Summarized Transcript of Moms Moving On

Introduction: What Does It Really Mean to Be Resilient?

HOST (Michelle Dempsey-Multack):
Welcome back to Moms Moving On. Today we’re diving into one of my favorite subjects, resilience. When you hear the title of the book we’re discussing, you’ll understand why. I’m joined by Dr. Jonathan DiPiero, co-author of Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges. He’s an associate professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai, assistant director at the Center for Stress Resilience and Personal Growth, and a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma recovery.

HOST: Dr. DiPiero, thank you for being here.

GUEST (Dr. Jonathan DiPiero): Thank you for having me on. I’m thrilled to share what resilience really means and how families, especially divorced parents, can use it to help children thrive.

 

Why Do We Crave Control After Hardship?

HOST: Many parents I work with worry that divorce scars their children for life. They crave certainty. They think, “If I control everything, maybe the pain will lessen.”

GUEST: That’s a misconception. Stress and trauma don’t automatically destroy or strengthen us—it depends on how we process them. And not every adverse experience leads to lifelong scars.

• Minor struggles, like bullying or a tough sports season, are not permanent damage.

   

• What matters most is how children are supported through the challenge.
• Over-control can actually make children more anxious and less confident.

QUOTE: “Control in co-parenting is like holding water in your hands, no matter how tight your grip, it slips away.”

 

Resilience vs. Lasting Scars: What’s the Difference?

HOST: Parents fear, “If I leave my marriage, am I scarring my kids forever?”

GUEST: Divorce itself isn’t the scar. Research shows that high-conflict households—constant fighting, tension, lack of love, are more damaging than separation. What helps children most is having at least one stable, consistent caregiver.

• Children need emotional availability more than a “perfect” family structure.

   

• Modeling calm responses builds resilience in kids.
• Divorce does not automatically equal trauma—it’s the environment around it that matters.

 

How Do We Model Resilience for Our Kids?

HOST: Parents ask me, “How can I protect my child through this transition?”

GUEST: Start with yourself. Kids look to you as their role model. If you’re doing the work, acknowledging grief, facing fears, building your support system, you’ll be equipped to guide them.

Key strategies:

• Practice expectation audits: focus on what you can control versus what you can’t.

   

• Use safe space reinforcement: remind children daily they are loved and supported.
• Show resilience by example, own your flaws, adapt to challenges, and demonstrate growth.

QUOTE: “In order to build your child’s resilience, you should work on your own, because they look to you as a role model.”

 

The Role of Therapy, School, and Community

HOST: Is therapy necessary for every child of divorce?

GUEST: Not always. While therapy can be helpful, it isn’t the only resource. Supports can come from:

• School psychologists and guidance counselors

   

• Faith communities or extended family
• Peer mentors, coaches, or trusted adults

QUOTE: “Children need one stable caregiver to thrive, just one consistent anchor can make all the difference.”

 

Resilience in Action: What to Look For

HOST: How can parents tell if their child is becoming resilient?

GUEST: Look at how they handle small setbacks. Do they seek help after a bad grade, or collapse under pressure? Do they blame others, or take appropriate responsibility? Building self-awareness and accountability are key markers of resilience.

• Resilient kids adapt, recover, and learn from mistakes.

   

• Non-resilient kids may isolate, panic, or blame others for every challenge.
• Adults can strengthen resilience at any age, it’s never too late to change.

 

Final Reflections: More Than Just One Event

GUEST: Divorce is not your child’s identity. Nor is it yours. Don’t let one event define your entire life. You are more than a trauma survivor; you are a parent, a professional, a friend, a whole person with agency and purpose.

QUOTE: “Your divorce is one chapter, not your whole story. Resilience is about writing the next one with clarity and hope.”

 

Raw Transcript:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Moms Moving On. We’re gonna be talking about one of my favorite topics today.

 

And when you hear the title of the book we’re gonna be discussing, you’ll know what it is, because if you know me, you know that this is a topic I fixate on. We’re talking to Dr. Jonathan DiPiero, and he is one of the authors of the book, Resilience, the Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges. I’m so excited to have you here, doctor.

 

Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me on. So as I’m learning, you’re an expert in all things resilience.

