After coaching more than a hundred autism moms—whether their child is newly diagnosed at two or aging out of the school system at twenty-two—Lisa keeps having the same three conversations. In this episode she shares those three universal truths and why they apply no matter where you are in the journey.
In Episode 199 of The Autism Mom Coach, Lisa Candera shares three truths that can change how autism moms move through parenting, stress, and decision-making. Based on 18 years of raising her son with autism and coaching more than 100 moms, Lisa explains why the search for the right therapy, school, supplement, or strategy often turns into an exhausting loop. She also tackles one of the heaviest burdens autism moms carry: self-blame. From there, she walks listeners through a more useful focus—putting time, energy, and attention on what is actually within your control. This episode is especially relevant for autism moms dealing with guilt, meltdowns, anxiety, emotional overload, and the pressure of trying to hold everything together.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- Why “there is no right answer” frees you from chasing a perfect decision that doesn’t exist.
- Why “this is not your fault” matters, and how self-blame can deceptively feel safer than grief.
- Why “you have more power than you think” is true when you focus your energy on what is actually yours to control.
Listen Here:
Links Mentioned:
- The Autism Mom Coach
- The Solid Circle waitlist
- One-on-one coaching with Lisa Candera
Full Transcript
You are listening to episode 199 of The Autism Mom Coach, Three Things I’ve Told Every Autism Mom I’ve Ever Worked With. Hi, I’m Lisa Candara, mother to an 18-year-old son with autism and founder of the Autism Mom Coach. After my son’s diagnosis at age two, I poured all of my time, energy, and resources into helping him while completely ignoring the intense anxiety I was constantly feeling.
While white-knuckling it got me through the first several years, it completely fell apart when my son hit puberty and aggression and self-harm became part of our daily lives. I needed to figure out how to stay calm while he was constantly dysregulated. But how? No one had the answer, so answering this question became my mission.
I have spent years learning what actually works, not from textbooks or therapists who have never lived this life, but from trial and error in my own life. From all of that, I have created tools and strategies that have helped me stop escalating meltdowns, make impossible decisions, and parent for the long game.
I’ve now coached over 100 moms through the same struggle. In this podcast, I share everything I’ve learned and what I am still learning with you. Let’s get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. I am so glad you’re here, and I hope you’re doing well. In this week’s episode, I want to share with you the three things that I have told every autism mom that I’ve ever worked with.
I’ve noticed over the last several years of coaching over 100 moms is that whether a mom is coming to me with a child who is two years old and they’ve just been diagnosed or their child is 22, a young adult, and they’ve just transitioned out of the school system, we are having many of the same conversations.
Yes, applying it in different times, in different scenarios, but the conversations remain the same So I wanted to just talk about the three things that I see universally. First, moms, and I am included in this, who believe that there’s just a right answer somewhere, and they haven’t found it yet, and they need to find it, and they need to work harder to find that answer Whether this is the right therapy, the right specialist, the right school, the right supplement, the right combination, always searching for the next thing.
And For the… And if they’re not actively searching for something, if they’re actually in a place where things are going and they are working, wondering, “Should I be doing more? Things are going well, so maybe I need to increase therapy, increase hours, increase intensity.” There is always this constant drive of looking to fix and looking to do all of the things that can possibly be done for what?
To maximize our children’s support, their resources, their chances at living a, their chances of living a happy, independent life. But what I’ve seen is that this consumes us in ways that aren’t helpful for us, and they’re not even helpful for our kiddos. I have this one client I was coaching recently, and she’s coming to the calls week after week, and she’s exhausted.
And so we started to talk a bit about her sleep habits. And what I knew, because I’d coached her about bedtime routines and things like that, I knew her kiddo was in bed and asleep by nine o’clock. Regardless of what was happening in the lead-up to nine PM, by nine PM, in bed, asleep. And so then my question to her is, “What time are you going to bed?
Because if your kiddo is going to bed at nine, you still got a solid chance of getting seven hours of sleep in.” And what she told me was that, “Oh, when my kiddo’s in bed, I use that time between nine and sometimes one AM to research.” And this research is just going through articles about autism, combing through Facebook groups, learning about different strategies that different people are using, reading studies.
You name it, she was doing it, and she was doing it for hours. And she would describe, she’s, “I have all these tabs opened, I have all these things I’ve saved, and I’ve never gone back to one of them.” And so I was asking her, “Why are you doing this? You know, what is the point?” And what she said is something that just is so familiar to me, and I’m sure to you, too, is that this idea that there could be something out there that she’s missing or that she’s not trying something that if she tried it, she would find out that it worked or it didn’t work.
And it was essentially this form of trying to regret-proof herself for the future. Because hey, what if she finds out that if she just increased therapy by five hours a week, that her child would go from graduating from high school with his class and going on to college versus not. And so that kind of- ‘Cause there was always the, there was always this fear of what if the one thing I’m not doing or I’m not doing t- enough of would be the difference maker for my kiddo.
But what I know from parenting a kiddo with autism for 18 years now is there is no one right answer. There just isn’t. Our chil- our children are complex, and they are evolving. And so what works one day might not work the next. And so we are constantly being called upon to be flexible and to pivot, but the idea that there’s these answers out there, and if we just work hard enough, that we’re going to find the answer, and then once we find the answer, we will know that we’ve done all that we can, and we don’t have to feel guilty.
