Transcript for
Child-focused practice with parents who use substances

Narrator (00:02): 

Welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast. 

Nicole Rollbusch (00:07): 

Hi, I’m Nicole Rollbusch and welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast. Before we start today’s episode, we would like to pay respect to the traditional custodians of the lands on which this podcast was recorded. We also pay respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and to elders past and present. Before we begin, please be aware that this episode includes a mention of pregnancy loss. 

Please take care while listening and seek support from a trusted source if anything raised brings up difficult feelings for you, or you can find resources for support in our show notes. Many parents who use alcohol and other drugs care deeply about their children’s wellbeing and want to support their development, relationships, and sense of safety. But children’s experiences can often be overlooked when services are focused primarily on the adult. 

Substance use can affect family life in complex ways. It usually co-occurs alongside pressures such as mental health concerns, trauma, housing stress, financial hardship, family and domestic violence, and other barriers to accessing services. At the same time, safe, stable, and responsive relationships can play a powerful protective role in supporting children’s mental health and wellbeing. 

For many parents who use substances, their relationship with their child can be a source of motivation, hope, and change. This creates opportunities for practitioners to build on parents’ existing strengths and support steps that strengthen children’s safety, connection, and development. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Alicia Phillips. Alicia has worked as an individual and family counsellor for over a decade across youth mental health and adult and other drug services. 

She now works as an AOD family therapist and as a specialist family violence advisor for AOD services in Northeast Victoria. Alicia also brings her own lived experience of addiction, parenting, and life beyond addiction. Together, her lived experience, AOD practice and family therapy training offer valuable insight into child-focused practice with parents who use substances. 

Alicia joins us to talk about starting conversations about children early and how curiosity, compassion, and attention to parents’ hopes and strengths can build trust and keep children and their wellbeing visible. Well, thank you so much, Alicia, for joining me today for this chat. It’s great to have you with us. 

Alicia Phillips (02:29): 

Hi, Nicole. Thank you for inviting me here to talk about this. 

Nicole Rollbusch (02:32): 

So I wanted to start by asking you to tell us a little bit more about yourself and your work. 

Alicia Phillips (02:38): 

Great. So yeah, I’m a family therapist. I’m working in the alcohol and other drug sector in Victoria. I’ve been working in this space for a number of years, providing individual and family counselling. I also now have a role supporting our alcohol and other drug services to improve their responses to family violence risk when working with our clients. 

I have my own lived experience of addiction, so I’ve experienced being on the other side of the system, so to speak. As a new mom, nearly over 20 years ago, I was managing my own journey, moving out of addiction, alongside learning how to be a parent to my daughter. So this is a subject that’s really close to my heart. 

Nicole Rollbusch (03:21): 

Fantastic. Really appreciate you coming along to share your experience from, as you say, both sides of services, being a practitioner, but also your lived experience as well. So today we are talking about having conversations with parents who use substances about their children’s wellbeing. Why is it important that we’re having these conversations about children, children’s mental health and wellbeing in these settings? 

Alicia Phillips (03:51): 

Firstly, it’s important because it’s likely to actually be really important to your clients who are parents. For a lot of people talking about their substance use and starting to consider changes, they’re going to be motivated by the people they care about, and that’s likely to be their children. And we also know that parents using substances can have an impact on children’s wellbeing and their ability to thrive and be really well-supported by their families. 

And when we’re thinking about those impacts, it will depend on the context of the substance use, what the patterns of use are, what protective factors are in place to mitigate that, because most parents who are using substances will also be doing things to help protect their kids from the impacts somewhat. Having said that, there are some common impacts that we do see when there’s some problematic substance use in families, financial stresses, impacts on family routines. There might be exposure to substance use. Often parents will talk about using substances to manage their emotions, and they might even talk about it actually helps them be a better parent to be able to hear that. And we know that often when people are changing their substance use, learning emotional regulation skills, learning how to stay connected to themselves and others while experiencing strong emotions is going to be part of the work. And also part of a parent’s role to model that and teach that to their children as well. 

So sometimes this work will happen with the parents alongside the children learning about emotions as well. And there’s another side to this diversion of emotions and using substances, manage emotion. If the parent’s sense of pleasure is all wrapped up in the substance use, then they might actually be missing out on that sense of joy and delight in parenting. And without that, that’s actually going to make parenting a lot harder. So there’s lots of impacts here. 

