Enthusiastic Sobriety

If you’re reading this book, there’s a good chance you’ve asked yourself a question that almost every parent eventually asks: “Why does my kid keep getting high?” It’s a fair question, and it’s one that usually comes after months or years of trying to make sense of something that doesn’t seem to make any sense. Parents tell us about the good life they’ve tried to provide. They talk about vacations, birthdays, family dinners, school events, and all the ordinary moments that make up a childhood. They tell us how much they love their son or daughter, and then they look at us wondering how alcohol or drugs could possibly become more important than everything they’ve worked so hard to give them.

Over the years, we’ve learned there’s usually another question hiding underneath the one parents ask out loud. They may never actually say the words, but it’s there in almost every conversation: “Why aren’t we enough?” or “Why is what we've given them not enough?” If you’ve ever found yourself asking one of those questions, or something similar, we hope one idea will stay with you as you read this book. Your teenager or young adult is probably not choosing drugs over you. More often than not, they’re choosing the relief alcohol or drugs provide.

That doesn’t mean your teenager is consciously thinking, I’m in pain, so I need relief. That’s not how most young people experience it. They simply know they want to feel good, and getting high feels good. In fact, for some of them, it feels great. Looking back, many of us who found recovery eventually realized we weren’t just chasing the high. We were chasing the relief the high gave us. At the time, we didn’t have those words. We just knew we’d found something that quieted the noise inside, even if only for a little while, and we wanted to feel that way again.

That doesn’t excuse the lying, the broken trust, or the chaos that substance use brings into a family. Those things are real, and we’ll spend a great deal of time talking about them. But we’ve learned that if we misunderstand why a young person keeps going back, we’ll spend our time trying to solve the wrong problem. One of the biggest misconceptions we’ve encountered is the belief that young people continue using simply because they like getting high. Getting high certainly feels good, but that’s rarely the whole story. The young people we’ve come to know over the years don’t describe their experience as finding a drug. They describe it as finally finding something that made them feel different, and for some of them, that difference felt like the answer to a question they’d been asking for years without ever knowing how to put it into words.

That’s where this book begins. Before we can talk about recovery, consequences, or what parents should do next, we first have to understand why getting high became so important in the first place. Once we understand that, many of the decisions that once seemed irrational begin to make a great deal more sense.

Experimenting

One of the words we hear all the time is “experimenting.” Parents will tell us, “I think they’re just experimenting,” and young people will often say exactly the same thing. We’ve come to think that the word deserves a little more attention because, when you stop and define it, an experiment is simply a way of finding out whether something works.

Think back to science class. You have a hypothesis, you test it, and then you repeat it to see if you get the same result. If A plus B equals C once, you do it again. If A plus B still equals C, you’ve learned something. The experiment is over because you have your answer. You don’t keep running the same experiment for six months. Once you know it works, you’re no longer experimenting. You’re simply repeating the result.

The first time a young person gets high really isn’t much different. Someone hands them a joint, a cart, or a pill. They don’t know exactly what to expect, so they follow everyone else’s lead and wait to see what happens. They pack the bowl, light it, inhale, and get high. A few days later they do the same thing. They pack the bowl, light it, inhale, and get high again. Maybe they do it one more time just to be sure. Same result. They’ve learned the formula. The experiment was a success. They now know exactly what they have to do if they want to feel that way again.

From that point forward, they’re no longer “experimenting.” They’re using.

This is where we think parents accidentally confuse two very different things. We’ll hear someone say, “My son has just been ‘experimenting’ for the last six months,” or, “She’s only ‘experimenting’ on the weekends.” We understand what they’re trying to say, but six months isn’t experimenting. Weekends for months on end isn’t experimenting. The experiment ended the moment they learned alcohol or drugs produced the feeling they were looking for. From that point forward, they’re using.

That distinction matters because it changes the conversation. An experiment answers a question. Using repeats the answer.

Use breeds mistrust

The problem isn’t simply that they learned how to get high. The problem is what they learned while they were high. They weren’t sitting there trying to analyze their emotions or figure out why they suddenly felt different. That’s not how most teenagers think. They simply knew they felt good. For some, it was the first time they could remember feeling that way. We’ve heard young people describe that first experience with almost identical words: “Oh my God… this is what I’ve been missing.”

Then another thought quietly follows. “All those adults told me this was terrible. They told me bad things were going to happen. How could something that feels this good be so bad? They must have been lying.”

That’s why the experiment can become so dangerous. They’re no longer trying to find out whether alcohol or drugs work. They already know the answer. Now they’re going back because they remember how they felt. They’re not chasing marijuana, alcohol, or pills. They’re chasing relief, confidence, acceptance, peace, excitement, or whatever feeling they experienced the first time. Once someone believes they’ve found something that makes life feel better, it’s easy to understand why they keep going back.

Dallas

Dallas was eleven years old the first time he got high on marijuana. He was spending the afternoon at a friend’s house playing video games when his friend’s older brother walked into the room and asked if they wanted to smoke weed. The timing couldn’t have been better because just a week earlier Dallas had gone through drug and alcohol education at school. Looking back, he laughed and told us the class probably had the opposite effect of what it was intended to do. Instead of making him less curious, it made him wonder what everyone was talking about.

He told us he wasn’t trying to rebel. He wasn’t looking for trouble. He was simply an eleven-year-old who was curious enough to find out what marijuana felt like. He also had absolutely no idea what he was doing. He remembered being scared to death. It was hot outside, and he could feel the sweat running down his back. The whole time he kept thinking somebody’s parents were going to walk in and catch them. He watched everyone else carefully, trying to copy exactly what they were doing. When it was finally his turn, he took the biggest hit he could, coughed so hard he thought his lungs were coming out, and waited.

Then everything changed.

As we listened to him describe what happened next, it became obvious why this story has stayed with us for so many years. He said the fear disappeared. He stopped worrying about getting caught. He stopped worrying about the sweat running down his back. Everything that had been making him anxious just seemed to disappear. Getting high also gave him a sense of connection to his peers. He felt included, as though he finally belonged.

When we asked him what it felt like, he sat quietly for a moment before saying, “I felt complete. It was like I’d finally found what had been missing.” Then he smiled and told us the very next thought that went through his mind. “How could something so bad feel this good? They lied. They all lied.”

A few minutes later, while we were still talking, he said something we’ve never forgotten. “That first high, I was in. I was so in. I decided in that moment that I was going to smoke pot for the rest of my life, every day, sitting on the front porch with my grandchildren as the sun came up and as it went down.”

Think about that for a minute. An eleven-year-old had already imagined the rest of his life around marijuana. He wasn’t thinking about addiction or consequences. He certainly wasn’t thinking about what his life might look like ten or twenty years later. He believed he had found the answer to the way he felt inside.

When we talk about the hole in the gut, sometimes called the hole in the soul, this is what we mean. Dallas didn’t have those words when he was eleven. He wasn’t trying to describe anxiety, depression, loneliness, or emotional pain. He simply knew that before he got high, something inside him never quite felt right, and afterward it did. Looking back, we’d say the marijuana didn’t actually fill the hole. It temporarily covered it up. But an eleven-year-old doesn’t know the difference. All he knows is that he finally feels complete, and he now knows exactly how to get back to that feeling.

That’s why this story matters. Dallas didn’t leave that backyard believing he had discovered marijuana. He left believing he had discovered the solution to the way he felt inside. The experiment was over. He knew it worked. From that day forward, he wasn’t trying to find out what marijuana felt like anymore. He already knew. He was using because he wanted to get back to the feeling he’d found that afternoon. Once someone believes they’ve discovered that kind of relief, it becomes much easier to understand why they keep coming back, even when the consequences begin to pile up.

Good Drugs and Great Drugs

Dallas’s story naturally leads to another question. If marijuana felt that good for him, why doesn’t everyone who tries marijuana have the same experience? That’s one of the biggest misconceptions we’ve encountered over the years. We tend to assume that drugs affect everyone the same way, but they don’t. The same substance can mean something entirely different to two different people because the drug isn’t the whole story. The person using it is part of the story too.

We’ve come to think about this by making a distinction between what we call a good drug and a great drug. Almost every drug feels good to somebody. That’s why people use them in the first place. But every once in a while, a young person finds a drug that seems to answer a question they didn’t even know how to ask. It quiets their anxiety, softens their loneliness, gives them confidence, slows down a racing mind, or creates a sense of peace they’ve never experienced before. Suddenly, they can dance at the party. They can talk easily to a boy or a girl. They have confidence in areas of life where they never had it before. They no longer feel alone in a room full of people; they feel connected. At that point, the drug has become much more than something that feels good. It has become what we would call a great drug because it appears to solve a problem that nothing else has been able to solve.

Unfortunately, that’s where things begin to change. In the beginning, the young person is chasing the feeling they had the first time they got high. They remember how complete they felt, how peaceful they felt, or how comfortable they suddenly became in their own skin, and they naturally assume they can recreate that experience. But over time, the brain adapts. The same amount no longer produces the same effect, and little by little that magical feeling becomes harder to find.

At the same time, something else is happening that often goes unnoticed. When the drug wears off, the young person doesn’t simply return to where they started. They often come back feeling just a little bit lower than before. The first few times that difference may be almost impossible to notice, but eventually it becomes significant. They’re no longer using because they’re trying to get back to that incredible feeling they had in the beginning. They’re using because they just want to feel normal again. That’s one of the saddest transitions we see because it usually happens so gradually that the young person doesn’t recognize it while it is happening.

Once that happens, some begin “experimenting” with other substances, looking for something that might recreate the feeling they remember. It isn’t necessarily because they’re thrill seekers or because they’re trying to become harder drug users. They’re trying to recreate the feeling they remember from the beginning. If marijuana no longer produces that feeling, maybe alcohol will. If alcohol doesn’t, maybe mushrooms will. Maybe LSD. Maybe cocaine. The substance changes, but the goal stays exactly the same. They’re searching for the feeling they experienced when the experiment first became a success, and many spend years chasing something they’re never quite able to find again.

Sam and Jerry

Whenever we explain this to parents, we introduce them to Sam and Jerry. Neither one is a real person, but together they represent thousands of teenagers and young adults we’ve worked with over the years. Before we go any further, we should warn you that nobody ever wants to be Jerry. Parents usually laugh when we say that, but by the end of the story they understand exactly why.

Sam is nineteen years old. Jerry is twenty. On a Friday night, Sam pulls into Jerry’s driveway to pick him up for a party. Before they ever get there, though, they’re already starting from two very different places. If we could somehow measure how they’re feeling emotionally on a scale from one to ten, Sam begins the evening at about a seven. Life isn’t perfect, but he’s doing pretty well. He’s looking forward to seeing his friends, listening to music, and having a good time. Jerry, through no fault of his own, starts the evening at about a three and a half. He couldn’t necessarily tell you why he feels that way. He just knows that he does. He wonders whether he’ll fit in, whether he’ll say something stupid, whether people really like him, and whether everyone else seems to have life figured out better than he does.

At the party, someone offers them both a drink, a cart, or a pill. About an hour later, if you walked through the house, you couldn’t tell them apart. They’re both laughing. They’re both talking. They’re both relaxed. From the outside they’re having exactly the same experience. Inside, though, something very different has happened. Sam has gone from a seven to a ten. Jerry has gone from a three and a half to a ten. They both arrived at the same place, but Jerry traveled a much greater distance to get there.

That difference is what matters. For Sam, getting high felt good. For Jerry, getting high felt magical. The self-doubt became quiet. The insecurity disappeared. The constant second-guessing stopped. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t worrying about what everyone else thought of him or whether he measured up. He simply felt comfortable. That’s why we say nobody wants to be Jerry. Sam enjoyed the experience. Jerry believed he had found the answer to the way he felt inside.

Eventually, the party ends, they both go home, and the drugs wear off. Sam doesn’t wake up back at a seven. Maybe he wakes up at a six and three-quarters. He had a great night, but he’s basically back to being Sam. School still matters. He continues to have goals. He cares about his future. The party was something he did, not something that changed the direction of his life.

Jerry’s morning is different. He doesn’t wake up back at a three and a half. He wakes up a little lower than where he started. Now he doesn’t just remember feeling uncomfortable. He remembers what it felt like not to feel uncomfortable. He remembers what it felt like to be a ten, and now he knows there’s a way to get back there. That changes everything.

The next morning, Jerry calls Sam and says, “What are we doing tonight?” Sam is confused. “What do you mean?” Jerry says, “Let’s find another party.” Sam laughs and tells him he can’t because he has a big test coming up and needs to study. Getting a good grade matters to him. Jerry doesn’t understand the answer because, from his perspective, the choice doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone choose studying over feeling the way they felt the night before?

The answer is that Sam and Jerry aren’t chasing the same thing. Sam had fun. Jerry found relief. Those are two very different experiences, even though they may look exactly the same from the outside. For Sam, the party fit into his life. For Jerry, the party had become much bigger than the party itself because it wasn’t really about the party anymore. It wasn’t about the music, the people, or even the drug. It was about getting back to the way he felt while he was there.

As time goes on, Jerry keeps trying to return to that first feeling, but something begins to change. The drug doesn’t work the way it did in the beginning. What once felt like a ten becomes a nine. Then an eight. Eventually the goal is no longer to feel amazing. He’s just trying to feel normal. We’ve watched this happen over and over again, and it usually happens so gradually that young people don’t recognize it while it’s happening.

That’s also why some young people begin “experimenting” with different substances. They aren’t necessarily looking for a bigger high. They’re looking for the relief they remember from the first successful experiment. The substance may change but the goal stays the same. They’re trying to get back to the feeling they remember from the beginning.

Before we leave Sam and Jerry, there’s one more thing that’s important to understand. This story isn’t saying Sam could never develop an addiction or that Jerry was destined to develop one. That’s not the point. At this moment in their lives, Sam simply had less to gain from getting high than Jerry did. If Sam continues drinking, smoking marijuana, or “experimenting” with other drugs, his relationship with those substances can change too. Repeated exposure teaches the brain, and what begins as something that simply feels good can eventually become something that feels necessary. Jerry just reached that point much sooner because the relief he experienced was so much greater.

Parents almost always stop us here and ask the question we’ve been hoping they’ll ask. “Why did Jerry start at a three and a half in the first place?” That’s exactly the right question, because once we understand why Jerry started there, we can finally understand why one young person experiences a drug as simply good while another experiences it as great.

The Hole in the Gut

After more than fifty years, we’ve learned there isn’t one answer that explains every teenager or young adult. Sometimes it’s anxiety, trauma, bullying, rejection, loneliness, or loss. Often, we can’t point to one defining event at all. We’ve worked with brothers and sisters who grew up in the same home with the same parents, the same opportunities, and many of the same experiences, yet one seemed comfortable in their own skin while the other spent years wondering if they were enough. Somewhere along the way we stopped looking for one explanation because there simply isn’t one that fits every family.

