Empowered by Hope
You want the best possible quality of life for your child regardless of diagnosis or prognosis. Raising a child with medical complexities is often lonely, scary and overwhelming. Join two parents of amazing children with rare medical complexities, Emily K. Whiting and Ashlyn Thompson, to get help and grow with them into empowered advocates for our kids. Here you’ll find a community of support, encouragement, education and resources, equipping you to navigate your child’s medical complexities with hope. To get more personal support, connect with us directly at www.ParentEmpowermentNetwork.org.
Empowered by Hope
Caring for the Caregiver: Nurturing You, Nurtures Your Child
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This open conversation between co-hosts, Emily & Ashlyn, offers clear language, practical insight, and zero judgment for parents, caregivers, and anyone walking the tightrope of medical advocacy and family life.
What changes when the caregiver’s well-being becomes the foundation of the family—not an afterthought squeezed into the margins? We dig into the real-world difference between mental well-being (clear thinking, decision-making, stress management) and emotional well-being (awareness, regulation, expression), and show how both systems work together when you’re navigating complex care, hospital stays, and the relentless logistics of raising a medically complex child.
We share a raw, honest arc—from coasting on grit to running on fumes—and the moment a therapist reframed anxiety through the lens of modeling. Kids don’t just hear our words; they absorb our state. When we pause to name feelings, set a 20-minute boundary for a solo walk, or ask for help before we explode, we’re teaching emotional regulation in real time. That’s not selfish; it’s skill transmission that lifts the whole household. You’ll hear why survival mode makes “take care of yourself” feel impossible, how delayed processing can hit when the fires calm, and how grace—not guilt—creates the space to refuel without apology.
We connect the dots between caregiver health, fewer blow-ups, better decisions, calmer hospital interactions, and a higher quality of life for every member of the family. We also point you to a companion blog with expanded reasons and resources, plus a preview of our next chapter on the “how” of making change stick in a busy, unpredictable reality.
If this resonated, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review to help other caregivers find these tools. Tell us: what’s one small refuel you can commit to this week?
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Get your copy of She is Charlotte: A Mother’s Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Journey with Her Child with Medical Complexities by Emily K Whiting on Amazon
Whether you've just been blindsided by your child's diagnosis or you've been in the trenches of their complex medical needs for a while, Empowered by Hope is here for you.
SPEAKER_02:Though we wish you didn't know this heartache, we're so glad you found us. So together we can walk this journey in hope.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to Empowered by Hope. It's your co-hosts, the originals, Ashlyn and Emily with Parent Empowerment Network. And it feels really good to be back, the two of us together, which feels like eons ago at this point. But we have been busy, busy and making waves in all the best ways. Surviving a lot too, but super excited with so much that is to come. Because we value your time and understand how much is on your plate. So you can get what you need clearly and quickly. So, today's topic. We are going to be talking about why prioritizing your mental and emotional well-being as a parent slash caregiver is critical and a game changer for your child's life for your entire family. And we are going to do that with two methods. One, we're going to actually talk about what is the difference between mental and emotional health or well-being. We're going to be using the word well-being today. And I have to admit, I had to brush up on this, Emily, before we started this just to make sure it was crystal clear.
SPEAKER_03:I'm pretty prompt for you to tell us because I don't know.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And then after we just do a high-level overview of the differences between mental and emotional well-being, then we're going to talk about why prioritizing it actually matters. What is the value to leaning into this for yourself, the parent, the caregiver? We're focusing on you slash us today in that role. Of course, our children's is extremely important, but one of the things we'll talk about is their well-being starts with ours. So, Emily, you ready to dive into this? Oh, I'm so ready.