For practitioners talking to their clients who are parents about this, it’s going to be really hard to do that if you’re not leaning in with really almost radical empathy. It’s hard work for practitioners. They’re holding the child’s experience in mind. They’ll generally have some ideas about what’s going to make this better and some hope for how things can be better from the family, but they’re also going to need to be building up the parent’s capacity to stay in the work and to be able to hear that, to be able to discover that together down the track in the work. 

Nicole Rollbusch (06:23): 

Yeah, it’s quite nuanced work that is happening where there’s a lot going on. There’s holding the child in mind and thinking about these impacts, supporting a parent to understand those impacts, but also ‘what are the protective factors?’ and “what’s going well?’ that’s not just about all the things that are going wrong. 

Alicia Phillips (06:45): 

Yeah. So practitioners need to allow themselves maybe to slow down in the work a bit to build up a really good picture of the good stuff before their client’s going to be able to explore the stuff that’s not going so well with them. 

Nicole Rollbusch (07:00): 

Where can you find entry points to have these conversations? So how do you start these conversations with parents? 

Alicia Phillips (07:10): 

I think you start at the start. I think when you’re first meeting with someone and you want to know who are their important people, who are their supporters, who are the people they care about? And so if they’re parents, you’re going to be hearing about their children then at that point. 

And I think that’s a really good place to start because the risk is if we don’t start talking to people about their role as a parent at the start, what can happen from practitioners is that they only start to concentrate on their client as a parent and the children because they’re worried about risk. So they’re only having this conversation when some element around risk or safety has been raised. 

Then you’re just coming in with this risk mindset, which the client is going to be anxious about that, you are going to be anxious about that, and that’s not going to open up a very useful conversation. But if you’re starting at the start, you’re going to understand ‘how big a role is parenting for this adult that you’re working with?’ Well, ‘what do they love about it?’ ‘What’s a bit tricky about it?’ ‘What works really well in their family?’ 

Get to know their children as they know them. And if you’re doing all that before any element around risk or safety is raised, you’ve got a really good foundational understanding of that family, which might help you to then have more difficult conversations later if they’re needed. 

Nicole Rollbusch (08:39): 

Yes. And I think opening up that conversation at the beginning and just bringing in that curiosity or those curious questions you’ve sort of flagged there, it just normalises that part of the conversation, doesn’t it? In saying that, sometimes talking about kids can be confronting or not an easy conversation for parents to have. What strategies have you found to be most effective in building trust before perhaps introducing conversations about children’s wellbeing? 

Alicia Phillips (09:12): 

I think it’s going to help to have a really good understanding of your client and understand their substance use in context. Don’t make assumptions about how this works. Ask them if you can both understand together how the substance use developed. There may be useful aspects about their substance use. 

There’ll be aspects that probably help them get through the day or help them manage really tricky parts of their life. And if you’re able to hear that, then it’s going to be easier for them to also share some of the things that aren’t working so well. And so I think it’s not assuming that you’re going to have a really problem saturated conversation and that you’re only looking for the things that aren’t working well. 

And if you can have that conversation around substance use, you’re helping them understand that you might also be able to have that sort of conversation about their parenting as well. It’s not just looking for all the problems. You want to understand the protective factors, the things that work in their family, and then there’ll be some scaffolding there to start considering the things that aren’t working so well, including maybe some of the not so great impacts that might be happening for kids in that family. 

Nicole Rollbusch (10:23): 

Yeah. Can you speak on those impacts a little bit? 

Alicia Phillips (10:29): 

I think, once again, this is going to be really dependent on the context of the substance use for this particular parent. And this is one of those things to guard against making assumptions because I think as workers, we can develop a real shorthand of going, “Oh, okay, they’re using this substance in this way at this frequency, so I’m going to assume all these other things are happening.” But every family is going to be managing a similar problem in a really unique way. 

It’s really allowing, giving yourself time for you and the client to figure out how this family really uniquely manages these problems, and that will help you understand what the impacts are for the children. We do know that the likely impacts when someone is really quite heavily dependent on a substance is that they’re using it in some ways to regulate their own emotions. And so it might be that they sit with a natural, very high level of anxiety and they’re using it to reduce that anxiety. And so it might be a conversation about how does that present then to their child? 

How does their child notice the difference when their parent’s been using this substance? And then it might be able to shift into a conversation about what’s it like for that child then to notice that mom or dad is a bit kind of numb, they’re a lot less anxious, but they also might be not so present. It has to be a bit of a discovery you’re doing together. As a clinician, it’s not just going in and telling them what might be happening in their family because you don’t really know. You’re really having a conversation together to try and figure out what this looks like for their family. 

