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Hey friends, welcome back. It smells like holidays around here. I absolutely love the smell of holidays. Okay, I'm going to talk to you and there are some people who might get teed off at what I'm going to talk about and then there's others that are going to be like, Oh, you know what? I totally get what she's saying here.
So I am going to talk about neurodivergent families experience. More importantly Parents experience with unconscious bias society, ableistic society, and a marginalized community that is very much gone unseen and for the most part, people don't get right. And there's not enough conversation about it. I am going to talk about this in kind of a way that maybe hasn't been [00:01:00] talked about before. I have gone on this tangent of owning yourself, owning your experience in life, taking accountability, taking responsibility. It's very interesting because when you are talking about a marginalized community, There is a little bit of a different twist there, because you have the people's thought processes, you have people's ignorances, you have people that just plain flat out don't get you, don't know anything about you. Don't know anything about the way your brain or your body is wired.
Maybe there's a lot of messages that go around about the community, right? There are so many people that are so vastly outdated as to what does autism look like or what does ADHD look like. There are people that don't even know that maybe even have [00:02:00] ADHD that don't know that ADHD and ADD are now not separate.
they're put together in one kind of criteria, one wired differently brain. What can happen is the experience of a parent. There is so many comments. There's so many looks that we get. There are so many judgments that we have on us. Depending on our children, depending on our parenting comments that could be said about our children.
And there can be so many big feelings about it, right? Whether the big feeling is anger or whether the big feeling is shame ormaybe you have a parent that's had so many comments and they're constantly blaming themselves, right? we can go to a school [00:03:00] and we can ask for services for our children. That child might even be diagnosed. And instead of offering services to the child, the parent can get slipped parenting guides or parenting help books to teach the parent how to be a better parent. You can have people that blame you for your child's behavior. I can't tell you how many therapists or friends that have said to me your children's behavior is coming from you. They're picking up on you and your feelings. And so, therefore, they're acting out because of what you're doing. What? You do realize I have neurodivergent children. Their experience is not a neurotypical [00:04:00] experience.
So the way that they experience the world may not be the way that John Smith at public school experiences life, right? It could be that my kids behavior is dysregulation. It could be that my kids behavior is they've been masking at school all day long and they're coming home and losing it because they can't hold it together anymore and at home is safe.
It could be that they have PDA, and at school, they don't have the option of being able to display their PDA. And so when they get home, they cannot handle any more demands on them, even if they're perceived demands. let's take it a different way, right? You go out to public, you're so excited to go to the zoo, you bring your kids to the zoo and [00:05:00] you have a child, they get so full of joy and excitement and they really want to see the giraffe or the lion or whatever it may be, and they start climbing the fence.
So they could get a better look. And in their experience, they're just so excited to see the giraffe. There could be other parents that are around that make comments on the child that is climbing the fence. Or the child that is screaming and squealing because they're so excited to see the gorilla, right? It could be that you have a child that is completely losing it in the middle of the store and you have other people walking by saying, what the heck is that parent doing? Why don't they get the kid out of the store? There are so many messages that a parent gets, [00:06:00] especially a neuro spicy parent, That everything that their child is doing is their fault, that they need to change.
They need to be different. They need to act different. They need to punish their child. They need to change the way that they're feeling. They need to change their energy, right? All of the things that the child is experiencing is the parent's fault. I am not saying that a neuro spicy parent is never at fault for anything. I Am saying that there is a constant blaming and shaming going on a parent that already has an incredibly difficult and challenging job ahead of them. Take a parent who has one neurospicy child. There are doctors appointments, there's therapy appointments, [00:07:00] There's equine appointments, there is play therapy, there's talk therapy, there's OT, there's PT, there's IEP meetings at the school, there's the constant phone calls of the incident that happened at school, there's the bullying at school, there's the therapy the parent needs because they're so stressed out that they're trying to show up for their child.
That's only one child. Can you imagine having multiple children that are all neurodivergent? A parent that has a neurodivergent child, they have done studies that they have the stress response of a war veteran. And yet that parent is constantly being told they do not add up and what they need to do differently and how they need to be differently and that they're doing things wrong. And this comes from so many different facets And aspects of their life. What I want to say here, as [00:08:00] far as owning yourself and taking accountability, it is not up to a parent to take accountability of the way their child feels, of their child's behaviors, of the child's emotions. A parent could do everything right, and that child could end up being a president of a computer company. That parent could do everything right, and that child could end up using and homeless. We don't know as parents what the future holds for our children.
