The emotional toll of autism parenting is real, and it falls heaviest on the parent carrying the day-to-day weight. In this episode of The Autism Mom Coach, part one of a two-part conversation with psychotherapist Janeen Herskovitz, Lisa and Janeen focus on moms: how the constant state of high alert wears on our nervous systems, why so many of us over-function until we crash, and what it actually takes to protect our own mental health while showing up for our kids. Janeen shares her own evolution from trying to “out-research and outrun” her son’s autism to accepting it, and offers a grounded framework for self-maintenance built on kindness, intention, and boundaries.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why so many autism moms over-function and carry an unspoken belief that they are never doing enough, and how unprocessed trauma can surface as depression, short fuses, and exhaustion that does not feel like ordinary depression.
- Janeen’s three pillars of parent “self-maintenance” (treating yourself with kindness, living with intention, and establishing healthy boundaries), and why a boundary is meant to protect you and your child rather than function as a wall.
- How to recognize guilt as a “false alarm” tied to impossibly high expectations or someone else’s “shoulds,” and why letting your partner parent in their own way, even imperfectly, strengthens the whole family.
About the guest: Janeen Herskovitz is a psychotherapist in private practice in Jacksonville, Florida, who has specialized in autism and special needs parents since 2010, and a former special education teacher. She is the mother of two young adults on the autism spectrum and the host of the Autism Blueprint podcast.
Resources mentioned:
- The Autism Blueprint
- Determining Associations Between Intervention Amount and Outcomes for Young Autistic Children: A Meta-analysis. JAMA Pediatrics. 2024;178(8):804-813.
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Transcript
You are listening to episode 182 of The Autism Mom Coach: Autism and Mental Health with Jeanine Hershkowitz. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. This week, I am joined by Jeanine Hershkowitz, therapist and host of the Autism Blueprint podcast, for a two-part conversation on mental health and autism.
In part one, we’re talking about moms and the emotional toll of autism parenting. We’ll unpack how the constant state of high alert affects our nervous systems and what it takes to protect our own mental health while showing up for our kids. In part two, we will turn to teens and young adults, and Jeanine will share with us what she hears the most from them and how we can support them.
With that, hi Jeanine, and welcome to the podcast. Can you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself? Hi, Lisa. Thanks so much for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here. I am a mother of two young adults on the autism spectrum, both affected in very different ways. I’ve been a psychotherapist working in the field of autism with special needs parents since 2010.
I have a private practice in Jacksonville, Florida. Great. And if you could, just tell us about how your career has evolved alongside having two children with autism. Yeah, sure. I was one of those people that thought life was gonna go a certain way, like most of us, right? Had it all planned out. I was a special education teacher before I, I had my kids.
The universe does have a sense of humor. So, I- it was such a difficult time. That was back in 2001 when my son was diagnosed with autism, and it was a very different landscape at that time. So w- we were dealing with people not really knowing what autism was at the time. It was just coming to the forefront.
And I realized during the process of getting my son diagnosed and then trying to figure out what life was gonna look like for him, there wasn’t a lot of support for parents. When I went back to grad school, I went back when my kids were probably in elementary, early middle school, and decided I’m gonna open a private practice and help these parents that don’t seem to have a lot of direction.
And since then, the field of autism and mental health has expanded, thank goodness. We know a lot more about what happens in our brains and bodies when a person is on the autism spectrum. We’ve learned a lot more about what the families go through and what the parents go through. So in my practice, I deal with a lot of parents that are grieving, having a brand-new diagnosis and not really knowing where to start, and what does this mean for me?
And what I found throughout the years in my own personal journey was that when I took care of myself, when I took care of my own mental health, that’s when I could be a good parent to my kids. That makes so much sense. And before we get into that, I’m just wondering, you said we’ve come so far in what we understand about autism and the resources for the child.
Do you feel the same way about how we support the parents? That’s a great question. I feel there is more support, but probably not enough. I see a lot of parents that still have this belief that they’re not doing enough for their kids, right? Or for their families. And those are the parents that are usually working full time and trying to get their kid to every therapy that’s been recommended to them.
They’re over-functioning. How many of us moms in particular, I’ve seen dads that over-function too- Mm-hmm … but it’s very often the moms that are over-functioning, and very often the moms that end up having to put our careers on hold or our hopes and personal dreams on hold. I feel like now people understand that the parent is affected, but I still find very well-meaning therapists of kids, whether it’s occupational therapists or behavioral therapists or whoever the child’s working with, to not really have that empathy and compassion all the time for what that parent might be going through.
