Chitty Chats with Stacy

Erica Schuppe
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[00:00:00]

I'm

so excited to be here today with one of my most long term colleagues. I'm going to call you that. I'm going to call you my most long term colleague. So I am Stacey York, Stacey Nation, Stacey York Nation, whatever. Uh, and I am a licensed clinical social worker. I've been working in this field for a really long time and I am embarking upon a series of wonderful humans who will just sit down and have a chitty chat with me about.

The work we do, the life we have, the balancing act or the lack of balancing act that we have sometimes. And today I'm super honored to have one of my dear, dear colleagues and friend Erica Shoup. I'm going to let you introduce yourself. I know a lot about you, but you might have some points you want to make that, uh, might be different than mine.

So [00:01:00] this is Erica. Hi, welcome. Thank you for being willing to do this chitty chat with me

today. Yes, I'd love to see you anywhere, Stacey. So this is great. Um, I'm Erica Shoup. As Stacey said, I'm an Occupational Therapist. This month is my 20th year of graduating from OT school, which is amazing. wild to me.

So the little ones that I saw in preschool are in their twenties now, which is just like, how can my first patients be high school kids? Um, let alone college kids. And they are, and I am trained through the level one of the neuro sequential model therapeutics. I am a foster adoptive mom. And a bonus mom, and a made from scratch mom, um, and I own a private practice at this point in time in Billings, Montana.

And I think it's been about 13 or 14 years since I've been in private practice. So now we have a big team of OTs, um, speech therapists. We are adding physical therapy slowly over the summer and then counselors also. So, [00:02:00] a lot going on.

It's been such a privilege. to have a seat and watch you grow all the ways that you're supporting and helping humans.

And I feel so privileged that I've gotten to see that. It's not a front row seat per se, but some days it is, right? Some days we call each other like 911. We're in the shit. How do we deal with this personally or professionally? Help me out. What does this look like? And I've just come to appreciate your insight, your knowledge, your perspective.

And one of the most important things I love about you, Erica, is your authenticity. And so part of the reason I started to do this series is because I have people in my audience and my community who are like, come on, you all are professionals. You're not living in the shit show that we're living in, are you?

And I just laugh, right? I'm like, if you are with a professional who isn't also living the work that we [00:03:00] do, we're not practicing co regulation. We're not working on our own selves. Like this work doesn't work.

The Intersection of Personal and Professional Life
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So I just want to, I just want to hear a couple of points from your life, whatever you feel comfortable sharing about how your professional life and your personal life intersect sometimes.

And you might be working on both.

I don't know if sometimes is the right word. It's just a 24 7 365 enmeshment. Uh, so I first met Stacey, um, oh my gosh, eight 18 years. I don't even know how long I've known you forever. She was, she was three, right? Right. But I knew you from work at a different facility, at least a little bit before that.

So I mean, yes, forever, more than a decade. So, but I got to really know Stacy in like those 911 calls of, I'm glad I have your phone number. My kid has gone. I don't know where she's at [00:04:00] anymore. And we were still doing foster care with my older daughter. And she allows me to share these stories. And, um, I ask her frequently, can I keep sharing her story?

And she says yes. So I'll keep doing that until she takes that permission away. I guess she's almost 15 now. So, um, just in a really bad spot with our daughter. And, um, I had had a baby who rocked our boat. She was neediest. Most non sleeping child had ever been born. All of our routines went out the window.

We switched homes. We switched preschools and everything, and the wheels fall off the bus at our house. And all of the things that I knew how to do as an OT at that point in time, which is a different way of parenting, were not successful all of a sudden anymore. And people really They try to kind of poo poo and minimize what you're saying to them.

We were, you know, our parents, our friends, etc. They're like, Oh, three year olds are challenging. Two year olds are challenging. I'm like, I work with kids. This is not a typical level of challenging. It's just not. So to, um, [00:05:00] Bring that to a professional, which was Stacy, who actually understood what we were going through, changed the trajectory of our entire life, my entire career, everything, um, from those interactions.

And that was with the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics. And I think one of the things that Stacy said to me those first couple of visits was, you know, the calmest heartbeat in the room has to parent the dysregulated child. That has stuck in my brain. It's like a core memory from working with my daughter at that point in time.

