Welcome back to our latest episode from Lessons From the Playroom. I have with me another really special guest, miss Carrie Hamilton. I’m going to tell you a little bit more about her in just a second.
But what I want to say is that I approached Carrie last year at the International Association of Play Therapy conference and just said, I really want you on this podcast. Carrie has such an important message for all of us, and we get to have a conversation today with her about the experience, the very lived experience of being a parent or caregiver with a child that struggles with neurodivergent or sensory struggles. So a little bit about Carrie.
And then Carrie, we get to say hi and start our little chat. So she’s a wife, she’s a mama of two. She’s also the director of play therapy at Antioch University in Seattle.
In the United States. She is the owner of a group practice clinic called Olympia Therapy. She’s the president of the Washington Association of Play Therapy.
She’s an author. She presents internationally. And I already said this or alluded to this, but I’m just going to reinforce it.
What’s so amazing about you, Carrie? I mean, many things, but one of the things I love about you as a presenter is that you present, first of all, from your heart. Second of all, you present from the lived experience. You don’t just present from a theoretical understanding.
And what you bring is so invaluable. So I just, first of all, want to say thank you for what you’re doing in the world and for the conversations you’re having with so many because it’s a really important conversation and you’re really inspiring. I’ll just name that too.
You’re really inspiring. Yes. So we are today I invited you on because I do want to have a conversation with you about as play therapists, how do we support parents and caregivers when their child is struggling with sensory challenges? Because it can really be a lot.
So. Hi, Carrie. Hi.
Good morning. How are you? We’re here. We’re doing this.
I’m so excited to have this conversation because this is my passion. It’s what I live, and I want what I have lived to be known for the world so that those who are like me and those parents as professionals can support those parents who thought we knew and we didn’t know. And we really need more help than people are aware that we need, right to be here.
Totally. So we’re about to jump in, Carrie. Let’s dedicate this episode to all of our listeners who are in this position of having someone in their home that has sensory challenges, know struggles in this particular way.
And may this be a hug for you listeners, if this feels like your lived story. And for the others of you who have children in your practice who struggle in this way. May this conversation offer you some more support so that you can feel better equipped to support the parents and caregivers.
So just putting that attention out there. And with that, let’s start with this piece, Carrie. This idea that sometimes we think we know, or we think we are aware, we understand what sensory struggles actually are, when in fact we actually yeah, my favorite things to talk about, I’m like, you think you know, and we don’t know really when it comes down to it.
And that’s from my own personal experience with my own graduate programs and my ten years before I became a parent. Being a play therapist and working with children with neurodiversity and trauma and understanding regulation but not fully understanding the amount of energy and level of intensity that sensory challenges can really take at home depending upon the struggles that each individual child has. Right.
And I thought I knew. And then you have one, and then you go, I don’t know anything, and you try with desperation to reach any possible point of regulation or calmness or just a sense of knowing what you’re doing with your child. My biggest challenge, Brady, is my second child.
So I thought I had it figured out with my first one and my second came along, was the complete opposite in every possible way. And he’s charming and beautiful and magical. And at the same time I’ve got a lot of gray hair from him because of just trying to help him be who he is in this world and be able to survive in this world because the first few years of his life, it was all about keeping him alive.
And that’s a pretty stressful place to be for parents. And I think we get them coming into our clinics at age three, four and parents are worn out and they’re tired and it’s a different level of tired than most people think. Absolutely.
So I will go ahead and also name and join you in this that Maya Avery also struggles with sensory challenges. And yes, the first many years of her life were particularly taxing, particularly exhausting, and finding a way to help her little body soothe some days felt almost impossible. And what it took within me was incredibly challenging.
So we can have this conversation both of us from the lived experience of having a child that needs more and needs things that sometimes maybe I know. I often felt like I couldn’t provide or I didn’t know what to provide. I didn’t know what I didn’t know what to do.
You said the word you started to talk about just following or just kind of having to go with it a little bit. Yeah. Using your intuition, that was true for me as well.