Instead, we’ve found it more helpful to think about it another way. Imagine Jerry has a hole in his gut. It isn’t a real hole, and it isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a picture that helps explain something we’ve heard teenagers and young adults describe for years: a feeling that something is missing, unsettled, or not quite right inside. Some people carry a very small hole. Others carry one that feels enormous. Some hardly notice it’s there most days, while others seem to wake up with it every morning. They spend years trying to fill it with popularity, romantic relationships, money, drugs, alcohol, sex, or anything else they hope will finally make them feel complete. Sometimes those things help for a while, but sooner or later the feeling comes back because none of those things were ever designed to permanently fill the hole.

Now think back to Dallas. He didn’t know anything about holes in the gut. He wasn’t trying to understand brain chemistry or explain emotional pain. He simply knew that before he got high, something inside him never quite felt right, and afterward it did. When he told us, “I felt complete. It was like I’d finally found what had been missing,” he was describing the same thing we’re talking about here. Looking back, we’d say the marijuana didn’t fill the hole. It temporarily covered it up. Dallas didn’t know the difference. All he knew was that whatever had been bothering him on the inside was suddenly quiet.

That’s exactly what happens to Jerry. He isn’t thinking about dopamine, addiction, or any of the science behind what he’s experiencing. He’s simply comparing how he felt before he got high with how he feels afterward. The self-doubt is quiet. The insecurity is gone. The constant pressure he carries around every day has disappeared. For the first time in a long time, he feels comfortable in his own skin. Once someone experiences that kind of relief, it’s much easier to understand why they’ll want to experience it again. Parents naturally focus on the drug because that’s the part they can see. Jerry isn’t focused on the drug at all. He’s focused on the relief it gave him. Until parents understand that difference, they’re often trying to solve a different problem than the one their teenager is actually experiencing.

The hopeful part of this story is that the hole can be filled without alcohol or drugs. Our experience has taught us that, and we continue to watch it happen over and over again. Recovery doesn’t simply take something away from a young person. It helps them build the very things they were hoping the drug would give them in the first place. They develop genuine confidence instead of the borrowed confidence they got from getting high. They find real belonging instead of chemically manufactured belonging. They build friendships based on honesty instead of getting high together. They discover purpose through service, self-worth through responsibility, and a community where they finally feel accepted for who they are instead of who they’re pretending to be. None of that happens overnight, but little by little the hole begins to fill with things that actually last.

That’s why we’ve come to believe recovery isn’t simply about helping a young person stop getting high. It’s about helping them build a life where alcohol and drugs are no longer the answer to the way they feel inside.

Does It Matter What We Call It? Abuse or Addiction?

One of the questions parents ask us all the time is, “Do you think my teenager is an addict?” It’s an understandable question, but after more than fifty years we’ve found ourselves asking a different one. We usually ask, “Are alcohol or drugs becoming more important in their life?” because, for us, that’s the question that tells us where a young person is headed.

The truth is that not every teenager who uses alcohol or drugs develops an addiction. Some experiment and stop. Some abuse substances for a period of time without ever becoming dependent. Others gradually develop a dependency that eventually grows into addiction. Those differences are real, and they’re important when we’re planning treatment, but they don’t change one thing we’ve believed for a very long time: every one of those young people deserves help.

We knew a young man named Mark who was fourteen years old. People would sometimes joke that he was barely rude to a drug, meaning he had only gotten high a handful of times. In their minds there was no way he could really have a problem yet. Mark didn’t see it that way, and neither did his parents.

The problem wasn’t that Mark had years of substance use behind him. The problem was that he would do almost anything to fit in. If someone offered him five dollars to do something stupid, he’d probably do it. He took extreme risks, rarely thought about the consequences, and desperately wanted to feel accepted. He wanted to belong, and he was willing to do just about anything if he thought it would help him find that connection. Alcohol and drugs weren’t the whole problem. They were simply one more symptom of what was already going on inside him.

Technically, Mark didn’t meet the clinical definition of addiction. You could have called him an experimenter or a substance abuser, but none of those labels changed the fact that he was a fourteen-year-old headed in the wrong direction. More importantly, he had something many young people don’t have until much later: he had a willingness to stop.

Willingness matters because recovery cannot be forced into a young person from the outside. Parents can set boundaries, create consequences, and seek help, but the real work begins when a young person becomes even a little bit willing to tell the truth, take action, and try something different. Mark’s story matters not because his substance use was severe, but because his willingness gave us something to work with.

The first of the Twelve Steps in our Enthusiastic Approach programs is: “We admitted that mind-changing chemicals have caused at least part of our lives to become unmanageable.” That wording allowed Mark to work the Twelve Steps from exactly where he was in his substance use. He was able to identify at least one part of his life that had become unmanageable, and he threw himself into recovery. As he did, we watched him begin to find the things he’d really been looking for all along. He developed healthier friendships, made better decisions, found people who accepted him, and discovered he didn’t have to risk everything just to feel like he belonged.

When Mark graduated, we faced an interesting question. Most of our graduates continue their recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA), or Cocaine Anonymous (CA), but because his history of substance use was so limited, it wasn’t immediately obvious where he fit. When we asked him what he wanted to do, he didn’t hesitate.

He smiled and said, “I’m just going to go to AA. Working the Steps has made my life better.”

That conversation took place more than ten years ago. Mark still goes to meetings. He still enjoys recovery, and he’s still living the principles he started learning when he was fourteen. We’ve often wondered what might have happened if someone had told him, “You don’t qualify yet. Come back after you’ve done more damage.” Thankfully, nobody did.

That’s why we’ve never been comfortable telling a teenager their story isn’t bad enough yet. We don’t ask someone with cancer to wait until it reaches Stage 4 before recommending treatment, and we don’t think young people should have to earn the opportunity to recover by accumulating enough pain to satisfy a definition. Some of the worst consequences happen long before someone meets the clinical definition of addiction. It doesn’t take an addict to overdose. It doesn’t take alcoholism to get behind the wheel after drinking and change someone else’s life forever. It doesn’t take years of substance use to lose a scholarship, destroy trust at home, damage an important relationship, or make a decision that follows a young person for the rest of their life.

One of the lessons we’ve learned over the years is that alcohol and drugs don’t really care what we call the problem. Whether someone is experimenting, abusing substances, becoming dependent, or living with an addiction, the consequences continue moving in the same direction if nothing changes. That’s why we’ve always believed the earlier the investment, the higher the return. We’d much rather meet a family while they’re asking, “Is this becoming a problem?” than years later when they’re asking, “How did things get this bad?” Early intervention gives young people the opportunity to change direction before alcohol or drugs become the organizing force in their lives.

At the end of the day, we’re much less interested in finding the perfect label than we are in helping a young person’s life move in a different direction. If alcohol or drugs are becoming more important than family, school, friendships, responsibilities, or the future they once wanted, that’s enough for us to begin helping. We’ve never believed a teenager should have to lose everything before they deserve the opportunity to find something better.

The Tack in the Foot

Bob Meehan founded the Enthusiastic Approach and wrote Beyond the Yellow Brick Road: Our Children and Drugs. Bob had a way of teaching that made people remember stories for the rest of their lives. He didn’t usually begin by explaining an idea. Instead, he’d smile, lean back in his chair, and say, “Let me tell you a story.” Before you knew it, everyone in the room understood exactly what he was trying to teach.

One of Bob’s favorite stories started with a famous rap artist coming to St. Louis for a sold-out concert. The place was packed with teenagers. The music was loud, the lights were flashing, and everyone wanted to be just like him. About halfway through the show, the rapper was exhausted from performing. Someone brought a chair out onto the stage so he could sit down for a minute. As the audience watched, he slowly took off one of his shoes, then pulled off his sock. He reached down beside the chair, picked up a thumbtack, held it high enough for everyone to see, and then pushed it straight into the heel of his foot.

The entire crowd cringed. People covered their eyes, others yelled out in disbelief, and everyone wondered what in the world they had just witnessed. The rapper never reacted. He calmly pulled his sock back on, slipped his shoe over the tack, stood up, and finished the concert. If you watched carefully, you could see a slight limp, but otherwise he acted like nothing had happened.

A few days later, a teenager named Billy was sitting on the bleachers during gym class. Billy had been at the concert, and he happened to be one of the popular kids at school. During a break he took off one of his shoes, pulled off his sock, found a thumbtack, and pushed it into the heel of his own foot just like the rapper had done. Then he put his sock back on, tied his shoe, stood up, and went back to gym class. He walked with a little limp, but otherwise acted as though everything was perfectly normal.

A couple of weeks passed before Billy came home complaining that his knee hurt. His mom didn’t think much of it. Like a lot of parents, she figured it was probably growing pains, handed him a couple of Advil, and told him to give it a few days. When the pain didn’t improve, she finally scheduled an appointment with the doctor.

Bob always described the doctor’s office the same way. It was a little run down. The carpet was worn, the furniture had obviously been there for years, and one of the fluorescent lights flickered every now and then. After examining Billy’s knee, the doctor smiled and said, “I think a knee brace is exactly what you need.”

Billy wore the brace, but a few weeks later he came home complaining that now his hip hurt. Once again his mom assumed it was probably just part of growing up. She gave him a couple more Advil, waited a few days, and when that didn’t help, she made another appointment.

This time, as they walked into the office, Billy’s mom noticed something had changed. The lighting had all been replaced, and the place looked a little nicer than it had before. The doctor examined Billy, nodded thoughtfully, and said, “You know, it’s amazing how many young people are coming in with hip pain these days. I think it’s time we got you a cane.”

Billy couldn’t imagine walking through the halls at school with a cane. Seeing the look on his face, the doctor smiled and said, “Don’t worry. You’ve got great insurance. Come downstairs with me.”

The doctor led Billy into the basement, where there was an entire room filled with canes. Bob always compared it to one of those old department store tie displays. You’d press a button, and the whole rack would slowly rotate so you could look at every option before making your decision. Billy watched cane after cane come around until he spotted one with a dragon wrapped around the handle and bright red eyes.

“That’s the one,” Billy said. “If I have to carry a cane, I might as well have a cool one.”

So Billy went back to school carrying a dragon cane.

A few weeks later his hand began hurting from using the cane. Calluses had formed, and they were becoming pretty painful. His mom tried the same routine she’d used before. She gave him some Advil and hoped it would get better. When it didn’t, she scheduled another appointment. While she was talking to one of her friends about Billy, her friend suggested it might be time for a second opinion. Billy’s mom agreed that wasn’t a bad idea, but since they already had another appointment scheduled, she figured they’d just see what this doctor had to say first.

The doctor looked at Billy’s hand and immediately knew what to do.

“I’ve got the answer,” he said. “You need a glove.”

He reminded Billy that he still had excellent insurance, so down to the basement they went again. This time Billy picked out a nice leather glove that matched his dragon cane perfectly. He walked out of the office convinced they were finally getting somewhere.

A few weeks went by, and now Billy came home complaining that his shoulder hurt. By this point, his mom was getting pretty used to hearing that something new hurt every few weeks. She did what she’d done before. She gave him a couple of Advil, figured maybe it would work itself out, and hoped this would be the one that finally got better on its own. It didn’t. So she called the doctor’s office and made another appointment.

When they walked in this time, Billy’s mom almost couldn’t believe she was in the same building. The old carpet was gone. Beautiful new flooring had been installed, the furniture all matched, and everything looked clean, modern, and expensive. It was a far cry from the little dingy office where they’d started several months earlier.

The doctor came in, listened while Billy explained that now his shoulder was hurting, nodded his head a few times, and said, “I think I know exactly what’s going on. Why don’t we move the cane over to the other side so you’re not putting so much stress on this shoulder, and we’ll put this arm in a sling for a while.”

Billy figured that made sense. After all, the doctor had been right about everything else so far. They put his arm in a sling, switched the cane to the other hand, and sent him on his way.

A few more weeks passed, and now Billy started getting terrible headaches. Not just once in a while, either. They were becoming more frequent, and they were bad enough that his mom finally started wondering if maybe they needed to look somewhere else for answers.

She was talking to one of her friends about everything Billy had been dealing with, and her friend finally said, “Have you ever thought about getting a second opinion?”

Billy’s mom admitted she probably should. She already had another appointment scheduled with their regular doctor, but she decided after that appointment she’d try someone new.

The regular doctor really didn’t have anything different to offer. Billy was using the knee brace, using the cane, wearing the leather glove to protect his hand, had his arm in a sling, and now he had headaches. They talked about a few possibilities, adjusted a couple of things, and Billy’s mom left more frustrated than when she’d arrived.

A few days later they walked into another doctor’s office. It wasn’t nearly as fancy as the first one. Nothing matched. The furniture was just ordinary office furniture, and while everything was clean, it certainly didn’t look like a place that had been making a fortune selling knee braces, dragon canes, leather gloves, and slings.

The doctor spent quite a while talking with Billy. He asked when all of this had started, what had happened first, and how one problem seemed to lead to another. Then he asked Billy to stand up and walk across the room.

Billy slowly walked across the office carrying his dragon cane, wearing his leather glove, with one arm resting in a sling.

About that time Billy’s mom said she needed to use the restroom, so she stepped out for a minute.

The doctor walked over to Billy, knelt down, looked at his shoe, and said, “Billy, would you mind taking your shoe off for me?”

Billy took off his shoe. “Now your sock.” Billy pulled off his sock. The doctor looked at him and smiled. “Billy, you’ve got a tack sticking out of your heel.” Billy looked right back at him and said, “I know.”

The doctor laughed a little and said, “Well, if you take the tack out, your knee will quit hurting. Once your knee gets better, your hip won’t have to compensate anymore. Then you won’t need the cane. If you don’t need the cane, your hand won’t keep getting calluses, so you won’t need the glove. Once you’re not leaning on the cane all day, your shoulder will settle down, and before long your headaches will probably disappear too.”

Just then Billy’s mom walked back into the room. She could tell by the look on Billy’s face that something had happened.

“What’s going on?” she asked. Billy answered before the doctor could. “He wants me to take the tack out.” His mom looked at the doctor like he had completely lost his mind.

“We’ve spent months trying to figure this out,” she said. “He’s had appointments, braces, a cane, a glove, a sling, and now you’re telling us the answer is taking a tack out of his foot?”

The doctor simply smiled and said, “Yes, ma’am. That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

Billy shook his head. “I’m not taking it out.”

His mom agreed with him. They got up, walked out of the office, climbed into the car, and drove right back to the first doctor because they were convinced this new doctor didn’t know what he was talking about.

Bob would then look at the audience and very loudly yell, “Take the tack out! We have got to stop treating the symptoms and get to the root problem.”

What We Learned

Everything we’ve talked about in this chapter eventually led us to one conclusion that changed the way we looked at recovery.

Long before we were working with teenagers and young adults, we were trying to figure out our own recovery. Like most people, we thought recovery meant learning how not to drink or use drugs. It didn’t take us very long to realize that simply removing the alcohol or drugs wasn’t enough. We were still the same people we had been the day before. We still had to learn how to live. We had to learn how to build healthy relationships, how to be honest, how to ask for help, how to take responsibility for our lives, and how to find purpose without relying on a substance to get us there.

When we eventually began working with teenagers and young adults, we weren’t trying to create a treatment philosophy. We were simply sharing the things that had helped us. As more young people and families came through our doors, we started noticing the same patterns over and over again. Young people responded when recovery became more than avoiding alcohol and drugs. They responded when it gave them connection, responsibility, purpose, and a way to feel comfortable in their own skin. Little by little, those experiences became the foundation of what is now known as the Enthusiastic Approach.

