Therapist

I had one once…for years and years.
She helped me unburden myself, heard my ramblings and tried to pin me in a feeling I’d stumble over in avoidance or a minimizing brush off. She helped me face myself without judgement, unloading my suite of baggage down to a functional sized day pack one feeling at a time. I was a marsupial in life, hording feelings deep in my pouch while refusing to acknowledge what was actually growing in there. The junk I kept wasn’t compatible with life and neither was I. It took those years to shift through the junk I’d stored up.  Some junk was mine, directly earned, and a lot more mixed in of unwanted donations from others I’d accepted only to ease someone else of the burden. After years of therapy I can say I’m now comfortable with boundaries, setting and maintaining them,  recognizing healthy relationships and capable of leaving a toxic one, and recognizing that feelings aren’t meant to be stuffed for later, but felt and released in the moment they arrive. This freedom allows me ro truly love others as they are without judgement. Thank you to my Therapist for all of that support.

Professionally I am labeled a Speech-Language Pathologist with a board certification and the alphabet M.A. CCC-SLP trailing my name on professional documents. The majority of the world has no idea what that means and I’m more commonly referred to as a Speech Therapist…even though what I actually do is still mostly unknown, simplified and watered down. There are SLP’s in the world that live life rigidly and correct everyone in the use of the alphabet…because it took a lot of work to earn those letters, but personally I think speech therapist wraps up a better definition for what I actually do everyday. (Mostly if something affects your airway-respiration, breathing, voice/vocal chords; your mouth-chewing, feeding, drooling, swallowing, articulation, speaking; your brain-lanuage, comprehension, attention, memory, hearing, reading, writing, thinking, cognition, executive functioning…SLP’s are likely in your face for rehab.)

Personally I work in pediatrics doing home visits for all my patients. The kiddos I see are typically atypical meaning they have their own bell curve of functional and vary from that seemly average 2 year old you simply can’t understand to kids who are more medically and developmentally complex; the autism spectrum with limited communication, picky eating and “odd” behaviors, infants just out of the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) born premature as early as 25 weeks old, ventilator dependent with tracheostomies, chair bound, non-verbal, tube fed, frequent seizures, paralysis, stroke, brain tumors, hearing impairments, to end of life complications/diagnosis and palliative care. My patients aren’t simple and I’m rarely bored. Doing home visits I don’t just see kids, I see families. I see the day in and day out, long term with extended family visits and suports, holiday celebrations, weekend plans, hobbies and interests, to the daily grind of coping, fighting, stress, fallout, hope, tears and exhaustion.

I’m supposed to have professional boundaries, no fraternizing! To remain professional and seperate…but I can tell you that line is only important for what I can’t take home and means nothing for how I show up. Going to someone’s home 52-104 times per year, I visit more often than most grandma’s,  I’m there more frequently than a best friend,  I bring with me a consistent and steady presence that cares about each kid, shares joy in baby-sized-steps of progress and in the disappointment with set backs. I listen to my families and that’s where my work starts, hearing how they feel facing life today in frustration, anger, pain or joy. They can’t do it alone,  and neither could I. We’re all meant to connect,  to be seen and heard…not just in the highs but desperately in the lows. I think speech therapist is a more descriptive term for what I do, it’s the therapy that counts in all of its layers.

Looking at our society and our nation today I struggle to watch the news and engage with current events.  I’m frustrated and angry with the “systems” we promote, caring more about being PC, self promotion and agendas than the people that those things hurt. We’ve become a nation that’s angry, pitted against our differences and isolated beyond recognition. We hate based on adjectives with a vocabulary of one: color, party, homed, poor, vaccinated, illegal, masked, armed, etc. We’ve forgotten our sameness, the one that unites our differences as an us, as American. We don’t need more agendas, division or hate. We need to hear again and learn how to listen; to remember we’re all human and are wired to connect, to be seen and heard and learn how to have our feelings and more conversations. We need less alphabets of importance and more therapists who care. We can all learn to be a “therapist”, someone who can listen withholding judgement, some one who cares and listens to understand rather than for solution, for those we find in our circle of care.