What Kids in Active Addiction Can’t Tell Their Parents (But Desperately Need Them to Know)

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. When Enzo was at his worst, he would not listen to his mother. But he would go have coffee with a mentor. It was not a failure of Brenda's relationship with him. It was biology. For parents who have tried everything, understanding this dynamic removes the sting of rejection and opens a practical door: finding a mentor who has been through it and come out the other side can reach a kid in a way that no parent, no matter how loving or skilled, can fully replicate. The one skill that made the biggest difference in recovery When Brenda asks what single skill made the biggest difference, Enzo's answer is immediate: mindfulness. Not as a wellness trend, but as the ability to step outside a moment, become a third-person observer, and ask whether this is actually an emergency or whether the spiral in his head is outrunning reality. That skill came flooding back when he was learning to walk again after his overdose. Everything absorbed in wilderness therapy and programs -- seemingly rejected for years -- was still there. The investments parents make in treatment are not wasted. The concepts stay, waiting for the moment the door opens from the inside.