Year: 2021

From Baby to Toddler: Motor Milestones and Ableism

FROM BABY TO TODDLER: FIRST STEPS

Technically, a baby becomes a toddler on their first birthday. There is so much development in so many different areas around this time but the one that gets the most attention is walking. A baby’s first steps are often much celebrated and, emotionally, mark the shift into toddlerhood. The name ‘toddler’ even comes from the unsteady, wide based gait quintessential to new, young ambulators.

With walking comes more independence and the end of crawling, bum scooting, rolling, or other forms of baby locomotion. From then on into adulthood, they’ll be walking (or so we assume and hope – more on the ableism of this perspective below). Though they aren’t yet talking (for the most part), potty trained, or really all that independent, it feels like a sudden shift away from baby behaviours and into the next phase of their life.

Babies (or toddlers) learn many other motor skills before taking their first steps. There’s rolling, sitting, and crawling but even once they start working towards walking there are many skills still to learn. There’s pulling up to stand (and learning how to safely return to the ground), weight shifting, cruising, letting go in standing, taking a reaching step while cruising, and then, eventually, a free standing step. And even then, it’s a while longer before walking becomes their main mode of locomotion.

As with all types of development, babies practice each of the smaller steps constantly. They are trying new things, seeing what works, and getting excited when they figure out how to consistently replicate an action. Especially when it helps them gain access to new areas and perspectives. And we get excited right along with them. We encourage them, get excited with them, protect them, and console them.

But why focus on first steps? Why aren’t a baby’s first words or some other milestone the most celebrated aspect of becoming a toddler?

THE PROCCUPATION WITH MOTOR MILESTONES

Motor milestones and a baby’s growth are the two main indicators of whether a baby is developing as expected during their first year of life. There are standards of when babies are expected to start holding up their head, rolling, crawling, pulling up to stand, and walking. It is so easy to get hung up on these expectations, comparing your baby to others or to the ‘standard’.

This comparison can cause a ton of anxiety and pressure that we can inadvertantly pass on to our babies. We teach them that their actions and physical development will make us more excited than other areas and that is what they should focus on. We are encouraged to have our babies play on their tummies on the floor, even if they hate it (‘They’ll get used to it, you just have to keep trying!’) rather than trying alternative positions that encourage the same types of development.

Yes, motor development is an important part of a baby’s development because, as I understand it, it encourages, allows for, or results in development in many other areas such as spatial awareness, differentiation of self from others, depth perception, emotional development, etc. But what we’re not told is that there is a range of ways and timelines a baby can develop motor skills that still result in developing all these other areas, especially if the parent(s) are engaged and play with them in meaningful ways.

The most important part is that we are excited for whatever aspect of development our baby is focused on in the moment and is able to achieve. When we’re in community with others, I think it’s important to be excited and curious about all the different ways babies develop and try not to compare, shame, or judge based on differences.

MOTOR MILESTONES AND ABLEISM

The concept that there is a ‘right way’ for a baby to develop is extremely ableist. It is so easy to fall into this way of thinking when everything we are told is about when our baby ‘should’ be able to do certain things. This has become especially evident for me around the ‘first steps’ milestone.

Here are some of the thoughts that have been spinning around my head and how I’ve been trying to address them from an anti-ableism perspective:

Using ‘taking their first steps’ as the indicator for becoming a toddler

This is inherently abelist. Not all children take steps. If they do, they may take significantly longer than 12-16 months to get there. Just the idea that a human that isn’t walking is considered a baby makes me cringe. So no, a baby does not need to take their first steps to be considered a toddler. I think I’ll stick with the first birthday as the marker of that threshold.

Getting excited when my baby learns new motor skills

It’s always exciting when your child learns new things, no matter what type of skill it is. But motor skills seem easier to identify as an observer. We can see all the little progressions and attempts as they work up to being able to do something. And of course we get excited when they are able to do something new.

But does that mean we’re putting unnecessary emphasis on motor skills due to an ingrained ablist perspective? Not necessarily. If we’re excited because our baby is excited and because they learned something new, that seems fine to me. Just because we’re excited to see them roll for the first time, doesn’t mean we’d be any less excited if, at the same age, our baby had just learned how to open and close their fist. Being excited for any development at any age, whatever stage your child is at, is one of the joys of being a parent.

Using motor milestones as the main indicator of development

Again, I think this is ableist. Motor milestones should get no more weight than social development, language development, play engagement and activities, sleeping skills, eating skills, and overall growth. Sure, some of those others are harder to observe and measure and may have a wider range of ages when they appear and develop. But focusing on motor milestones simply because they are easiest to track puts undue focus on physical ability, stressing that that is somehow more important than all the other areas. This is not true and highly ableist.

Identifying motor ‘delays’ and accessing support services

As a rehab professional, this is where I get stuck. I don’t like the focus on motor skills to the exclusion of other types of development but I recognize that if there are motor delays, this can be the earliest and most easily identifiable indicator that there may be delays in other areas as well. I also know that the sooner a child, parents, and family has access to interdisciplinary support, the easier it is for the family to learn how to create a supportive environment for a child who’s needs might be different from the mainstream experience.

I think it becomes ableist when motor delays (or other delays) and accessing support services comes with negative judgement. Anything along the lines of ‘your child isn’t normal’, ‘you have failed as a parent’, ‘you did this to your child’, ‘you should be able to support your child on your own’, or ‘you are weak for needing help’ is pure ableism. Even the more subtle aspects of needing to prevent as much future disability as possible so they can have a good life is ableist. Preventing disability for the sake of enduring less pain, stigma, or struggle is one thing. Assuming that they won’t have a good life if they are born with or develop a disability or delay is a whole other and very ableist thing.

FINAL THOUGHTS

  • First steps are very exciting and are a culmination of many smaller skills and hours of practice.
  • First steps and the beginning of walking (or being fitted for and learning to use their first wheelchair) marks the end of ‘baby’ locomotion skills and can trigger a grieving process around the end of the ‘baby phase’.
  • Babies become toddlers on their first birthday, not when they take their first steps.
  • Focusing on motor milestones to the exclusion of other areas of development is ableist.
  • Stressing about and pressuring your child to perform motor skills they are not yet ready for is unnecessary and comes from internalized ableism.
  • Comparing to others or the ‘standardized norm’ can cause unnecessary stress and focus on motor development.
  • Following your child’s lead and being excited for whatever skill they are working on is one of the joys of parenting and not inherently ableist.
  • Accessing support for yourself and your child should you feel you need to help provide a positive and supportive environment for your child is important.
  • Negative judgement around motor delays (or any type of delay or disability), accessing supports, or perceived future quality of life is extremely ableist.

Have you had similar thoughts and experiences? Do you agree or disagree with what I said here? Leave a comment below with your thoughts or share your story!

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From Baby to Toddler: Developmental Thresholds and Complex Emotions

DEVELOPMENTAL THRESHOLDS

Babies are constantly changing. Even before birth, their development during pregnancy is rapid and constant. And yet, we perceive this development as occurring in stages. Some of these stages seem arbitrary – like the trimesters of pregnancy – and some seem practical – like the motor milestones. The change from one stage to the next requires adaptation and often comes with excitement, pride, mourning, and anxiety.

Often, these thresholds feel sudden because we mark them with a discrete event – conception, birth, first time our baby sleeps through the night, first time they eat solid foods, first tooth, first step, first word. But really, these are indicators of progress that is slow and constant.

This focus on a discrete event is where we get into trouble. The more sudden a change from one stage to the next feels, the more trouble we have adapting and the more our emotions around this change can feel overwhelming.