We’re told a lot of times, “Oh, work on this at home this week.” I used to look at that and go, “Yeah, sure. I’ll be lucky if I get- … this kid to keep pants on this week. Yeah, yeah. But we’ll do our best. So one of the things that I’ve told the clinicians that work for me at my office is, “Please don’t give these parents homework.”
If there’s a homework that I give a client about their child, I’ll say, “This week, keep an eye on this,” or, “Look out- Mm-hmm … for that.” Or, “When this happens, try it this way.” That kind of thing. So there’s a lot more parent coaching, I think, that goes on, but I’m also doing a lot of heavy-duty trauma work. So I’m an EMDR therapist, which is a type of eye movement processing therapy that has been, I think, more in social media and, and things like that today, so I think people have probably heard of it.
But it’s been a life-changer for me and for my family, just as far as being our go-to therapy. A lot of what we deal with in our daily lives is traumatic. We have, uh, kids that run away, and get lost, and get bullied, and you just can’t watch your child go through these things and not be affected. I really want to dive into the trauma work that you do with autism parents and how it shows up in them.
That is a complicated topic. The clients that I’ve been working with recently, and in general, they’re coming in with something that’s not autism-related. I’ll have an autism mom, say, for example, that comes in and says, “I’m, I’m having trouble focusing. I’m feeling depressed. There are some days where I can’t get out of bed, but this doesn’t feel like a depression.
This feels different.” Patience is running thin, and they snap at their kids or their spouse. All symptoms that I’ve had, by the way. And realize that they’ve had things happen to them in the past that haven’t quite been fully processed in their brains, right? So that’s how trauma happens, right? Something happens to us that’s either too much, too soon, too fast, is the way that I’ve heard it.
I like that, too. Yeah. That you can understand it better. Yeah, and then we don’t have to argue over, is my trauma big enough- Mm-hmm … to get trauma therapy for? Here I’m a therapist, and I have sought out trauma therapy for myself, and had that same thought of, “Gosh, I wonder if I’m bad enough-” For sure … to be able to do these things.
And the question is, if you think that you’re suffering, you’re suffering. And you’re probably way beyond where I should have been in therapy maybe a year ago And once I started going, I realized, oh, this is why I do what I do. This is what it feels like to be on the other side of the couch, so to speak. I think as special needs parents, we grow such a high tolerance for pain, like mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Yes. Oh, I’m glad you said that, because I can recall before I was a therapist, going to a therapist, and I was severely depressed and didn’t even know it. My son had just been diagnosed in 2001. And so I remember being in a therapy session and my therapist listing out all of the things that I experienced that year, and one of them was the loss of a high school friend in the towers.
And then I’ve got two kids under the age of four, and I’m a young mom. I’m maybe, what, 26, 27 at the time. Yeah. So it was a really difficult time, and I remember saying to the therapist, this happened, and she just looked at me and she said, “No wonder you feel the way you do.” And it just felt so good in that moment to be validated and recognized just for that.
I was like, “Yeah. God, yeah, I have been through a lot this year.” I think Lisa, you and I are similar in this way. When you’re the kind of person who’s just, “I’m gonna pick myself up, keep going. We’re gonna figure out how to fix this and keep going.” And in the beginning of my journey, I was very much focused on let’s fix this.
There has to be a way for my son to not be autistic anymore, right? Because in my mind, autism was a disease process, and I was being taught at the time that there are… We don’t know what causes it and we don’t… We’re not sure. Here are the things that we’re sure of and here are the things we’re not sure of, and some of the things were, is it related to diet?
Is it related to vaccines? Is it related to chemicals? I have actively searched out those things for a really long time and did a lot of things that worked, and then a lot of things that just wasted money. And I can tell you, just as a parent, go with your gut on those things. As a parent, you’re the best, you are the best expert on your child, so you’re going to get information from doctors and from therapists and from people like us, but take it in and do what’s right for your family.
When I was told that I had to do 40 hours a week of ABA therapy with my son, and after the first time we went and the therapist taught him how to make a frog hop and he wanted the frog to fly. My son had never even picked up a toy frog before, so in my mind I’m like, “Yay, you’re picking up a toy. You wanna make it fly?
Give that frog wings. You go.” And sh- he was told that’s incorrect. And that’s when I left and never went back, and I have since… ABA therapy has since improved Mm-hmm … as far as where it was then in a lot of places. But I don’t think your child should be in any therapy for 40 hours a week. And it’s so damaging, all of that one-size-fits-all, and it’s like on one hand we don’t know this, we don’t know that.
