We work with a lot of parents and a lot of women, and these are the people who are in charge of most of what has been dubbed the holiday “magic.” The thing about magic is: it’s fun. It’s the old traditions and new additions that make the holidays feel joyful and memorable. And while that is fun, it’s a lot of pressure. And it also includes some not so fun logistical planning, and takes up a ton of mental space. It also is expected from women who are often also managing working full-time and being the default caretaker. 

Starting to plan early can be a useful tool for managing end of year holiday stress; but how do you know if you are engaging in supportive planning for your future self, or entering into a space of over control and even anticipatory dread? It’s incredibly difficult when we don’t have the space, time and resources to do all the special things we want to do for our families. How can we balance the magic of the season with the acceptance of what is to find what is enough? And maybe even avoid unnecessary anxiety?

Late October is the time of year when everyone agrees that wearing a mask is a reasonable thing to do. Whether trick or treating, handing out candy, going to a Halloween party, or just getting into the spirit of the season, everyone can experiment with being someone or something else.

But for folks who are neurodivergent, it often becomes apparent at an early age that to maneuver through the world you have to make slight changes with how you present yourself; your facial expressions, your tone of voice, the phrases you use, the interests you express, your desire to participate in certain obligatory interactions or activities over others. Especially for women and female-identifying folks, who are often taught that adapting to their social surroundings and people-pleasing is essential to their value as a human being, this kind of costuming becomes second nature. After years it often becomes completely subconscious, making it difficult to connect with the real you at all. 

We commonly call this masking, and while we all adapt a little to the company we’re around, for neurodivergent folks it is more about survival than simply getting along with different people in our social sphere. How can becoming more aware of masking help women with autism and/or ADHD get more in touch with their true selves? 

Almost every therapist website lists a scroll of specialties: anxiety, depression, trauma, relationships, life transitions, self-esteem, grief, women's issues, LGBTQ+ concerns. There is no regulatory body checking those lists. In Ohio, as in most states, a licensed clinician may legally treat any condition within the general scope of their license. The word "specializing" on a profile means whatever the person who wrote the profile decided it meant. And this is most-likely well-intentioned. Any generalist therapist should also have the skills to assess for when a particular presentation of a concern is outside of their scope of practice and provide referrals. But it would be nice if you could just get the help you need without going through that extra step. 

Knowing how to tell the difference between a generalist and a specialized clinician, and what questions to ask during the consultation process, can help you find the right therapist for you, whatever your concern. 

If you’ve spent any amount of time on Instagram or TikTok, you probably have a working encyclopedic knowledge about neurodiversity at this point. Most of the people who come in to work on ADHD have already read a great deal about it. You have watched the videos. You have the color-coded planner you abandoned in April. You know about dopamine, and body doubling, and the fact that you are supposed to eat protein in the morning. You have probably tried a dozen systems that worked beautifully for two weeks and then stopped working entirely, and you have a theory about why that keeps happening, and the theory is usually some version of it being your fault.

So the question you are likely bringing to therapy is not what ADHD is. You live that all day and have the idiosyncratic memes to prove it. The question is what an hour a week with a therapist is supposed to do about a neurological difference, and whether any of it will make an actual difference in how your life feels.

It’s amazing how, no matter how long it’s been since you were in school, there’s a shift in late August everyone can fall. Something in the light changes, the stores fill with more variety of notebooks and binders than anybody could ever need, and your body starts preparing for a shift, a return, whether, or not your calendar has one coming. For those of us who graduated for the last time long ago, it still happens. And it definitely still happens when you off on your own at college or are recently graduated.

If you are heading back to campus, that feeling probably comes with a mix of anticipation and low-grade dread you may not fully be able to explain. If you graduated college  in May, it might come with something stranger: a season that has been organizing your life for as long as you can remember suddenly arriving with nothing attached to it.

You bought the notebooks and crayons. You labeled the water bottle. Maybe you even laminated some cute, little, morning routines for each child. Or maybe you just grabbed everyone’s stuff that was still sitting in their backpack in a pile in the closet from last May in an end-of-summer haze. Either way, you got everyone out the door (maybe on time even!) on the first day, which felt like a genuine accomplishment. And let out a big exhale for the first time in weeks. 

And then somewhere around week two your seven-year-old started melting down over a sock, your teenager stopped speaking in complete sentences, and seemingly the only moment to yourself is the 45-minutes you spend stuck in the pick up line.

The return to school is one of the biggest annual regulation demands placed on a family system, and it hits parents just as much as it hits kids. Normalizing the mess can help with the weight of it all, so let’s talk about what back-to-school dysregulation  actually looks like at different ages, why the dysregulation is expected rather than random or due to poor planning, what you can do to take care of yourself, and how to tell the difference between a hard adjustment and something that warrants some outside help.