Motor development especially can seem to happen in sudden leaps. If that is our focus, we can fall into the pattern of waiting for the next leap to happen, trying to help our baby get there faster, and even becoming anxious if the space between leaps is taking ‘too long’. But if we pay attention to other areas of development, we see them progressing more quickly during that space between gross motor leaps – fine motor control, perceptual abilities, social interaction, language ability, sleeping skills, and eating skills.

So when we take a holistic global view, development doesn’t happen in chunks with discrete moments marking one section to the next but gradually and globally. We can define our child’s ‘stages’ in whatever way is most meaningful to us. And the thresholds between stages are more like the changing of seasons than the flip of a switch.

COMPLEX AND CONFLICTING EMOTIONS

Often, thresholds or transitions from one stage to the next cause lots of complex and conflicting emotions. We are excited to see our baby learn new things and delight in their excitement and wonder (such as learning how to turn pages in a book). We are proud of how far they’ve come and how our bond with them is manifesting. But we also mourn the loss of the things we enjoyed about the previous stage that we will never get back (such as being able to cuddle and read a book without them grabbing it, chewing it, or tearing it). And we can feel anxious about adapting to, managing, or guiding them through the next stage of development (such as how to stop them from damaging books while still encouraging their interest in them and promoting literacy).

Sometimes, the mourning especially feels big and overwhelming to the point that you wonder if there’s something wrong with you (such as yearning for the days when your baby was soft and tiny and squishy and stayed where you put them). In these moments, I have tried to identify what it was about the previous stage that I feel I am losing and look for how that same experience or form of connection is showing up in my baby’s new way of being or interacting (such as encouraging my baby to come to me when they need me or getting down on the floor to play with them on their level).

As with all endings of one stage and beginnings of the next, the closer you look at them and pay attention to the details of the experience, the more they seem to overlap. The ‘moment’ when one thing ends and another begins starts to look more like a process. This zooming in helps me smooth out the emotional experience as well.

It means I am not mourning everything at once but in small pieces as the changes occur. I can then more easily stay focused on the exciting new aspects of my baby’s development and our life together. I can be proud of the small victories as well as the big ones.

I can also see the smaller pieces of the change as they occur and adapt in real time instead of feeling like something has suddenly shifted that I wasn’t ready for. In this way, I avoid a lot of the anxiety that comes from a sudden loss of feeling competent, a loss of control, and the feeling of my baby growing up too fast for me to keep up. There will definitely be times when things do shift suddenly – an illness or injury for example. And maybe I will have to learn a completely different way of dealing with those. But for the more predictable shifts that happen as my baby grows into a toddler, I have found this ‘focus on the details’ approach to work well.

WHEN DOES MY BABY BECOME A TODDLER?

The standardized moment when a baby becomes a toddler is their first birthday. This is an example of an arbitrary and sudden way to mark this threshold. For us, this time corresponds with the end of my parental leave and the start of daycare. Their first birthday is also the first anniversary of their birth and all the emotional memories that come with that. We are also in the process of weaning bottle feeding and our baby is rapidly working their way to taking their first steps.

These related yet varied developmental and life changes all feel like part of the process of my baby becoming a toddler. So while their first birthday may be the definitive moment that the label flips over, the emotional processing of this developmental change incorporates so much more.

PROCESSING THE THRESHOLD FROM BABY TO TODDLER

The threshold between baby and toddler isn’t the first time in parenting that I’ve experienced complex and conflicting emotions, and it definitely won’t be the last, but it feels particularly big.

Some of the changes around this threshold involve the ending of something that has been a constant for us since their birth a year ago or very close thereafter (bottle feeding, parental leave and full time caregiving). These aspects have been core elements that defined our existence up until now. Progressing past them to move on to the next phase feels like we’re giving up parts of what defines us as a family. Or what has defined our experience as a family up until now.

The end of parental leave is like pushing our way out of our family cocoon (reinforced by the pandemic-induced isolation) and re-entering the world, now as a family of three. It feels vulnerable and shaky. It feels like there will be monumental distance between us after spending almost every day together.

Their first birthday is an opportunity to reflect on all our memories and experiences, growth and change from this first year. It will also bring back a lot of emotional memories from our experiences of labour, birth, and immediate postpartum.

The end of bottle feeding feels like the end of early morning cuddles and a clear step from the baby-drinking-from-a-baby-bottle phase into the toddler-drinking-from-their-own-cup phase.

There is so much development in so many different areas around this time but the one that gets the most attention is walking. A baby’s first steps are often much celebrated and, emotionally, mark the shift into toddlerhood. The name ‘toddler’ even comes from the unsteady, wide based gait quintessential to new, young ambulators. But this ‘milestone’ especially feels like a long slow process as I’ve watched my baby go from sitting to pulling up to stand, crawling, cruising, kneeling, bear-crawling, standing, balancing, reaching, and soon, taking steps, then walking. And even then, it will be a while before they give up crawling altogether.

So overall, there is a shift towards my child becoming more independent, spending more time away from me, and a re-defining of our experience as a family from one that exists in isolation to one that exists integrated with the wider world. Clearly, my baby is not the only one making a shift to a new stage. We all will be shifting together.

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How to be a Trans Inclusive Health Care Professional

THIS IS IMPORTANT AND YOU CAN HELP!

Trans people experience a wide range of barriers to health care including overt discrimination, uninformed health care professionals, systemic discrimination, and personal biases. As a result, trans people frequently have negative experiences in health care settings and often avoid accessing health care services even when it is necessary. Ultimately, this leads to significant health disparity. This is compounded by having intersectional identities and experiences that also experience health care bias (fatness, racial minorities, disabilities, neurodivergence, sex workers, previous incarceration, current or past drug use, etc.)

Trans people have a significantly higher risk of suicide, especially youth. The single biggest protective factor against this increased risk is having supportive people in their life that respect their name and pronouns. That’s all it takes (though the more support the better of course).

So as a health care professional, what can you do to help? Here are some suggestions.

DON’T ASSUME

Don’t assume you know someone’s gender. Not based on their legal gender marker, their presentation, their body shape, their voice, their experiences, or the clinical service they are accessing. Trans men can be pregnant, birth, and body feed their children. Trans women can have a low voice. Nonbinary people come in all shapes, sizes, and presentations. Not every trans person is able to or cares to change their gender marker.

Don’t assume someone’s pronouns or the language they prefer based on their gender (or any of the other above information). People can use any pronoun regardless of their global gender identity. Pronoun preference can shift day to day, depending on context, or depending on the people they’re with. Other gendered terms are separate from pronouns. People can prefer seemingly conflicting terms (such as preferring Mx., sir, guy, sister, and Mom) and this is perfectly fine.

Don’t assume a trans person’s transition trajectory. Don’t assume every trans person wants to transition in any way, what components they will want to include in their transition, or what order or length of time they will take to access and engage with the options available to them. There are not only two pathways for transitioning. There is no set end point to transitioning. It is a highly variable and individual process that spans many many years if not the rest of their life.

So if you’re not supposed to assume any of these things, how do you find them out so you can interact respectfully and provide the appropriate care? You use neutral language for everyone (not just the people you suspect of being trans) until they specify or until you confirm by asking specific questions. Knowing what questions to ask and how to ask them in a specific and respectful way comes with practice. It is your choice whether you want to practice on your own time (via accessing formal training opportunities or informally interacting with trans people on a personal level) or over the course of your professional career.

RESPECT NAMES, PRONOUNS, AND GENDER IDENTITIES

You don’t have to understand every gender identity in order to respect them.

When you get someone’s name or pronouns wrong (which you will, we all slip up sometimes), correct yourself and move on. Do not apologize, especially not repeatedly or profusely. By apologizing, you are putting the focus on you and the mistake you made and forcing the trans person into the socially conventional role of either thanking you for the apology or excusing the original mistake, neither of which is acceptable.