Nicole Rollbusch (12:01): 

Yeah, I love that you’re really describing that real collaborative kind of process with a parent and that curiosity of moving away from those assumptions that you mentioned and really just looking at that family in front of you and being really interested in how their family works and perhaps how substance impacts that family in particular. But also, as you said before, acknowledging that substance use happens for a reason and it’s likely serving a purpose for that parent as well and being really curious about that and what that might be. 

Alicia Phillips (12:37): 

I think if we’re talking about working with parent with problematic substance use in mental health or AOD services or family services, you are not talking about working with only substance use. You’re going to have lots of real world problems happening. Substance use alone generally won’t lead people to services like mental health or AOD or family services. 

There’s going to be a number of different things. You need to hold all of that in mind for the client. The conversation is never going to be about just the substance use. And all those other things that are happening for your clients, they’re also happening for the children if the children are in their care as well. 

Nicole Rollbusch (13:17): 

Yes, so important to remember. And yeah, as you said, the substance use can be a result of other challenges that a family are facing. So it’s never going to be just about substance use. There’s likely other things going on for them as well, and as you say, their children. I wanted to ask you a bit about, I think practitioners can find it challenging to jump into these conversations. What are some of the common challenges that might occur when you’re having these conversations with parents about their children? 

Alicia Phillips (13:53): 

Yeah, I think that’s a really fair question. I think one of the challenges for practitioners who have developed a really good sense of being aware of what is this like for the child, the practitioners who can bring forward the child’s experience when they’re working with the parent might then start to feel a bit impatient about wanting to make things better. 

And I think this is a really tricky space to continue to build on your relationship working with the parent, holding the child’s experiences in mind and not rushing forward too quickly to try and fix it. It makes sense. Once you are understanding the impacts for the child, you do want things to be better for this family and you also need to bring the parent along with you. 

So it needs to happen at a pace that’s working for them as well. And I think that’s where sometimes we can inadvertently leap into judgement and creating a really shaming experience for the parent we’re working with, giving to that impatience a bit too much. I think it could be scary maybe to start the conversation for practitioners if this isn’t their usual way of practising, and that’s going to be made more difficult if they’re only starting the conversation because they’re getting a sense that they do need to start worrying about safety and risk. 

Don’t wait till then, start these conversations earlier, have the children in mind from the start. I think it’s also, you’re working with your client’s experience of stigma and judgement possibly over a very long time. We know that for most people accessing help for their substance use, they’ve taken many, many years to get to this point to walk in the door, and they’ve probably had many, many experiences of stigma and discrimination around their substance use. 

So some of the work around building trust and rapport is actually quite corrective work. You’re already maybe on the back foot because you’re trying to do some repair work at that point for the very real damage that stigma does over people’s lifetimes. 

Nicole Rollbusch (15:53): 

And I did want to ask you to speak a little bit more about shame and guilt because I think that seems to come up a lot, particularly when we are talking about parents who are using substances. So what role does the shame and guilt play in these conversations? And you’ve just touched on that a little bit, but can you speak a little bit more to that? 

Alicia Phillips (16:14): 

Shame is an impact from experiencing stigma and discrimination. A sensitivity to shame is also a real risk factor for developing a substance use problem as well. So you may be working with clients in this space who do have a high level of shame. We have some older ideas around challenging people, confronting people, trying to use shame to motivate people. 

We actually understand much better now that it’s not a useful space for people to be in. When people are feeling shamed, they’re actually not able to take on new information. They’re not connecting with you. Their systems have shut down to protect themselves. You’ve lost that connection once someone’s in that feeling of shame. 

And so a lot of the work in this space might be about how does someone manage their shame and feelings of overwhelm while doing this work? In family therapy, we have a phrase we use a lot, talking about the talking. So it’s kind of talking about how you’re going to be talking about difficult stuff, but talking about the talking first, what is this going to be like? How are you going to remain connected to your clients? 

How can they let you know when they’re heading into now overwhelmed, a sense of shame that’s going to get in the way of them being able to connect with you and continue to do the work? And I think that’s always going to be a big part of substance use work, and particularly when you’re working with parents and much more so for mothers because we have a lot of narratives in our society about mothers and what they should and shouldn’t be doing and particularly around substance use. 

Nicole Rollbusch (18:03): 

And I really like that talking about the talking you mentioned because it feels like there’s that sense of transparency around, and also it’s like we’re in this together, how do we want this to work rather than it feeling that disconnect that can sometimes happen of telling or doing to, you’re really sort of doing with when you’re having those conversations. And I wanted to ask a little bit about, because you’ve sort of touched on this a bit, but how can practitioners ensure they’re not inadvertently causing shame while still being able to have those conversations about children? 