And another one was, you need to think like an OT and not a parent right now. And I was like, okay, I can do those things. So just, you know, how do I go into things all the way? That's how I go things. Like, I'm not going to start entry level. I'm just going to jump in and I'm going to get trained in this now.

So within about 10 days of just using more OT and sensory and regulatory strategies, I was like, Oh, we can survive this. I don't know if we're thriving those days, but we can at least survive the challenges that we're facing every day. So. That's really [00:06:00] where I started, um, where it started to change the trajectory of everything in my house and then career too, and then I started receiving referrals for these kids that were really similar to the kid I was parenting with, and all of a sudden, I had a different lens to use with these kids, because you, you look at our kids, And they look fine.

They've got all their parts where they need to be, they're moving, they're running, they're jumping, sometimes not in the most coordinated way, but they look okay. So, a lot of people have a hard time seeing what the struggles are, and the struggles are huge. Um, so it changed everything in my practice, and I started networking with a lot of different professionals, and it's changed every part of my career and has really connected me to the people that I work with every day. I mean, professionally, even across the U. S. has really changed with, um, Yeah.

Well, I love that it took me saying, Hey, be an OT.

Oh, and one of the things that has been super interesting, and I know you know this because you have a, a [00:07:00] hubs who's in the mental health situation. And so the crossover between OT and mental health and the importance of having that OT base before you can really tackle a lot of that mental health. Is there, what are some thoughts about that?

The Importance of Sensory Processing in Mental Health
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What do you have? I know you have thoughts. I have

so many thoughts. And yes, my husband's a counselor. So, and a veteran and works at Wild Roots as well. So, you know, let's just make things as nutty as possible. That's what we try to do. Um, so, and he actually will have parents talking about their kids and say, we need to get our kid into counseling.

My husband will say, you actually need to get your kid into OT instead. So for a lot of our kids, especially our littler kids, our kids that have had experiences really early on that have changed the way they process sensory information in the environment and with inside their own bodies, and how they can regulate that and respond.

But first, just notice all of that is the first step for our kids. So they can't do. Talk based therapy for the most part. They're not, their cortex is barely [00:08:00] online because of their age anyways. And they're not able to use language to talk about early experiences because they might not have verbal memories for that because it happened early.

And what we're seeing is the body based stuff. We're seeing the behavioral responses to different environmental things or internal experiences or situations they're coming into in school, et cetera. So really starting our work with those kids that truly have mental health type challenges, but starting it with getting them connected to their body.

And, um, improving sensory processing, you know, making changes to how they can tolerate different experiences and then adding the words for my body feels like this and that's fine. That's what this is being. So making those early connections with body first, um, seemed to be the big core need for the kids that we work with.

A lot of times our families will come and they'll say, well, I don't have any concerns about their motor skills. But when we really peel that onion down a little bit. We find a lot of concerns with visual skills, motor skills, retained primitive reflexes, et cetera, [00:09:00] that we're just seeing as anxiety or we're just seeing as PTSD, et cetera.

But, um, we're just dialing it down to the, well, we say the roots, we're getting back to the roots of where those challenges are and addressing it there first, before our amazing mental health professionals can come in and do more of the cognitive based type models with the kids.

Well, and correct me if I'm wrong.

I think the reason you, you and I both fell in love with the neural sequential model is that it makes sense. And so you see like, Oh, if we address the body and we address their sensory needs and their reflexes and how their body moves in space, and that they're actually connected to their body when they're in space, right?

Then you can reach out and you can start looking at emotions and feelings and processing all those things. And for me, it was a game changer because I kept going like, why am I not getting anywhere with these kids? What's happening? What's happening? What's happening? Oh, cause I'm doing it out of order.

And so for me, it was helpful to, to go, yeah, there's this other piece that needs to [00:10:00] be in place first. And it sounds like you guys have really dug into this has to be in place. Kids have to be able to notice their sensory systems and what's happening around them as well as the parents. Cause I I'm curious about that.

Do you also teach parents about their own sensory systems?