Somewhere along the way, we realized we’d been asking the wrong question. The question was never, “How do we get a young person to stop getting high?” The better question was, “How do we help them build a life where getting high no longer solves the problem?” That one question changed the way we looked at almost everything. Instead of focusing only on taking something away, we began focusing on helping young people find something better.

That’s why you’ll probably notice this book spends less time talking about alcohol and drugs than you might expect. Alcohol and drugs matter, but they aren’t really the point. The more important question is why they became so important in the first place and what can take their place once recovery begins. That’s the journey we experienced ourselves. It’s the journey we’ve had the privilege of walking with thousands of teenagers, young adults, and families, and it’s the journey we’ll continue exploring throughout the rest of this book.

As we close this chapter, there’s one more thing we hope every parent hears, because it’s something we’ve been saying for more than fifty years. We learned it from Al-Anon, and it remains one of the most important things we can tell a parent: You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, and you can’t cure it.

Addiction has a way of convincing parents that if they had just loved their child more, parented differently, made stricter rules, not dropped him when he was a baby, or made better decisions, none of this would have happened. We’ve never found that to be true. We’ve worked with wonderful parents whose children struggled with addiction, and we’ve worked with deeply dysfunctional families whose children never developed a substance use problem. Life is rarely that simple.

What you can do is learn. You can begin to understand what your teenager or young adult is experiencing. You can learn to respond instead of continuing to react. You can stop carrying responsibility that was never yours to carry, and you can become part of a recovery process that offers real hope. None of those things will guarantee the outcome you want, but they will change the way you walk through it, and they’ll put you in a much better position to help when your son or daughter becomes willing to accept it.

At the beginning of this chapter, we asked why a teenager or young adult would continue using alcohol or drugs even as the consequences kept piling up. We hope the answer makes a little more sense now.

They’re usually not choosing alcohol or drugs over you. They’re choosing the relief they believe alcohol or drugs provide. That doesn’t make the choice any less painful for the people who love them, but it helps explain why consequences alone so rarely solve the problem.

Before we can begin talking about recovery, though, we have to make sure we’re treating the right problem. If alcohol and drugs are the tack, then no amount of treating the limp will ever solve what is really causing the pain. Once the tack is out, we can finally begin to understand what made it so powerful in the first place.

For more than fifty years, we’ve been asking a different question. Once we recognize what the real problem is, how do we help a teenager or young adult become willing to do something about it?

That’s where our story really begins.

Optional listening

Tack in the Foot

An original song for this chapter.

Audio file: chapter-1-song.m4a — upload it alongside index.html.

← Beginning Next: What Is the Enthusiastic Approach? →

Cassidy was sixteen when someone asked her a question that would ultimately change her life. In retrospect, it’s almost funny that a question so simple could become one of the most important moments she would ever remember. At the time, though, it didn’t feel simple at all. It felt intrusive. She had only been sitting with the counselor for a few minutes when he looked at her and asked, “Are you happy?”

Without thinking, she answered, “Yeah.” The word came out almost automatically, but before she could even finish saying it, another thought exploded in her mind. What the hell? How does he know? She hadn’t told him she was unhappy. She wasn’t crying, asking for help, or pouring out her life story. As far as she was concerned, she was just another teenager sitting across from another adult who was probably about to tell her everything she was doing wrong. Somehow, though, this counselor had managed to ask the one question she hoped nobody would ever ask because, if she was honest with herself, she already knew the answer.

The truth was, Cassidy wasn’t happy. Her parents were angry with her. She had been kicked out of school, was dealing with legal problems, and had become very good at lying to the people who loved her most. Looking back, it almost seems obvious that she was miserable, but that’s one of the confusing things about alcohol and drugs. From the outside, everyone could see a life falling apart. From the inside, it still felt like alcohol and drugs were the only things making life manageable.

Cassidy’s story isn’t unusual. We all lived some version of it before we became counselors, and we’ve watched it repeat countless times among the teenagers and young adults who have come through our program. We’ve heard the same question from thousands of parents. After talking with their child about fentanyl, overdoses, jail, ruined opportunities, and everything else that could happen if their son or daughter keeps using, they sometimes ask the question that brings almost every family through our doors: “If they know all of that, why don’t they stop?”

One of the biggest things we learned in our own recovery was that we had been asking the wrong question. Fear doesn’t compete very well against something a young person believes is helping them. From Cassidy’s perspective, drugs weren’t the problem. They were what she relied on to feel better. It was an unhealthy, temporary, and ultimately destructive way of coping, but in her mind it worked. Once we understood that in our own lives, we began to understand why simply telling teenagers that drugs are dangerous rarely changes their behavior. Before recovery could become attractive, it had to offer something that could compete with what the drugs appeared to be providing.

A few days later, two friends picked Cassidy up. It felt like any other day. The plan was to hang out, see where the day went, and eventually end up at a party. Recovery wasn’t even on the radar. Somewhere during the drive, one of them casually mentioned they were headed to a meeting. The idea didn’t sound particularly appealing, but it wasn’t worth arguing about either. It seemed easier to sit through whatever this was, get it over with, and move on.

When they pulled into the parking lot, Cassidy immediately realized this wasn’t what she expected. Instead of a church or a treatment center, there wasn’t even a building. The group had temporarily been kicked out of the church where they normally met, so everyone was gathering under a pavilion in a local park. As she got out of the car and started walking across the grass, music drifted through the air. The closer she got, the louder it became, and before they ever reached the pavilion, she could already hear teenagers laughing.

As she got closer, she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. Young people were everywhere. Some were throwing a football while others wrestled in the grass. Small groups stood around talking. Others were laughing so hard they could barely finish a sentence. They didn’t look like they had been forced to come or like they were serving some kind of punishment. If someone had dropped Cassidy into the middle of it without any explanation, she would have assumed she had stumbled onto a party, but she couldn’t figure out where the party was.

She kept looking for the keg. Then for a cooler full of beer. Then for someone smoking marijuana behind a tree. She assumed she just hadn’t found it yet because, in her experience, young people didn’t gather like this unless alcohol or drugs were involved. That wasn’t something anyone had taught her. It was simply the world she had been living in. But the longer Cassidy stood there, the more confused she became because none of it was there.

A young woman walked over with a huge smile and opened her arms to give Cassidy a hug. Cassidy immediately stepped backward. Hugging strangers wasn’t something she did, and she wasn’t about to start now. The young woman just laughed, introduced herself, and started talking as if nothing unusual had happened. Cassidy’s hesitation didn’t seem to bother anyone. They simply accepted her exactly as she was.

Another thing we’ve come to appreciate is how different the recovery community really is. Newcomers aren’t expected to trust everyone on the first day, open up, share their feelings, or suddenly believe everything they’re hearing. The people welcoming them remember exactly what it felt like to be new because they once stood in that same place. They remember being skeptical and wondering if they belonged. So instead of trying to convince anyone, they simply make room. Newcomers can sit back and watch. Questions get answered when asked. Most importantly, everyone gets the time and space to decide for themselves whether they want to come back.

Cassidy left that night with something she hadn’t expected. She wasn’t convinced recovery was what she wanted, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the people she had met. They were sober, yet they seemed happier than almost anyone she knew. It didn’t feel forced or fake. They genuinely enjoyed being together, and that challenged everything she believed about both recovery and teenagers.

What brought Cassidy back wasn’t a belief in recovery. It was curiosity about the people who seemed to be living it. Long before understanding the program or the principles behind it, she recognized there was something different about the young people she had met. They had something she wanted, even if she couldn’t yet put it into words. Returning gave her time to watch, build relationships, and discover that their happiness was real. That curiosity opened the door to her own recovery.

It took Cassidy a long time to understand what she was seeing. At first, she assumed these young people were getting high and were simply better at hiding it. Maybe the alcohol was in someone’s car. Maybe they slipped away before she noticed. In her experience, people her age did not have that much fun sober, so there had to be something going on that she had not found yet.

As Cassidy kept coming back, that explanation became harder to hold onto. These young people were not sneaking off to get high or putting on a show for newcomers. They were genuinely enjoying themselves. Even then, it would be a long time before she fully understood what they had discovered. They had found something deeper than simply learning how to have fun without alcohol or drugs: they could be genuinely happy without getting high.

That was confusing because it challenged everything she believed. Up until then, she honestly thought drugs were what made life exciting. She thought getting high was what made people laugh harder, enjoy music more, and forget about their problems for a while. If someone had asked her what sober people did on a Friday night, she probably would have imagined a room full of folding chairs and long faces. What she found instead was a group of young people who couldn’t wait to spend time together, and none of them needed alcohol or drugs to enjoy themselves.

That experience wasn’t unique to Cassidy. Almost every one of us left our first meeting with the same realization: there was something different about the people. We didn’t return because someone convinced us alcohol and drugs were dangerous. We returned because of the people. The laughter felt genuine, the friendships looked real, and being together seemed to bring real joy. One of the greatest lessons we learned was that what we had found was hope, even though we didn’t have a name for it yet.

Since then, we’ve watched that same experience happen thousands of times with teenagers and young adults. Very few kept coming back because someone convinced them they needed recovery. They came back because they found a place where they felt accepted, understood, and genuinely wanted. Long before the principles of recovery made sense, they had already found a reason to return. The principles weren’t learned first and practiced later. They were experienced first, and understanding followed.

That’s one of the foundations of the Enthusiastic Approach. We don’t believe recovery becomes attractive because someone gives a great lecture or wins an argument. Recovery becomes attractive when a young person meets people who are living a life they quietly find themselves wanting. We know that because it happened to us, and we’ve watched it happen again and again with tens of thousands of others. In retrospect, one of the greatest gifts of our own recovery was learning that the opposite of addiction isn’t just sobriety: it’s connection.

One evening, we were all gathered around a bonfire when a young woman named Stacey found herself in what we call a “gnar.” Around here, that’s what we used to call those deep conversations that seem to happen naturally in recovery. The kind where two people become so engaged that the rest of the world seems to disappear.

Stacey was completely absorbed in her conversation. People nearby noticed that a stray ember had landed on her blanket and it had started to smolder. They called her name once. Then again. She never even looked up. She was so engaged in the conversation that she didn’t hear a thing. Finally, one of the young men pushed through the group, grabbed the blanket, and yelled, “Stacey, you’re on fire!” Someone quickly smothered the blanket, and within minutes everyone was laughing, including Stacey.

Today we recognize that what we remember most isn’t that her blanket caught fire. It’s that she had become so completely engaged in a genuine conversation with another person that everything else faded into the background. Moments like that happen more often than people realize. They’re reminders that recovery isn’t just about quitting alcohol and drugs. It’s about discovering relationships that are so meaningful, authentic, and life-giving that they begin to replace what alcohol and drugs only pretended to offer. That’s the kind of connection we mean when we say the opposite of addiction isn’t just sobriety, it’s connection.

We didn’t understand any of that when we first got sober. We simply experienced it. Bob Meehan was the person who helped us understand why it mattered and how it could become the foundation of an approach to recovery.

Bob Meehan

At this point, it’s probably helpful to introduce someone you’ll hear us talk about throughout this book. Bob Meehan devoted more than fifty years of his life to working with teenagers, young adults, and their families. Along the way, he became the founder of what is now known as the Enthusiastic Approach. Over five decades, he helped build a recovery community that has impacted tens of thousands of young people and their families, always guided by a simple belief: recovery must become more attractive than alcohol and drugs.

Almost every idea that makes up the Enthusiastic Approach can be traced back to Bob’s work with young people and his relentless desire to understand what actually helped them choose recovery. He was constantly observing, asking questions, challenging assumptions, and refining the way recovery was introduced to adolescents and young adults. The principles weren’t developed in a classroom or written on a whiteboard. They were learned by walking alongside thousands of young people, paying attention to what worked, and never being afraid to rethink what didn’t.

One of the things that made Bob different was that he never assumed adults already had all the answers. He believed that if we wanted to help teenagers and young adults choose recovery, we first had to understand how they experienced the world. That meant asking questions, listening carefully, and being willing to learn from the very people we were trying to help.

The Enthusiastic Approach wasn’t developed all at once. It evolved one conversation at a time. Bob spent countless hours talking with young people in recovery. He wanted to know what made sense to them, what confused them, what gave them hope, and what caused them to shut down. If something wasn’t connecting, he didn’t simply conclude they weren’t ready. He became curious. Instead of asking, “Why don’t they get it?” he asked, “Help me understand what we’re missing.”

That curiosity shaped nearly everything that one day became the Enthusiastic Approach. Many of the traditions, activities, and ideas throughout this book grew out of those conversations. One of those ideas was finding a way to express the Twelve Steps in language that adolescents and young adults could genuinely understand and relate to. Bob didn’t do that alone. Many of the young people living in recovery became part of the process, talking through what each Step meant and searching for words that made sense in their lives while carefully preserving the meaning, purpose, and principles of the original Twelve Steps. The goal was never to change recovery. The goal was to help young people discover it.

One of Bob’s greatest gifts was his ability to make people feel seen, heard, and genuinely loved. Whether he was talking with a teenager, a parent, or someone with decades of recovery, he had a way of making you feel like you were the most important person in the room. It didn’t matter who was waiting to talk to him or what else was happening around him. When you were with Bob, you had his full attention. That was his gift.

We believe that gift shaped the Enthusiastic Approach as much as any philosophy ever could. Bob understood that if we truly wanted to meet young people where they were at, we first had to know their address. By “address,” he didn’t mean where they lived. He meant knowing where they were emotionally: what they were afraid of, what mattered to them, what they were struggling with, and how they saw the world at that moment. The only way to know someone’s address was to care enough to listen, love them where they were, and make them feel safe enough to tell you the truth. That became part of the culture of the Enthusiastic Approach, and we still strive to treat every person who walks through our doors the same way Bob treated us.

Although Bob is no longer with us, his influence continues to shape everything we do. Nearly every principle, tradition, and philosophy you’ll read about throughout this book grew directly out of his life’s work. We’ll share much more of his story later because understanding Bob helps explain how the Enthusiastic Approach came to be.

Before we go any further, we want to mention another resource that has been a cornerstone of the Enthusiastic Approach for decades: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road: Our Children and Drugs, written by Bob Meehan. His book has helped countless parents better understand substance use, recovery, and their role in the process. Many of the ideas introduced there helped shape the philosophy you’ll read throughout these pages. If you haven’t read Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, we highly recommend it.

As Bob Meehan continued working with young people, he began noticing something that most adults completely overlooked. Every Monday morning at school, the conversations were almost never about what happened in class. They were about the weekend: the party everyone went to, who embarrassed themselves, the latest hookup, the people who got left out, and all the stories that had already started becoming legends by Monday morning. Whether anyone admitted it or not, everybody wanted to be part of whatever everyone else was talking about.

Bob realized that if alcohol and drugs were creating the stories everyone wanted to hear on Monday morning, recovery had to create stories worth telling too.