Repeating what you said with the correct pronouns, name, or other language is necessary to cement the correct version in your brain. The more you de-emphasize the mistake and emphasize the correct version, the faster your brain will adapt and stop making mistakes in the first place.

If someone else corrects you, say ‘thank you’ (not ‘sorry’), repeat it correctly, and move on.

If people around you are making mistakes, make sure to correct them if you feel it is safe to do so. It is often easier to hear when other people make mistakes than when we do it ourselves. The more you correct someone else, the more you are emphasizing the correct version to yourself and others. You can correct others by interrupting them and stating the correct pronoun/name/language, by repeating what they said but using the correct pronoun/name/language, or by continuing on with the conversation, ensuring to use the correct pronoun/name/language with added emphasis.

This goes for documentation and patient records as well. Find a way to include preferred names, pronouns, and other important language in your patient demographics tracking system. Document using the patient’s preferred name and pronouns. If these don’t match their legal information, start with a note that states that you will be referring to [legal name] as [preferred name] and using [preferred pronouns] for the remainder of the patient’s chart. If you have to do this at the beginning of every chart note, then do it. It’s important.

IT IS YOUR JOB AS A PROFESSIONAL TO BE OR BECOME INFORMED

It is not your patient’s job to educate you on the basics of trans identities, trans health care, trans bodies, or how to respectfully interact with them.

It is your job to know what aspects of trans experiences and medical care relate to your scope of practice. If you are a medical doctor and do not understand that trans men do not need prostate exams and trans women do not need pap smears, you have a significant amount of learning to do to be considered a competent medical professional (for anyone, not just trans people).

‘I was never taught that in school’ is never a good reason not to know something. All regulated medical professions have an expectation of continued learning and keeping up with medical advances and new research. Would you prescribe someone the same medication now that you did twenty years ago even if it was no longer recommended and newer medications that are cheaper, more effective, and with fewer side effects had since been developed? No? Then don’t treat a trans person according to twenty year old ‘best practice’ guidelines. Those are no longer best practice. The world of trans care is changing rapidly. It is your job as a professional to stay up to date.

YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING TO BE A GOOD HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONAL

Even if you are doing your best to stay informed, there will be times when you’re not sure whether you’re missing something or whether their experiences as a trans person simply aren’t relevant. You don’t need to know everything. But…

You need to be willing to admit when you don’t know something.

You need to do the work to learn what you need to know when you identify a gap in your understanding or knowledge.

And you need to be able to find the information you need and assess whether the source is reputable, scientifically based, and whether it holds bias (hint: there is always some bias if it is a scientific source so it’s important to be aware of it).

TRUST THE PATIENT

Trans people’s experiences are incredibly nuanced, intersectional, and often very internal. You cannot judge what a trans person (or anyone, really) is struggling with internally by looking at them. Therefore, you cannot judge what care would be best without first understanding and accepting what they are telling you about their experiences, struggles, joys, and desires.

It is your patient’s job to be as honest with you as they think is safe and necessary in order access the care they need. Sometimes this involves misrepresenting their identity or hiding parts of their medical history. The more informed you are and the more respectful you are, the more likely your patient will trust you, the more honest they are likely to be with you, and the better the care you can provide.

Don’t question their lived experience because it is outside your area of experience or expectation. Trans people are not exaggerating when they describe the systemic barriers they face such as long wait times, repetitive updates and submissions of forms, lack of appropriate processes for changing legal documentation, etc. You can be shocked and disgusted that that is the way the system is but unless you have your own lived experience of navigating these barriers with a trans person and have found a way around or through them, you have no right to argue against them, suggest that they are doing something wrong, or simply haven’t tried hard enough.

TRANS PATIENTS ARE STILL PATIENTS

At the end of the day, trans patients are still patients. If you’re not sure how to proceed, draw on your clinical knowledge and treat the patient in front of you, not the trans patient you are assuming they are.

Don’t know whether the testosterone that a trans patient is taking may be relevant to the reason you are seeing them? Go back to the basics. What affects does testosterone have on a human body? What body systems might it affect? Are these relevant to your patient’s current concerns? You can follow a similar thought process for any component of trans experience or medical care.

If you think something might be relevant, explain your reasoning to the patient in terms they would understand and ask some clarifying questions. If you’re still not sure, make a note of it and move on to the next part of your assessment. Then, before you see the patient for their next visit, learn more about it.

As with any patient, consider the whole health of the patient, mental health included. If there is a component of their trans identity or trans specific medical care that you are worried is causing concern for other aspects of their health, consider ALL the consequences of interrupting that behaviour or medical care before making a recommendation.

Often, trans people have to compromise their physical health and wellbeing in order to protect or maintain their mental health and wellbeing enough to function in society. If you then suggest that they change their behaviour in order to protect or improve their physical health, that change could cause significant damage to their mental and emotional health (which is much harder to get help with and recover from). So, before making any recommendations, ensure that you understand the patient’s reasons for engaging in that behaviour or pursuing that avenue of medical care. You may not be seeing the big picture, or your version of the big picture might be different from your patient’s.

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

I hope this has helped clarify a few things and point you in the right direction. Simply by reading this, you are already showing you are a better health professional to trans people than the majority. That is how low the bar is. Please help raise it.

Below you will find recommended resources. These are a place to start, not a sum total of what you need to know. If these links are outdated or broken, please let me know. I will try to keep it up to date. But again, if you are a health professional, you have the skills to find these resources on your own.

Beyond these links, how are you supposed to learn more about trans people (or other minority groups that differ from your experience)? Here are a few options:

  • Talk to a trusted friend or family member who is trans (or other minority) outside of a professional-patient relationship
  • Read descriptions of trans experiences written by trans people (such as this blog)
  • Attend a lecture or other learning opportunity presented by a trans person
  • Pay a trans person to provide education to you and your staff or assess your clinic/practice on the basis of trans inclusion

Reach out if you are struggling to find specific resources. If you are a trans person and would like to add suggestions to this post for how health professionals can be trans inclusive, please leave a comment!! The more experiences and voices the better.

REFERENCES AND RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

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How to Find a Queer and Trans Inclusive Daycare

Parenting is hard at the best of times. When you have to trust your child’s care and guidance to a group of strangers at a daycare, you want to know that all the hard work you’ve put in will be supported, not contradicted.

As a queer and trans family, we believe in raising our child in a gender creative and expansive way. We believe in respecting and affirming their bodily autonomy and teaching and modeling consent. We believe that under no circumstances do body parts define a person’s gender and until a baby is old enough to vocalize their preferred gender, pronouns should be considered temporary. Gendered language should be used sparingly (using child instead of girl or boy) or expansively (using child, girl, and boy equally to refer to the child).

As a queer and trans family, we don’t feel constrained by traditional gender roles. We don’t necessarily use traditional, binary parental terms or binary pronouns. We don’t necessarily celebrate traditional binary parental days. Our families may include sperm donors and donor siblings, surrogate and bio parents, children of our close queer friends whom our kiddo thinks of as ‘cousins’, and many other varieties.

Having to interact with institutions that care for our child opens the door to discrimination, isolation, and othering. Finding an inclusive daycare, school, pediatrician, etc is a lot of work. Often, these don’t even exist or we choose to travel much further than we hoped in order to access them. When we do find one, we often still have to do significant work to explain our identities and family structure and recommend ways they can be even more inclusive.

