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Parenting Complex Developmental Trauma with Sandi Lerman | The Neurodiverging Podcast

Sandi Lerman  is a certified transformational coach, mindfulness teacher, and somatic practitioner. She’s also the parent of a young adult with significant complex developmental trauma. Today’s she sharing some of what’s she’s learned through her decades of supporting her child’s growth.

(Patrons, please note that all tiers have access to our full interview and Q&A with Sandi here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/parenting-trauma-105199490)

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Thank you to our Patrons for funding this podcast. Find out more and pledge today at patreon.com/neurodiverging.

Show Notes:


Guest Bio: Sandi Lerman

Sandi Lerman is the Founder and Program Director of Heart-Strong International (HSI) and the creator of the Heart-Strong Model™ for growth, healing, and transformation in adults and children. HSI provides certification programs and training for heart-centered practitioners and aspiring coaches to build confidence, learn an effective coaching system, and make money doing work they love.

Sandi is a certified transformational coach, mindfulness teacher, and somatic practitioner. A life-long educator, she has over twenty years of teaching experience in K-12, university, and adult education settings. In addition to her training certified transformational coaches, parent coaches, and educational trainers, she has coordinated two state-wide non-profit parenting and community mental health education programs in Indiana.

Sandi is also a former American Sign Language interpreter, speaks Spanish, and has lived and worked as an international educator in both Scotland and Mexico.  Most importantly, she is the proud Mama Bear of Hiro, a young adult adopted at age ten who has overcome extreme challenges resulting from complex developmental trauma.


About Neurodiverging

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Transcript: Parenting Complex Developmental Trauma with Sandi Lerman | The Neurodiverging Podcast

Thank you to nakia h. for their work transcribing this episode!

DANIELLE: Hello, my friends, and welcome back to The Neurodiverging Podcast. Today, we’re doing something a little different, so my intro’s going to be very short. We have been inside our Patreon group, in the Parents Group, inviting guest experts to come in to speak to the parents there to answer questions and to record a podcast while we’re at it. And so today, I’d love to share with you the first guest we invited to our Patreon Parents Group, Sandi Lerman. Sandi is here to talk to us about the experience of being a parent of a kid with complex developmental trauma and what she’s learned as she’s gone through the work of supporting him.

Thank you so much to all of my Patrons who fund our ability to do this work and who were there in the live recording of this to have a conversation with us, to ask questions, and to develop their own understandings of their parenting lives. We’re so happy to be doing this now. If you’re interested, I hope you’ll come check out at Patreon.com/Neurodiverging. It’s three bucks a month US to join the Basic tier, which includes the Parent Affinity Groups. We would love to have you there. Here’s my conversation with Sandi!

Introduction to Sandi Lerman of Heart-Strong International

Welcome all to the Neurodiverging podcast! Thanks for being here today. I’m Danielle Sullivan, I’m your host. We’re going to dig right in today. We have Sandi Lerman with us. Sandi is the founder and the program director of Heart-Strong International, and is the creator of the Heart-Strong model for growth, healing, and transformation in adults and children.

Sandi was the person who certified me as a parent coach and as a trauma-informed educational trainer, which is very exciting, so we know each other relatively well, and I am so excited that she agreed to be here today for us. Sandi is a certified transformational coach, a mindfulness teacher, and a somatic practitioner. A lifelong educator, she has over 20 years experience teaching K through 12, university, and adults. And, in addition to training certified transformational coaches, parent coaches, and educational trainers, she’s coordinated two statewide nonprofit parenting and community mental health education programs in Indiana.

She’s also a former American Sign Language interpreter, speaks Spanish, has lived and worked in Scotland and Mexico, and is the proud mama of Hero, who I guess we’ll talk about a little bit in a couple of minutes, but is her kiddo who has overcome pretty significant challenges around complex developmental trauma. So, Sandi has a lot of both personal and professional experience in this field, and I’m so thrilled you agreed to be here, Sandi! Thanks so much for being here today!

