February 7, 2022
Cindy Lopez:
Welcome. My name is Cindy Lopez, the host of this CHC podcast, Voices of Compassion. We hope you find a little courage, feel connected and experience compassion every time you listen. Today we have the privilege of being part of a heart to heart conversation with mother and son about the son’s journey and their family’s journey with ADHD and anxiety. It’s a really special episode featuring Sawyer Lythcott-Haims and his mom, Julie Lythcott-Haims.
You know, as parents, you want to do everything you can for your child to make sure he’s happy and successful, and we’ve had lots of conversations with parents about that, but today’s a little different because the son actually offers us a glimpse into his experience. We’ll hear him talk about trying to understand his own gel-like brain as he goes from relief to acceptance. Just make sure to listen to the episode so you understand that reference to his gel-like brain, and really ends up being a frank and vulnerable conversation between mom and son. For mom becoming the parents their son deserves, her words by the way, and for the son from misgivings and misinformation to greater understanding and appreciation of himself.
Julie and Sawyer thank you so much for joining us today. It’s so valuable to hear these personal stories and I know our listeners love them and we’re so honored that you’re willing to share your story with us.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Thank you, Cindy. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. I am at a point in life where I feel like I’ve gone through a bunch of challenges, and I’m ready to share them to make other people who might have the same challenges their lives easier.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I’m grateful to be here too, Cindy, I got to admit, I’m having a bit of a moment. I get to be on podcasts, but I’ve never been on a podcast with my own kid, and I’m just really excited for this opportunity. I’m this person who’s written about parenting, and I’m also actively doing it and trying my best and often getting it wrong, and I’m really here to try to be vulnerable and open and hopefully be useful to your listeners.
Cindy Lopez:
So, Sawyer and Julie, let’s start by maybe taking a look back. Sawyer how was it for you as a young child? What was going on with you at school, at home, whatever makes sense to talk about?
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
So school was this weird paradox for me as a really little kid. I knew I loved learning, but I couldn’t make school work, and I remember having like a little time management sheet in second grade that my teacher decided that I needed, and knew there was something going on with me, but I didn’t know what, and fourth or fifth grade rolled around, and my teacher recommended I get tested for whatever they test you for, and it was like, okay cool, I’ve got ADHD and having a label to attach to all of those experiences made everything feel so much better. All of a sudden it wasn’t, oh, I’m bad at school. It’s I have this set of challenges that make school harder, and I can do something about that. Those first early years school was really rough, but once I had some idea of what was actually going on with me that made tackling everything much easier.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah as an educator, I know school’s not made for most kids actually.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, yeah. It’s really surprising.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I knew I was going to have a lot of moments on this podcast I’m already having one, which is, I don’t think I’ve heard Sawyer say before what he just said that school was really hard for him. From my vantage point, he was always bright, engaged, energized by school, a learner in the school environment at home. So I didn’t know that school was hard for him in the second grade. I will tell you that his teacher in the second grade suggested that he might have ADHD, and my husband and I said we don’t want to pathologize this kid. We don’t want to be part of the diagnosis culture that is pervasive in Palo Alto and the sort of pathologizing of boys who might be developing differently, and we just saw whatever Sawyer was going through as probably air quotes, “normal” and not something that we had to react to with some kind of diagnosis or different way of being. The teacher in third grade had told us the same thing. We ignored it then as well, and then the teacher in fourth grade, who we had gotten to know, trust and respect, which doesn’t mean we didn’t respect the other two, but this was now the accumulation of two plus years worth of data if you will. The fourth grade teacher told us and we were like, you know what we better get this checked out, and that’s the set of tests that Sawyer is referring to. It happened in the fourth grade where he got a diagnosis, largely of ADHD, tiny bit of anxiety the guy told us. We’re not quite sure what the tiny bit was in the testing, and we tried to respond by getting him the supports that were recommended at the time at elementary school level, and Sawyer says he was relieved to have the diagnosis. I think Dan, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I think we were a little bit afraid, we didn’t quite know what it meant. We tried to do what we thought we were supposed to do. In retrospect, I think we didn’t endeavor to learn about these diagnoses and to respect them and validate them and bring them into our lives and figure out what needed to change. We were sort of managing it as a little side issue that would occasionally crop up. I don’t think we had any sense that for Sawyer there was relief in knowing, meaning that for Sawyer things had been hard for quite some time.
