Reflection: Perspectives

reflection 5
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[00:00:00] Hey friends! Happy Monday! So I'm on my beautiful drive today. We hit about 9 below at one point. But it's sunny, it's pretty, I'm enjoying the drive. I am Deep in the thought around the word perspective. So, I've been thinking a lot about how humans of all ages can oftentimes minimize other people's experiences.

experiences because of perspective. So for those of you who've listened to a lot of my chitty chats or my trainings or been in my audiences, you know that I [00:01:00] talk a lot about the cortex and the cortex is the last part of the brain to develop. And it typically develops around 25 It's 30 years old and it's responsible for critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, and perspective.

I think that's a really important piece of understanding the human experience. So, it's really hard to have perspective if you haven't lived for a while. And you get more perspective with the more experiences you have, and the more you, you know, you get older, and you have more life behind you, and you realize what the small stuff is, and you realize what the big stuff is, and so, when it comes to kids, or our own children, students, teenagers, a lot of times, A lot of times we'll say things like, Oh, that's not that big of a deal, you know, focus on the small [00:02:00] stuff.

And what we're doing is we're minimizing their experience. We're minimizing what they have as perspective. And I'm going to tell you a story. So this weekend literally shit hit the fan and I had a sewage pipe break. So. I'm sitting upstairs, I'm doing what I do, I'm just relaxing, having a nice weekend, and my daughter comes up and was like, Mom, there's water everywhere.

And I go down to my laundry room, and sure enough, one of the pipes from our sump pump has broken. It like, popped off of where it needed to be, and her entire shower is broken. And all of the flushing that occurred in the basement is now all over my laundry room floor. And I just thought to myself, doesn't it take a little bit of shit to just remind you that [00:03:00] you're human and that life is happening?

It really puts you in the moment, right? And for some people, that could be a really bad day. That could be, like, the worst day. But in my last couple of weeks, as I've been just living my life and doing my things, every day has been a conversation about suicide. about death of a loved one, about police involvement.

Every day of my work has been hard and have been really hard conversations and including in my personal life. I've had a lot of personal life hard conversations over the last week and I just sat there as I was swamping up. The shit in my basement thinking, how lucky am I to have indoor plumbing? How lucky am I to have a roof over my head?

How lucky am I to [00:04:00] have this problem? And that's perspective. That doesn't mean it wasn't shitty. It was literally shitty. It was gross. It was nasty. I did not enjoy it one bit, but what perspective does is it really does give us those beautiful pieces of what is important and what isn't important. And it's a gift.

It's a gift and it's a gift we get with more experience. It's a gift we get as we get older. It does not mean it's a gift that we get to use as a weapon against people who don't have perspective, who aren't old enough to see, you know, the perspective that we've had. And it doesn't mean it's a gift we get to use against people who have a different perspective.

So, I just thought that was interesting to kind of think about that and to think through, you know, as Adults who are taking care of children. We're co regulating. We're showing up for them in their hard [00:05:00] moments We never want to minimize their experience We also don't want to minimize the experience of other people in our families in our friendship circles Their experience and their perspective is different than ours and that's okay So the gift of perspective is about our own journey.

It's not necessarily about someone else's journey so I just, uh, yeah, just thinking about that and you know, who doesn't need a beautiful shitty story on a Monday morning, hoping it'll all get fixed this week. and you know, thankfully I'm on this drive. So I get to, I have a different house I can go to and shower and I can use that bathroom.

Uh, I hope you all have a beautiful week and I appreciate you all showing up in the way that you do. Sending you lots and lots of love. [00:06:00]

Creators and Guests

Stacy G. York Nation, LCSW
Host
Stacy G. York Nation, LCSW
Trauma informed care and education, passion to end child abuse and neglect, loving humans #gobeyou #parenting #therapistlife
Reflection: Perspectives