Tanya (00:02.798)
Hello and welcome to this third season of Parenting Neurodivergent Kids Together. It is a great honor to be back in 2025 and to be serving you and your family with this podcast. Now before I start with today's topic on how burnout changes us as parents,

I just want to acknowledge that it's been a while since we have dropped a new episode and a lot of this is because the end of the year is usually a really difficult time for me. My energy is generally a lot lower and a lot of the time because of you know lots of things I end up

near the edge of burnout towards the end of the year myself and it's also a time where a lot of stuff has traditionally over the last three or four years happened for our family with my children it's been a lot of crisis stuff happening at the end of the year and even though last year we didn't have any of that happen and everybody was in a good

place.

Tanya (01:33.551)
our body remembers and it always takes a toll on me, always takes a toll on my kids it's like we are experiencing some type of group PTSD from that time in our shared past and so it means that I spend a lot of time just feeling like things are a little bit off

I don't have a lot of energy for things and creating stuff on the podcast and all the back end stuff that goes along with having a podcast just wasn't accessible for me. But I'm back and I just want to talk about how this podcast might change a bit this year. Last two seasons I had a lot of guests.

guests on the podcast and I do aim to have lots of guests on the podcast again this year but I also am going to be taking the opportunity to record some solo episodes this year. I know I did one or two last year but I really have some things that I want to share with you and so I am going to be taking a bit of time

to be sharing some of the things that have been percolating in the back for me or you know just things that are close to me and my heart with you on this podcast. So today I want to talk about Autistic Burnout or Neurodivergent Burnout as some of us know it and the change that happens for us.

when our kids go into burnout. Now for many parents, many many many parents, a lot of us arrive in burnout or especially our first experience of burnout and we're utterly unprepared for it. We don't know about burnout. Many of us don't even realize that our kids are autistic. We have had an inkling

Tanya (04:01.15)
over the last few months, the last few years that something has changed for our kids. We notice that they're struggling and there has a lot of families there is this period where we're just desperately trying lots of different things to help our kids because we can see that they are struggling we can see that they're getting worse. I know for

for my family, we had spent a couple of years before my daughter had burnout, seeing counselors, seeing therapists, trying different medications because we could see that, especially my two older kids, that their mental health was struggling. But everything we were trying just wasn't working. And then we ended up

in a place where we were deep deep crisis. For us it meant that our child took an overdose and ended up in hospital.

It's a moment of real shock when this happens to you, to your family, to your child. Because even though we were busy leading up to this point, we were still trying to hold on to our old lives. We could see things needed to change, but we didn't really want to change them. And then

We ended up in this place where there was no other opportunity or no other option but to change.

Tanya (06:02.224)
and

Even though, you know, our kids and their health, their wellbeing for you, it might be a mental health crisis, or it might just be that your child is in bed, they can't get out of bed, they can't leave their room. You might notice things like, you know, they can't take care of themselves, things that they used to be able to do for themselves, they can't do anymore.

You notice things that changes the sleep. You might be noticing more extreme meltdowns, shutdowns, increased sensory sensitivity, all those things that make it really difficult for our children to just manage normal life. It puts a big stop to a lot of the things that you might have been doing with your family.

and you reach this place where you really have to stop, re-evaluate your priorities and ask yourself what is really important for me and my family and what were the steps that led us into this place and there is a separation that happens

between us and the outside world and I really do feel like it's a necessary separation we have to reach this point where we're blocking out the world we are intentionally blocking out the world because up until then we have been doing all the things listening to all the people and

Tanya (08:03.702)
doing things that actually on a certain level didn't feel right to us, but we were just following advice because we trusted that people, know, like doctors and psychiatrists and CAMHS and mental health teams, they knew what they were doing, you know, obviously because they've been trained to deal with this and we've been doing all these things.

and then we've reached this place of crisis and there's a lot of questioning that happens for us you know what does it mean about me as a parent that I have a child that no longer wants to be on this earth that is so unwell that they can't leave their room

We live in a society where parents are judged by how healthy their kids are, how well they're thriving, how well adjusted they are, how well behaved they are. And when we look at our life at that particular point,

Tanya (09:16.91)
And we hold what is happening for our kids up against those indicators of being a good parent, a successful parent. You can't but feel like you're a failure.

I also want to talk here about the fact that we spend so much time outside of ourselves looking for answers outside of ourselves. You know, a lot of times because we don't want to trust ourselves, we it's frightening to do it alone. We might ask AI, know, chat, GPT, Google for an answer.

for our problem rather than tuning into ourselves and doing the work to try and figure this out for ourselves.

One of the things that just when I was in this very first experience of being with my daughter, it felt like, and I don't know if any of you who listening to this episode have experienced this, but it felt like I had been living in this sort of place where

Tanya (10:36.77)
There had been sort of shadows, like shadowy areas in my life, places that I knew needed attention, but...