It is up to us to access and get the best help we can and the best resources we can to be able to help ourselves and mentally maintain ourselves and take care of our wellbeing. And also learn all of the tools that we can to take care of our [00:09:00] kids. It is not your energy. It is not your feelings that your kids are reacting to.
Is energy real? Yes. Is a child being able to sense their parents feelings and emotions? Yes, absolutely. And also, it's the child that can then make decisions from there. When we have neurodivergent children, there are so many things that lead up to behaviors. There are so many things that lead up to dysregulation.
It could be that they're dysregulated now, over something that happened at 8 a. m. and it's 6 p. m. right? So being able to take that time to allow the [00:10:00] child to come down off of the dysregulation and have moments of deep breaths and regulating themselves to really Get in there and ask questions or just give the child a clean space to let them talk. I'm going to take this and I'm going to talk about it in a personal way. I'm doing this because not only am I a coach that coaches neurodivergent parents, I am also a neurodivergent person. with neurodivergent children. And I cannot tell you how often I have been blamed for my children having a hard time.
I had children having mental health crisis and that was blamed on me. I had children that were on a daily basis getting dysregulated and [00:11:00] having huge meltdowns. And that was also blamed on me. It wasn't blamed by just one person. It was all around. It was genuinely coming from every aspect of my life. When I started to really lean into solitude, not isolation, but solitude, It's very different for me because isolation is I'm pushing everything and everyone away so then I can be by myself. Solitude was more like I protected my energy and I stayed quiet so I could really listen to my own thoughts, my own beliefs.
I could. tap into my values and morals, and I could then make clean decisions for my kids. It also gave me the ability to really [00:12:00] dig in and figure out what was going on with my kids. And it turned out there was a lot of very pointed reasons why my children were going through what they were going through.
90 percent of the experience that they were having, it was happening outside the home, but it was only showing up inside the home my purpose in telling you this, Is we as parents, we want to do the best that we can for our children. We're constantly asking ourselves, am I a good parent?
Am I making the right decision? Am I doing the right thing? What is their future going to be like? how can I help my kid? Am I doing the right thing? Is this going to be helpful? It really is up to us to be able to spend time with ourselves to be able to [00:13:00] process, check in with our values and morals, and decide how we want to show up as a parent. It is also so helpful when we are able to find resources that very much understand our experience. I will give you a perfect example.
There is a huge difference between going to a therapist and having talk therapy from a therapist that does not understand yours or your kids neurocomplexity. Between going to a therapist who very much understands your or your kids neurocomplexity. It is a huge difference to hire a coach, whether it's a life or a business coach or just coach in general, when they do and do not understand neurodiversity
and the [00:14:00] different types of neurocomplexity and what might be going on in your wiring and your kids wiring and being able to ask the right questions to show up and help you. And then also give tools that are geared towards neurodiversity so then you can have a very much inclusive experience.
All in all, I believe that we were made to be the parent of our kids. And there's no one else in this world that will love our kids the way we love our kids. It also might be the hardest job, I believe, is the hardest job that you can possibly have.
I had a friend a long time ago say to me that our kids are our greatest teachers. And the kids that give you the hardest time were placed [00:15:00] in your life. For a reason to teach you the most valuable lessons. And I have taken that and thought about that over and over in my time as a parent and I believe it to be true.
I genuinely believe that one of the most powerful things that I could do as a parent is really spend time getting to know my kids and really understanding how they navigate in life and what their needs are because as they grow, their needs change. It's also been very powerful for me to have people come to me and consistently want to place blame on me for my kids behaviors or experience in life and decide how I want to show up in that [00:16:00] moment. I remember a long time ago, I had somebody talk to me about. The red sea and the blue sea and marginalized communities and asking what does thought work have to do with that? And what I said is you cannot change how other people view you. You cannot change what other people think about you. The only thing that you have control over is What you think what you feel and how you want to show up in life And there are so many ways that we could talk about neurodiversity and how we in general are treated as a community.
One thing that is very blatant right now is there's just not enough [00:17:00] education in society for them to catch up with how our experience is as parents of neurodivergent children in the world. And It is up to us what we think about it, how we feel about it, what we want to do about it, how we want to show up for our kids, and what resources we want to seek out.
the Neurotribe, is a membership that is a community where you belong and you can bring all of the things that are part of the neurodivergent community into the tribe. We have coaching, we have classes, we have mini courses, we have all of the topics, whether it's relationship, communication, boundaries, thought processes, parenting everything that you could possibly [00:18:00] think of that you want support with as a neurodivergent person, or a neurodivergent person running a company, Or a neurodivergent person in a family.
You've got it all here in the Neurotribe. I hope to see you all in there. Please like, subscribe, and share. Love you all. Take care.
