Addiction rarely touches one person alone. It is often called a family disease because it moves through a household, a marriage, and sibling relationships, and it reshapes how everyone connected to it shows up for one another. Two episodes of the Positive Recovery MD podcast look at families healing from addiction from opposite ends of the same road: one is a conversation with mothers who are living on the other side of loss, and the other is a conversation about the family's role while a loved one is still in active addiction.
Together, they offer a fuller picture of what families healing from addiction actually looks like. For some, that healing begins in the midst of the challenges of addiction, learning how to support a loved one without losing themselves, through self-care, boundaries, and their own recovery and healing. For others, that healing work begins after a sudden loss, learning how to work through grief as a family and find purpose again.
Turning Pain Into Purpose with M-COPE
The first conversation belongs to Kathy Posey, Kim Robbins, and Paige Butler, three women serving on the board of M-COPE, the Montgomery County Overdose Prevention Endeavor. Kathy and Kim co-founded the organization after meeting in GRASP, a grief support group for families who lost a loved one to substance use. Kathy lost her son Josh at 23. Kim lost her son Steven at 24, nine days after he left treatment. Paige's story is different; her daughter is in recovery today, and Paige and her husband are raising her grandson.
M-COPE runs on four pillars: awareness, prevention, education, and remembrance. The Texas Memorial Walkway, which started with 66 photos of Texans lost to drugs and alcohol, has grown to more than 325. Their Blessing Bags go out to people leaving incarceration or being asked to leave a recovery home, two of the most vulnerable moments in someone's recovery, filled with Narcan, toiletries, a bus pass, and something to eat. Their scholarship fund gave out $6,000 last year to students who have either walked alongside a loved one's addiction or are building a new life in their own recovery.
A Path for Families Healing From Addiction Loss
The grief itself is talked about with a rare kind of honesty. Kathy describes a friend's advice that stayed with her: everybody in a family grieves differently. A mother's grief is not a father's grief, and a sibling's grief is not another sibling's grief, and mistaking that difference for a lack of love nearly broke her marriage before she understood the depths of grief. Kim talks about refusing to let grief take over, leaning into her faith, and reading everything she could get her hands on. Paige describes grief as something that never fully leaves, only becomes more bearable, like waves that come in gentler some days and knock you over on others.
None of them frame their sons only by how they died. Kathy remembers Josh's humor. Kim remembers Steven making the high school baseball team as a freshman. Their work exists because they refused to let addiction be the only word attached to their children's names.
Tap to listen to their conversation on Spotify: Turning Pain Into Purpose with M-COPE
See the Texas Memorial Walkway in Person
The Texas Memorial Walkway, which Kathy mentions in the episode, will be on display at two upcoming events. Both are free and open to anyone who wants to remember a loved one or simply stand alongside other families healing from addiction and loss.
A Light for Our Angels: An M-COPE Remembrance Event. Saturday, August 22, 1:00 to 4:00 PM at The Woodlands Community Presbyterian Church, 4881 W Panther Creek Drive, The Woodlands, TX 77381. Doors open at 1:00 PM to view the Walkway, with a remembrance program from 3:15 to 4:00 PM.
International Overdose Awareness Day. On Monday, August 31, an evening program begins at 6:30 PM with Sweet Treats and Connection. The program starts at 7:00 PM and will be the first event held at the newly renovated Hamill Foundation Conference Center at The Council on Recovery, 303 Jackson Hill Street, Houston, TX 77007. The evening will include Narcan training and distribution, a panel discussion with Dr. Jason Powers and Dr. Andrew Krieger, and a candlelight vigil to close the night.
Family Roles in Addiction: What Families Healing From Addiction Need to Know
In the next conversation, Julie DeNofa sits down with Colleen Hargrove, LCDC and Outpatient Manager at PRC Round Rock, who took over the podcast for a conversation built entirely from listener questions about how families navigate a loved one's addiction. Both women bring more than professional experience to the topic. Colleen grew up in an alcoholic family and is a person in long-term recovery herself. Julie, though not in recovery herself, shares her experience of loving someone with addiction and the trials and challenges that came with trying to fix, control, and cover for someone she could not save on her own.
The episode centers on one distinction that Colleen returns to again and again: enabling feeds the addiction, and supporting feeds the recovery. Paying someone's rent while they are still using is enabling. Paying for sober living is supporting. The difference is not always obvious in the moment, especially to a parent or partner who is exhausted and afraid, which is exactly why the episode spends so much time on boundaries, not as punishment, but as the thing that keeps a family member well enough to stay in the relationship at all.
Julie and Colleen also talk through what it looks like to bring children into a family's healing process at an age-appropriate level, and why families so often need their own support the same way the person in treatment does.
You can listen to this conversation here: Family Roles in Addiction with Julie DeNofa and Colleen Hargrove
Why Both of These Conversations Matter
Families healing from addiction and families healing from loss are not separate audiences. They are often the same people at different points in time, or different members of the same extended family, each holding a different chapter of the same story at once. What Julie, Colleen, Kathy, Kim, and Paige all describe, in their own way, is that healing was never something anyone did alone. It happened through community, through people who had walked the same road. How powerful it is to hear someone else say, "I understand because I've been there."
If you are supporting a loved one through active addiction, or you are carrying grief after a loss, you do not have to figure out how to heal on your own. We can talk through where you are and what support actually looks like for your family, whether that is treatment, a family workshop, or simply pointing you toward a community like M-COPE. We believe families can heal together. Call 713-904-4699 any time.