I just couldn't, I didn't have the courage. I didn't have the tools. It just felt too exhausting to go and examine those areas. And then when my daughter was in the hospital, it felt like somebody had come into the shadowy places of my life and just opened all the curtains, turned on the spotlights and

I could just see all these places that needed my attention that I'd been ignoring and I just couldn't ignore them anymore. And it was overwhelming.

Tanya (11:34.924)
sent me into a very, very dark place. And I felt there was a lot of like questioning that was happening, questioning about who I am as a person, questioning about what does it mean to be a good parent, a good daughter, a good woman, a good girl. I'm the type of person who spent most of her life

that I now know in survival mode, in fawn mode. I am a late diagnosed autistic ADHD person. I didn't know this about myself. And so I spent a lot of time highly masking. And I reached this point when I was there with my daughter and I didn't know who I was anymore.

and I felt found myself in a very very difficult place of grieving of letting go of realizing that my life as I knew it

was about to change and it had to change. It had to change because my children needed it to change. If I was going to be able to keep them alive and to help them to recover and for us as a family to survive this. And you know there's all these emotions and stages that go with grief. There are

There's the anger, there's the denial, there's the bargaining stage, there's the sadness or depression stage, there's moments of acceptance.

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and I felt like I was this like ping pong ball or like in a pinball machine just kind of been

you know catapulted from one end from one emotion to another emotion there were days where

I just had to hold everybody together.

And that was keeping everybody safe, keeping everybody alive was my job for the day.

and

Tanya (14:13.102)
I had to really confront the places in me that had never known love and all the places that I expected for things to be a certain way to receive support or

Tanya (14:33.395)
and where I wasn't going to receive that support.

And so the separation was essential. I needed to tune out everything outside of me so that I could come back to myself. I could rediscover myself. But that I also could tune back into my child and what they needed from me. And this was a time of rebuilding trust.

I had spent so much time doing things that went against my core beliefs as a person and also broke down the trust between me and my children.

and so this was a time of hearing from my children all the things that they've thought were made me a bad parent all the mistakes that I've made and to be able to just sit there and listen to them listen to them talk without trying to defend myself but just truly listening

Even though it was so hard, it was such a healing experience for us and our family.

Tanya (16:07.534)
I couldn't have done it if I had had all had everybody sort of talking in my ear. I had to do things like remove myself from groups, remove myself from social media. For a while I didn't even talk to the people in my extended family, my friends, because I just I couldn't.

didn't have the energy for one to be able to do any of these things keep any of those relationships alive but also I needed that time I needed that time to think and to me it felt it felt like an awakening and I know that that is sometimes you know used in a

spiritual woohoo kind of way but it really did feel like I had awakened to myself and for a lot of time I wrote I just wrote heaps of stream of consciousness stuff I wrote heaps of aha moments things that I had you know questioning things that I was learning it even just in the end it ended up being a book

which is available and we're trying to,

Tanya (17:42.318)
my book here or you know ask for sales but that's how I process this experience.

And the thing is, is that

through this transformation, can be an incredibly terrifying place to be because we're changing, we're changing so much as a person and the people around us, the ideals, the society that we live in, the community that we live in is not changing, they're staying the same and so the separation becomes isolation.

because people just don't get it. just don't understand. And it's not like, you know, they

They don't know how to be around us or they don't know how to talk to us or they don't know how to help us because that can really happen. is this sort of, you know, the stigma still around mental health and people don't know how to deal with things that they don't understand.

Tanya (18:59.928)
But there is this internal isolation that happens because we spend so much time working on ourselves, working on our parenting, way that we're supporting our children, tuning into what actually works for us, that going out into the outside world, speaking to other people, mingling with the same people that we perhaps did before,

It's incredibly confronting because those people haven't changed the way that we did.

Tanya (19:42.646)
It can be both really heartbreaking and make you feel really lonely even though you're surrounded by people, perhaps like a family gathering or a friend's barbecue. But it's also incredibly triggering because the things that we might have believed or the things that got our kids into the position that they're into now, people are still talking in that way.

They're still, you know, using that as a way to parent their own kids. And we just want to sometimes talk about why that isn't the best way or educate people.

Tanya (20:33.048)
But we know that if we're going to talk up about that, A, we might be dismissed or we might be attacked. But it will just aggravate things. It'll just make things worse. And so we stay quiet a lot of the time. Or we just stop going to these things.

