#42 - Tanya Valentin on School Can't Parental Grief and Transformation

In this episode, host Leisa Reichelt is joined by Tanya Valentin, a neuro-affirming family coach from New Zealand. 

Tanya shares her journey of discovering her neurodivergence and her family's experiences with school burnout and autism. They discuss the challenges, grief, and shame faced by parents, and the transformative power of finding new paths to education and parenting. 

Tanya also talks about the resources and support available for families dealing with similar issues. Tune in to hear insights on breaking societal norms and fostering genuine connections with your children.

00:00 Welcome to the School Can't Experience Podcast

00:28 Meet Tanya Valentin: A Journey Through Burnout and Neurodivergence

02:53 Understanding Burnout: A Family's Struggle and Discovery

05:29 Navigating Parenting Challenges and Professional Advice

12:53 The Emotional Toll: Grief, Shame, and Transformation

41:34 Finding Support and Resources for Parents

45:57 Closing Thoughts and Resources

Tanya’s Resources

Tanya has a holiday support menu for parents, centred on the grief and emotional weight that can surface at this time of year.  The supports range from free to paid and are designed to meet parents across different needs and capacity levels.

You can find that here: https://tanyavalentin.co/holiday-support-menu/

And here is the link for parents who may wish to join From Burnout to Balance: https://tanyavalentin.co/parent-community/

People & resources mentioned in this episode:

• Dr Anna Neff: https://neurodivergentinsights.com/
• Dr Francis Weller: https://www.francisweller.net/
• Dr Emmi Pickler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmi_Pikler
• Kristi Forbes: https://www.kristyforbes.com.au/
• Dr Naomi Fisher:https://naomifisher.co.uk/

Transcript

Leisa Reichelt: 0:05

Hello and welcome to the School Can't Experience Podcast. I'm Leisa Reichelt and this podcast is brought to you by the School Can't Australia community. Caring for a young person who's struggling to attend school can be a stressful and isolating experience, but you are not alone. Thousands of parents across Australia and many more around the world face similar challenges and experiences every day. Today we are joined by Tanya Valentin, who is a New Zealand based, neuro affirming family coach, and whose program From Burnout to Balance has helped support many families through difficult times. Tanya is going to take us on a deep dive into the parenting experience of School Can't and burnout, and all of the grief and shame that can be part of that experience, but also the transformation that can come from it as well. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Tanya Valentin, thank you so much for joining us on our podcast today. It's such a pleasure to have you here.

Tanya Valentin: 1:00

Thank you so much for having me, Leisa.

Leisa Reichelt: 1:03

I would love it if we could start by getting to know you a little bit, Tanya. Can you tell us about yourself and what's your story?

Tanya Valentin: 1:12

So, late diagnosed AuDHD person. Discovered that I was neurodivergent after my children found out, like a lot of mums. Only found out after my daughter went into burnout for the first time. We've had a few burnouts. It was such an eye-opening experience for our whole family because before that we didn't even know that there was any neurodivergence in our family. For us it started with my children having a tricky childhood, but nothing overtly eye-opening. But looking back through a neurodivergent lens, it was probably just me having a very similar experience to them as a child that made me just think, oh yeah, that's just normal.

Leisa Reichelt: 2:04

This is just what happens.

Tanya Valentin: 2:05

This is just what happens. Then when we got to the teenage years, I noticed that things just started to crumble. So my children are all born female, although, some of them have transitioned into other genders. I think there wasn't a lot of understanding at that time about girls who could possibly be autistic.

