Latest / The Conscious Divorce / How to coparent with a recovering addict
Transcript
- Justin Milrad: I want to start today with a sentence that most parenting advice will never say out loud. You cannot love someone out of an addiction. You can want it more than they do. You can plan around it, pray around it, beg and bargain around it. You can lie awake at two in the morning rehearsing the conversation that finally makes them see it. And none of that reaches the part of the brain where addiction actually lives. If you're co-parenting with someone who is struggling, that's the hardest truth in the whole thing. Because you're not just managing your own disappointments anymore. You're standing between that disappointment and your kids trying to be a wall soft enough that they can still love the other parent and solid enough that nothing gets through that shouldn't. Here's what I know about my work running an outpatient mental health and addiction treatment center. After years of coaching people through exactly this, you cannot control the addiction. You can control the structure around it. That single distinction is the entire episode. Everything else we talk about today is just how to build the structure. plank by plank so that your children are safe, your sanity is intact, and the door to recovery stays open. So let's get into it. Welcome to the Conscious Divorce Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Milrad. I'm a certified divorce coach, financial planner, MBA, and the founder of Reclaim and Reboot Transformational Coaching. As well, I'm an author, the author of You 2.0: Divorce a Better Way Forward, the You 2.0 Workbook, and the Co Parenting Playbook. This is a show where we treat divorce not as the end of your story, but as the plot twist that forces a better one. We do that with strategy, structure, and honesty. No empty platitudes. No pretending this is easy. Just real tools for people who've done the work and lived it. Before we go further, our disclaimer. And today it matters more than usual. I'm a certified divorce coach. I'm not an attorney. I'm not your financial planner. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a physician or addiction counselor. Nothing in this episode is legal, financial, medical, or therapeutic advice. What I'm giving you is education, perspective, and a framework for thinking clearly. When addiction and custody intersect, the stakes are high and the details are specific to your jurisdiction. So please work with a family law attorney, a licensed clinician, and where appropriate, an addiction professional who can help you look at your actual situation. And one more thing, before we start, if any part of this today hits close to home, take whatever serves you and leave the rest. You know your family, you know your situation better than any podcast ever could. Part one, why this is different. Let me name the thing that makes this so isolating. most co-parenting advice assumes two flawed but fundamentally reliable adults. It assumes that if you communicate clearly, keep a shared calendar, stay child focused, and manage your own reactivity, the system holds. That advice is good. It's also in your situation a map for a road that no longer exists. It's a GPS confidently routing you across a bridge that's out. Because addiction doesn't respect the calendar. It doesn't care that it's your co-parents' weekend. It introduces a variable that standard advice was never built to handle, which is unpredictability. The missed exchange, a promise made with total sincerity on Tuesday and broken without explanation on Friday. The text that reads a little off and leaves you scanning it for 20 minutes, trying to decide if you're being paranoid or perceptive. You're not managing a difficult person. You're managing a moving target, and that target is attached to a person your children love. So let me start by pulling you out of isolation because the isolation is the part that makes people feel crazy. This is common, painfully, quietly common. a research letter published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2025. Drawing on the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, estimated that roughly 19 million American children are living with a parent who has a substance use disorder. That's about one in four kids. Of those, an estimated 7.6 million are living with a parent whose disorder is moderate to severe. Sit with that ratio for a second. One and four. That's not a rare tragedy that landed only on your doorstep. That is a public health reality touching a quarter of the children in this country. An earlier SAMHSA report had put that number closer to one in eight. And the jump is largely because the diagnostic criteria were updated, but the direction is the same. You're not the only parent lying awake doing this math. I say this not to minimize your situation. I say it because shame thrives in the belief that you are uniquely broken and you're not. What you're facing is hard and it's human and it's survivable. Brene Brown has spent her career on this idea that shame cannot survive being spoken. The moment you stop treating this as your family's dirty little secret and start treating it as a problem to be managed with structure, you take back a little bit of the ground. Addiction has been quietly stealing from you. Let me make this concrete because the