But here’s what everybody should do. It just makes no sense, and there’s actually a study that came out a couple of years ago with JAMA Pediatrics that challenged that more is better, and where that Bellett study and the flaws in that and how dated it is and et cetera, and it really came down to what you’ve already talked about, is doing what’s right for your family.
Yes. Yes, and that’s the key. We’ve had this mantra in our house that this is our normal. Our last name is Hersh, so we call it Herskovitz normal, in air quotes. Yeah, yeah. ‘Cause it’s not normal, but it’s our normal. I, in the beginning, was trying to fit my son into the neurotypical world. Now I’m making a more friendly home, and have been for a while, trying to make the home more friendly for my son, because that’s his safe place.
Yeah. When did you shift from, I call it out-resource, out-research, outrun autism to autism is here to stay? That’s a great question. I think it happens over time, which is how you would want any big change in your mind to happen, right? Any sea change in your life that’s going to happen, you want it to happen slowly so that you don’t freak out.
It was just one thing at a time, coming across doctors who had me convinced that only they could treat my child, and you don’t need psychiatry because this is all in the immune system. That’s not true, by the way. Your child can have immune system issues, but very often we do need, and for my child anyway, and that’s all I can really speak to, is my son needed psychotropic medication.
He just did. Yep. He needed medication given by a psychiatrist that was going to help his brain do the things that he couldn’t do. It was a, a slow process. I think I would say once I started my podcast, Autism Blueprint, and just started talking to people all around the world about their research and their experiences, and then matching it up with mine.
And so I think it was probably around that time, I started the podcast in 2017, solely to give parents a free resource. That was a real game changer because then I was connecting with people all over the world and getting their input and realizing that it’s… The world of autism as a parent, it’s like religion in a way, in that you have to find what makes sense to you and what fits, and then make that fit your family.
Nobody gets to tell me how that’s gonna look, but I can fit into one of these areas within the autism community and be fed. So how has that looked for you and your family? So I think how that’s looked is just being really… So there’s three areas that I talk about when I talk about parent self-care. Or the word self-care has been thrown around so much that I like to call it self-maintenance at this point.
Mm-hmm. The three areas that I have been able to identify, at least in my patients, is treating yourself with kindness, living with intention, and establishing healthy boundaries. And when these three things are present, that’s good for all of us. So one of the things in our house that we’re really focused on is living with intention.
If we’re going to host a holiday, for example, we were just talking about this last night, who’s gonna host Thanksgiving? Do you wanna- should we have it at Grandma? Should we have it at our house? Get an idea of how is Ben, my son, how is Ben feeling today? Ben is limited in his verbal ability. He has some health issues that go along with his autism, but he loves his family and he loves to socialize.
So I wanna make that as successful as possible. Mm-hmm. So I wanna make that as successful as possible for him, which might mean that we host it, have people bring food, and that way he has his own safe place. You know, there was a time back in the day where he would only wanna go to Grandma’s at Thanksgiving, and so we would make sure that we did that.
He’s now becoming more flexible, so now we don’t have to do the same thing every year. So just little things like that. When we go for a, a drive, we, like a lot of families maybe, we have a pet barrier behind the front seat and the back seat that’s designed so that your pet doesn’t jump across- Yeah … the front seat.
For us, it’s designed so that if my son has a meltdown, he doesn’t hit the driver. Yeah. These are things that other families don’t have to think about. And sometimes when I tell other parents that, they’re like, “Oh, do you have a big dog?” I just go, “Yeah, I do.” Alternatively, you can just buy a retired police car and just have the same- Listen, I actually looked into that at one point.
You should have. Almost bought a police car. Parents are the most creative and resourceful people out there. I remember, I got this actually from one of the parents that would come to see me. My son was hopping our fence, which is a six-foot tall fence, white vinyl. Mm-hmm. Not easy to get over, but- Sure … he’s t- tall, so he would just hoist himself up there and hop over and run out into the woods.
So of course, we can never take our eyes off of him. But this was when he was a teenager. And I had a mom say to me, “The secret is Vaseline.” And I said, “What?” And she said, “You’re gonna get funny looks, but go to the store and buy just the biggest vats of Vaseline that you can find, smear them on the top of the fence, and then not only will he have this, like, aversion to touching it, but he’ll slide right off” Hilarious.
