Inside Your Kid’s Mind: Hidden Pain Behind Substance Use, with Brad McLeod

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Brad was 17, sitting in a psych ward for the second time, when a stranger told him about a program in Tennessee. He said no. He ran from a rest stop on the highway, and the police caught him a few hours later. That moment tells you everything about where he was: a kid who had never learned to stay, never learned to feel, and hadn’t yet found anything worth staying for.

What followed was more than a decade of trying to outrun himself. Percocet. Heroin. A methadone clinic he drove to every morning with no car and no money. A felony conviction at 18. A deportation to Canada with a lifetime ban from the US. Brad doesn’t tell his story like a cautionary tale. He tells it like someone who finally understands what his brain was looking for, and what it took to stop running long enough to build something worth keeping.

Today he hosts Sober Motivation, a top 0.5% podcast globally with more than five million downloads, and runs an online community for people in recovery. He started it from his basement not because he had the answers, but because he knew what it felt like to be alone in this.

This conversation is for every parent who has watched their child go through treatment and wondered if anything is actually landing. Brad says something I’ve believed for years but have rarely heard said plainly: sobriety is the starting line, not the finish line. What he built after that line, and why it held, is what this episode is really about.

If you’ve done everything right and it still isn’t working, this one is for you.

YOU’LL LEARN:

• How Brad went from two psych ward stays and a felony to host of a top recovery podcast
• Why sobriety was never his problem, and what the real work looked like
• The question he asks every person about the night before they get sober
• What getting back on ADHD medication at 38 finally showed him about himself
• What it means to build a life you have something to lose in

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Sober Motivation Podcast
• Sober Motivation Community
• Brandon Novak Memoir, Dreamseller

This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
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