 

You are an associate professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai and the assistant director of Mount Sinai Center for Stress Resilience and Personal Growth. You’re a clinical psychologist, an expert in psychological resilience and the treatment of trauma-related mental health conditions. And after many years working with individuals impacted by the 9-11 terrorist attacks, you now focus on supporting the mental health needs of healthcare workers.

 

How beautiful, especially right now in the state of this world that we’re in. And unfortunately, I’m reading you’ve experienced extensive bullying in your childhood, which kind of led you to the place you’re at now. I’m excited to hear about all of this.

 

Yeah, happy to share more. We’re extraordinarily lucky at Mount Sinai that we have a center to support our own healthcare workers. And also that you have taken, what I’m sure was incredibly challenging for you and turn those lemons into lemonade in some way.

 

I do think that’s one of the most important roles we play as humans on this planet is helping somebody else through something we’ve been able to figure out or navigate or grow through. So I’m excited to hear your backstory. I’ll shut up now and let you introduce yourself.

 

So I’m John DiPiro. As you said, I’m a clinical psychologist. I grew up on Staten Island.

 

I was born and raised there for a good part of my life. And I think going back to my experiences, one of the things that struck me is that I didn’t really fit in when I was a kid. I was kind of a misfit, bookish, kind of lost in my own thoughts a lot of the time.

 

And there was a big interest on Staten Island in particular in organized sports. And my parents were actually basketball coaches and baseball coaches, but I didn’t see myself as very coordinated. I wasn’t particularly athletic or talented.

 

And I think that put me on sort of the outskirts of social groups. It didn’t give me supportive friendships. I had the sort of distinct impression that I was invited to birthday parties in grammar school just because they were inviting the whole class, not because they actually wanted me there, which in retrospect was kind of heartbreaking.

 

But then there was a lot of bullying, being called abusive and bad names. There was some hands-on abuse in terms of the bullying. There was incidents where my pants were pulled down in gym class.

 

Thankfully, I was wearing underwear, but still very, very embarrassing. And probably a woefully inadequate school response to that bullying. And as a result, I actually moved around a lot.

 

From school to school, trying to find a setting where I felt welcomed and supported but actually the kids were the same everywhere I went, neither being kids. So the bullying didn’t actually change. And I really, I think looking back, only found my close core friend group in late high school, college, and certainly graduate school.

 

Well, I think high school is a brutal, or adolescence is a brutal experience in general. But when you are dealing with the added stress of bullying or anything in life that makes it just a tad bit harder, I mean, this is impossible. I see it day in and day out with my daughter and her peers and where we’re at in this world of moms moving on is this notion that if a child experiences something difficult, good for them.

 

They’re going to be resilient. But I just, I don’t know how one equates to the other without a lot of hard work. You’re right.

 

And I think this is, maybe there are misconceptions on both ends that stress and adverse experiences always lead to post-traumatic growth, always lead to positives at the end of the day, is I think an oversimplification of the literature and our understanding. And I think dismisses a lot of the suffering, but it’s also not the case. And I wouldn’t be a clinical psychologist if this were the case, that minor adversity is scarring someone for life.

 

And I think there is a concern that if, for example, there’s bullying, my child has bullying in one grade in grammar school, or they don’t win a trophy for their baseball team or basketball team, that there’ll be scarred for life. There’ll be some emotional toll that sticks with them and shakes their confidence forever. And that’s far from the truth.

 

Okay. Well, that’s good to hear, I think. But in your experience, I mean, this obviously had a lasting impact.

 

And so now you’ve come through, you probably walked across that stage of graduation, like, thank God, I’m out of here. But then I’ve got the rest of my life to deal with. So how did you, like, at what point did you start to turn this around and kind of step into this place of growth after what you had experienced? Yeah.

 

So I should say that this was largely confined to probably say pre-high school years. So grammar school and middle school in particular were particularly tough for me. I went to an amazing high school, Xavier High School in Manhattan, all boys, Jesuit with a military background.

 

JROTC program high school. It was one of the best educational experiences of my life. There’s a lot of structure and also a lot of, you know, there’s like a code of conduct or an honor code.