To some extent, and just bringing that back up of all of us have a way that we experience the world. And it's like, you know, a huge gamut of what we need. You know, some people need a ton of movement. Some people don't, some people need to be on their rowing machines.

Like Stacy, some people need to be doing their yoga and lifting weights. All of us are right. All of us are doing those things to feed our system and keep us feeling good. But, and, and we can even notice you're like, ah, I've not been to the gym in a day or two, and I am not my best. I'm, I'm shorter. My patience is, um, less, et cetera, because we're tuned into our body.

So even just talking to adults about those things and pointing out what they're already doing, what their strategies already are to meet those needs is sometimes a good place to start. But [00:11:00] we do a lot of teaching parents about just co regulation, self regulation. So we'll do heart rate and even sometimes their parents, they come in.

I'm like, wow, you're running on fire today. And let's. I don't know what your heart rate is. And a lot of people are wearing Fitbits and things now too, so it's like, Oh, your resting heart rate is 140. Have you been running a marathon? Why? Right. Why is your body running at 140? And are we shocked that Timmy is like climbing out the sunroof?

We should not be, because you're a system moving like this. So teaching families those real simple things, and about their kids too, and to look at it not as behavior, but uh, I think it's a, uh, Robin Gold talked about, is it a protective coping mechanism? That's my favorite phrase to use now. So is that protective coping mechanism, you know, maybe isn't working so well at school or home, but is it helping them?

It doesn't make sense. If we look at that as a regulatory type in part of their body, [00:12:00] not just a behavior, because, you know, you dig down and you're like behavior makes sense when we look at it differently. I

love that.

The Impact of Stress and Trauma on Everyday Life
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So one of the questions I get, and I'm going to ask you this question is, Hey, Erica, can you just leave work at work?

Or do you think about this stuff all the time? It's all I think about.

Yeah. People. Yeah.

How often do you think about the word regulation? How often do you think about your heart rate? How? And I'm like all day, every day, like it's just become part of who I am.

Right. And it's my, more of my worldview now too, I think too, about how I just interact with people.

I had a mom. Frustrated yesterday and she had a reason to be, but listening to her, um, on the phone and I know just a, just a preview, just a little three sentences about her life and in my head I could go, Oh, she's 13 today. And she's coming at me with her middle school level of regulation and I'm just going to [00:13:00] have to roll with that.

I can't make her think in a different way right now. We're not going to do any problem solving today. There's not a lot of executive functioning skills. This is where we're at based on her little bit of history. So I feel like that's how I look at most people that I have interactions with too. It's probably, I don't know that it's made me.

There was also the pandemic, and I'm an introvert, so I've definitely, you know, snuck back into my corner probably more in the last couple of years, but just how I look at systems and organizations, etc. I have a slide saved, one of Bruce Perry's slides saves just about organizational stress. You know, and where are our school districts, like the organizational stress and whether we can think long term or even, you know, to the next fall.

Nope, not so much. We're just trying to keep everybody alive today. So it is, it's just part of my all day, every day, the way I think about people. Yeah. When

people ask me, Stacy, I have not been through trauma. This does not apply to me. Sometimes [00:14:00] I laugh out loud, Erica, I'm going to be honest, because first of all, I'm like, we literally just went through the pandemic.

That was a global trauma. We've also been through slavery. We've also been through wars. We've been through, as a collective society, we've been through a lot of things. And so to me, in my worldview, I'm like, We've all experienced trauma, whether generationally or organizationally or in the country we live in, whatever that looks like.

So I'm just curious what your response to that is like, does this stuff apply to everyone?

I think it applies to everyone because we're all just nervous systems running around the world, doing our best. And at some point in time, you probably, I think my ACE score is like zero. I've got no ACE score. I've had this wonderful, um, upbringing.

Thank you, parents. Um, but has my nervous system in my 45 years on earth ran into situations that were too much for it to handle? Yeah. And that would be, um, parenting. Yeah. [00:15:00] And of the three kiddos in my home, there's a lot of extra, um, kind of across the board. And. You add no sleep to that. You add a career to that.

You add a marriage to that. You add living with the world. And have there been periods of time where that was stretched way too far for my nervous system and my whole body to handle that without it being traumatic? Absolutely not. So, but because I learned what I've learned on this journey, I can also tell that, Hey, I am at capacity.