We don’t have to blame ourselves. It is really a cycle that you just can’t win, especially in a situation where, as I talked about last week, there is no answer to autism. There is no quick fix to the neuro complex… There is no quick fix to the complex neurodevelopmental condition that our children have, coupled with so many other factors.
And once you’re able to settle that there is no one right answer Then the decisions that you make don’t feel so heavy, so all or nothing. Like, I’m going to choose the decision that helps my kid or harms my kid. Instead, it’s more like we’re going to try this, we’re going to evaluate, and if it works, it’s great, and if it doesn’t, we have that information, and we can move on.
But what I see and I’ve experienced is getting stuck in this belief that there is a right path, and I just don’t think that there is. I think that there is so much complexity in what we are facing that it requires us to be flexible and not to hold too tightly to any one path or solution. Number two, this is not your fault.
In the past six years, I’ve heard a lot of reasons that moms think autism is their fault. Everything from where they lived, to whether they vaccinated, to what medications they took during their pregnancy, to whether they had postpartum or a C-section. It really runs the gamut. And look, there is a lot out there that suggest that things that we’ve done or were exposed to during our pregnancy are…
do impact autism. We don’t know that, but the research is everywhere in suggesting and wondering, and of course, we are latching on to all of that. People around us are latching onto it. They’re asking us questions. We’re getting asked questions in intake processes that maybe sometimes suggest to you that, hey, is this why they think my kid is autistic?
And so the idea of self-blame for a mom is not new. It happens whether your kid is autistic or not. There is a ridiculous amount of pressure and expectations on mothers to understand and know and be clairvoyant when it comes to everything about their child, but that’s just not the case. And second, your child’s struggles related to the fact that they have autism are also not your fault.
Yes, it is hard to watch. It’s hard to see. It really truly is. But blaming yourself for that Just creating more pain for you. It’s the idea from Buddhist teachings of the second arrow. So the first arrow, your child has autism. They have a complex neurological disorder that impacts the way that they communicate, the way that they experience the world.
And those struggles cause you pain. That is a painful thing for any parent to be faced with. That is the first arrow, and we could not have avoided it. It is what it is. We have children with autism. The second arrow is when we then blame and shame ourself because of those struggles. And so that is the self-inflicted wound.
And what I work with all of my clients on is, look, this is hard enough, and we have to be affirmative in the steps that we take to not make it harder. And truly, when you are guilting, when you are blaming yourself, you are making it harder on you. Another thing that I talk to my clients about that just goes in with this it’s not your fault, and this is a deeper teaching and certainly something that we get into inside of the membership, is that when you are able to blame yourself, it actually can feel better than grief.
Okay? Having the idea that it’s your fault and then therefore your responsibility to fix it in some way can feel weirdly empowering. It doesn’t feel great, but it does not feel as terrible as grief does. Finally, the third thing I have said to every client I have ever worked with is You have more power than you think.
I know how easy it is to feel like your life has been hijacked by autism and you’re playing a constant game of Whac-A-Mole, and it can make you feel like you don’t have control of your own life. But the fact is, is that you do, and you have so much more control when you start focusing on the things that are yours to control.
I found this with my son when it came to his behaviors because I was so fixated on fixing his anxiety, controlling his OCD, and all of that effort was really just me spinning my wheels. I wasn’t able to stop or fix his anxiety or his OCD, but I was sure able to amp it up with my own stress, my own anxiety, my own urgency.
And so what I have found and what I’ve shared in some shape or form with everyone I’ve worked with is that when you focus on the things that you can control, you have so much more power and effectiveness when it comes to parenting your child So whatever it is that you’re dealing with your child, whether it is meltdowns after school, meltdowns in school, elopement, decisions about schools or medications, instead of focusing on the things within that are not in your control, start to look at what is in your control.
You always get to decide how you want to think, how you want to feel, and how you want to show up in any situation. When you focus on that instead of dispersing all of your time, energy, and attention to things that you can’t control, you are going to be so much more effective and so much more grounded in the reality, as opposed to this idea that you should just be able to control everything and that things that are happening that are beyond your control are somehow your fault.
All right, everyone, that is it for the top three things I’ve said to every client I have ever coached. There is no right answer, this is not your fault, and you have more power than you think And guess what? You do not have to figure this out alone. You can maximize your effectiveness with support. And this is exactly what I am doing in my membership.
It is support with structure. Not only are you in community with other moms, you also have all of the support and resources that I’ve created and shared with clients over the last six years all at your fingertips within the membership. I have several modules that walk you through all of the tools and strategies that I teach in a very specific order so that you can implement it in your life right away.
If this sounds interesting to you, go to my website, theautismmomcoach.com, click on the solid circle and you can join the wait list now. All right everyone, thank you for being here. I will talk to you next week. Thanks for listening to The Autism Mom Coach. If you are ready to apply the principles you are learning in these episodes to your life, it is time to schedule a consultation call with me.
Podcasts are great, but the ahas are fleeting. Real change comes from application and implementation and this is exactly what we do in my one-on-one coaching program. To schedule your consultation, go to my website, theautismmomcoach.com and take the first step to taking better care of yourself so that you can show up as the parent you want to be for your child with autism
