Choosing Affirmation Over Control

How one mom advocated for her autistic son through mental health crises

Feb 08, 2026

What do you do when your community views your neurodiverse teen as a problem to be solved, rather than a child worthy of respect and care?

Bridget’s worst fear came true when her young adult son became incarcerated. But contrary to cultural stereotypes about inmates, her son’s story isn’t one of violence and willful defiance. It’s a story of a neurodiverse kid who did his best while experiencing severe anxiety. It’s the story of an autistic teen who experienced bullying from his peers and a lack of support from school administrators. And it’s the story of a teen who fell into addiction to manage his pain and loneliness, making honest mistakes along the way.

Through it all, Bridget, a former school therapist and mom of four, has been her 28-year-old son’s advocate. She’s also learned about unconditional love, letting go, and acceptance. She writes a Substack called Black Sheep Mom about parenting an incarcerated son. Here’s part one of her story.

Getting Help

Serena: Tell me about your son.

Bridget: From birth, he was different. I can only say that now in hindsight. I was a first time mom and I didn’t know what “normal” was. I just kept thinking, “Well, okay, so he’s intelligent, so he’s rambunctious. What’s the big deal?” It wasn’t until my second boy was born two years later, when I realized not everything is that intense.

Serena: You’re talking about signs of autism and other neurodivergent tendencies. What did you notice?

Bridget: He was always fussy, but he never wanted to be held. By grade school, he had difficulty with eye contact. Social cueing was a foreign language.

He loved patterns. The shoes in the mudroom had to be lined up by size, or he would melt down. He had to touch the lights a certain number of times. His bedtime had to be very rigid. If it wasn’t, he had, like, Chernobyl-esque meltdowns.

By the time he was in middle school, it had become completely untenable and dysfunctional. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome1 and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Serena: How did the school handle his needs?

Bridget: Unfortunately, it became a battleground between him and the teachers. When they started switching classes, he put his coat on his seat at his desk because he was afraid of the germs from other kids who sat in the same chair. The teachers wanted him to put his coat away. He would say, “No, I have to have my coat.” They would argue with him, and then he’d end up in the office, and then we would get the phone call.

That was when my husband and I realized we needed help. So we took him to a prestigious university where he went through all the testing and nine months of exposure therapy. It was a long road. But at least then we knew what we were dealing with.

Serena: This sounds agonizing! What happened next?

Becoming Desperate

Bridget: Unfortunately, public school ended up being a bad situation for him. He had a target on his back as a behavioral kid, but a lot of it was because of his anxiety. As part of his IEP, the administration had him carry a pink slip from class to class, and he had to get it signed by each teacher every day. The boys made fun of him.

He begged me, “I don’t want to go there anymore. All I am is a problem.”

That’s what evolved for him: he became this problem to be solved, for the school, the teachers, and even me and his dad.

Serena: I have so much compassion for this kid! It sounds like most folks couldn’t see beyond his anxiety to uncover who he really was. How did he cope with feeling like he was just a problem in others’ eyes?

Bridget: By his sophomore year, his mental health had morphed into a type of OCD that I had never witnessed. Sports were saving grace. He’s athletic and strong. He’d do two football practices a day and then very intense workouts at home. So he was working out six, eight hours a day that summer. He had an obsession with how his abs looked, which turned into body dysmorphia. Every day, he would ask me, “Do you see my six-pack?” He wanted validation; he kept checking, checking, checking in the mirror.

I was like, “What is happening?”

Serena: Would you call this an eating disorder?

Bridget: Yeah, it was another compulsion and a way to control something when he felt no control elsewhere.

Serena: That’s how I might describe my daughter’s eating disorder, deep down: an obsession with her body and food and an attempt to control her environment. So your son was in this desperate place. What did you do?

Bridget: One night, I found him on his bedroom floor, sobbing. He said, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t live like this.” It was a sort of passive suicidality.

He was already in therapy, we were already doing a lot of stuff, but that’s when I said, “Something more has to happen.”