And there's this real awkwardness that happens because of this internal change. We are not the same person anymore.

and that's why people around us don't get it and it doesn't just happen to people outside of our family circle this can happen inside our family as well our immediate family you know what often happens when our kids end up going into burnout is that one parent if we are in a relationship with a co-parent or a partner is that

One parent goes into key giving mode and they spend all the time with their child. They're doing all this internal work. They're doing all the research. They're desperately trying to find answers because a lot of times answers aren't that easy to come by. And we have the other parent who is focused more on, you know, keeping a roof over your head, keeping food on the table.

keeping the lights on the power on all these things that are really important practical things but they can become this real disconnect between us and our partner and let's face it you know parenting is a complex and hard job we come into parenting with our own ideas about parenting and what is good parenting and if we haven't had an opportunity to

Tanya (22:34.112)
really reflect on our parenting we just parent the way that our parents parented us whether that was good or bad and

So we have one parent that's doing all the work, that's doing all the changing and the other parent that perhaps isn't at the same level. We can be at different places in our journey and there can be even be the separation in our family where we feel like it's us and our child against our partner or if we're on the other hand and we're the breadwinner can feel like our partner and our child against us.

and that can cause a lot of really complex issues in our families and our immediate families and I think that's one of the reasons why

This is so hard on our relationships with our significant other. Because there's just so many things that is going on. So much change is happening. You know, we talk about the person that's doing the caregiving often feels really touched out. We're doing most of the emotional regulation. We're co-regulating for our child. And that

is invisible and exhausting work. It takes a lot out of us to do that for our children. And so that doesn't leave us much bandwidth to be emotionally available for our partners.

Tanya (24:19.206)
and there is just all this separation isolation that happens

But.

we need, the irony of this is that we need to be around other people.

we need, we can't heal in isolation. There has to become a point where we start to let other people back in. But because in the past we have been hurt by this, we've been rejected, we've been attacked.

it's very hard to let people back in, it's very hard to trust, it's very hard to put ourselves back on the line or our heart back on the line and because we just don't want to be hurt again and we're tired, we're exhausted, we don't want to have to explain ourselves or educate other people about what's going on for us, what's going on for our family.

Tanya (25:34.018)
And that is why being around other people, other families, other parents who have been through not the same situation but a similar situation is so healing. In my job I work with families who are helping their children to heal from burnout.

Often the time where we're working together is the first time the parent has been truly able to express how they're really feeling. It's the first safe place that they've had to talk about how hard this experience is for them.

And that itself is incredibly healing. And then in my group programs where we have fortnightly catch ups with between families that I'm working with, either in my one to one or my group program, you know, when families start talking to each other, and they realize that the other person they're speaking to gets it, an hour isn't long enough.

because it's like the floodgates are open and

meeting somebody else that gets it. It's just so, powerful. And that's why I have committed this year to creating more safe places for parents to meet and talk and process this experience. And I'm doing it in a few different ways. So the first one is this podcast. You know, if you

Tanya (27:28.512)
If this episode is resonating for you, share it with someone that you love, family member, another parent that you know who's going through this. Comment, start a little chat, wherever you are seeing this podcast, comment. And I am going to be having a monthly free masterclass called Healing Together, Parenting Through Burnout.

And this is going to be a safe place for parents to come together to start that healing process. And to. Get that validation, get that support, feel seen, feel understood. And then there is also the opportunity for you to work with me in a paid way. Either in my one to one practice.

But also my group program and I hope that you don't mind me just talking a little bit about my group program because it is amazing. There is a course component to it which is kind of like a toolbox that gives you understanding and tools to help you to navigate through burnout with your child. But there is also this opportunity to

meet other families in a way that you know is safe because I've vetted these families. It's not like you know when you go into a Facebook group or a big public group where you're not sure if it is safe, if it's safe to talk. So we have these fortnightly opportunities for parents around the world to meet up which is amazing and

Tanya (29:24.546)
The other great thing about this, even though it's a paid program, you can join any time and after the initial investment in the program, you can stay for as long as you would like, as long as you need. There is no sort of ongoing like, you know, annual fee or anything like that, because I know how long burnout can take to

navigate. Sometimes it can just take a few months but sometimes it can take years and it's important to have people in your corner that support you while you navigate this.

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So if you would like to find out about the master class and how you can register for that, or if you would like to give my group program a go, do have a 14 day risk free trial where you will receive the first two modules of my course.

You will have the opportunity to come to one of the group sessions and meet the other families. You'll also be joined to our off social media group chat and see, you know, try it out. See if this is the right fit for you. So the details are in there and.

Tanya (31:01.25)
whatever you decide to do, if you're just wanting to listen to this and you're kind of dabbling, just know that you were not meant to shoulder this alone. taking time to support yourself as a parent is really important because you even though you are focused on your child, you're also worthy of healing and you deserve community support and friendship.

Tanya (31:35.416)
So let me know in the comments if this has landed for you, if you resonate. And I look forward to chatting to you again soon.