Parenting has always been hard. What’s different now is the volume and intensity of everything that surrounds it. Social media delivers an endless stream of worst-case scenarios — missing children, exploitation, tragedy, comparison — directly into the palm of your hand. The political environment around schools has become a source of genuine stress for families across the ideological spectrum. The cost of raising children in New York City is relentless. And then there are the everyday challenges that don’t make headlines but accumulate quietly: the developmental concerns, the behavioral struggles, the sleepless nights, the constant sense that you should be doing more or doing it differently.
Anxiety is a reasonable response to all of that. The problem is that parental anxiety doesn’t stay contained. It touches everything — the way you show up for your child, the quality of your relationship with your partner, your ability to be present in the moments that actually matter. And when it goes unaddressed long enough, it stops being a reasonable response to difficult circumstances and starts being a condition that shapes your life in ways you didn’t choose.
You don’t have to be in crisis to deserve support. If anxiety is affecting how you parent — or how you experience parenthood — that’s enough of a reason to talk to someone.
Why Parental Anxiety Deserves Specific Attention
There’s a tendency to normalize parental anxiety in a way that actually does parents a disservice. Of course you’re worried — you’re a parent. Of course you’re stressed — this is hard. Those statements are true, and they also miss the point. The fact that anxiety is common among parents doesn’t mean it’s inevitable, doesn’t mean it’s harmless, and doesn’t mean you have to manage it alone.
Anxiety affects the nervous system in ways that have real consequences for how you parent, even when you’re trying your hardest to show up well. A dysregulated nervous system doesn’t turn off when you walk in the door from work. It affects your patience, your reactivity, your ability to be genuinely present rather than physically present while mentally somewhere else. It affects how you read your child’s behavior and how you respond to it. Over time, these effects accumulate.
Research on parental mental health consistently shows that a parent’s emotional state is one of the strongest predictors of a child’s emotional development. That’s not a guilt trip — it’s a reason to take your own mental health as seriously as you take your child’s.
What Parental Anxiety Can Look Like
Parental anxiety doesn’t always look like panic or obvious distress. It often shows up in subtler patterns that are easy to mistake for conscientiousness, protectiveness, or simply caring a lot.
Some of the most common ways it manifests include:
Hypervigilance Around Safety — A persistent, exhausting alertness to potential dangers that goes beyond normal parental caution. Difficulty letting children take age-appropriate risks. Intrusive thoughts about what could go wrong.
Overcontrol and Difficulty Stepping Back — Managing every aspect of a child’s environment, schedule, or social life in ways that come from anxiety rather than intentional parenting. Struggling to tolerate uncertainty about outcomes you can’t control.
Emotional Reactivity — Responding to normal childhood behavior — tantrums, defiance, sibling conflict — with a level of distress that feels disproportionate but is difficult to regulate in the moment.
Constant Comparison and Self-Doubt — Measuring your parenting against other parents, against what you read online, against some imagined standard you’re never quite meeting. A persistent sense that you’re falling short even when the evidence doesn’t support it.
Difficulty Being Present — Going through the motions of parenting while mentally rehearsing future worries, replaying past mistakes, or managing internal distress that makes genuine presence difficult.
Physical Symptoms — Insomnia, tension, fatigue, and somatic complaints that don’t have a clear medical explanation but track closely with the stress of parenting.
Recognizing these patterns in yourself is not a sign of failure. It’s information — and it’s the kind of information that therapy is well-positioned to help you work with.
How Parental Anxiety Affects Children
One of the more difficult realities of parental anxiety is that children are exquisitely attuned to their parents’ emotional states. Long before they have language for what they’re sensing, children pick up on the nervous system signals of the adults who care for them. A parent who is chronically anxious, even if they’re managing it skillfully on the surface, communicates something to a child’s developing nervous system about what the world is like and how safe it is.