SANDI: Thanks for inviting me. I’m so excited to be here.

How does trauma happen to kids?

DANIELLE: Yeah, me too! So just to get started, we put this, kind of, series of events together to talk about how, especially parents of neurodivergent kiddos, can support their older children and young adults who have experienced trauma. And I think that a lot of parents, especially when they’re new to neurodivergence as a concept, kind of underestimate how much trauma kiddos are encountering in their daily life. So I wonder if we could start real basic with just like what is trauma — What is trauma? And how our kiddos may be encountering it that parents should be aware of?

SANDI: That’s a great place to start. I think a lot of people when they hear the word trauma, they immediately think of a medical trauma, and they don’t always think of psychological trauma unless it’s PTSD, which most people associate with veterans or people who’ve gone through really horrific life-changing experiences that were really, really obvious traumas, big T situations.

But what happens with children is we have this other kind of trauma, and it’s called developmental trauma or complex trauma. And when it happens to kids when they’re little, it changes the way they see the world, it changes the way their brain is wired. It really becomes a form of neurodivergence for some children, whether or not they are born ADHD or autistic, or other kinds of neurodivergence. This becomes, sort of, their worldview, and they’re in this fight, flight or freeze response to stimuli in the environment.

So, the kinds of things that can cause developmental trauma, you know, the obvious things, the neglect and abuse and relational trauma with a caregiver that’s not very responsive, those things are pretty obvious. But what happens is a lot of parents don’t realize their children have trauma. They might say, “Oh, my child has never been through a traumatic experience.” But if your has any kind of a difference, whether that is neurodivergence or really any kind of a disability or giftedness or something where their brain is a little bit different from everyone around them, they’re taking in things differently, and people see them differently and treat them differently and expect them to fit norms of society that are neurotypical, and that can be really stressful.

So when you’re put in stressful situations over and over and over again, the brain starts responding to that, and there’s an endocrine system that responds to that. You have high heart rate, you’re sweating, you’re trying to protect yourself, and you go into this protective response. Over time, that becomes a form of trauma. And so that’s why it’s developmental trauma, because it affects the trajectory of development of a child, and we can see behaviors that kids have that are related to that, which a lot of people attribute to neurodivergence, but really it could just be the trauma.

What behaviors might a traumatized child display?

DANIELLE: Thank you so much, I really appreciate that. I hear two things that I would love to talk about more. The first bit being when I talk to clients who are still in the beginning stages of learning about trauma and how trauma affects humans, a lot of folks seem to kind of locate trauma responses in the brain of the way you think or the way you would imagine or even looping thoughts, like these kind of cognitive things. And I heard you start to link trauma to the body, too, like that we have physical responses to trauma, and I think those can be hard to notice in children, especially, like you said, it can be seen to be a neurodivergent trait as opposed to a traumatic response to a situation. Could we talk a little bit more about that?

SANDI: Yeah. So there’s a famous book by Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, right?
DANIELLE: Yeah.

SANDI: In this book, he explores why — how trauma is stored in the body as muscle memory. It’s stored in the muscles, it’s stored in the way the heart rate variability works. It’s stored in the way hormones are released or not released or too much or too little of different kinds of hormones respond, and all of these things are wonderful things when they’re working for the purpose they were designed to work for, which is to give you a surge of adrenaline or a surge of something that you need to get out of a dangerous situation, right?

A tiger is chasing you, you know, you’re walking across the street, and a car honks their horn, and suddenly your heart rate goes up, and you’ve got all this adrenaline, and that’s all there to get your heart pumping so that you can move quickly, get out of the way, and get out of danger. But what happens is in our modern world, we go into stress response for things that are emotional stressors rather than just like those obvious things, those obvious big things that are dangers, and then our brain signals the body that, “Hey, you’re in danger,” and then all of those systems start to react, and they can get stuck in that fight, flight, freeze response.