Yeah It worked. The birds weren’t happy. Hysterical. Yeah. The funniest things can make the biggest difference. Yeah. So what about boundaries? Yes, and I think it’s hard to do for those of us who want everybody to be happy myself included. When we want everybody to be happy, turns out usually nobody’s happy, and you’re the one that’s the least happy.
There isn’t anything wrong with putting your happiness first. You can take care of your happiness while taking care of others. We’ve heard that when the airplane’s going down, you put the oxygen mask on yourself first so you can help others, and that is absolutely true. Yeah. I, I agree, but I also like to think about boundaries more broadly in the sense that they’re good for us, but they’re also good for our relationships.
So every relationship that we have needs to have healthy boundaries. So it’s not if I have a client that comes in and says, “Oh, I set a hard boundary, and I told that person I’m not calling them anymore,” that’s not a hard boundary. That’s a wall. The boundaries you set with other people are to protect you or your children.
So when we have young children or older children that need us to advocate on their behalf, the boundaries that we set for them for their protection, and the same with ourselves. That, for me, looked like little things like when my daughter would bring home whatever the school fundraiser was selling that week, right?
The cookies or the whatever we had to sell, which meant the parents had to sell it. She knew. She would bring them home and say, “Mom, do you wanna look at this, or should I just put it right in the trash?” She just knew our family- Mm-hmm … didn’t have time for that kind of BS. Somebody else can do that. Yeah.
For sure. I can’t do all things. I have to be able to look at my family and say, “Here is where my energy is needed most,” and then just the ability to say no. I see this a lot in my clients, that they won’t do the PTA meeting or the room mother thing or send in the snacks, but then they will feel the guilt about it.
Yeah. So dealing with guilt is something I see every day. We feel guilt over things that we
do wrong. It’s the alarm in our body. It’s the red flag that goes up when we’ve done something wrong. It’s our conscience. But we’re feeling guilt over things when we’ve done nothing wrong, and that’s what I call a false alarm. So if I’m feeling that guilt, I’m gonna wanna know in my client, where are you feeling that guilt in your body?
When’s the last time you felt this? Did you feel this at some point growing up? And what’s the story that you’re telling yourself? Yeah. We can see, where is this guilt coming from? And it’s most likely coming from some expectation of yourself that’s way, way too high. Yeah. Is it coming from the violation of a value, or is it coming from a should?
Well, I love that. We have all these shoulds or things that other people do that we believe that we should do that we don’t even really want to do, but get the, these added layers of pressure. I know when I’m talking to my clients about boundaries, part of the work of the boundary is committing to not indulging in the guilt.
You might have that feeling come up, but recognizing what it is and liking your reasons for the boundary so that prevails over the, “I should be different than I am.” Yes, 100%. It’s funny, in the process of learning to accept where my son was, I had to accept where I was, and it just shone a gigantic spotlight on the stuff in me that needed to be healed, I would say.
Just because there was stuff that I didn’t even know was there, and that’s what trauma will do to you, is it will bring stuff to the surface that you didn’t even know was there, even if it’s unrelated. Yeah. For sure, and I think that in the intensity of the households that so many of us live in or the situations that we face, that if there’s something in there, it’s gonna get stirred up, and it can get stirred up regularly.
Janine, is there anything that we haven’t covered that you think is important to say before we wrap up? Yeah, I think part of my mental health journey was in understanding how to relate to my spouse or my partner. I think that was a really big part because I wanted a lot of times to be right instead of being connected, and we can only be one of those things.
I feel like in a lot of households there’s one parent carrying the heavy weight of the autism diagnosis in their child, and the other one that’s probably out in the world working and things like that, but is less involved in the day-to-day. And in our family, I didn’t realize what I was doing to my husband until we switched roles, and he started staying home with my son and I started working full time.
And it was a real eye-opener when we switched roles because I have so many moms in particular who are like, “But my husband’s gonna do it differently than me.” Yes, he is, but still we need to let them. But it’s something that I think we really need to look at, that whole family picture is what I’m saying.
Yeah, I see a lot of that in my married clients of the h- the husband might not do it right or they’ll do it in a way where I’ll have to clean it up later type of thing. The fact is they might form a different way of coping and relating to your child than you do, and that’s okay- Yeah … because that’s also showing flexibility on your child’s part.
Before we go, please tell everyone where they can find you. Sure. You can find me at autismblueprint.com, and that’s where my podcast is, and on YouTube and Spotify at Autism Blueprint. All right. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. All right. Thanks everyone for listening. I hope you found that helpful.
Stay tuned for next week’s episode as Janine and I dive into the mental health of teens and young adults with autism.