This isn’t about blame. Anxious parents don’t make their children anxious through bad intentions or inadequate effort — they do it through the normal mechanisms of human attachment and co-regulation. It’s also something that can change when the parent gets support.
Anxiety treatment that helps a parent regulate their own nervous system more effectively produces ripple effects in the family. Children whose parents become calmer, more present, and more regulated tend to become calmer and more regulated themselves. The work you do on your own mental health is some of the most direct investment you can make in your child’s.
What Underlies Parental Anxiety
For many parents, the anxiety they experience isn’t entirely new. It’s connected to experiences that long predate their children — patterns from their own childhood, their relationship with their parents, early experiences that shaped what they believe about safety, worthiness, and what it means to be enough.
Becoming a parent activates those older layers in ways that can be surprising and disorienting. Holding a newborn for the first time, watching a child struggle, navigating a difficult developmental stage — these experiences can surface fears and feelings that seem out of proportion to the present moment because they’re not entirely about the present moment. They’re about everything that came before it.
Trauma and attachment history play a significant role in parental anxiety for many people. Parents who experienced inconsistent care, emotional unavailability, or frightening experiences in their own childhood often find that parenthood brings those experiences closer to the surface — not because something is wrong with them, but because the attachment relationship with a child activates the same neurological systems that were shaped by their own early attachment experiences.
EMDR and other trauma-informed approaches can address this layer of parental anxiety in ways that insight-focused therapy alone sometimes can’t — working directly with how early experiences are stored and how they’re being activated in the present.
Postpartum depression and anxiety are also worth naming specifically. The transition into parenthood, particularly after a first child, is one of the most significant neurological and psychological transitions a person experiences. Anxiety and depression in the postpartum period are common, frequently undertreated, and respond well to therapy when they’re addressed rather than pushed through.
What Therapy for Anxious Parents Addresses
Therapy for parental anxiety at Flourish Psychology is individualized to what’s actually driving the anxiety and how it’s showing up in your specific life and family. There is no single script — what the work looks like depends on who you are, what your history is, and what your goals are.
That said, several areas come up consistently in work with anxious parents:
The Anxiety Itself — Developing a more workable relationship with anxious thoughts and the physiological state that accompanies them, using approaches like CBT, ACT, and somatic therapy to build genuine regulation rather than just symptom management.
The Underlying Patterns — Examining where the anxiety comes from, what it’s protecting, and what early experiences may be shaping current responses in ways that are no longer useful.
The Parent-Child Relationship — How anxiety is affecting the way you show up for your child and what shifts in your own regulation produce in the relationship.
The Relationship with Your Partner — Parental anxiety puts real pressure on couples. How anxiety-driven behavior patterns affect the partnership, and how to address the relational dimension alongside the individual one.
Guilt, Shame, and the Inner Critic — Many anxious parents carry a significant burden of self-judgment alongside the anxiety itself. The voice that says you’re not doing enough, you’re doing it wrong, your child deserves a better parent. Therapy addresses that layer directly, not as a secondary concern but as a central part of the work.
Identity and Loss — Parenthood changes who you are, sometimes in ways that feel disorienting. The loss of previous versions of yourself, previous freedoms, previous relationships to your own time and body — these are real and deserve space, not dismissal.
The goal is not to produce anxiety-free parenting. That’s not realistic, and it’s not the point. The goal is to help you parent from a more grounded, regulated, and intentional place — so that the anxiety that’s present doesn’t determine the quality of your experience or the quality of your relationship with your child.
You Deserve to Be Present for This
Childhood moves fast. The stages that feel endless in the middle of them — the sleepless infant months, the tantrum years, the complicated adolescence — become memories before you fully realize they’ve passed. Anxiety robs you of presence in those moments. It keeps you in your head, in the future, in the worst-case scenario, rather than in the room with your child.
Getting support for parental anxiety isn’t indulgent and it isn’t selfish. It’s one of the most practical things you can do for your family. The parent who does their own work shows up differently — not perfectly, but more fully.