statistics can stay abstract until you put a face on them. Picture a parent. I'll call her Maya. Maya's not a client. She's a composite of a hundred people I've sat with. So nothing here is anyone's private story. Maya's ex is by most measures a good father, funny, adored by the kids. And roughly one weekend and four, he goes dark. A pickup that doesn't happen. A phone call that goes to voicemail. And then two days later, a flood of remorse, so genuine, it breaks her heart all over again because she can hear that he means it. For two years, Maya lived inside that cycle. And that cycle has a name she didn't have a word for hypervigilance. She reads his texts like a forensic analyst. She kept her phone face up at dinner. She canceled her own plans preemptively just in case she would be needed. She was, in effect, doing his recovery for him inside of her own nervous system, and it was quietly exhausting. Maya's turning point was not the day he got better. It was the day she accepted that his getting better was not a lever she controlled. And she stopped organizing her entire life around a variable she could not move. That acceptance did not make her cold. It made her free to build. and that's exactly what we're gonna do in the rest of this podcast. Now, holding two truths at once is the entire emotional skill set of this episode. So let's practice it right now. Truth one, addiction is a legitimate medical condition, not a moral failure, and your co-parent is not a villain. Truth two, your first job is not their recovery. Your first job is your child's safety. Compassion for the adult and protection for the child are not in competition. You're gonna hold both in that order for as long as this lasts. Part two. Active addiction versus recovery and why a promise is not a plan. To build the right structure, you have to understand the thing you're structuring around. So let's talk about what addiction actually is, because the model you hold in your head determines every decision you make. Addiction is not a willpower deficit. The National Institute on Drug Abuse defines it as a chronic relapsing brain disorder. Chronic meaning ongoing, like diabetes or hypertension. Relapsing means that returns to use are a feature of the illness, not a sign that the person is weak or that you are a fool to hope. When you hold the willpower model, every relapse feels like a personal betrayal. When you hold a medical model, a relapse is data. It tells you the plan needs adjusting. It doesn't tell you that that person is hopeless. Let me go one level deeper on why willpower is the wrong frame, because it changes how you interpret everything you're about to see. Addiction hijacks two systems in the brain at once. It floods the reward system, the dopamine circuitry that evolution built to make us pursue food, connection, survival, and it teaches that circuitry that the substance is survival, more urgent than any of those older priorities. At the same time, it degrades the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for judgment, impulse control, and thinking through consequences. So you end up with a cruel equation. The accelerator is jammed to the floor, and the brakes have been worn down at the same time. That's not a character flaw. That is a brain doing exactly what a hijacked brain does. That's why the sincerest promise in the world can evaporate in the phase of a craving. The promise was made by the prefrontal cortex. The craving is negotiating with a much older, much louder part of the brain that doesn't care about promises. I'm not telling you this to excuse anything. Understanding is not the same as excusing, and an explanation of behavior is never a permission slip for it. I'm telling you this so that when it happens, you don't waste your finite energy taking it as a referendum on how much they love your children. It usually isn't that. It's the illness doing what the illness does. And that reframe frees you to stop litigating their heart. And start managing the structure, which is the only thing that has ever actually protected a child. This matters for trust, and trust is the currency the whole co-parenting relationship runs on. So here's the number I want burned into your memory. NIDA estimates that 40 to 60% of people treated for a substance use disorder will relapse at least once. And here's the context that reframes it. That range is right in line with relapse rates for other chronic diseases. Hypertension and asthma sit around 50 to 70%. Type 1 diabetes, 30 to 50. We do not say insulin failed when a diabetic's blood sugar spikes. We adjust the plan. SAM HSA's data suggests something even more sobering and oddly more hopeful. Many people need three to five serious attempts before recovery holds. Not one clean promise, multiple rounds. Which means if you're waiting for a single dramatic turning point after which everything is fine, you're waiting for a version of recovery that mostly exists in movies. So let's separate three things that get collapsed into one word: sober. There is active addiction where use is ongoing and behavior is unpredictable. There is early recovery, which is the most fragile and statistically the most dangerous window. Because relapse risk is highest in the first several months after treatment. And there is long-term stable recovery, which is real and which does drop the risk substantially. By