Tag Archives: Relationships

Let’s Talk About (Disability &) Sex!

Had an incredible time today as I was interviewed on a podcast about disability, where I got to talk about not only being disabled, but being part of a disabled family, and the highs and the lows of that. One of the questions I was asked was, How do your different disabilities play a roleContinue reading “Let’s Talk About (Disability &) Sex!”

“What Exactly Is a Life Coach?”

I was sitting with a friend the other day and she asked me, “Heather, what exactly is a life coach? What do you do?” And I figured maybe she wasn’t the only one who was uncertain…

Human Bill of Rights

A few weeks’ back I discovered an incredible resource by Peter Walker. Okay, it was actually just a simple list, but as I read it through I realized that even though I loved all of the things on this list, I had never accepted that they were true for me. Which was brain-boggling for me. How had I gotten this far into life without realizing that these things could be true for me? 

Raising An Adult By 18 – Creating a Plan

Last week we talked about how our values should be used as the basis for our parenting plan. How we need to figure out where we’re trying to get to before we can create a plan for how to get there, just like we need a destination before we can plot a course of travel on a map.

But once we have the destination how do we create the plan?

Be Careful Where You Park

I was sixteen when I first got my driver’s license, and as a driver, one of the earliest things I learned how to do is to park. That’s because knowing where and how to park your car is essential to coming back to your car where you left it, in one piece, and in a drivable condition – ready to go on to your next destination.

I was taught rules about which way to angle my tires when I parked on a hill – one way for when I had a curb to butt up against and a different way for when there was a soft shoulder.

I was taught rules about how much space I should leave between myself and other vehicles.

I was taught how to tell if a place was a fire route or otherwise designated as a no parking space.

And someone even attempted to teach me how to parallel park, although that lesson clearly didn’t stick very well!

But the more life I live, the more I realize that we should probably also be teaching our teens about how and when and for how long it is safe to ‘park’ ourselves in life.

Start By Getting Curious

On Wednesday we talked about ‘Otherworld’ and the idea that the world revolved around more than just me.

And we talked about the fact that this kind of thinking makes it easy for us to misinterpret people’s motives and intentions and end up assuming that people are being ‘deliberate and malicious’ far more frequently than they actually are.

Having identified the problem, now we have to figure out how to get to a solution.

And I think that the solution is to assume that there’s probably an explanation for the behaviour, and then get curious and see if we can figure it out!

Otherworld

We might never admit it to anyone else, but we sometimes like to believe that we live in a twisted Otherworld. This Otherworld (also known as ‘Solipsism’) is often seen as an issue just for people who are on the Autistic Spectrum, but the more I talk to people the more I think it’s there for most of us unless we have consciously made a different choice.

In this Otherworld, the world revolves around me: people exist to make me happy and their negative responses are deliberate and malicious attacks against me. And while most people don’t take it all the way to it’s logical conclusions, it does seem to show up more often than would be strictly speaking helpful.

All The Feels

So on Monday I introduced you to the idea of sitting with your hedgehogs (your emotions). It was a great description that helped me to understand a new way of interacting with my emotions.

But what I discovered for myself, for my kids and with an increasing number of the families I work with, it’s difficult to sit with your hedgehogs and name your hedgehogs if you’re not actually clear about what emotions you’re having in the first place.

Forgiveness

The idea of forgiveness can be very difficult for many people. It had always been drilled into me that it was important to forgive, and I would screw up my eyes and try hard to forgive those who had hurt me, but it rarely seemed to make much of a difference.

Then a couple of years ago I ran across a book by the Rev. Desmond Tutu and his daughter, Mpho Tutu, called, The Book of Forgiving: The Four-Fold Path For Healing Ourselves and Our World. And I figured that since Desmond Tutu had grown up under the horrors of apartheid as a black South African, and overseen the Truth and Reconciliation commission there, he might have something of value to say on the subject of forgiveness.