New York can be loud. It has cars. It has subways. It has a lot of people. Not only is it loud, but it echoes, which adds to the volume. Indeed, it’s loud not only in noise, but in other senses as well, as there are very pungent scents, lots to see visually, and more.
There’s mental health benefits to living in a city. You’re able to enjoy more time with people. You’re able to get very quick access to help. You have more resources and, theoretically at least, more opportunities.
But there are downsides as well, most notably: big cities are loud. They’re busy. They are, often, in a position to overwhelm your senses. There’s a climate and resource argument to be made that all of us should be living in big cities, but we still have to be aware of what living in such a big city – especially a *loud* big city – does to the mind and body.
For example:
Sensory Overload – Most of us are somewhat used to the city by now. But when you’re stressed or overwhelmed, you still need a way to essentially relax your brain so that you can focus on your tasks and needs. That is much harder in a big city like New York, because there is so much sensory overload. There isn’t really an opportunity for resetting your senses.
Anxiety Production – Loud noises and busyness can also create their own anxiety. Noises can trigger anxious feelings, as your mind has to determine whether or not the sound is a danger. If you’re already prone to stress and anxiety, not only will this only exacerbate your symptoms but the sounds themselves may trigger the “yes, it is a dangerous noise” response more often.
No Chance to Process – Similar to sensory overload, one of the ways that we are able to cope with stress as adults is by processing the day as it happens and at night. But when you have your senses overloaded with noise, it becomes harder to process the information of the day, and that can put stress on the brain.
Depending on where you live, busy cities may also make it harder to sleep or, in some cases, make you more tired because your brain is exhausted from processing the day.
The Benefits and Weaknesses of NYC
Mental health is complicated. Overall, there is considerable evidence that living in a place like New York is actually beneficial for one’s mental health, especially given access to resources, people, and more. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and for those that are already struggling, New York’s sensory overload can make things worse.
If you need help with your mental health for any reason, please reach out to us today.
Trauma can dramatically change not only our life, but the way our brain actually operates. As a result, often times overcoming trauma relies on addressing these cognitive and emotional changes, because only by doing that can you move forward towards a better future.
An example of this is “Alexithymia.” It’s a condition that doesn’t happen to everyone, and is not always caused by trauma, but when it does occur in someone with PTSD it becomes important to address it.
What is Alexithymia?
Alexithymia is a psychological condition characterized by difficulty identifying, expressing, and understanding emotions. Individuals with alexithymia often struggle to describe their feelings, differentiate between emotions and physical sensations, and engage in emotional introspection.
While alexithymia can occur in the general population, research suggests a strong correlation between trauma and the development of alexithymic traits.
Alexithymia is not classified as a mental disorder but rather as a trait or condition that affects emotional processing. It manifests in ways such as:
Difficulty Identifying Emotions – Individuals may struggle to recognize their own emotional states or describe how they feel.
Limited Emotional Expression – They may appear emotionally distant, struggle with verbalizing feelings, or display a restricted range of facial expressions.
Confusion Between Physical and Emotional States – Bodily sensations, such as muscle tension or an upset stomach, may be misinterpreted as purely physical discomfort rather than an emotional response.
Externally Oriented Thinking – A tendency to focus on external events rather than introspecting about emotional experiences.
Trauma, particularly chronic or severe trauma, can play a significant role in the development of alexithymia. This is especially true in cases of childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The connection between trauma and alexithymia is rooted in both neurological and psychological factors.
Neurological Impact of Trauma on Emotional Processing
Trauma affects brain structures involved in emotion regulation, including:
The Amygdala – Responsible for processing emotions, the amygdala may become hyperactive in response to trauma, leading to heightened fear responses while impairing emotional awareness.
The Prefrontal Cortex – Critical for emotional regulation and self-reflection, this area may be underactive in those with trauma, making it harder to process and articulate emotions.
The Corpus Callosum – Trauma, especially in early development, can impact the communication between the brain’s hemispheres, limiting the ability to integrate emotions with rational thought.
