The Things We Don’t Say Out Loud — Part 1
There’s a particular kind of quiet that happens in a closet at the end of a hard day.
I know that quiet. I’ve sat in it.
As a behavior analyst, a mom, someone who is both ADHD and Autistic, and someone who is also raising a daughter with ADHD and suspected autism, I find that I often can bring a deeper personal perspective and understanding to the families I work with. I say that not as a confession but because I want you to know the person writing this isn’t writing from above. I’m writing from inside the same rooms you’re in.
We all say things we regret. We all do things we wish we could take back before the words even land. And then we sit with it — the guilt, the replay, the slow understanding that we just lost it on the little person we’d do anything for.
Here’s what I want to tell you, parent to parent: that guilt doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re loving so hard it’s bending you.
People like to call parents of kids with autism “superheroes.” It’s meant well. And it lands wrong.
Because superheroing is lonely work. You stand there holding everything together, and the world applauds, and you smile, and underneath you’re thinking: I can’t do this again tomorrow.
The praise doesn’t lighten the load — it adds to it. Now you’re not just carrying the parenting and the circumstances you were already dealing with. You’re carrying the expectation of being exceptional while you do it. While you’re also trying to understand a little person whose needs are so specific, so particular, that half the world doesn’t speak their language.
And all the kudos in the world don’t change the days you feel like you’re not enough. The days you’re quietly certain you can’t do it.
You can. And also ….you’re allowed to feel like you can’t. Both are true at once.
Then there’s the rest of it. The stuff that has nothing to do with your heart and everything to do with systems that weren’t built for you.
Insurance you don’t fully understand. Waitlists that stretch for months … sometimes close to a year …. when all you want is for someone to start helping your child now. The unfairness of it sits on top of everything else, and it’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to people who don’t live inside it.
You’re allowed to be tired. You’re allowed to be angry that this is taking so long. None of that makes you a bad parent. It makes you a human one who loves someone enough to keep pushing through a door that keeps closing.
I think this is exactly why it matters who walks with you.
Not a provider who hands you a treatment plan and disappears. Not someone who only calls when there’s a billing question. People who treat you like family.
People who will sit in the hard conversation — the one about insurance, the one about the wait, the one about the meltdown you had this morning before the coffee was even ready.
People who will even pray over you, if you want it. Not because you have to. But because some seasons aren’t going to be carried by our own strength. I’ve learned that one again and again: it’s in my weakness — not my power — that Jesus shows up and becomes the strength I couldn’t find on my own. The closet got quieter the day I stopped trying to muscle through it alone.
So if you’re sitting in the quiet today — in a closet, a car, a bathroom with the door locked — here’s the one thing I want you to hear:
The fact that you’re worrying about any of this at all? That’s not failure. That’s love with a name on it.
You’re not alone in this. And you were never meant to carry it in your own strength.
Pillars Behavioral Health serves families across Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Colorado. If today is a hard one, we’re here — for the therapy, and for the hard conversations too.
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