Wide Open Spaces
Below you can find out: how I came to write this book and why I did. You'll probably find our experiences overlap in some ways.
And what exactly is included in it...there's a list of some of the topics featured for you to get the gist! It ranges from proper self-care and stress responses to capacity gaps, rapport building and what co-dependency looks like when members of your family under function. I also cover PDA, big feelings and sensory processing but don't worry it's all low key. Every chapter explores the important stuff whilst also making sure it lightens your load. This whole book is designed to make your life easier and balanced!
This book will definitely speak to you if;
- your children are neurodiverse (with or without diagnoses)
- or you have a deeply feeling child
- or kids with high anxiety or mental health issues
- if they refuse school for any reason
- or don't fit into the education system in any way and are at home/in a specialist provision or still trying to make it work in mainstream
Also if your life feels unbalanced, overwhelming and you wonder how on earth you'll keep going on like this, this book will be a soothing salve. You'll also enjoy it if you hate the idea of parenting books and don't like being told what to do! It's very low demand because we certainly don't need to be adding more onto our plates!
What makes it different from other parenting books?
Just about out of crisis mode, the idea came to write about the path out of overwhelm. I needed to process what had happened to us as a family I think. But also I was aware that I'd found my way back from burn out and I wanted to share that with others who I could see were struggling everywhere I went. It had been so isolating at times, my world getting pretty small there for a moment and I'd wished that I'd had a warm, comforting non-judgemental community to rest with. Writing the book felt like creating that. Many people who have read it have said they felt they were less alone when reading it.
It starts off as a get-down-to-the-nitty-gritty guide to self-care. A practical, logical one, not one that tells you to light a few scented candles! It explains how you even manage to think about self-care at a time like this and how you can go about it even in the hardest of moments. There's spaces to journal and some really thought provoking questions that will help you get to the bottom of whether your life adds up and what to do if it doesn't?
Once we've established how you're going to centre yourself back in your own life (rather than being a supporting role in your child's main character story), what soothes you and what lights you up and makes you feel alive, the second half of the book slips into semi-memoir as it explores (through lots of anecdotes from my own experiences) ideas to make your neurospicy family life easier.
So how is it different? It's warm and funny at times and never tells you what to do. In fact it mostly tells you how you can ease back and do less if anything. And there's lots of imaginative ideas about how to parent nd children creatively.
It was written especially for parents of neuro sparkly children because that flavour of family life is a whole other ball game. It's hard to stay centred and keep hold of yourself in such a dysregulating situation and normal parenting books just fall so wide of the mark for us. I wanted to create something that felt like home and properly useful at the same time.
Topics include:
The capacity gap - what to do when your days don’t add up
Stress responses and how to stop them lingering in your system
The centre line (embodied technique for coming back from being dysregulated yourself)
Real self-care - what that actually is and how to do it
Lots of ways to bring yourself back to life and what blocks us
Living with chaos
Dysregulation - what it actually is
Stepping outside of the status quo
All behaviour is a communication
Resilience is bullshit
Our children are our soul teachers
Rapport building and communication including PDA (pathological demand avoidance)
How to deal with big feelings
Co-dependancy in a neurodiverse family
Being human getting it wrong and how to apologise
Plus more.
How I came to write it?
Wide Open Spaces got written following the most difficult few years of my life.
To be clear, things had been tricky for years but suddenly at the end of my youngest's time at primary school they escalated. There were school melt downs, school refusal on an epic level, the battle for support and funding, the waiting lists and diagnosis appointments, watching both my children's mental health deteriorate to the point that I could no longer work as this needed constant attention, financial struggle, watching my own mental health deteriorate and eventually landing in burn out and existential dread.
That's kind of it in a nutshell although there were relationship tensions and the death of a parent in the mix too. But with the right support and ideas from all sorts of places I worked my way back to a life. that feels balanced (or one that can rebalance when needed) aligned with a satisfying purpose and alive! I translated all the tools I found into what could work in a neurodiverse family facing the obstacles I was facing and this is what this book is.
I hope it brings you some peace and places you back in the centre of your own life experience.
Lou xxx
Available from Amazon, Waterstones or direct from Jessica Kingsley Publishing.