If you’ve experienced a loss you may be familiar with the drop-off. Somewhere around the six-week mark, the lasangas stop arriving, the texts thin out. People stop asking how you are with that particular tilt of the head. And you are still standing in your kitchen at nine at night, wondering how everyone else managed to pick their lives back up while you are still here, in the middle of this.

That gap between what grief actually requires and what the people around you seem to expect is one of the most common things people bring into therapy after a loss. Of course the loss itself; but also the compounded loneliness of grieving in a culture that treats mourning like a two-week project.

August 30 is National Grief Awareness Day, which is a reasonable occasion to talk about what grief really does over time, how it moves through a year, and what actually helps when someone you love is carrying it.

Difficulty conceiving and the journey to get pregnant looks many different ways. It can involve losses, failed attempts, and recurring disappointment, along with financial, emotional and physical stress. It also can put a strain on relationships, when the partner going through fertility treatments feels misunderstood or unseen by the partner whose body is not going through the same stress; or when both partners experience grief and disappointment about how this stage of life looks different than what they had hoped for.

It is normal to feel all of these things and more when you experience infertility. At Wild Hope, we consider conception part of the perinatal period; especially when you consider the emotional and physical demands of fertility treatments, it is a time that deserves specialized care from a therapist with the background knowledge to properly support you. 

Earlier this year, the Peanut App took out a full page ad in the New York Times alerting readers to the concept of ‘matrescence’ or the period in which someone becomes a mother. Those of us in the perinatal space have been familiar with the term for awhile, but as the ad pointed out, most people have no idea that the word exists. And without language for something, it is hard to name it. And even harder to understand what is happening to you. 

Becoming a parent changes who you are. Not just what you do, not just your schedule or your priorities or how you spend your Saturday mornings, but who you actually are. Along with your priorities and values, our sense of self reorganizes. Your relationships reconfigure. Things you thought you knew about yourself get complicated, and things you thought were resolved have a way of surfacing again.

The term matrescence was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 and has been given more recent clinical attention through the work of reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. Matrescence refers to the psychological, relational, and identity-level transformation that happens when a person becomes a parent. It is not a disorder, and it is not a failure to adjust. It is a genuine developmental transition, as significant as adolescence, and it has been largely unnamed and underserved in mainstream culture.

When trauma is also part of your history, that transition becomes considerably more complicated. This post is about how those two things intersect.

Long before Bessel Van Der Kolk or Gabor Mate, Judith Herman was exploring how trauma impacted individuals, specifically women who had experienced SA and how their symptoms were often treated as personality disorders more often than their male counterparts. Herman was also the first person to present the concept of complex PTSD and advocate for it’s inclusion in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. When so much of the research on mental health has been done on white, male, subjects, it is important to understand the nuances of how trauma impacts female-identifying and nonbinary folks. Because of our socialization, the impact it has on our lives and identities presents in an entirely different way. But even further, the trauma we experience is often different as well. Anyone can experience complex trauma; but when you also exist in a female or gender non-conforming body, the complexity is built in.

We’ve all found ourselves pulling at our hair or biting a nail here and there. But, if you’ve noticed that you do regularly, sometimes for long periods of time without realizing it, or in a way that’s starting to cause a physical changes (bleeding fingers, bald patches, etc.) it’s possible you are experiencing body-focused repetitive behaviors BFRBs). And yes, therapy can help. 

BFRBs are more common than most people realize, and significantly misunderstood. It’s important to get clear information about what BFRBs are, why they happen, and what kinds of strategies tend to actually help. And to do so without the layer of shame that so often comes with this misunderstood, but incredibly common, behavior.

Most parents right now are stressed to some degree. The cost of living, the lack of childcare or immediate familial support, carrying the weight of significant cultural events, one after another, all while trying to give you kids a memorable summer. Most caregivers experience a large range of emotions when it comes to how they feel about raising children at any given moment; and sadly right now stress is a very common one in this moment. 

The creating of meaning is essential to therapy, and especially when exploring our identities and claiming agency over the narrative of our life. If you are exploring your gender identity, experimenting with how you express your gender, or considering a gender transition, you deserve support that goes far beyond open-minded or non-judgmental. This is a time that calls for care that is truly affirming, from someone who brings genuine competence and fluency to this specific lived experience, and will support you in creating your own unique narrative of who you are and who you will become. The last thing you need, when something feels this vulnerable and personal, is to find yourself educating or reassuring the very person who is supposed to be supporting you.

Understanding your gender can be one of the most significant processes of your life, and therapy can be a meaningful source of support along the way, but only when the provider is skilled and informed enough to allow you to tell your own story and make your own meaning, without getting in your way. You deserve a therapist who already understands this terrain, so that every session can be about you, not about bringing them up to speed.