Let’s keep going down. I mean, as a parent, you’re desperate to do anything to try and make sure your child is like we want them to be in that place of feeling successful and happy. And my intuition when it came to Brady’s struggles was really the, I’m going to do whatever it takes, I’m going to follow his lead.
Because nothing that I thought was going to work was working for him. And so it always seemed to be the opposite. And instead of becoming frustrated with that, I leaned in with curiosity and really strived to be like, what is it that he’s seeking? What is it that he’s needing? How can I provide that to him? Because our bodies know best, right? And they don’t have words, and they can’t communicate with us, but they certainly can be showing us through lots of different communication, particularly the nonverbal, what’s their body doing, that informs us what they’re actually needing.
And if we know what we’re looking for, we have a better sense. And here I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I understood.
But Brady’s level of symptomology really put it to this obscure place that almost seemed impossible because his behaviors were so unsafe, his behaviors were so intense that you couldn’t help feel like you were doing something wrong as a parent. And on top of that, then how do I keep my kids safe, let alone help him grow into a healthy adult? I can’t keep my kids safe. That leaves you in that hyper state for long periods of time and exhausted on top of that, which leaves you in a hyper out of state.
Right. And so I felt that paying attention to my intuition was the most important thing I could do because it was my deep body listening. Right.
It’s that capacity to just be with another human being and trust that they know what they need, even if it seemed weird or bizarre, to make time is to just go for it and to do it, which took a lot of faith on my part to trust in what I knew. I think what you’re saying is so key for play therapists, because sometimes I think when we hear a parent or caregiver talk about, I’m really struggling with this with my child, or I don’t know, sometimes we want to pull out the bag of tricks, well, try this or try this or try this. And not to say that sometimes those things aren’t helpful.
But I’m hearing you say that maybe there’s a more important message, which is parents, what’s going on with your intuition? And how do you teach the parent or caregiver to follow their intuition and follow their child’s lead and let the child’s body guide the way? Rather than something you read in a book or something that you here, try this. Everybody’s telling you, giving you advice, sensory toy, brush them or whatever it is, which, again, may or may not be useful, but I’m hearing you say, no, we need to go a different angle. We need to go a different direction.
I believe so. I think that as parents, we’re taught to second guess ourselves sometimes because we don’t have training on being a parent necessarily. It’s just here.
Here you go. And we go off our lived experiences and whatever we’ve absorbed or learned. Right.
And with kids who’ve got significant sensory challenges, none of the standard parenting strategies are going to work. Like, none of them. And so parents really feel at a loss as to what do you do.
And I work with this with my husband, who’s a teacher. He gets child development. He understands all those things, and yet he’s baffled, what are we doing? Right? But he trusted in my intuition and said, let’s just go with it.
Let’s figure out what he needs, allow him to meet his needs and look at those patterns, look and see what’s happening with him. What can we get him to those places, to where we can see? Is it intensity? Is it the type of input? Is there anxiety? Like whatever it was, we were trying to go for everything. But if we hadn’t trust our guts on that and allow parents to trust our guts, then we’re missing a huge piece.
Because when I teach in my presentations, I’m always like I tell clinicians to ask the parents a very scary question, a very vulnerable question, which is to say, what are you afraid to tell me? What are the behaviors that you’re afraid to let me know that are the extreme scary ones? Because those are the ones that are going to be most informative to you as a clinician to gauge severity and intensity of distress within the family unit. Right. That is going to be hard.
And you will see them start to tear up because they’re like, I don’t want to tell you you’re going to call CPS, you’re going to make these phone calls that I don’t want people to know how bad of a parent I am. And that is so important for you to be of intuition with them, to say, I get this. I understand this is maybe different.
Let’s go there. Let’s talk about it, because I want to give you the support that you need. And that will often be the very first time those parents experience unconditional positive regard of, you see me and you see what’s gosh, what a beautiful question, Carrie.