Cindy Lopez:
Have you been able to have this conversation with each other before this or is this something that’s happened now or in adulthood?
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
It’s something that we’ve I’d say talked about more and more as I’ve gotten older. I kind of can’t be stopped from talking about myself when I have the opportunity, and I’ve always been interested in digging into myself and figuring it out. I find it interesting that you said this was the first time you heard me say school was hard in elementary school. This is the first time I’ve heard you say that it took three different teachers recommending me to get tested for you to do it.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah. So let’s thank CHC for bringing us to this place of frank vulnerable conversation. Side note, we do very much work with CHC as a family, and we’re really grateful for the role you play in the lives of families and individuals, and that’s how you know we came to be on this podcast.
I mean I feel like there’s a whole lot to fill in. You just asked Sawyer did things change in your adulthood? We have now arrived at a place fairly recently, Sawyer is 22, I’m 54 for what it’s worth, and we now in the last couple of years, I as an individual have faced what I did not know as a mom, and have taken a deep interest as has Sawyer’s dad, my partner, in figuring out, okay, what do we need to know? How do we support this kid? What do we need to do differently in terms of our own behaviors? What kinds of supports and resources external to us does he need? I would say we are now in the last two years trying to show up for Sawyer as the parents he needs and has deserved all along. Please don’t get me wrong. I absolutely adore this child. I just, frankly, in Palo Alto and Silicon valley, I didn’t want to be one of those parents, cause they were all around me, parents sort of looking for a diagnosis so as to gain some kind of advantage. In a community that’s so driven toward a narrow definition of success, there is a little bit of that going on, and
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think I let peer pressure here in Silicon Valley not make me want to game the system, but made me want to prove I was not gaming the system. Therefore, I was not going to lean into a diagnosis, which some people treat as a very loosey-goosey thing, even though it is a real thing, I just didn’t want to be caught up in that my son was bright, my son was thriving. I thought all of these things, and I thought we’ll get him a little bit of help that he needs on the side for when he needs it, but he’s fine. He’s brilliant, beautiful, kind and fine. That was how I would have defined Sawyer, and I still would frankly, but he’s also got ADHD and anxiety and dysgraphia and all of those things have turned out to matter in ways that I never appreciated when he was young.
Cindy Lopez:
So Sawyer, how did you feel about your diagnosis? You said it was kind of a relief…
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Absolutely.
Cindy Lopez: …to know that there’s like this collection of challenges neurologically based and so how’d you feel about that, and Julie you referenced you know best ways to support Sawyer and what you were doing and thinking. Did meds ever enter into the equation? That’s always something that parents want to know especially around ADHD.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
I had my own misinformation based misgivings about engaging with whatever the system that treated ADHD was. I don’t remember how old I was. Mom you may have to fill in this detail. You asked me if there was a magic pill you could take that would take away your distractedness, would you do it?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Sixth grade was when I first asked.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Okay, that was post-diagnosis, and I said how would it taste? What would it taste like? And then said, no. I had this vague idea of meds that people take to help with various things, but I thought they all kind of worked like anti-anxiety meds where you have to take them over a long period of time and it builds up in your body and whatever, and my little 11 year old self was like, that’s way too much, that sounds like a lot. I don’t want to deal with that.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
You know, you actually said it in such a way that it just reinforced my own sense of your brilliance. You said, “wait a minute, would it change my brain chemistry? I don’t want it to change who I am,” and I’m staring across the kitchen counter at this 11 year old, who is such a science lover and comes back at me with this pretty thoughtful, educated response, and I just thought, yeah, that’s a valid response, and so periodically I would bring it up. Sixth grade I brought it up, maybe I brought it up again in eighth grade because the system was starting the heap itself upon Sawyer, and it was getting harder and harder to be distracted in Palo Alto Unified…
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
and the medication journey finally reached its peak or the inflection point happened junior year at Gunn high school.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah. I didn’t want to take meds in middle school. I didn’t wanna take meds going into high school. Once high school got hard enough, it kinda hit me over the head with it. I was like, all right, it’s time to try meds. I still had a lot of the fears around what it would do to me. I had a more fleshed out idea of the different types of medications at that point, but still never done it before. I tried Adderall for six months, didn’t do anything. I tried Ritalin and the first day was like being reborn.