some longitudinal estimates, once a person holds five years, the odds of lasting recovery climb dramatically. Those are three completely different risk environments, and they shouldn't carry the same parenting arrangement. Here's the trap I watch people fall into. Your co-parent goes to treatment or gets a sponsor or simply says the words, I've got it handled now. And a wave of relief hits, and you want so badly for it to be over, and that you quietly relax the safeguards. I understand that impulse completely, and it's the single most common way children get hurt in these situations. But a promise is not a plan. And treatment is not the same as trust. Recovery is not announced. It's demonstrated. So the rule I want you to adopt is this do not track labels, track behavior over time. not what they say they are, but what they consistently do across weeks and months. Words are cheap and an active addiction, often sincere and unreliable in the same breath. Consistency is the only thing that has ever actually predicted safety. James Clear has a line that fits recovery better than almost anything in the recovery literature. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Your co-parenting goal, staying sober for the kids, may be completely genuine. What will actually determine the outcome is the systems around it meetings, medication, monitoring, accountability, treatment. When you assess where things stand, you are not judging their heart, you are reading their system. and you can respect that person while soberly evaluating the system at the same time. Part three, what your children are actually carrying. Now we turn to the people this is really about, because while the adults are managing logistics and lawyers, the children are running a quieter, heavier operation, and most of it is invisible. Picture the family as a house. When one person is struggling with addiction, the floor of that house tilts. And here's what children do, instinctively, brilliantly, tragically. They learn. They shift their whole weight to keep the house from feeling like it's false. One kid becomes a little adult, the responsible one, managing siblings and moods and schedules. One becomes the peacemaker, reading the room and diffusing before anything ignites. One acts out because at least the chaos then has a name that everyone can point at, and one disappears, becomes low maintenance, invisible, no trouble at all, which parents often mistake for the kid who's fine. The invisible one is frequently the one caring the most. Underneath those roles is a specific emotional weather system. And it helps to name it because your children often cannot. There's fear, the low hum of not knowing which version of the parent is coming home. There is disappointment, sharp and repeated. Every time a promise dissolves, there's confusion because the same parent can be warm and wonderful on Tuesday and absent and frightening by the weekend. And a child's developing mind cannot reconcile those two people into one. And there's anxiety, the general sense that the ground is not solid, that something could go wrong at any moment, and it might somehow be their job to prevent it. and that weather has a biology. When a child lives in an unpredictable environment, their stress response does not get to switch off. The nervous system floods with cortisol and adrenaline over and over until a state is supposed to be an emergency setting, becoming their baseline. Researchers call the extreme version of this toxic stress, and it's not a metaphor. It's a measurable psychological pattern that shapes a developing brain. The child who is always scanning the room. Always braced, always a half step ahead of the next disruption, is not being dramatic. Their body has learned that vigilance is safety and that learning useful now is expensive later. These are survival adaptations. And here's a cool part: the very skill a child builds to survive the tilt, the hypervigilance, the people-pleasing, the emotional caretaking are just the exact traits that quietly sabotage their adult relationships decades later. You're not just watching them. Get through a hard season. You're watching a template get written, which is also the good news because the template can be rewritten. And the thing that rewrites it is exactly what you're able to give: stability, safety. A parent whose love is not conditional on the weather. This is where the research gets important and where I want to be careful because it's easy to misuse. In 1998, doctors Vincent Falitti and Robert Anda published the adverse childhood experiences study. Run through the CDC in Kaiser Permanente with more than 17,000 adults. It found a strong, stepwise relationship. The more adverse experiences someone has accumulated in childhood, the higher their lifetime risk for depression, addiction, and even physical disease. And household substance use is one of the named experiences on the list. Now here's where parents panic. They see substance abuse on the ACE list. They see divorce a few lines down, and they conclude they have permanently broken their child. That is not what the science says, and the distinction is everything. The ace is not the label. The ace is the lived environment, the chaos, the unpredictability, the exposure to ongoing conflict, the night the child didn't know which version of the parent was coming home. What the