Teenagers haven’t changed very much. They have always been, and probably always will be, “fun machines.” The names of the apps are different, the music is different, and the way they communicate has changed, but they still want the same things they always have. They want to belong. They want to have fun. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want memories to laugh about and stories to tell when school starts on Monday.

That realization shaped the Enthusiastic Approach from the very beginning. Instead of looking at Friday and Saturday nights as the time when teenagers were most likely to get into trouble, Bob saw them as the greatest opportunity to show young people that recovery could offer something better. If getting high created friendships, memories, and stories, then recovery had to offer those things too. We couldn’t expect a young person to spend the weekend sitting at home and somehow believe recovery was the better choice. Recovery had to become a life they genuinely wanted to live.

Because we got sober here, we’ve always understood that recovery has to be lived, not just talked about. If young people are going to choose recovery over alcohol and drugs, they have to discover for themselves that the best memories, the strongest friendships, and some of the most meaningful experiences of their lives can happen sober. That’s why Friday and Saturday night functions have always been a cornerstone of the Enthusiastic Approach. They were never designed simply to keep people busy. They exist because they’re where friendships are built, trust begins to grow, and hope starts becoming believable. They’re where young people discover something many never thought was possible: they can actually have more fun sober than they ever had getting high.

Interestingly, those weekend functions didn’t begin as some grand philosophy. They started because Bob had a growing group of teenagers and young adults who kept showing up on Friday and Saturday nights. He knew those evenings were often the highest-risk time for drinking and using, so he simply started finding things for everyone to do together. That practical solution created the experiences through which friendships, trust, and hope could grow and eventually became one of the defining traditions of the Enthusiastic Approach.

Our own recovery had already taught us that relationships rarely grow because people sit in circles talking. They grow because people laugh together, solve problems together, cheer each other on, stay up too late talking, and create experiences they’ll remember years later. The activity is rarely the point. It’s simply the environment where friendships have a chance to grow. That’s why, more than fifty years later, Friday and Saturday night functions are still a central part of what we do.

One thing we’ve observed over more than fifty years is that the friendships young people build in recovery often become one of the strongest sources of stability in their lives. A teenager or young adult who knows exactly where they’re going on a Friday night, who has friends expecting them, and who genuinely wants to be there is making a very different decision than a teenager who believes the only place they’ll find connection is at a party where everyone is getting high or drunk. That’s why we’ve never looked at community as something separate from treatment. From our perspective, community isn’t separate from treatment. It’s one of the ways treatment comes to life.

Building the Bridge

Creating a recovery community young people genuinely wanted to be part of was only the beginning. Once they came back, we had to help them understand why it was changing their lives.

When most of us first got sober, we were introduced to the Twelve Steps. Those principles changed our lives, and we believe they’ll keep changing lives for as long as people need recovery. The principles were never the issue. Bob noticed that young people simply weren’t hearing them the way adults did. They weren’t rejecting recovery. They just needed someone to introduce those same principles in a language that fit where they were in life. The message didn’t need to change. The introduction did.

A sixteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old may both struggle with alcohol or drugs, but they aren’t standing in the same place. Most adults who find their way into recovery have already accumulated years of consequences. They’ve lost marriages, careers, homes, finances, or relationships that can never be replaced. By the time many adults ask for help, they’ve experienced enough pain that they’re willing to look at themselves differently.

Young people haven’t lived that long. Many are still going to school. They still have parents who provide a place to live. Some still have friends, jobs, athletic opportunities, or plans for college. Even when alcohol or drugs have created serious problems, they often don’t believe their entire life has become unmanageable. From their perspective, they don’t have a drug problem. They have parents who won’t leave them alone, teachers who don’t understand them, or police officers who happened to catch them.

When Bob Meehan first started working with teenagers, he quickly discovered that arguing with them about whether they had a problem rarely accomplished anything. The more he tried to convince them, the more they defended themselves. It wasn’t because they were dishonest. They simply hadn’t experienced life the same way most adults entering recovery had.

That led Bob to ask a different question. If the Twelve Steps lead people to recovery, how do you build a bridge that helps a teenager get there? Part of that bridge is built through counseling. In the Enthusiastic Approach, counseling isn’t separate from the recovery community. It’s often the first place where a young person begins to feel understood instead of judged and the first place where they become willing to consider that recovery might actually have something to offer.

All of our counselors once sat in the same chairs as the young people they now work with. Every one of them began their own recovery through an Enthusiastic Approach program before completing specialized training in the Enthusiastic Approach to adolescent addiction treatment. They’ve experienced the program from both sides, first as young people searching for hope and later as counselors helping others find it. That lived experience doesn’t replace professional training. It strengthens it. They understand what it’s like to walk through the door for the first time because they’ve walked that path themselves.

The answer wasn’t to change the principles. It was to change the introduction. Bob began translating timeless recovery principles into language and experiences that made sense to adolescents and young adults. Instead of expecting a sixteen-year-old to immediately identify with decades of consequences, he learned that if they could honestly admit alcohol or drugs had caused problems in even one part of their life, that was enough to begin. They didn’t have to understand everything on the first day. They just had to be honest enough to take the next step.

That insight has guided the Enthusiastic Approach ever since. We weren’t trying to create a new recovery program or replace the Twelve Steps. Our goal was to build a bridge. We rewrote the Steps for teenagers and young adults while carefully preserving the meaning, purpose, and principles behind every Step. As we often said, “To meet somebody where they’re at, you have to know their address.” By then, we understood that knowing someone’s address meant understanding where they were emotionally and developmentally before deciding how to help them move forward. Once young people feel understood instead of argued with, they’re much more willing to listen, and from there they can begin walking the same path of recovery that has changed millions of lives.

People who visit for the first time are often surprised by what happens after the meeting. They expect everyone to head home as soon as it’s over. Instead, they find groups of teenagers and young adults standing around in the parking lot talking, laughing, making plans, and sometimes staying for another hour or more. Every now and then a parent will ask, “Is the meeting still going?” We usually smile and tell them, “No, it ended a long time ago.” They stay because they’ve found a place where they genuinely want to be.

One of the questions people ask us all the time is, “How do you know when recovery is really working?” The honest answer is that there isn’t one moment that tells you. It usually isn’t dramatic, and it almost never happens all at once. More often than not, you notice it by looking backward instead of looking forward. One day you realize the teenager or young adult sitting in front of you isn’t quite the same person who walked through the door a few months earlier.

We’ve learned to pay attention to the little things because the little things usually come before the big things. A young person who used to leave the second the meeting was over now stays in the parking lot talking for another hour. Nobody asked them to stay. The meeting ended a long time ago, but the conversations didn’t. The teenager who used to sit quietly in the back of the room hoping nobody would notice them is now the first one walking over to introduce themselves to a newcomer.

Other changes can be even easier to miss. Parents tell us their son or daughter is laughing again, coming downstairs to eat dinner with the family, watching a movie together, or apologizing without being forced. Those moments may not sound extraordinary, but if you’ve lived with addiction in your home, you know they represent something much bigger than they appear. Recovery usually doesn’t announce itself with one dramatic moment. More often, it quietly reveals itself in moments like these.

As recovery continues, we often begin to see another kind of change. Young people stop asking what recovery can do for them and begin wondering how they can help someone else. They bring a friend to a meeting, volunteer to help set up chairs, stay afterward to clean up, or notice a newcomer standing by themselves and walk over to introduce themselves. At first, we often encourage young people to help because that’s how many of us first learned what it meant to be of service. Eventually, though, something changes. They stop helping because someone asked them to and begin doing it because they genuinely want to. Recovery has quietly become part of who they are.

When that starts happening, we’re reminded of our own recovery. Every one of us was welcomed by someone who had already walked the road before us. At some point, without even realizing it, our roles changed. We stopped being the newcomer and became the person greeting the next newcomer. That’s one of the moments we love most because it’s living proof that recovery continues to pass from one person to another. Nobody has to announce that they’ve become part of the recovery community. You can see it in the way they begin caring about the people walking in behind them.

In recovery, we call these choices acts of service. Service simply means doing something that helps another person or strengthens the recovery community without expecting anything in return. It can be as simple as setting up chairs, welcoming a newcomer, making coffee, calling someone who’s struggling, or staying afterward to help clean up. Those acts may seem small, but they represent an important shift. Recovery is no longer something we’re simply receiving. It becomes something we’re sharing with others.

That’s probably one of the clearest signs that someone has really caught it. Recovery is no longer just changing their life. They’re becoming part of the reason it changes someone else’s.

We saw one of those moments with a young woman named Kelsie. When Kelsie first came to us, she had a hard time seeing much value in herself. She rarely smiled, kept people at a distance, and almost never talked about how she was feeling. Then one morning she walked into the meeting with a huge smile on her face, looked around the room, and said, “I’m happy today.”

Most people probably wouldn’t think much about those three words, but everyone who knew Kelsie understood how significant they were. She wasn’t saying life had suddenly become perfect, and she certainly wasn’t saying she’d never have another difficult day. She was simply recognizing something she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Happiness was beginning to show up on its own instead of being borrowed from a drug.

Those are the moments we learn to notice. Recovery doesn’t always arrive with some enormous revelation. Sometimes it walks into a meeting with a smile and says, “I’m happy today.”

More Than Sobriety

As we’ve reflected on our own recovery, we’ve realized something we couldn’t have understood when we first walked through the door. Back then, we thought the goal was to stop drinking and using drugs. We thought sobriety was the finish line. It didn’t take long to discover that sobriety was really just the beginning.

When people hear the words Enthusiastic Approach, they sometimes assume we’re talking about excitement or high energy. That’s understandable because our meetings are full of laughter, music, conversations, and young people who genuinely enjoy being together. But enthusiasm isn’t the same thing as excitement. Excitement comes and goes. Recovery isn’t built on a feeling. It’s built on a way of living.

The word enthusiastic has long been associated with the idea of being “inspired by God.” Whether someone has a deep faith, is still searching, or isn’t sure what they believe, we’ve always loved the picture that creates. To us, it means believing life can become something better than it is today. It means choosing hope when hopelessness seems easier, choosing connection instead of isolation, and choosing a direction that leads toward growth instead of away from it.

One of the things our own recovery taught us is that recovery is passed from one life to another. Books have their place. Counseling is important. Meetings are essential. The Twelve Steps transform lives. But every one of us can probably point to at least one person who made recovery feel possible. A phone call when we needed someone. Coffee after a meeting. Being noticed after disappearing for a few days. Someone believing in us long before we believed in ourselves. Those relationships shaped us just as much as any lesson we ever learned.

In Twelve Step recovery, one of the most important relationships is sponsorship. A sponsor is someone who has what you want, has been where you are, and has found a way to the other side. More importantly, they’re willing to help you get there too. They do that by sharing their own experience, walking beside you through the Twelve Steps, and showing you how to live the principles of recovery in everyday life.

Sponsorship isn’t just for young people in recovery. Parents need sponsors too, and those relationships can be every bit as important. Recovery can be just as unfamiliar and overwhelming for parents as it is for their son or daughter. Having someone who has already walked that road, understands the fears and challenges, and is willing to guide them through it can make all the difference. None of us were meant to do recovery alone.

That’s why we invest so much time helping young people build community. We aren’t trying to keep them busy. We’re trying to help them find the same kind of relationships that changed our lives. Eventually, something remarkable begins to happen. The teenager who once stood quietly hoping nobody would notice them becomes the one greeting newcomers at the door. The young adult who once wondered if recovery could ever work becomes the one telling someone else, “Hang in there. It gets better.” Without planning it, they become living proof that change is possible.

When we first came into recovery, we were attracted to people who had something we wanted. Today, one of the greatest privileges of our lives is watching the next generation become those people for someone else. That’s how recovery continues. It gets passed from person to person through conversations, friendships, and acts of service. Long before newcomers understand the principles, they begin seeing them lived out in the people around them.

By now, you may have noticed that the Enthusiastic Approach isn’t built around one idea. It isn’t just counseling, just meetings, just sponsorship, or just activities. It’s all of those working together. Every piece was developed because experience kept teaching us the same lesson: young people recover best when recovery becomes a life they genuinely want to live.

If someone asked us to define the Enthusiastic Approach in one sentence, we’d probably say this: The Enthusiastic Approach is a recovery community rooted in the Twelve Steps and inspired by a Power greater than ourselves, where teenagers, young adults, and their families help one another build lives they no longer feel the need to escape.

Everything else, including meetings, activities, counseling, service, sponsorship, family involvement, and all the traditions we’ve developed over the years, exists to support that one purpose.

That’s the journey we’ll continue throughout the rest of this book. We’ve spent this chapter explaining what the Enthusiastic Approach is. The chapters that follow are about how it works, why it works, and how families can become part of the same journey that changed our lives.

← Previous: Why Does My Kid Keep Getting High?Next: Raising the Bottom →

For years, Bob Meehan taught a way of thinking he called raising the bottom. A bottom is the point when the consequences of alcohol or drug use become painful enough that someone becomes willing to change. Most people think you have to wait for that person to lose enough before they become willing. Bob believed there was another way. If you could help a young person find something healthy they genuinely valued, something they didn’t want to lose, their alcohol or drug use could begin costing them something that actually mattered to them. That healthy connection could raise the bottom before they had to lose everything else in their life.

Amanda tells a story that captures this better than any definition ever could. When Amanda walked into an Enthusiastic Approach meeting, she knew she had found something different. It felt like home almost immediately. For the first time, she felt understood instead of judged, accepted instead of criticized, and surrounded by people who seemed to believe there might still be something worth fighting for in her. She left that meeting with hope she hadn’t felt in a long time.

The problem was that hope and willingness were not the same thing. Amanda wanted the friendships, the acceptance, and the sense of belonging she had found, but she also wanted to keep getting high. In her mind, there was no reason she couldn’t have both. She could come to meetings, show up at functions, spend time with the group, and still use whenever she wanted. Because everyone cared about her, she assumed there would always be another conversation, another warning, and another chance. The staff talked with her, encouraged her, and kept hoping she would decide she wanted what they had found. Other young people reached out to her because they genuinely cared about her, and everyone wanted to see her succeed.

Over time, though, it became obvious that Amanda wasn’t the only person being affected by her choices. The community that had become so important to her also had to be protected for the teenagers and young adults who were working hard to build a life in recovery. After every reasonable opportunity had been given, the staff made the difficult decision to ask Amanda to leave. It wasn’t done out of anger or frustration. It was done because continuing to ignore the problem wasn’t helping Amanda anymore, and it wasn’t fair to everyone else who was doing the work of recovery.

Amanda had lost things before. She had lost privileges, disappointed people she loved, and experienced consequences that many parents would have hoped would finally change her direction. None of those losses had been enough because alcohol and drugs still seemed worth whatever they cost. Being asked to leave was different because she wasn’t just losing another privilege. She was losing the first healthy place she had ever truly wanted to belong. She was losing friendships she cared about, people who believed in her, and a community where she had begun to imagine a different future for herself. For the first time, alcohol and drugs were costing her something healthy that she genuinely wanted to keep.

Years later, Amanda told us she was devastated. Looking back, she realized that moment marked the beginning of a completely different way of thinking. She couldn’t keep one foot in recovery and one foot in addiction forever. Eventually one of them was going to win. Amanda earned the opportunity to return, and over time she rebuilt trust the same way everyone rebuilds trust—with honesty, consistency, and time. Today she’s one of the staff members helping other teenagers and young adults discover the same hope she almost lost.

