His Mom’s Hard Boundary Drove His Recovery, with Darren Hobbs

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

You‘ve probably watched your child make a decision so obviously terrible you could not understand how it made sense to them. Darren Hobbs can tell you exactly how it looked, because he made that decision. He had done treatment. He had a sponsor, a home group, a year chip. Then he took some cash he made, drove back to his old dealer, and fully believed he could be the sober cocaine dealer in a small college town.

His story starts at 14, with a Vicodin prescription after surgery and the discovery that with substances in him, everything was better, easier and more fun. It runs through years of drinking and cocaine, wrecked cars, stolen money, and parents who kept trying to love him out of it. It ends, or maybe begins, on the floor of a Nashville bar with undercover detectives on top of him, staring at 20 years in prison.

What changed him was not the arrest. It was a phone call from his mother, and one sentence she said that I know broke her heart - and drove his recovery.

Darren is a Certified Intervention Professional, founder of The Firm Addiction Consulting in Nashville, and a cast member on A&E's Intervention. He has taken hundreds of families through interventions, and he is blunt about what parents do that keeps their kids stuck. He also told me the most extraordinary story of divine timing I have heard on this show. If you watch on YouTube, you will see the goosebumps on both of us.

This is the first of four recovery stories this month, and I started here because Darren says out loud the things our kids cannot.

If you are watching your child choose the things that will hurt them and cannot make sense of it, this one is for you.

YOU'LL LEARN

• What Darren told himself the day he decided he could sell cocaine and stay sober
• The one sentence his mother said on the phone that did what years of crime, jail and chaos never did
• Why he says parents are the ones who installed the buttons their kids know how to push
• The two things he sees in almost every family who calls him at crisis point
• The tool he calls an industry guarded secret for families who cannot get in a room together

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Firm Intervention and Addiction Consulting, Nashville, TN
• Darren on Instagram
• Die Sober Podcast, hosted by Darren Hobbs and Zach Livingston: https://www.thefirmaddictionconsulting.com/podcast
• The Stream, free two-week trial: https://hopestreamcommunity.org/try
• Worried Sick free ebook: https://hopestreamcommunity.org/worried

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