My appointments in Preston - Social Story
We’re gearing up to move all of our staff and clients over to our Preston site at the beginning of term 2. Some of our clients have always been seen in our Thornbury clinic, and may feel some anxiety about changing to a different premises. And so to help with the adjustment, we’ve created a social story that you can download or print which includes lots of information and photos to help ease any anxiety that might be felt about the upcoming change.
If you’d like to download the social story, click here!
Alternatively, you can call or email our clinic and they’ll be able to email you a copy or you can pick one up from our Thornbury clinic.
We’re moving to one site!
Dear Valued Clients,
Crisalida has been growing and evolving over 16 years of business, constantly progressing our facilities, our team and our therapies to provide the best of what Crisalida has to offer to our community.
In order to continue this, we are going to be uniting our two clinics as one, at our Preston West location as of Term 2, Monday the 15th of April, 2024.
This will create better opportunities for therapeutic continuity of care between disciplines, effective collaboration with clinicians and a focal communication point for families to reach our reception and administration team.
There will likely be a transition period over the April school holidays, so it is recommended to communicate with your therapist directly to ensure you are aware of when they will be making the move over to Preston from the Thornbury rooms.
Therapy services, therapists and days in the clinic will remain the same in most circumstances. We will, however, be upgrading our staff carpark with a new outdoor therapy studio and gardening hub.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please call us on (03) 9484 6299 or email us at admin@crisalida.com.au.
We thank you for your continued support.
Annabelle Griffin and Melissa Bryan
We’re Running for the 1 in 70 Australians on the Autism Spectrum!
We have put together a team - the Crisalida Cruisers! - to run a collective 70km (psst, we’re already there and aiming higehr) and to raise $300 for Autism Spectrum Australia, helping children and adults access early diagnosis, specialist therapies and the support they need to reach their full potential in life.
Some of us are fabulous runners - shout out to Nick who just completed the half marathon! - and others could best be described as shufflers rather than runners. But it all counts, and we’re doing our bit to support our community.
We’d love if you could show your support by donating:
https://www.runforautism.org.au/fundraisers/crisalidacruisers
Together, we will help provide the best opportunities for people of all ages on the autism spectrum so they can participate, engage, and thrive in the world around them.
Help make our run count and show your support by donating today!
Thank you,
Crisalida Cruisers
Term 4 Seminar Series!
We are so excited to announce our upcoming Seminar Series in October and November, with 5 seminars hosted by various Crisalida therapists. These seminars are aimed at parents, carers, teachers, educators, students and other allied health professionals. See our flyer below for the dates, topics, presenters and how to book. The seminars will be held at our Thornbury office, but will also be available to watch online. We hope you enjoy them!
Welcome Here Project
Did you know that Crisalida is a proud member of the Welcome Here project?
This means that we are committed to providing a safe, supportive and welcoming space for all LGBTIQ people, and in fact all people regardless of background, ethnicity, religion or belief. Crisalida works hard to ensure that we are a welcoming space where everyone is free to be who they are, that we celebrate diversity and create positive change in our community.
Clic here to find out more about the Welcome Here Project.
Music Therapy at Crisalida
Did you know that we now have a music therapist as part of the team at Crisalida?
It’s been several years since we’ve been able to offer Music Therapy sessions, and we’re so excited to have Nick Murray, an experienced and passionate music therapist at our Thornbury office.
What is Music Therapy?
If you’d like to sign up your child for a therapy session, or if you have clients who could benefit from music therapy, Nick still has some availability. Here’s Nick himself to tell you more about it…
For more information or to book a session, contact Crisalida at admin@crisalida.com.au or (03) 9484 6299.
Welcome to our new Website!
Hi there and welcome to our new website. We’ve been working hard on updating our site and making it as clear, intuitive and helpful as possible. We hope you like the new look and that you can find your way around it easily. Feel free to let us know what you think! And give us a follow on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram, so that you can keep up to date with our news and updates.
If you’re a potential new client, please note that at the moment, many of our services are at capacity. Please contact us prior to filling out a registration form to find out about which services are currently available. You can call the office on (03) 9484 6299 or send through a message using our contact enquiry form.
Thank you for your continued understanding and support.
Making Room in your Care Cup: Caring for Yourself Means Caring for Others - by Dr Sarah Ford
Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash
Let’s take the fact that many parents and carers believe caring for yourself is selfish, and blow it apart. Looking after your own needs is, in fact, selfless. Carer’s/parent’s cups are often full to overflowing with stress, tiredness and to-do lists, which undermines their ability to be the carer/parent they want to, and can be. Making space in your cup to focus on yourself rests and recharges you, with benefits for all.
Caring for yourself means looking after your whole self, which is much more than making time for a bath or a cuppa. The parts that make up the whole can be roughly divided into: social, mind, emotions, body, creativity and spirituality. Tending one part boosts others as they are all connected.