research points to again and again is that stability and warmth are protective, powerfully so, even in hard situations, which means the very thing you feel most powerful powerless over, the addiction itself, is not the thing that most shapes your child's outcome. The stability you build around them is. You cannot control the addiction, you can control the structure, even here, especially here. So let me give you the hard boundary that protects the child's inner world. And I want you to treat it as a non negotiable. Your child is never the messenger, never the caregiver, never the sobriety monitor. They don't carry the notes between parents. They don't report on whether dad was drinking or whether mom seemed off. They are not asked to check, to watch, to smell, to remember, to relay. The moment a child becomes a sensor in the adult surveillance system, they lose the one thing they're supposed to have, which is childhood. Protecting that line is one of the most important things you will do in this entire process. Let me pause for just a moment because if you're still with me this far in, I suspect you're either living some version of this or you love someone who is. If that is you, do me a favor. When this episode ends, send it to one person. The friend who has been white knuckling a co-parenting relationship and thinks they're the only one. The family member who keeps asking how to help and doesn't know what to say. Sharing this is not about the show. It's about the fact that the single most protective thing in any of these families is that the same steady parent does not feel alone. Your forwarding this might be the reason someone else stops feeling crazy tonight. and if this podcast has been useful to you, please follow it. It helps with the algorithm and it will also notify you when the next episode launches. Okay, back to the work. And we're getting practical now. Part four warning signs you don't get to ignore. We're shifting from understanding to action. And the first action is learning to tell the difference between a bad day and a genuine safety concern, because you'll be tempted to explain both away. I want you to anchor on one word. Observable. We are not diagnosing your co-parent. You are not qualified to. I am not qualified to from here. And the label is not the point. What matters is behavior you can see, name, and if necessary, write down. Think of yourself less as a judge and more as an instrument. You are reading conditions, not passing verdicts. Here are the signals that move a situation from difficult into concerning. These are the ones you don't have to rationalize at. Driving with the children or planning to while there is any reasonable question of impairment. This one has no gray area. Impaired driving with your kids in the car is a line full stop. Falling asleep at the wrong times, becoming difficult to rouse or being unreachable during their own parenting time. Leaving the children without appropriate supervision or in the care of people you don't know and didn't agree to. Unsafe environments during parenting time. Substances left accessible. People coming and going who have no business around your kids. Asking the children to keep secrets. Any version of, don't tell your mom, don't tell your dad. Secrecy is the oxygen. This whole thing breathes and children should never be asked to hold it. Pattern of missed or dropped responsibilities. Not one hard week, a pattern. Missed pickups, forgotten commitments, a reliability that is quietly eroding. Notice what's on that list and what's not. It's not, I think they seem like they're using. It is the exchange was missed, the child was left alone, the car keys were in hand, and something was clearly wrong. Behavior, not theory. And here's the calibration that keeps you honest in both directions. A single missed exchange is concerned. It is not by itself an emergency. A parent asleep on the couch while a responsible adult is present is different from a parent unresponsive while a seven year old is trying to make dinner. Precision matters because if you treat everything like a five alarm fire, you will exhaust yourself and lose credibility with a very court that might one day need to believe you. Save the alarm for the fire, document the smoke. Part five, boundaries that are about safety, not punishment. Now we build the walls of the structure, and the word for those walls is boundaries. And I need to correct the most common misunderstanding about them right away. A boundary is not an attempt to control the other person. You've already learned the hard way that you can't control them. A boundary is the decision about what you will do to keep your children safe in response to what happens. Control says you must stop drinking. A boundary says if there is any sign of impairment at exchange, the exchange does not happen. And here is the pre agreed alternative. One reaches for a lever you don't have, the other stands on the ground you actually own. Think of boundaries like guardrails on a mountain road. A guardrail is not a moral judgment about the driver. It is not there to punish anyone. It's there because the drop is real and the cost of going over is a child. You would never look at a guardrail and call it cruel. You would look at it and call it responsible. That is exactly the spirit you want, firm and completely unsentimental about the stakes, without