This is because there is a difference between accepting, aware, inclusive, and affirming. For me, accepting is the bare minimum. This is the absence of overt discrimination. Awareness comes when they understand the unique needs and identities of the queer and trans families they may encounter but haven’t necessarily taken steps to make space or include these in their policies and programs. Once they create and act on these policies and programs and complete some LGBT diversity and inclusion training, I would consider them inclusive. If they actively include diverse gender identities and family structures in their representations, encourage the kids to engage in all kinds of play regardless of sex or gender, vocalize their pronouns and ask families and kids about their own (as age appropriate), and apply all kinds of adjectives to kids regardless of sex or gender, then I would consider them affirming. This, I have yet to find.

We are currently in the middle of searching for a daycare for our little one. I don’t yet have the experience of working with a daycare to understand and respect our family’s identities and our child’s gender presentation and personal boundaries. I’m sure I will share more on that when it comes. For now, here are a few ways I have used to search for a queer and trans inclusive daycare.

COMMUNITY RECOMMENDATIONS

This is the best option. Having a recommendation from another family with similar identities/structure to yours who already attends a daycare and has had a good experience not only gives you a first hand recommendation but also another family to back you up should you need to bring up issues around inclusivity.

However, this is also the hardest to find for most of us. I received one recommendation from a queer (but not trans) family for a daycare they attend and like and one recommendation from a queer and trans family for a daycare they attend and have had no problems with (but isn’t actively inclusive).

So I kept those daycares in mind and moved on to other options:

WEBSITES

I did a quick search for daycares within commutable range of our house and came up with about 13 options. I thought this was a pretty good number. I then looked at all their websites. Of the 13, only one mentioned gender in the types of diversity they were supportive of. A couple others mentioned being supportive of/welcoming all types of families, family structures, and cultures.

This was not super encouraging. Clearly, I would have to ask specific questions to see if any of the others were inclusive even though they didn’t mention anything on their websites.

CONTACT WITH QUESTIONS

So I sent out emails to my top eight choices in our area based on their policies and programs listed on their websites. The more emails I sent, the more brave I got and the more specific and direct my questions became. Because really, what is a daycare going to do to me if they’re transphobic and I’m asking about inclusivity? The worst that could happen is I get a negative response which would give me a very clear answer about whether to send my child there or not.

Here are some questions that I asked:

  • Do you have any policies regarding interactions with trans and queer families and children?
  • Has your staff done any LGBT specific diversity and inclusion training?
  • What is your knowledge of and perspective on gender development in children?
  • What is your approach to children’s toys, clothing, pronouns, and other language?
  • Do you have any LGBT inclusive children’s books?
  • Do you have any LGBT identifying staff?
  • Have you had/do you currently have any other LGBTQ families attending your daycare?

The majority of responses ignored all of my specific questions and used a blanket statement such as ‘we are supportive of all cultures and families’. What this says to me is ‘I don’t understand why these questions are necessary and have no idea how I would answer them in a way that would satisfy you so I will reassure you as best I can and hope that’s good enough’. This falls into the category of ‘accepting’ but not even ‘aware’.

The couple that responded with more specific answers to my questions had decent answers and freely admitted when my question was not something they had ever considered before. One even went so far as to say they would put that at the top of their list for training opportunities for their staff, resources to add to their library, and further learning for themselves. While I would consider that falling in the ‘aware’ to ‘inclusive’ categories, they show potential for being ‘affirming’ in the future and open to corrections and suggestions.

The ones that had good responses and the ones that were recommended by other LGBT people became the list of places we wanted to tour.

TOURING SITES

This is the stage we are currently in. Here is a list of things we are paying attention to when we go on site tours.

What to look for

  • Books with LGBT characters, families, and gender creative representations and stories
  • Gender neutral toys and play spaces (red flags for anything divided into boys/girls or pink/blue)
  • Pronouns included on staff ID badges/name tags or kids’ cubby areas

Interactions with staff

  • Do they respectfully ask about your family structure, identities, and pronouns?
  • Do they introduce themselves with their pronouns?
  • Do they gender your child before asking what pronouns you are using for your child?
  • How do they react if you correct their use of language for your child or family?
  • If you observe them interacting with other children, do they interact in a way you are comfortable with?

HOW TO BE A QUEER AND TRANS INCLUSIVE DAYCARE

If you are someone who works in childcare, here are some suggestions for ways you can be queer and trans affirming in your business structure and programming. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

  • Mandatory 2SLGBTQ inclusion and diversity training for current staff
    • Include this in new staff training or repeat after a period of staff turnover
  • Familiarity and competence using a variety of pronouns
  • Knowledge of how gender develops in children
  • Actively counteract your biases around gendered clothing, toys, behaviours, and types of play
  • Use a variety of adjectives and forms of encouragement for all children
  • Books that depict families of all structures, children and parents of various gender experiences and presentations, and a variety of pronouns.
  • Ask for and offer your pronouns when interacting with kids and adults

If you are a queer or trans parent and looking for childcare, I hope this helps give you ideas or makes you feel less alone in the struggle. If you have other questions you would ask, other things you would look for during tours, or other recommendations to childcare businesses, please leave them in a comment or send me an email! I’d love to hear your experiences with your hunt for inclusive and affirming childcare.

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Welcome! Who Are You and What Do You Need?

I have now been writing this blog for three years! I recently discovered that with all those posts, my blog was not very searchable (sorry about that!) I have fixed this somewhat but also wanted to provide a snapshot of what you might find here.

Depending on your situation, identity, or what brought you here, you will be looking for different things. Scroll through the section titles in this post to find one that seems like it fits. Check out the posts in that section (and maybe some of the related posts linked at the bottom of those) to get started.

You can also use the links in the menu on the left to find a list of posts under each category and an excerpt for each. One of the links in that menu is for Let’s Talk Gender – our podcast about our experiences with gender and transitioning and my experiences with and thoughts about nonbinary identity so if audio is more your thing, definitely check that out. The archive or timeline of when posts were written is on the left as well. You can quickly look through that menu to see if any titles jump out at you. Lastly, you can click on a tag or key word from the list on the left that relates to something you’re looking for to find the latest posts related to that topic.

Are you…

QUESTIONING YOUR GENDER OR DECIDING WHETHER TO COME OUT?

LOOKING FOR FTM TRANSITIONING EXPERIENCES?

LOOKING FOR NONBINARY EXPERIENCES?

LOOKING FOR TRANS PREGNANCY EXPERIENCES?

A QUEER OR TRANS PARENT?

LOOKING FOR MENTAL HEALTH SUPPORT?

A PARTNER OF A TRANS PERSON?

A FAMILY MEMBER OR FRIEND OF A TRANS PERSON?

A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL, TEACHER, OR BUSINESS PERSON WHO WANTS TO BETTER SERVE TRANS PEOPLE?

TRYING TO UNDERSTAND NONBINARY IDENTITIES?

LOOKING FOR BIG IDEAS ABOUT GENDER?

I hope this list helps you navigate this blog more easily and find what you’re looking for. Let me know if you are looking for more information on a particular topic. I will point you in a helpful direction and/or create new content on that topic!

If you have different gender based experiences than I do and you are interested in contributing to this blog, please get in touch! I’d love to have more diverse stories and experiences represented.

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Who’s Feeding the Baby and Other Influences on Parental Roles

Our parental roles have shifted a few times throughout our baby’s first ten months. In the first two weeks, I was exclusively feeding the baby from my body. As this was not a role that my husband could fulfill, he made considerable effort to take on as many of the other baby care and general household tasks as he could. That included diaper changes, baby baths, making meals, shopping, and getting the baby to sleep.

After two weeks, we had to switch to bottle feeding which meant that we now had equal ability to feed the baby. I still had the extra load of pumping multiple times a day so my husband would typically feed the baby while I was pumping. We would then share the rest of the baby care and household tasks more evenly.