I remember the first day of doing homework on Ritalin and finally feeling like I was getting something that everyone around me had always been able to do and I couldn’t. The ability to focus, it’s hard to describe if you’ve never dealt with it yourself, but tapping into that when you haven’t had it before is a little like if you lived a life walking through like gel, if like the air around you was gel and you stepped out into the air for the first time, moving through the air would feel easier, right? That’s what the brain feels like focusing for the first time.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
This is hard.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I’m glad you’re sharing it.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
That’s a, that’s that’s a new metaphor.
Cindy Lopez:
I like it.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims: Just build that one.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
It’s hard to hear as somebody who adores you and who never, ever, ever has wanted you to have a moment of struggle.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Absolutely. I’ve talked with adults or heard from adults who were diagnosed in adulthood, that they often have a lot of like grief kind of looking back over their years of not understanding. You’re like, man, if I’d gotten this figured out 20 years earlier, how much more could I have done and whatever, whatever. And I had that for a little bit in high school. I don’t dwell on it now. It was just school could have been easier, but there was definitely a component of like, how am I just getting to this now?And it was great you know, I was on stimulants of some sort all throughout high school and college and it made everything easier, even when stuff started to get hard for other reasons, It messes with the appetite, and I don’t like that, but stimulant meds were exactly what I needed.
Cindy Lopez:
So I’m wondering, thinking back again to what was the conversation like between you and your parents? Talking about your ADHD and anxiety, how did they explain it to you or did they even need to explain it to you?
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
So I had already read Percy Jackson by the time I got my diagnosis and that main character has ADHD and dyslexia, and there was another book series that I’ve read, The Fonz, Henry Winkler has a children’s book series about a kid with ADHD and dyslexia. I had enjoyed that. I was like, okay, like, I’ve got what the protagonists of my favorite book series have. Like cool, fine, sure. We didn’t really talk about the anxiety part that I’ve always felt was just kind of like a part of my personality. I don’t know what you guys said to me about ADHD. I just remember thinking like, okay, kind of got that covered.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I know that we sought out supports, there was a local doctor in Sunnyvale we took you to. He was kind of a talk therapist.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
I had the various strategy developing people along the way.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah. Ms. Erin, who was helping you with dysgraphia, just getting the writing out of your head. This was a kid with such beautiful articulation orally he’s a reader always was. His ideas always seemed engaging and well above his grade, and I’m saying all of this because I’m proud of my son, but also to let you know that that is how I’ve always seen him, and this became I think part of my inability to see him because frankly, those results that told us ADHD, a little bit of anxiety, dysgraphia also told us his IQ, which is high, and that made me beam. Oh, my gosh, I always knew, but look now I know like, oh, and here we were Palo Alto Unified, Gunn, high school, you know, all the right schools, brilliant kid. And you know, he’d go to school, he’d do stuff at school, he was doing well. Homework was a mountain, a burden, an oppressive weight on him and therefore in our open floor plan house where everybody’s kind of sitting on top of each other. It became a burden every single day of the week in high school, and it got to a point sophomore year, five hours of homework at night because of the distractedness, because he couldn’t focus. Homework was taking so many hours, and we knew this wasn’t the dreaded junior year when those hours are supposed to be okay, according to our community, right? This was not yet that terrible time. This was a year before the terrible time was supposed to hit, and I grew really afraid. How is he going to get any sleep if this is the amount of time homework is taking, and as I watched sophomore year play on that’s when I came back again junior year to say is it time to talk about medication?
Mike:
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Cindy Lopez:
So Julie you referenced when you got the evaluation results about Sawyer, you talked about the high intelligence scores and you talked about it as yes, he has ADHD, but he’s really smart. Do you want to talk about that?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think I saw him as formidable, intellectually, and therefore probably able to beat whatever challenges were in his path. I didn’t understand ADHD. I just saw all that he was capable of. So I was seeing the diagnosis as explaining a few of the speed bumps he had hit along the way, but I think I just thought his intellect was going to win out. And you know, his curiosity about ideas, his deep interest in the various subjects that captivated him. I think I thought that that would pull him through.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
That’s not how it works, parents.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
No, right.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
In case you’re wondering, your kid is brilliant and will have ADHD for the rest of their life, and it will continue to affect them into adulthood. They are brilliant, and they have ADHD.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
So fast forward to the summer of 2019, Sawyer had been at a small liberal arts college, a very rigorous place two years and he had come to us, midway through his sophomore year at the winter holidays, told me in his dad, I think I need to take a year off school. I think I need to just figure things out. Things are not necessarily going well. It was that kind of ominous, but I’ve got a handle on it.