When a person experiences severe trauma, the brain may no longer be able to process emotions effectively, and the result is poor emotional processing.
Emotional Suppression as a Coping Mechanism
For individuals who have experienced trauma, particularly childhood emotional neglect or abuse, suppressing emotions may become a learned survival strategy. If emotional expression was met with punishment, rejection, or indifference, the brain adapts by disconnecting from emotional experiences to reduce psychological distress.
Avoidance of Emotional Triggers – Trauma survivors may unconsciously disconnect from their emotions to avoid pain, leading to emotional numbness.
Dissociation – Chronic trauma may result in dissociative tendencies, making it difficult to access emotional states and recognize them as personal experiences.
Hyperarousal and Emotional Overwhelm – Some trauma survivors experience emotions so intensely that they develop a shutdown response, numbing emotions as a form of self-protection.
Some of these issues may also be related to the type of trauma and the age it occurred. Individuals who grow up in environments lacking emotional support may develop alexithymia as a result of insecure attachment styles. When caregivers fail to model emotional recognition or discourage emotional expression, children may struggle to develop emotional awareness in adulthood.
For example, if the person experienced neglect, without consistent emotional validation, individuals may not learn how to recognize or describe their emotions. If they struggled with abuse, fear-driven relationships can create emotional dysregulation, leading to avoidance or suppression of emotions.
Alexithymia and PTSD
Alexithymia is frequently observed in individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Studies indicate that trauma survivors with PTSD often exhibit alexithymic traits, which can interfere with traditional talk therapy and emotional processing treatments. This can make trauma recovery more challenging, as individuals may struggle to verbalize distress, engage in self-reflection, or process traumatic memories effectively.
Managing and Treating Alexithymia in Trauma Survivors
While alexithymia can be a barrier to emotional healing, certain approaches can help trauma survivors gradually reconnect with their emotions and develop emotional awareness:
Mindfulness and Body Awareness – Practices such as mindfulness meditation and somatic therapy can help individuals tune into physical sensations linked to emotions.
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) – This therapy helps individuals identify and label emotions in a structured, supportive environment.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) – Can help trauma survivors recognize patterns of emotional avoidance and develop strategies for emotional expression.
Journaling and Expressive Writing – Encouraging structured reflection on experiences can help bridge the gap between thoughts and emotions.
Trauma-Informed Therapy – Therapies such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and somatic experiencing may help address underlying trauma and improve emotional awareness.
For those who have experienced trauma, alexithymia can make emotional healing more complex, but it is not a permanent condition. With the right therapeutic support and strategies, individuals can learn to recognize, process, and express emotions in a way that supports their mental well-being. If you’ve been struggling from trauma, reach out to Flourish Psychology today to speak to one of our therapists and get the help you need.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), typically referred to as EMDR, is increasingly becoming one of the most popular treatments available for addressing post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Scientists have discovered that one potential cause of PTSD is poor processing after the event has taken place. Essentially, they’ve found that when a person experiences a significant trauma, their brain isn’t always able to fully process the event. EMDR works by essentially helping – in a calm environment – the person with the trauma go through and process the details of the event so that it can be move to long term memory and prevent excessive stress.
This process is extremely effective. But the way that it’s described often has some people worried that it sounds similar to some pseudoscientific treatments, such as hypnotherapy, and they’re worried that it could be responsible for “false memories” – where an individual, typically under the guidance of a therapist, remembers events that did not take place.
QUICK ANSWER: EMDR cannot and does not erase, alter, or place false memories. EMDR’s role is to change where existing, evidence based memories are stored in the brain.
How EMDR Works and How it Affects Memory Processing
During the overwhelming experience of trauma, a person’s memories of the event do not fully form the way other memories form. Instead, memories can be fragmented, emotionally charged, and difficult to process. Because the brain isn’t accurately able to process these memories, they begin to affect the person’s mental health.