So I'm going to disappear to the woods for 48 hours and I shall return. So I can manage and notice those things so much better because of this life. But, um, I think even with a really solid, you know, zero ACE score, making it to 18, life is going to throw some things at you, most likely that are going to be too much for your body to handle.

At some point in time. I feel like our, our ability to manage it is better when it happens later. You know, I did, you know, because I didn't have early [00:16:00] stress, I didn't have all of that unmanageable stress when I was a kid. So my ability to figure it out for me and figure out ways to manage it as an adult have been much easier than if I had had a traumatic or just even a ton of turmoil in my childhood that I had to deal with.

It would've been much harder for me at 35. to figure this out because my body would have already been loaded with stress hormones, but it wasn't. So it makes a difference. The timing, the timing support in your life makes a huge difference for all of us to love

that. I also just really love how you are just normalizing so many things, right?

You're normalizing stress. We all get stressed. Things can stretch us to the point that the stress sometimes feels like we're going to snap. That doesn't always mean that we're in this drastic mental health crisis. Sometimes it just means the dynamics of the stress are so far stretched that we have to go back to the roots of our nervous system and say, how do we navigate this?

Right. Right.

The Role of Self-Care in Nervous System Regulation
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And talking to parents and just other moms too, that, you know, everyone [00:17:00] self care self care, self care, self care, like care of your nervous system. Yeah. Like, can you tell how fast your heart is beating and what can you do to return yourself to someplace a little bit different before you walk into the house or before you walk into a room or before you walk into work, et cetera.

that I think is one of the most important things. And I also have a heart condition where mine will sometimes beat. For 200 or so for a while, it's not great. Um, but because of my work with all of this, I also can typically say, you know, Harvard's at like 73 today. I'm doing great. Or, Ooh, I should maybe go do something else.

I think I'm going to live 180s. Um, but having that internal regulation and the knowledge to even develop that, uh, yes, that's, that is the basics of self care. I feel like it's not necessarily getting your nails done or those other things, but, um, you know, understanding yourself as a nervous system, I think is super important.

this is a

fun question. I've been asking a lot of people and I think you're going to have a fun answer. So, uh, one of the [00:18:00] tricks that we, one of the tricky parts of being human, when I visit with educators, I take a survey in the room and say, how many of you are drinking water? And, and very few raise their hand.

And then I say, how many of you are not drinking water because you can't even get a bathroom break? And they all raise their hand. And I'll say to parents, how many of you are doing something for yourself each day, calms your nervous system. And they're like, when would we do that? We don't have time. And so I'm just curious for you, how important is it that we really do a daily.

gift to ourselves, a daily check in with our nervous system, a daily taking care of that. What are your thoughts

on that? I can't think of anything that's probably more important than that really, because, um, you know, I think the old saying would be like mom sets the tone or something like that in the home.

That would be the, you know, The 80s saying for that and it's really do wherever you go, you, the better you are, you do set the tone and emotion is contagious.

The Impact of Our Actions on Others
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Your nervous system is contagious. So whatever you're [00:19:00] bringing into the space, you are feeding everyone around you. We, I feel like, are just like a nation or maybe a world of dissociators right now.

I mean, how many hours a day are we just dissociated? And we need a little bit of that, like, I need a half hour to look at cute baby pictures. It's good for all of us. Yay! Look at these cute babies. But do we need six hours? Because I think if you put that app on your phone that just looks at usage, um, if you have six hours to look at cute baby pictures or political memes, you probably have 30 minutes for that walk in there somewhere.

The Importance of Balance in Our Lives
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Um, so, I think it's the most important habit. Um, and I think our ancestors and people before us always did those things. They were making food, they were doing music, they were sitting on the front porch and talking to the neighbor. They were going on a walk because they had to. We were doing those things in community and moving bodies and doing things that served one another and served ourselves.

And we're just, we're, we're historically low, I would guess, [00:20:00] at doing those things right now. Yeah. One of the

things I tell people all the time is you may not have time for a 30 minute walk, but you probably have time for a 10 minute walk. Yeah, you may not have time to drive to the gym, but I bet you have time to.