Like, really beautiful question. It’s interesting. And then there’s that part two of it.
And then how did you respond and what are the ways you responded that you don’t want to tell me? Exactly? What did you do in desperation? What did you do in desperation? What are you holding shame about? What are you beating yourself up about? Where are you feeling like you are an adequate parent? Hi, listeners. I’m going to ask you to step out of the playroom for just a second so we can talk business. I’m talking about the business of therapy.
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I hope to see you there. Get all the details at Learn Synergeticplaytherapy.com. I want to pause here and just say, when I teach parenting stuff to play therapists, I feel like I often put in front of play therapists, what do we need to do in our own minds to expand our own capacity to hold parents in a different way without our own judgment about it? Totally.
Because we have our own beliefs and messages of right and wrong parenting and what’s good behavior and what’s bad behavior as parenting. But if we come into the situation with that locked in, I think sometimes the parent is not going to feel safe opening up and sharing. I just love where you’re going with this.
Right. Because it’s like, can we open up a conversation to the really messy stuff? It’s super messy, and it’s often what are you telling the doctors? That they’re denying that it exists, that they’re just saying, you’re just not doing enough of blankety blank. Right.
Like, do sleep training, get them on a schedule, do all these different things. Yeah, that’s the standard way. And you’ve tried and you failed.
And so now you’re afraid to come to another professional and feel that judgment on you. And I think for those, parents are often vibrating with their own Dysregulation, right? Like, they’ve got this kid and their own cells are in their hyper aroused or sometimes even hypo aroused. Right.
They’re just shut down completely. And I think using our clinician intuition and trusting instincing that and seeing that and knowing, okay, there’s more here. Because this is a level of dysregulation and tiredness and exhaustion and fear that’s coming off of parents that if we can have that little bit of a compassion of just be open with that allows them to approach us in a different way.
And then the floodgates open. Honestly, so many times I’m like, so I’m hearing from your kid, they won’t wear shorts, they won’t wear socks, they bounce off the walls, they’re climbing everything. And you’ve been kicked out of three daycares.
Yes, I think I might know what’s happening for you. And those words alone bring such relief to parents and then start asking them questions because they feel seen and heard, unlike other times in their life. Because even me, as a professional, I went through multiple specialty doctors, and they all told me, do behavior training, do sleep training.
I’m like, do you know who I am and what I do for a living? You think I haven’t done that already? Right? I’m coming. Because this is different. This is at a different level.
And if I was had to advocate on that level, then we know what our populations, we work with, how much advocacy they need on their own as well, in order to have any movement whatsoever. And even in addition to the professionals, there’s the societal messages, your friends, right? Your friends or your extended family, they’re not going to understand. And then there’s those compounded messages sometimes of just let them cry it out, or what are you doing? Or stop trying to meet stop trying to meet the need.
Totally. You’re just begging them, what are you exactly? You’re raising a child that’s going to be like, overly dependent and this and that and all of that. And so what a really important message to parents? To say, no, but what’s the voice inside? And is the voice inside saying no? Let them hang upside down off the couch, let the pillows go everywhere.
No, help. Find ways for the mess to happen. Find ways to help the body.
Let them do it. Right? Let them do it. And that’s very true.
That’s part of my presentations is I’m able to show these pictures of crazy things that happen out in the community or out and say and we were judged for this. Right? Like pictures of my son with his feet up on Red Robin, right? His feet are in the air, and his head is underneath the counter, right? And he and my daughter are playing a game, and they are happy as can be. And for the waitresses to be able to say, he needs to sit up, I’m like, no, you don’t want him to sit up.
He’s doing just fine. Just fine. You really don’t want to mess with this scenario right now.
And we are okay with this, and he’s not doing anything. Like, he’s not what he could be doing. So, no, we’re going to stick with this.
And them sensing that it was okay because we were confident in saying that it was okay, we were able to say to the community, we are okay with what we’re doing and we know that it works. And I am very conscious and aware through my own work, right? Like I didn’t allow that shame to get in the way. But that is not true of the parents that we’re with.