Let’s start with developing and maintaining social connections because a supportive network allows for cup-charging breaks/respite, and can be called upon when you are sick or stretched beyond your capacities. Along with family and friends, there are online forums, such as the private Facebook group Parents and Carers Connect, and local support groups, or a carers group at Crisalida*. There are also apps, such as Gather My crew, with which friends can provide support in times of need. Some that I have used allowed friends to coordinate a meal roster for families with newborns, sick children and bereaved families.
Tend to your mind by noticing your thoughts and attitudes towards yourself and caring\parenting. How we think affects how we feel, and unhelpful/negative thoughts lower our mood and prolong suffering. A common example is the belief that “If I ask for help, people will think I am not coping”. Thoughts like these can create feelings of sadness, anger and resentment. Try noticing if these thoughts pop up, and curiously ask yourself if this thought is wise, true, helpful? Just because we have a thought does not make it any of these.
Caring and parenting involves a lot of tending to other’s emotions, and neglecting your own. Making time to connect with your feelings is fundamental to maintaining your own mental health. This can be as simple as regularly taking ten minutes to be still and check in by, for example, giving your full attention to noticing your feelings (body and mind), or by calling a friend to share a concern. If your own mental health is suffering, seeking professional support is a brave and selfless step towards self-care.
Our bodies crave regular movement, nutritious food and adequate rest/sleep. Research is increasingly showing the importance of these for maintaining mental health. Achieving this does not require large chunks of time, or being alone. Here are a few ideas. Lie on the couch with your headphones on and listen to a 20-minute relaxation recording while little ones sleep or older ones listen to an audiobook. Introduce Sunday morning yoga as a family activity. Plan a healthy meal together and give children responsibility for finding the ingredients at the shops and contributing to cooking.
Creativity puts spark in your cup. Consider what you enjoy but have not been making time for, or if there is something you are itching to try. Everyone is creative, although some of us stopped believing this from a young age perhaps due to criticism, or thinking we are not as good as others. There are many, free online and community-based activities to explore, including those run by local libraries and neighbourhood houses.
Connecting with your spirituality is a personal and varied experience that may or may not be religious. It is about about how we make meaning of our lives, and the greater world. Spirituality may, for example, involve meditation, prayer, rituals, long hugs with loved ones, or being in nature. Explore what resonates with you, feed your soul and power-up your cup.
Below are some links to carer/parent resources:
Carer Gateway: Australian Government portal for a range of information and supports for carers:
https://www.carergateway.gov.au/
Carers Austraila (Vic) (Ph 1800 242 636) offer a carers advisory line and a low-cost counselling service, as well as online suggestions for self care at
https://www.everythingcarers.org.au/resources/carers-victoria-services/
Sane Australia: Self care tips for caring with someone with mental health problems
Family Caregiver Alliance: American organisation offering helpful and detailed tips for self care:
https://www.caregiver.org/taking-care-you-self-care-family-caregivers
*Crisalida is currently looking at starting a Carer’s group. Please email intake@crisalida.com.au if interested in joining.
Play: It’s Serious Work - by Dr Sarah Ford
I recently overheard my daughter threatening her toy bunny with a “week of silence” for being too noisy. She was re-enacting our recent conversation about her screaming, although she invented the threats of silence, I swear. At the same time, freedom to tell wild lies is one of the many joys of play.
Playing is “child’s work”, literally. It is the innate job of children to play a lot and it promotes their development: emotionally, socially, intellectually and physically. From infancy, play is how kids explore, discover and understand themselves, and the wider world. These qualities of play are unique in that they are not attained via other activities, such as viewing screens or reading books.
Playing out the bunny scene was a way for my daughter to work through her feelings about her voice being stifled and, to feel powerful by switching roles so that she was in control, an opportunity that children rarely have in real life. The capacity of play to promote children’s recovery from emotional distress is why play therapy helps many children feel lighter, and shine brighter.
The way children play changes with age. Typically, infancy and the toddler years involve more solitary play, followed by parallel play, which is playing alongside others more so than directly interacting. From infancy, most children will mimic others, especially family members. Pretend or imaginative play tends to take off after a child turns three-years-old.
Plenty of opportunity to play is particularly important in the first seven years of life, when developmental foundations are laid and children typically live moment to moment, seamlessly traversing between imagination and reality. After this they develop analytical thinking and, while play is still fundamental to healthy development and relationships, pretend play is gradually replaced by, for example, more structured games and increasingly sophisticated peer interactions.
So if play is a child’s job, then it’s the adults’ job to nurture this by, for example, creating organised play spaces, brainstorming play ideas with kids and, when a suggestion to play alone is met with Ï’m bored”, persisting. Boredom begets creativity. I have noticed that if I stay firm and stick with the suggestion, eventually all kinds of solo, imaginative play arises.