Cindy Lopez:
Was that shocking?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Well, he was at a school that doesn’t really give out grades. You have to go ask for them.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
And I was not going to ask for them.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
So we were not getting any from him, but we were sort of gleaning we’re trying to be hands-off. Cindy, I wrote a book called How to Raise an Adult, which is on the harm of over-parenting. So I am desperately trying not to be that over-parenting person, and there’s a whole lot of irony here, obviously. So I am over-parenting as it would turn out. I have continued to learn about myself as I’ve tried to help others. So anyway, Sawyer tells us he needs to take time off. I think we had sensed enough of the difficulty without seeing any printed evidence. So we agreed that that was a good idea, and he let us know what his grades were in the spring semester of sophomore year, which seemed to confirm like, yeah, time off to regroup or figure things out is important.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Two DS and an F for what it’s worth, two Ds and an F those were my grades, putting it out there.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I’m glad that you decided to share, and that’s when Dan and I bought all the books, not literally all the books, but we went searching for some really good books around supporting people with ADHD cause that’s when it clicked for us finally, however, brilliant our son is, his situation is now out of his control. He’s got a diagnosis, he’s got some challenges. We don’t understand them. We need to understand them, and we bought a bunch of books by Ned Hallowell that came recommended to us, and we flagged them up. We had five books total, and I would read one while Dan was reading another, and then I’d give him the next one. We had this round Robin way of reading and we flagged these books up with notes that we had made. And boy did we see him in the books, and we saw ourselves a little bit.
When Sawyer came home at the end of that difficult sophomore year, planning a year off, which he would take, he would leave school and get a job and live in Portland. He saw the books on his dad’s desk, and he went in there to get some paper out of the printer I think or getting something he had printed. I’m in the kitchen and he goes, mom, “I saw the books on dad’s desk,” and I just had this bit of panic almost like we were secretly investigating him, but didn’t want to let him know, you know, I didn’t want him to think we thought there was anything wrong that had to be read up on, right. You can see, I was still not in any place of acceptance.
So Sawyer says, mom, I saw the books and my heart leaps and he goes, mom, and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, “thanks for taking an interest in understanding who I am.” Lord have mercy, and I just looked at him and beating back tears as I am now and said, “Sawyer, I’m so sorry. You know, I want to be and dad wants to be, we want to be the parents you deserve, and we’re trying to get up to speed and learn all the stuff we did not know.” And that’s when we began to step alongside this kid facing it rather than denying it.
We were in denial, and I regret that and that’s why I wanted to be on this podcast. Anybody’s out there with a younger kid, and they’re not embracing or understanding or learning about the diagnoses, whatever they may be. Please hear me. You will regret it. You will feel ashamed actually. So if you have the means, whatever means you have, learn about it, take it seriously, center the diagnoses.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
They’ll center themselves if you don’t.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
If you center them and respect the diagnosis and pivot life accordingly, rather than get caught up in some kind of race to just finish, finish, finish, get the grades, get it done, and fail to honor and respect the diagnoses for the challenges they are bringing to your child.
Cindy Lopez:
So Sawyer as you’re hearing your mom talk about all of this, and we’ve said have you had this conversation before. What’s going through your mind right now?
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Well, I’m trying to remember what it was like for me, you know, that was a very mentally tumultuous time.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
The only reason that I didn’t take leave earlier was because I was directing a play. I had to stay on throughout spring semester. I was not going for grades there. I had to stop. I had burnt myself out.I’d had this image that I was going to be a lab biologist, which I had attached myself to as a 14-year-old because I needed a future to envision because not knowing is terrifying, and when it came to organic chemistry and like lab work and all that sophomore year, I had this realization like maybe I have been going at this for the wrong reason and being in that limbo zone was very de-stabilizing. I was aware dimly in the background that my parents were beginning to kind of learn about this. This is also when I started therapy for the first time in my adulthood, and I just remember that was when the like anxiety was becoming a whole new part of life, and a lot of things were getting harder. I remember just appreciating all of the support, like going off to college showed me that there are a lot of kids who like have parents who just don’t support them in any of their struggles and all of that, and I had these two parents at home who were desperately trying to improve on what in my impression was like already a pretty, pretty good run of having parented me. I was really grateful. I felt looked after.