Alicia Phillips (18:40): 

I think this is practitioners being aware of their own kind of biases and responses to drug use. I know particularly if they’re not working in the AOD field, specifically doing this work outside of that, people can have really strong reactions to the thoughts of someone using a certain substance in a certain way. So I guess when I’m thinking about shame and clients feeling really judged and maybe even defensive when they’re first coming to work with you, I really want practitioners to hold that kind of history of stigma in mind and how that might be adding to this. 

And I guess I might even share one experience that I had around really stigmatising treatment. The healthcare system a few years ago following a late miscarriage of a very wanted planned baby. And I was receiving lovely, compassionate care in the hospital from everyone I’d interacted with. And then after a few hours, a nurse came to take my blood and she noticed that I have scars from IV drug use many, many years earlier. And everything changed at that moment. 

She said a pretty mild comment. It was just, “Oh, well maybe it’s for the best.” And to me that just signaled, “Oh, everything’s changed.” And I don’t remember what the care was like in the next few hours after that, but it almost didn’t matter because for me, I’d kind of been told that I wasn’t deserving of this lovely, compassionate care that I was getting. And I think when I reflect on that, that’s how shame and stigma can play out when we’re working with clients using substances. 

So it might necessarily be about something you’ve done or said in the room at the time, but they’re carrying this history of ways that they’ve been judged that have had a real impact. And so some of your work is actually creating a different experience for them and healing some of that judgement and stigma that hasn’t come from you. It’s not the way that you would work, but is the reality of the experience for your client. 

Nicole Rollbusch (20:53): 

Yes. So important to keep that in mind and that those experiences may have potentially occurred for clients sitting in front of you and just how much that can really impact a client’s feelings about attending a service and where they might be at when they just walk in the front door. 

Alicia Phillips (21:12): 

I think a lot of practitioners would actually be shocked at the level of discrimination that their clients have experienced. And that’s because the practitioners listening to this, they aren’t stigmatising their clients in this way, but they are still managing the impacts of stigma that’s occurred. 

Nicole Rollbusch (21:31): 

Yes. And they can play a really important role in, as you mentioned earlier in the conversation, doing that work to heal those experiences and can really step up and make sure parents aren’t experiencing that in their service. They can make that choice that they’re providing them with a different experience. 

Narrator (21:55): 

Before we jump into the second half of today’s episode, make sure to check out one of Australia’s largest free collections of child and family mental health resources for practitioners. The Emerging Minds Families website has a range of content to support your work with children and families. You can explore other podcast episodes like these, webinars, videos, fact sheets, and more. Visit us today at emergingminds.com.au and discover your next resource, course, or conversation. 

Nicole Rollbusch (22:27): 

You touched on this a bit earlier as well, and a question that often comes up when practitioners are wanting to know about how to support parents who are using substances and talk with them about their children’s wellbeing is how do we hold parents accountable? That word accountable sort of comes up a fair bit or how do we tap into healthy guilt to help bring about change? And I think what you’ve described so far is there are lots of nuances in this work and I think there can be even misunderstanding around what it means to hold parents accountable or impose what’s termed healthy guilt in this scenario. Can you speak a bit more about that? 

Alicia Phillips (23:13): 

It’s really about how you believe people change. If a sense of healthy guilt is going to be a useful kind of agent for change for a particular client, then they will probably actually get there on their own. They probably don’t need you to be handing that guilt to them. Yeah, guilt does help motivate people to change things, but it’s only useful when it’s kind of an internal motivation. 

And the term accountability, I think it’s really about having a really good understanding of the context of your client’s substance use and the other things that are difficult for them. We really assess that really well, then it’s going to guide us as to what we believe they can and are capable of being accountable for. You might be working with a mom who’s using substances in a way that’s not great for her, not great for the kids, and she’s also stuck in a violent relationship. 

And so if we’re only asking her to be accountable for the substance use, but we’re not actually providing the services and support and accountability to the person using violence as well, it’s not going to be helpful. The priority there is going to be safety from violence rather than a focus all on the substance use. 

Nicole Rollbusch (24:35): 

Yeah, that gets me thinking about control and maybe this assumption that substance use is something that can be controlled. And if you’re just looking at it in isolation and not what the context is, then I think you said before that sometimes it can seem that substance use is kind of this easy thing to address and hone in on. But if we’re talking about accountability, there could be many things that are outside of the control of the person that you’re working with where they can’t make those changes. 