Shovel your yard or your

driveway, right? Or lay on the floor. Lay on the floor in your house, put a hand on your chest and hand on your tummy and see if you're breathing. Yeah, just little teeny pieces of that. And even, you know, you and I use the word dosing a lot for our families. I'm sure you use that too.

Like you just need a little dose. Like how often do you need a little dose and how little of a dose. is helpful for you. Can you have a saying that you say when you walk in a new spaces of, Oh, I'm going to take three breaths and I can walk in here calmly. That's a little dose of regulation. And it took you just long enough to take three breaths before you walk into your kid's room.

So it can be those little teeny doses. And I do think we all have time to do those little teeny doses. Yeah.

Managing Transitions and Stressors
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One of the [00:21:00] things I say to people a lot is that transitions are some of our most triggering times, right? Triggers are stressors. And we're recording this. We're getting ready to end the school year, go into summer.

We're going to publish this right at the end of summer, going back into school. What are some thoughts you have, both as a parent and a professional, for Managing the transition between home and school.

I think the one I use, use the most and use first is lower the bar. Lower it again. Lower it again. It's just, it is so hard.

It's so hard. Obviously the months I hate the most every year are May. And, uh, December also, but just those transitional months to school too, like that, or just the two weeks after the time changes. I mean, those things seem so small, but how come they hijack everybody for weeks? They're not small is why.

So, uh, I think setting up really simple routines for back to [00:22:00] school the week before is a good place to start as an OT. Um, I always try to pair those with things that are easy to remember. So it's Tuesday, we eat tacos. Wacky Wednesday, we order something, you know, Friday, we have pizza and a movie. So most of our families are like, my kids won't eat anything.

Well, my bet is they'll eat five dinners or seven dinners that you make. If you looked at all the dinners in the history of dinners, they will eat seven. Fine. Make those seven dinners on the same night for two months straight. No one will care and no one will fight about dinners. And then the kids have that predictability.

So even those simple things like that, um, over scheduling too, we don't.

Can you just, let's just say that word one more time because holy guacamole, that is a huge amount of time that we spend. Anyway, go ahead. What was that word you just

said?

The Dangers of Overscheduling
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Overscheduling. Um, I tell families, I'm going to quit everything you can quit, which I'm, you know, my kids are not athletic.

So maybe I'm winning the lottery here. I, I do have one that's doing an [00:23:00] activity. It's one hour, three days a week. It's been great. We, as a family decided very early on that our family structure and dynamic was not going to be well suited. Our children were not capable of doing early athletics. So we opted for only things that were flexible.

That you could do a month, not do a month. You could do five days. You could do no days. And I feel like that lack of over scheduling has been something that's really supported the nervous systems at our house really well too, that we can see, wow, okay, in December we have 17 extra things for home and school.

We are not doing jujitsu lessons this month. We're just not, we're just going to take the month off. So building predictability as well as understanding what's truly important and not important for your family. It is just as important that your family go on a walk after dinner or that your kid play in mud than they play competitive soccer.

Can I say that out loud? Um, unless that really serves your family. Well, it does. Is it serving your [00:24:00] family? Because what I hear from parents, a lot of it. is that all of the things they've put their kids in is not serving their families. Yeah. I think

this is a really important conversation to have and not very many people want to have it.

And that's why I think it's good. You know, one of the things we said a lot was you have to do at least one activity every quarter, just because the social piece, we live in such a rural area that we want our kids connected. And actually what's happened is now we're in an area where they're doing four days a week of school and they have a three day weekend.

And that has been a game changer for nervous systems. because now they've got extra time to recover and recuperate. And I am certain that you are spending as many hours with families as I am talking about the little, tiny, itsy bitsy bits of connection that they get. They're not eating dinners together.

They're spending, I have one family that spends almost 20 hours a week in a car

together. [00:25:00] And is that 20 hours? of being annoyed and irritated and everybody on a separate device checked out? Or is that 20 hours of time for connection? Because it could go either way, but I think frequently it goes pretty strongly in one direction.