a drop of contempt in it. Let me give you the practical architecture. Put the important communication in writing. Move the meaningful logistics to text, email, or co parenting app. Not to build a case, though it does create a record. The deeper reason is that writing removes ambiguity. An active addiction, a spoken agreement can be sincerely made and genuinely not remembered. Writing is not an attack. It is a shared source of truth that protects both of you from the fog. make transportation and exchange safer. If impaired driving is a real risk, then the parenting plan should not depend on your co-parent driving your children. Build in alternatives before you need them. A neutral exchange location, a third party who handles transport, exchanges that happen at school, so the handoff is naturally supervised and the children never sit in the middle of an adult moment. Name your backup caregiver in advance. Every one of these families needs a bench. Trusted adults identified and agreed to now while everyone is calm, who can step in when a parenting block cannot safely happen. You don't want to be scrambling to find a safe pair of hands in the middle of a crisis at nine on a Friday night. Decide in daylight who you call in the dark. Decide in advance what happens when parenting time is missed. This is where most plans fall apart in the ambiguity. What happens if a scheduled exchange doesn't happen because a parent cannot safely take the kids? If the answer is improvised every single time, every single time becomes a fight. If the answer is written down and agreed to, it becomes a procedure. And a procedure runs calmly, protects the child from watching their parents detonate over the same landmine again and again. Every one of these is about safety, never about punishment. Say that to yourself until you believe it, because your co-parent in something your own guilt will try to reframe your boundaries as cruelty. They are not cruelty, they are load bearing. Part six, building the safety plan before you need it. There's an old line in emergency medicine. In a crisis, you don't rise to the occasion. You fall back on your preparation. The entire point of the segment is to make sure that when a hard moment comes, and it may, you're not improvising. You are executing something you've already built. So here's the safety plan. Build it now on a calm afternoon, not in the middle of a bad night. Review the current parenting agreement with clear eyes. Know exactly what it says about exchanges, supervision, decision making, and what your actual options are. You cannot use a tool you haven't read. Identify your trusted adults and make sure the children know them. Not just that they exist on your list, but that your kids know these are safe people they're allowed to call or go to. Keep emergency and professional contacts accessible and current. Pediatricians, therapists, your attorney, and where relevant, a treatment or crisis line. In the United States, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline covers mental health and substance crises. And SAMHSA's national helpline can help locate treatment. Have the numbers before the night you need them. Teach your kids in an age appropriate way who to call and where to go if they ever feel unsafe. Keep it simple and calm. This is not fear. This is the same reason you teach them to cross at the light. Consider a family code word. A single word a child can text or say that means come get me, no questions asked right now. It gives a scared kid an exit that doesn't require them to explain themselves in a moment they can't. Keep the paperwork organized. Medical records, school information, custody documents in one place you can reach fast. In a real crisis, being able to put your hands on the right document in thirty seconds changes what you can do. Decide in advance which situations require immediate attention. Draw the lines while you're calm. So in the moment you are following a decision, not making one under adrenaline. And here's a boundary that sits underneath the whole plan. The one people get wrong out of sheer desperation. Your children are not your evidence gathering team. They do not take photos, they do not collect proof, they do not investigate. A safety plan exists to give a child an exit, never give them an assignment. The instant a kid believes their job is to gather evidence against the other parent they love, you've handed them a burden that will outlast this entire chapter. The plan protects them, it doesn't deputize them. Part seven. Documentation, the boring superpower. Let me talk about the least glamorous and most powerful tool you have. Documentation I know the word alone makes people's eyes glaze, but if this situation ever moves into a legal setting and it might, calm, factual, contemporaneous documentation is worth more than the most passionate speech you could ever give. think of it like the black box of an aircraft. A flight recorder doesn't editorialize. It doesn't get angry. It simply logs what happened when in plain data. That neutrality is exactly what gives it authority. Your documentation should aspire to be a flight recorder, not a diary of grievances. So here's how to do it well. Record dates, times, and specifics. The exchange scheduled for six that didn't happen. The call came at the wrong hour. Concrete, checkable, and boring. Save