EMDR aims to integrate these memories more adaptively by:
Reducing the emotional distress associated with the memory
Helping individuals view past events with less reactivity
Strengthening cognitive insights related to the experience
Since EMDR relies on memory recall and cognitive restructuring, it operates within the natural processes of memory reconsolidation – where memories are reactivated, modified, and re-stored in a way that aligns with new information. In other words, new memories are not being introduced, nor is a person trying to discover information that was not already there. Rather, they’re taking information that is already in their minds, and using the process of EMDR to store it all together.
Why EMDR is Not at Risk for False Memories
For a person to experience false memories, a person would have to be under very specific conditions that all have to align. Research suggests that for someone to have false memoires implanted in their minds, all of the following situations would need to be present:
The person would have to be given new information or provided with new possibilities that were not already present.
The person would have to be in a situation where they could be guided towards new beliefs, with leading questions, suggestive language, hypnosis, or because they are unable to recall any details of the event and are seeking answers.
Unlike some other forms of therapy that explicitly work to “recover” repressed memories, EMDR focuses on existing memories and the emotional responses tied to them. These memories are not hidden or repressed. They are simply very emotional. The person that has these memories already knows they exist, but is simply having a difficult time processing it effectively.
EMDR in the Hands of a Qualified Psychotherapist
Therapists that specialize specifically in EMDR are trained directly not to use leading questions, not to imply any event has occurred, and not to suggest that something is being missed or repressed. The goal of EDMR is to prioritize existing memory recall and use a series of techniques to reduce how emotionally charged the events feel, so that ultimately the brain can move the memories into their correct placement in the brain instead of these fragmented memories that cause significant stress.
Licensed therapists, trained EMDR, like those here at Flourish Psychology, know how to address trauma accurately and correctly and avoid any situation where suggestion or leading questions could alter a person’s thoughts and memories.
EMDR is and remains one of the most effective strategies we currently have for treating PTSD and trauma. But of course, it is important to work with people that have been specifically trained in this type of approach. If you’re looking for help with trauma for yourself or someone you love, please reach out to Flourish Psychology, today.
Most of us have had some strange dreams and, depending on who you talk to, many times people will try to talk to you about what your dream might “mean.” There’s this belief that dreams have meaning, which causes people to remember their dreams more or think about their dreams intensely, using them as fuel to make decisions or better understand themselves.
Scientists frequently debate whether or not dreams have meaning. Most agree that the answer is probably “no.” Dreams occur when our brain are trying to create memories and process the day, and then the dream itself is just how our brain weaves that processing together in order to tell a story.
Still, that doesn’t mean that dreams are useless from a psychotherapeutic perspective. Quite the contrary. While it’s not clear whether or not dreams always have meaning independently, there are ways to decipher dreams anyway that can have meaning.
For example:
YOUR Intepretation
You’ve probably heard about Rorschach Tests. These are tests where a person looks at an ink blot that has no particular design, and tells the therapist what they see. The ink blot itself has no design, but what we see the ink blot can typically be very meaningful.
Dreams can be very similar. For example, imagine your parents are in your dream, and your mom is helping you with a problem but your dad is silent. You interpret that as a sign your dad is distant, or keeping a secret, or neglectful. Within the context of the dream, it may not have had meaning. But the way you interpreted the dream absolutely might have meaning, which in turn can be used to spark discussion.
Common Dream Experiences
Studies have confirmed that certain emotions and experiences could affect some of the themes of our dreams, which is why many of us have very similar dream experiences. For example, many people dream about being chased. Why would so many people dream about being chased, if dreams are just processing events of the day?
We don’t entirely know. But we do know that it’s more common in those with anxiety. Perhaps it is the brain trying to train a person in their sleep on how to flee if they face danger (since anxiety is the activation of a fight/flight response), or maybe a person with anxiety has a heart that is beating faster in their sleep, and the brain is trying to explain that heartbeat increase by having the person run.
