Navigating A Teen Mental Health Crisis with Tracey Yokas

Become A Calm Mama

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, 10 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.

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Prior to writing her recent book, Tracy earned her master's degree in counseling psychology, and she lives in Newbury Park, California with her family, her cats and her fish. And when she's not writing about mental health, she can be found playing with paint, glitter, and glue. She loves to bring people together through art in order to help women in their journey towards authenticity.

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.

Unhealthy Coping Strategies

As we talk about so often on this podcast, all behavior is a strategy to communicate, cope, or change our circumstance. Tracey’s story is no different.

Through this crisis, she learned that eating disorders are really about someone struggling in their own life with powerlessness, control issues and low self esteem. It’s much deeper and more complicated than wanting to look thinner. In the book, she says, “Eating disorders are an unhealthy attempt to change low self esteem, and their coping mechanism for being terrified of not measuring up.”

Often, eating disorder and self harm behaviors like cutting go hand-in-hand. You might see someone get into healthier eating habits, but then the cutting resurfaces, or vice versa. It’s an attempt to replace one coping strategy with another. Symptoms keep popping up because there is a deeper root cause that hasn’t been healed.

When you understand that disordered eating, self harm or other symptoms are a strategy for something that's going on inside, you can realize that it's not against you as the parent. It's not personal. It's not because you did something wrong.

Tracey shares that, looking back, she thinks it did her family a disservice to be so hyper-focused on the behavior. This is easy to do because the behavior is what you see. It is what scares and overwhelms you. But it’s also easy to get lost in the behavior (the symptom) and lose sight of compassion for the deeper struggle.

Navigating a Teen Mental Health Crisis

When Tracey saw her daughter suffering in this way, she says she hit an emotional rock bottom. The baggage she’d been carrying with her throughout her life came to the surface. She realized that she couldn’t actually control anyone but herself.

As a mom, you’re going to want to eliminate the pain for your child. You want to fix things for them. But you can only actually do your own work.

Tracey breaks down her healing journey into three parts: self care, self trust and self love.

Self care. Tracey shares that for nearly two years, she was missing the point that her therapist was asking her to do the same thing that she wanted her daughter to do - take better care of herself.

She thought that everybody else had to be okay first. But she learned that , while she needed to facilitate the best treatment she could for her daughter, she also had a responsibility to take care of herself and heal herself.

Tracey believes self care is totally misunderstood by many people. It’s not just about the external stuff. It really comes down to understanding our own patterns, tendencies and coping mechanisms, and choosing strategies that move us toward connection rather than away from it.

Her own experience of self care looked like a return to a creative practice. She says, “I could never have imagined where, ultimately, creativity would lead me and all the benefits I would get from it.”

Self trust. When you don’t trust yourself, you don’t have an inner guide for making decisions in your life. When things don’t go the way you envisioned, what will you draw from?

Tracy says self trust is about staying connected to yourself, being okay with each step of the process and trusting the reasons behind your decisions.

Self love. This one is really hard, especially if you haven’t had a loving relationship with yourself in the past. But when we heal, our kids inevitably heal because we interact with them differently. I love what

Moving Toward Compassion

Tracey writes in her book about becoming a compassionate witness of Faith and of her pain and struggle:

Instead of reacting in fear, despair, and confusion, now, at least on the outside, I could respond differently. Calmness, concerted, and focused had required discussion with the therapists, input from Faith, trial and error, and lots of practice for which life afforded me opportunity.

Over time, I improved. I learned to sit on the floor, breathe, remain quiet and very still, preventing my own body and my own emotions from being hijacked.

I could witness Faith's pain without trying (at least most of the time) to intervene or to fix. Without floating away on waves of my own anxiety. Without being swept up in currents of fear.

This is really what compassion looks like. Sitting on the floor, breathing. This is what your kid needs.

Tracey goes on to write: Sweaty and spent, Faith would calm down because she would always eventually calm down. The big feeling cycle always ends. You're just there to be a witness. The problem solving, dealing with the behavior, talking about it can all wait until later.

I am so thankful to Tracey for writing this beautiful and sharing her story with us on the podcast. She is a wonderful example of what becoming a calm mama is all about.

If you or your child are struggling, please reach out to get the support you need. Get in touch with a therapist, Tracey, me or a trusted family member or friend. You are not alone.

Connect with Tracey Yokas:

• Read the book: Bloodlines: A Memoir of Harm and Healing
• Visit Tracey’s website to learn more about her work
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Follow Tracey on Instagram and