So, yeah, the kinds of things — You said, what kinds of things could parents look for? I mean, if your child’s heart rate goes up, if they’re sweating a lot, for my son, he wrings his hands, or he might crack his knuckles, or he used to pound a little bit. A lot of the stimming behaviors were really exacerbated by the feelings of anxiety and trauma. But it’s really just a very severe form of that overwhelming stress that goes on over time, that the body gets stuck in that response.

How can we tell whether a behavior is a response to trauma or part of other neurodivergence?

DANIELLE: And I can speak for my family. We’re mostly autistics, but our stims get a lot more pronounced when we’re overwhelmed, and that can be a sort of like neutral we’re living our life overwhelmed, but sometimes — Like, we’ve all experienced trauma, and so sometimes it is related to something else going on. We end up with a lot of that, the kind of stereotypical — The rocking; When my littlest was young, we had a lot of headbanging that we had to intervene on, a lot of pacing, a lot of if you’re somebody who talks, a lot of echolalia. So those are things that — Just in case it’s helpful to parents, those are that I see in my own kids. What are some of the ways that parents can assess whether something’s like a traumatic response or whether it’s some other form of neurodivergence?

SANDI: Yeah. So, my philosophy on cause and effect is that in the end, the way you’re going to respond and support a child who’s having a difficulty is going to be the same regardless of whether it’s neurodivergence or trauma “causing” the issue to happen. We want to create a safe, loving, connected environment regardless, right? So it’s hard sometimes to tease those things out because, like you said, stimming is just like normal life for lots of folks who are neurodivergent, and that’s just something that’s a self-soothing thing, or it’s just something that you do, it’s just part of who you are.

When it becomes pronounced, when it becomes overwhelming, when the child’s withdrawing or it’s clearly anxiety, there’s clearly some really some fear-based kinds of behaviors, that’s when you want to say, “Hm, this may be something beyond neurodivergence. This could be a trauma response. This could be a stress response.” There’s a lot of different ways of looking at that. Typically, we would take someone to see a therapist, and I think that’s okay, but not — sadly, not all therapists are very trauma-informed, which is surprising because you would think that would be part of their training.

Barriers to Supporting Kids with Trauma

But a lot of them, they look at the DSM for diagnostic criteria, and not all kids will match that perfectly, but they may still have trauma or vice versa. It may be underdiagnosed or overdiagnosed, and then the way they treat it a lot of times is just giving you extra medications for anxiety, which for kids with trauma sometimes can cause the exact opposite effect of what they’re intended to be used for.

For example, my son, when he was put on — I won’t go into a lot of detail, but when he was put on anti-anxiety, antidepressants, it made him extremely explosive, and this is what happens to the nervous system when you’re suppressing that emotion that’s overwhelming, and then you give somebody an antidepressant that relaxes them enough that they’re going to go ahead and do the things that they may have had inhibitions for before. So medications are tricky, and it’s not the only way to look at the problem. There’s a whole lot of other holistic interventions and holistic things you can do to support a child.

DANIELLE: Yeah. I would love to talk about those things more, and I’ll just say for folks who are here live, too, Sandi has a whole set of programs on this, so I’m not asking you to give us your whole (laughs) eight-week training in an hour, but I also think there’s some hesitancy, reasonable hesitancy, to engage the medical system over much with neurodivergent families because doctors don’t believe the parents who are self-identifying as neurodivergent, they don’t believe that the kiddo is. They believe the kiddo has I’m thinking — Okay, I’ll just say directly, as a woman-ish autistic person who is late identified and who has children who are neurodivergent, getting my daughter identified for anything is like an impossible task. Getting myself identified for further things as I learned more about them was an impossible task.

