Hard Conversations About Teen Substance Use: Why You Can’t Put Them Off

When a Child in the Community Is Lost Brenda and Cathy open this episode by acknowledging something deeply painful: a child of one of the moms in their community had recently passed away as a result of complications from substance use. They were honest about their hesitation to share it, not wanting to add to the trauma parents already carry or to use fear as a motivator. But they decided to talk about it anyway, because, as Brenda put it, 'this is reality. This is a situation that our kids are in. They have a life-threatening illness.' Cathy spoke personally about the family, noting that they had done everything possible with grace and beauty, and that the young man knew he was loved. She reflected on a broader truth she has witnessed in families who have experienced this kind of loss: 'I think they could say pretty confidently that their relationship with their child was beautiful, and the fact that their child knew how much they loved and cared for them.' — Cathy Cioth Why Treatment Isn't Always the End-All This young man had been to treatment and sober living, and Cathy was direct about what that means: treatment is not a guaranteed fix. 'Sometimes it doesn't,' she said, referring to recovery holding. 'Sometimes there are complications from the actual substance.' Brenda added that parents are arriving for help with children who are far more acute than they used to be — not at a four or five on a scale of difficulty, but at a nine, a 9.5, or beyond. Both Brenda and Cathy were clear that they are not speaking from a position of having gotten it right themselves. 'Brenda and I aren't sitting here saying you need to do this,' Cathy said. 'We also have been there.' But Cathy's son, now in sobriety, told her something that shifted her perspective entirely: 'Mom, it just prolonged my pain.' — Cathy Cioth, quoting her son The Real Danger of High-Potency THC A significant portion of the conversation focused on high-potency THC, which both hosts say is now at the center of nearly every conversation they have with treatment professionals. 'I would say the majority of our conversations are all about high-potency THC and the devastating impact it's having on their kids' mental health,' Brenda said. They described how today's THC landscape is different — teens are using vape pens constantly throughout the day, not occasionally. And what's in those pens is often a synthetic, lab-grown version of THC, not naturally grown marijuana flower. Cathy described how the adolescent brain is particularly vulnerable, and how the substance can act like a finger pulling the trigger for a child who already has a mental health condition — even one that hasn't been diagnosed yet. She also described the trap kids fall into: the substance helps at first, so they use more. Then it stops working, they need more to get the same effect, and eventually they can't stop because they feel sick without it. 'That can be a slippery slope very quickly,' Cathy said. 'Like months, not years.' Vicarious Trauma Your Child May Be Carrying Brenda introduced the topic of vicarious trauma — not what parents carry from the helping professions, but what their children are absorbing from the world around them. 'If you're having a hard time understanding why your child's behaviors make sense,' she said, 'their behaviors do make sense.' She listed the things happening around kids that parents often don't see: bullying happening entirely on phones, sextortion, violence and sexual assaults in school bathrooms, school shootings, friends overdosing — fatally or not — suicidality among peers, and self-harm. Kids don't bring these things to their parents, Brenda said, because they know how their parents are likely to react. And the phone makes it worse: even if none of this is happening in a child's school directly, they are watching it happen somewhere, on a device in their hand. 'If it's not happening in their school, they are watching it happen on their telephone. It is a little like a handheld violence machine.' — Brenda Zane Putting Down the Rope: How to Have Hard Conversations Both Cathy and Brenda were honest that they avoided hard conversations for a long time — not out of indifference, but because they didn't know how to have them without a blowup. Cathy described the impulse to react: 'I couldn't understand why it never worked, but I loved to pick up the rope, because I felt like I had to.' Picking up the rope — yelling, negotiating, blaming, shaming — is tug-of-war, and it doesn't move anything forward. The alternative they described is to pause on yourself rather than telling the child to calm down. Say something like: 'I need a break. I am not going to be able to talk to you in a way that's really conducive to going anywhere right now, and I see you're hurting. Just give me some time. I will get back to you on this.' The episode closes with a reflection from a former community host who lost his own son. He told Cathy: think about the next time you see your child, and think about the words that come out of your mouth as if they are the last ones your child will ever hear from you. 'If these were the last words that went into their ears,' Brenda said, 'would you feel good about that?'