Their shame cycles are huge. Their judgment is huge. Their parenting is judged at a whole different level, particularly within those family units and friends.
And oftentimes families are not going to understand, just not going to understand. And that makes them feel even more isolated and alone out in the world, even more so. And then that compounds over and over and over.
Let’s talk about when individuals in the immediate family system don’t understand. Like maybe there is a sibling system that doesn’t understand or maybe you are in partnership with someone that doesn’t understand or there’s a difference in parenting approaches. Let’s talk about the impact of that.
That’s a hard one. Yeah. I think when the other parents, right, whoever that other parent is, and sometimes even the parent who’s sitting in front of you, who’s brought kiddo in for service, right, they aren’t willing to fully admit or acknowledge what may be going on with that child, that there’s a reality to this.
And that’s where I think the benefit of our neuroscience education allows us to explain it in such a different way that when we can explain it, talking about the body and talking about our parasympathetic nervous systems and talking about it in a way that says, no, actually, this is how sensory works. We all have them. And I can usually name off I usually start to name off a few things that most people have, like chewing on bottle caps or similar things.
I’m like every single person has sensory sensitivities. There’s not one of us that has a perfect sensorial nervous system. That’s not possible.
And it’s just when those have become so compounded that they’ve got a bag of them, that’s when it becomes harder. And when a partner doesn’t want to acknowledge, usually it’s a partner who’s probably struggling with the same things and or is exact opposite sensory to their child. So to just be around that child is immensely difficult for them to do because the very things that set them off as a human is done by their child.
So to connect or to think about belonging with that child is extremely difficult for them. Yeah. And so it’s helping them to find understanding and being able to explain it.
Which is why I think sensory needs to be known by all child clinicians so that they can help to explain. I preach body before brain. I’m like our bodies have to be regulated in a place where they can connect and be a human before our emotions could be on board and be able to be thought about.
Right. Like parents come and I just want them to tell you what’s wrong with me? And I’m like they don’t know what’s wrong with them. They cannot tell you because they have never had that sense of what feeling calm feels like.
Right? And then the siblings see all attention being drawn to this one entity in the family, good or bad, and they feel left out or they feel jealous often or they feel like they have to overhelp and become over parentified trying to parent said right. And so that sibling conflict becomes twofold and if not managed by parents and acknowledged and validated that their experience is just as real as the other child’s experience, then we’re missing out on that and that creates a whole nother family dynamic system that’s going to have a problem moving forward. And so the deniers are always going to be there and you can hope that with educating them we can break through some of that barrier, but it’s still going to take awareness of trying things and helping them find that regulated state for themselves, that then they start to believe, because oftentimes they’re just in their own Dysregulated state.
Most often. I’m hearing you say that it’s helpful to look at this as a systemic like the whole system needing support rather than just one parent or caregiver bringing the child and that’s it without recognizing impact on the entire system and getting curious about who else in the system might need support. Maybe it is another sibling or like you said, maybe there’s a parent that’s really pushing away or really not wanting to embrace what’s going on because their own stuff is getting activated.
Yeah. I’m just hearing you say, let’s think about this from a systemic impact. Yeah.
Significantly. Because there is no way that a child with significant sensory challenges isn’t going to impact the whole household. Whether it be disruption in the middle of the night, whether it be disruption in daily activities and transitioning and just making things difficult in just exhausting the parental units from which then they don’t have time for other right.
And I think if you fail to look at it systemically, then you’re going to fail that child in that family because there’s so much happening within there that we have to support all the little baby steps it is so that we help support the child as we go along. Can we also normalize the impact on marriage? We can do that because we’re talking about all of these different relationships but I think also just to name and normalize having a child and we know this when we say what are the biggest stressors on a marriage or partnership? It’s like moving, having a kid, money, sex, all this kind of stuff right. Let’s throw sensory challenges to the mix also disrupt the household but just to name just to name that that’s another layer in a partnership that can be challenged.
