A warm and authoritative guide to maternal mental heath—offering real solutions—by popular online therapist, Dr. Cassidy.

Motherhood is messy. Parenting Starts from Within is for the moms who find themselves losing their temper more than they’d like. Or shutting down when things feel too loud or too much. Or who are tired of snapping, spiraling, or second-guessing themselves…and want to understand why this keeps happening, and how to change it. Author and therapist Dr. Cassidy Freitas has a solution and it starts with a simple idea: the way we react—especially in hard parenting moments—is often shaped by patterns we inherited but never got the chance to question.

In her book, she invites mothers to see that much of what they carry didn’t start with them—and that they have the power to choose what continues and what ends. So how does they break the cycle? By finding what Dr. Cassidy calls margins: the spaces we can create (mental, emotional, physical, and relational) that allow us to respond differently. That help us catch ourselves in the moment, regulate our nervous systems, and make more intentional choices—where we can pause, breathe, notice, soften, and shift. Dr Cassidy weaves together stories from her own messy motherhood moments with the tools she’s gathered as a therapists to explore how generational cycles show up in everyday parenting, why these patterns are so hard to change, and how margins can help you feel less reactive, more connected, and more like yourself again.