the relevant messages and voicemails. Do not delete in anger. Preserve the record as it actually is. Describe what you observed without inflation. Not he was obviously wasted and doesn't care about the kids. Instead, arrived forty minutes late, speech was slurred, I made the decision not to send the children. One is an accusation, the other is an observation. And observations are what hold up. Note the impact on the child factually. Child was upset and couldn't sleep. Child asked why the visit didn't happen. You are recording effect, not performing outrage. Keep it off social media entirely. A public post is not documentation. It's ammunition your co-parent's attorney will happily use. And worse, it's something your children may one day read. The record you keep is private and disciplined. Here's a principle that governs all of it. Document facts, not conclusions. Not he is an unfit father. Facts. Missed three of the last five exchanges. facts do not need you to be angry, to be devastating. They simply accumulate quietly until the pattern speaks entirely for itself. Let the record be the one thing in this whole situation that never loses its temperature. Part eight, supporting recovery without enabling. This is a tight rope, and it's the segment people most need and most resist. How do you support recovery without enabling addiction? Because those two things can look almost identical from the outside. And the difference lives entirely in the details. Let me give you the cleanest distinction I know. Support helps the person do the hard work of recovery. Enabling protects that person from the natural consequences of the addiction. Support is handing someone a rope while they climb. Enabling is climbing the wall for them and wondering why they never build the muscle. So concretely, supporting recovery looks like encouraging treatment, acknowledging real and demonstrative progress, keeping your language free of contempt, and protecting your children's ability to have a safe and loving relationship with the other parent as that parent earns it. Recovery is hard enough without being shamed at every turn. And shame, as Brene Brown's research shows again and again, is not a motivator. It's the driver of the very behavior you're trying to see end. You can be honest about impact without being cruel about character. Enabling, on the other hand, looks like covering for them with the kids, telling the children dad is sick when dad relapses in a way that teaches them the family rewrites reality. Cleaning up every consequence so that person never actually feels the cost of the disease. Pretending a serious incident didn't happen because naming it feels disloyal. Every one of those, done out of love, quietly removes the friction that recovery actually requires. Here's a reframe that holds the two together. Compassion and accountability are not opposites. They're partners. The most loving thing you can often do for someone in active addiction is to stop absorbing the consequences that might otherwise wake them up. You're not being harsh. You're refusing to be the airbag that lets them keep hitting the wall without ever feeling it. That's not the absence of love. In these situations, it's frequently the highest form of it. And notice, none of this requires you to hate them. In fact, it works better if you don't. You can hold a genuine hope that this person recovers for their sake and your children's while refusing to build your kids' safety on that hope. Hope is a beautiful thing to carry. It's a terrible thing to use as a foundation. Part nine: When to escalate. Let's talk about escalation because knowing when to act and how far is one of the hardest judgment calls you'll make. I'm going to give you three levels. Think of them like a thermometer. Your job is to read the temperature accurately and respond to that temperature. Not to the temperature your fear is inventing, and not to the one your denial is hoping for. Level one, concerning but not urgent. is new unreliability and missed exchange, communication that's getting erratic, a concern about relapse that you can't confirm. Something is off, but no one is in danger right now. At this level, you don't call a lawyer in a panic and you don't pretend nothing happened. You document it calmly. You pick up your boundaries, you review the parenting agreement so you know your options, and you consider looping in a coach, a therapist, or an attorney for a quiet conversation, not a legal missile, just informed guidance so you're ready if the temperature climbs. Level two, repeated or serious concerns. Now that pattern is established, a confirmed relapse that is affecting parenting, repeated impairment, unsafe transportation, Children reporting that they were not properly supervised, a refusal to honor the safeguards you've already agreed to. This is where you move from managing to acting. You contact a family law attorney, ideally one experienced in cases involving addiction. You speak with your child's therapist or pediatrician. You look seriously at options like supervised exchanges, supervised parenting time, or a formal relapse and safety plan built into the custody agreement. We'll talk in a moment about how to do that in a way that supports recovery rather than just punishing it. The point of level two is that hoping is no longer a strategy. Structure is. Level three, immediate