Pretty flowers put me over my edge.

I remember the day my husband brought me flowers.

I was depressed and dissociative after six months of full-time caregiving for both my boys during the pandemic and while Cooper was in burnout. I spent my days providing constant 1:1 attention to Cooper, mixed with de-escalation, carefully navigating my body position on the ground so that I would be a constant – albeit moving – physical barrier between them.

Because of the shutdown in Michigan, my husband was working from home on the front porch and every day he would pause his work in front of the computer for two hours and move to his phone while with the boys, so that I could get a break from caregiving. I would go up to my room, try to read and immediately fall asleep, no matter how much I had slept the night before. My body would simply shut down.

In the evenings, I would be so depleted I couldn’t speak. In the mornings when I woke, my hands were sore from unintentionally clenching in my sleep. Sometimes I would wake to feel them tingling and then realize I needed to change my pajamas, soaked from cold sweats. My wrists hurt so much during the day I started wearing a brace. 

So the day my husband walked in with flowers, a loving gesture and recognition of giving over my nervous system to my son, it hit me like a brick.

I saw the flowers as a threat.

My brain was so tired from hyper-vigilance and trying to predict every minor movement, tone, word, or thought that would set off Cooper’s threat response, I simply could not manage.  

The idea of taking the flowers out of their wrapper, finding something to put them in, put them in water, cut the stems, put that powder in there, and then figure out a place to put them in the house where they would not be destroyed felt insurmountable. I couldn’t even articulate that at the time.

On top of that, I simply viewed these beautiful flowers as one more thing to keep alive. One more demand. One more visible cue that registered in my head as “failing” and "not enough" as a caregiver.

(Sometimes I still feel like this with our service dog, who wants affection and attention, and I just need to be inside my own bubble of recovery with zero engagement with other sentient beings.)

I still don’t love receiving flowers for all the above reasons, but I have gotten to a place where I can take a step back, cut the damn stems and at least savor a few moments of beauty. Sometimes I even *purposefully* buy flowers as a testament to how far our family has come. While this may not seem like a big deal to most families, it is an enormous symbol of progress for us, including for my mental health.

I share this story with you because it came up during a coaching call with a client this week – a mother who is in the my-executive-functioning-is-fried-and-one-more-thing-on-my-plate-might-destroy-me-phase of caregiving for a PDA child in burnout. I mentioned the flower story to give her a sense that she is not alone AND that I believe that over time, she will also emerge from her trauma cave.

Much of my content is focused on taking action, implementation, how-to’s, and movement. I am committed to supporting you in getting clarity, getting unstuck and then moving through tough decision-making, tradeoffs, triggers, and personal transformations as a parent to help you find a sustainable sense of peace while parenting a PDA child or teen. To empower you to find your unique path that will help your specific child thrive *over the long term* (read: years).  

This is the design of the Paradigm Shift Program – to give you the tools that facilitate radical acceptance of the constraints in your life so you can transcend them.

The work is painful. Which is why we do it in community with a sense of belonging, with an acknowledgement of *your* trauma. And it is not the right fit or timing for every family. For example, the flowers-might-kill-me-stage might not be exactly the right time to commit to the work of making a paradigm shift. Or it might be. Only you know that.

However, even if my work, coaching and program design is for movement and getting out of the stuck place, I also want to acknowledge the trauma cave. The difficulty of getting up each morning. The hyper-vigilance and massive strain of trying to anticipate and read the neuroception of another human. The nervous system stress of lending your body and “safe and social” state for months or even years at a time.

I believe you will all get to a place where you can smell the proverbial flowers. Or at least not want to destroy them, or punch the person you see buying them at a coffee shop with their chill, neurotypical child in tow who is just *being* in the space and world without fight or flight defining their every move. I remember those thoughts and feelings too.

I will leave you with this – there is NOTHING wrong with you if you have a violent internal response to things like pretty flowers and seemingly smug parents of well-behaved neurotypical children. You are not a bad person or parent. We have all been there.

Here is a beautiful talk about Radical Self-Forgiving from Tara Brach that I listened to recently.  I hope you can pop it into your earbuds sometime soon (but NO PRESSURE! If it feels like the flowers, just drop the demand on yourself lol).