old supposed to be doing yeah so that was our big big red flag like we're not going to be able to parent our way out of this this has gone to a whole new realm that we have to get control over so it became really dangerous and we were really worried for his safety at that point so that was our first really major like, oh, wow, this is this has really become a huge problem.

12:09Hunter Clarke-Fields:Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcast right after this break.

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13:57Hunter Clarke-Fields:That's an additional$50 off bundles, and they already have some discounts, people. An additional$50 off bundles with the code hunter at whisker.com slash hunter. I mean, this is, for you, this has got to be, I mean, feel terrible. Like, you must feel like, you know, blaming yourself, Well, you know, if you've gotten to hear some of his stuff about the divorce and I have no family. And I know that now, like with the work that you do, one of the statements and the mission statements you have is you are now the cause of your child's substance use. How did you get from maybe, and where were you at that point as far as the guilt that maybe you were feeling?

14:48Hunter Clarke-Fields:and get to the point of understanding? I mean, how do you get from there to you are not the cause of your child's substance use? There's a lot of work that has to happen to go from, you know, I must have caused this, which almost every parent at some point says to themselves, to really understanding that I am not the cause. The caveat there is I am involved in this family system. and I do play a role and I did play a role in parenting him in a way that made him feel like he was not capable, like he was different and needed to be fixed. And a lot of that had to do with how I was parenting him, which I was doing the best I had with what I knew.

15:38So we really, we can get tied up in this mindset of like, oh, I caused this and I spent years trying to figure out what did I do? And was it that weird kid who I let him sleep over at his house in second grade? Or was it the fact that there was a... It's always the woods, right? There was like a whole thing of woods next to his high school, and I should have picked him up in a different location. I mean, we go to these crazy lengths to find what did I do? And the reality is he could have just as easily gotten addicted to rock climbing or basketball or something healthy, but he didn't. This is the direction that he went, and this is kind of how he is wired.

16:23And so I encourage parents to set that aside because, first of all, you're never going to find the reason. You aren't the cause, and you can spend a lot of time that you could be using that time and that brain space to be working on solutions and getting more in tune with yourself and really looking at your own patterns and your own way of being and not taking up time in your brain thinking about this, you know, what did I do? Because every person in recovery that I have ever talked to, and I talked to a lot of them, say, oh, there's nothing my parents could have done. They didn't do anything to make this happen.

17:03And my son tells me that. He's like, mom, there's nothing that you did to make me go in this direction. And so it's not to give ourselves just an out because we definitely play a role in the parenting system and in the family system, but we're not the ones to blame for the fact that, oh, my kid is vaping THC every day of the week. So there's a big distinction there to make.

17:31Hunter Clarke-Fields:Okay, yeah. So looking at some things with more clarity and nuance, I mean, I guess that, yeah, and you can't turn back time. You've got to begin where you are. You know, you said, you know, I don't want to stoke up those feelings for you, but like you said that you had parented him in ways that made him feel like he wasn't capable. If you could, like, if you could go turn back time now, what are those things that you would change just for the listener who may have younger kids who are, you know, maybe falling into patterns that may be not that supportive, I guess? Yeah, I would definitely have let him solve more of his own problems.

18:19I think I had this sense that, first of all, he had a very traumatic birth. We almost lost him at birth. And so I think from that moment, I have felt overly protective and like I needed to overly parent him, which I can only see now, right? Looking back in time, I would have never been able to see that at the time. But also just in elementary school, knowing that he really struggled with focus and attention, he would bring home homework and he would be so like, oh, this is stupid homework. And I'd be like, you know what, you're right. It is stupid. I'll just color the frogs for you. This is dumb that you have to do this.

19:00right and I would do these things because I knew he was so bright and I knew that this did feel like a waste of time for him a lot of these things and also I think I overly tried to set up systems and things to help him when he really didn't want those and it's a tricky balance with a young kid who has ADHD because the professionals are telling you put the checklist on the wall to make sure that they brush their teeth and they back their backpack and all things. But the more I put in place to accommodate his ADHD, the more he felt like, oh, wow, I must be really broken. Like, what is this? Because my brother doesn't have these things because his younger brother, two years younger, he didn't have ADHD.

19:48He was fine. He'd get up, brush his teeth, pack his backpack, eat breakfast and be early, you know, at the car. Whereas Enzo would be, you know, I mean, if you have a kid with ADHD, it's just painful to watch them try to organize themselves. So I over-parented him in a way that made him just feel like, wow, you know, I'm different. I'm really broken. We tried medication. Medication is proven to actually reduce the likelihood of substance use and addiction down the road for young people with ADHD. At the time, this was two, it would have been early 2000s. There wasn't quite the level of expertise on ADHD and medications.

