97: Whats New and What to Expect in 2024

You are listening to episode 97 of The Autism Mom Coach, Whats New and What to Expect in 2024

Welcome to The Autism Mom Coach podcast, I am your host, Lisa Candera. I am a lawyer, a life coach, and most importantly, I am the full-time single mother of a teenager with Autism and other comorbid diagnoses. I know what it is like to wonder if you are doing enough or the right things for your child and to live in fear of their future.

I also know that constantly fueling yourself with fear and anxiety is not sustainable for you or of any benefit to your child. That is why in this podcast I will share practical strategies and tools you can use to shift from a chronic state of fight, flight to some calm and ease. You are your childs greatest resource, lets take care of you.

Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. This is my first episode back after the new year and I am glad to be talking to you. In this episode Im going to catch you up a bit about whats going on with me and what you can expect from the podcast and from me in 2024 but before I do that I want to also share with you some exciting announcements. Mark your calendar on January 20th, I will be hosting Autism mom and author, Carrie Cariello at Beanz & Co. Caf in Avon, Connecticut.

For those of you who might not be familiar with Carrie, she is the mother of five children, one with Autism, her son Jack is now 18. And Carrie has been writing about her experience as an Autism mother for the last, I would say 10 years. Her first book was called What Color Is Monday? She published this when Jack was about eight or nine, I believe, followed by Someone Im with Has Autism, and now, Half My Sky. Where she really digs into the experience of parenting five children, keeping a marriage together and advocating for her son and some of the lessons that shes learned.

So Carrie will be at Beanz & Co. on January 20th from 12:00 to 2:00 to sign copies of her books. There will be supplies of Half My Sky available for purchase. However, they will be limited and I do expect a big turnout. So if you want a copy of your book signed, I suggest that you be BYO. Also this is a family event. Beanz is the most inclusive place you could ever go to. In fact, their tagline is everyone belongs. Beanz & Co. was co-founded by two special needs moms who saw the need for dignified employment for their children and for people in the disabilities community.

So Beanz & Co. actually employs half people with disabilities. It offers job training and job support and it is truly the most delightful place to spend time. And I would know because I spent a lot of time there. I will leave the link in the comments and I hope to see as many of you there as possible.

In addition, I recently interviewed Carrie for the podcast and those episodes will be coming out at the end of January. So you will also get to hear a bit more from her about her journey and about the process of writing these books, why she writes the books. And a bit about the why behind why she shares the details of her familys life, her childs story, and her experience as an Autism mom. I am positive that you will find it delightful and inspiring, so stay tuned for those episodes.

Okay another mark your calendar, save the date. On January 31st, I will be doing a webinar. This is going to become a regular feature that you can expect from me. Each month I am either going to be offering you a webinar where I will be teaching on a particular topic or an open coaching call. Were going to kick off the year with a webinar and the working title is Lessons from Rock Bottom. Its a working title, well see.

But really the point of the webinar is to share some of the lessons I have learned this year as a way of teaching you how to evaluate the ups and downs of your Autism journey. Because so many of us spend time either dreading, being scared of what might happen or just dealing with it, rinse and repeat. And what Im going to offer you in this webinar is an example of how Ive actually evaluated the past year of my life, which has been the most difficult personally, as a parent really all around.

But Im not doing this so I can just share the woe is me, look at all that happened. No, I want to show you what Im doing with all of these experiences. I want to show you how Im evaluating them, the lessons that Im taking forward from them. And I want to share them with you because no matter what your experience is, no matter if your child is two or 25, you can use these lessons and these principles and apply them to your day-to-day life to make improvements.

So Mark your calendar, stay tuned, information will be forthcoming. If you are on my mailing list, no sweat, youre going to get all of this information in your inbox. For those of you who are not on my mailing list, get on it. The link will be in the show notes. You can find me on Facebook, on Instagram, get on my mailing list. I share weekly newsletters with my audience and my subscriber list is always the first to learn of new offerings, of open coaching calls, of webinars. So if youre not already, get on the mailing list. Thats it right now for announcements.

So I am going to share a bit about whats been going on with me. My son, Ben, was not with me for Christmas, sadly. He is still in the mental health hospital and this has been rough, some really rough, sad times for me, deep sadness, a lot of crying in the aisles of Target, skipping parties, leaving parties early. And as difficult as this has been, I do know that hes where he needs to be and hes getting the support that he needs. And in fact, even when he was with me for Christmas in the past couple of years he really wasnt.

Ever since OCD entered our lives, he has been trapped in his brain, the prison of his brain. And so no matter where we were or what we were doing, he was always spinning in some way about the OCD. And thats just kind of a weird place to be, is to be sad that your kid isnt with you, but also Im not sad that were not having the last three Christmases, either, where there was so much joy that was sucked out of our day because of my sons perseverations, because of the intense, intense anxiety.