The medication decision was a difficult one for my husband and me. But our son was suicidal. He was absolutely hopeless.

He was put on Prozac and did well for about nine months, then plateaued. That started our rollercoaster journey with many different meds.

Serena: So the medication helped for a while, but his relationship with the school continued to deteriorate. What happened there?

Bridget: He was eventually expelled his sophomore year. In the middle of summer, I picked him up from a job where he had been bailing hay. He had a pocketknife, which he used to cut bales of hay. I drove him to the college campus for a weeklong football camp. Since he was late, he raced in, took off his work clothes, shoved them in a bag, put on his football gear and ran out to the practice field. Two days later, I got a call because there was a smell of weed in the dorms. So they called the cops and searched everyone’s stuff. Then the cops found his pocketknife that he used for work. The cops didn’t have a problem with it. It was just a pocketknife. He’d never got it out. He’d never been violent, nothing like that. But the school had a zero-tolerance policy. So even though it was the middle of summer, this happened off campus, and he’d never gotten the knife out, they still expelled him.

Serena: That seems so unjust, especially for a kid who has already had so many struggles and is just trying to find his way in the one place where he feels safe - the sports team. It seems like they didn’t have the resources to support him well.

Bridget: In hindsight, you could say a lot of things, but I think it was a way of them ridding themselves of him as a problem child. It was a small town, and there were lots of politics at play.

Serena: So your son’s sense of himself as a problem was confirmed. How did your son process this rejection?

Bridget: He went out of state to a military academy. That was the only option we had. After you’re expelled, you can’t go to any other public school and most parochial schools will not take you either.

The night before he went into his second year of military academy, he made a foolish mistake. He felt hurt and angry after his former public school refused to reinstate him. So he logged into Facebook, tagged forty-three friends in a note that said “F you.” One parent reported it to the local prosecutor, who then charged him with forty-three counts of malicious use of a telecommunications device - essentially cyberbullying. That began the long journey of legal involvement.

Serena: Wow. That’s a huge consequence for a stupid social media post. As someone who has autistic loved ones, I can also imagine how a dysregulated, autistic person could act out like that without envisioning the long-term consequences.

So your son’s childhood and adolescence was quite a rollercoaster - and we haven’t even gotten to the incarceration story yet! What has helped you support him? How have you handled your own anxiety on this journey?

Choosing Affirmation Over Control

Bridget: When my son was in sixth grade, I was trained in a relational modality called Nurtured Heart. It taught me to ask questions like, how am I going to show up in this room with this kid? Where’s my energy going to go right now?

a person holding a fruit — Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Here’s an example: What if I found my toddler standing on the coffee table? Our knee jerk reaction is, “Oh, you’re going to fall and hit your head!”

The reality is they haven’t fallen yet. I can say gently, “Oops, I need you to get down from there,” and help them down.

Then I say, “Look at you taking care of your body. Thank you for being safe.”

That’s a very different framework from lecturing the kid about why he can’t be on the coffee table. We get so caught up in what could happen, and how dangerous and how scary, instead of staying in the moment. We don’t affirm our kids with “You’re capable of being safe. Thank you for taking care of yourself.”

If I hadn’t learned some of those skills, I don’t know if my son and I would have a relationship today. Before then, I was so focused on everything wrong. The irony is that I was so worried. I used to picture him in an orange jumpsuit on the side of the road, and all my energy went into preventing that. Guess what happened anyway? He’s sitting in prison blues this afternoon. So all my energy in that direction didn’t change it one bit. If anything, it probably opened the gates a little wider.

Serena: I love that: affirming what’s true and our kids’ ability to take care of themselves rather than anxious danger management. Your worst fear came true: your son went to jail. One of my worst fears came true: my daughter inherited an eating disorder like mine. And we’re still here.

Bridget: Yes, that’s it. We’re still here. We’re still breathing. And I can say to my son, “I still love you. There are lots of possibilities ahead.”

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