Cindy Lopez:
Can you talk about your anxiety and you know that summer of 2019 that you both referenced, it sounds like the anxiety was kind of becoming larger.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Up until I was like 19 I always kind of just thought I had an anxious personality. I’m just an anxious person. It definitely compounded the stress of ADHD when it came to like homework, and they’re such a insidious pair, ADHD and anxiety, but I had been terrified to go to college. Taking that next step out of high school was a big worry. Finding the stability that I did at Reed was very helpful, but then as sophomore year started with a big destabilizing event that made focusing on academics practically impossible. As I was feeling less and less confident in this future that I had set out for myself, the anxiety of an increasingly destabilized future was building. Knowing that I couldn’t do school, and I had to do something else, I felt good that I could recognize that, but one of the reasons that I’d gone straight to college was like all the other options sounded scarier, and now I was having to go with one of those scarier options. There was a lot in life that was just really feeding the anxiety or making the anxiety worse.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think we really got clear on Sawyer’s anxiety and the ways in which our dynamics at home might be contributing to that anxiety, may be exacerbating his anxiety. I got really clear when an article arrived in the mail. The Atlantic magazine, I think May 2020 came with this beautiful, horrible cover story on children and anxiety, and it highlights the research out of Yale and the lab of Ellie uh, Lebowitz that examines what happens when parents take what might seem as ordinary childhood fears and over accommodate those instead of empathizing with the fear and expressing confidence that while it’s hard now I know it’ll get easier, something like that, and one of the examples was when you make food for your kid and take it with you because your kid doesn’t like to eat a lot of different things outside the realm of allergies and so on. And I was like, oh shoot, oh shoot, really? I thought that was just loving.
I mean, let’s be honest. I knew when I did it, when you were seven Sawyer that it was potentially problematic, but I didn’t want you to be hungry. I didn’t want you to be hungry at that barbecue. So I tucked a little pasta with butter and parmesan in my bag so you would try the food that was offered, but then you’d have food, and you’d listen to me. I just didn’t want you to be hungry, and I didn’t know that accommodating that fear in myself of your discomfort, my inability to handle your discomfort. I didn’t know then that that might play into the creation of bigger anxieties, but that article in the Atlantic, was eye opening for me. I almost gasped. It was almost like they had a camera on our family. And of course there were other families in there, and they hadn’t had a camera our family, but other examples where air quotes “worse than ours.” So I did feel a little bit better, but I said to Sawyer, this just came in the mail. I think you should give it a read. And he did, and he turned to me and he said, mom, this describes our family.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
I think this is us.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think this is us you said, and as devastating a realization is that was, boy was it a gift. Because we have been actively repatterning our dynamics as parents around Sawyer’s sense of worry or fear or what have you. Our instinct has been to protect and prevent, and what we’ve learned is, nope, we’ve gotta support, validate, be there, but then express we believe in you. We know it’s hard, but you do hard things and we you know, we think you can.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
The only like bits of good, we can mind from the COVID time from just the last year and a half that it’s been is having that time was incredibly incredibly important for me. I’ve been in therapy for like a year and two months now with CHC, and that’s been lovely, and I’ve been working weekly on this, and I don’t think we would’ve been able to make the changes we need to. I don’t think we would have been able to start talking about it. For me at least everything changed with the pandemic, but the previous two months of 2020 before it started were by far the worst for me, I had a big mental health crisis, ended up in the hospital for a little bit. I still didn’t want to come home though. I still was like I gotta fight through this and then the pandemic hit, and I had to be home, and I had been throwing myself at this wall increasingly having it not work, refusing to accept that and the pandemic was what made me say, okay, let’s try this differently.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
One of the best things about this time has been like I’ve been re-building myself while the rest of the world does it around me. I don’t feel like I’m alone in doing it. That was a really crucial part of all of this.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think the pandemic gave us a second chance. This kid had sort of by some definition launched himself out into the world, spent some time in college. Now he’s working and living up there with people his own age. The pandemic offered us to come back to this home, create a trio, his dad, Sawyer and me. Kind of begin to repattern is what I call it. Be willing to stare in the face of what we had been doing traditionally, why we had been doing it and decide to do things differently. Sawyer mentioned he’s had therapy through CHC for a year and two months. We’ve had family therapy for just a little bit short of that amount of time.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Getting those patterns ironed out and back to something healthy is going to take some, some bad feelings. It’s gonna suck. You have to push through that. You have to know that it’s what’s going to happen and you have to be willing to do it because trust me better you do it now with your kid when they’re 10, then having to do it when they’re 22.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
Easier said than done, but begin to put the effort in.