 

There was a certain set of expectations that everybody was held to. Obviously there were still, you know, people doing some bullying, but it really wasn’t as bad as what I experienced when I was younger. I think people are just so busy trying to get all their assignments done.

 

So that was, I think, a corrective experience for me, especially finding my pack in some way there and then college too. But as you said, what had stuck with me and required some work on my part is in some ways, those bullying experiences shook my confidence. It shook my self-esteem.

 

It made me feel kind of consistently on the outskirts of, you know, friend groups, you know, on the periphery, not really there because someone really wants me there, but there because they like had to invite everyone to a party or a gathering. And that took a while to shake. But I think through finding, through my own work, I was able to find experiences that corrected those faulty assumptions.

 

And that I learned that the environment that I faced as a child is not the environment that I face as an adult. I actually have much more resources and things to offer people. I have many accomplishments, people like me for me, like that corny song from the 90s.

 

Isn’t that amazing how that happens? And I think that’s really important. It’s part of a trauma healing process in some way that you learn that the experiences of the past that were traumatic or challenging in some way are not necessarily the experiences of the present moment. You learn to differentiate the past from the present.

 

And the thing about conditions like PTSD is that it really halts you from doing that. When you have a condition like PTSD, it’s as if the trauma is playing out in the present moment again and again and again. It’s as if the problematic relationships are playing over again and again and again.

 

It’s like the threats playing over again and again. But part of the healing process is differentiating what’s the past from what the present moment is. And seeing that oftentimes, if not always, the present situation is much more safe and you have much more agency and control and resources than you did at the time of the traumas, especially if they were childhood traumas.

 

Right, and that’s why doing the work is so important. I know it has been for me to be able to say, as an adult 40-year-old woman, what I’m feeling right now is reminiscent of what I experienced in my childhood. However, I’m not nine-year-old Michelle right now, right? And so being able to differentiate that, and it’s interesting, you said in learning and doing the work, you understood more about yourself.

 

And that happens for me too. And it puts a lot in perspective, but in the work that I do, parents come to me with the same concern over and over and over again. I have to leave my marriage.

 

Am I scarring my kids for life? Is this gonna mess them up forever? Are they going to have PTSD? Somebody said kids are resilient, so it’s fine. It’s like the same narrative over and over and over again. So what does that really look like for children in terms of scarring them for life when their parents get divorced? Yeah, I think that’s a misconception.

 

I think if you look at the literature, there are probably some studies that show that children of divorced parents might be a little bit more anxious, might be a little bit more depressed, but it’s not categorically the case that every child of divorced parents is knocking on a therapist’s door with a full major depression or anxiety. And oftentimes, I’m sure you see this in your work, it’s actually more harmful for the child to be in a relationship with parents that are fighting all the time. Oh my God.

 

Or that there isn’t love, there isn’t open communication being modeled. And I think that’s an important distinction. Like what’s the alternative? Right, what is the alternative? And that’s, you know, I tell people all the time, I have never met an adult who, you know, hears about what I do, whose parents got divorced when they were adults that doesn’t say to me, my God, if only my parents got divorced when I were young, it would have saved me so much trouble.

 

And it’s like, you know, like you said, a misconception of the divorce will mess up the kids. There’s so many things that mess up the kids, one of them being that tension in the home. That’s right.

 

And I think the most important thing is consistency. And it’s about, you know, the parents can be, the partners could be separate, there could just be one parent involved, but being a reliable, consistent, emotionally available parent, I think is the most important. And that can happen in two separate apartments or two separate houses.

 

I was just gonna say, one of the facts that I love to quote over and over and over again, came from an article from Harvard, the Science of Resilience, which I’m sure you know, which points out that children need one stable caregiver to thrive. And so for all of our single parents listening, rest easy, because if you are that one stable, consistent person, your kids have a great shot at thriving. That’s right.

 

And even true for kids who might not have that at home, just having one role model, one mentor, one teacher, one, you know, person in a big brother, big sister program, can make a significant difference. There’s actually plenty of research to show that that’s the case. I love to hear that, because, you know, it’s tough out there these days.

 

There’s a lot going on in many different shapes and forms for people everywhere. And I feel it’s, you know, anxiety in our children is truly coming from the anxiety we project onto them, right? It’s this multi-generational transmission process that you’re not aware of it. You’re just going to keep repeating, but we want to create resilient children.