Then my husband went back to work and I became the primary caregiver during the majority of the day. My husband always made (and continues to make) an effort to do as much of the morning and evening baby care as he can, allowing me to have some personal time, extra sleep, or complete household tasks.

To me, this sharing of baby care is normal and expected. In talking to friends who also have new babies, this isn’t the case for every family. I’m not sure why but I have noticed some patterns.

WHO’S FEEDING THE BABY?

The primary factor seems to be who is feeding the baby or whether the feeding duties can be shared.

The baby is exclusively fed by one parent

Historically, the birth parent was the sole nursing/feeding parent and also the primary caregiver for the rest of the baby’s needs. This view seems to still influence some people to lump all the baby care together and place it in the domain of the feeding parent. As it turns out, only the feeding is exclusive to the feeding parent. All the rest of the baby care can be done (and in my opinion should be done) by either/both parents.

In some families, like mine, we view each baby care activity separately – feeding, sleeping/bedtime, changing, bathing, playing, medical appointments, etc. In this scenario, if the feeding can only be done by one parent and is often a highly demanding and time consuming task, at least one if not more of the other tasks could be taken over by the other parent/another caregiver.

The baby can by fed by either parent/any caregiver

This seems to make it more likely that baby care duties will be shared. If the feeding duties can be shared, it makes it more obvious that the rest of the baby care can also be shared. The majority of the care may still fall to one person due to work or other responsibilities but even if this is the case, there is more room for negotiation.

The baby is partly fed exclusively by one parent and can partly be fed by either parent

Whether the exclusive feeding responsibilities are from nursing, body feeding, or pumping, in this scenario one parent takes some of the feeding duties and the rest can be shared with the other parent/caregivers.

Because some of the feeding can be shared, it follows that the other baby care can be shared, as with the previous scenario. I feel like this would make it more obvious to the non-lactating parent how much of the work falls exclusively to the lactating parent. Ideally, this would lead to the non-lactating parent helping out with shareable duties as much as possible.

CONDITIONING, COMMUNITY, AND GENDER ROLES

While the question of who is feeding the baby seems to be a strong factor, there are still the influences of conditioning, community, and gender roles.

Conditioning

How someone was raised and how much they feel a need to follow what feels like a traditional model of baby care can have a strong influence on whether the above feeding scenarios have any impact on their involvement. If someone grew up in a strongly feminist household with an expectation that everyone pitches in with cooking, cleaning, and general household chores, I feel like they would be more likely to prefer/expect to share baby care duties regardless of the feeding arrangement. If someone was raised in a strongly patriarchal, traditional household, they may have the opposite expectation. How rigid this conditioning was and how strongly they still adhere to it as an adult will determine if they are influenced by a shared feeding situation to share the rest of the baby care.

Community

Another influence is how their peers are raising their own kids. This will not only model what baby care is like but also be a guiding force to follow a similar path as they ask for guidance or compare situations.

Another aspect of community is what expectations their community members have expressed when it comes to parental involvement with the baby. There can be guilt and shame placed on someone who chooses to share feeding and baby care duties when they are expected by their community to be the parent exclusively responsible for feeding and caring for the baby. It seems like this negative judgement is less likely to be placed on a non-feeding parent who is choosing to have little involvement in baby care even when their community expects them to be more involved. However, community can be a strong influence, sometimes stronger than a partner’s voice. If a valued member of a community voices a concern, disappointment, or expectation that the non-feeding partner be more involved, it can have a supportive impact.

Gender Roles

How much someone feels the need to adhere to society’s gender roles or carve out a set of gender-based expectations for themself related to baby care would also impact how they share the work. For some people, regardless of gender, the sudden addition of parenting duties could feel threatening to their sense of who they are, how they present, and where they fit in society as related to gender. They may adapt and figure out how to integrate this new aspect of their life into their self concept. Or they may rebel and hold even tighter to the aspects of their familial role and lifestyle that previously contributed to their sense of their gender.

For others, the new role of being a parent and caring for a baby can serve as a replacement for a lost role while on parental leave. It can be a strong gender affirming role or be a substitute for the satisfaction and pride they get from their career or other endeavors that are put on hold. Sometimes it can be challenging if the new parenting role feels satisfying in terms of purpose but at odds with their gender role. This can occur for any parent/primary caregiver.

The person experiencing this sort of internal tension may not even know that gender plays a part in why they feel reluctant to engage in baby care or reluctant to allow their partner to assist with the baby care. If this is your experience or you suspect it may be your partner’s experience, I think it’s worth a conversation.

I hope some of this resonated with you and helped you understand yourself or your partner a bit better. Evidently, I advocate for sharing parental responsibilities as much as possible. This doesn’t necessarily mean 50/50. If one parent is off on parental leave while the other is working full time, it may be more like 80/20. But I don’t believe it should be 100/0. Even if you are a sole parent, I believe you need community support to help raise a child.

Let me know what your baby care situation is and what impact the feeding role, conditioning, community, or gender roles has had on you.

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How to Manage Stress and Prevent Burnout Part 2

If you started with Part 1, you’ll already be familiar with my blue-yellow-green-yellow-red stress state system, what each state feels like to you, and have a variety of factors you can use to identify your stress state. If you’ve been tracking your state since last week, you may have already noticed some patterns in how your stress state fluctuates over the course of a day or week.

The next step is to identify what is making your stress state move away from the green zone (triggers) and what you can do to bring it back towards the green zone (relievers). Then we’ll put everything together to build a routine where you manage the stress you accumulate as it happens and keep yourself in the green zone as much as possible.

TRIGGERS

Triggers are anything we find stressful. Anything that changes our stress state in a direction away from the green zone.

Some are obvious – the ones that have already come to mind as you read this. Others you’ll have to discover by observing fluctuations in your stress state and looking for the cause.

Some are predictable and consistent – these are the easier ones to manage. Others are spontaneous or fluctuating in intensity and will take extra time, awareness, or effort to manage.

Types

There are lots of different types of triggers. The things that trigger a stress response in you is completely individual and valid. Here are some examples (but this is by no means an exhaustive list):

  • Personal
    • Health fluctuations, physiological stresses, pain
    • Security (income, house, car, work, finances)
    • Dysphoria
    • Addiction
    • Reminder of past trauma or loss
  • Interpersonal
    • Abuse, threats, violence
    • Discrimination
    • Worry or care for a loved one
    • Expectations
    • Deadlines
    • Tension in a relationship, broken trust
    • Loss
  • Societal
    • Political unrest or discrimination
    • Systemic discrimination
    • Sensationalist news cycle
    • Pandemics/natural disasters

This list is just to get you started and give you some ideas of where to look. Not all of these will be sources of stress for you and there are likely other things that are triggers for you that are not on this list. You can keep adding and removing triggers from this list as things change in your life. For now, let’s take the list you have and fill in some practical details for each one.

Effects

Some triggers have a consistent and specific effect on your stress state. For example, some triggers will always push you towards the red zone while others will always push you towards the blue zone. If you notice any triggers like this in your list, make a note of it.

Most of your triggers will have a more general effect of moving you away from the green zone in either direction. Which direction your stress state moves is not always predictable since we are complex organisms living in a complex societal system. We are not trying to create an equation or predictive model, simply look for patterns.

Intensity

Different triggers will have different magnitude of effect. Some cause a small amount of stress and might move you from green to yellow or yellow to red/blue (one step). Some cause a moderate amount of stress and could move you from green straight to red/blue or from yellow straight to black (two steps). Some may cause so much stress that you would immediately shut down or dissociate i.e. move from green straight to black (three steps).

