Heather Ross is the mother of a child who struggled with addiction, a Certified Parent Support Coach, Invitation to Change Certified, CRAFT trained, and the host of the popular podcast called Living with Your Child’s Addiction.

Heather tried all the approaches the professionals recommended even though they didn’t feel right to her. She tried tough love, waiting for her daughter to hit rock bottom, and other traditional approaches that are confrontational and based on stigma rather than science. Those approaches caused chaos in her home, intense stress for the whole family, and destroyed her relationship with her daughter. 

Feeling desperate and defeated, Heather stopped everything that wasn’t working and tried something completely different.

The new approaches that she learned from coaching and CRAFT empowered her to support her daughter based on her values as a mother. 

She brought unconditional love, stability, and emotional health to her relationship with her daughter. Heather educated herself about substance use disorder, started focusing on self-care, learned how to set boundaries and allow natural consequences, and started using positive communication skills.

The changes she made not only repaired but strengthened her relationship with her daughter. 

It also created space for her daughter to seek treatment and start her own recovery journey. The recovery path is not a straight line though. It can be filled with many challenging twists and turns. Tragically, Heather’s daughter had a reoccurrence of use and was given a deadly dose of fentanyl.

After the devastating loss of her daughter, Heather called on her tools and resilience to lean into helping more parents and using science-backed education to change the stigma around substance use. She’s grateful that she worked hard on herself, learned how to support her daughter, and created a beautiful loving relationship with her.

Heather has a 1:1 coaching program for parents that is family centered, based on science, and works during recovery or active substance use. She believes that parents have more power than they realize and the best gift they can give their child is a healthy parent.