For example, a mother who may be in a family and domestic violence relationship, that’s not her responsibility, that’s not something that she can control. So yeah, I think when we start talking about accountability, it feels like that there’s this assumption that there’s choice and control over things that perhaps there’s not control over. 

Alicia Phillips (25:31): 

If it was easy to change this problem, your client would’ve done it by now. And if they could make these huge, difficult changes just based on advice alone, they also would’ve done it by now. So I think it’s allowing yourself to slow down and understand the complexity and the multiple factors have led to the substance use problem and that are keeping it going. 

Nicole Rollbusch (25:57): 

So I wanted to jump back to those really specific conversations about children and children’s wellbeing. And a really common barrier that gets raised is mandatory reporting. So practitioners know that it’s a requirement of their role, but describe feeling as though it shuts down conversations with parents. So how can practitioners balance child protection concerns with supporting parents and still being able to have these conversations about children and children’s wellbeing and not being afraid to delve into those because they’re concerned that it might mean a parent disengages? 

Alicia Phillips (26:39): 

Yeah, it’s a common question. And I guess for me, it makes sense that practitioners would find this space difficult if they’re only talking to their clients about their children once they’re kind of reaching that threshold of having to think if this is a mandatory report or not. And yes, our clients know we’re mandatory reporters and yeah, we’re going to be honest and upfront about that. But I think this fear also really holds us back from doing all that lovely work that could happen before a mandatory report. 

I think a lot of this work is not about waiting till you’ve got that threshold of risk. It’s actually about intervening a lot earlier and preventing mandatory reports. When you’re talking to clients or parents about their children, you are really kind of stepping in an early intervention space. And I think that doing that with all clients that are parents is going to increase practitioner skills in talking to clients about the children. 

And it’s really satisfying to do that work with someone and feel like this is preventative work. And then there’s a reality that sometimes you will reach a threshold where you are concerned enough about child safety that you need to make a mandatory report. Generally, this won’t surprise clients. They do understand we have this role. 

So giving them as much choice and voice in any reporting process, I think, being honest with them that this is happening, why it’s happening, if you can give them as much choice in that process as to how it’s going to happen, as to what’s their perspective, what would they like other services to know, that can help you maintain that relationship. I think being really clear and revisiting what mandatory reporting is and what is your responsibility in your role. I know a lot of practitioners will do this in their studies and early in their career. 

We’ll learn about mandatory reporting and it doesn’t necessarily get revisited once they’re doing the work. So get really clear on what needs to be reported. Some people might have this idea that any kind of parental illicit substance use needs to be reported, and that doesn’t actually fit with your mandatory reporting requirements. So if you’re really clear about what significant harm you are reporting and how you come to that decision, then it’s much easier to be really honest with your clients too about why this is happening. 

 Nicole Rollbusch (29:15): 

And I really like what you said before about moving away from that risk focus can really help these conversations and that it can be challenging when we get to a point where it’s like, oh, I’m hearing about kids and I’m worried about them, but you’ve not spoken about them before. So yeah, going back to what you said earlier in the conversation around just really normalising conversations about kids and being curious about them at the beginning and not necessarily with that risk lens, but with that curious lens around the parenting role and the things that are going well, as well as the things that might be challenging. 

Alicia Phillips (29:56): 

It’s helpful to start with a foundational belief that if you are working with a client and they’re a parent, that being a parent is a really big part of their identity and that their children are really important to them. Most parents absolutely love and treasure their children and want the best for them. 

And if we’re starting at that point, then we’re going to develop a much better understanding of what’s working well in this family, what values our client has as a parent, what hopes and dreams they have for their children. This is a really good starting point for any conversation with a parent about their child. So it’s not going in with that assumption that you’re going to be talking about risk and problems. 

Nicole Rollbusch (30:47): 

Kind of reminds me of parents sometimes being described as defensive or resistant to conversations. I think that sort of gets thrown in there as well, in those conversations around mandatory reporting and talking about children. How can we understand this presentation from parents in a way that can support practitioners to have these conversations? Because I think when you feel like you’re going to get met with defensiveness or resistance as it can be termed, can make practitioners feel like they don’t necessarily want to go there. So how can we look at that in a bit of a different way or understand what might look like defensiveness or resistance in a bit of a different way? 

