The Weight We Carry: Stress, the Nervous System & Special Needs Parenting

For me, you know, the way I coped with it, and I'm curious your initial coping mechanisms, but, and this is just how I deal with life and, you know, maybe to a fault where, you know, I'm not always, maybe don't have the proper emotional reaction to be like, you know, comforting about it or just, you know, kind of address the emotional aspect of it.

But, you know, for me, it was more like going immediately into fixing mode.

That's how I'm more.

I mean, that's what I do for a living is fix problems.

And I do that a lot.

Whenever a problem comes up, you know, I don't really process it emotionally as much as I just go into the immediate mode of how do I fix this situation? Um, and that's when I went and learn all the little method stuff.

Um, you know, read the book, disconnected kids, um, made you suffer through the audio version of that.

Um, uh, that wasn't the easiest listen, but, um, and it made so much sense to me.

And, and, you know, um, you know, like we've, uh, like I talked about on another episode about how that journey has kind of, you know, worked into changing how the practice runs.

So it's been, you know, really kind of a good thing in a lot of ways of, of what we've been to ride other people.

Um, but I think it's really important to, and that's kind of the topic of the show is to kind of focus on the stress load that, that parents, um, have, you know, I think it's like 70%, uh, over 70% of, of, uh, Parents with special needs children have excess levels of stress and anxiety.

They're all caused mortality.

So they die younger, which is not good because these kids oftentimes need you to live a long time to give them the support as they get older.

You know, I think a lot of these kids get forgotten when they turn 18, 19, 20, because there's not as much support systems and it's more on the parents, which is even a bigger, bigger issue that leads to the stress.

And, you know, talking about what you were saying, it's like, you don't really see it coming as much because I think every child to some extent, especially your first, which Jacob was our first child, it's stressful.

You know what I mean? Cause you don't know what you're really doing and you're trying to figure it out.

And, um, you know, you kind of, you kind of expect that stress to some extent.

Does that make sense? And the difference is, and you can kind of pair this to our daughter, uh, Dylan is, you know, she can still have some stressors, but, um, um, You know, it kind of teeters down as a, you know, she's able to communicate.

She's able to be more independent and do things for herself.

Yeah.

And that doesn't really happen.

That didn't really happen.

Well, it's happened.

You know, some of those, you know, Jacob, as he's improved and got more independent, it's happened.

But it's not as it's it's more steady of a hypervigilance that you're into.