Leisa Reichelt: 2:29

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 2:30

So what we saw was a lot of mental health stuff. A lot of anxiety, depression. Seeing things like self-harming, lots of worrying behaviour We tried all different types of therapies and counselors and everything to help them and nothing seemed to be working. Eventually we hit COVID and I think this was a huge, for a lot of people I speak to, this has been a huge sort of catalyst for them. When we started coming out of isolation the wheels just fell off, especially for one of my children. And then we ended up with a hospitalisation. Still didn't know that anybody was autistic. And eventually after we tried all the medications and therapies. A female psychologist in my daughter's CAMHS team said, Hey, maybe we should test for autism. And yeah. And then went through the testing process, which wasn't easy because my daughter was a very high masker, appeared to be very social, very high achiever at school and, what we've discovered since is, would fit into that twice exceptional place. And yeah, she just reached the point where she just could not go to school anymore, even though being incredibly bright and really loving learning, but just, just couldn't. So two years of being at home, eventually dropping out of school and us trying to figure out how to help her. Didn't know anything about burnout back then. Eventually I came across, I think it was Dr. Anna Neff's work around burnout and started piecing bits together. And then once we had the language of burnout and low demand parenting and just being able to support her in a different way, we started to see some recovery happening. Ultimately, she never actually went back to school, but this year she has finished her first year of university.

Leisa Reichelt: 4:51

wow..

Tanya Valentin: 4:51

So that is amazing. And I discovered along the way that there is just so many other different paths to education, right. We're brought up to believe there's just this one path that all children have to walk down. But there's been so many different ways that she's still been able to learn and do education and to ultimately be in a program that really stimulates her and to be able to study in the way that she would like to.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:19

What's she studying?

Tanya Valentin: 5:19

Astrophysics.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:22

Oh my God,

Tanya Valentin: 5:22

Yeah.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:25

That's incredible. Go her. That's amazing. Tanya, when you tell this story, it sounds to me as though you had lots of professional people around you trying to help

Tanya Valentin: 5:38

Mm-hmm.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:38

and getting you the autism diagnosis, which is good,

Tanya Valentin: 5:41

Mm-hmm.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:42

in terms of understanding the burnout side of things and what to do, that feels as though that landed a lot with you to find the resources and gain the understanding. Is that your experience?

Tanya Valentin: 5:58

Absolutely None of the professionals knew about burnout. They all looked at us through the anxiety and depression lens. Their approach was, let's just get her back to school as quick as possible. Nobody was saying, Hey, she's just really exhausted. Her system is burnt out. This is a nervous system thing, not a mental health thing. And I know that they can overlap, SSRIs that we, give kids for depression or anxiety, none of them had an impact. They actually made things worse.

Leisa Reichelt: 6:36

Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 6:38

yeah, a lot of that was just figuring out, oh, okay, let's try this. And going with faith and intuition a lot of the time. We eventually started piecing together and, and figuring things out.

Leisa Reichelt: 6:53

That must have been quite scary.

Tanya Valentin: 6:56

Definitely was, because a lot of the things that I had to do as a parent went against my upbringing. How i'd been taught to parent. Before all of this, I was a teacher as well. So, I had the lens of education through that behaviourist lens and

Leisa Reichelt: 7:17

hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 7:17

I found myself having to confront all of that. Our family was in a crisis point. My relationship with my husband was not great. Our children, they were all at a really low point. I was faced with like. What we've been doing hasn't been working, so we have to try something else. It was an option that I think many parents are faced with of, we just have to do something drastically different here, or we are just going to end up repeating this cycle again and again.

Leisa Reichelt: 7:54

Part of the reason that it's scary is because it doesn't always work quickly. Like you have to stick with it. This low demand, all of this stuff that flies in the face of what everyone's telling you that you should be doing. You have to stick with it for a good period of time, months often, before you see any sign of it working.

Tanya Valentin: 8:18

Absolutely, and I think this is the hard thing for a lot of parents. I find this in my work with families as well, that we as parents want to fix the behaviour or we're wanting to fix the symptom of what we're seeing. And a lot of the work is actually about repairing relationships. So it's incredibly frustrating and worrying because you're seeing all this really, sometimes damaging behaviour like self harm or restrictive eating or just wanting to go into their room and not come out. And you've been told as a parent, well, you need to go and fix that behaviour. And if you're not doing something about the behaviour, you've been neglectful as a parent and you're not doing your job. I know for my children, a lot of what I needed to do was just repair my relationship with them because we'd gotten to a point they saw me as part of the problem. Where they felt like they couldn't trust me because I'd been listening to everybody outside of me and doing all these things that people were telling me to do, that my children just didn't trust me anymore. They had to feel like we were on the same team before I was able to actually help them and for us to actually influence any type of behaviour that most people are concerned about first.