SPEAKER_03:I am living this so uncomfortably. So, yeah, let's do it. Perfect. Okay. Ackland, tell us. I'm really curious what is the difference between mental and emotional well-being? Because it's one hot big old mess in my brain.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So the explanations I'm going to be sharing with you about the difference between mental and emotional well-being come directly from onlinepsychiatrists.com because they spend a lot more time going to school on this topic. So we should lean into their words for sure. And we will be we will make sure to reference them in the show notes if you'd like to go in and do a deep dive on this. So mental well-being involves processing information and making decisions. Then you have emotional, and that centers around the awareness and management of your feelings, right? So it's more the difference to me is so you're actually processing the information with mental. And then on the emotional side side, it's more about being just aware of those feelings in your body and what we are doing with those feelings. Then the other important thing is that mental well-being focuses on clear thinking, rationality, and managing stress. I would say that those are really, really high value tools. Or you want that tank as full as possible when doing anything medically related with your child. So then on the flip side, the emotional balance to that would be being concerned with expressing emotions in a healthy way. Okay. Being concerned. Oh, you mean like emotional well? Concerned with like you have like so the emotional aspect is when you are when you have concern with expressing emotions in a healthy way. If you have strong emotional health, right? We're able to communicate. I am feeling frustrated rather than just blowing up in frustration. You're able to help somebody understand what you're feeling so that they can work with you as opposed to feel attacked by you. Right. I know we all just thought of a million circumstances where our emotional tank was maybe a little lower than ideal when we talked to yet the seventh nurse in our hospital stay who still did not have the orders correct. Or to our spouse or to our children, or right. And on and on and on, right? Okay. So the last point though, there's there's I'm gonna put an asterisk by this one because I think this is probably the best way to transition into why we are having this conversation and want you to spend time with us talking about this today. So your mental well-being essentially it influences how you interact with others and cope with challenges. I think that's actually probably the most important point to understand when you think about the state of your mental well-being. How are how am I able to interact with others and cope with the challenges that arise in my life? And then on the emotional side, your emotional well-being affects your inner world, your inner dialogue, your emotional regulation or lack thereof, and overall ability to be present in the moment within your body, within yourself, right? Because when we're not able to do that, how often are we repeating the past in our minds, or are we racing to the future when the reality is it's impossible to go back, just as it is impossible to predict what will happen in three days and three years? So Emily thought what do I thought? Yeah, exactly. It's your emotions to me, I'm like most of the time, those are the very first words you hear in your mind. It's like those are reactions most of the time, right? You don't even, there's no thinking behind it. You just instantly start hearing that dialogue in your voice in your head. And when you're going through stress, at least personally, there's a lot of times I will say it's not the most positive or optimistic cheerleader right off the bat.
SPEAKER_03:Definitely not.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So now we've covered that. Emily, what are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_03:I am giggling because this is so relevant uh to my world. Um, so anyone who's new to the podcast, very high level, I'll tell you the very fast story. My daughter is seven. We've had over 20 surgeries, we're in and out of the hospital all the time, lots of complexities, yada yada. I have four children at this point. Um, life is very full, to put it mildly. And I think I was generally pretty mentally and emotionally well prior to having my first child. I would say I coasted on that mental and emotional well-being for quite a while, for quite a few years, and did pretty darn well. And then along came my fourth baby, and my goodness, Ashlyn knows firsthand. Um, my coasting came to a screeching halt, and I am now in the throes of figuring out how to be mentally and emotionally well, which is why I'm gala, because this is so relevant to me. Oh my goodness. So, yeah, I think this is really helpful actually because breaking it apart, like to me, it before we had this conversation, it feels like, like I said, one big hot mess. But you're right that um, you know, as you were saying, your mental well-being influences how you interact with others. My goodness, isn't that true? And a lot of times you interact with others because of the way you're interacting with yourself, which is because of the emotions you're experiencing and the thoughts you're having about yourself. So just to be relatable to all of you listening, I have been on a journey with whether it's postpartum