Amanda’s story reminded us exactly what Bob had been teaching for years: Recovery begins to look different when alcohol or drugs start costing someone something they genuinely don’t want to lose. Our job has never been to make life more painful. Our job has been to help recovery become valuable enough that it becomes worth protecting.

When Consequences Become Personal

Ashley had experienced plenty of consequences before. Like many young people struggling with alcohol and drugs, she had disappointed people she loved, lost privileges, and broken promises she genuinely intended to keep. None of those things changed her direction because, at the time, getting high still seemed worth the cost.

One night, Ashley had been drinking and never should have been behind the wheel. On the way home, she stopped at a Whataburger drive-through. The young woman working the window recognized Ashley from school. As she handed Ashley her food, she looked at her and casually said, “Wow, Ashley… drunk again.” There wasn’t a lecture. She wasn’t trying to embarrass Ashley or prove a point. She simply handed her the food and made an honest observation before moving on to the next customer.

Ashley drove away furious. She couldn’t believe someone had said that to her. When she got home, she was still angry. She kept replaying the comment in her mind while she drank some more before going to bed, convincing herself the girl had judged her without knowing anything about her. At the time, all Ashley could think about was how unfair the comment had been and how angry it made her feel.

Years later, Ashley told us she eventually realized the young woman hadn’t been judging her at all. She had simply said what she saw. Ashley had been drunk, and it wasn’t the first time. Somewhere along the way, alcohol had become part of how other people knew her. That realization stayed with her because it forced her to see something about herself she had spent a long time avoiding. She didn’t like the reputation she had created, and for the first time she began recognizing that alcohol was taking away more than she had been willing to admit.

Nothing dramatic happened that night. There wasn’t an arrest, a car wreck, or a trip to jail. Most people would probably have forgotten the conversation before they even got home. Ashley never did. Years later, she could still tell the story because that brief interaction became deeply personal to her. It wasn’t the biggest consequence she had ever experienced, but it became one of the most meaningful because it changed the way she saw herself.

Stories like Ashley’s have taught us to be careful about trying to predict what consequence will finally matter. We’ve watched teenagers and young adults continue using after arrests, broken relationships, lost jobs, and consequences that looked enormous from the outside. We’ve also watched someone begin questioning the direction of their life because of a simple conversation that most people would have overlooked. The consequence that changes someone’s life isn’t always the one everyone else expects. Sometimes, it’s the one that becomes deeply personal to the individual experiencing it.

One of the hardest things for parents to accept is that they can’t control what finally becomes meaningful to their teenager or young adult. They desperately want to know what to do next. Should they be stricter? More understanding? Should they take something away, let them stay home, pay for another treatment program, or refuse to help? They’re looking for the thing that will finally make recovery more attractive than continuing to use.

Over the years, we’ve realized that’s usually the wrong place to focus. Parents can’t control which consequence, conversation, or experience finally gets through. What they can control is the environment they create at home. They can build healthy boundaries, stop protecting their teenager or young adult from the natural consequences of substance use, and make recovery the most attractive path available. That’s where we’ve found parents have the greatest influence, and it’s where Kristen’s story begins.

A United Front

Kristen was seventeen, and by that point her parents honestly didn’t know what else to do. They had taken her to counselors, put her in treatment, pleaded with her, argued with her, and hoped that something would finally get through. Every time they thought things might be getting better, they eventually found themselves right back where they had started. Whether it was alcohol, drugs, or the behaviors that came with them, the same patterns kept repeating themselves.

Eventually, Kristen ended up in the intensive care unit. When she was discharged from the hospital, her parents came to pick her up, and she climbed into the car assuming they were taking her home. That had always been the pattern. There had been arguments, broken promises, tears, and consequences that never seemed to last, but eventually everything would drift back to what had become normal for their family.

As they drove, Kristen noticed they had passed the exit for home. She looked over at her dad and asked where they were going.

“We have an appointment,” he replied.

A few minutes later they pulled into an office building and walked inside. Waiting there were members of Kristen’s family along with a counselor. One by one, each person talked honestly about what her choices had been doing to the family. They spoke about the fear they lived with every day, the broken trust, the lies, the chaos, and the pain of watching someone they loved become someone they hardly recognized. No one was trying to embarrass her, and no one was attacking her. They were simply telling the truth about what her substance use and the decisions surrounding it had been costing everyone who loved her.

When everyone had finished speaking, the counselor looked at Kristen and asked if she had anything she wanted to say. Instead of taking the opportunity to listen or reflect, she responded with a sarcastic remark.

Her father looked at her and quietly said, “If you’re not willing to get help, then you can’t be part of this family.”

Those weren’t words spoken in anger. They were the words of a father who had finally reached the point where loving his daughter meant refusing to let unhealthy choices continue running their home.

Kristen was furious. She screamed at her parents, blamed them for everything, called them every name she could think of, and made it clear she believed this was all their fault. When there was nothing left to say, her parents stood up, walked out of the office, got into their car, and prepared to leave. As Kristen continued yelling in the parking lot, her father looked at her one last time and quietly said, “You made your choice.” Then they drove away.

Kristen hitchhiked back to the house believing that once she got there everything would settle down like it always had. Instead, she walked up to the front door and discovered the locks had been changed.

For years, Kristen believed that was the day her parents abandoned her. Years later, she told us she sees that day completely differently. Today she believes that decision helped save her life. It wasn’t because her parents finally discovered the perfect consequence or because they found exactly the right words to say. It was because, for the first time, Kristen could no longer divide them. She could no longer play one parent against the other or count on one of them to soften what the other had decided. They became a united front.

We’ve watched this happen in families over and over again. Both parents love their son or daughter and both desperately want to help, but they don’t always agree on what helping looks like. One parent wants to hold the line while the other wants to give one more chance. One thinks it’s time to take the car away while the other worries about how they’ll get to school or work. One says no more money while the other hands them twenty dollars because they say they need gas. Before long, the parents are arguing with each other while their son or daughter is learning exactly which parent to go to depending on what they want.

Young people figure this out pretty quickly. If Mom says no, ask Dad. If Dad sets a boundary, go back to Mom and explain why this time is different. Sometimes they know exactly what they’re doing, and sometimes they’re simply doing what young people do when they don’t like the answer they got. Either way, if parents aren’t standing together, there is always another place to go for a different answer.

That’s why we believe so strongly in parents becoming a united front. It doesn’t mean Mom and Dad have to agree about everything. We’ve never met two parents who do. It means they have those disagreements with each other, away from their son or daughter, decide together where the boundaries are, and then support each other in holding them. If one parent sets a boundary and the other parent keeps removing it, eventually the boundary doesn’t mean much at all.

We also don’t believe parents need to spend all of their time trying to come up with bigger and better consequences. Alcohol and drugs usually create plenty of consequences on their own. A young person may be failing school, losing a job, running out of money, damaging relationships, getting tickets, or losing the trust of the people around them. Parents love their children, so their natural instinct is to help. They call the school, pay the bill, replace what was lost, give back the car, make an excuse, or hand over money because they don’t want to see their son or daughter struggle. The problem is that sometimes, without realizing it, helping takes away the very consequence that might have eventually meant something.

The goal isn’t to make their life miserable or to keep piling on punishment until they finally give in. It’s to stop making it easier to continue making unhealthy choices.

Those walls don’t force a young person to change. Recovery, maturity, and healthier decisions are still choices that belong to them. But when parents stop rescuing, stop undermining each other, and stop providing an easier path around the boundaries they have set, they begin to raise the bottom. They aren’t creating the pain. They’re simply no longer removing the pain that naturally comes from unhealthy choices.

Years later, Kristen told us she no longer sees that day as the day her parents abandoned her. She sees it as the day they finally stopped allowing her choices to control their family. At seventeen, she was furious with them. Years later, she understood that they hadn’t stopped loving her. They had finally learned that loving her and making it easier for her to continue using were not the same thing.

Building Walls

Once parents stop trying to find the perfect consequence, the next question is usually, “What do we do instead?” Over the years, we’ve come to believe families need healthy walls.

A wall isn’t something parents build in the middle of an argument. It isn’t a punishment they invent because they’re frustrated, and it isn’t a threat they hope will scare their teenager or young adult into making better decisions. A healthy wall is something everyone understands before the problem happens. It simply says, “This is how we’re going to live in our family, and if you choose to do something different, this is what will happen.”

The walls themselves don’t have to be complicated. If your curfew is 11:00 and you come home at 1:00, you may lose the use of the car for the next two weeks. If you use your phone to buy or sell drugs, you may lose your smartphone and use a basic phone for thirty days. If you get a speeding ticket, you’re responsible for paying the ticket and the attorney’s fees before you drive again. If you choose not to go to school, Mom and Dad aren’t going to call and make up an excuse for you. You’ll have to deal with the school yourself.

The important part is that none of those decisions are being made in the middle of an emotional moment. Nobody is yelling, threatening, or trying to come up with something painful enough to force a teenager to change. Everyone already knows what the wall is and what happens if it gets pushed.

We believe that’s important because, whether parents like it or not, teenagers and young adults are going to make their own choices. Parents don’t get to choose whether their son or daughter comes home by curfew, buys drugs with a phone, skips school, or speeds in the family car. Those choices belong to the young person. What parents get to decide is what happens in their home and what privileges come with responsibility.

Bob Meehan used to say, “First-class citizens don’t get high.” We always understood that to mean first-class citizens also accept responsibility for their choices. Freedom and responsibility have always gone together. As teenagers become young adults, parents gradually give them more freedom, but that freedom also comes with more responsibility.

When a wall is pushed, parents aren’t taking away the right to choose. They’re respecting the choice that was already made. They aren’t reacting in anger or making up a punishment on the spot. They’re simply following through with what everyone understood from the beginning.

In Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, Bob also talked about what he called “shots.” He would tell parents to imagine they only had six "shots" in their gun, so they needed to choose them wisely. Most parents never needed all six. In fact, many only had one or two. The important thing was understanding the difference between a wall and a shot. A wall has a natural or logical consequence. A shot is a dealbreaker.

For example, a family might decide that continuing to use alcohol or drugs is a shot. They might say, “You cannot continue getting high and live in our home.” Another family might decide violence is a shot. If Billy is punching holes in the walls or hitting his sister, his parents may decide he cannot continue living in the home while that behavior continues. Some parents may have other things they feel just as strongly about. Every family is different, which is why parents have to decide what is serious enough to become a true dealbreaker.

That doesn’t mean a teenager or young adult has to become homeless. If continuing to get high is a shot, the choices might include going to treatment, living with the other parent, staying with grandparents, or another safe arrangement. The point isn’t to throw someone onto the street. The point is that continuing to get high while living in the home is no longer one of the choices.

Whenever parents tell us something is going to be a shot, we ask a pretty simple question: “Are you really going to do it?” If the answer is no, then it can’t be a shot. Parents have to think these things all the way through before they say them because a shot can’t be an empty threat.

We had a family once who decided that breaking the law would be a shot. If their daughter broke the law, she couldn’t continue living in their home. The counselor challenged them and asked, “Are you really going to make her leave the house for anything that breaks the law? What if it’s something stupid?” Once the parents thought about it, they realized that wasn’t really what they meant, so they changed it before they ever presented it to their daughter.

Not long after that appointment, their daughter got in trouble for trespassing. She and some friends had gone fishing somewhere they didn’t realize they weren’t allowed to be. Her mom called the counselor afterward and said, “I’m really glad we changed that. There’s no way I would want to kick my daughter out of the house for something that stupid. She was fishing. Do you know how many worse things she could have been doing?”

That’s exactly why Bob told parents they only had six shots and to choose them wisely. Something can be wrong without being a dealbreaker. A wall says, “If you choose this, here is what happens because of that choice.” A shot says, “This is a dealbreaker. You cannot choose this and continue living in our home.” Before parents call something a shot, they have to think it all the way through and be sure they’re actually willing to follow through.

Once a shot has been given, it can’t become a negotiation the minute it gets tested. If parents say something is absolutely nonnegotiable and then back down when their son or daughter pushes hard enough, everything else they say becomes harder to believe. We would much rather see parents have one carefully thought-out shot they’re prepared to follow through with than six empty threats they never intended to keep.

The same consistency matters with walls. Teenagers and young adults may not like them, and they’ll almost certainly test them, but they usually do better when they know where the lines are. If a rule changes depending on the mood in the house, one parent follows through while the other doesn’t, or every consequence turns into a negotiation, they notice. When alcohol or drugs enter the picture, those gaps become even more important because a young person will quickly learn which rules are firm and which ones aren't.

Walls and shots don’t make someone choose recovery. What they do is make it clear what parents are willing to live with, what they aren’t, and what happens when those lines are crossed. That’s where walls connect back to raising the bottom.

When Holding the Wall Feels Terrifying

Sheila was the mother of a sixteen-year-old boy named Drew. She and Drew’s father, Daryl, were divorced, but they were both involved in meetings with the Enthusiastic Approach program. From the beginning, it was pretty clear that Drew had very different relationships with his parents. Daryl had always been the strict one. Drew would tell us that he couldn’t get away with anything at his dad’s house. Sheila, on the other hand, had spent much of Drew’s teenage years trying to be more of a friend than a parent.

When Sheila talked about it with the counselor, she was pretty honest about why. Drew was already angry with his father because he thought Daryl was too strict. Sheila was terrified that if she started putting up walls too, Drew would feel like he had nowhere to go. More than anything, she was afraid her son would hate her.

The divorce had made things even more complicated. Before coming into the program, Sheila had made the mistake of talking poorly about Daryl to Drew, and Daryl had made the same mistake with Sheila. Without really intending to, they had given Drew a place to go whenever he didn’t like what one parent was telling him. If Dad was being too strict, Mom understood. If Mom did something he didn’t like, Dad understood. Drew had learned how to live in the space between them.

Eventually, Sheila and Daryl sat down together with a counselor. The counselor pointed out the dynamic that had developed and how much it was affecting Drew. Neither parent particularly enjoyed hearing it, but they both recognized there was truth in it and agreed that something had to change.

Afterward, Sheila asked if she could meet with the counselor without her ex-husband. During that appointment, she finally said what she was really afraid of. What if she stood up to Drew and it didn’t work? What if he hated her forever? What if she put up these walls and he self-destructed because now he believed he had nowhere to go?

The counselor didn’t promise her that Drew would respond well. In fact, he told her there was a pretty good chance he wouldn’t. Drew might get angry, blow up, or tell her he hated her. None of us could promise exactly what he would do. What we could tell her was that continuing to enable Drew because she was afraid of his reaction was making it easier for him to keep doing exactly what he was doing.

It took several appointments before Sheila was ready. Putting up a healthy wall can sound pretty simple when you’re sitting in a counseling office talking about somebody else’s family. It feels completely different when it’s your sixteen-year-old son and you’re terrified that holding that wall could cost you your relationship with him. Eventually, Sheila became willing to try. She went home and had the conversation with Drew, and he responded about the way everyone expected him to. He blew up, told her he hated her, told her she was a terrible mother, and pushed against the wall as hard as he could, hoping she would do what she had always done and back down.