Every year, the parents we work with (and the parents among our staff) think it’s going to be different. The kids are getting older, we’re used to the transition, the summer transition will be smoother this time. But without fail, the sudden plummet out of routine and stacked schedules into open days and nowhere to be (or maybe new places to be like camp) lead not just to logistical confusion but emotional chaos. 

If you are a parent, especially a working parent, or if you have kids who are neurodivergent, or if you yourself struggle with transitions and routine disruptions, you probably know this feeling well. Summer can be genuinely wonderful. It can also be genuinely hard. Both of those things tend to be true at the same time.

This post is not about hacking summer or making every day count. It is about understanding why the loss of routine affects your nervous system and your family’s, what actually helps, and how to build enough structure to support regulation without turning July into another version of the school year.

We started talking about identity and trauma in June for Pride month, and exploring how trauma further complicates exploring a queer identity in an already homophobic society. But trauma impacts identity in all sorts of ways and we’ll continue to explore that this July. 

It’s impossible to look at Instagram or Tik Tok and not have someone tell you what is wrong with your nervous system. You probably had plenty of things in your head that you knew you needed to improve, and didn’t necessarily need your entire nervous system added to the list. You've probably come across references to "fight or flight" or something about a freeze response. What gets talked about less, though, is how all of that survival wiring doesn't just affect your stress response in the moment. Over time, it shapes your sense of self, who you believe you are, what you think you deserve, and how much of yourself you feel safe letting other people see.

If you've ever felt like you're not quite sure who you are outside of what other people need from you, or you've caught yourself wondering why you habitually shrink or perform or go along with things that don't actually feel okay, it could be worth exploring how past trauma has impacted you. Not because there's something wrong with you, but because your nervous system was doing exactly what it was built to do to survive, and that meant you had to create a lot of stories to understand what you were living through. 

When we think about how to manage the coming weekend and all it entails, we can utilize things like personal values, boundary setting, and intentionality to figure out what to do with all this ‘celebration’ time. That is one thing in your circle of control. The people currently in power do not get to determine what this day means to you, if anything. That is genuinely your call.

As we’re figuring out who we’re going to be, we use the different stories and narratives available to us to create the blueprint or foundation for what is possible for how we can see ourselves and who we will become. We get these stories from our own families, our communities, and popular culture including everything from what a loving successful relationship looks like, to what it means to be a well rounded, happy adult. But not all of us see the person we feel like we’re becoming reflected back to us. 

The prominent narratives available to most of us as we’re growing up are heteronormative or based on traditional binary gender presentations. Even the romcoms, pop songs, or tvs shows we’re surrounded by rarely provide queer stories to help illuminate all the ways of being in terms of sexuality, gender and love; and therefore folks who don’t fit into the predominant narrative are left without a blueprint or guide for what is possible, or even allowed, that resonate with what they feel and know about themselves. 

When trauma is also part of our history, whether it's developmental, relational, cultural, or some combination thereof,  that process of figuring out who you really are gets significantly more complicated. Trauma has a specific way of interrupting the conditions that identity exploration actually requires, and for folks who already were up against a lack of relatable examples, the experience of developing a solid sense of self becomes even more complex.

Pride Month is bright, loud and fun on purpose. The Pride flag itself has gone through many iterations, but the use of colors has always been meant to represent the diversity of the members of the LGBTQ2SIA* community in colors that were bright, alive, and celebratory. Similarly, Pride events are meant to provide visibility, out loud and up close advocacy, and a moment of peace and celebration for even just a few hours to folks who often are not given the freedom to be visibly and loudly themselves. But for many queer people, June can also feel superficial, overcorporatized, or watered down from its origins in activism and protest. 

Celebration is woven into queer culture, not incidental to it. Throughout decades of criminalization, pathologization, and systemic erasure, queer communities have marked survival with joy. They have built chosen families, created gathering spaces, developed rituals, and insisted on pleasure and festivity even in the middle of loss. This reflects something profound about how humans sustain themselves through prolonged adversity: by creating pockets of meaning, beauty, and belonging that cannot be taken away. Joy, in this context, is a form of resistance and a real and precious resource. But it is still complex. 

June offers a concentrated opportunity to receive that collectively, complexity and all, surrounded by people who understand something about your life without needing it explained, and that kind of belonging has real weight. But the critiques of how different folks show up during Pride month (especially allies) is a fair and important one. And it is worth asking what happens in July.

When trauma is also part of our history, whether it's developmental, relational, cultural, or some combination thereof,  that process of figuring out who you really are gets significantly more complicated. Trauma has a specific way of interrupting the conditions that identity exploration actually requires, and for folks who already were up against a lack of relatable examples, the experience of developing a solid sense of self becomes even more complex.

June offers a concentrated opportunity to receive that collectively, complexity and all, surrounded by people who understand something about your life without needing it explained, and that kind of belonging has real weight. But the critiques of how different folks show up during Pride month (especially allies) is a fair and important one. And it is worth asking what happens in July.