And what, you know, what are the dynamics of why they're spending that, right? We run into that. Well, we're running here because he wants to do this and I don't do that. And we're running here because she wants to do this. And so I just think it's so important to reevaluate. The importance of connection and how families are doing that.

I'm so glad you brought that up because overscheduling really does impact a nervous system. Yes,

and it is a very unpopular opinion to bring up to families about how many activities the kids are in, et cetera, and whether the kids are getting their social needs met, et cetera. But, um, for a lot of kids, I think being in a social setting, seven hours a day, forced socialization and forced structure [00:26:00] and all of those things, for some of our kids, it really keeps them together.

They need the structure, they need the routine, clear expectations from school, et cetera. But by the end of my work day, I don't want to talk to another human being. And if I then had to go play a team sport, no way, there's just no way that I could do it as a grown person with some pretty decent skills.

So, you know, talking about families that aren't getting home until eight o'clock at night and they haven't done any schoolwork, they haven't just snuggled and read a book. They haven't pet the dog. I mean, there's all of those connection moments that might be being missed by just doing too much all the time.

Yeah.

Love that. I, I think it's an unpopular opinion. That's a really important opinion. And I really appreciate you saying it because I think there's, it's a discussion, right? When we talk about systems, we forget that going to and from sports is part of the system going to and from activities as part of the system.

You know, I have a [00:27:00] family I work with and their kid is very into drama. And they said, you can do one play a year. That is all our family can tolerate. There's three plays a year that are provided and they're like, you can do one. That's all our system can handle. And I actually really love the way they framed that.

Like we're, we're willing to put stress on the system because this is something you really enjoy and you can do it. And the rest of us have to sacrifice for you to be able to do that. And we will do that one time a year, but we're not doing it all three times of the year. So it seems like there can be some negotiations and some discussions around some of that as well.

Right, right. And I do have families that do a really good job with Managing those schedules and it seems like it's something that brings them joy going to places together and doing all these things and they're all in the hotel on the weekend or they took their camper and all the kids are in soccer.

And for some of those families, it does look like that brings them joy and then it's not, it's not a concern for their system. But, um, yes, anyways. [00:28:00] Love

that. Well, thanks for digging into that.

Strategies for Navigating Transitions and Maintaining Balance
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So what are some of the words you would just leave parents, educators, adopted parents, mental health professionals, you know, the humans that we are in touch with, just about transition time, seasons, transitions, your nervous system,

there's so much there.

There's so much there. Yes, that our bodies get used to the rhythm and routines. I mean, even just with the nicer weather, like I'm used to that. Now I get out and sit on my front porch and have a cup of coffee in the morning.

Thank God. It was time.

I'm such a better human for it. January and February. I'm not nearly as good of a human as I am once that sunshine hits and I can do it.

So just recognizing how essential that is, even, you know, when kids have substitute teachers and we look at the kids all apart, or, um, if they have assemblies at school, if they have holiday days, I'm Kids are often a disaster, and also that's something you can opt out as [00:29:00] well. So I think families feel like they can't skip that.

I'm like, does the Valentine's party result in two days of meltdowns? Yes. I say we don't have a Valentine's party. You have a Valentine's party at home. You can go to the zoo, do something else. Um, so increasing predict, um, predictability, I think is the best thing we can do. Having visuals for kids, even long after we don't think kids need visuals.

We like to pull visuals from classrooms, et cetera, about third grade. And I feel like we have failed to then. teach the kids how to then use their own visuals. I mean, how many calendars do you have Stacey? A lot. I have three actually. Just three. Okay. So yes, I have one on the computer. I have one on my phone.

I have one of my, a paper one I carry around because I'm old and we're not then teaching our kids when they get to eight, nine, ten. You know, do they also have a phone? Do they have a calendar for school? How can we teach them to look ahead? So do we have a family calendar where we're writing things down?

All of that, we're running a calendar in our head all day long. We know [00:30:00] we're going to stop at the grocery store and grab a rotisserie chicken at 9 o'clock in the morning. But we picked up Jimmy from basketball at 5, and he is not anticipating that rotisserie chicken. So just those simple things of pre warning when you pick them up after school.