 

So let’s talk about the book a little bit and how this applies to our child rearing, our just general existence, being able to get out of bed in the morning. Next. Yeah, so I’d say that the biggest message from the book for parents in particular is in order to build your child’s resilience, you should work on your own because they look to you as a role model.

 

Ooh, that’s a good one. Yep. So that’s probably the place to start, making sure that you are facing your fears.

 

You know, if you’re going through a divorce that you’re like acknowledging that that’s actually happening, you’re accepting the fact that this marriage is over, you’re doing the work yourself, then you’ll be better able to have that conversation with your kids. Preach, doctor. Yes, that is it.

 

I mean, it’s so important to be able to, you know, if you want your child to be a certain way, but you’re not showing that to them, it’s a little hypocritical, right? So that’s super important. I love that. Yeah, where do you expect them to get it from? Right, exactly.

 

And, you know, is there, in your expert opinion, is there a critical need? You talked about not every child of divorce is going to be knocking on a therapist’s door, but is there a benefit to sort of like preemptive therapy or emotional or mental health support for young children who are learning to adapt to a co-parented lifestyle or, you know, their parents are in the midst of a high conflict divorce? Yeah, I would say there could be a potential benefit, but the other thing we want to acknowledge too is that not everyone can afford that. Not everyone can access mental health care in the community. There’s a youth mental health crisis, and it’s actually hard, sometimes almost impossible, to find a qualified, you know, marriage and family therapist or child therapist to see.

 

And I would say it’s not necessary for everyone. I think there are probably some kids that are probably higher risk, kids that are already anxious, kids that are already depressed, kids that it might be more prone to blame themselves, even though it doesn’t make sense that they would, kids maybe with neurodevelopmental challenges who might have a hard time understanding the transition when it happens, or might have trouble with transitions and changes and changes of settings. And I think in some cases, those are the kids that already have supports in place.

 

You know, some schools have robust counseling programs or at least teachers that are aware and can be on the lookout for supports, but people also get support from their community more broadly, their families. They get support from their faith community. It’s not necessarily only from a, you know, credentialed therapist that people can get help with these situations.

 

People were dealing with separations of marriages long before therapists existed 100 years ago. Right, right. Well, yeah.

 

And, you know, I think I’m a little biased because for me, I always say to my mom, because my parents had a very, very ugly, brutal, nasty divorce that lasted the entirety of my adolescence, 10 years, from when I was eight until I was 18, my parents were in court. And I always say to my mom, had you just put me in therapy? Like we could have saved a lot of trouble. And she’s like, but nobody did that then.

 

Nobody, that was not the thing. So you go to therapy now and you deal with it now. But one of the biggest loopholes, like you mentioned, I give to parents who were either therapy is not an option because of cost or because the other parent won’t agree to it.

 

Your biggest loophole is that school support, the school psychologist, the school guidance counselor, the social worker, that’s what they’re there for. And they don’t know unless you tell them. And so never be shy to just make that phone call or knock on that door and be like, hey, can you keep an eye out? Here’s what’s going on.

 

It’s like an extra hug for your child every day. You can’t go wrong with that. Yeah, that’s absolutely right.

 

There are built-in supports. And in fact, it’s even more important as you’re contemplating divorce to think about what your support network is. I tell this to patients all the time.

 

You’re thinking about divorce. Who are your friends? Who are your family that you could turn to? Who is in your corner? Who can watch your kids? If your spouse, your ex-partner isn’t around anymore and you need to stay late at work, who can you turn to? And it’s really important to put that social support network in place, put some time into that before it gets challenged. Absolutely, that village thing is huge.

 

And unfortunately, I think for both moms and dads, moms don’t want to hear, well, if it’s so hard, you shouldn’t have left your marriage. And dads want to prove that they could be good dads. So they’re gonna be shy about asking for help too.

 

But it is like the critical first step, like you said, is have that emergency contingency plan in place for when shit hits the fan, because it inevitably will, that’s parenting. But back to resilience. So how do you know if your child is headed on the road towards fabulousness and strength and all good things because they’ve built that resiliency throughout the adversity? How do you know? What do you look for? Yeah, so we think about resilience, broadly speaking, as the ability to adapt, grow and recover from challenges, big and small.