And I’m like, well, reasonably well-educated, I have good health insurance, I can advocate for myself, so, like, for folks who are really struggling, it’s not doable sometimes, even if you wanted to engage the medical system to find someone, like you said, trauma-informed, but also, like, neurodivergent-informed, like somebody who’s not gonna step all over me when I say, “No, I am a late-identified autistic, and I need these things.”

So, I think, although I encourage folks to bring in support when they can, I think it’s really important for parents to be building the skillset at home, as best they can anyway, with the resources they have to be able to support their kiddos. So, I would love to talk about what are some things parents can do to start creating that connected space, to give themselves the support they need to help a kiddo who has extra needs.

SANDI: Yeah. So, wow — There’s a lot to unpack in what you just said about the medical system. And I kind of alluded to this a little bit, but we, our family — And I don’t want to bash the medical system because there are some brilliant doctors, there are some amazing therapists, you know, there are some wonderful people that we have encountered, but by and large, we have been traumatized by the medical system for that very reason that you described. Because I have a kiddo who has lots of intersecting identities.

You know, he was adopted, he’s transgender; He is a dark-skinned person from Guatemala, so there’s racial trauma there as well. He’s Deaf, so we use sign language at home, so he not only has a disability, but he also has a different language, and so there’s trauma around trying to communicate with people who don’t understand the Deaf community, so there’s all these different identities, and we don’t know if anybody’s going to have any knowledge about any of those things (laughs) when we walk in the door. So when we’ve been in emergency situations, and we were in significantly challenging and dangerous situations early on after he was adopted.

People would — You know, we’d go to the emergency room, and I’m like, “Okay,” and I’d have to list all those things that I just described and explain to them, and they’re just looking at me like, “Why is this mom trying to take control of our emergency room?” (laughs) And it’s because I’ve been so traumatized by people who didn’t get him and didn’t understand what his needs were.

How can a parent reconnect with an explosive child?

So, yes, absolutely, I totally understand why a neurodivergent person would feel a little bit of trepidation going to get medical treatment because you don’t know what you’re gonna get. So, hearing you in that regard. And then your other question was, how does a parent connect with a child? What do we do to support a child who’s experiencing this? And it’s going to depend on the kind of trauma, the source of the trauma, what’s traumatizing for the child, all those things. I like to call those things the roots. You know, we can see behaviors. We can see — we talked about the increased amount of stimming, increased anxiety, high heart rate, avoiding activities, maybe school refusal. A lot of kids have school trauma. A lot of these things are behaviors, right? And parents will come to me for parent coaching because they want to fix their child’s behaviors, right?

But what I always encourage parents to do is look beneath the surface of that and, like, look for what’s the root. Like what is the underlying thing that’s happening that’s causing the child to be fearful, anxious, worried, stressed out? You know, what’s the cause? Because if we can address that in a collaborative way and solve problems together, then we can reduce the stress so that you can then connect and build a relationship. But it’s not about punishing and giving rewards and consequences and all of that. Those are very old systems that tend to retraumatize or create trauma in kids that didn’t have it, if they feel — Especially, and some of you all if you look at PDA —

DANIELLE: Yeah.

SANDI: …profile autism, PDA, they’re not gonna respond to that kind of a system, it’s just going to increase their stress and increase their trauma.

DANIELLE: Because I know that there’re — I don’t know if they’re in this room right now, but we have a lot of parents who have PDA kiddos or may have — You know, it’s hard to identify sometimes, especially the US — and when I do parent coaching, I find the model you teach of looking at the root of behaviors, looking at connection, and then also recognizing nervous system imbalance or recognizing overwhelm as just a behavior that has a root as opposed to overwhelm being — I’m not making any sense because I know what I want to say (speech overlaps) —

SANDI: No, I know what you’re saying.

DANIELLE: …and it’s not coming out (laughs). Okay. Help! (laughs)

SANDI: (speech overlaps) I do know what you’re saying. What you’re saying is, how do you stay away from looking at the behavior as the problem —

DANIELLE: Yes!