Learning to play alone, and with other children, fires up the developing brain in wonderful ways, as does parents getting down on the floor to join in play. The latter promotes closeness and strengthens the parent-child relationship. Genuinely joining a child in play, as opposed to being there in body but not mind, is challenging for many adults for reasons such as our minds struggle to stay in the present, time is limited, or our parents never played with us so we have no model of this and may even resent it.
But even twenty minutes of regular “special time” being fully present with your child doing whatever they want will boost your bond. This is also a scheduled time to have fun, get the giggles going and release tension. The whole family benefits from this. Below are some fun family play ideas for ages one to twelve from Louis Franzini’s book Kids Who Laugh: How to develop your child’s sense of humour.
Ages one to three
Mix up animal sounds by pretending that certain animals make the sounds of other animals e.g. a cow goes “woof woof” and take turns in choosing an animal and demonstrating a sound that does not go with the animal. The fun and laughs come from the difference between the associations the child has learnt and those created in the game.
Ages three to six
Pick words or pictures out of a hat and take turns acting them out, or have a staring contest and whoever laughs first “loses” the game and then must do something funny or tell a joke or a riddle.
Ages six to nine
Make up a funny story that extremely exaggerates events and people’s characteristics, such as “This is an untrue story about Sally Small who was so tiny that when she walked down the street…..” Then the child adds the next bit and you keep taking turns while making the story more and more ridiculous.
Ages nine to 12
Help your child create a comedy show, make up tongue twisters, or make a funny home video.
References
Playful Parenting (2001) by Lawrence Cohen
Kids Who Laugh: How to develop your child’s sense of humour (2002) Louis R. Franzini
Parenting in Year 12: Supporting, not stressing - by Dr Sarah Ford
Stress is a normal part of year 12 and, at manageable levels, can motivate learning and performance. But too much stress is debilitating. Type “Year 12” into a Google search and titles in the first few results include “surviving” and “is it worth the stress?” (see link below to ABC news report). Students, already burdened by the pressure of a ranking-based education system, need home and family to be a sanctuary.
But parents often do not know how to support their teen, or think they do know, but are misguided. A good starting point is to ask your child: How can I support you? Most teens are resourceful and, after 11 years of schooling, have a good sense of what works for them. They are also more likely to engage in a conversation in which they have control.
As part of this discussion, try to explore the following key areas: How to help them follow their daily/weekly routine, find balance, and keep connecting to life beyond school, all of which sustain students during intense study times. Here are some other suggestions derived from working with Year 12 students:
Keep connecting and communicating
Regularly find time to check in with your child about how they are. Focus on asking how they are feeling, rather than how school is going. This reduces the school pressure they already feel, and you will likely find out more about how things really are for them. Try to choose a time that will work for them, or ask them to choose a time to chat.
When teens are distressed, listen, try to stay calm, and simply validate their distress.
Offer a hug. Often the best support is not trying to fix a problem, but simply acknowledging and sitting with hard feelings. Later, when they are calmer and ready to talk, a way that you can help may present itself, such as encouraging them to have a night off or to see a friend.
Encourage breaks and regular rest
Regular breaks help the brain to work harder during study time. Shorter bursts of study of about 50 minutes followed by a 15-minute break are more effective than marathon stints. Breaks should involve leaving the study environment to, for example, move and energise the body, step outside for some fresh air or to eat a healthy snack. Encourage a regular sleep and wake time that allows for at least eight hours of sleep each night, and scheduled time to relax and do nothing, or a calming practice such as yoga or reading a fiction book.
There is life beyond school
Life beyond school does not stop in Year 12, and nor should it. In fact, finding a balance that includes continuing to see friends, exercise a few times a week, and maintaining a part time job (up until exam time), helps with managing time and keeping up energy, both of which are good skills for studying. This is a peak age for peer connections and keeping these up, within reason, will help kids remain emotionally balanced.
Help contain social media
The constant distraction of social media splits attention and compromises the ability to focus and remember information. Brainstorm ideas with your child about how to minimise their use of social media during study times and the half hour leading up to bedtime, when the brain needs to wind down rather than get fired up by screens.
Unconditional love
Above all else, remember to regularly tell your teen that you love them, regardless of their school performance. Your child’s year 12 results do not determine their future. Many people who do poorly in exams go on to have fulfilling and rewarding lives. Reflect on and name their strengths, including aspects of their personality, their abilities and the things they enjoy doing across all areas of life. We are all much more than a number.
ABC News Report: Year 12 Exams: Are they Worth the Stress?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-11/year-12-exams-are-they-worth-the-stress/9029260
More support and information for:
Parents
Youth Beyond Blue: Surviving Year 12
http://resources.beyondblue.org.au/prism/file?token=BL/1292
Students
Headspace: How To Reduce Stress & Prepare for Exams
https://headspace.org.au/young-people/surviving-school-exams-and-stress/
Youth Beyond Blue: Surviving Year 12