Yes, marriages are definitely, I think sacrificed for the child just like with other medical illnesses like if child has cancer or any other big medical thing where the overtime is having to spend to in my example specifically to keep him alive. This is an urgent need. It’s not just that there’s a simple adjustment needing to be met.
It’s that my whole attention was having to be on the survival of this little human being. That it’s hard to maintain a marital relationship if there isn’t alignment with your intention and belief of what you’re doing to help with child. Right.
And even then it’s going to be rocky at periods of time that’s known in my family for sure is there’s rocky times because dependent upon his ability to be safe or not allows my ability to be in my safe place from which then I can be an interaction and show love and kindness for my partner. Right. And so it’s extremely damaging to marriages, particularly those that don’t want to lean and be curious together, even if they have difference of opinion.
If there’s a really big stoicism or difficulty in wanting to get to know that child for who they are, then the grief overrides. And that grief of not having the child that you wanted to have or the belief that the dreams of that child that you think are gone in the moment of the distress. By no means are they gone because they have magical pieces to them that we just haven’t seen yet.
But there’s grief in this is harder than I wanted it to be. This is not the kid I wanted to have. Yes.
One of the things that I’ve noticed with the families that I work with is it’s almost like both partners have to make a decision. We are going to be partners in this. We’re coming together for many purposes, but this is one of the purposes that we’re coming together for.
And we are both rowing in the same direction around this purpose. And then that can create the sense of tag teaming or the sense of your nervous system shot. Let me take over.
Your nervous system needs a break. Let me take over. Let me regulate you so you can regulate the child.
Okay, my turn. I’m going to regulate you so you can regulate that. But there’s almost this sort of thing, the rhythm completely that has to take over in the household.
Right. And not to say that the family can’t exist without that. I’m just naming that it seems like that can be a more successful dynamic when both partners say, all right, we know what we’re up to and we’re in agreement about what we’re doing and they need to have an open conversation about that.
Sometimes they haven’t even talked about that yet. And so that parenting session is like, are you guys in this together? Where are you guys aligning at with this? Where do you need extra support? Where do you not understand? How can I get you on board and alignment so that we’re at least, as you said, rowing in the same direction instead of trying to try to row up the river, which is not going to be successful for any of us. Right, exactly.
Oh, goodness gracious. I’m really like taking a breath as we’re talking about talking about this. Well, it’s hard.
It brings up all those feelings, right? Totally. I’m like, yep, yep, yep, yep. I know we’re talking about the challenges and the struggle.
I also want to name in this my experience as a mom, one of the greatest gifts that Avery has given me is the trusting the intuition piece. And what I have found is that when I can lean in to her rhythm while honoring my rhythm, so it’s not just maybe we can talk about that too, because if I just let go of me to constantly tend to her needs, that doesn’t work so well either. So it’s a sense of you and me and our rhythm, right.
Our rhythm together. But she has taught me how to trust my intuition, and in doing that, she’s taught me how to trust her more. And that’s the piece that has actually that’s where we’re close.
It’s interesting, in the midst of all the chaos, there is a sense of I got you, I got you, because of the intuition piece. And I think because I tried all of the advice and it didn’t work, I think had I stuck to that, it would have created a greater rupture dynamically between us. I don’t know if that’s a similar dance with you as well, but I just love that you’re focusing on how do you allow the trusting of your child and the trusting of yourself? And I want to add one more piece in here before you respond with that.
There’s almost a place of I don’t actually need to have a label for what’s happening, and I don’t actually cognitively even need to know what’s going on right now, because I can just follow what’s unfolding. Yeah, 100%. You described it really well, and I would agree with you.
And in the work that I’ve done and the work in my own self, my ability to trust myself once I started trusting myself increased. Right. Like, my capacity to go, I am on the right track, because I can see our connection is strong.
I can see that we got each other. Right. I wanted to giggle when you said, I got you.
Right. Because that is, in our household, what we say when things are, like, going awry, we’re all like, we got this. You got me.