danger. This is the one I need you to hear with total clarity, because in this moment, every other consideration falls away. A parent attempting to drive impaired with the children, An overdose or an unresponsive parent, violence or a credible threat, children left with no safe supervision, a child reporting immediate abuse or danger. In these moments, there is no documentation step first. There is no let me text my attorney first. You address the immediate danger. You call 911. You get the children safe. That's the entire priority, and it's the only priority. The legal strategy, the documentation, the long game, all of it comes afterwards. Once the people are safe. Let me say it as plainly as I can. Safety first, strategy second, always in that order, no exceptions. Between those three levels, the skill is honesty. Denial wants to follow everything under level one so you never have to act. Panic wants to follow everything under level three so you feel like you're doing something. Your children are best served by the parent who can look at the actual thermometer and tell the truth about the number. Part 10, how to talk to the children. Now, the conversation that terrifies parents most. What do you actually say to the kids and the fear underneath the question is usually how do I tell the truth without either terrifying them or turning them against the other parent? Start with the frame. You are aiming for honest but age appropriate. Children do not need the adult details. They don't need the diagnosis, the history, the specifics of the last incident. What they need is enough honest information that their own eyes and their own experience are not being contradicted. Because children always know when something's wrong. What harms them is not the truth. It's being told the thing that they can plainly feel is not happening. That's the lie that teaches a child not to trust their own perception, and that lie follows them for decades. There's a tool I want to give you developed by the National Association of Children of Addiction. An organization that has been the voice for these kids since 1983. It was created by a counselor named Jerry Moe, and it's called the Seven C's. It's designed to be said to a child in their own language. Here it is. I didn't cause it, I can't control it, I can't cure it, but I can take care of myself by communicating my feelings, by making healthy choices, and celebrating me. Look at what that little framework does. The first three C's lift the crushing weight of responsibility off a child's shoulders. Because here's the secret truth of almost every kid in this situation. They believe somewhere deep down that it's their fault, that if they were better, quieter, more helpful, more lovable, the parent would stop. The seven C's gently clearly tell them this was never yours to cause, to control, or to cure. And the last four C's hand them something back, a sense of agency over the one thing they can actually tend to, which is themselves. So let me give you the specific message to deliver, in your own words, over time. This is not your fault. Say it directly, more than once. Their instincts is to blame themselves, and you are actively countering that instinct. You're allowed to love your mom or dad. You never have to choose. You're not making them defend the addiction by loving that person. Both can be true. You can always talk to me about what happens, and you will never be in trouble for telling the truth. You're giving them permission to speak, which is the opposite of the secrecy addiction demands. This is a grown-up problem and the grown-ups are handling it. It's not your job to fix, to watch, or to worry about. Their job is to be a kid. And one thing to avoid, do not make promises you can't keep. Do not tell the child, Daddy is going to get better now, or this will never happen again. You don't know that. And if it doesn't you don't know that. And if it does happen again, you've taught them that your reassurances cannot be trusted at the exact moment you need them most to trust you. Give them honesty and give them safety. Those you can actually guarantee. The rest you hold with them one day at a time. Part eleven Rebuilding Trust When Recovery Is Real Let's end where hope lives, because recovery does happen, and when it does, you will face a genuinely difficult question. How do you let trust back in without setting your children up for hurt if it doesn't hold? Here's the governing principle: trust returns gradually, and it returns on the evidence of consistent action, not on the strengths of an apology. This is where your co-parents' recovery and your children's safety can finally start moving in the same direction, but only if the rebuild is structured. Not emotional. I want to borrow this from my own background here because I spent years in financial planning before this work, and trust after addiction behaves almost exactly like compound interest. It's painfully slow at the start, a week of reliability barely moves a needle, but consistent deposits made steadily over time compound into something genuinely solid. What are you looking for is not a grand gesture. It's a long, boring, beautiful streak of small deposits. Showed up, showed up, showed up again. This is also where the legal structure can become a gift rather than a punishment, and I want to reframe how most people see it. When