Leisa Reichelt: 9:47

Yeah. That resonates with me so much for probably the last six or eight months. That's the main thing I've been working on with my son since he came out of school and started home education. The main thing I had to convince him was that when he told me he did not have the energy to do something, I would believe him and I would listen and I would not try to coerce him to do one more thing or walk home from the movies or to just go and do one class Because I spent so much time just going, okay, we'll just do one more thing. You'll be fine. One more thing. And that completely destroyed the trust between us and his belief that I was doing my job to look out for him and his interest. I had become part of the system that was trying to coerce him into doing things that he didn't feel like he had the capacity to do.

Tanya Valentin: 10:40

Yeah. And I think the other really hard bit, and I dunno if you've experienced this, is that a lot of times you're having to sit and listen to your child talk about how you failed them as a parent, and do it in a way that focuses on actually listening and validating their experience and not being on the defensive because it hurts so much to hear them talk about the relationship that way.

Leisa Reichelt: 11:13

Yeah. I still feel as though my head is in two places when those conversations happen on the one hand I feel sadness and regret, for things that I did but there's still a part of me that goes, when you are 30, are you going to look back and go, why didn't mum make me go to school? Why didn't mum make me brush my teeth twice a day? Why didn't mum force me to eat more healthy food? I just wonder in the longer term'cause we get told this, if you don't do this, you're going to regret it when you're older. I was told so many things I was going to regret when I was older. The tattoos. I didn't get that. I probably would never have regretted.

Tanya Valentin: 11:56

It is so tricky because the truth is we don't know. We can only do our best as parents with what we have at the moment. Sometimes our children might look back at choices that we've made as parents and go, why did you make their choice? Why didn't you do that? And I suppose if my child said that to me, I would validate that experience and say, well, I could totally see why you would think that way. And maybe even open a conversation about that and approach it from more of a collaborative way rather than feeling really defensive, because a lot of defensiveness comes from us feeling a lot of shame about our parenting and how we hoped that we would've been able to, to do things differently.

Leisa Reichelt: 12:53

Tanya, one of the reasons that I wanted to talk with you today was because of the work that you do with families. We spend a lot of time focusing on and talking about our kids, and rightly so,

Tanya Valentin: 13:05

Hmm.

Leisa Reichelt: 13:06

but it is also a huge experience for the parents involved as well. Can you talk a little bit about grief and shame and how that's experienced, why we'd need to do the work, to let it go, why that matters and maybe how we might start thinking about going about that.

Tanya Valentin: 13:29

This is such an important thing to talk about because in a lot of parenting spaces, we are told we are not supposed to feel grief. That if we feel a certain way or we say, you know, I'm grieving, people automatically go to, well, you don't love your child, or you don't accept them for who they are. And that's a big social norm that I really want us to push aside when we start talking about grief, because there are lots of different ways that we can experience grief, but as a culture, we are very grief illiterate, we just associate grief with someone dying.

Leisa Reichelt: 14:09

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 14:10

So we don't have a lot of language to put to our experience and. I discovered Dr. Francis Weller's work quite early on in my journey. And learning to have language to process how I was feeling extremely helpful because there are lots of different ways that we can experience grief as parents whose children are in burnout. Our experience touches all five gates of grief that he talks about. The first one being that everything we love ends, which is our typical way of looking at grief, but there's also the grief for the parts of us that never received love.

