Why You Feel Depressed When Parenting a Hypersensitive, High-Needs Child

**You can also listen to this in audio format only on The Regulated Mother Podcast on Apple or Spotify.

**Below is the podcast turned into a blog article for easy reading.

Why You Feel Depressed When Parenting a Hypersensitive, High-Needs Child

The Fog That Creeps In

Parenting a hypersensitive, high-needs child can feel like being caught in a storm that never lets up.

Your child is in distress multiple times a day. You try everything to help, but nothing seems to work. You feel powerless, exhausted, and like you're running on fumes.

And then, one day, you realize there’s this fog that has settled in—you’re waking up more numb, and going to bed feeling more flat. You try to be more positive or feel grateful… but the heaviness doesn’t lift. You just feel depressed.

Understanding why this happens is key. Because once you understand it, you can begin to gently support yourself to shift out of it, starting from the inside out.

When Depression Took Over My Life

There was a long stretch of time when my son was having five-hour rages daily. It was so intense.

He also couldn’t sleep, he stopped going to school, and he lost interest in everything he once loved.

I was constantly activated, exhausted, and depleted—and no matter what I tried, nothing was helping.

I would wake up with a feeling of dread, walk around on eggshells all day, and go to bed trying to convince myself I was grateful.

But under all the coping tools and affirmations, I was depressed.

I didn’t recognize it at first because I was still functioning. But I was slowly shutting down—cycling between frustration and collapse.

And it wasn’t just emotional. It was physical. I could feel it in my whole body. It was heavy, and I was dragging myself around.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what was happening. But now I do. And it’s something many mothers are living with—without even realizing it.

What Depression Really Is

Depression isn’t just sadness. It’s the body and brain entering a protective shut-down mode because everything feels like too much.

From a clinical standpoint, depression is diagnosed when symptoms like persistent low mood, disinterest in activities, fatigue, sleep issues, and hopelessness last more than two weeks and interfere with life. Doctors often explain it as a biochemical imbalance, particularly with neurotransmitters like serotonin. This view is still valid, and medication can help some people to feel better.

But what we now know is that brain chemistry is shaped by life experience. Ongoing stress, trauma, sleep deprivation, and nervous system overwhelm can all contribute to depressive states. Especially for parents of neurodivergent or high-needs children—where the stress is relentless.

Research shows that around 50% of mothers parenting a child with autism report high depressive symptoms, compared to just 6–14% of parents of neurotypical children. That’s not a small gap. And it validates what so many of us are living through. This isn’t a flaw in you—it’s your body reacting to extraordinary demands and lack of recovery.

Why We Become Depressed

These are some of what I see as the root causes of why we can become depressed…

Emotional Suppression

Parenting our high-needs kids triggers a lot of emotions in us. And when you don’t have space to feel and process your grief, rage, fear, or powerlessness, your system suppresses them automatically so that you can just keep going. But eventually, the load gets too heavy—and the system goes numb.

That numbness is your body saying, “I can’t keep carrying this.” You can think of depressed as the pressing down of all the emotions—de-pressing—and when there is no outlet, the only option becomes to numb them down because otherwise it would all be too much.

Nervous System Shutdown

From a nervous system or somatic point of view, every time your child activates, your body automatically mobilizes fight or flight energy. But because you can’t act on those impulses, you suppress that energy. Over time, your nervous system starts to believe, “This is inescapable.” That belief drops the system into dorsal vagal shutdown—a freeze or collapse state. Depression is the nervous system’s way of saying: “It’s all too overwhelming and I don’t feel like I have agency.”

Genetics, Biochemistry & Nutritional Support

Both of my parents had seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, where in the winter months, due to less sunlight, you can feel more depressed—and I had this same condition for most of my younger life too. At first, I thought it was purely genetic. But when I left my family environment and moved to New York, the SAD disappeared. That told me: it’s not just about genes. It’s about environment, modeling, and how we learn to automatically be based on what we observed growing up.

Years later, when my son was born and wasn’t sleeping and was so colicky and hard to take out anywhere, I started to feel more depressed. I saw a functional medicine doctor and started taking vitamin D3 and other vitamins that supported my thyroid and my methylation cycle—a process that helps regulate stress and mood and helps your body detox. It helped stabilize me in a way I could feel ok, and the depression didn’t take hold of me so deeply.

Circadian Rhythm & Sleep

Sleep isn’t just about rest—it’s about hormonal and emotional regulation. Your circadian rhythm—your internal body clock—needs natural light to function. When it’s disrupted, your body struggles to produce serotonin and melatonin, and your mood begins to tank. 

Many of us moms are up at night, living in survival mode, and losing access to the very rhythms that keep us emotionally stable. If this is the way it is for you right now, I get it. I was there. Sleep is still an issue in my home. So I just do the best I can to prioritize it when I can, and if not, then I make sure I use my other supports to help my body get what it needs so I don’t drop so low.

Exercise & Movement

At one point, I made a 30-minute outdoor walk my non-negotiable. Even when I was tired, even when nothing was working, I walked. And almost every time, I came back feeling different. More capable. Less foggy. The combination of sunlight, movement, rhythm, and breath literally pulled me out of shutdown. It didn’t solve everything—but it helped me feel like me again, even if just for a little while. The biggest difference I saw was how I would more easily go into anger and rage the days I didn’t walk, and the days I did walk I was able to stay more calm. So I made walking a priority.

The Hidden Inner Conflict

There is something else I need to name here, which is this deep hidden inner conflict. It is something that so many mothers feel, but hardly ever say out loud. And it’s this: “I feel depressed… because of my child.”

