This quote found me during a season of parenting when everything felt like it was falling apart.
When the child I once knew seemed to vanish. When meltdowns, shutdowns, emergency room visits, hospital stays, and struggling to keep a teen alive who didn’t want to be here, and complete withdrawal became the norm.
This was a time when connection with my child felt out of reach, and with the constant buzz of survival, the ever-present current of my life.
I felt left holding all the pieces. Frantically juggling, trying to hold it all together.
Holding on…Holding on…
“Will we ever survive this?” I wondered while losing myself in the process.
This is burnout. And if your child is experiencing autistic burnout, you may be too.
It’s disorienting, frightening, and isolating. And it was the beginning of a painful but profound spiritual awakening for me.
Not the kind painted in pastel colours and mantras. But the kind that begins in the dark night of the soul. The kind that rips you apart and starts with surrender. Not out of choice, but because there is nothing left to do.
The Emotional and Spiritual Cost of Holding It All
There’s a quote I come back to often: “No mud, no lotus.”
The mud is the mess. The grief. The anger. The parts of parenting no one warned you about.
The thoughts that wake you up at 3 am and refuse to leave the recesses of your mind.
You might be feeling deep compassion for your child — but also guilt, rage, resentment, despair, or a longing to escape.
As you live with the emotional impact of child burnout, you may be asking yourself, “Who am I if I can’t fix this?” “Will things ever get better, and what happens if it doesn’t?” “Am I allowed to grieve what I thought this would be, and do these feelings make me a bad parent?”
These questions don’t mark your failure — They mark your initiation.
Why Burnout Can Be a Spiritual Awakening (Even If It Feels Like a Breakdown)
What happens to a caterpillar inside the cocoon isn’t a gentle rearranging. It dissolves. It becomes goo.
Many parents (myself included) describe this time as a complete loss of identity.
And still… Somewhere underneath all the breakdown, a new way of being begins to stir.
Not because you’re choosing to “grow.” But because you have to become someone new in order to survive this — and to walk alongside your child with love, presence, and truth.
Connection to those outside of you falls away, and the only thing left to cling to is the connection to self.
To be with the fear, the grief, the silence, the slowing down.
This is the cave you didn’t want to enter. And inside it lives something more essential than advice or strategies:
Your soul. Your intuition. Your truth. Your capacity to be with what is, without rushing toward quick fixes or “better.”
This is a spiritual awakening. Not out of ease — but out of the fire.
In my book, When She Wakes, She Will Move Mountains (which I wrote while I experienced my own awakening), I recounted:
By nature, caves are dark, sometimes tight, scary, and uncomfortable. Our caves are often silent, and still, and, more often than not, we are alone. The cave needs to be dark and narrow so it can limit the amount of outside stimulus we have so we can focus better on our interior light, and the journey within. The cave needs to be silent so that we can locate and listen to the gentle hum of our inner life source.
Why Spiritual Health is Good For Mental Health
Soul care isn’t just poetic — it’s powerful.
Dr. Lisa Miller, a clinical psychologist and researcher, found that a nurtured spiritual life (not religious obligation, but an inner felt sense of connection) reduces the risk of depression by up to 80% in young people — and protects against trauma in adults.
Her research shows that spiritual awareness lights up the same areas of the brain as deep empathy, intuition, and meaning-making.
And when we are parenting in a storm, we need more than coping strategies. We need meaning. We need connection. We need to feel held by something larger than ourselves.
How to Move Through the Goo (Not Around It)
If you’re in this space — the dark, the goo, the cave — I want you to know:
There is nothing wrong with you. You are not weak. You are not failing.
You are in the process of unbecoming so that something softer, truer, and more sustainable can emerge.
You will emerge, marked by this experience, forever changed.
Just as I was marked, by the tattoos I chose to have emprinted on my skin (one of them the quote I started this blog with), but with marks so deep that they are visible to no one except me.
It’s not a place for quick fixes. It’s a space for slowing down, being witnessed, and reclaiming your soul in the midst of it all.
Because sometimes, the most sacred thing we can do is not “fix” our way out of the dark — but stay in it long enough for the light to return from within.
Join Held: A Soul Circle for Parents in Burnout
You are being reshaped — not ruined. And one day, when the light returns (as it always does), you may look back on this time not just as the hardest season…
…but as the season that brought you home to yourself.
Columbia University’s Spirituality Mind Body Institute
Research: Spirituality protective against depression (Miller et al., 2012, JAMA Psychiatry)
The Person Who Wrote This Blog
Hi, I’m Tanya Valentin, an AuDHD parent, family coach, author, and podcaster. I guide parents of Autistic and ADHD kids through burnout recovery using a neuro-affirming, trauma-informed approach.
As a parent of three autistic teens, I know firsthand how isolating and exhausting this journey can be. That’s why I created From Burnout to Balance, a space where parents can find real, practical answers to help their child recover from burnout and a supportive community, so no parent has to navigate it alone.
