Healing Happens in Community
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Well hello there, Reader, Buckle up, folks, this is a long one. I had a powerful experience and want to share it with you, as fully as I possibly can. Last week, I was so lucky to be invited to spend a day with the team at Dandelion NeuroRelational Family Services in Ft. Ripley, MN. The co-founders, Matt Sherman and Sara Sherman Schwab, are graduates of the BBTI’s Immersion Program for Professionals, along with two of staff members. Matt is an Advanced Practitioner! Matt and Sara have woven the framework of the Immersion Program into their programming and have been teaching the parent course since 2022. After getting a tour and meeting their horses and goats, I spent three hours with their team of 10 - exploring what’s really hard about staying grounded in our core tenets while working inside systems that insist punishment and control are on the path to behavior change. It can be lonely, isolating, and self doubt often creeps in. “Are we doing this right?” Those three hours were awesome, but what happened next was completely beyond what I’d been anticipating. Healing Happens in CommunityMatt, Sara, and their team hosted a gathering for their community and clients so they could meet me and I could meet them. In just two hours I saw over and over and over again why Matt, Sara, and their team at Dandelion are so successful. They repeatedly and without compromise consistently offer their clients the absolutely most important intervention. They see their clients. They reflect to their clients how amazing they are simply by the genuine smile on their face when their clients arrive. They give their clients opportunities to see and believe in their own goodness. One of their long term clients arrived early to cook for the community. It was a party, afterall! It was a casual gathering - there wasn’t a moment where I was introduced or made to feel like I was anything other than what I was - a part of their community, the same as everyone else. One by one, their clients would stroll up to me, some with a marshmallow on their roasting sticks, others with a cornhole bean bag in hand, and tell me how I’ve changed their lives. How learning about their kids’ brains changed everything for them. I heard stories of dads advocating fiercely for their child to be supported - not punished - by the school. I heard parents talk about their children’s verrrrrrry challenging behavior with curiosity and compassion, while still maintaining rules, expectations, and boundaries. I watched the team provide guardrails to children who wanted to do something questionably safe - all while staying deeply connected to them. I watched kids ASK PERMISSION and stay regulated if they were told no. I mean, there was fire involved. There were lots of nos but also a whole lot of yes’s. I was truly speechless. I really was already a part of them. At the same time, it was clear that what is truly changing these people’s lives was the community. It’s the care they give and receive from one another. It’s cooking for each other, offering a meal, and helping with the clean up. It’s talking about their children’s extremely hard and sometimes dangerous behavior, and having folks just - listen. Not recoil. Not give advice. Not tell them to set better boundaries. I left full of hope and gratitude. I left with a sense of awe. I left feeling content. I also left feeling angry because state and federal funding has been impacted, which severely limits the services Dandelion can offer. Anger is an emotion that lets us know something is happening that violates our values and boundaries. Anger is mobilizing. It helps us DO something. We can be angry and regulated and that’s exactly what will create change. Anger will help us tenaciously address this injustice and find creative solutions so that our country’s most vulnerable folks can continue to get the support they need - because they, too, are worth it.
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