SANDI: …as opposed to the underlying problem that’s causing the behavior. Like, how do you know which is which?

DANIELLE: Thank you! I appreciate you, Sandi (laughs).

SANDI: Yeah. Yeah, I get that because that’s the key, right? That’s the hardest part. But once you start to realize that that’s what you have to figure out, then it becomes easier. But it’s hard because for a lot of our kids, like for my son all of his trauma is preverbal, s our story is that he grew up in an orphanage in Guatemala without any language at all. So, he has language deprivation trauma as well because he was the only Deaf child at his orphanage, and nobody used sign language, and he had very inconsistent use of a hearing aid, and it was never clean or changed, or, you know, it’d fall out, and he’d lose it and he’d get in trouble, and then they never got a new one.

So, he didn’t have access to spoken language or signed language, and that was traumatizing. You can imagine being 10 years old, living in a Guatemalan orphanage and you don’t know what anybody’s saying to you and you’re just in trouble all the time, you know? So for him, figuring out what was wrong (laughs) like, why are you having this explosive meltdown? Was a mystery, really, for the first year that he came home to live with me.

And I really had to treat him like an infant in some ways because I couldn’t figure out why he was having the meltdown. And, you know, I started with a case manager who we were doing the sticker charts, and she’s like, “Well, if he gets stickers every day then he gets an ice cream,” and blah, blah, blah. And so I would just follow directions because that’s what I was told to do, I didn’t want to seem like “that mom”, you know?

DANIELLE: Yeah.

SANDI: I did everything they told me to do, but all of that just made him more explosive, and I still didn’t know why he was so upset, you know? Well, he has such a traumatic history that some of his upset is just from his life experience. And so we could just assume that for some kids, that if they’re neurodivergent, there’s going to be a certain layer of trauma of just living in a world that’s not really set up for them, and then on top of that, there may be other things, and I think that’s what this question was about, too.

DANIELLE: Yeah, we have some good questions (laughs).

How Co-Regulation Supports Traumatized Children

SANDI: Great questions. Yeah, you’ve got a smart audience. So, yeah, there’s layer upon layer for some people and some children, and young adults, that figuring out, like, the exact route is not always possible. But like I said before, we can still respond with compassion and connection and helping them regulate. And we call this co-regulation because our nervous system, our nervous systems, are very interconnected. That’s why we have to live in society. I mean, it’s hard, some of us are more introverted, and it’s a little bit hard to be in society. But that co-mingling and that co-regulation of nervous systems is so key to keep us feeling safe and feeling loved and feeling like we belong.

And so when a child or a young adult is having a hard time, coming up to them and just providing safety, providing cues of safety, whether those are visual cues — In my son’s case, I couldn’t communicate with him because he would fly into a rage and not look at me, and then there’s no communication happening, but just being very loving and very kind and very soothing, even when he was attacking me, at times. Like, it was rough. But I learned that this is not him. This is not really him, this is his — what I call his trauma dragon.

Like this is this beast that comes out when he’s terrified. He’s not being defiant. This is what a lot of families think that their children are very “oppositional”; Oppositional Defiant Disorder. I don’t like that at all. I don’t like that diagnosis at all because it assumes that the child is opposing you. Just like with PDA, in some ways, it’s not somebody that is trying to be oppositional, it’s somebody who literally cannot access the ability to meet the demand that you put on them. You know? So understanding that it’s a can’t, not a won’t, is a big key.

DANIELLE: When you were describing your experience, especially in your son’s — your family’s kind of earlier days together. First, do you have any suggestions for parents who are dealing with either highly explosive or highly shut-down kiddos? I have a lot of parents, and I think there’s some of them in this room that are very hesitant to push, want to be supportive, don’t know how to talk to the kiddo, don’t know what to say to them, don’t know how to be supportive without being intrusive. And just if you have any suggestions or advice or recall what you did to get to a place where you can kind of find that self-compassion and not guilt yourself over every little explosion or shutdown or avoidance. Yeah, I know that’s a big question. Yeah.

