Raising Families Starts With Helping Parents Find Their Footing
Welcome to Mamahood After Trauma, a space created to support mothers as they heal from trauma, break generational cycles, and discover healthier ways of showing up for themselves and their families. Here, you’ll find honest conversations, practical tools, and encouragement to remind you that healing is possible, one step at a time.
Introduction
Parenting can feel overwhelming when the demands keep piling up and so much of life feels outside your control. Between school, homework, activities, and the pressures of everyday life, it can be difficult to find a moment to breathe. Dr. Jerry Weichman, a clinical psychologist who has spent 27 years working with adolescents and their families, shares practical ways parents can manage stress, focus on what they can control, and reconnect with a sense of purpose. His message is a reminder that we cannot control everything happening around us, but we can learn to respond differently and make small choices that help us move forward.
Table of Contents
“The only control we have”
The problem with putting your nose in it
Where the mind goes—and what comes into view
Put some energy back out
“Everybody looks like they’re 10% zombies,” says Dr. Jerry Weichman, describing the parents he sees out in the world. It’s an image both funny and bleak: a population running on fumes, trying to get children to school, finish homework, make practice, and stay calm while life keeps adding one more thing.
Weichman has spent 27 years working with adolescents and their families at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach. He is also raising three children of his own, currently in elementary, middle and high school. His professional and personal lives meet in one blunt observation: modern parenting can feel like drinking from a fire hose.
What can a parent do when the water is already coming in?
“The only control we have”
Weichman’s answer starts with a distinction that sounds simple until the school run goes sideways: parents can’t control most of what happens around them. They can control how they respond, and how much effort they put into what they do.
“The amount of homework, the drivers in front of us who are distracted on their phones, being late places”—these are among the pressures parents contend with, he says. Trying to mentally manage what lies outside their control adds another layer of stress.
He compares the feeling to a submarine taking on water. Therapeutic tools can act like pumps, helping a person steady themselves. But when the hatch is still open and water is rushing in, the pumps cannot keep up.
“The minute you go, ‘This person or this situation does not control how I think or feel—I do,’ you take that power back.”
The point is not that people can choose their way out of every hardship. Weichman is speaking about the smaller, repeated moments in which stress starts to take over: noticing anger or anxiety rising, pausing for a breath, and separating what is happening from how to respond.
That pause, he says, can make the other tools more useful.
The problem with putting your nose in it
Weichman talks to children in images. When he wants to explain rumination, the habit of repeatedly turning a problem over in your mind, he asks them whether they have ever picked up dog poop, brought it close to their face, and inspected what the dog ate.
“No,” they tell him.
That, he says, is what people do when they take something unpleasant in life and keep magnifying it.
“Thoughts create problems,” he says. “Actions fix problems.” If something needs attention, the useful question is not how long you can examine it, but what action might improve the situation or help you get around it.
The joke makes a serious point without dressing it up. Attention can make a problem feel bigger; action can change what happens next.
Weichman’s other everyday prescription is less comic and more practical: exercise. It does not require a gym or a long workout. A walk, or even five minutes of running, can help, he says. Getting the body moving earlier in the day is one small intervention he recommends for mental health.
Where the mind goes—and what comes into view
Weichman describes time through another driving metaphor. Spend too long looking behind you, and you risk crashing into what is in front of you. The past can pull people back into painful memories; the future can invite predictions about what might happen. Neither can be controlled from the present.
To return to the moment, he suggests paying attention to the five senses: what you see, smell, taste and hear, and what you physically feel on your body. Notice the pressure of a chair beneath you, for instance, not only the sensations inside you.
He calls the present a “warm, protective little bubble.” The phrase is gentler than his submarine and dog-poop analogies, but the direction is the same: find what is real and available now, rather than getting swept into what has already happened or might happen next.
Weichman also argues that the lens through which people interpret an event shapes the thoughts and feelings that follow. Looking only for what is wrong can become a habit, he says, and that habit can spread. He has traced a high-school student’s low self-esteem back to a pattern that began in middle school: focusing on one thing that felt wrong, then generalizing that judgment to other parts of life.
Put some energy back out
The final shift in Weichman’s advice is outward. He worries that people have become preoccupied with themselves, with what they think, believe and want others to believe. That focus, he says, can crowd out a sense of purpose.
Purpose does not have to come from achievement or acquisition. It can come from who a person is there for. A little more eye contact, a smile, or warmth in the voice can change someone else’s day and offer a break from one’s own negative thoughts.
Weichman remembers the “pay it forward” movement, when people would pay for the order behind them and leave. It lasted only a few months, he recalls, but the feeling stayed with him.
“I really do think we can get back to that,” he says. “But we’ve got to make it about putting our energy out to other people.”
The world may still feel unstable. Parents may still be running on fumes. But in Weichman’s account, the first step is not to take responsibility for everything coming through the hatch. It is to close what can be closed, find the next manageable action, and make sure there is enough of you left to offer someone else a little steadiness.
Resources
Emily Cleghorn’s Free Quiz: “Find Your Next Step to Calm and Healing”.
Dr. Jerry Weichman's Podcast Website: raisingfamiliespodcast.com
Dr. Jerry Weichman's Website: drjerryweichman.com
If you’re a mama healing from trauma and seeking a new way forward, remember: You deserve support, your child deserves joy, and together, you can break cycles and build a brighter future.
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