Drew then called his father, and that phone call could have changed everything. In the past, Daryl might have used the opportunity to point out something Sheila had done wrong or allow Drew to believe that Dad was the one who really understood him. This time he didn’t. Instead, Daryl told his son, “Look, I know that was very hard for your mom, but she loves you very much, and we both agree that you need help.” For the first time, Drew couldn’t go to one parent to get around the other. It wasn’t because neither parent loved him or because they had abandoned him. It was because they had finally stopped undermining one another.

Drew became even angrier and ran away. He was gone for less than twenty-four hours, and during that time Sheila wanted desperately to call him. She was scared, and every instinct she had as his mother told her to go find him and fix what had happened. Daryl didn’t call him either. For once, both parents held the same wall. Eventually, Drew called his mother and asked for help. He came in, met with a counselor, and began treatment.

That didn’t mean Sheila suddenly stopped being afraid. Throughout Drew’s treatment, Sheila still had to work on the fear that had made it so hard for her to set boundaries in the first place. She had spent years believing that being a good mother meant keeping her son happy with her, and little by little she began to understand that those weren’t the same thing. Sometimes being Drew’s mother meant allowing him to be angry with her. Sometimes it meant saying no when saying yes would have been easier, and sometimes it meant trusting that their relationship could survive his anger instead of making decisions based on her fear of losing him.

Sheila had worried that standing up to Drew would destroy their relationship. Over time, she began to see that standing up to him was exactly what he had needed from her. Drew already had friends. What he needed from Sheila was his mom.

Get Off Your Asphalt

Bob Meehan used to tell a story that parents never forgot. He included it in Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

Imagine you’re teaching a young child to ride a bicycle. You run alongside them with one hand on the seat while they’re learning to balance. You encourage them, steady them when they wobble, and celebrate every little success. Eventually, though, there comes a moment when you have to let go. It’s the only way they ever learn to ride on their own.

Of course they’re probably going to fall. They might skin a knee, scrape an elbow, or come inside crying because they hit the driveway a little harder than they expected. No parent enjoys watching that happen. Every instinct says to protect them. If we could somehow throw ourselves onto the asphalt before they hit the ground, most of us probably would.

Bob would smile when he got to that part of the story because he knew exactly what parents were thinking. Then he’d say that’s exactly what many parents of teenagers and young adults are trying to do.

Every time life starts delivering a consequence, parents throw themselves onto the asphalt. Mom pays the rent before an eviction notice arrives. Dad replaces the money that disappeared. A parent calls the professor before the class is failed. Someone smooths things over with an employer, writes another check, makes another excuse to relatives, finds another place to stay, or rushes in to rescue a teenager or young adult from the latest crisis.

Sometimes that crisis is connected to alcohol or drugs. Sometimes it’s simply the result of poor decisions. The details may change, but the pattern stays the same. None of those choices come from a lack of love. They come from love mixed with fear. Watching someone you love struggle is incredibly painful, so parents naturally want to soften the landing.

The problem is that every time we throw ourselves onto the asphalt, we put ourselves between our teenager or young adult and the lesson life was trying to teach. Instead of learning that missing work can cost a job, teens learn Mom or Dad will fix it. Instead of learning that spending money recklessly creates financial problems, they learn someone else will cover the difference. Instead of allowing life to teach the lesson, parents keep stepping in and taking the consequence away.

Something else happens when parents keep stepping in. Eventually, their teenager or young adult starts blaming them for the consequences instead of recognizing that their own choices created them. Losing the apartment becomes Dad’s fault because he wouldn’t write another check. The court case becomes Mom’s fault because she wouldn’t pay the attorney. Being fired from work becomes Mom or Dad’s fault because they didn’t wake their teenager up.

Parents step in because they’re trying to protect the relationship. Ironically, they often end up putting the relationship directly in the line of fire. Substance use rarely gets blamed. The parent who finally stops protecting it usually does.

We’ve learned this principle reaches far beyond alcohol and drugs. Every teenager has to discover that choices have consequences. Every young adult has to learn that responsibility creates freedom and avoiding responsibility eventually limits it. Those lessons have always been part of growing up. Substance abuse simply raises the stakes. It makes parents more afraid, and that fear makes it much more tempting to step between their son or daughter and the natural consequences that could eventually help them grow.

Getting off the asphalt doesn’t mean becoming cold or uncaring. It doesn’t mean hoping life becomes harder than it has to be, and it certainly doesn’t mean abandoning your son or daughter. It means allowing reality to do the teaching whenever it safely can. Parents still love. They still encourage. They still help when help is genuinely helpful. They simply stop making themselves the thing standing between substance use and its natural consequences.

Looking back, that’s one of the biggest changes we made as a program. We stopped believing our job was to create consequences. Most of the time, the consequences were already there. We just needed to stop taking them away. That didn’t mean we wanted young people to hurt or that we wanted their lives to get worse. It meant we had to get off the asphalt and let them experience what happened because of the choices they were making. At the same time, we wanted to give them something healthy they didn’t want to lose.

That’s what Bob Meehan meant by raising the bottom

← Previous: What Is the Enthusiastic Approach?Next: Piss and Crap →

The Parent Game

One of our favorite exercises with teenagers and young adults is something we call The Parent Game. We ask the group, “What does your mom want?” and the answers are usually all over the place. “She wants me to quit vaping.” “Get a job.” “Clean my room.” “Stop hanging out with those friends.” “Be sober.” After we let them guess for a while, we tell them that what most moms really want is to feel appreciated.

It can be as simple as saying, “Thanks for driving me to group,” or “Dinner was really good. Can I help with the dishes?” Young people can get used to the rides, the food, the money, the worrying, and all the things parents do so regularly that they stop noticing how much is being done for them.

Meehan used to tell a story about one of the Enthusiastic Approach residential programs that made this point really well. In this example, the parents lived in the same city as the residential program, so they got to see their son each week when they came to the parent meeting. The young people’s meeting was held in the same building, and they would arrive in a van while their parents stood outside waiting for them. Those parents were watching closely. They had spent the whole week wondering how their son was doing and whether treatment was starting to make any difference.

In the first few weeks, the van would pull up and their son would get out complaining. “Mom, why did you send oatmeal cookies? I wanted chocolate chip. And you didn’t send enough for everybody.” Then he would turn to Dad, complain that his allowance was not enough, and ask for another twenty dollars. Mom would get her feelings hurt. Dad would get pissed because Mom was upset, but he would usually reach into his wallet and give him the money anyway.

The next week they would come back and some version of the same thing would happen again. His parents were standing there hoping to see some evidence that he was changing, while he was still mostly focused on what they had not done right for him.

As treatment went on, he started seeing things differently. By one of the final visits, he got off the van, walked over to his parents, hugged them, and thanked them for sending him to treatment. He told them about some of the things he had been working on and let them know that he was finally starting to get something out of being there.

His mom was thrilled. Without being asked, Dad reached into his wallet and happily gave his son fifty bucks.

Meehan liked to point out that the young man ended up getting more of what he wanted once he stopped making the whole interaction about what he wanted. More importantly, he had finally started paying attention to the people standing in front of him.

Once the group understands that part, we ask the next question: “What does Dad want?” We usually hear answers like respect, success, or money. Meehan’s answer was that Dad wants Mom to be happy. There was always some humor in the way he taught it. If Junior is making Mom miserable, Dad is probably feeling it too. If Junior takes a minute to appreciate her, life in the house tends to go a little better for everybody. Meehan used to joke that if Mom is happy, Dad is happy, and he might even get lucky.

Then we turn The Parent Game around and ask the parents what every teenager or young adult wants. Most parents guess freedom, money, a car, or to be left alone. Those are all things young people tell their parents, but what they usually want most is to feel seen and heard.

Being heard does not mean getting what they want. A parent can listen to the entire argument and still say no. The difference is that the young person feels like they actually got to have the conversation instead of feeling like the answer was decided before they ever opened their mouth.

By the time most families get to us, parents have usually had plenty of reasons to be cautious. After enough problems, it becomes easy to start answering before the young person is even finished talking. Before long, what was supposed to be a conversation turns into a lecture, and the young person hears about as much of it as Charlie Brown heard from his teacher: “Wah wah, wah wah.”

The Parent Game helps both sides pay better attention to the person in front of them. A lot of family conflict is not because somebody is trying to be difficult. It is because everybody is standing in the same room looking at the same situation from a completely different place.

The young person may be thinking, I’m doing better. I’m sober. I’m showing up. Why are they still on me? The parent may be thinking, After everything we have been through, how can you not understand why I’m still scared? Both people can be telling the truth from where they are standing and still completely miss each other.

That is where things can go sideways fast. We react to what we think is happening instead of slowing down long enough to understand what the other person may actually be experiencing. The young person sees control. The parent sees fear. The young person thinks nobody is listening. The parent thinks nobody appreciates what they have been through. Before long, everybody is arguing about the reaction instead of understanding what was underneath it.

The Parent Game gives us a simple way to start looking outside ourselves. What does Mom want? What does Dad want? What does the teenager or young adult want? Not just what are they asking for in that moment, but what is really happening underneath it?

That idea sits underneath one of the most useful tools Meehan ever taught us in Beyond the Yellow Brick Road: Our Children and Drugs:

P.I.S.S. — Properly Interpret Social Situations

Years ago, Bob Meehan was sitting with a group of teenagers talking through some situation one of them had gotten himself into. As Meehan was explaining where the young man had gone wrong, he said, “Dude, you’ve got to properly interpret the social situation.” One of the other boys started laughing. It was kind of a Beavis laugh. He had just heard something nobody else had caught yet. Meehan looked over at him and said, “Dude, what?” The boy was still laughing when he said, “Properly Interpret Social Situation. It spells Piss.”

Of course, once he said it, the whole group started laughing. Meehan thought it was funny too, and from then on, P.I.S.S. became part of the language of the Enthusiastic Approach. It stuck because it was funny, but also because everybody knew exactly what it meant: slow down, look around, and figure out what is actually happening before you make the situation worse.

Learning to P.I.S.S. Better

We worked with a young man we will call Max. He was seventeen and in outpatient treatment, and reading social situations did not come naturally to him. He had a hard time reading the room, especially when it came to girls, because his hormones tended to get there before his judgment did. Like a lot of teenagers and young adults, Max wanted to jump into romance before he had enough sobriety or enough tools to handle what came with it.

He started spending a lot of time with a young woman who was also very new to recovery. His peers talked to him about it and warned him over and over again, but Max was convinced they simply did not understand. “She is the most important person to me. I have never felt this way before. I have never had anything like this, and you are trying to take it away from me.” There were probably fifty conversations trying to get the two of them to slow down and stop spending so much time alone together.

Eventually Max went to an Enthusiastic Approach residential treatment program for about forty-five days. While he was gone, the young woman had some space too, and by the time Max came back, she had gone to residential treatment herself. When Max returned, he was starting to see things differently. He could recognize how he had put romance before his recovery and how that had contributed to some of the struggles that eventually led to residential treatment.

One day he pulled a counselor aside and said, “Hey, I don’t know if I’m right, but I think there are two people in the support group sneaking around and spending time with each other, and maybe they’re not ready.” A few months earlier, Max had been the guy everybody else was trying to talk to about almost the same thing. Now he recognized a familiar pattern and wanted to help another young man avoid some of the mistakes he had made.

What Max did not understand yet was that recognizing a pattern is not the same as knowing the whole story. Some of what he was seeing came from his own experience, and some of the other young man’s situation was different. The counselor already knew what was going on, but Max still needed to work through what he was seeing. He was nervous because the other young man had become a leader in the support group, and Max was not sure how he would respond to criticism from somebody newer.

He shared all of this with the counselor, and they laughed a little about the irony. With some coaching on how to share his experience without being accusatory, Max decided to go talk to him. The young man listened and said, “I’ve talked to my sponsor, and I’ve talked to her sponsor. I’m trying to wait until she gets past her inventory before I ask her on a date, but you’re probably right. I need to slow down so she can actually do the inventory, and I don’t mess this up.”

Max came back to the counselor excited and a little baffled. He had gone into the conversation thinking he understood exactly what was happening and found out there was more to it than he knew. A few months earlier, Max could not see any of this when he was the one in the middle of it. Now he could recognize a familiar pattern, realize that some of what he was seeing came from his own experience, question whether he knew the whole story, and actually talk to the person instead of deciding for him what was going on.

That is learning to P.I.S.S. better. Sometimes properly interpreting the social situation means noticing what is happening around you. Sometimes it means realizing that your own experience is affecting what you think you see, and sometimes it means understanding that you may not know nearly as much as you think you do.

C.R.A.P. — Communication Resolves All Problems

Years later, C.R.A.P. was added to the Life Skills Toolbox. C.R.A.P. stands for Communication Resolves All Problems, and Meehan used to joke, “Have you ever tried to crap without pissing first? It usually indicates a problem.” It is funny, but it also makes sense. If you have misread what is happening, you are probably not going to have a very productive conversation about it. Once you have some idea of what is really going on, then you can C.R.A.P. about it.

We worked with a young woman we will call Gina who was twenty years old. Her background had been pretty different from most of the people in the group, and before she got sober she had learned that there were certain words you did not use around people and certain things you did not just assume about them. When she came into treatment, she was around a bunch of young people who had not necessarily learned some of those same things.

When staff were not around, some of the language they used was pretty inappropriate, and Gina started getting her feelings hurt. Eventually she came to the counselors and said, “I don’t want to go to the hangout because I don’t feel like they respect me.”

We talked with her about what had been happening and helped her sort through it. We also pointed out that she was starting to use it as a reason not to hang out after group, and nobody she was upset with even knew there was a problem. We suggested that she talk directly to a couple of the people in the support group and tell them what was happening.

Gina was nervous because some of the people she needed to talk to were leaders in the group. In her mind, if they were leaders, they should already know better, and she was not sure how they were going to respond. It took her a couple of weeks before she was ready to have the first conversation.

When she finally did, the young person listened and said, “Oh my God, Gina, I had no idea. I don’t even think about that kind of stuff. I just say whatever comes to mind. I had no idea it would offend you, and I’m so sorry.”

That conversation went much better than Gina expected, which made the next one easier. Eventually she talked to everybody she needed to talk to, and most of them responded about the same way. They had not realized they were hurting her feelings. They wanted Gina around, and once they understood what was happening, they changed the way they spoke around her.

Gina had spent a lot of time deciding what their behavior meant, and they had spent exactly zero time thinking about how it was affecting her because they did not know. Once they finally talked about it, everybody understood a little more than they did before. That is the C.R.A.P. part. Gina could not expect them to understand what was happening for her if she never actually told them.

When Nobody Knows What the Other Person Means

We worked with a fifteen-year-old girl we will call Charlotte who was newly sober. Her family had gotten very disconnected, so they decided to start a new tradition where one night a week everybody would sit down and have dinner together.

Charlotte’s mom, Barb, worked hard to make it happen. She was already trying to pick up the pieces after finding out her daughter had a drug problem, and Charlotte’s dad, Henry, saw how much effort she was putting into the family.

