New Year’s Reset: A Gentle Path for Neurodiverse Families
January. New year. Exact same you and exact same everyone in your family, but the middle of winter!
Just take a moment.
Yes, right now. In the middle of reading this blog. Take a few deeper breaths, extending the exhales out and ask yourself, how are you right now?
Forget this morning and the last week trailing behind it. In this very moment, how are you?
Can you get a sense of what emotions you’re holding? How they feel in your body?
Are there any physical sensations alongside them? Like a tightness, an ache, a warmth or a sparkly, activated feeling?
Drop your shoulders and really land your attention inside your body.
If there was one thing you could do for yourself right now that would make you even the teeniest bit more comfortable or balanced what would it be?
It may be a simple shift in position …or making a hot drink or perhaps getting a blanket and really allowing yourself to rest for a while.
Or maybe you need to put a great tune on and get up and move your body?
Or grab the coats and be reading this from the park? Don’t stop leaning into this until you land on a truth.
If it’s a quick-shift-of-position-grab-a-blanket kind of thing, do that now and come back. If it’s something more, hold that in your heart whilst you read on. I invite you to do it directly after reading this.
January started for me with creating a vision board on Pinterest with a friend. It was so connecting and heart-warming to do that with her. I totally recommend it at any time of year, but it did feel particularly good at this page-turning start.
And now I can scroll through that glossy board of loveliness throughout the months to follow to remind myself of; the things I like doing, where I’d like to be placing my time, my intentions, my witchy manifestations, my please gods and all things creative that caught my eye when I was saving pins.
It’s a great exercise in connecting with your own soul self, your core essence outside of parenthood. And if you’d like to read how I went about this (and see my board) I explain the process in more detail here…
Then, rather hilariously, the day after I created my vision board, I felt totally overwhelmed by it! I couldn’t even feel into the possibility of those things taking shape in the months ahead when right now my capacity is low. The board aspirations seemed distant and garish. And the more I have reflected on this since, the more that makes sense.
The new year, start of the calendar thing is completely artificial after all.
In Devon the landscape is covered in frost as I write. It’s beautifully dark and still …and star studded at night. We drove up to Dartmoor yesterday evening with flasks of tea and saw shooting stars and Venus and the most beautiful moon. And it was freezing and I thought my toes might drop off.
Nature is resting right now and my body wants to too.
In another month or so, the first stirrings under the ground will happen, the ones that later explode into spring. But January is naturally a time of deep rest and restoration. Quite hard to do when you are trying to earn a living and support your family emotionally. And everyone keeps getting colds that completely derail them.
Sometimes all the big emotions, teacher/CAMHS meetings, ECHP admin, school refusing, dysregulation, tempting the people you live with to eat something nutritious whilst holding down a job just doesn’t add up. I began nose diving into burnout a few years back and had to stop and assess what was actually viable. Some stuff just had to go either temporarily or permanently. Other things needed to be brought in to create a soft landing space.
(Excerpt from Wide Open Spaces)
‘The soft landing place can be seeing your best friend (or texting them), or it can be the week ahead if you take out all the commitments in the diary. It can be super-soft loungewear or your favourite hoodie with the cosy lining or a blanket on the sofa. It’s foods that don’t confront your child, balanced meals, plenty of drinks and a settling in to the comfort of the winding down/bedtime routine with ease, time and patience. It’s everyone staying in their comfort zones and has the same feel as a pyjama day on a relaxed holiday. It’s baggy parenting with room for everyone to breathe, even if that means the children are on their screen a bit more. For kids with anxiety the screen is often a safe place to escape.’
For me January needs to be a soft landing space. Here’s what I need, right now, for this particular January:
- Regular time outdoors on my own regardless of the weather. Even a short, drizzly walk in waterproofs still does me a lot of good and I never regret it once I’m out.
- Time with my best friends. Deep and authentic conversations where I feel totally understood and loved for who I am. I love WhatsApp voice messages as I walk home from work, time with my women’s circle and am getting dates in the diary for in-person meet ups to look forward to.
- Music I’m loving a couple of warm and nurturing playlists I’ve created to listen to on my walk and my cheesy kitchen dance playlist.
- Heat I don’t have a bath so I’m relishing any opportunity to have a sauna. I also love my hot water bottle for all those times (most of the time) when a sauna and hot tub are not available and bowls of homemade soup.
- Creativity All I want to do right now is sew, knit, paint and write, following my obsessions down rabbit holes. And doing these non-productive things give me energy to do the other stuff. I’m sure I’ll manage to do some washing after I’ve finished my very amateur, just-for-my-own-enjoyment painting of a crow. Ten minutes here and there fills me up. I go to bed early and get up early if necessary to have that time to myself. A cup of tea, a podcast and my journal or something creative on the dining room table and I’m all set for the hours ahead that involves getting a teenager with ADHD out of bed.
What are you going to do next to balance yourself? Keep asking.
Lou xx
Wide Open Spaces offers journal prompts, ideas and activities that help you to grow your sense of self, find out who you are beyond your parenting roles and re-centre you within your life in a way that is going to make all the hard stuff feel easier.
It also explores finding peace within a neurodiverse family with imaginative approaches to big emotions, communication and relationships.