Leisa Reichelt: 14:52

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 14:53

The sorrows of the world and how we experience just everything that's happening in our world. There's also what we expected, but didn't receive, which I think is a huge one for parents. And then also our ancestral grief. Especially if we come from a family of undiagnosed neuro divergent people, and a lot of times we have so much disconnection or dysfunction, addiction, just all these things happening in our families that we are now finding that we have to heal from as parents. When I found out that I was neurodivergent, I thought back to my grandma who is no longer with us. She had what I recognized as times of burnout herself, but people just thought, she's had a nervous breakdown and then they would institutionalize her. I feel a lot of grief for how she was never understood and never supported in the right way. As we navigate this, it's not just about how do I support my child. Its totally changing your perspective and bringing up a lot of your old trauma that sometimes you feel like you've healed from and reprocessing it through a new lens. It really changes us. There's a lot of transformation that happens for parents during this time as well.

Leisa Reichelt: 16:22

I wanna dig into transformation very soon, but I wanna dwell on grief for a little bit longer because I would love for us just to articulate, you know, what are some of the really typical things that parents in this community are grieving and legitimately grieving.

Tanya Valentin: 16:42

A lot of us, we grow up seeing all the happy families on TV or the people around us. We think, we're going to have something just like that. Especially if your childhood wasn't the best and you think, well, I'm going to create something different for my child. then because of circumstances you can't do that. I know a lot of families where they can't even sit down at the table and eat a meal together because it's just too overwhelming for the different people in their families. Sometimes it feels like a little thing, but for some families that's a huge, part of grief. Or, we're coming up to the holidays now and there are lots of families that one parent has to take a child to an event and the other child has to stay home with the other parent, and they can't experience that together. We might have this idea of the experiences that our children are going to have in their schooling, you know, the milestones they're going to be able to meet or the social activities they'll be part of. A lot of it's having to let go of that sort of stuff. Another one that's that's huge for a lot of families is when you go through this experience, you change to such an extent that the people around you, you feel like you can't relate to them anymore. You can't have a conversation.

Leisa Reichelt: 18:09

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 18:09

You really miss the community that you thought you would have or just people who could understand or you could talk to. If someone hasn't gone through something similar, it's very hard for you to relate to them and them to relate to you. You might have family members who still believe in the old way of parenting. Every time you meet with them, they tell you what a horrible job you're doing, how you're going to ruin your child. Letting go of those relationships can be a huge part of grief.

Leisa Reichelt: 18:46

I know in the School Can't community, there are a awful lot of mums who have had to give up careers that they really love, jobs that they really enjoyed, financial security that they really wanted to have throughout their life that has just crumbled in the face of School Can't. It's not exactly the most joyful conversation, but I think it is worth acknowledging that for a lot of us, there are a lot of things to grieve.

Tanya Valentin: 19:11

Yeah. I found that before my daughter went into burnout, I had started a career doing professional development for educators. And it was like my own business that I had nurtured from an idea and I had to give it all up. I couldn't do any of that because it involved a lot of time away, a lot of travel, and my world just got so small. All I was doing was just at home supporting my child. And that was, where I wanted to be. But, there is also the grief of your own personal identity as a person.

Leisa Reichelt: 19:52

Tanya, we could disappear into the well of despair here without too much trouble. Help us understand why we should give this some thought and consideration. Why we need to process it and, what are some pointers for how to move through?

Tanya Valentin: 20:10

I think, why we should take time to process it is because if we are carrying around grief that we can't process it forms a barrier to connection with the people around us. When we are feeling a lot of unprocessed grief, it shows up in other ways, like resentment towards our child or other people around us. It shows up as disconnection because we are just feeling so numb and disconnected from ourselves because we are just, we've been told you shouldn't feel this way. So that brings up a lot of shame. I'm a bad person. I'm feeling all these feelings, and I shouldn't be feeling them. I should be feeling X, Y, Z, or I should be feeling grateful. All these things that we've been taught to do to bypass our feelings. Or another thing that I hear quite a lot is, well, you just need to accept it. And I am a big believer in radical acceptance. But it's only one part of the grief process. You have to experience all the other things and process all the other things in order to make that acceptance possible.

Leisa Reichelt: 21:29

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 21:30

Because if you don't, you just end up in what I like to call'almost acceptance mode', where you're like, oh, yeah, I accept that my child can't go to school and that's fine, but I need for them to start doing something, right?

Leisa Reichelt: 21:43

Yeah.