anxiety, just anxiety in general, I don't know. My baby's eight months old now. Doesn't really matter. Bottom line is it's anxiety. And I used to be able to really navigate poor thoughts or complex situations and be like, okay, we're gonna be objective, we're gonna handle this, we're gonna get through it, it's all good. Now it's like I want to crawl into a corner and hide my head because it feels too much. And I know, I know that it's unhealthy. So I've been on this journey of trying to prioritize my own mental and emotional well-being. And here's the thing a lot of times it feels uncomfortable because it feels like you are making others' emotional and mental well-being less important than yours because you're like, well, I need to go on a like so last night, I need to go on a walk by myself. What happens? My six-year-old becomes a puddle on the floor because he wants to go on a walk too. And my husband, bless his heart, while he very much supports me doing things on his own my own, he has this look of like, you're gonna leave me with all four of these kids, including a baby who wants to nurse right now. And so my initial reaction is like, never mind, never mind. I'll take care of myself later. It'll be okay. I'll just stay, I'll just like, you know, muddle through it. But I'm getting better at being like, you know what? Everyone will be okay for 20 minutes. I'm gonna go on a walk for 20 minutes and I'm gonna go on it by myself. And if I come back and my son's still a puddle on the floor and my baby's screaming because she had to wait for 20 minutes, everyone will be okay. It will be okay. So, anyway, that's where I'm at in my journey of just trying to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, knowing that sometimes mama needs to come first, and that's okay. And it's not selfish, it's because I'm gonna come back and gonna be able to pick up that boy off the floor and be ready to be a great mama for him rather than be like, Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Emily, thank you for sharing that because having been on this journey with you much more closely the last four years, right? Like I was I was somebody on the outside looking in the first few years. And I want to make a really important distinction, you know. One, there's no mess about this. Like the only thing messy is life. So it is really, really important that if you are when you are listening to us talk about this, you understand that judgment is not a part of this conversation. That that means there's no judgment from us. And we are asking you to give it your best to not judge yourself as you're hearing this. There is not a perfect prescribed way to navigate this, not I mean any part of life, truthfully, right? We all come to every experience with a thousand versions of ourself from you know previous experiences. So it makes sense that we're all going to interact with different things in different ways. Our emotional and mental well-being is not going to, you know, ride on a perfectly level, smooth road and just drive in one direction. Okay. Right. So no judgment allowed in here. Got it? No guilt. We are kicking guilt out because today is only about learning, having more awareness, having much more space for grace with ourselves and with others. And that is what leads to feeling empowered. Okay. Empowerment doesn't come from just feeling strong and muscling your way through things and and you know being bulky and bloody and frankly scary looking because you've just, you know, white knuckling it through life. Exactly. That's a good way to look at it. White knuckled it. Strength is great, but resilience is ultimately more what I feel like that's the journey I feel like I'm starting to explore on this path is allowing myself to recognize the resilience that I have been developing throughout this journey. And resilience comes from finding strength in others, from not expecting myself to have all the answers and do it all on my own. But that is not something that I would have even entertained, definitely not, you know, four years ago. And it's still something that I have to consistently have conversations with myself about today. So, in order to make sure we stay on track, we want to focus this part of the conversation today about why it does actually really matter beyond the obvious things, like you know, that side-by-side comparison we talked about and Emily's personal story shared so much. But like, let's just pull on that story you just shared, actually. Let's just build off of that to highlight why it is important. I witnessed you at the beginning like be this rock. And you're right, like you were this, you've always been like a very driven, a very organized, more type A person, right? Uh, glass half full, maybe glass overflowing, truthfully. Um, and then some, and just like this incredible grit and determination, right? All while being poised. What I feel like I witnessed from the outside, and then as we grew closer in our friendship and our relationship turned into like one of very, very, very heavy leaning support. Yes. What I saw you do was like you said, you pulled on that mental and emotional well-being that was very as well established. But I almost look at it as so if we have a tank, right? Like a car, if you don't stop to get fuel when you're at 50%, let's say you add another leg to your journey, you're not going to have more fuel in the tank without filling up.
SPEAKER_00:That's such a good analogy.