That thought alone can bring on a wave of shame. “Because what kind of mother thinks that?” says my inner critic. It sounds like a betrayal of the very person you love most in the world. But the truth is, this is not about a lack of love.

It’s about the pain of loving so deeply… and still feeling powerless. It’s about pouring everything you have into helping your child—and watching it not work. That powerlessness builds over time. And if there’s no space to feel it, no way to resolve it, your system starts to shut down.

That’s how depression begins—because your nervous system feels like it’s trapped and stuck with no way out.

And then there’s the shame that comes with that feeling.

Even having these thoughts—“I wish things were different,” “I feel like I’m drowning,” “I don’t want to do this anymore”—feels so wrong. You wonder: What kind of mother feels this way?

Here’s the answer I want to give you: A deeply loving mother. A human being whose nervous system is overwhelmed, depleted, and trying to survive a situation that’s bigger than one nervous system can hold alone.

This inner war—between deep love and deep depletion—is at the heart of why so many of us end up in a depressed state.

Somatic Experiencing and Internal Family Systems: Two Trauma-Informed Paths to Healing

If you’re realizing now that you would like to get some help for your depression, I want to name two therapies that are both very non-pathologizing. These approaches understand the roots of depression and help you to process and release the trapped emotions and beliefs from your system.

Somatic Experiencing

This therapy is a body-based, nervous-system approach that sees depression as stuck survival energy. When we are activated by our child’s behavior, our bodies mount a stress response—we want to fight or flee. But when we can’t do either, our system defaults to a shutdown or freeze response, which often manifests as depression.

The way out isn’t to push through or override the depression. It’s to first be with the protective response of depression in that dorsal state—offering safety to the system—and then gently allowing the body to move into the defensive response it never got to complete. When that incomplete fight or flight response is supported and released, the body can let go of the stored survival stress. This is what begins to restore a sense of freedom, possibility, and empowerment.

In everyday life, becoming unstuck can look like movement—walking, bouncing, stretching—or feeling into what didn’t get expressed during a moment of high activation with your child. Maybe it’s rage, fear, or grief. I like to do a whole-body shake-off after intense moments, which helps release that stored energy and prevent me from dropping into shutdown.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

IFS is another approach I love. It teaches that you are not the depression—you are your true Self, with a capital S. Depression is a part of you, and you can become the compassionate awareness of it.

In IFS, depression is often seen as a protective part that tries to shut everything down so you don’t have to feel the pain underneath. It’s trying to protect you from overwhelming grief, rage, fear, or powerlessness.

When you meet this part with compassion and ask it, “What are you afraid I’ll feel if you didn’t protect me with this depression?”—you begin to hear the stories, the beliefs, and the wounds it’s trying to manage. IFS helps you go to the root and gently heal the origins of those wounds.

It also helps us uncover the meaning our nervous system is making—like “I’m trapped,” or “This is hopeless”—and helps us rewrite that meaning with a new truth, from a place of safety and self-leadership.

These two modalities—Somatic Experiencing and IFS—are powerful tools for healing depression. They don’t just help you manage symptoms. They help you transform the underlying energy, beliefs, and emotional pain that are keeping you stuck.

The Power of Meaning and Purpose

Now I want to talk about one of the most powerful ways to shift out of depression: reconnecting to meaning.

Studies show that having a sense of purpose is strongly associated with lower rates of depression and anxiety. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust, said, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’”

Depression often takes hold when life feels meaningless—when we’re suffering with no sense of why. We feel trapped in cycles we didn’t choose, and it can feel like we’re just surviving with no direction.

But meaning changes that. When we connect our struggle to something bigger—when we say, “This has shaped me, deepened me, made me more compassionate”—then depression begins to loosen its grip.

Most of us didn’t expect parenting to look like this. We had dreams—often unconscious—of how it would feel, what kind of child we’d have, how we’d be seen as parents. When those dreams die, we grieve.

And if we don’t grieve consciously, that grief turns into depression. We stay stuck in the loss of what we thought parenting would be.

But when we let go of the old story—when we release the idea that our child must fit a mold, that we must be the kind of parent who gets praised and validated—we create space for something new to take root.

For me, that new meaning became about becoming more of my true self:

• More compassionate
  
  
• More aligned with my values
  
  
• More honest and present
  
  
• More accepting of myself and my child
  
  

This path—though not the one I would have chosen—has shaped me in ways I never could have imagined. It has invited me to live from truth, not from conditioning. To love with fewer conditions. To find joy in the connection I do have, rather than the one I thought I needed.

Meaning doesn’t erase the pain. But it gives it purpose.

Final Thoughts: An Invitation Back to Yourself

If you’re feeling depressed right now, I want to offer you an invitation back to your true Self.

Can you become the awareness behind the depression? Can you witness it, instead of being overtaken by it?

Depression is not who you are. It’s a part of you—a nervous system protective response that is overwhelmed and trying to protect you from feeling too much.

Can you meet it with compassion? Can you say, “I see you. I understand why you're here”? And then gently ask: “What are you protecting me from feeling?”

Often what’s underneath is grief, anger, or powerlessness—from both the past and the present. And this is where your healing begins.

You are not a bad mother for feeling depressed. You are a human mother navigating extraordinary challenges.

But this is not the end of your story.

When you reconnect to meaning—to your “why”—and begin to live from your true values instead of your conditioned ones, something shifts.

This depression becomes a guidepost. A sign that something inside you wants to change. A call to become more of who you truly are.

This is the path to reclaiming your power.

This is the path to freedom.

This is the path to you.