And there is a lot of relief of knowing that he is safe where he is and that he did have a really fun Christmas. I got him some really sweet gifts. He had fun with his peers in the program. He got some books that he really loves, some Legos, and that was all very, very heartwarming. The reason Im sharing this is look, nobody wishes for this for their kid, nobody wants this but some of us experience it. And I just want to take a little bit of the stigma out of it. I am not alone.

I have clients who are in the same boat as me. Their children spent the holidays in a hospital getting the help that they need. And no, its not an ideal time of the year to do it. But the fact is there is no Christmas, there are no birthdays, there are no celebrations when your childs mind is imprisoned by their perseverations, their anxiety, their OCD. And sometimes making decisions like this, hard decisions like this, its the right decision.

And for any of you who are experiencing this now or in the future, I want you to know that you are not alone in making these hard decisions. And that although some people may not understand it, they also have the privilege of never having to understand it. But for those of us who do, we support you. I support you. Thats it on the Ben front.

For me, I have been doing a lot, a lot of my own personal work on grief because grief has been front and center of my experience in a really big way over the last year. And I didnt even realize it until our family therapist referred to me as a grieving mother. So I started to really research grief. Im really wanting to understand it more. And so of course, I have hired a grief coach. I have gotten certified in grief recovery. And now I am participating in an advanced coaching certification on grief and post traumatic growth, which Im really excited about.

The coach Im doing this with, her name is Krista St-Germain and she coaches widowed moms. And a lot of her work has been devoted to understanding the ways in which we can not only process our grief, understand our grief, make room for our grief, but also all the ways that we can grow from our grief. And that is where post traumatic growth comes in. And Im so excited to learn more. Im so excited to share more about it on the podcast and to make it part of my coaching program. So there will be lots of new learning and new concepts that are coming your way that I will be sharing with you this year.

And then finally for the podcast, I am going to start sharing with you some more voices, the voices of my clients. I want you to hear about the results other people are getting from coaching, other moms, other full-time working moms, other stay at home moms, other professionals, other mothers with multiple children with disabilities, other single moms. I want you to hear more of these voices so that you can see your experience in other people.

Because I think its so easy, especially when youre in a fight, flight state or youre in grief, to think that youre the only one, to think that your circumstances are way so different from other peoples and that you cant get help or this work wont help you for whatever reason.

I want to demystify this a bit for you by bringing you more voices. And to share with you more about how my own work, my own grief work, my own coaching has helped me progress, has helped me to process some of the really difficult things that I have been experiencing in the last year. The difficult decisions that I have ahead of me without completely drowning. That is all possible for you too, whether your child is two, whether they are 24. Whether or not things are smooth sailing and youre like, I dont know, whatever youre talking about, thats not my situation. And thats fine.

But you can still learn from this podcast. There are lots of principles that I share that will help you whether your child is in an acute state of anxiety or whether just managing the day-to-day uncertainty of, is there going to be a meltdown, how to talk to your parents about your childs diagnosis. How to deal with other people in your life, how to deal with your own resentment, your own compare and despair when it comes to other folks in your life.

All of those things are things that I work with my clients about and they get progress and they get progress quickly. Because when you are spending the time, your precious time, just even a little bit of your precious time to you, to your brain, to your emotions, you get progress and that is the challenge though. The challenge for all of us is to shift from the super hyper focus on our kids and fixing, helping, making everything right for them to ourselves.

And thats the message I really want to drive home from now on. Weve all heard of the oxygen mask. And lets just face it, none of us really believe it, not really because weve all done a lot without the oxygen mask. We have all sacrificed our mental, emotional, physical health to help our children to get through the day. We are so used to doing it that I dont know that we really believe that self-care is important. I think that we know it in terms of yeah, weve heard that a lot and thats what people say. But knowing it in your bones and making it your priority, there is such a difference.

And so I want to share with you the experience of clients who have gone through my program, who went from knowing it in theory to integrating it into part of their lives, to part of who they are, to part of how they parent. I have to tell you from my perspective of being in year 16 of this, I didnt get here until a couple of years ago. And of course I wish I knew then what I know now. But since I do know what I know now, I want to share it with you. I want to share it with as many Autism parents as I possibly can.

You do not need to run yourself into the ground. You do not need to spend your days and nights walking on eggshells, waiting for the other shoe to drop. There are proactive things that you can do every single day to help you show up as the parent you want to be no matter what your child is doing.

Alright, that is it for this weeks episode of the podcast. I hope you found it helpful. I hope you marked your calendar. I hope you save the dates. And I hope you join my mailing list so that you get all of this goodness right in your inbox. Thanks for listening and I will talk to you next week.

Thanks for listening to The Autism Mom Coach. If you are ready to apply the principles you are learning in these episodes to your life, it is time to schedule a consultation call with me. Podcasts are great but the ahas are fleeting. Real change comes from application and implementation and this is exactly what we do in my one-on-one coaching program. To schedule your consultation, go to my website, theAutismmomcoach.com, Work With Me and take the first step to taking better care of yourself so that you can show up as the parent you want to be for your child with Autism.