Consider each trigger on your list and assign it a number value from 1 to 3. You can add a 0.5 value if there are some low level triggers that wouldn’t even move you a whole stress level. Or you can use whatever number system works for you (1-5, 1-10). Try to keep it as simple as possible. We want to be able to easily relate it to the fluctuations in our stress state and, as you’ll see in the next section, use the same system for our stress relievers.

Let’s take a look at those now.

RELIEVERS

Relievers are anything that decreases your stress level or shifts your stress state towards the green zone. These are not things that get rid of the cause of the stress (the trigger or stressor). They are activities that reduce the stress load on our system by helping us process or decrease the effects of the stress.

Types

As with triggers, there are lots of different types of relievers. I have grouped them into categories that I find practical.

  • Positive Interaction
    • A long hug
    • Intimate time with my partner
    • Positive social time with a small group
    • Exercising compassion by doing something nice for someone
  • Moving Your Body
    • Running or other cardiovascular exercise
    • Hiking or fast paced walking
    • Dance
    • Strength training
  • System Regulation
    • Deep breathing
    • Meditation
    • Yoga, stretching, Tai Chi, Qigong
    • Relaxation
    • Reading
  • Creative Expression
    • Creative writing
    • Art
    • Crocheting, sewing, or other fiber crafts
    • Singing or playing music
  • Productive Processing Time
    • Journaling
    • Therapy
    • Letting my mind puzzle through things, find connections, or clean up the mental clutter while doing housework, having a shower, or other mundane task
    • Doing a mundane task while staying focused on the positive effect I am having or the gratitude I have towards that aspect of my life

Some of these will occur over the natural course of your day. Some you will have to find time to engage in.

Effects

Some relievers will have a stronger effect towards relieving stress from specific sources. For example, I find exercise to be particularly helpful for acute triggers like an interpersonal interaction where I experienced discrimination and creative expression to be particularly helpful for chronic low level triggers like dysphoria, systemic discrimination, and typical daily stress.

Some relievers will have a stronger effect when you are in a specific stress state. For example, I find system regulation relievers to be more helpful when I am in the yellow to red zones and positive interactions when I am in the yellow to blue zones.

Some relievers will be effective no matter what stress state you’re in or what the trigger was. For me, this is productive processing time.

If you notice any of these specific effects, make note of them next to the relievers in your list.

Intensity

As with triggers, each reliever will have a stronger or lesser effect. Some will bring you one level closer to green, some will move you two levels closer to green. However, in my experience, triggers tend to be better at moving us away from the green zone than relievers are at restoring us to our green zone. So if you used the 1-3 scoring system for triggers, it’s likely that you’ll be using 0.5 or even 0.25 for some of your relievers. Even though it seems like an activity that relieves so little stress wouldn’t even be worth doing, it is important to have these relievers in your list. You’ll see why in a second.

Energy Cost

This is a really important aspect of relievers to consider. How much energy does it take for you to initiate or complete each relieving activity? You can use a number system again (1-3, 1-5, or 1-10) or a traffic light system (red for hard, yellow for moderate, green for easy), or any other system that makes sense to you.

The important thing is to know which activities you can do with little to no energy reserve, which ones will take a bit more energy, and which ones will take considerable energy. This shows you which ones to engage in when you’re in an extremely burnt out state (black), which ones you can manage in a moderately stressed state (red/blue) or slightly stressed state (yellow), and which ones you’ll only be able to engage in when you’re at your best (green).

For the most part, I have found that the higher the energy cost, the greater the intensity of the effect on my stress level. This means that the low cost relievers have the smallest effects. But sometimes, if that’s all I can manage, that is where I have to start. Don’t forget these effects are cumulative. Four easy stress relieving activities can bring me out of the black zone and back into blue/red. I then have enough energy to engage in slightly higher cost activities that have a stronger effect.

Now that you know all about your triggers and relievers, let’s design a practical strategy for managing your stress level and keeping you in the green zone.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

So far, you have:

  • Identified your stress states and described them using physical, mental, and emotional cues
  • Identified patterns in how your stress state fluctuates throughout the day or week
  • Identified your triggers, how they affect your stress state, and how intense that effect is
  • Identified your relievers, what types of triggers or stress states they are useful for, how intense the effect is, and how much energy they cost

Now you will learn how to use this information on a daily basis to manage your stress as you accumulate it. The goal is to develop a routine that is sustainable and helps keep you in the green zone. That way, when you encounter unexpected triggers or routine triggers are suddenly more intense, you have a buffer before you end up in the black zone and you have the energy reserve to engage in the most effective relievers.

Here is one example of a daily practice you can follow:

  1. Monitor your stress state (as discussed in Part 1)
  2. Make note of the triggers you encounter – type, effect, intensity
  3. Make note of the relievers you engage in – type, intensity
  4. Determine amount and type of unresolved stress
  5. Engage in appropriate and manageable relieving activities

You will see a pattern of typical triggers you encounter and typical relievers you engage in. If your day to day activities are sustainable and allow you to stay in the green zone, you will find you are engaging in enough relievers to match or outweigh the amount of stress generated by the triggers.

If your day to day activities are slowly leading you towards burnout (or other black zone state), you will find that your typical daily relievers are not sufficient to counteract the stress generated by your triggers. Are there triggers you can do a better job of avoiding or resolve altogether? Are there relievers that would be more effective that can replace the ones you are currently using? Are there relievers you can add to your routine that would be low cost or ones you can do while doing other things?

After a few weeks of assessing your stress state and the balance of triggers and relievers, you will figure out which relievers work easily into your schedule to most effectively balance the majority of the stress from your triggers. But at some point, you will encounter one of those spontaneous triggers, one that was suddenly at a much higher intensity, or a seemingly unending stream of small triggers that add stress faster than you can deal with it. This is when you’ll need to add something to your routine.

Determine which relievers you have the energy to engage in and of those, which would be the most effective based on the type of trigger or the stress state you are in. If you’ve been doing a good job of relieving your daily stress as it happens, you will be starting from a fairly stable place and it will not take nearly as much work to return to your green zone.

You can add extra relieving activities to your schedule a couple times a week to process any extra stress beyond your typical that you accumulate from those unpredictable triggers. If your stress is well managed on those days, these become bonus green-zone-reinforcing activities!

I hope this set of emotional processing and stress management posts has helped you! If you have questions, need clarification, or simply need a sounding board to work through some of these steps, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can send me an email or comment on a post.

If you have a different way to process big emotions or manage ongoing stress, I’d love to hear it! Please send me an email or comment below! My strategies won’t work for everyone. Maybe yours will be the strategy someone is looking for!

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How to Manage Stress and Prevent Burnout Part 1

In an ideal world, stressors would be concrete and transient – easy to identify and able to be processed to the point of relief. But in the real world, there are a lot of stressors that are nebulous and persistent. It’s hard to relieve your stress when you can’t identify or get rid of the source.

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. The stress is still there whether you acknowledge it or not. It is still affecting your hormones, behaviour, emotions, and brain function. It builds up and builds up until you are forced to remove yourself from contact with the stressor via sickness, burnout, addiction, or breakdown. While stress is not always the cause of these states, in my experience, unmanaged stress will inevitably lead to these states or something similar.

I have struggled with burnout for a number of years. During this time I have developed and refined a strategy for monitoring my level of stress and taking daily action to relieve as much of it as I can to prevent it from building up and causing burnout. In this post I’ll talk you through the monitoring component. In Part 2, we’ll work through the managing process.