SANDI: It’s so hard for parents. I just want to — If any of you here or who are listening, if you’re in that situation, I am sending all of my love and my peace and my hope for you because it is tough when your child — First of all, when your child is in pain, of any kind of pain, and you know they’re in pain because they’re having these explosive behaviors, right? It’s hard because you know that they’re hurting, but you don’t know how to fix it or how to help.

And then if they’re also being really not very kind to you, it’s harder for you to stay regulated yourself because you’re being now triggered, all of your trauma of rejection, and if you have Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria like I have, if you have a sense of any your own childhood trauma, which most of us have some form of trauma or some experience with childhood difficulty or relationships that maybe weren’t so great, anytime in our life can affect the way we relate to our children, too. So it’s very, very hard. So I just want to acknowledge that, first of all. And this isn’t a shamey-blamey kind of an approach at all when I work with families like this because they’ve already received enough shame and blame at the school.

Handling Blame as the Parent of a Difficult Child

A lot of times, schools don’t get it. They’re like, “Well, he’s fine at school. Why can’t you control him at home?” Right?

DANIELLE: Yeah.

SANDI: Because at home, first of all, it’s his safe place, and secondly, because he has kept it all together all day long, and now his nervous system is done for the day, and he can’t hold it together, now he’s going to have a meltdown when he walks in the door, right? So none of that shame and blame.

DANIELLE: I think the blame is the thing that I hear the most from parents.

SANDI: Yeah.

DANIELLE: That not only that they’re receiving blame from their external family and the school and all these other places, but also that — sometimes from their spouses — but also that your kid has a meltdown, and then it’s kind of okay for a day and has another meltdown and is okay for the day. You start to feel like it’s your fault, like you’re somehow triggering them, even if it has nothing to do with you. And I think it’s one thing to sort of consciously know that and another thing to be able to internalize, like how do I support this kid when they’re kind of constantly either blowing up or blowing in, almost like collapsing.

SANDI: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the shutdowns can be sometimes worse than the meltdowns because then you don’t know what’s going on. You can’t get in the doorway of opportunity to have the conversation, right? So what I discovered — So this happened to me, right? My kid was having — He came to live with me when he was 10 years old, and now he’s 23, so, for the first three or four years I didn’t know what I was doing. I took all the classes, I went to all the seminars, I did all the things. What I discovered after lots of trial and error was that the only thing I could do in those situations that were super explosive was just be an anchor in the storm.

How to Support a Chronically Dysregulated Child

So, if you have a child who’s very, very explosive or very, very shut down, you’re not going to try to prod them or teach them anything or — No teaching’s gonna happen because they’re in that survival mode, their nervous system, their body. We talked about the body. It’s a can’t, it’s not a won’t. They’re not refusing to behave, they’re not refusing to listen to you. If you are allowing them to just let that emotion out — Sometimes you need to do a safety plan if there’s dangerous behaviors happening, so I don’t want to just — I teach a whole module on how to do that, but you just drop your expectations temporarily. It doesn’t mean forever.

So, I just grabbed this out of my drawer. I know Danielle, you’ll recognize this. This little slinky is in the shape of the model that I use to teach parents about this. It’s a spiral. Those of you, if you can’t see it if you’re listening and not watching, it’s a spiral, and when children are at the bottom rung of the spiral, it feels like they’re going in circles. It just feels like this is happening again and again and again. You’re having a meltdown, and then everything gets calm, and then they have another meltdown, then it gets calm, and they have another meltdown, and it feels like Groundhog Day, like that’s never going to change, things are never going to get better. But what happens is if you realize that they’re in a stage right now where that is what needs to happen because their nervous system is so dysregulated, and they need to know that you’re a safe person in a safe — It’s a safe place.