Tanya Valentin: 21:44

I accept that they need to be at home and we need to try all these different therapies and things to get them better so that they can go back to school. So we're not actually really accepting it.

Leisa Reichelt: 21:56

Tolerating,

Tanya Valentin: 21:58

We haven't really been able to develop that emotional depth in ourselves to be able to even hold our own acceptance. But it also makes it difficult for us to hold the emotions of our children and their grief.

Leisa Reichelt: 22:15

Which is a big part of the job.

Tanya Valentin: 22:17

Yeah.

Leisa Reichelt: 22:18

So where do we get started on this? If we're kind of blocked on our own grief.

Tanya Valentin: 22:22

Exploring putting some language to it, and just having some awareness that it's there, first. Awareness is always the first step. And just allowing yourself to be able to have an emotion or to label an emotional, to feel something. We sometimes feel, especially if you've been suppressing your emotions, if I allow myself to feel this feeling, I'm just going to be pulled down and I'm never going to be able to get back up out of it again.

Leisa Reichelt: 22:53

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 22:54

And we just bottle those feelings up and then they feel harder and harder for us to process.

Leisa Reichelt: 23:01

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 23:01

So sometimes it is working with a therapist or somebody who can be a compassionate witness for you. I worked through a lot of this through journaling and writing down what I was feeling at the time. There are a lot of different ways that we can do this and other ways just to embrace self-compassion. The simple three step self-compassion break. This is suffering, this is a struggle, or this is hard and I'm not the only one who feels this way. And then I always like to do it as if like third person was talking to me or I was even talking to my younger self and say something like, this feels really hard and we are going to get through this together. Or, this felt really important to you and nobody acknowledged that. Giving yourself a little bit of kindness and words you would like others to say to you in that moment can be incredibly powerful and healing. Just to be able to start incorporating that into your own language, because the first thing we do when we feel like we shouldn't experience something is we criticise ourselves

Leisa Reichelt: 24:15

The other thing that you mentioned earlier that I think is related to this, it's like the grief is the cleansing process that opens you up to the greater transformation. And I have heard a number of School Can't parents say that, although living through School Can't with their kids and learning what they needed to learn and going through that whole process, is extremely difficult, and in some ways you wouldn't wish it on anybody. At the same time, it does change you as a person so dramatically in a way that you wouldn't necessarily wish yourself back to how you were before.

Tanya Valentin: 24:55

I call it the spiritual awakening that I wasn't expecting and maybe even didn't want. But it definitely is something that I think happens to a lot of parents, perhaps people don't really talk about. What I'm sharing isn't about diminishing the hard or bypassing how traumatic this can be. To me it's kind of like a this and this sort of situation. The thing that I did find about this experience was that, first of all, when it happens and your world gets really, really small, it's really hard. But I also feel like it has a purpose and I almost look at it as an intentional separation. Before our children go into School Can't or into burnout, we spend a lot of time listening to other people, doing all the things that people tell us we should be doing, and then we need time for that noise to die down. And for us to be able to start hearing our own internal dialogue, and for us to start trusting ourselves again through trial and error. And we can't do that when we have lots of people talking in our ear.

Leisa Reichelt: 26:22

You need to create the space, don't you? For new ideas to come in.

Tanya Valentin: 26:26

We've got into a place in our society where we've stopped trusting ourselves.

Leisa Reichelt: 26:32

Yes.

Tanya Valentin: 26:34

Even before we had AI, I would find myself just faced with a situation that I actually knew the answer to as a parent, but instead I would Google it. What should I decide to do about such and such? So allowing yourself a bit of space to start trying things. Giving yourself a whole lot of compassion and approaching things from a beginner's mind is really important. And as we do things like, I'm a big believer in, if you walk on the path, the path will open itself in front of you. As we do things, as we start to see results. Like almost like even know if you're a scientist and you're sort of just looking at the situation and gathering data about, oh, I did this, or, I approached this situation in a new way and this changed. Just being able to open that space and for you to learn to trust yourself a little bit without all the people outside of you trying to give you input the whole time an important first part of that transformation process.

