Cassie Kuzmanoff, LICSW

07/23/2025

06/11/2025

❤️

05/21/2025

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, reminding us not just to tend to what’s blooming outside, but to nurture what’s growing within. 🌱 This month, let’s make space for tiny, meaningful acts of care — for ourselves and each other. You don’t have to wait for a breakdown to give yourself a break. You don’t need permission to rest, reset, or reach out. Here’s a list of gentle things you can do to support your mind, body, and spirit. ✨ Most importantly, check in on the people you care about.

04/30/2025

💜😳
Nobody is responsible for our emotions.
Not our children.
Not our partners.
Not our parents.
Not the stranger who cut us off in traffic.
NOBODY.

Because emotions don’t come from other people. They come from within US — from our expectations, our wounds, our stories, our history.

What someone else does might touch something inside us — but what rises up in response is ours.

When we blame our children for how we feel —
“You’re making me angry,”
“You’ve ruined my day,”
“I wouldn’t be so upset if you just listened”—
we hand them a burden that was never theirs to carry.

And when we rely on them to make us happy, we teach them that their role is to regulate others —
to walk on eggshells, to perform, to please, to fix.

But children are not our therapists.
They are not our emotional regulators.
They are not here to heal what we haven’t.

They’re here to be children.
To grow, to learn, to feel, to mess up, to need us.

And it’s our job to meet that need without projecting our pain.

Emotional responsibility is not about perfection. It’s about awareness. It’s about owning the space between what triggered us and how we chose to respond. It’s about recognising: this is mine, not theirs.

Because when we take full responsibility for our inner world, we set our children free to live fully in theirs — unburdened, unafraid, and deeply loved. ❤️

Quote Credit: .ma.g ❣️

Follow & .ma.g for more

04/15/2025

Nobody is responsible for our emotions.
Not our children.
Not our partners.
Not our parents.
Not the stranger who cut us off in traffic.
NOBODY.

Because emotions don’t come from other people. They come from within US — from our expectations, our wounds, our stories, our history.

What someone else does might touch something inside us — but what rises up in response is ours.

When we blame our children for how we feel —
“You’re making me angry,”
“You’ve ruined my day,”
“I wouldn’t be so upset if you just listened”—
we hand them a burden that was never theirs to carry.

And when we rely on them to make us happy, we teach them that their role is to regulate others —
to walk on eggshells, to perform, to please, to fix.

But children are not our therapists.
They are not our emotional regulators.
They are not here to heal what we haven’t.

They’re here to be children.
To grow, to learn, to feel, to mess up, to need us.

And it’s our job to meet that need without projecting our pain.

Emotional responsibility is not about perfection. It’s about awareness. It’s about owning the space between what triggered us and how we chose to respond. It’s about recognising: this is mine, not theirs.

Because when we take full responsibility for our inner world, we set our children free to live fully in theirs — unburdened, unafraid, and deeply loved. ❤️

Quote Credit: .ma.g ❣️

Follow & .ma.g for more

04/13/2025

With dysregulation, thinking and behavior can get erratic. Tantrums erupt. Crying gets loud - or aggressive.

⚡️Emotions can suddenly flare, flooding the body with adrenaline and leaving us in a fight/flight response. Other times it can leave us clumsy or scattered. Guarded or reactive.

In that moment, children cannot follow instructions or requests to tell what happened.

Here are some things you can do to ground them.
1. Move close.
2. Hold a hand or a shoulder.
3. Get down to their level.
4. Hold the space for a beat.
5. Use just a few words. "I'm here." or "This is hard," is plenty.
6. Avoid asking for explanations or about feelings in the moment
7. Listen, if a child has things to say, without disrupting if possible.
8. Hold the thought that they are a good kid having a hard time.

This strategy helps to support a child through their full arc of emotional expression.

Keep at it and you will see that your own calm, close and warm attention anchors the child and they can co-regulate with you.

Listening to a child like this helps their bodies learn what they need to feel centered and giving them an outlet shifts the feelings and emotions behind dysregulation.
This evidence-based approach is trusted and practiced by educators, therapists, counsellors and parents worldwide.

03/26/2025

Subtle changes in language can shift how we think about behaviors across the lifespan.

03/11/2025

02/18/2025

Incredibly well said. 👏