Episode Details

When autonomy is low, meaning has to be high. That is what I learned during the two years I spent as a full-time caregiver for my older son, isolated in our home, and putting myself physically between him and his eighteen-month-old brother when things got bad.

In this episode I share how I found a sustaining "why" during that period, and how other families I have worked with have found theirs. I also introduce a practical tool I call the "hang your hat on the day" goal: a way of redirecting from goals that depend on another person's behavior to goals that are entirely within your own control, so that you can give yourself genuine credit for what you are doing every single day.

Key Takeaways

• When Autonomy Is Low, Meaning Has to Be High | 00:00:00 Parenting a PDA child or teen introduces an almost constant rock-and-a-hard-place dynamic: every choice has a cost, and there is no option that gives you genuine autonomy without a trade-off. When you want to go to the gym, there is a cost when you come back. When your partner takes over for a few hours, there is a cost to their energy level. That sustained low autonomy is depleting in a way most people around us will never understand, and what I have found, from my own experience and across the families I work with, is that meaning is the variable that makes it sustainable. We need a "why" that gets us through the day.

• How I Found My "Why" in the Basement | 00:01:46 I was in the basement of our home in Michigan, putting myself between my older and younger sons when things got violent, feeling my own violent rage moving through me that I want to name as normal rather than shameful. My older son needed constant undivided attention and dopamine or he would go after his brother, and I was isolated, sensory overwhelmed, and out of resources. I had been reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and had a seed planted about the idea that a clear why makes almost anything endurable. In that moment in the basement I realized: my entire doctorate had been on nonviolence and grassroots peace building and there I was, finally practicing it. Not theoretically. In my own basement. That was enough meaning to sustain me through that period.

• What Other Families Have Found as Their Why | 00:06:27 The meaning does not have to be mine. Across the thousands of families I have worked with, the sustaining whys have included: healing intergenerational trauma, becoming the parent they wished they had, practicing becoming a less judgmental person, learning non-reactivity as a skill, learning about disability and neurodiversity in a way that changes how they move through the world, and healing themselves through the relationship with their child. None of these are about outcomes for the child. They are about what the parent is becoming through the practice of showing up, which is the only part any of us actually controls.

• Why Goals That Depend on Your Child Will Undermine You | 00:08:29 One of the most consistent patterns I see across the families I work with, and in myself, is attaching goals to things another person has to do: my child will go back to school in the fall, my child will be independent by this age, my partner will come on board if I explain it clearly enough. When these goals drive our sense of progress, we are setting ourselves up for a particular kind of suffering, because we have no control over another person's nervous system or choices. The shift I ask parents to make is not to stop wanting those things. It is to stop basing today's measure of success on whether they happened.

• The Hang Your Hat on the Day Goal | 00:10:06 This is the practical tool that helped me through the mos