You may be able to process and resolve some of the areas of emotional stress in your life. I have a different system for this which I talk about in two posts: How to Work Through Areas of Emotional Stress Part 1 and Part 2. The more areas of stress you resolve, the less stress you have to manage on an ongoing basis. And being good at managing your stress will help you stay as happy and content as you can while you’re working on cleaning up as much of your emotional chaos as possible. Both processing and managing stress are important. You can start with either one. The important thing is to put in consistent effort until it becomes automatic.

STRESS ZONES

The first step towards managing your stress is to identify what your different stress states feel like to you. I colour coded my stress states as follows:

Green: good, happy, relaxed, calm, confident, optimal, not stressed at all.

Red: anxious, irritable, angry, chaotic, antsy, hyper, spazzy, fight or flight.

Blue: tired, heavy, sad, numb, scared, avoidant, fatigued, freeze or flight.

These three states (what I think of as neutral – green, high – red, and low – blue) are the easiest to identify. But you don’t want to wait until you are all the way in the red or blue zones to recognize a shift in your stress level. So I include yellow zones – one between green and red, and one between green and blue. I also added a black zone beyond red and blue to indicate that spending too much time in either of those states will lead to burnout or sickness (or whatever your system shutdown mode is).

I laid out my page from top to bottom as follows: black, red, yellow, green, yellow, blue, black.

Now you are going to add as much detail for how those states feel like to you as you can. We are going to use three different indicators: physical, mental, and emotional. For each of these, start with whatever colour is easiest for you to fill in (typically green, red, and blue). Move on to the harder ones (typically the yellow zones). If you’re not sure what to put in the yellow zones, write down a gentler version of what you have in the red or blue zone. For example, if you put angry in red, maybe put frustrated in yellow, or if you put fatigued in blue, put tired in yellow. Don’t worry about filling in black – your system will tell you when you’ve hit that level whether you know what it feels like or not.

Let’s go through each of these indicators separately.

Physical

How does your body feel when you’re in that state?

How much energy do you have? Do you tend to sleep more or less than your average?

Do you have increased muscle tension or heaviness and fatigue? Does your body feel hot, cold, tingly, or numb? Where in your body do you feel these sensations?

Does your appetite change? Do you feel nauseous, queasy, or hungry?

Do you feel dizzy or lightheaded? Do you get headaches, body aches, or other types of pain?

How does your breathing feel? Is it faster or slower, deeper or shallower? Do you breathe more with your chest and shoulders or your belly?

How does your heartrate feel? Is it faster, slower, or erratic?

Mental

What thoughts go through your head when you’re in that state?

What words do you use when describing a situation such as going to work or attending a family gathering when you’re in that state?

What words do you use when describing yourself when you’re in that state?

How is your ability to concentrate? Are you able to shut out external distractions? Are you able to ignore distracting thoughts and emotions?

Are your senses heightened or dulled? Are you hypersensitive to any particular stimuli?

How easy is it to learn something new? Are you able to remember things just as easily as when you are in the green zone?

How would you describe the inside of your mind? Is it chaotic, filled with static, fritzing, dark, foggy, cloudy, bright, open, constricted, porous, etc?

Emotional

What emotions do you feel most often when in this state? To make this nice and easy, refer to an emotions wheel such as this one.

Don’t be afraid to write down conflicting emotions for the same colour. Each state isn’t always triggered in the same way so we can definitely experience a range of emotions.

You may find describing one of the indicators (physical, mental, or emotional) to be significantly easier than the others. We all experience stress differently and pay attention to different stress responses. I still recommend you try to write down something for each indicator in each stress state. Sometimes when we’re calm we can most easily identify one aspect but when we’re actually in this state it’s a different aspect that is most obvious.

MONITORING YOUR STRESS STATE

Once you have a list of physical, mental, and emotional descriptors for the five stress zones, you can start using it to monitor your stress level. You can’t manage something you aren’t aware of. Set an alert on your phone to go off at regular intervals or pick a few times a day to do a quick check in. Try to pick a few times a day when you are in different environments – when you wake up, when you’re at work, when you’re with family, before bed.

You can quickly answer the above physical and mental questions and pick out three emotions on the wheel and then see which state your responses line up with or you can refer to your descriptions of the zones and do a physical, mental, and emotional check in to see where you land. Whichever way gets the most honest and accurate response without taking so much time that you won’t stick with this practice.

The goal is to get familiar with your own stress states and symptoms so that you don’t have to consciously do the check in. You will notice when your muscle tension, energy level, or breathing pattern changes. You will hear a repetitive thought in your head and know that you’ve shifted to a different zone. You’ll realize your reactions to people around you are different, indicating a new emotional state.

I recommend documenting your stress state. If you’re monitoring it, why not track it as well? You can use a pocket calendar with coloured stickers (make sure you differentiate the two yellow zones somehow), an app in your phone, a journal, or even a series of sticky notes if that’s what’s handy.

You can track your stress for a few days, a week, or longer. It’s up to you. This information will show you any consistent patterns in how your stress changes throughout your day and throughout a week. These patterns will be very helpful when we work through the second step in this process: managing stress.

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How to Work Through Areas of Emotional Stress Part 2

You will want to start with Part 1.

How is everyone doing? If you have started working through steps 1 to 3 already you might be feeling a bit emotionally vulnerable, bruised, or drained. That’s ok. It’s part of the healing process. But make sure you take care of yourself. If you push yourself too fast and don’t let your emotions settle again before tackling steps 4 to 6, you will be too overwhelmed to use your analytical skills and too vulnerable to be as honest with yourself as you need to be.

In case you missed it before, here is a blank chart you can use as a guideline to fill in as you work through the steps.

Processing-Emotional-StressDownload

Now, let’s continue on to steps 4 through 6.

4. IDENTIFY THE SOURCE OR TRIGGER FOR EACH EMOTION

This is the hardest part in terms of thinking and detective work. The goal is to answer the question “Why do I feel this way?” for each negative emotion that you listed in step 3. Some examples of sources or triggers for emotions are:

  • Beliefs held by others close to you or society as a whole
  • Formative experiences
  • Influences of people who had an impact on you
  • Physiological factors
  • Dysphoria
  • Your own actions
  • Personal values or priorities
  • Personal beliefs or attitudes

Sometimes you need to work backwards a few steps. For example:

  1. Area of stress – feeling like I’m not a good parent
  2. Aspect of control – belief;
  3. Emotion – inadequate;
  4. Why? Because I can’t lift my kid due to pain (physiological factor). Why does not being able to lift my child due to pain make me feel inadequate? Because I have an expectation that in order to be a good parent I need to be able to lift my child when they ask to be picked up (personal belief). Why do I feel like being a good parent requires lifting my child? Because that is the model of parenting I am exposed to by society (belief of society – ableism).

Result: I am affected by the belief that I am not a good parent which makes me feel inadequate because society tells me I should be able to lift my kid when they ask to be lifted and I can’t always do that because of pain.

This process takes time. You have to sit with each answer to the why question for a little while to see if your mind is still searching or if that resonates with you as being the root cause. I have found that talking to a trusted friend or family member is very helpful at this stage. They often have similar experiences or insight into my own beliefs, thoughts, experiences, feelings, and actions.

During this process you may uncover a new influential or formative experience from your past that is the root cause of the area of stress you originally listed in step one. You can either work through this area of stress again by starting with the newly discovered cause or you can list this experience as a separate area of stress and work through it at another time.

Sometimes the root cause of an emotion is something that is within our control (matches something we wrote in step two) and sometimes it’s not. When it is, we can be reluctant to accept that this is true because it would mean we are responsible for some of the emotional distress we have been feeling. But be honest with yourself and fear not! The next step will help you use this hard-won accountability to your advantage.

5. TAKE ACTION

By now you have separated out your different areas of stress, identified what aspects you have control over, experienced the emotions that are triggered, and discovered the root cause of those emotions. Now you are going to decide what actions to take.