Leisa Reichelt: 27:58

I think I'm hearing a couple of things in there. I'm hearing one thing, which is that you learn to let go of any idea of certainty as to what the future's going to hold,

Tanya Valentin: 28:10

Mm-hmm.

Leisa Reichelt: 28:11

I think in the life before School Can't. We're like, well, of course my kid will go to primary school and then they'll go to high school and they'll get their ATAR I'm speaking Australian here. So apologies to people who have got different processes then they can do whatever they like at uni, but as long as they go to uni and then they'll get a job and then they'll do this. And you just have this kind of sense of certainty of what the steps of life are. And that of course, the kids are going to follow those steps. And then that gets blown up. And then I think you go, okay, well I don't even really know what's going to happen today or this week or this month, and I think that's, learning to live without that, that false certainty for the future is, it's very difficult. The other thing that you talked about that really resonated with me was getting in touch with your own sense of what's going on, whether that's your intuition or your own beliefs or your own reading of the situation.'cause as a, as a late diagnosed autistic person, I've spent my entire life looking externally for guidance feedback and validation. I've never trusted myself because when I did that, things usually went badly. Having to flip that around and going, maybe, I've got just as good a chance at getting this right as anybody else does has been a, a huge change for me personally.

Tanya Valentin: 29:38

Yeah. And I really just resonate with what you're saying about it, feeling really scary. Sometimes it really feels like you are off grid on this road where there is no map, there's no path, and you're having to create your own path. And the thing that I always cling to was the path that I had followed that others had put in front of me had gotten us to this place. And even before my daughter went into burnout, before we found out that we were autistic, I remember clearly I went through a period where I was looking in the mirror and going, who am I? Because I, I just spent all my life listening to other people, pleasing other people, and probably masking very heavily to fit in. I had no idea who I was as a person anymore, what I thought, what I wanted, because I put so much trust in what other people said that I should be doing. Part of the transformation is being able to listen to yourself say, okay, my sense is this is what we should be doing. Nobody else knows our children the way that we know them. And another huge part of it, I feel, is actually just tuning into your child and their needs and letting go of some of that narrative that we have about children always needing to be controlled. That they're always trying to manipulate you, that they've always got ill intent. You know, even from little babies, I remember people saying, you can't pick them up when they cry'cause they're just trying to manipulate you And I also realized that alot of the times when I went against what I thought my child needed and did something somebody else told me to, I could feel it in my body that that wasn't the right choice. I'd spent a lot of my life going against my own instincts as a parent, learning to mistrust those instincts as you're just being too soft or you're going to do harm to your child. And then realizing, well, I followed all the advice that I've been given and my child's even worse off than if I had listened to myself. Learning to lean into the actual feelings in your body and your own understanding about who your child is as a person rather than the lens that people have tried to make you believe about your child, is another huge part of that.

Leisa Reichelt: 32:46

Once you start doing that, quite often you can discover that there are a whole range of people who have been researching and writing and thinking about this for a long time. There's actually a vast resource that's available to help support this different way of thinking and being in the world that I was completely unaware of. So partly it's intuitive and, trusting what you see and know, but also it's reaching out and looking for different things than what people have been putting in front of you.

Tanya Valentin: 33:23

Oh, 100%. A huge part for me in that process was, research and the things that I was, looking into to back up my new perspective. Part of this process is you're planting seeds. But you actually need things around you to help nurture those seeds so they can start to flower and bear fruit. I think for me this really started when, and I was still the teacher at this stage, there was this Hungarian pediatrician called Dr. Emmi Pikler, and she was all about seeing infants whole people worthy of respect and a partnership between that infant and you as the person taking care of them. The way that we are finding more and more about neuroscience, about the brain, about the nervous system, those things back up us actually. doing the low demand, following our children's needs, the things that we've learned about the different parts of the brain how that influences our children's behaviour, was such an eye-opener for me because it made me realize that a lot of times when children are behaving in a certain way, it's not because they're intentionally trying to do it, that there is a deeper need, that there are in perhaps a different part of their brain or their nervous system. We are just thinking, oh, it's just bad behaviour. But is actually a neurological reason behind that, and that was really eye-opening for me as a parent.

