Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction - Keep Coming Back: A Hollywood Director Finds Art, And Healing Through His Daughter’s Recovery, with Mark Rosman

Keep Coming Back: A Hollywood Director Finds Art, And Healing Through His Daughter’s Recovery, with Mark Rosman

08/15/24 • 47 min

Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

After years of producing feature films and TV shows about family life like Cinderella Story, Perfect Man, Lizzy McGuire, and many others, Mark Rosman was forced to face the reality of problems in his own family.

Mark and his wife spent some time in denial about their daughter's substance use. Even after two trips to the emergency room, they decided against professional advice to get her into treatment immediately. They chalked everything up to ordinary teen rebellion and experimentation, sending her to a traditional boarding school instead. Less than one month later, she was in the emergency room again after downing a bottle of Listerine. Thus began the roller coaster we're all familiar with: periods of hope and sobriety, followed by lapses into chaos and returns to use.

Like many parents, Mark instinctively rejected the notion of "self care", or any form of detachment from his daughter's behavior and state of mind at any given time. Finally, in what seemed like his 100th parent group meeting, he admitted to himself (and everyone else there) the utter hopelessness he was feeling. This was the beginning of the entire family's recovery.

In this episode, Mark talks about how this realization helped him to learn to set boundaries and how – now five years into his daughter's recovery – he’s making his own story into a feature film which, for the first time, focuses on the experiences of parents.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Keep Coming Back Film
Keep Coming Back Instagram account

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ABOUT THE EPISODE:

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Keep Coming Back Film
Keep Coming Back Instagram account

Previous Episode

The Anxiety Factor: Untangling the Adolescent Anxiety And Substance Use Knot, with Jarell Myers. Ph.D.

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

When Dr. Jarrell Myers took his first job out of grad school, he loved working with children suffering from anxiety disorders, as well as their families. It was a calling he’d already been pursuing for years. But there was a big problem: many kids who needed needed help for their anxiety couldn’t become patients in his program because they were using substances.

While this made some clinical sense (for reasons Jarell will explain), it also failed to acknowledge that substance use was woven into their anxiety, often as a coping mechanism. This is what finally led him to the Center for Motivational Change (CMC).

CMC publishes the book I recommend more than any other to parents of kids struggling with substances – Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change. Today I finally have a chance to speak with Dr. Myers about some of the core principles it contains.

In this episode, we discuss the nature of anxiety, why it makes sense that anxious kids to turn to substances, how parenting those kids may trigger our own fear and anxiety responses, and how to give our families the best fighting chance in the face of these realities.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Next Episode

There Are No Bad Parts Of Us: Understanding Internal Family Systems (IFS) for Addiction, with Cece Sykes

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Everyone knows the experience of internal dialogue and conflict about who we are and how we will respond to the world around us. It can feel as if there are parts of us at war with each other. For kids using substances, these parts can become extremely polarized – for instance, part of them wants nothing more than to use, and another genuinely desires self-control.

My guest today says that while their inner parts are engaged in this debate about use, it's hard for them to see the underlying cause of the substance use or addictive behavior, whether that be loneliness, anxiety, or shame.

Cece Sykes saw her first client almost 45 years ago, and since then has been doing incredible work with young people suffering from addiction and trauma. Cece is one of the first practitioners of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a framework for understanding the roles each of these parts are playing, discovering what role they play in our coping, and gaining a deeper understanding of our kids' needs and motivations.

Interestingly, understanding IFS can change our relationship with ourselves as well. We all have these parts, and the self-examination that this framework provides can help us move beyond the unhealthy dynamics that often develop between parents and kids using substances. In this episode, Cece explains how that works, and how we can help our kids recoginze all the parts of them, without shame, and with more self-compassion.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Cece Skyes, LCSW website
IFS Therapy for Addictions
“We All Have Parts,” by Colleen West
“No Bad Parts,” by Dr. Richard Schwartz

Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction - Keep Coming Back: A Hollywood Director Finds Art, And Healing Through His Daughter’s Recovery, with Mark Rosman

Transcript

Mark00:00:01.899

It dawned on me. I said, wait a second. I'm like looking at myself in the mirror going, wait a second, the kind of arc that I went through, the growth that I went through is what you want out of a main character. They start in one way and then they, through this whole experience, they come out with all this growth. And I realized that had happened to me. And not only that, that this had never been done before. Nobody had ever made a, at least a narrat