What’s Really Going On Inside Your Kid’s Mind When They Use Substances

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 cooperating. The skills and frameworks he encountered kept surfacing years later, once he was finally ready to implement them rather than simply accumulate them. For parents who have watched a child walk out of a program and immediately relapse, this matters. The knowledge went in. The timing was wrong, not the intervention. Brad also noted something about the question he asks guests on his podcast: the night before they got sober, did they have any idea it would be their last night? Almost universally the answer is no. Change can arrive without announcement, and previous treatment is part of what makes it possible when it does. Building a life worth staying sober for The identity work Brad describes is the unglamorous part of recovery that rarely gets discussed. He graduated as an addiction counselor, worked with teenagers in a residential setting for eight years, and eventually launched Sober Motivation from his basement not because he had the answers but because he knew what it felt like to be alone in the question. Community, purpose, and accountability that he did not expect all played a role in the shift. For parents, the invitation here is a reframe. Rather than focusing exclusively on abstinence, the deeper question is: what does your child have to live for? What are they building that they would not want to lose? Helping create conditions for that, even incrementally, is some of the most powerful work a parent can do alongside the more visible interventions.