Many of you know that we suddenly lost my husband due to a blood clot in 2021. It has been a bumpy journey with grief for me and my children since then. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I discuss how I’ve helped my kids with anxiety and OCD navigate grief, what I discovered about loss and my new children’s grief book.
To order your copy of The Grief Rock: Understanding Grief and Love click here: https://amzn.to/3W9KnaY
Raising kids with anxiety or OCD is hard enough. But when you add chronic pain to your daily routine it can push you over the edge. Often we backburner our own issues. We tell ourselves that we don’t have time for our struggles. That we don’t have time to address our needs. We push through and do more damage in the end. But the truth is if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t be able to effectively take care of your child. Helping a child with anxiety or OCD is exhausting and chronic pain will only add to that fatigue. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk to Dr. Andrea Durand, my go-to expert on all things pain related. She explores our relationship with chronic pain and discusses ways we can address the pain to minimize its impact on our daily lives.
Shaun Flores had been suffering from OCD for years without knowing it. He hopped from OCD theme to OCD theme, listening to OCD’s lies and searching for certainty with each new worry. It wasn’t until 2022, when he finally met the right therapist, that he learned that all of his fears had one explanation, OCD. Shaun has turned his OCD pain into a passion to advocate. Since his diagnosis he has added a new face to the OCD advocacy scene. A face that was desperately underrepresented. As a black man, he is helping normalize a disorder that doesn’t care about race, ethnicity or gender. In this week’s episode of the AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I had the honor to talk to Shaun about his journey with OCD and the incredible work he is doing to help others.
We all want our kids with anxiety or OCD to use coping skills to deal with anxiety, overwhelm, and dysregulation. But what happens when they refuse to use them? In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I talked to my go-to expert on coping skills, best-selling author and therapist, Janine Halloran. In this episode, Janine and I discuss why some kids refuse to use coping skills and what approaches to use in order to help them embrace these tools.
When we are in the trenches trying to help our kids with anxiety or OCD it can be hard to think of our kids flourishing. Often, however, it is within the struggle itself that some kids can find resiliency and purpose. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I invited Stephanie Krauss, author of Whole Child, Whole Life, to discuss her own journey with her son’s OCD as well as elements of her new book that offer a shift in perspective.
If you are parenting a child with OCD you might be scouring the internet looking for ways to help your child. It can be such a relief when you finally stumble on the right approaches to help your children with OCD. You might have found the right OCD therapist or the right OCD support online. Often when we find these resources we dive head first into changing things at home. It can be exciting when you learn that there is a treatment approach for OCD that is highly effective. You might want to start doing ERP (Exposure Response Prevention) right away. But often we are missing some foundational steps. We haven’t poured the concrete and yet we are already building a house. In this week’s Youtube video, I talk about the importance of assessing where your child or teen is at before jumping in with OCD interventions.
When we are raising kids with OCD it is important that we fully understand the therapeutic approaches our kids are being taught in therapy. Ultimately we will want our kids to be able to utilize those tools throughout their life. The use of imaginal scripts can be an effective tool in their OCD toolbox. In this episode of the AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore what imaginal scripts are, how to write an effective one and the most common pitfalls that make them less effective.
Anxiety and OCD can impact executive functioning in so many different ways. When our children are being bombarded with upsetting thoughts, executive functioning skills can go out the window. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I invited Rachel Kapp and Stephanie Pitts, educational therapists and the hosts of the Learn Smarter Podcast, to discuss ways we can help our kids improve their executive functioning skills.
Here are the top 5 podcast episodes I would listen to if you are new to helping your child or teen with OCD.
One of the most common anxiety themes is the fear of choking. Kids with this fear often hyperfocus on what they eat and how they eat. At its worst they can avoid all sorts of foods that they feel are “unsafe.” This can limit their diet and cause nutritional issues. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore the many ways a choking fear can show up, how the fear grows and strategies to help your child move through the fear.
Anxiety and OCD can hit self-esteem hard. Having self-compassion and self-love can be an uphill battle. How do we talk to ourselves? How much self-compassion do we show ourselves? Resilience is another key factor in our kids’ long term success. Resilience doesn’t mean we don’t crumble. It is what we do with the crumbs that counts. How do we show up to our child’s struggles? How do we show up to our own life’s struggles? In this week’s episode of the AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about how to improve our own self-compassion and resilience to model those skills for our children.
OCD progress is not linear. It is often actually bumpy along the way. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I explore why things can get messy and how to see beyond the messy to recognize the OCD progress.
OCD wants us to take its threats seriously. It wants us to debate with it, argue, and come up with solutions to circumvent the issues it presents. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I explore how these issues can show up and how we can teach our kids and teens to not get caught in OCD’s trap.
