Glowing Up in September

Here we are in September of 2020 with what I like to call “growth opportunities”. That just means taking difficult stuff and allowing it to help us grow and improve rather than break us. YOU WILL NOT BREAK US 2020! But honestly, I believe that many difficult events make room for new ways of operating that are better than before. One growth opportunity we went through was the attention to the BLM movement in June. It was a moment of reckoning and one that we want to utilize for growth and sharing the room with mental health professionals and activists that can shed some light on ways in which the mental health community can continue to grow. Also, we will be talking about being a mom during a pandemic. School is starting, and that is offering many growth opportunities to many parents, myself included.

Share the room

This month is exciting because we get to talk to Natalie Rosario LPC about racism in mental health services. I worked with Natalie at a community health center, and we are honored that she is taking the time to discuss barriers BIPOC are experiencing when trying to access mental health services. Natalie and I will be doing an instagram live at the end of the month to have this conversation with a goal to increase awareness of these barriers. We are going to be talking about her experience as a bilingual clinician, as a client, and ways in which Latinx people are often misdiagnosed.

Mom in pandemic 

Whether you are homeschooling, sending your kids off to school, juggling working from home and distance learning, or one of the millions of combinations of these things, this fall is going to be new territory for many parents. There’s good news though. No one has ever done this before, so you won’t be able to do it wrong. The bad news is doing something new is often scary. But, thankfully that’s normal and we can all move through it together. It’s all about being flexible, making weekly if not daily adjustments, and having as much grace with ourselves and others as possible. If we are able to lower our expectations of our “achievements” and focus on our own capacities to balance the wild waves of these times, we will get through this in ways that will make us proud. This month we will be posting self care tips to help everyone get through this.