Alicia Phillips (31:34): 

I think it’s helpful to think of the defensiveness as protective in some way. This parent is either being protective of their children, their family because services are only ever having this conversation with them with an assumption about all the things that are going wrong. So it makes sense that someone wants to protect themselves from more conversations like that. 

It might also be that they’re defensive because they don’t think that you can be helpful to them and their children. And so it’s about being okay with that defensiveness. There is still good intentions behind it. It’s either protecting themselves from just feeling emotions that might be too difficult in that moment, or it’s protecting them against things that haven’t gone so well for them in the past when they’ve interacted with services. 

Nicole Rollbusch (32:26): 

Yeah, I really appreciate that idea of seeing something as protective rather than that more negative connotation that perhaps the way that parents might respond can be seen sometimes. So if we frame it as protective, it feels more possible for these conversations to happen. And you mentioned before about parenting values, delving into what’s important to parents. How can practitioners support parents to do this and why can that be a really valuable strategy when we’re working with parents who are using substances? 

Alicia Phillips (33:06): 

I think it’s a valuable strategy for a few different reasons. We know that actually one of the ways that people do change their behaviour is when they do find that their behaviour doesn’t quite meet up with their values. So if someone is considering changing their substance use, then talking about values is likely be part of that work anyway. Talking about their values as a parent is going to help you both understand what is that really good stuff that’s sitting there? 

What is it that they would like to be even better for their family and for their kids? Yeah, values is how you get to that. And I guess people won’t necessarily recognise that they hold values or that term mightn’t be so useful. So it might be a real about exploring together what that means and what are the things that they know are really important to them around what their kids need. That conversation will help uncover what their values are. 

Nicole Rollbusch (34:03): 

As you say, values might not be something that a parent has been asked about before or thought to think about. Yeah, so I really like the idea of exploring what are values and really taking it back to understanding what values can be. And so yeah, there’s sort of that scaffolding involved as well around what values are too. 

Alicia Phillips (34:29): 

And I think a useful way to start their conversation is also just asks them what they hope for their children. Where do they hope their children will be in a few years time? And that will help you to uncover what core values are sitting there as well for them. 

Nicole Rollbusch (34:49): 

And as you said before, that this can also lead to having conversations about what they would like to be different or perhaps how they would like to live more closely to those values which can lead to behaviour change. 

Alicia Phillips (35:04): 

Yes, and a much more evidence-based way to understand behaviour change than thinking about terms like healthy guilt or accountability. 

Nicole Rollbusch (35:14): 

We know this work isn’t solo work. We need to work with other services and get support from those around us when we are doing this work. How can practitioners best collaborate with other services or within their own service to best support both the child and the parent? 

Alicia Phillips (35:38): 

For practitioners, you’re right, this isn’t solo work. We’re generally working in teams. We have peers, supervisors. Yeah, being really aware of how you use that to help you stay in the work and stay well doing this work. And for clients, a lot of the work for someone when they are changing their substance use is actually about reconnecting with community. 

Sometimes it might be about moving out of the drug use community and rejoining more mainstream community. So the collaboration piece will be part of the work. How do they interact with their children’s school? Do they have their own doctor and healthcare? So you’re wanting people to reconnect with all those services that will keep them well as they do change things and will help. No family can exist in isolation, so they are going to need these services to be there when you are stepping out. 

Nicole Rollbusch (36:40): 

Yeah. So really important to be thinking about your own support network, professional support network as the practitioner, but also the services that can make up the family’s support network as well. So we’re coming to the end of our time together, but before we go, I just wanted to ask if you wanted to add anything that we haven’t covered. 

Alicia Phillips (37:06): 

I think there’s so much potential for this work to happen in lots of different services, not just in alcohol and other drug services, and that a really kind of curious, compassionate response can make a huge difference for parents in this space and the small changes can also make huge difference for children of your clients in this space too. So it’s not always going to be about the big dramatic shift from addiction to a substance to not using it all. Sometimes it’ll just be those lots of little steps on the way that are going to make a huge difference for your client and their children. 

Nicole Rollbusch (37:46): 

That’s a great message to end on, I think. So thank you so much, Alicia, for joining us. It’s been a real pleasure to chat with you. 

Alicia Phillips (37:54): 

Thank you, Nicole. 

Nicole Rollbusch (37:59): 

Thanks once again to our listeners for joining us. We’ll be back with a new episode next month. In the meantime, explore our catalogue of over 200 episodes, and we hope you’ll join us again soon. 

Narrator (38:11): 

Visit our website today at emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practice. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds, the centre is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability, and Ageing under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.