Leisa Reichelt: 35:16

I often say to people, I've learned more in the past two or three years of supporting my son than I did probably in the 10 years prior to that. The intensity of the knowledge that I've gained and how it's shaped me as a human has been incredibly intense. But I dunno what to do with it necessarily. Do you know what I mean? It's like, great, now I know all these things and I still don't have a job. Do you have any way of bundling it up a little bit and going, this is why it matters.

Tanya Valentin: 35:45

I love to think of things in terms of a metaphor of what's happening in nature. We replicate cycles in nature being part of the natural world ourselves. The metaphor that made the most sense to me is that of the caterpillar to the butterfly. Before we have moments where they might stop going to school or go into burnout we struggle, we're a totally different being. When we reach this point where the crisis happens, we have to move this space of darkness. It's almost as if we're going into that chrysalis. So when the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis, it doesn't just be a caterpillar that grow wings, it actually dissolves. Like it just turns to goo. And when you're in that chrysalis stage, a lot of times it's just getting through the day. You know, you're not thinking about this on a deeper sort of level, but through this process, you are changing. You're evolving all the time. There's a lot of days like that, just like the caterpillar who's turned to goo. And the other part of it too is that sometimes we have some ideas of how our future's going or where we're forming into the butterfly. But also what happens in their chrysalis is that the cells that will eventually form the butterfly, they will form, and then they dissolve again, and then they form and they dissolve again. And it's like that for us too. We are changing and we're shaping, and sometimes we just need to give ourselves compassion and just be patient with ourselves because are just doing the best that we can with the capacity, the understanding, and what is available to us at that time. And then there is a time where our children come out of burnout. The stage that we are in now is not going to be the stage that we're in forever, even though it sometimes feels like it's going on forever. But as our children grow and mature, they're going to change their life stage. It's going to, look different to what we imagine, but it's not going to stay the same. And for us as parents, we're emerging at that time too. sometimes with the butterfly, the butterfly doesn't just come out of the chrysalis and then flies off. There is a struggle to come out of the chrysalis. You have to have time to dry your wings. For us as parents, when we are coming out of this time, sometimes we have to allow ourselves just a bit of time and space to rediscover who we are as a person. Now that we're not a full-time around the clock caregiver of our child.

Leisa Reichelt: 38:50

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 38:50

Sometimes the things that we really enjoyed as a child and we thought we would do as an adult, and it never worked out that way. Sometimes those things come back to us again.

Leisa Reichelt: 39:02

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 39:02

When I was a child, I really wanted to be an author I never allowed myself to do that. But because I let go of so much social shoulds and conventions, I found it was in myself to be able to actually lean into the thing I really wanted to do. So I do a lot more writing now.

Leisa Reichelt: 39:24

Hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 39:25

You know, sometimes it's just figuring out one little thing that you enjoy or that you know about yourself. And just taking that first step, like not thinking about the whole staircase, but just thinking, oh, what is it that I'm being pulled to do right now? And allowing that to take shape.

Leisa Reichelt: 39:44

And enjoying the fact that you're not locked in by the conventions that probably you were for a lot of your life beforehand.

Tanya Valentin: 39:51

Absolutely.

Leisa Reichelt: 39:52

Mm-hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 39:53

There is grief in that too because, we've had to give up a life. An identity, we've had to give up a lifestyle. And there's also the realization that that lifestyle or that identity beforehand wasn't sustainable for you in the long run. And that's why we've entered into this process. And a lot of times you're in this place of feeling like you're in a more authentic relationship with yourself and with your child.

Leisa Reichelt: 40:27

And that might not sound like a lot, but it actually really is.