The purpose of taking action is to interrupt the link between the root cause (step 4) and the negative emotion (step 3). We can only act on things that are within our control (step 2) so for each emotion that you want to disrupt, you have to identify which link closest to the root cause is in your control and choose an action that will address that. Using the example from step 4, the root cause (societal ableism) is not within my control so I would back up to the link before (personal belief) and target that with an action plan.

Some examples of actions are:

  • Reframe the experience or adjust your beliefs through journaling, art, or a list of affirmations
  • Change your behaviour or adopt a new habit
  • Re-evaluate your priorities and values
  • Seek out community, connection, or support
  • Channel your personal experiences and strong emotions into advocacy
  • Talk about your experience or struggle and embrace the vulnerability
  • Confront negative influences
  • Set or re-set personal, emotional, or relationship boundaries

Be creative. Take actions that resonate with you and will help support you. Avoid actions that will drain you further or take more time, money, or willpower than you can give. You may be able to find an action that will break more than one cause-emotion chain.

Take small steps. No action is too small but most actions that you come up with initially will be too big.

Set short term goals (hour, day, week at most). Our brains are constantly measuring the distance to our goal, how much progress we are making, and how much effort it is taking to achieve that progress. If progress slows down too much or takes too much effort, our brain automatically shifts into stress mode (which we are clearly trying to avoid) or flight mode (I don’t actually care about this goal anyway, I’m fine). This is such a common occurrence for us that we are pretty terrible at noticing when it is happening. Thus, the reason for step six.

6. REVIEW YOUR PROGRESS

Don’t leave this step for too long! When you are working through hard stuff to get out of a stressful emotional loop, a month can feel like eternity unless you can tell you’re making progress. At the same time, this process can be so emotionally intense that you need to dedicate a week to working out the root cause of each emotion for one area of stress.

So pick a timeline that works for you – two weeks, a month, three months. I would say six months is too long no matter how slowly you have to work through your areas of stress.

You can start your timer from when you initiate your action plan or from when you started with step one. It depends if you are reviewing your progress with one specific area of stress or the whole process for all areas of your life. You can set different review periods for both of these if you’d like.

When the time to review comes up, look back through your notes from step one through to step five. Do they all still resonate with you? Have the emotions that you experience when you replay the event or delve into that area of your life changed? Do you have new insights into the root causes or triggers for those emotions? How have you done with following through on your action plan? Did the actions you took help the way you wanted them to or do you want to try something else?

If a lot of the stress from an area has resolved, try working through the steps again as though it is the first time. If there are aspects you still need to work on, this will make those clear. If you’re happy with how well it has resolved, consider that area of stress complete!

WHAT IF THE CAUSE OF THE STRESS IS ONGOING OR OUT OF MY CONTROL?

Not all areas of stress can be resolved by processing them. Sometimes we process the parts we have control over (challenging our negative beliefs, adjusting our priorities, finding community and support) and it is still a moderately high source of stress.

I have a different system for managing stress that I share in another two part series: How to Manage Stress and Prevent Burnout Part 1 and Part 2. It is visual, practical, and straightforward. There are lots of ways you can adapt it to create something that will work for you.

As always, reach out if you need to.

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How to Work Through Areas of Emotional Stress Part 1

My experiences have taught me how to work through intense situations and process emotions so that I’m not holding on to negative sources of stress and being influenced by them in ways I don’t like or can’t control. I wanted to share my strategy in the hopes that it will help you do the same.

This process is based on the belief that we can, for the most part, control what is in our own heads and are responsible for our own emotions. We can absolutely be manipulated, traumatized, abused, gaslit, or have a chemical/hormonal imbalance but my hope is that working through this process will help separate the manipulation and influence of others or physiological causes from what is genuine to ourselves and under our control.

This process has six steps:

  1. List areas of emotional stress
  2. Identify which aspects are within your control
  3. List the emotions
  4. Identify the source or trigger for each emotion
  5. Take action
  6. Review your progress

In this post, I will explain steps 1 to 3. In Part 2 I will cover steps 4 to 6.

Here is a document containing a blank chart that you can use as a guideline to fill in.

Processing-Emotional-StressDownload

Now, let’s look at the first three steps in detail.

1. LIST AREAS OF EMOTIONAL STRESS

What takes up space in the back of your mind that nags at you, wears down your emotions, or takes energy to keep it pushed to the back of your mind? When you’re having a day where you are stressed, tired, irritable, numb, or teary, what negative things does your brain say to you? What aspects of your life make you feel stressed when you are forced to think about or focus on them?

These can be a variety of things:

  • Past experiences that were traumatic, difficult, or had a lasting negative impact on you
  • Negative beliefs about yourself
  • Broken relationships
  • Components of your life that feel like a constant struggle
  • A future event (though this is often causing stress because of a present or past situation or belief)

Still not sure what is specifically bothering you? Think through each area of your life: health, work/vocation, relationships, childhood, finances/security, identity, or anything else that is important to you. Do you frown, feel your body tense, or experience a negative emotion when you think about that area of your life? It’s a good bet that one area of stress relates to that area. Break that area of your life down into smaller pieces if you can and watch for the same reaction. The more specific you can be the better.

2. IDENTIFY WHICH ASPECTS ARE WITHIN YOUR CONTROL

Often when something happens to us we feel like we have no control over the situation or event. This naturally leads to the belief that we have no control over the outcome or effects of the event. In my experience, this is not true. We always have control over SOME components of how a situation is affecting us presently. For example:

  • Our current actions
  • Our current beliefs and attitudes
  • Our ability and willingness to adapt
  • Our willingness to seek out and accept support

Be honest with yourself. This isn’t about figuring out the truth of a past event. This is about identifying how that past event is currently affecting you and what parts of that effect are under your control. What you learn from this step will be important for building a useful action plan in step 5.

3. LIST THE EMOTIONS

This is the hardest part emotionally. You might want to pick one area of stress to focus on and continue from step 3 to 6 with that one area before you process another one to avoid being overwhelmed. You will likely want to work on this step in a private, safe space. I recommend having a self care plan in place in advance – when you are in emotional turmoil, what helps you regain a sense of emotional stability? Plan to engage in these activities or have a friend standing by for you to connect with as often as you need while working through this step.

The goal is to list all the emotions that are brought to the surface when you delve into each area of stress. Some ideas of how you can do this are by:

  • Replaying the experience in your head
  • Writing about that area of your life or that situation
  • Listening to the self-talk that relates to that experience or aspect of yourself
  • Talking about it with a trusted person

Don’t forget about the positive emotions! Often we focus on the negative ones and once we list the positive ones along side them we realize we have a more balanced experience than our brain has been telling us.

I recommend you refer to an emotions wheel (such as the one you can find here) to help you find appropriate words for what you are feeling. I have definitely had the experience where I feel something, or more likely many things, and it is overwhelming and difficult to find a word that describes it which leads to frustration. You can also use the emotions wheel as a prompt – work your way around the wheel thinking about each emotion separately, what that would feel like for you, and if that feeling matches something that came up while replaying or sitting with an area of stress.

If all the different areas of stress in your life seem to cause the same set of emotions or if you only seem to experience emotions from a narrow spectrum of the emotions wheel, consider the possibility that there may be an underlying physiological cause such as a neurochemical or hormonal imbalance. I am not a doctor. This observation comes from personal and second hand experience.

You are halfway there! Steps 1 to 3 are all about discovery. In Part 2 we explore steps 4 to 6 which are about analysis, action, and reflection. Take your time with this process and take care of yourself as you work through the tough stuff. I’m always here for you if you need community and support.

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