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Universal Design: Bathrooms
The next stop in our Universal Design series is one that we use every day – the bathroom! Bathrooms are critical to our physical and emotional well-being, but are also an incredibly major issue for accessibility far before most of us would consider ourselves disabled! There are three main issues to address when it comes Continue reading
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Canaries
What do you know about canaries? I’m about to do a deep dive. Surprisingly enough this directly relates to disability advocacy. According to Wikipedia, canaries were used to detect carbon monoxide in coal mining from around 1913, when they realized that toxic gases such as carbon monoxide or asphyxiant gases such as methane in the Continue reading
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Perspecticals
My new chair has given me a new perspective on the world. It’s incredible to me to be able to sit taller than I could ever stand, and it makes me realise the power of different perspectives or lenses on how we see and understand the world – our perspecticals. The lens we use to Continue reading
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Straightening the Walls
“What are you doing today?” “We’re straightening the walls.” (Wishes they had said something exciting like “the roof is going up”, then thinks about it for an extra second and realises the last thing I’d want is a roof on top of crooked walls…) “Good. I appreciate straight walls!” Watching a house be built Continue reading
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Universal Design: Entryways, Hallways and Room Layouts
We started with our discussion of Universal Design Considerations with Zero Barrier Entries. So the logical next step would be Entryways, Hallways and Room Layouts. Continue reading
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Disability From All Sides
I live at an interesting intersection. I am a disabled woman raising disabled kids. Which means I spend time in both “disabled” spaces and “special needs parenting” spaces. I know disability from both sides. I know what it’s like to worry about your children and their disabilities. I know what it’s like to have Continue reading
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Perspective
Perspective is an interesting thing, isn’t it? When we were in Toronto this week, we stayed in a condo overnight and I had this unusual view out my bedroom window. Everything seemed both larger and tinier than in real life… Some perspectives are comfortable for us. Others leave us feeling off-kilter. Having lived my entire Continue reading
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Medical Trauma
I grew up at Sick Kids. I had multiple operations over the years. Almost every surgery came with excruciatingly painful complications. One of those surgeries happened 33 years ago today. I was seven. I remember it vividly, including being in a hospital room which – for all intents and purposes – could very easily Continue reading
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Universal Design: Zero Barrier Entry
So you’ve found your property and know that you want to build a Universally Designed structure on it. Maybe you’re building your custom dream home and want to know that you’re going to be able to stay in it as you age. Maybe you’ve just been told you have a progressive condition and you’re going to Continue reading
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Why We Need to Rethink Our Relationship With Pain
[Image description: a colorful assortment of pills fill a counter] Given the amount of pain medication we consume on an average annual basis (Americans received more than 300 million pain prescriptions in 2015 alone – not including over the counter usage) it’s very quickly obvious that we in North America have a pain problem. In Continue reading
About the program
In 2017 I was newly self-diagnosed with atypical autism, struggling with burnout, and striking out when it came to therapists who could address the issues I was facing. At the same time, I was building skills around life coaching, shame reduction, and trauma-informed therapy for work. Gradually I realized that what I needed – an embodied, autonomous, agency-driven coaching approach to unmasking – was not something I was going to find “out there”, but something I was going to need to create if I wanted to recover my life. This was the moment the Values Based Integration Process was born.
Having developed the program for myself – and having seen the incredible results it brought in my own life – I began to use it with coaching clients. The results were out of this world!
After conversations with Dr. Devon Price, the technique was featured in his book Unmasking Autism. With it, came interest in the technique and the decision was made to begin training coaches and therapists to help make this toolkit more readily available.
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