 

And so you could see that in, for example, how your child deals with minor challenges. Okay, they get a bad grade on a math test. Do they collapse on the ground? Do they get angry at the teacher and blame them? Or do they ask for extra help? And do they share it with you and get your guidance and support? Or are they trying to hide it from you, like under their pillow and like forging your signature on the report cards? How do they deal with that? And you can see different strategies are helpful and different strategies are less helpful, right? Like getting a bad grade on the test and immediately knee jerk reaction blaming the teacher and saying that they were incompetent is probably not so helpful.

 

They’re your teacher. Yeah, yeah. Well, and parents, I urge you stop, when you don’t like a child’s teacher, do not let them know that because then everything will be the teacher’s fault.

 

I’ve been in that situation before, yes. And I think it’s really important to instill a sense of personal responsibility. And I think this happens too.

 

This can happen in the workplace. You know, it’s partly generational, although I don’t really like making generalizations. You know, there’s been an increased emphasis on workplace culture and communication in the workplace and mentorship and leadership.

 

But there are often times where, say you get corrective feedback on a performance appraisal and the employee blames the manager and says it’s their fault or they’re biased against me in some way, or they just don’t understand me, or we don’t get along. You know, not taking personal responsibility for your behavior. And I think that’s really, really important.

 

That’s a really important cornerstone of resilience. Like child does something, they’re held accountable in a reasonable way that’s developmentally appropriate. It’s not looking for somebody else to blame.

 

Okay, like what was your contribution to this problem? Right, right. I always ask my daughter that because she’d like to think it was nothing. And then in pointing things out, you know, having that conversation about things happen in a cycle, right? Like nothing happens in a vacuum by itself.

 

Why might that child have said something not nice to you? Was there something you did? Did you not invite them to play? And having those conversations and pointing out to them that they in fact have flaws, I think that is only building their self-awareness which is really necessary for helpful and healthy relationships down the road. One of the things that I do is I do this with my patients. I essentially break out a pie chart.

 

Okay, so this situation went down. What is your contribution to the situation? I don’t want to give the sense I’m blaming you. It’s not, it’s never a hundred percent, one percent, either direction.

 

What piece can you own that you have control over? That’s a good question. How many times do you just get a blank stare like I didn’t do anything? Sometimes, but like some leading Socratic questioning eventually. But I think the opposite is true.

 

Like most often what I’ll get is that they’re taking full, like for example, someone with depression might see themselves as a hundred percent to blame for a situation or healthcare workers with a patient outcome, they’re holding themselves a hundred percent responsible for what happened. But there are many other factors at play. There are many other team members involved and they see themselves entirely responsible when in fact they were maybe like 20% of the overall picture but they’re seeing themselves as a hundred percent.

 

So we want, you know, the perfect outcome for children going through hard things is that they will have the tools and resources available to become resilient. What is the opposite of resilience? What does that look like as an adult? Yeah, so I think the opposite of resilience looks like loneliness, social isolation. It can look like depression and anxiety.

 

It can look like not really having a lot of tools in your toolbox that you’ve built up or that have been given to you to manage challenges. So when challenges happen, every challenge throws you into fight or flight mode. Every challenge, even small ones might send you into a panic because you view yourself as incapable or you actually don’t have the resources to manage it.

 

And so it does not set you up for moving through even everyday life when something goes wrong. Do you think it’s ever too late to say, wow, I could be handling things way better. It’s time to build some resilience up in here.

 

Yeah, I don’t think it’s ever too late. People are always able to change, always able to try something new. And maybe it’s just tweaking something around the edges.

 

Maybe it’s a big change. But I think there’s a lot people can do on their own and a lot, especially for folks that have been struggling for a long time of depression and anxiety, even a small change in the way they view themselves or interact with other people can go a long way in terms of a long-term cumulative effect on their mood. Little changes, people aren’t capable of change.

 

I mean, I hate when, oh, they can’t change, people don’t change. I don’t believe that for a second. I know I’ve changed a lot.