I got you. I got you. And my kids now, even in distress, if they see us in distress, because I believe in making sure our kids see our emotions too, they’ll walk up, and, I got you, mama.
I got you. Right. Because there’s really no name we can put to that other than, I see you, I hear you, I understand where.
You’re at we don’t have words for right now because we’ve lost our language, because we’re in we don’t have language anymore. But I can see I got you and give you a hug. That is what happens in our household, right? We hug each other when we don’t have words because we know that that’s the big part of words will come online when we feel connected again.
But I think in my intuition from way back when until now, my confidence in trusting, something’s wrong, something’s not right. I can’t say what’s wrong or right. I just know that there’s something wrong.
All right. There’s been too many times with Brady in particular where I knew something was very wrong, but no one would listen to me. And one of them was he had a C diff infection, but we didn’t know it for two and a half months.
And I could just tell he was off. Something was wrong. I kept taking to the doctor.
Nothing was listening. No one was like, he’s fine because he doesn’t feel pain. So he couldn’t say that he was hurting, but something was wrong.
My gut was saying, something is wrong. And so finally, an episode happened where he went to the bathroom and he had blood, which then scared everybody, right. Because CEDIF had eaten through his colon, finally.
And the doctor’s like, Why didn’t you bring him in? I’m like, look at your records. I brought him in five times. You just weren’t listening to me.
Right. And that of, yes, my intuition was 100% correct. I am not going to doubt myself anymore.
Right. Like, never will I do that again. And in that and you probably have with this with Avery as well, it sounds like, is brady can look at me from across the room.
So can Mackenzie, but Brady can look at me across the room and walk over, and he’ll just say, I love you, Mama, when he can see that I’m not okay. Totally. Right.
He doesn’t have to ask. He doesn’t need to know why. He just says, I love you, Mama, and gives me a hug, and then we’ll walk away.
And that is the power of having that connection and intuition of trusting yourself and trusting the child. They trust you innately, but they see you at a level that you haven’t seen yourself either. Yeah.
It goes both ways. It goes both ways. Oh, yes.
So beautiful. Avery’s is if we’re sitting there, she’ll just put her hand on my leg, or she’ll put her hand or she’ll just sort of like there’s a way they do just a it’s just a touch. It’s just a way that she’ll touch me.
It’s her way of saying, I got you, mama. Now. I will also name, too, that I am also one of those parents that gets flooded when things get really challenging, and there are those moments when I get super dysregulated, and so I want to normalize that too.
It’s not like, oh yeah, I’ve got this lovely connection with I mean, I do have a lovely connection with Avery. And sometimes things are really hard, sometimes things are really hard and sometimes things are really messy. And sometimes I got to dig down deep into places that I wasn’t sure that existed in me and I’ve got to practice my own regulation and literally put into practice everything that I teach because I have to work my own sensory system while her sensory system is having a hard time.
I think that there’s another layer. I don’t know if you would agree with this, Carrie, but I find that I spend time with my parents that I work with. In addition to trusting their own intuition, how do they work with their own sensory? Like, what do you do in those moments? What do you do when your system is so overwhelmed or your system feels hijacked because things are so intense? How are you connecting to yourself? How are you working your own what does your own body need that whole piece too? Do you want to speak to that? I do.
When we get the inclination that sensory is going to be a part of this case that’s coming in, we don’t have just the parent do the sensory checklist for their child. We have it do that for them as well so that we can work with and they’re like, well, it’s not about me. I’m like, Actually, it’s a lot about you, and I will explain more.
But right now I don’t want to give you information because I want you to fill this out honestly. Right. I promise I’ll give you answers as soon as I see what we’ve got.
Right. And I think when we can show the similarities between parents and child on what their regulation needs are and or the differences of this is the why you’re struggling more in these areas, it’s so informative for parents and that helps them also buy in more to. There is something I can do within myself that’s innate to me that will help my child, which is a big, huge gift that we could give parents.
