Become A Calm Mama podcast - Tracey Yokas Creates

A Conversation with Darlynn Childress

Today on the podcast, I am interviewing Tracey Yokas, the author of Bloodlines: A Memoir of Harm and Healing. She is here to share her experience of navigating a teen mental health crisis with her own daughter, including the struggles and what she learned through the process that helped them both cope and heal.

You’ll Learn:

The true cause of eating disorders (it goes much deeper than you might think)
A mindset flip to help you navigate hard times
Why addressing the behavior is not a long-term solution
How to support yourself so you can show up for your child when they’re struggling

Today, 12 years later, Tracey’s daughter, Faith, is healthy, and they have a beautiful relationship. I think you’ll love this conversation about compassion, sitting with your child in the struggle, hope and much more.

A Teen in Crisis

I’ve described Tracey’s book as a story about healing from grief. In this case, Tracey’s mom passed away suddenly. Her daughter, Faith, had been close to her grandmother, and her grief showed up in the form of eating disorder, self harm, depression and anxiety.

Faith’s first symptom appeared about three weeks after Tracey’s mom died. She suddenly wasn’t as hungry as she usually was. She began eating less, and that quickly escalated into not wanting to eat anything at all. Tracey knew pretty quickly that she was not consuming enough food to stay healthy. Faith also started doing self harm in the form of cutting.

Tracey describes the overall experience of this time as devastating. Their lives were “normal”. Then, it was like a switch was flipped and it no longer was. It was isolating, terrifying, as if the rug had been pulled out from under their feet.

Tracey withdrew from her friends and activities and committed (to an unhealthy degree) to her daughter’s recovery. She did the research, read the books, went to the appointments – did everything she could to try to solve the problem.

She now sees that she was operating under a lot of false assumptions about what she was supposed to do and how she was supposed to be. And wounds from earlier in her own life were exacerbated by this perceived loss of control over her family’s well being.

There were so many pieces that came together to heal Faith, Tracey and the rest of their family, including residential treatment, individual, couple and family therapy. Tracey says that, for them, learning to truly understand compassion between human beings was a “hugely life changing” part of the process.

Become a Calm Mama

Become a Calm Mama is the parenting podcast where you learn practical parenting tools and strategies so you can stop yelling, feel more calm, and show up as the mom you want to be.

Episode Highlights

I share, in part:

What I learned about eating disorders.
How common it is for self-harm and eating disorders to present together.
Reasons for my openness and vulnerability that so many people are suffering and reduction in our tendency to judge.
The tendency to focus on the behavior led us to miss some important aspects of the recovery journey.
The toll mental illness and crisis can take on our kids and the whole family.
How commitment to helping our children can actually be unhealthy. . .the misbelief that more information, harder work could solve our problems.
How generational trauma played into the mix of my mothering choices and impacted my choices.
The pain of isolation during times of crisis.
As always, the importance of self-care and what we so often misunderstand about it.