One of the words I hear most frequently from parents is “overwhelmed.”

When a parent tells me that she is overwhelmed, I usually say, “That sounds very difficult.  What do you do when you’re overwhelmed?”

I don’t know what to do.

So what do you do?

I just told you.  I don’t know what to do when I’m feeling overwhelmed.

I see.  But the last time you were overwhelmed, what did you do?

I didn’t know what to do.  That’s what happens to me when I overwhelmed; I don’t know what to do.

I understand what you’re saying.  What I want to know is, the last time or anytime you can remember, that you were feeling overwhelmed, what did you do?  Did you crawl into your bed and hope that everything and everybody would go away and you wouldn’t be overwhelmed anymore? Did you scream out of frustration and despair?  When you realize that you’re overwhelmed, somehow, in some way life goes on, you do or say something.  I would like you to think back and tell me sometime you can remember when you were feeling overwhelmed, what did you do or say?

I don’t know.

Okay.  When you ask your child a question and he says, “I don’t know,” what you say to him?

I usually say, “how can you not know?”

So now that you said to me that you don’t know the answer to my question, how would it be helpful for me to say to you, “how can you not know?”

That doesn’t really sound helpful at all, but what else should I say when he says he doesn’t know something that he obviously should know?

I would suggest that you say to him what I’m going to say to you now that you told me you don’t know something.  “I believe you that you don’t know and I would like you to think about it and try to remember what you did or said when you were overwhelmed.”

Now that I’m thinking about it, I was overwhelmed last Tuesday night because I needed to start cooking for Shabbos, my daughter asked me to help her with her homework, I had to at least make a brief appearance at my neighbor’s daughter’s vort, and there was still a pile of unfolded laundry on my bed.

Excellent.  I appreciate your thinking that through to remember what was going on that caused you to feel overwhelmed.  And what did you do?

The first thing I did was to tell my daughter that I don’t have time to help her with her homework and she should please call a friend.  Then I prepared a couple of things to get them into the oven for our Shabbos meals, then I went to the vort and ended up staying there much longer than I had wanted to because I didn’t want to cut people off when they began to speak with me.  By the time I got home, it was nearly midnight, but I couldn’t leave the laundry on my bed unfolded so I folded it, and finally got to bed much later than I wanted to and I was tired the whole next day.

The first thing you did was tell your daughter that you didn’t have time for her.  What did you have time for?

What I meant was that I didn’t have time for all the things that I needed to do.

So when you were overwhelmed because you didn’t have time to do all the things you needed to do, what you did was to decide that you didn’t need to help your daughter, but the other three things you decided you did need to do and you got them done.

Yes, I didn’t need to help my daughter; she could call a friend and get the help from a friend rather than from me.

And you’re quite sure that your daughter is fine with that.  I’m not so sure.  I wonder if your spending time with your daughter, even time spent doing homework, would be nice for her.  She may be wondering why you have time for your neighbor and her daughter, but not for her. 

I’m wondering if the homemade kugel is important to your daughter or if she’d rather you spent that time with her and bought a kugel from the store.  And I really don’t understand what would’ve happened if you had moved the unfolded laundry off of your bed you could go to sleep and you or someone else could fold it tomorrow.

When you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re probably saying to yourself, “I don’t have time for all of this.”  After you’ve said that to yourself, sit down, slow down, and say to yourself, “what do I have time for?”  Take responsibility for the fact that there are very few things that you need to do and many things that you would like to do.  Choose the things that are most important to you to do, and the people that are most important to you.  Then, accept the fact that other people are going to be disappointed that you didn’t choose them, and that there are some things you’re not going to get done, yet.

We may think that the antidote to feeling overwhelmed is to push ourselves harder.  That is often unrealistic and sometimes unhealthy. Very often the best way to prevent feeling overwhelmed is to accept our limitations, and make sure our expectations, for ourselves, are realistic.

Rabbi Yitzchak Shmuel Ackerman is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with specialties in marriage, relationships, and parenting.  He works with parents and educators, and conducts parenting groups for men and women.  He can be reached at 718-344-6575