Tanya Valentin: 40:30

Yeah. I love, there's a quote by, the book's called The Prophet and he talks about the storm and he says when we get to the other side of the storm, we will not know how we got through the storm or even what the storm was about, but the truth about that storm is that it's going to have changed you. And that's the whole point of the storm. I resonate with that because, you get to this point, you're like, I don't know how we got through this. I don't know what this was about. I'm different. My child's different. Our family's different. Our life is different, that can be a really amazing thing. It's really hard and it's a lot of trauma that I'm still having to work through myself about my experience. But as you said, I wouldn't give any of that back because as a person, I have learned and grown so much through the process.

Leisa Reichelt: 41:34

Tanya, if we have folk listening to us who are in the middle of the storm right now and would like some guidance to make their way through the storm, what resources would you suggest they consider?

Tanya Valentin: 41:53

I think the most important thing we can, do here is if there is a person in your life you have a trusting relationship with, do talk to that person. First, look at the resources in your immediate community. Sometimes when we're in these situations and we are so locked in shame because we might think I'm just a bad parent or I'm just a bad person, we don't realize that we can actually ask for help. Not everybody in your life is going to be like that, but there might just be that one person. Trying to find your tribe or community can be incredibly helpful. I see this in my community all the time that I have for parents Even though the other parents can't fix their parents' problem, having someone say, yeah, I really get that. I really understand that. I've had times like that too can just be so healing for us because, ah. You know, there's not a lot of people that we can actually talk to about that or have people understand. And I think also knowledge is key. So if you do have the capacity finding truly neuro affirming resources that'll help you to understand your child, understand yourself and normalises other ways of doing things can be really helpful too. Like I learned so much from people like Kristi Forbes, Dr. Naomi Fisher. Those people who can really just put what we're going through and those ideas into words be incredibly helpful. Because we need to have examples, we need to have other people we can look at their work and go, yes, I can, I can see myself in that and I'm not alone. And I think, you know, in partnerships and families, in your marriage as well,'cause there's usually one parent that is doing all the research,

Leisa Reichelt: 44:08

Mm-hmm.

Tanya Valentin: 44:09

Sometimes when we are experiencing something really intimately, it's very hard for us to put it into words that doesn't sound like we're just trying to lecture somebody or we're trying to get our point across. So having other resources or knowledge that we can share with others can be incredibly helpful in that space as well.

Leisa Reichelt: 44:32

And Tanya, if folks have kids who are experiencing burnout, you've got some services available to help support there as well.

Tanya Valentin: 44:41

Yes. So I do have my parent community From Burnout To Balance. We have a really wonderful community. And then part of that is also resources and coursework and things that parents can do if that's in the space that they're in. And then there's also like a group coaching once a month where we discuss things that might be going on for people in real time and. very low demand as well, so parents can just engage in it the way that they would like to. I also have a one-to-one, individualized parent coaching, And I often see a lot of like co-parents with that as well. Which is really lovely because this journey can really tear apart marriages and relationships and partnerships. So seeing parents come together and learn to understand their child through a new lens can be incredibly powerful.

Leisa Reichelt: 45:43

We will put a link to all those in the episode notes for folks who want to find out more. Thank you so much for the work that you do, and thank you for sharing with us today on the podcast.

Tanya Valentin: 45:55

Thank you so much for having me, Leisa.

Leisa Reichelt: 45:57

Well, I hope something in our conversation with Tanya resonated with you today. And if you are in the middle of the School Can't storm. Know that you are not alone. You can reach out to the community and there are people and resources to support you and hopefully on the other side of this, we'll all find ourselves as beautiful butterflies we never imagined being. If you have found our podcast helpful, I would be so grateful if you could take a moment to subscribe or maybe give us a rating or a review. It does really help us get the podcast in front of people who have School Can't kids, and who haven't yet found our School Can't community and the information that we share. If you have some feedback for us or perhaps a suggestion for a future topic or guest, or maybe you've been inspired to share your own lived experience story, please drop me an email to schoolcantpodcast@gmail.com. I would love to hear from you. If you are a parent or carer in Australia and you are feeling distressed, remember you can always call the Parent helpline in your State or call Lifeline on 13 11 14 Thank you again for listening and we will talk again soon. Take care.