The first dinner went pretty well. Charlotte sat with everybody, ate dinner, and then got a phone call. She excused herself from the table and left her plate sitting there. Henry noticed, but he did not say anything. The next week the same thing happened, and then it happened again.

After about a month, Henry was pretty irritated. He was not expecting Charlotte to wash the plate or even put it in the dishwasher. He just wanted her to take it to the sink, but the problem was that he had never actually told her that.

In Henry’s mind, Charlotte should have known. He watched Barb work hard to make these dinners happen, and every time Charlotte left that plate sitting there, it started to feel like she did not appreciate any of it.

Charlotte had no idea this was happening. She could tell something was off with her dad, so she talked to her sponsor about it. They went through all the things she thought he might be mad about. Had she been late? Had she screwed something up at school? Had she been rude to somebody? None of it really fit.

Finally Charlotte went to him and said, “Dad, I feel like you’re mad at me and I don’t know why. I talked to my sponsor because I was starting to feel a little crazy, and I figured instead of guessing, I’d just ask.”

Henry was surprised she had even noticed because he thought he had been hiding it pretty well. Then he told her, “You’re disrespectful. Your mom works really hard to make these dinners happen, and you can’t even take your dish to the sink.”

Charlotte just looked at him because she had never once thought about the plate. She tried to keep a straight face because she did not want to make him madder, but Henry caught the look on her face and realized he had spent a month getting angry over something he had never told her was important to him. He started laughing, which gave Charlotte permission to laugh too, and they finally talked about what had actually been going on.

Charlotte told him she had been making an effort to come to the dinners because she wanted a relationship with her family. Hanging out at home was not really what she would have chosen to do, but she knew it was important and she was trying. Henry told her what he had been seeing. He saw Barb working hard to hold the family together, and every plate left on the table felt like Charlotte was missing all of it.

Later, Henry told Barb what had happened, and her reaction made the whole thing even funnier. She told him she had not even noticed that Charlotte was leaving her plate on the table. Henry had spent a month getting irritated because he thought he was protecting Barb, and Barb had no idea there was even a problem.

For a month, Charlotte and Henry were both looking at the same situation and telling themselves completely different stories about what it meant. Charlotte thought her dad was upset about something she could not identify. Henry thought Charlotte was intentionally being disrespectful. Neither of them actually understood what was happening until they talked about it.

That is exactly why P.I.S.S. and C.R.A.P. work so well together. We properly interpret the situation as best we can, then we communicate about it instead of assuming we already know the whole story.

The same lesson applies to parents navigating recovery.

Parents Have to P.I.S.S. Too

P.I.S.S. is not just for teenagers and young adults. Parents have to properly interpret the social situation too.

A big part of what we have been trying to do in the earlier chapters is help parents understand where their son or daughter actually is in early recovery. Parents may be looking at a messy room, bad grades, a lack of motivation, or what looks like irresponsibility and thinking, Why are we not fixing this yet? Meanwhile, the young person may be using most of what they have just trying to stay sober, show up, tolerate feelings, and learn how to live differently.

When we misunderstand the situation, it becomes extremely easy to respond to the wrong problem. Once a young person has stopped using drugs, parents usually have a pretty clear picture of what they think getting better should look like. They think, Great, now that they’re off drugs, we want them to get a job, clean their room, catch up in school, help around the house, get serious about a sport, and start acting responsible again.

None of those things are bad goals, but this is where parents can accidentally get ahead of the process. The accurate social situation is that early in recovery, the young person is giving up almost all of the things they have been using to make themselves feel okay. That obviously includes drugs and alcohol, but it can also include pornography, dishonesty, manipulation, unhealthy relationships, attention seeking, creating chaos, or really anything else they have been leaning on to avoid dealing with themselves. Once those things start getting stripped away, there is a huge void left over.

On top of that, if they are in an Enthusiastic Approach program, their entire friend group has changed. This means they have to relearn social norms that are often the opposite of the social norms they had with their getting-high friends. The things that were “cool” with their previous friend group no longer get a positive reaction from their new friends in recovery.

Suddenly, there is outpatient, support group meetings, and functions to show up for, and all of it is new. School is still there, too. They have to figure out what to say when old friends want to hang out, or when a teacher or coach asks why their schedule has changed. If they begin reading the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous with a sponsor, they may come across the idea that the attitudes and emotions they have lived with can change, too. That is a lot to take in. It takes time, and it is far more complicated than simply “stop using drugs.”

We talk about this as the difference between watch time and calendar time. Parents, having been aware of and living in the chaos for a long time, want to see results in minutes, hours, and days. They see recovery as a few changes that need to be made to get “back on track.” Young people in recovery, usually only just becoming aware of the massive undertaking they have started, tend to change over weeks, months, and years.

We have found that when parents give young people enough time and space to make recovery the priority, while still keeping reasonable boundaries around them, a lot of the other things begin to come back in time. Motivation, responsibility, school, work, and family relationships usually have a much better chance once there is actually something solid underneath them.

That is why parents have to P.I.S.S. too. If they think the main problem is the bedroom, the grades, or the job, we are going to respond very differently than if we understand where the young person is actually starting.

This difference between what parents see and what young people see comes up all the time in recovery. A young person can be doing exactly what we want them doing and still completely miss what the situation looks like from Mom and Dad’s side. At the same time, parents can get so focused on the one thing that is bothering them that they miss all the things their son or daughter is actually doing right.

Tommie’s story is a good example.

Tommie had spent most of the weekend with people from the support group. He had been having fun, staying sober, and doing exactly what we wanted him doing, but he had barely communicated with his parents. From Tommie’s perspective, everything was fine. He was safe, he was with good people, and he figured he would see Mom and Dad Monday night at the meeting anyway, so there was not much reason to check in.

His parents were looking at the weekend very differently. They did not know most of the people Tommie had been with, they had not heard much from him, and they were trying to trust a situation that still felt pretty new. They were hoping that when they saw him Monday night, maybe they would get some acknowledgment that they had been pretty cool about the whole thing.

After the meeting, a bunch of the young people were going to Chipotle and then hanging out. Tommie realized he did not have any money, saw Mom and Dad across the room, and walked over thinking, I’m hungry. I need twenty bucks. He walked up and said, “Hey, can I have twenty dollars for Chipotle?”

There was no hello, no hug, no acknowledgment that he had barely checked in, and no, “Thanks for letting me hang out all weekend.” Mom snapped and said, “Absolutely not,” and before long the conversation had turned into a lecture about communication and respect and ended with Tommie being told he was going home.

From Tommie’s perspective, this made absolutely no sense. He had spent the entire weekend doing something positive, and now he was getting punished for asking for food, so he argued back right there in the middle of the meeting space and everybody ended up uncomfortable.

Tommie was looking at the weekend and thinking, I stayed sober. I was with good people. I did what I was supposed to do. His parents were looking at the same weekend thinking, You barely talked to us.

The whole thing could have gone very differently if either side had properly interpreted the social situation. Tommie needed to understand that Mom and Dad had spent the weekend worrying and taking a pretty big leap of faith. A hug, a thank-you, and some acknowledgment probably would have changed the entire conversation.

His parents also had a chance to slow things down, pull Tommie aside, explain that the lack of communication was not okay, and make it clear that if he wanted the freedom to keep spending time with the support group, he also had to communicate. Then Tommie still could have gone to Chipotle, stayed connected to positive peers, and had a chance to do better next time.

Instead, nobody P.I.S.S.ed very well, nobody C.R.A.P.ped very well, and everybody ended up pissed.

When Recovery Starts to Mean Freedom

Young people tend to respond better when recovery starts to mean more freedom, not less. That does not mean throwing out the rules or pretending trust comes back overnight. It means making the direction clear: when you communicate, show up, stay sober, follow through, and stay connected to healthy people, life starts to open up. When you are dishonest, disappear, break commitments, or return to old behavior, life gets smaller.

That is vastly different from reacting to every mistake by taking away the exact things that are helping recovery. The Monday night situation is a good example. Tommie absolutely needed to communicate better, and his parents had every right to be frustrated, but sending him home from the support group hangout increased everyone’s irritation while also cutting him off from the very people he needed to be around.

Sometimes the better move is to address the behavior and still protect the recovery. A parent can say, “You need to communicate with us. You cannot disappear all weekend and then walk up asking for money like nothing happened. If you want this kind of freedom, we need to hear from you,” and then give them the chance to do it differently.

Over time, young people start connecting those dots. Recovery is not just meetings and not using drugs. It becomes the reason they get trusted with more, get to go more places, spend more time with good people, and start getting pieces of their life back.

That is a much better lesson than making recovery feel like one more thing that gets taken away every time they mess up.

When the Past Gets in the Way

One of the hardest things for parents in recovery is that they are rarely reacting only to what happened today. They are reacting to everything that happened in the past too. After enough lies, relapses, broken promises, and treatment attempts, fear can start filling in the blanks before they even know what is happening.

Cory was a good example. He was seventeen and had already been through several treatment programs. He could do pretty well for a while, but relapse had become part of the pattern, and when it happened he usually hid it until somebody caught him. By the time his family came to an Enthusiastic Approach program, his parents had been through that cycle enough times that they were always waiting for the next dreadful thing.

Eventually Cory started taking recovery more seriously, but after a while he relapsed. The next day he came into group and told everyone what had happened. Nobody had caught him or confronted him. He came in and told the truth on his own.

We told him he needed to tell his parents. The counselor planned to give them a heads-up first because we knew how hard the news was going to hit, but Cory did not wait. He picked up the phone and called them himself.

His parents reacted from all the history they had with him. Mom got upset, Dad got angry, and Cory came back into group feeling pretty defeated. From their side, the reaction made sense. They had heard promises, been lied to, and watched things fall apart before. In that moment, though, all of that history made it hard for them to see that Cory had actually handled this relapse differently.

Later, both parents talked with their sponsors and were able to look at the situation a little differently. The relapse was still a problem, but Cory had also done something important—he had told the truth without getting caught first. They went back to him and told him they were still upset about the relapse, but they also owned their part in how they had reacted. They apologized and told him they were proud of him for being honest.

That did not make the relapse okay. It just meant they were learning to notice progress even when the whole situation was not perfect. That was important because we want young people to learn that honesty is worth practicing, even when the truth is uncomfortable. If a young person finally starts doing something differently and we are too focused on what went wrong to notice it, we can accidentally make it harder for them to do the right thing the next time.

This is where the past can get in the way. Parents can get so used to looking for the lie, the relapse, or the next problem that they start reacting to the whole history instead of the moment in front of us. Part of P.I.S.S. for parents is learning to recognize when that is happening. Sometimes properly interpreting the social situation means asking ourselves whether we are responding to what happened today or to everything we are afraid is about to happen again.

We are going to talk much more about this when we get into parent recovery, because learning how to respond to progress without ignoring the problem is a big part of recovery for parents too.

Assume Noble Intent

Another thing we talk about a lot with families is assuming noble intent. That does not mean being naive or ignoring behavior that needs to be addressed. It means not automatically filling in every blank with the worst possible explanation.

Cory’s parents had a tough time with that in the beginning, especially when it came to the support group. They did not know these teenagers and young adults, and they were not convinced that bringing more people with drug or alcohol problems into Cory’s life was necessarily a good thing.

That started to change as they spent more time around the group. Instead of assuming the other young people were a bad influence and avoiding them, they chose to encourage Cory to invite them over. They watched young people come into their home, talk with them, help clean up, show respect, and actually enjoy being around adults. The more they saw, the less they had to guess.

Before long, they were hosting Tuesday night hangouts at their house. Every week they opened the door, fed whoever showed up, and let the house fill up with young people in recovery. They kept doing it for two years, all the way until Cory graduated.

That is really what assuming noble intent is about. You can still ask questions, pay attention, and use good judgment without deciding ahead of time that something is probably going to go wrong.

Assuming noble intent keeps us from immediately going to the worst possible explanation, but it does not mean we automatically understand what is happening. Sometimes we can stop assuming the worst and still completely miss where the other person is coming from.

If we really want to meet somebody where they are, we have to understand what is underneath the behavior. That is where knowing their address becomes important.

Knowing the Address

In Chapter 2, we shared one of our favorite sayings: “To meet somebody where they’re at, you have to know their address.” Assuming noble intent helps us pause before deciding the worst about somebody’s behavior, but it does not mean we know what is going on with them. If we want to help, we have to listen long enough to understand where they are coming from and what might be underneath what we are seeing.

Chance was twenty-two and had a pretty significant history of lying. He lied a lot, and honestly, he was not even good at it. People could usually tell, including his mother. A lot of the lies involved other people too. He would also hold onto other people’s lies because he thought it made people like him, but in a sobriety program that can cause a lot of harm.

By the time a new counselor started working with him, most of the staff were pretty frustrated. Chance had done dishonesty lists over and over again. Everybody had talked to him about lying, trust, holding secrets, and how his behavior affected other people, but none of it seemed to be changing much.

The new counselor decided to start somewhere else and asked Chance to tell his life story. As Chance talked, it was obvious when he exaggerated and when he lied, but it was also obvious how sad he was. He had been through a lot when he was younger, and somewhere in the middle of telling his story, he explained when the lying started without really meaning to.

He said he never felt like he fit in and wanted the other young people at school to think he was cool. Since he did not feel cool, he started telling them he had done things he had never actually done because he thought they would like him more.

The next day Chance came in ready to do another dishonesty list, but the counselor stopped him and said, “Dude, do you know what I thought your address was before we talked yesterday?” Chance figured it was going to be something about being a liar, holding secrets, or making it harder for other people to get sober.

The counselor said, “Yeah, maybe. But do you know what I think your address is now?” Chance said no, and the counselor told him, “When I heard your story yesterday, what I heard was how sad you are and how badly you want people to like and accept you. Somewhere along the way you started lying because you thought it would help you fit in, and now you have gotten so lost in the lies that you do not even know who you are anymore.”

Chance looked up with tears in his eyes and said, “How did you know?” Then he immediately tried to suck the tears back in. The counselor looked at him and said, “I’ll add one more thing to your address. You have a tough time letting yourself feel anything in front of other people.”

They both laughed, and then Chance had a really good cry. The lying was still an issue and nobody was excusing it, but for the first time we understood a little more about what the lying was doing for him.

Putting It Together

The longer people stay involved in recovery, the better they usually get at all of this. Young people start reading the room better, noticing how their behavior affects other people, and realizing that not every no means somebody is trying to control them. Parents start getting better at separating what is happening today from everything that happened in the past.

None of us do this perfectly. We can completely misread a situation, especially when our own feelings get involved. We can decide what somebody meant before we ask, react to something from the past that is not actually happening now, or get so focused on being right that we miss the person standing in front of us.

That is why these tools work so well together. P.I.S.S. helps us slow down and look at what is actually happening. C.R.A.P. helps us talk about it. Assuming noble intent gives us a little room not to jump to the worst conclusion, and knowing somebody’s address helps us respond to where they actually are instead of where we think they should be.

A lot of recovery is learning how to live differently with other people. We get better at reading the room, asking instead of assuming, owning our part, and going back to a conversation when we get it wrong.