20:37And so we tried a couple. He hated them. They made him not sleep even more than he already didn't sleep. They made him lose weight. And I kind of just said, okay, fine, we'll just give him up. And I really wish that I would have kept with that and found a dose and a medication that did work for him. Because what happens is once you, you know, they know like, oh, my brain is racing, racing, racing, right? I can't stop it. It's all over the place. I think of it like a ping pong or not ping pong, a pinball machine. And I look at my son go through the day and it's kind of like that. It's like he's ping ponging all over the place and he hits this thing and then it sends him over there and then that thing sends him over here and they can't remember what he started with.

21:23And so when you are feeling like that, and then you find something like marijuana that just makes it all stop, you know, one of the reactions that a lot of the kids of the parents in our community, the kids will be angry at their parents when they find marijuana or alcohol, because they'll be like, you were hiding this from me all along. Like, this is the thing that works. I can't believe you wouldn't tell me about this or let me, like, they're actually angry because they feel such relief. And so it's so important to understand that that substance for them is their solution. It is not the problem.

22:04It's problematic for sure. It's going to lead to bigger problems, but for them, they see it as the solution. And so when we come up and we say, well, you need to stop doing this and I can't believe doing that and punish, punish, punish, the behavior that's sitting on the surface that we see, they're like, well, this is the best thing in the world. This has solved my problems. Which is why we really encourage parents to like dig underneath. If you're seeing this behavior on the outside, there's a reason why they're doing that. And to really get curious about, well, what do you like about it? What is it doing?

22:43If I would have asked Enzo that when he was in you know, eighth grade, well, why do you like marijuana so much? Why do you like drinking alcohol? He probably would have told me, it just calms everything down in my brain. It just slows everything down and I feel normal. So it's so important to get that deeper level of understanding.

23:04Hunter Clarke-Fields:And how did you, so going back to your story, how did you guys respond to this 16-year-old trip down to California to get like like bulk levels of marijuana. What were the lines of communication between you and Enzo at that time open? The lines of communication were not open. They were non-existent, basically. It was either we're yelling and screaming at each other or somebody was slamming a door. I mean, at that point, we had police involvement, obviously, because he was a minor. And the police at that time stood in my living room at three o 'clock in the morning and said, your son is going to be dead or in jail if you don't do something.

23:48We know who he's running around with. We know what's going on. You got to do something. So we worked with an educational consultant or a therapeutic consultant to help us because I had never been in this world. I was an advertising executive. I had no idea. I didn't even know that this world existed. It was one of those movie moments where you're like, is this really my life? Am I really standing in my living room at three o 'clock in the morning with a police officer telling me my kid's going to be dead or in jail? So there are therapeutic consultants, just like there's college placement consultants who can kind of help your child figure out where to go to college.

24:24There's the same type of role, but these consultants help you. They look at your child's medical background, their psychological background, education, all of those things, and then help find a treatment placement, whether that's out of home or whether that's a local resource that matches what they need. And so we ended up going the route of wilderness therapy at first because he was really at risk. We were very worried for his safety and we needed to get him out of Washington state. Our age of consent in Washington is 13 years old. So once your child turns 13, parents cannot get medical records.

25:07You cannot find out what they're talking about with the therapist. You get zero.

25:12Hunter Clarke-Fields:Wow. That's got to be unusual. I've never heard of it that early. It's pretty bad. I think it's one of the lowest in the whole country. And so you've got your hands tied behind your back as a parent because you know this behavior is going on, but you don't exactly know what's going on. You can't get any test results. And so you're kind of flying blind. So we were describing to this consultant, here's what we're seeing. And her advice was, let's interrupt this pattern. Let's get him safe for a period of time out of state, and then decide what will happen next. So we went the treatment route. It's a very long story.

25:56He ended up running away from treatment, his second placement, and then really bounced around in and out of different programs for the next five years. So yeah, we went that route. And every time he was in treatment, he did get something. There's more that they learn. They get more tools that they put in their tool belt. They don't always use them right away, but they're there. And then when they're ready, then they tend to reach in and use those tools.

26:23Hunter Clarke-Fields:Wow. I mean, I guess it was good that you were an advertising exec because that had to be incredibly expensive. It was insanely expensive and it still is. Fortunately, since then, so that was 2014 that we first sent him to Wilderness, there is more insurance acceptance now. More programs do accept insurance either in or out of network, but it's still, you know, you think if your kid broke their leg, you would just, obviously you would use your medical insurance, right? To go to the hospital and they'd fix the leg. So you would assume that the same thing would apply for mental health or substance use.

27:08And unfortunately it's just not the case because what they need, especially as a young person, a teen who needs help for substance use, it's not just a medical thing. It's not just, okay, now they test negative for THC, they must be fine. There's so much behavioral health that needs to be addressed in that case. And often, like my son, there's such a need to get them out of the environment that they're in because that's where all of the negative people are, the triggers, all of the things that go along with their substance use. So their therapy may be covered by insurance, but where are they gonna live?