The Quiet Crisis Next Door

Tag: impulse control

  • Celebrate Every Little Thing Like It’s Big

    The stress in my life lately has been palpable and ravenous, requiring the delivery of an increasing diet of effort, guzzling sleep while leaving behind far too many regurgitated memories of middle of the night hours. Last night was the first night in several days I slept more than 6 hours. Tony was awake a…

  • The Nightmare of “No”

    “He’s growing so tall! He’s doing so well! He’s being so patient!” We were finishing up a quick trip into a local grocery store this morning with a new ABA behavioral therapist that is working with Tony in the mornings, and those were the cashier’s comments to us. As I have explained before to those…

  • French Fry Flexibility

    About 3 years ago, I had just headed out on a walk with Tony and Hannah when Andy called me. The garage door had broken free from its rails and he was trapped inside the garage. Because I was strength training pretty heavily still at that time, I was physically the strongest person in our…

  • Using ABA To Calm Some Chaos

    Anyone working with our son quickly finds out that he wants everything to go exactly the way he wants it to go 100% of the time…and that he is very determined about trying to arrange things to get exactly that. There are many reasons of course why that cannot be encouraged, ranging from the fact…

  • Resurrecting Public Therapy

    The cashier at Bashas’ looked at me as she pulled Tony’s bag of suckers across the scanner and said, “I haven’t seen you guys in a while.” Her eyes crinkled around the corners, so I could see that she was smiling even though her mask covered much of her face. A whole year I thought,…

  • Some Things Are More Important

    I am rarely at a loss for words to write or say. Our current local surge of COVID infections has left me wading through a dim bog of uncertainty. Far too many in our communities have lost loved ones, others are still battling for their health, and many people have lost their jobs…so I feel…

  • A Year of Gifts

    So much of the gift giving in our communities is concentrated and condensed into days of prescribed celebration. But some of the best presents have trickled in bit by bit this past year, oft ill-wrapped by other circumstances and generally unannounced by fanfare, tags, or cards. Perhaps they are small compared to what some would…

  • Picturing Community Safety

    At the meeting place of Tony’s growth rate, his sensory differences, the profundity of his Autism, his intense impulsivity, and his heavily delayed risk assessment beats the heart of some of my deepest fears for our son’s future. We remain racing against time, have been engaged in every strategy we can think of for years…

  • No Such Thing as Medication Salvation

    This week, our story drops through the words of two songs of the same title, spliced and stitched together to help me animate the remaining fragments of my scattered thoughts. My moments this past week have been filled and stretched to the point where my own artistry just may not be enough to bring this…

  • 365 Days a Year of Things to Fear

    When I was young, our family often watched reruns of The Twilight Zone. Black and white memories of commonplace scenes twisting through sometimes terrifying deviations floating through the time warp of a 43 year old mind- faces and images frozen in grief or compounding horror. We are taught to think there is a firm line…