Notes. Thoughts. Big Ideas.

Another juggernaut 80 page report... and another framework. Pages of graphs and beautifully formatted charts.. plenty of words I'm not sure I can catch the gist of.. Another therapist has dreamt up another abstract simplism to tell themselves when Makos behaviour is "working". And each time, there's a hollow in my chest that gets a little deeper.. Not because the people bringing these behavioural frameworks don't care, they do, but because each one tends to arrive as if it's the only way, and my child is expected to meet us there. He's needed to adapt again. "Just toss the old model aside please kid! - This one is shinier!" I'm living in fear for Mako. For if, to stretch his already limited capacity across yet another attempt to manage his behavioural reality.. another therapist proposing a framework to annex the last framerwork.. and the massive, giant shame here is that they don't quite speak to each other. Mako is being asked to translate himself for the sake of others, depending on who's in the room, with a degree and a day-rate... As a parent, that starts to feel less like supportive movement and more like fragmentation, another version of explaining away Mako's normal - instead perceived against community normal.... and it's hard not to wonder why the responsibility keeps landing on him to adjust instead of us choosing something elegantly coherent and meeting him where he actually is. It raises a quiet question that screams in my chest, underneath all of this: what if the issue isn't which framework is best, but the assumption they all share?

Wade recently undertook more training in ConTactCare Methods. If you need the TL;DR "Contact Care is about working with the bodies, bone defences to unseen impact. The release method, instead of pushing through tension, it listens to, supports it deeply. When the nervous system feels met rather than managed, it releases naturally." Something Dale Speedy (The man who manifest the ConTactCare Method) said to me at our course the other day. He looked at me and said, "You know about the sense-abilities of people. You know that a look, a dirty look across a crowded room can be like a poke in the ribs." I didn't make much of it at the time. Was just shocked that he was speaking to me..! All day we'd been asked to feel the contracted sheath around bone structures. Oh God yes, there's times to question that my fat, old farmer fingers might not be even remotely attuned to the finer point of patho-fascia issues.. I should have had more faith. Mr Speedy is a farmer too.. But later that night, I started making all sorts of connections to the idea that our sense power—our sensitivity, through touch, through feeling, through perception—is way more powerful than I imagined. Immediately that came to mind were the Zen archers in Japan. The archers create feats like shooting the flame off a candle from 30 yards while blindfolded. And the more impressive feat that I ever saw was a series of archers kneeling on the ground and all hitting the bullseye in their target while shooting through a horse's legs that was trotting parallel to them and their targets. They always said, "You let your arrow when the flame is as big as your heart." Never really made much sense at the time..

The Yellow Hat Dilemma .... Just because the idea is nice... The auditorium had that low, restless, sweaty hum it always gets on a sunny December afternoon. Parents packed into rows, shuffling and murmuring, carrying memories from years before whether they wanted to or not. Even as adults, small town schools are always a bully-glance from terror... We were sitting there with them, hearts thumping harder than felt reasonable. Surely no-one could notice..? It was the local primary school's end-of-year concert. One of those events that's meant to be pure celebration. Pride. Smiles. Phones held up too high. And for the most part, it was exactly that. But underneath it, there was a tension I couldn't quite name at first. As the acts rolled on, something felt off. Then the teacher appeared at the side of the stage. Instead of lining the kids up like the others had, she wheeled out a large, bright trampoline. The room paused. You could feel it. A few whispers slipped out as you'd expect... What's happening? Why the trampoline?

Dear clinicians, I want to write this as a kind of apology — or maybe an explanation — Sometimes it looks like I must be totally checked out on you. It's that moment when you're sitting across from a parent like me, sharing what are genuinely good results, and instead of relief or celebration, I go Nicole Kidman on you.. I ought to be lit up with excitement. I might look down, or away, or suddenly very still. Yesterday, that parent was me. I'm still embarrassed. You were legit pointing out improvements in my autistic son — real clear signs of progress. The kind that on paper, absolutely deserve celebration. And I could feel your enthusiasm in the room, doing what it's meant to do: reinforcing progress, building momentum, reminding us that the work pays out. And yet, I felt myself withdraw. Not because I disagreed, or felt hopeless, or wasn't quietly excited.. I went quiet because I was guarding myself. Parents like me often look flat in those moments, but inside there's a very active calculation happening. We're weighing how many times we've felt this feeling before. How often early gains turned out to be fragile. How many times we celebrated too soon and then had to carry not just disappointment, but the emotional fallout of having believed too hard. There's a knife in the heart and many in the back of parents who represent a kid this much..

-On premature encouragement, awkward pauses, and the exits we take too early It usually happens in places that aren't meant to hold weight. A corridor outside a clinic. Or One-to-One in the park.. Nearly always sitting opposite each other. Close enough to be polite. Far enough to escape if needed. Places like a school gate with chalk dust on the concrete. A kitchen bench where coffee mugs cool untouched… One too many? The furniture is neutral. The lighting is kind. Nothing in the room suggests that anything difficult is allowed to happen here. The parent's body is angled slightly away, not defensively, just habitually. One foot hooked around the leg of the chair. Fingers worrying the seam of a sleeve that's been washed too many times. Their eyes stay present, but not wide. They've learned what wide eyes invite. Across from the parent, they sits upright. Shoulders back. Hands folded neatly in their lap like they're waiting for instructions. Their breathing is shallow, quickening just enough to register if you know what to look for.