SPEAKER_01:We all have, you know, just like cars have different, you know, mileage abilities. So it does look different for everybody. Conditions matter, things like that matter, etc. Your ability to thrive in survival mode, I would say was above average. But everybody does reach an empty tank if they don't refill. And what I saw you do with incredible strength, that I I mean, totally applauded. I mean, it was incredible, heartbreaking, but amazing was that it started to you started to get down to fumes. And then what you started to do was all I saw, once again, this is observation, folks, as a friend. It's really important to have somebody safe you can talk to who's observed you but only sees you with love and kindness. Okay. Don't ask, you know, your your kid's bus driver to have this conversation with you who doesn't know you, or or the judgmental clicky friends from, you know, high school. Anyway, it was like as each thing would come up, all the stuff you were still dealing with, you would sweep them under the rug because you had to keep going. And you somehow, it was like you almost used them as like a stepladder. So you could keep reaching what you needed to, but you kept shoving more under that rug of your own well-being, your own needs. And so you were reaching what you needed to for everybody else. But the further away you got from filling, like, you know, the closer you got to zero, the more unstable that mountain you had built under that rug became. And then it is almost odd to say that we don't care about odd, uncomfortable things. I mean, half the time we talk about poop on here, my gosh. That's my daily life, so it really is. Like, no joke. It's it's all parents' lives, whether we admit it or not. And um but something that's been really beautiful and hard to witness just in this past year is seeing you not fall off of that mountain, Emily, but for the first time, I think you're actually looking down and realizing that your foundation that you are standing on is not actually supporting you. I think you've been standing on your support for everybody else and your love and determination that is so fierce and literally, I mean, it's just this amazing thing to witness. That's been the glue. But it's like I feel like you started to realize I've glued everybody else together while falling apart simultaneously, but I couldn't come apart. And now that my family is in a real like comparatively better, more predictable place, right? I think you're starting to hear your inner self, your your body, your voice inside your mind that's been whispering, is starting to ask for your attention more. And if I totally made you feel like if that's not right at all, totally rewrite the script that I just read off.
SPEAKER_03:Well, there's a couple things you said that I think are really interesting and relevant for everyone listening. First off, when you're in survival mode, there's nothing that's more like nails on a chalkboard to me. And I and of course it's always delivered with great love. So it's not not frustration with the person, it just is the statement. I hear many times when we are in survival mode because we literally are just trying to survive as a family, that you need to take care of yourself. And that feels so much like nails on a chalkboard when we're in the throes of survival mode because we're literally just trying to survive from one day to the next. And so if anybody's hearing this and is like, ugh, I got you, girl or boy. We got you. We both believe that. We got you. We we hear it. We I mean, honestly, I am always like hesitant to call things self-care because it gives me that not because I'm self-preservation of myself, not because I'm not afraid to take care of myself, but because when you're in survival mode, that just feels like you don't get what I'm going through, right? That's that's the initial reaction. So, what I'm learning though, and I think I've we we've all experienced it to certain degrees, when you finally get out of that survival mode, that's when fit hits the shan, and you have to re you have to process what you just survived through. And that process mode is really messy, it's dirty, it's grimy, it's emotional, it's it's getting that emotional and mental well-being back. And I would dare to say the last seven years have been survival mode. And this year, we finally are in a place where like Charlotte is thriving. We still have over 20 specialists involved, we still have 10 more surgeries to go. We're still in and out of the hospital all the time. But she is thriving, and therefore I can finally take a deep breath. Whether I could have before or not, we could argue all day long. But like my mental well-being, I can step back and go, okay, all those things I compartmentalized because there was no time to deal with it. I gotta deal with it now because it's still there. So it's been really fun. And I love what you said at the beginning. Not fun, it's been really uncomfortable. But it's been fun to know like this is normal. It's part of the journey. And also, it's like when you look at it that way, it's actually really encouraging that hey, we're in a really good place, guys. We're not surviving anymore. We can go back and look at those things we didn't have time to deal with, or the mental space or the emotional capacity, and we can deal with it now. And sometimes, yeah, so that was really good. And then the other thing I loved your analogy of running on E, and it made me laugh because I totally do that with my car. I hate filling up my gas, hate it so much. So I wait till I have about 10 miles left, like less than a gallon.