When you create safety for them, they’ll start to relax a little bit, and then over time, you can start then connecting when they’re more regulated. You don’t want to try to connect when they’re dysregulated. Although I always I do try, but then if I feel like he’s not ready, then I’ll back off, you know? So I just back off. But when there are these little windows of opportunity where you can start connecting, you can start —

Really, you may even have to baby them a little bit, and that’s okay because when somebody is dysregulated, when you’re depressed, when I’m depressed, I don’t want people to tell me how to run my life. That’s not the time to have that conversation. What you want is support and nurture, and help. So if you can do that when they’re in that stage, then what happens is on this spiral, they go up to the next level of growth and healing, and things get better, and things get better, and then, eventually, you can start having conversations with them about what caused that meltdown. What bothered you so much? Is there anything I can do to help you? But you can’t have that conversation in the middle of the meltdown. So it’s really understanding the right timing, understanding what stage they’re in, understanding what’s needed at that moment, and then taking those opportunities when there are openings to have those conversations, but not feeling frustrated when things go back to the way they were because they just will.

It takes time and practice for kids to learn how to self-regulate. They’re gonna need a lot more co-regulation with you if they’ve had a recent experience of trauma or if they’ve had developmental trauma.

How to Train with Sandi Lerman

DANIELLE: Thank you. That’s super, super excellent. Sandi has tons more resources on these specific, like, aspects of that spiral, which is an excellent model. So you should go to her website and look at them. Okay, I know we gotta let you go. Thank you so much for being here and doing this with us today. I really, really appreciate it. Would you tell folks where to find you or anything you want to promote, but also just where to find you and get more information about all the work you do?

SANDI: Sure. Well, I’m glad that you’re doing parent coaching because you’re an amazing coach.

DANIELLE: That’s (speech overlaps), thank you.

SANDI: I no longer do one-to-one parent coaching, but I do train parent coaches, and I train educational trainers, and I’m also now training coaches who work with adults on various issues, not just their parenting. So if anybody has a desire to become a coach or to learn about coaching, you can reach out to me. I’m just Sandi Lermen on all the channels, Sandi with an I, and Lerman is L-E-R-M-A-N. My website is HeartStrongInternational.com. We have a couple of Facebook groups if people want to meet other folks who are either coaches or who are working with children. One of my Facebook groups is Changemakers for Children, and that’s for folks who want to work with parents or work with teachers on these issues, and then the other new Facebook group is Heart-Centered Coaches.

DANIELLE: And Sandi also has in her Facebook groups — Like you’ve done lots of interviews with people and you have videos up. The website is just a gold mine, too, so I do encourage folks to check it out if you’re interested. Some really good articles and resources.

SANDI: I just encourage anybody who thinks their child might have trauma, or if you think you might have trauma, don’t panic because it’s very pervasive today I think because of the way the world has been over the past, you know, really forever, but even the pace of everything has been much more in the past few years since the pandemic. There are a lot of people struggling, so there are ways to find hope and find healing.

My son has come enormously far from where he was when he first came to live with me. We don’t have those really explosive meltdowns at all anymore. He’s doing really well. So, I just want to leave you with that, not to despair, because the word trauma is a scary word. It’s actually, there’s a thing called post-traumatic growth, and when you focus on the growth, when you focus on the hope, change can happen, transformation can happen, healing can definitely happen.

DANIELLE: Thank you so much for listening to The Neurodiverging Podcast today. I hope the conversation was helpful for you, I hope you learned something. I cannot recommend enough going to check out Sandi’s blog, website, Facebook group. She has amazing information there, you will not regret it! And you can always find us and learn more about us at Neurodiverging.com, and check out the Patreon at Patreon.com/Neurodiverging. Thank you again to all the patron members who make work like this possible and who attended live this conversation with Sandi. We look forward to seeing you in our next guest expert conversation. Thanks so much. Please remember, we are all in this together.

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