courts address parenting time in the context of substance use, the goal, according to best practice guidelines from bodies like the Association of Family and Conciliatory Courts, is not to sever the relationship. Courts rarely eliminate contact entirely. The goal is a graduated path, supervised time that steps up to unsupervised time as sobriety is demonstrated and maintained. And the tools that enforce the path can cut both ways in the person's favor. Structured court admissible alcohol or substance use monitoring, the kind that confirms sobriety before parenting time begins, is often experienced as a punishment. But flip it around. For a parent genuinely committed to recovery, a documented record of clean, consistent tests over months is the single most persuasive piece of evidence they can bring to court to expand their time with their children. Their own promises are just words. The data is proof. Structure support recovery. Documentation supports safety. The same scaffolding that protects your children is what lets recovering parents earn their way back. That's not a coincidence. That's the design work. Let me put a face on that too, because the rebuild is where hope stops being abstract. Come back to Maya's X from earlier. In the version of this story that goes right, he does not have a single triumphant moment. He has a treatment program, a medication program. protocol, a sponsor, and a monitoring device he initially resented. And then he has something far less dramatic and far more powerful. A streak. Twelve weeks of clean checks before every exchange. Then 20. His parenting time supervised at first steps up to streak lengths. Not because anyone felt sorry for him, but because the record earned it. The kids stop racing. The phone goes back in the drawer at dinner. No one would make a movie about it. It's just a deposit. After deposit, after deposit, and eventually the account is full. That's what recovery actually looks like from the outside. It's boring and boring. In this context, it's the most beautiful word in the language. So, what are you actually watching for as trust rebuilds? Reliable communication, consistent attendance at parenting time, respect for boundaries instead of resentment of them, safe transportation, stable routines across both homes. And crucially, you reassess the safeguards based on. Demonstrated progress, not on pressure, guilt, or a moving speech. The safeguards loosen because the evidence earned it, not because you got tired of holding the line. Tired is not evidence. And let me connect this back to the framework of this whole show. You 2.0, reclaim, reboot, become. That framework is not just for you. It's the exact arc a recovering co parenting is walking into. And the family that gets the other side of this is almost never the one where the addiction was simplest. It's the one where the sober, steady parent held structure with enough strength to keep everyone safe and enough compassion to keep the door open. You can be both. In fact, for your kids, you really have to be. So let me bring this home. If you're co-parenting with someone struggling with addiction, you are carrying something enormous and you're carrying most of it where no one can see it. So before anything else, I want you to hear this. The steadiness you are holding for your children on the nights when you're exhausted and frightened and doing it anyways, that's not small. That's the whole thing. This is a load-bearing wall of your children's childhood, and you are it. Remember the one distinction that organizes all of this. You can't control the addiction, you can control the structure around it. You cannot cure the other adult. You cannot love them sober, cannot want it enough for both of you. But you can build the boundaries, the safety plan, the documentation, the honest and age appropriate conversations, and the graduated path that keeps your children safe while leaving the door open to recovery. Compassion for the person, protection for their child, held together for as long as it takes. Addiction thrives in chaos and secrecy. Everything we talked about today, every boundary, every written agreement, every calm sentence to a scared kid is a small active structure, a truth pushing them back against exactly that. You will not do it perfectly. You don't have to. You just have to keep building. Thank you for spending this time with me on the Conscious Divorce podcast. If this episode helped you or helped you understand someone you love, please share it with that one person who needs it and follow the show so that the next episode finds you. If you're ready to stop simply surviving this and start building the structured strategic path forward, that's exactly the work I do. You can find me at www.reclaimandreboot.me, where you can learn more about coaching and pick up my books, You 2.0: Divorce a Better Way Forward. The You 2.0 workbook and the co-parenting playbook, also available on Amazon.com. If you want to talk through your own situation, I offer a free 30-minute consultation. There's a link at reclaim and reboot.me. No pressure, no pitch, just real conversation about where you are and where you want to go. Until next time, I'm Justin Milrad reminding you that divorce is not the end of your story. It's the moment you get to start writing a better one. Take care of yourself. And take care of those kids.