Parenting Post-Wilderness: Parenting a Struggling Teen Before, During and After Treatment
Your guide to parenting a struggling teen or young-adult, whether they’re home, transitioning home, or presently in treatment.
Parents, say goodbye to exhausting confusion, overwhelm, panic and the unhelpful patterns that keep you and your family stuck. Learn how to develop healthy responses and set healthy boundaries with your teen instead of acting out of fear and anxiety.
Experience the relationship-changing power of focusing on your own behavior instead of futile attempts to control your teen.
Your guides to Parenting Post-wilderness are Beth Hillman, a life coach for parents of struggling teens and mom to a post-wilderness teen, and part-time co-host Seth Gottlieb, a wilderness therapy guide turned teen and young-adult recovery coach. Their unique combination of experience and training yields candid conversations chock full of practical, actionable tips and tools to smooth the challenges both parents and teens experience surrounding treatment.
Every week, you can expect conversations around:
- Parenting a struggling teen or young-adult;
- Setting healthy boundaries with your teen;
- Treatment options for your struggling teen or young adult;
- Bringing your kid home from treatment;
- Parenting skills to support your struggling child;
- Teen substance abuse, drug addiction, gaming addiction, suicidal ideation, or other teen mental health concerns;
- How to end power struggles and instead foster healthy communication with your teen or young-adult;
- And much more.
Listen in to discover how parents like you have learned to influence equanimity in the home and rebuild connections with the teens they love.
Connect with Beth on Instagram (@bethhillmancoaching) or find more information about working with Beth at www.bethhillmancoaching.com.
Parenting Post-Wilderness: Parenting a Struggling Teen Before, During and After Treatment
197. Intergenerational Narratives and Passing On Trauma to Our Children With Kellyn Smythe
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
When you grow up inside fear, survival, instability, or emotional chaos, those experiences don’t just disappear when you become an adult. They quietly shape the stories you carry about safety, relationships, success, control, and even what it means to be a “good” parent. And without realizing it, you might begin to pass those same narratives on to your own children.
In this deeply personal and thought-provoking conversation, I sit down with Kellyn Smythe to explore how intergenerational narratives and trauma get handed down through families, often without anyone consciously intending to do so. Kellyn shares the extraordinary story of growing up under a false identity after his mother fled an abusive relationship, spending years living in hiding, constantly carrying the belief that danger was always just around the corner. And his whole world was turned upside down once again when he learned the truth many years later.
But this episode isn’t just about Kellyn’s story. It’s about all of us.
It’s about the ways fear, anxiety, perfectionism, hypervigilance, and emotional survival patterns quietly move through generations. It’s about recognizing the narratives we inherited from our own parents and asking ourselves whether those stories truly belong to us… or to our children.
And perhaps most importantly, it’s about hope. Because awareness creates choice. And repair, connection, and new relational experiences really can begin changing the story.
In this episode on intergenerational narratives and passing on trauma to our children, we discuss:
- How family narratives and survival patterns get passed down through generations
- Kellyn’s experience growing up under a hidden identity
- The impact of fear, hypervigilance, and perfectionism on parenting
- Why many parents unknowingly pass their own anxiety and unresolved trauma onto their children
- The connection between intergenerational trauma and family dynamics
- How rupture and repair can create deeper connection within families
- Why awareness is the first step toward changing generational patterns
- The difference between acknowledging painful experiences and making them your identity
- How new relational experiences help create healing and emotional resilience
- Why repair and authentic connection matter more than perfection in parenting
Looking for support?
🗺️Need help setting healthy boundaries with your teen AND following through? My free guide will help you do so by creating your own Parent Home Plan!
🧘Learn how to respond in hard moments, without losing your cool, the relationship, or yourself, inside my 6-week Boundaries Masterclass.
🤍Influence lasting change in yourself and your struggling teen with my private coaching or parent group program specifically created for parents of struggling teens.
Have a question or need support? You can email me at beth@bethhillmancoaching.com
You can support the show by:
And remember parents, the change begins with us.
FREE online workshop - June 24 from 5-630MT
Respond Like Yoda (When Your Kid Is Acting Like Vader)
How to be grounded, avoid power struggles, and respond with clarity instead of reaction
Register at https://bethhillmancoaching.com/yoda
