You are the expert

Five years ago, when my PDA son Cooper was just entering burnout, I remember scouring the Washington D.C. area for “The Expert” who could tell me what to do and fix what was going on with him.  

I called countless occupational therapy clinics, reached out to practitioners of numerous modalities, and secured a spot with a renowned family and child psychologist specializing in Sensory Processing Disorder and Play.  

Even though I was doing my due diligence, the more broadly I searched, the more I thought that something just wasn’t clicking, that there was a missing piece. Yet, I pushed down this thought over and over, convincing myself that this wasn’t my area of expertise and someone else would know better than I would. That my intuition was really just me being annoying and anxious.

To attend the sessions with the renowned child psychologist, my husband and I took off time from work and drove out to the suburbs. Every other week it was with just me and my husband and then on the weeks in between we would bring Cooper along.

During the sessions without Cooper, we tried to articulate and explain his behaviors and challenges without understanding them ourselves. We couldn’t make sense of the complexities of his nervous system, let alone explain them to someone else. 

And then after the “talking” portion of the session, we would learn to play in a child-friendly way (with no child present) that always flopped when we got home and tried it with Cooper.

On the weeks that Cooper joined us, he spent the entire session appearing totally neurotypical, enjoying the novelty of the psychologist's toys.

After a couple months we stopped, and I remember crying to my husband that we had wasted our time and so much money for “nothing.” 

I never forget the feeling of that deep confusion, of not knowing the next right step for my family, and the desperation of the continual search for the “silver bullet” or "option C" that would make this all go away so I could “return to my old life.”

The sensation of entrusting “experts” only to realize that actually they didn’t know what was right for my family any better than I did.

And it's because of my desire to share what I learned from all that failing, all that trial and error – and now from seeing patterns among the more than 1,000 families with PDA children and teens I've worked with – that I created our signature program, the Paradigm Shift Program™.

I want to reduce your pain and trial and error, and help you see that YOU are the expert on how to support your PDA child or teen. You know them better than me (or anyone else), and with an understanding of how their nervous system works - and skills that you can master - you can bring them and your family to peace.

I'm not saying it will be easy. (I'd be suspicious of any "expert" who says it is.) I'm saying that you can learn to see and read the indicators of your child or teen's nervous system and then make decisions that - even if you don't like them due to the constraints you're facing - you feel confident are right for your family.