SPEAKER_01:The car is no longer beeping, y'all. It's yelling at her.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, and this, I mean, it's such a good example of how I do life. That is how I do life. I wait till the very last second, and then I'm like, dang it. Now I have to fill it up. Let's see how fast I can do it so I can keep going. Um, but I'm hitting a place where like busy is not my friend. Running ragged is not my friend, and I'm done with it. Although I say that life doesn't really afford for me to be done with it. It's still crazy busy, but it's a busy that has to happen, not busy added on to what already has to happen, right? So I think for those of you who are listening, why this is important. It's really important because it allows us to continue to show up for ourselves so that we can show up for others. It allows us to feel comfortable in our own skin. It allows us to be the person we want to be, be the person we were created to be, right? And if we don't love ourselves, we cannot love others. And I'll give you one more story that I think is just like a punch to the gut in the best of ways. It really was like the most healthy aha moment I could have had. This was about two months ago. I had been working to get Charlotte into therapy, and it was the first time, like we've we've had, you know, different therapies throughout, but I wanted her in therapy because I noticed she was having anxiety and it was translating into physical pain for her. And I wanted to get ahead of that because obvious reasons. Anyway, so the very first appointment, we go and we meet with this therapist, and she starts asking questions, and then she goes, So, Emily, tell me, how do you handle anxiety? What what do you do? And I was like, Oh boy. Well, that's funny you should ask because now that I think about it, I've never stopped long enough to think about it, but um, it manifests physically. I start hurting, I start getting very achy, I um I physically hurt, and that's when I know I've gone too far, I've pushed myself too hard, and I have to slow down. And she was like, I'm gonna say this with the utmost love. The reason your daughter translates anxiety into pain is because she's watching you. And I was like, okay, so um we're no longer gonna need this therapy for Charlotte, we need it for me. Can I come next week? And it was it was so good. Like, it wasn't guilt inducing because look, I was dealing with it the way I could at the time and the what I knew. And now it's time to like, all right, so clearly I need to work on how I handle things because my children are are gonna suffer from it. And and I want them to do better. And if I want them to do better, I need to do better for myself. So it was just such a cool moment. And um, we've had a lot of fun uh laughing about that, me and the therapist since then. Um and no, Charlotte has not gone back. I have several times, and I think it's been very helpful. So it is really important to prioritize emotional and mental well-being and what that looks like for each person is different. And I think that's what I'm really excited about to do next, Ashlyn, not in this episode, or else it'll go on for forever. But to talk about the how. And of course, that's gonna look different for everyone. And I do want to throw out the asterisk, we are not therapists. We definitely are not, but we have a lot of lived experience with this. And um sometimes I find that to be just so darn powerful from parent to parent. So um, I'm really excited for our next episode to dive into different ideas of how, especially when you're living this full throttle running too e sometimes out of necessity. Um life of caring for kiddos with complex needs.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Emily, thank you for sharing that. I think that was the perfect way to prime us for the next episode where we will dive into how we actually, you know, put it on, put mental and emotional well-being on the pedestal that we will benefit from and then ultimately our child and our family will benefit from. I do want to let anybody know that you know, we there's a lot more aspects to talk about with this. And we have started releasing blogs that accompany our podcast episodes. So we will link to that blog, but it will be under resources as well on the Parent Empowerment Network website. And we encourage you that if this conversation piqued your interest or you could tell that you were feeling some sorts of feelings while listening to it, we encourage you to go and check out that blog where we'll go into more detail. We will list out more reasons uh in a bullet point form, if you will, about why this is so valuable to truly just quality of life. That's the overall, the that's the primary purpose, is prioritizing it helps the entire family achieve the best quality of life possible. And that's really what it's all about at the end of the day, right? So we invite you to check out that blog, let us know what you're thinking, and uh please join us for the next episode as we dive into the how. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Bye.
SPEAKER_02:You are capable, you are equipped, and you are not alone. Together we can do hard things for our children.
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SPEAKER_02:We would also love to learn about your personal journey and how we can support you. And last but not least, if you know of someone who could benefit from this podcast, please do.
