Developing a healthy parent-teen relationship can be s-t-r-e-s-s-f-u-l.

As a parent, it can be difficult to raise a teen with both compassion and firmness. As a teen, it can be hard to open up to your parents and understand their reasoning. Together, these challenges create the perfect storm for misunderstanding and distrust...and oftentimes, actually results in parents using reward systems as a punishment to try and change unwanted teen behavior.

When you’re a disabled person, it can be really difficult to find a community of peers who get it.

Like…maybe you need to find a solution to something. Maybe you need validation. Maybe you need someone to tell you you’re not the only one experiencing something. Communication is a large part of our lives. In fact, it’s a human need. But when you’re disabled, for some reason, finding the right community of people to communicate with and about things, is sometimes just a bit more difficult.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Rev. Amelia Richardson Dress of UCC Longmont to chat about my blog post 7 Ways on How to Mentally Survive Your High School Lockdown. Below is the transcript of the podcast linked above.

Are you (or if you’re a parent, your teen) feeling stressed? You’re not alone. All people experience some sort of stress, but teen stress is reaching an all time high. From school to social media, our friends to our parents…the pressures of every day life just keep on growing. And while some level of stress can be healthy, high levels of stress can interfere with our abilities to learn, to create and sustain relationships, and even to manage our own emotions and overall mood.

If you’re a teen or even the parent of a teen, the fear and anxiety of a school lockdown or school shooting is all too real. In 2018 alone, more than 64 school lockdowns turned into school campus shootings. It’s as if school lockdowns and school shootings are becoming our new norm, establishing an all-too-familiar cycle of fear, devastation, and loss.

With the New Year already here, it might feel as if you want to start off on the right foot. But if you’re anything like us, you may have unwanted memories or feelings tugging along into 2019. And if you want to begin the process of releasing those unwanted memories or feelings, a burning bowl ceremony (also known as a burning bowl ritual) is a great place to start.

The first few months of college, whether you’re brand new to campus or returning after the holiday, can be tough. You’ve spent a lot of time academically preparing for this opportunity in your life, just like everyone encouraged you to do. Yet, here you are struggling to adjust to the dream you’ve spent so much time and energy working towards.

So often, distracting ourselves becomes a mundane task of living our lives. To give way to our busied thoughts and tasks of the every day such as school, work, family, friends, chores. Our instinct unfolds to this idea that it is easier to be absent-minded to ourselves - to our fears, our anxieties, our worries - all the pressures and demands of our lives. Thus the distraction becomes easier than the ability to pay attention.

So often, distracting ourselves becomes a mundane task of living our lives. To give way to our busied thoughts and tasks of the every day such as school, work, family, friends, chores. Our instinct unfolds to this idea that it is easier to be absent-minded to ourselves - to our fears, our anxieties, our worries - all the pressures and demands of our lives. Thus the distraction becomes easier than the ability to pay attention.

It’s all over social media and it’s in all of our personal conversations, it’s the topic of self-care. There are so many different ideas and opinions going around on what self-care is (and isn’t), none of which are necessarily wrong. But more than anything, is leaving a lot of unanswered questions and confusion about what each person should be doing for self-care. And honestly, this is a really tricky topic to talk about because self-care isn’t universal.