Cindy Lopez:
So speaking of that Sawyer, as an adult kind of looking back, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
I would say you’re not going to be able to take this advice but worry less let that sink into your brain and think on it and take meds. I really do wish I could look back and say like you will get to a place where stuff feels at the very least easier.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
It may not ever be as easy as it is for other people around you, but my god, it gets so much better, and don’t let your brain be as mean to you as it was to me.
Cindy Lopez:
Julie, what about you? Like, what do you want parents or our listeners to really hear from you today?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think number one that family therapy is what has enabled my son and I to be here in conversation with all of you. So it is worthwhile. We’ve been fortunate to access it through CHC. Don’t be ashamed, go get it, go get it, lean in and Sawyer said it, it sucks, but we learned how to talk through the difficult stuff instead of avoid it, which is what we’ve been doing all of Sawyer’s life.
The second thing I would say is don’t be afraid of your kids’ feelings and anxieties and needs and diagnoses, lean into them, learn about them, validate them. We were running from them or trying to paper over them, and they only grew bigger as issues in his life and his issues between us. So that’s important.Do the, “I know this is hard let’s talk, tell me more.” You know, center your child’s needs rather than saying, “oh no, no, it’s fine. You’ll be fine.” I mean, Sawyer would say to us, I don’t think I’m going to be successful in the real world. He said that in high school as this brilliant kid.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
I said that all the time.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
And we were like, what are you talking about, of course you are, like we did not hear what he was trying to say. So I would roll it back and spend a whole lot more time listening and not trying to fix or paper over, but really trying to listen and validate what was his reality.
And the third thing I want to say often it’s us, we parents, who could really benefit from some individual therapy to figure out what’s going on in me such that I can’t see my kid for who he is or such that I need him to get these grades so badly that I’m just gonna ignore this problematic situation. I just keep pushing him, you know, why do I need these outcomes so badly that I’m centering his future instead of the kid who’s right here in front of me, who needs to be loved and seen and held and heard and validated and supported, and I think we could, you know, for anyone listening, who can resonate, go do that work. I have been doing the work to understand the stuff within me that has made me the human and parent that I am, and I’m not trying to flog myself. I’m not trying to blame everything on me, but I am trying to own up to who I’ve been and how I’ve been, because I’m deeply interested in my own growth and my journey as a woman, as a mom. So I encourage anyone listening for whom this resonates to do what I did go go do that introspective work.
Cindy Lopez:
Julie and Sawyer, thank you so much for sharing your story with us today. We’ve gotten this unique view into your family and what was going on and how valuable your story is for all of us who are listening.
Sawyer Lythcott-Haims:
I just want to say on a last note it brings me so much joy to be here now, after the climb that I had to do to get here and then be able to look back and help some others up. So thank for this opportunity.
Cindy Lopez:
Thank you. To our listeners thank you for joining us. Just want to say both Julie and Sawyer noted CHC. If you’re interested, you can find out more at chconline.org. We have free parents support groups for parents of kids with ADHD, for parents of kids with anxiety, we have a free parent consultation, if you just want to come and talk with one of our clinicians about what’s going on and get some advice and guidance regarding next steps. Please reach out. Julie and Sawyer. So grateful for your time with us today.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
And Sawyer and I are with you from two different rooms in the house, and I’m going to go find my kid and give him an enormous hug. What a great opportunity. Thank you Cindy and thank you Sawyer.
Cindy Lopez:
Visit us online at podcast.chconline.org. Make sure to subscribe to Voices of Compassion so you never miss an episode and we’d love it if you’d leave us a rating and review. Have a question? Send us an email or a voice memo at podcasts@chconline.org. We’re here for you when you need us.