 

And a lot of it came from so much adversity and deciding the victim mentality just did not suit me. And so that’s what I really focus on in helping parents is giving their children a childhood they won’t have to recover from, and they can actually enjoy throughout the adversity such as divorce. So if you had a piece of advice for a parent who is either thinking of starting the divorce process or in it and just losing sleep every night over how their children are going to be affected, what would that be? Yeah, I would say- Aside from reading your book.

 

Yeah, I would say look at the support systems that you have in place for your child. Talk to other parents who’ve been through similar situations, and you might see a range of different perspectives. You might see examples of kids that maybe struggled a little bit temporarily afterwards.

 

There might be examples of kids that did exceptionally well. And so the more information you have, the more good information you have from peers, from role models, people who’ve been there and been through it, the better off you’re going to be. And I think it’s really important to think about what situation is best for your psychological wellbeing and survival, right? A lot of marriages end because the couple grows apart and they don’t love each other anymore and they’ve stopped having sex.

 

And other marriages end because there’s been outright verbal abuse and physical abuse. And that is certainly not a conducive environment for child mental health. And it’s actually much more beneficial for their mental health to be out of that environment to see potential examples of relationships that are more positive.

 

Yep, absolutely. I mean, one bad thing does not necessarily mean gloom and doom. And I think that that is so important.

 

So your book came out in September, right? Yes. Okay. Resilience, the Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges.

 

Where can this be found? Because I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy and I think everyone else should too. Yeah, you can certainly get it on Amazon. I think that would be the most effective place to get it.

 

And it’s readily available. It’s in stock. So I encourage people to check it out.

 

What they’ll notice is that there’s a little bit in each chapter about the science of resilience. There are personal examples from people that we interviewed and some from our own lives as authors. And then there are at the end of each chapter take home bullet points of practice, essentially practices that people can put in place to boost their resilience in those key areas.

 

I love that. I think that putting it into practice, that’s the way, right? Like we can read all we want, but actually having a way to implement what we’re learning and make it a regular habit is the only way to do it, right? Yes, that’s absolutely true. You have to make this a routine.

 

It can’t just be that you say, okay, I’m gonna exercise and you do it once. And then you suddenly think that you’re athletic. No, you have to make it part of your daily routine or even relationships.

 

Okay, you might have people on your phone or people on Facebook, but if you’re not talking to them at all, then they’re not really real relationships. They’re just like a counted number of followers or friends. They’re not, it’s not nothing of substance, but it actually doesn’t take very long to text someone or to send someone a direct message or to call somebody on the phone, like it’s 1985, actually have a phone call with someone.

 

It doesn’t take very long. And those little interactions can make all the difference. And I would also say, going back to this question of divorce, one of the things that I really encourage people to think about is seeing themselves as more than just one event in their lives, right? Oh, I love that.

 

This is the idea it’s called in the literature, event centrality, how central an event that happened to you is to your core identity. So a lot of people with PTSD see themselves almost essentially as a victim of a circumstance. And that is their entire identity is of a trauma survivor.

 

And it does not leave room for other things in their life. It’s so central to who they are and how they define themselves that doesn’t leave room to be a parent, a family member, a colleague to excel at work. And so this is the whole thing about like child, I’m a child of divorce, or I’ve been bullied in my life.

 

I don’t actually talk about it all that much, not because I’m suppressing it, but because there’s so much more to my life now. And this was like, this is like 5% of my life experiences. Well, I hope all those terrible bullies see you now and the work that you’re doing, because Lord knows they can probably use it too.

 

Thank you so much for sharing this with us and for the work that you do. I think it’s fascinating. Like I said, I’m kind of a junkie for this stuff because I like you had to kind of come through the darkness and apply that to something better and help myself through hard stuff.

 

And so I have found myself to be resilient with a lot of hard work. And I do believe that anybody can be. So I’m really excited for people to read this book and learn more about you.

 

If they wanted to reach out to you, how can they do that? Yeah, so they can visit my faculty webpage at Mount Sinai and my email address should be included there as well. We will link all of it along with a link to Amazon for the book. And if you have any other questions, you know where to find us here at Moms Moving On, info at momsmovingon.com. Thank you so much for being here.

 

Thank you for listening and we will see you next time. Happy holidays.