Because when we can show them that you actually have the ability to be in this place of regulation and be soothed yourself so that you can turn and give your full attention to kiddo that is in chaos right now and target that capacity, empowers them at that moment, you target too. Be able to turn and go, I got this right? To tell myself I got it, and I know what I need to do for myself. But that takes lots of practice, right? And you and I had a lot of practice before we even had kids, and we’re still struggling, which is what I tell parents.
I’m like, I am not perfect at this. I still struggle too. And if we can help this space with you and know what yours are and give you the gift of being able to regulate yourself and meet your needs, then your child will come along with you.
Because it’s the mirror nons, right? It allows that mirror neurobiology to be present. And oftentimes it sometimes takes a family session. Kids in doing his thing and me just them being able to see my presence, of just not having to be in control and just be there with kid and allow the kid to experience and to honor and reflect and validate the kid’s experience.
And in that process, I always sway. Swaying is my thing, right? I start swaying or I have a or I do my thing and parents are like, that’s all I needed to do. I’m like, yeah, it seems simple.
And it’s extremely difficult when you’re in a really stressful situation or you’re tired, you just got home from work and you are hungry, and all of those things are still going on. And it is possible if you can give the gift of those three to five minutes, in that moment, you’ll have a much better evening promise than if you aren’t able to just be present and let them express themselves to you. Because that’s really what they’re trying to do.
They’re trying to say, I don’t got control of me and I don’t know what to do. And I feel like I’m floating up like an astronaut. I was like, I feel like I’m floating like an astronaut.
I need to be grounded, please, right. Stride to have them be grounded. And when you can do that for yourselves, you do that for your kid, which allows for that buy in of what you’re doing with kid is much more successful for parents that themselves.
Yes. I had the image of one astronaut trying to ground another astronaut. That’s exactly why I talk about Mike.
How does that happen? Right? That doesn’t work so well. Someone’s going to be on the ground going, okay, I see you. All right, we’re going to start to reel you in a little bit because that’s exactly what it is.
Like, you’re just orbiting each other. Such a great visual. It is, exactly.
Oh, goodness gracious, Carrie. This has just been so beautiful. I know for me personally, just my own validation as I’m reflecting on my own journey, as you’re talking about your journey.
And I know this has been incredibly important and helpful for a lot of our listeners as well. If people want to know more, they want to find where they can find you and study with you or ask you questions or whatever it is, where can they find you for clinical and presentations? That would be Olympiatherapy.com. And I also have a parenting platform where I use all of this knowledge about neuroscience and sensory and our body before brain concepts of why the parenting strategies don’t usually work sometimes, which is called playful wisdom, which is@playfulwisdom.net
where I provide education, consultation, coaching, all of those different things for that as well. And I think it’s important. One thing I wanted to slide in was a little fact, right, is that one in six kids have sensory processing challenges that warrant diagnosis.
One in six, that’s a lot, a big percentage. And so it’s frequent, it’s common, and the more we can normalize it and acknowledge it, that is a huge gift we can give to our population. So that’s what I speak to on my parenting platform, and that’s what I present on for play therapy and child development frequently.
Well, and another plug for if we’re going to work with children, this needs to be part of our training and our background is being able to understand neurodiversity and understand sensory systems so that we can identify and we can speak to parents. We can give that proper diagnosis that’s much more appropriate for the treatment that’s needed. And sometimes us is not worth that.
They need to go. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Well, Carrie, thank you again so much. I look forward to when I get to see you in person and just really appreciate this really heartfelt and honest conversation. Thank you so much, Lisa, for having me on.
It’s been such a pleasure. You’re welcome. All right, listeners, I hope you were able to grab some beautiful nuggets and insight from that conversation.
And if this is your lived experience, hopefully you felt a hug coming your way through our conversation. And wherever you are in the world, whatever you are up to, remember that you are the most important toy in the playroom. So take care of yourselves, be well, and I look forward to the next time we get to be together.