In every one of those situations, people were reacting to what they thought was happening before they fully understood what was actually going on. Recovery gives us a chance to slow down, pay attention to the person in front of us, and talk to each other before we decide we already know the whole story.

And if all else fails, remember Meehan’s advice: you have to P.I.S.S. before you C.R.A.P.

← Previous: Raising the Bottom Chapter Five coming soon

When many young people first enter recovery, they often wonder: "Why do I have to go to meetings?" The honest answer is that recovery meetings provide connection, accountability, community, and hope.

Programs like The Crossroads Program, The Insight Program, The Cornerstone Program, The Pathway Program, and The FullCircle Program have long recognized that recovery meetings are one of the most effective tools for helping adolescents and transition-aged youth build lasting recovery.

Recovery is not meant to be done alone

Many young people entering recovery feel isolated, misunderstood, or disconnected. Recovery meetings help break through that isolation by connecting them with others who understand exactly what they're going through.

The Enthusiastic Approach teaches that the opposite of addiction is connection.

Meetings help young people connect with recovery peers, mentors, sponsors, families, trusted adults, and positive role models.

The second step

The second step of all Enthusiastic Approach programs states: "We found it necessary to Stick With Winners in order to grow." Recovery meetings provide an opportunity to do exactly that — and to build the healthy friendships, communication skills, confidence, accountability, and community connection that make up Recovery Capital.

Meetings are only part of the solution

A common misconception is that meetings alone create recovery. Meetings matter, but recovery is built through connection, community, and shared experiences. That's why the Enthusiastic Approach places such a strong emphasis on sober social activities.

Building recovery through fun

Every Friday and Saturday night, young people have opportunities to participate in sober social activities — sumo wrestling, crab soccer, dances, sober concerts, campouts, service projects, and more. For many adolescents, substance use had become connected to socializing, excitement, and belonging. These activities help them discover that connection, laughter, and friendship are still possible without alcohol or drugs.

The real purpose of recovery meetings

Recovery meetings help young people move from Enthusiastic Sobriety to Enthusiastic Recovery and ultimately to Enthusiastic Living — because recovery is not simply about staying sober. Recovery is about learning how to live.

One of the most important concepts in modern recovery science is Recovery Capital — the internal and external resources that help individuals initiate, maintain, and strengthen recovery over time.

For adolescents and young adults, recovery is about more than stopping substance use. It involves building the relationships, skills, opportunities, and supports necessary to create a meaningful life.

The four kinds of Recovery Capital

Social

Healthy friendships, recovery peers, family support, and trusted mentors.

Human

Education, job skills, emotional regulation, self-confidence, and problem-solving abilities.

Community

Recovery support services, recovery communities and meetings, positive recreation, and service opportunities.

Physical

Housing stability, transportation, healthcare access, and financial stability.

Recovery is not the absence of substance use. It's the presence of healthy supports, meaningful opportunities, and strong relationships.

Why it matters for young people

Adolescents and transition-aged youth are still developing emotionally, socially, academically, and professionally. Many have experienced disruptions in family relationships, peer networks, education, employment, self-esteem, and community involvement. Recovery Capital helps rebuild these areas and provides a foundation for future success.

The Enthusiastic Approach and Recovery Capital

The Enthusiastic Approach has long focused on helping young people build Recovery Capital through connection, accountability, leadership, service, and family involvement. Recovery support services — peer mentoring, family education, leadership development, sober social activities, recovery coaching, and alumni involvement — help young people keep building it long after formal treatment ends.

The future of recovery

As recovery science evolves, it's increasingly clear that lasting recovery depends not only on abstinence but on relationships, opportunities, purpose, community, and hope. Recovery Capital provides the foundation. The Enthusiastic Approach provides the pathway. Together, they help young people build lives worth protecting.

When we showed up at Crossroads, we were hanging on by a thread as a family. Our son was completely out of control and in many ways ruling our lives like a terrorist. Multiple suspensions from school, police showing up to inform us our son had been narcaned and status unknown on the way to the hospital, a trip to the psych ward, an outpatient and inpatient program none of which slowed down the inevitable trainwreck quickly approaching. My wife and I were terrified, which made it very hard to be on the same page. Our son used our fear to divide and conquer. He'd get us fighting about how to handle him, so he could go get high. He was in many ways running the house, and as we were reacting and fighting about the consequences for his behaviors, our daughter in many ways was left to fend for herself. We didn't have enough in our tank to handle reacting to our son much less be there for our daughter or our marriage.

I truly think we all, including our son battling the DISEASE of addiction, wanted peace in our lives, but we were all out of ideas for how to find it. When we found Crossroads, I was very angry, scared for my son's life, embarrassed at my failures as a parent, filled with resentment and more. Oddly, though, our son, who hated everything at the time, wanted to join CR after our first meeting. I didn't understand it at the time, but what I've come to realize, is he FINALLY felt like he was with people who understood what he was going through. And those people immediately accepted and welcomed him with love, regardless of how little he thought of himself.

But.....I was still pissed off at him. We were lonely. Thankfully, very few of our family and friends truly understood what we were going through. They knew it was a mess, but they, thankfully, didn't understand how unmanageable our lives were. And worse, they often had opinions about what we should do differently. How could we let a 16-year-old be so out of control? They didn't understand. Nobody understood the hell we were living. Until we went to our first weekly parents' meeting. There were parents from all walks of life, and they started sharing about what was happening in their families. It was a hallelujah moment. Finally, people who understand what we've been going through. We immediately felt a sense of community even if it was a community we preferred not to be a part of. This was the beginning of something amazing!

Our son went on his journey, and my wife and I began ours. This program taught us how to get on the same page, set boundaries with our son and daughter, own our part in all of this, and let go of trying to control our son. He was being controlled by a disease that is uncontrollable by anyone other than him. We can't control him or make him decide to get sober, but we can control our part in all of this. By each of us owning our own journey and part we have changed for the better tremendously. My wife and I have a strong marriage, we have a great relationship with our daughter, and our son. Our son has grown so much over the last 2.5 years. He hated himself and the world when we arrived at CR, and today, his energy is as calm and light as it has ever been. He's still an asshole teenager, but he is getting more comfortable in his own skin every day. It hasn't been an easy road since finding CR for him or us. He's had more than a few setbacks, but when we zoom out and reflect on where he was, it's a miracle. And the same applies to our family.

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I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, and for the first seven years of my life, my family felt relatively normal. I was a daughter. A sister. A little girl who believed the people she loved would always be there.

Then, in late August, my dad was hit and killed by a distracted driver. In a single moment, the world I understood disappeared. I did not know how to grieve. I did not know how to explain the fear, loneliness, and abandonment I carried after losing him. I only knew that something inside of me hurt, and that I desperately wanted that hurt to stop. I felt scared, alone, and different from everyone around me. More than anything, I felt as though I no longer belonged anywhere.

By the time I was 11 years old, I had found something that seemed to make those feelings disappear. Drugs and alcohol. For the first time since losing my dad, I did not feel afraid. I could talk to people, I felt accepted, I felt confident, I felt like I belonged somewhere. What I could not understand at 11 years old was that the thing I believed was saving me would slowly begin taking everything from me.

From ages 11 to 14, my life became a revolving door of hospitals and treatment centers, including two residential treatment programs. Each time, I would learn a little while I was there, but eventually I would be sent home to the same life without the tools, the community, or the support system I needed to stay sober.

After leaving my last residential treatment center, I found myself sitting on a reservoir beach in Colorado. I was exhausted. I called a friend and finally said the words I had been terrified to say, ‘I need help. I don’t know how to stop.’ She told me that on Monday, she would pick me up and take me somewhere called FullCircle. Before then, she told me to call one of its directors. I still cannot completely explain what happened during that phone call. For years, I had learned how to hide, protect myself, shut people out, pretend I was not afraid.

But when Sam Wilson answered, every wall I had built around myself collapsed. I sobbed. And for once, I let someone see how scared I actually was. That Monday, at six o’clock, my friend and her dad picked me up. We drove about 15 minutes to the FullCircle shop. I walked through those doors expecting another program. Instead, I walked into bright lights, loud music, laughter, and a room full of teenagers and young adults who looked genuinely happy to be alive. I remember thinking, ‘there is absolutely no way these people are sober.’ They did not look miserable.

They did not look like the people I had come to associate with treatment. They looked free. Before I had much time to process what I was seeing, a group of young women came up to me, hugged me, welcomed me, and told me they loved me. Those three words changed something inside of me. For so long I had been searching for belonging in places that were slowly destroying me. Then I walked into this strange little shop filled with people I had never met, and for the first time in years, when someone said, ‘I love you,’ I believed them.

On May 29th, 2022, I attended my first newcomers meeting. I have been sober ever since. FullCircle taught me something I had spent years believing was impossible. I never had to do this alone again. Recovery did not only begin changing my life, it began healing my family.

My mother, who had endured years of fear and heartbreak because of my addiction, began meeting with counselors who helped her understand what I was going through, and how our family could begin healing together. I will never forget the look on her face when I received my 30-day fist. And I will never forget watching that same face as the days became months, and the months became years.

Slowly, the relationships I thought I had destroyed beyond repair began coming back. I became a daughter again, a sister again, someone my family could trust again. But recovery gave me something even greater than the life I had lost. It gave me a life I had never imagined was possible.

Eventually, I joined bar staff and then served on steering for more than a year. I began sponsoring younger girls and walking beside them through the same fear, loneliness, and uncertainty that once consumed me. Somewhere along the way, the frightened girl who walked into FullCircle believing she belonged nowhere had become someone other people could turn to when they felt the same way.

I had found my purpose. In the summer of 2024, I graduated from the program. I walked across that stage and looked into the crowd at the family I once believed I had lost forever. They were there. They were cheering for me. And we were standing inside the shop that had become my second home.

Afterward, my brother and I walked toward the car. He was the kind of teenage boy who rarely showed emotion, but that day he looked at me and said, ‘I never have to worry about you again. I never have to worry that you won’t be home for Christmas or that you won’t come home at all.’ In that moment, I understood that my addiction had never belonged only to me. My family had been surviving it too, and now, for the first time, they had hope.

Graduating from FullCircle did not mean graduating from recovery. I continued working the Twelve Steps and became involved in CA and AA. I continued sponsoring women. I returned to FullCircle for major functions and helped wherever I could. I became involved in conventions, spoke on behalf of the program, helped create meetings for young women so they could have access to the same gift of recovery that had been given to me.

And while all of that was happening, something extraordinary occurred. My life kept getting bigger. I graduated high school. I began college while still in high school. I earned scholarship opportunities that allowed me to travel and experience a world I never would have known existed if I had continued using. I went from needing people to save a seat for me in a newcomers meeting, to saving seats for the next girl walking through the door. I went from believing I had no future, to building one. Today, I am pursuing my education in psychology with the goal of earning my PhD and specializing in adolescent psychology and addiction studies.

I have sponsored dozens of women. I have become a mentor, a godmother, a dependable daughter, a present sister, a friend, a leader. And, most importantly, I have become someone my younger self desperately needed.

When I was eleven, I turned to drugs and alcohol because I thought they filled the hole inside of me. I believed they gave me confidence. Friends. A place to belong. I know differently today. Belonging was never found in what I was using. It was found in people. In service. In recovery. In walking into a room terrified and hearing strangers say, “We love you,” until eventually I learned to believe them. And then, somewhere along the way, I learned to love myself enough to stay.

FullCircle did not simply help me stop using drugs and alcohol. It gave my mother her daughter back. It gave my brother his sister back. It gave my family hope back. But it gave me something even more profound. It gave me a purpose for being alive.

Today, my success is not measured only by the years I have remained sober. It is measured by what I have been able to do with those years. In the women I have sponsored. The young people I have welcomed through the doors. The meetings I have helped create. The education I am pursuing. The family relationships I once believed were gone forever. The people who can call me today and know that I will answer.

And every time a frightened young person walks into a meeting believing that nobody could possibly understand them, I get to be part of the same miracle that happened to me. I get to look at them and say the words that once changed my life. ‘I love you. You belong here. And you never have to do this alone again.’ On May 29th, 2022, I thought I was walking through the doors of FullCircle because I needed help surviving. I had no idea I was walking through the doors of the rest of my life.

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I joined an enthusiastic sobriety program, The Insight Program at 17 very lost. I think I had been high almost every day for 3 years when I had walked into the program. I had been bullied through the entirety of middle school and high school and I blamed my use on that. It would help me to feel confident, it eventually made me really popular in school, and I could even make friends that shared the same interest. The consequences of being grounded, a trip to the ICU, and car accident didn’t matter because I felt good in my own skin.

So walking into my first appointment it felt like my parents were trying to take away the one thing that fixed me. The staff didn’t feel that way though- they had given up getting high too. My first interaction with my IOP counselor I remember vividly, he said “sup, what’s your name”, which was a stark difference on how I thought that interaction would go. I had to be open minded he sounded like me. I walk into my appointment - I don’t remember much of that.

What I do remember is walking into the shop, where I found other teenagers. There was a kid playing guitar, a girl painting, and people coming up to talk to me. They all went and got food together too, I could tell they were not fighting to leave rehab, so it intrigued me even more.

Later I ended up joining IOP and my second weekend in everyone was taking a big trip to the beach. I had people fighting to get me in their car, I had never felt that way before. I drove down with 4 other girls and they looked out for me and made me feel included. I didn’t feel like the new girl.

We got to the beach and I floated in the water just cried. It was the first time I had felt hope. I went on that trip planning to get drunk throughout the program and check a box and left willing to rethink my plan. I stayed sober after that.

Outpatient gave me such a great opportunity to get close with people, it brought me around the shop and pushed me to go hang out afterwards. It gave me a chance to connect, even though it was scary it became comfortable really fast. I wasn’t the odd one out anymore I really found a place where I fit.

My parents and I got closer too. I didn’t feel like they were out to get me anymore. I finally felt heard. I ended up moving out when I turned 18 to go live with other sober girls from the program. I had graduated high school after I finished OP and got a job as a cashier. I became a functioning member of society, which had felt impossible the year before. I graduated with 2 years sober and have been sober ever since.

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Connection is the opposite of addiction.

From sobriety, to recovery, to a life worth living.

Enthusiastic Recovery

Enthusiastic Living

Stick with winners in order to grow.

Every Friday and Saturday night, something's happening.

Something many have never experienced before: having fun while sober.

Recovery Capital is what makes it stick.

People in your corner

Skills that carry you

A place to belong

A stable foundation

Good information, worth sharing.

Why Recovery Meetings Matter for Adolescents and Young Adults

Why Recovery Capital Matters for Adolescents and Transition-Aged Youth

Raising The Bottom

Raising The Bottom

Why Does My Kid Keep Getting High?

What Is the Enthusiastic Approach?

Raising the Bottom

Piss and Crap

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Stories.

Hanging on by a thread

The rest of my life

The first time I felt hope

One approach, a national network.

The Crossroads Program

Crossroads Support Group

The Insight Program

The Cornerstone Program

The Pathway Program

The FullCircle Program

Recovery is about learning how to live.

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Why Does My Kid Keep Getting High?

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Bob Meehan

Building the Bridge

More Than Sobriety