Could it be PTSD or burnout?

It's all too much. You're exhausted just thinking about your daily life. When someone asks how you are doing, tears spring to your eyes.

Your physical symptoms are accelerating. Nausea, headaches, GI distress, night sweats, shaking hands, grinding teeth.

Your brain is not able to cope with daily life. Brain fog, mental fatigue, swirling thoughts, out of body experiences, feeling dead inside.

For some of us, the parenting experiences we've gone through leave serious scars in the form of trauma. Often exacerbated by complex trauma earlier in our lives, we are suffering from an intense experience known as PTSD from the parenting journey. PTSD is not just for soldiers or survivors of attacks. It's for parents too.

For others, the experience is less about specific trauma symptoms and more about a general shutdown, as though you've lost the ability to participate in your daily life. Work is too hard. Even making a grocery list is too hard. You may be still moving forward, but the lights are off inside. You may be experiencing something known as "burnout." Burnout is not just for people in stressful work environments. It's for parents too.

If you are experiencing trauma and/or burnout from your parenting life, it can be particularly hard because you often cannot leave the environment that created the situation in the first place. Whereas soldiers can be sent home from the front lines, and executives can take a leave of absence from work, you cannot walk away from your struggling child. This can lead to experiences of feeling trapped, further deepening the pain you're already drowning in.

You may also feel intensely guilty for the thoughts and emotions that rise up toward your family or your child because of the distress you're in. You may have thoughts of running away, lashing out, or checking into a hospital. Our minds go to extreme lengths to create alternative scenarios where we believe we can be safe. Sometimes, the pain is so intense that our solutions become increasingly extreme.

Having walked through these incredibly hard seasons, I know first-hand that the answers are not simple. If it were easy to figure out, you'd have solved it by now. My goal isn't to tell you what to do next. It's to tell you that you are not alone. You are not the only one with these feelings, these experiences, these thoughts. And they don't make you a bad parent. It means you are suffering.

I urge you to find someone you can tell who understands, so that you don't feel alone with it and so that shame doesn't fester in the silences.

You deserve to be seen and heard in your pain. You deserve a support system around you to hold this with you as you slowly and gently find your way forward.

Solutions are not easy. They are not simple. But they are possible.

THE TAKEAWAY

You may have PTSD. You may be going through burnout. Your distress may be clinically significant. If this is you, and you don't know what to do next, start by putting words to your experience. Even if it is just in a journal or on a walk with a friend, tell someone how bad you feel. Give it a name. Not knowing what it is and feeling alone with it are two of the worst parts.