Hey, here's your snack. picking up an hour, we're grabbing a chicken, and then we're going to go home. That free warning things I think are pretty good. Or even just having the same day be the day that you stop and grab your groceries going home. So having visuals, having full family visuals, so the whole family knows what's going to happen.

Um, using those visual calendars, um, for home and school, et cetera, I think are really important forever. Like we, we pull them out of, we pull them out of classrooms and we stop pre morning kids. And doing that at the start, like the week or two before school starts, I think that that is really good too, just to get everybody on that, that routine too.

And also just adjusting your own expectations for, okay, now I am getting up an hour earlier. I have to get bodies to someplace when I've just left them all summer to do what they want. What is that going to do to me? How are we going to divvy up the [00:31:00] responsibilities in our household? differently now that school is here.

So recognizing that it is a huge change. Preloading what we can in using routines and predictability to keep everybody operating as best they can and also lowering the bar on expectations for everyone. Love it. Adults included, right? It's

just as hard on us. In some ways it's harder on us because we're navigating that transition and co regulating dysregulated kids through the transition.

So it's important to manage our own bar too. I love that. I

love that. Right. Well, and even, I mean, uh, in our household, I know in maybe years to announce you're doing the four day schoolwork by Thursday, everybody's all done. So just to acknowledge that everyone is all done by Thursday. Great. Thursday is now like survival food.

Like you're eating leftovers today and just, but having that on the schedule, recognizing, noticing, and then scheduling that downtime. Okay. Everyone takes a bath on Thursday or Friday or whatever it is and honoring that, um, [00:32:00] and just letting it be okay. I love that. I

think we're really living in a world where people think that other people are judging them based on how much we're doing or not doing and actually it's not true.

We're all sort of in our own survival mode and we're not even noticing what other people are doing sometimes and so just taking care of our own people and the rhythm of our regulation in our own home is critical. I love that.

Right. Well, and it is my daughter and I had a great social media discussion this morning, even about, you know, how, why she doesn't have it essentially mom didn't have until she was 26.

It's still been bad. You know, how, you know, what level of brain development do we need? What do we need coming into our house from outside our house for what kind of people, et cetera. Um, and you know, how do we celebrate every day? And, um, I mean, I use the hashtag all the time of everyday magic, going on a walk with your kids and a dog.

is magic. Agreed. You know, making, [00:33:00] you know, we've got rhubarb growing. We're going to do rhubarb jam, I think at home and in the clinic, just a super like that's magic. It's every day. Like that is what I want to keep celebrating. Like it doesn't have to be some fancy beach scene with some palm trees. Like this is magical sharing this time and doing these kinds of things.

So how do we bring the focus back to, um, those things? Everyday stuff.

Loving the life you're living in versus wishing you were living in a different life.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and recognizing that, just recognizing that it is the everyday is what makes everything work. Yeah. It's the

gift, right? It's

the gift.

It's not the one week you did something that wasn't your life. Right.

Yeah, no, I think, I think that's such a good point. So I refer people to your social media, speaking of all the time, but how can people reach out to you? How can people get ahold of you? If you want them to, if you have, I know you guys are booked where you're at, [00:34:00] um, but you put out so much good content for just all people who are watching this about regulation and routines and rhythms and all the things, just let us know how we can get in touch with you.

I use Wild Hearts Therapy on Facebook and Instagram. We've been trying to do some things on YouTube. We're just getting started with that because our families look to that. And then we also just added a Pinterest. page for Wild Roots Therapy, Inc. as well, where we're trying to put up just daily activities and fun sensory ideas, etc.,

things to do with kids and with each other, um, and for adults too. I think we have a whole section there for adults just for regulation. So those are all our contact places, but, um, I always use the disclaimer that We are just as real there as we are here. Like nothing is curated. There's no color schemes.

Nothing is professionally managed. It's just people snapping pictures and sharing what was happening in the moment and everyday magic.

Yeah. I love it. And I think you're doing a really beautiful job of just modeling being human. So I [00:35:00] appreciate that about you. Thank you for taking the time with me today, Erica.

I always love seeing you and I don't get to see you enough. So this was pretty special for me. Thank you. Right.

Thank you, Stacy. Great to see you.