These are all ways that how we feel can affect our dreams in some form, even if the content itself is not entirely meaningful.
The Exceptions
What if “dreams” as a whole don’t have meaning, but that we can somehow introduce things that we process within our dreams that have meaning.
This can be hard to explain so let’s look at an example. Imagine that you are someone that has struggled with negative self-talk, referring to yourself in your internal monologue as “trash” or garbage.” Then you go to sleep, and you’re processing the day, and suddenly you see a garbage can in the dream, and everyone is yelling at the garbage can.
Clearly, it’s possible that this garbage can represents you, and you’re dreaming about how you feel about yourself. This would be a dream that “has meaning,” which would directly contradict the idea that dreams are otherwise meaningless.
Even in this situation, the dream itself didn’t create meaning. The meaning came from your brain trying to process your day, and that includes the self-talk that you had earlier in the day. Still, it’s easy to see how this dream subject would be meaningful. The dream wasn’t trying to tell you something, but it still had meaning.
Analyzing Dreams and Discussing You
Dreams themselves may not inherently have meaning. But how we interpret our dreams, or the issues that occurred recently that led to us dreaming the way we did, can still be interesting. We don’t need to envision that dreams mean more than they do, but we can still think about our dreams and talk about our dreams in a way that might be meaningful.
Struggling with your dreams of late? Experiencing mental health challenges that may be affecting your life and happiness? Reach out to Flourish Psychology, today.
It’s Hard to Make Decisions – But It’s Even Harder Not To
Frequently, throughout life, we’re faced with choices. We have to choose where to go for dinner. We have to choose what show to watch next. We have to choose where we want to live, what shoes to wear with our outfit, what to name our dog.
Some of these choices are easy. Others are much harder.
But regardless of difficulty, most of us will, at times, face situations where we simply cannot seem to make a choice. This has a term – choice paralysis. Faced with the need to make a decision, we struggle, and eventually do nothing at all.
How Choice Paralysis Manifests
Choice paralysis refers to situations where, faced with more than one option, we pause on making a choice and ultimately – either intentionally or unintentionally – choose to do nothing at all. There are many examples of this in action:
Sometimes, choice paralysis is caused by being overwhelmed by choices. For example, if you’re scrolling Netflix looking for the next show to watch, there might be so many shows to choose from that you keep scrolling and struggle to make a decision, ultimately watching nothing.
Sometimes, choice paralysis is caused by the choice being too significant. “Should I buy this home” for example is a huge financial decision, and some people do nothing as the home they wanted gets taken by someone else.
Sometimes, choice paralysis is caused by just an overall lack of motivation. “What job should I apply for?” can be a bit stressful, and if you’re not fully motivated, that stress can then lead to simply not making a decision at all, and giving up.
Choice paralysis can be caused by anxiety, ADHD, stress, or nothing at all. But in all scenarios it creates a problem: if you freeze when you need to make decisions, then one of two things might happen:
You run out of time and make the wrong decision and rush to any decision, even if it wasn’t the right one.
You make no decision at all and nothing happens or changes for you.
Either way, it’s easy to envision how this is a problem. If you aren’t making decisions – or you’re not making the right decisions – then you aren’t going to be able to achieve your goals.
What Happens Next?
Choice paralysis is a real issue. It’s something that stands directly in the way of you being able to achieve your dreams and goals.
But addressing it requires an understanding of what it comes from. What is your thought process? Why is it occurring? What are the goals you’re trying to reach and what do YOU need to help you get there?
This will be different for every individual, which is why it is so important for us to meet and discuss your needs. But achieving your dreams and goals requires making sure you have the confidence to make decisions, self-knowledge so that you can motivate yourself, and more.
If you find that you have trouble with these types of decisions, reach out to the therapists at Flourish Psychology today. Let’s start you on a path to reaching your goals and removing choice paralysis from your life.
Location: 300 Cadman Plaza West Floor 12 - Brooklyn, NY 11201
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