Therapist and School of Mom founder Sarah Harmon '12 led a group of moms in a primal scream in Charlestown, MA in January, 2022. Photo: Alice Rouse
For many pandemic-weary parents, the viral video of a group of Boston mothers gathered on a football field screaming at the top of their lungs struck a familiar chord.
The 20 women, dressed for a chilly evening in hats and puffy coats, roared and yelled, releasing months of pent-up frustration, exhaustion and rage. But organizing a primal scream for moms is just one of the ways that therapist Sarah Harmon ’12 is trying to help mothers everywhere process and express complex and often difficult emotions.
“The scream came out of all these conversations with moms in my therapy practice and in my community around parenting small kids in a pandemic,” she says. “There were a lot of emotions and no way to really cope with them.”
In addition to her private therapy practice, Harmon runs a program called The School of Mom, an online space designed to help mothers practice mindfulness and self-compassion. She started The School of Mom in March of 2020 when she realized that many of her therapy clients could benefit from group support.
“Especially for new moms who had their first baby in the pandemic, there’s just a lot of anger, mostly stemming from grief and loss,” she says. “They didn’t have the maternity leave that they were supposed to have, or even the labor and delivery they were supposed to have. A lot of them were cut off for a while from their parents and their families couldn’t visit; they couldn't get someone to come over and hold their baby. It’s been awful.”
Helping parents handle complex emotions
Harmon’s interest in the psychology of parenting has much deeper roots.
“I always knew from my first undergrad psychology class that I was going to be a therapist,” she says, recalling her excitement as she looked through Lesley’s graduate course catalog. She got her master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Lesley in 2012 and a certificate in Mindfulness Studies in 2020.
Harmon’s own journey to motherhood was complicated by her mother’s struggle with mental illness.
“The weekend I walked across the stage to get my master’s at Lesley in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, my mom was involuntarily committed,” Harmon recalls. “As my dad put it very eloquently, I got my master’s from Lesley, and I got my PhD from my mom.”
Harmon credits her studies in Mindfulness with helping her work through many of her own complex feelings about motherhood.
“I had this true moment of understanding that the presence and the affirmation and the love that I so desperately wanted from my mother was only going to come from myself.”
She hopes to help other mothers become more self-nurturing and more resilient. In the School of Mom’s foundational program, she teaches four modules designed to break down the key components of mindfulness practice—curiosity, non-judgment, acceptance and kindness.
“The School of Mom is really the intersection of my personal experience with my mom and her struggle with mental illness and how mindfulness and self-compassion were a part of my journey in healing and learning how to mother myself,” she says. “Individual therapy is wonderful, but it’s very isolating sometimes. Creating a community to have open conversations, where people know they’re not alone, was really important.”
As the pandemic dragged on into a third year, Harmon knew that it was taking an emotional toll on the mothers she was working with. It also impacted her personally as she tried to do her therapeutic work from home.
“I had to have a confidential space, with two kids and the nanny and my husband at home,” she says. “My only options were—I’m not kidding—our bathroom or our freezing cold basement laundry room, where every single call dropped. I was shaking by the end of the day.”
Therapist Sarah Harmon '12 at home with her daughters. Photo: Alice Rouse.
A scream heard round the world
She had organized a group scream the year before with about 12 women, but this time around, there seemed to be an even greater need. Ironically, Harmon had planned to be at a silent retreat in January 2022 that had been canceled due to COVID concerns.
“January was a hard month for parents,” she says. In her household alone, “we’d had both kids home for sicknesses and COVID exposures. And then my retreat was canceled. I was just angry. So I said, ‘I think we need to scream again,’ so we did.”
Within days, the video of the women screaming in the football field went viral. The story was covered by the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and NPR. Harmon appeared on MSNBC, Good Morning America, and the Today Show to discuss the sense of exhaustion and anger that parents everywhere were feeling.
“It was wild,” she remembers. “I was supposed to be sitting in silence for 10 days and now I was screaming on global television!”
Harmon hopes that the scream will help open a deeper conversation about the complex and often challenging emotions that come with parenting, even beyond the pandemic.
“I want to help people understand why we were screaming, what’s behind it,” she says. “Anger is such a taboo emotion, especially with moms. But a woman who can be really tuned into her anger in a discerning way is so powerful. And that really inspires me.”