Eps 192: Talking About Sensory Sensitive Kids with Shelley Francis

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Casey O'Roarty 0:04
Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. You're listening to the joyful courage podcast, a place of inspiration and information for the parenting journey. I am your host, Casey o'rourdy, positive discipline trainer, parent coach and mom of two teenagers of my own. I'm honored to be a guide and a fellow traveler on the path of more connected and thoughtful parenting. Final reminder that come next week, we will begin the 2019 summer series here on the podcast, a best of compilation of shows that focus on the tween and teen years. As a parent of teenagers myself, I am on a mission to fill what feels like a gap in the information for those of us who want to maintain a kind and firm relationship based style of parenting as our kids go through their own developmental era of pulling away and figuring out who they are. So we're going to be kicking that off next week with wisdom from an interview I did three years ago with Sharon Valentin. It's so so so so good, and don't forget, if you love what you hearing here, please jump on over to iTunes and leave a review. I might even read it on air. This is how more people discover the show and how we can work together to create a more connected and loving world, one family at a time. All right now enjoy this episode. Hi listeners. My guest today is Shelly Francis. Shelly is an audiologist specializing in auditory processing, excuse me, disorder, and has been working with children for over 25 years. Over the years, she has noticed a trend where more and more children are being seen as extra sensitive, not only with their physical senses, but with their inner senses as well. By using her own sensitivities, she looks past a child's diagnosis and connects with their heart. Today, Shelley remains motivated by both her passion to help children and her unique perspective in childhood development, which she has described in her book, No Child Left unwrapped, understanding and honoring the gifts every child is born with. It's her hope that her book and her teachings will help create the needed paradigm shifts within our education system and within our society that will better support our beautiful, sensory, sensitive children of today. I'm so excited to be in conversation with you. Hi Shelly. Welcome to the podcast.

Shelley Francis 2:36
Hi Casey. I'm so excited to talk with you today. Yeah. Please

Casey O'Roarty 2:39
share a little bit more with the listeners about how you found yourself doing what you do.

Shelley Francis 2:44
Well, I had a audiology practice for about 30 years, and primarily I specialized in working with children with auditory processing disorder. And along with auditory processing difficulties, comes a lot of other sensory difficulties as well. And so even though what I was specializing in was auto processing, I saw children that came to me with many different diagnoses, such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, just learning difficulties, reading difficulties, things like that. But one of the things that I found, and what really started changing for me at the end, before I stopped providing the services, was that parents were bringing their children to me because they wanted me to fix them. And I started to really feel uncomfortable with that, because I didn't feel like they were broken and I didn't feel like they needed to be fixed. I felt like they needed to be understood and helped in a different way than what we've traditionally gone around, gone about doing. So that's why I decided to walk away from my practice a couple years ago and really focus on going in this different direction. What is, tell

Casey O'Roarty 4:02
me, tell me exactly. What is audio processing? Is that basically how we heat make sense of what we hear.

Shelley Francis 4:10
Yeah, so auditory processing is the way the brain interprets what the ear is hearing. Got it so it's, it's just another sense. It's our, you know, one of our sensory systems that connects us with information coming in from the outside world. And so when there's distortions or difficulty processing what the what the ear is hearing, oftentimes these individuals also have difficulty processing other sensory information. So it doesn't always stand alone. It often comes with other things. And what I've come to really realize that it's really more differences than really disorders. I don't always like that word, although there is a. Space for it, but I'm sometimes uncomfortable using it

Casey O'Roarty 5:04
well. It's that whole square peg in a round hole goal that we sometimes find ourselves working towards, or thinking that it's at the direction to move towards with our kids, right? And I love that. I love that. I love the distinction between differences versus disorder, and I think that what I'm and I'm as I'm listening and understanding deeper about your work, I'm imagining how challenging it is for parents who are not super schooled and educated in you know, how the brain listens, you know, gets messages from the ear or the other senses. And, you know, we're just trying to be explicit in our directions with our children, and they aren't falling into line. And then it becomes like, what is going on, you know? And we start putting labels like, oh, they just don't listen, or they're defiant, or they don't care, or they're looking for attention, when really, there's, you know, like, again, here's that iceberg metaphor. Again, there's something much deeper going on. So I imagine that parents are really grateful when somebody like you can help them to connect those dots, to get more of an understanding about what they're seeing with their kids. Yeah,

Shelley Francis 6:13
well, you know, as you know, as a society, you know, we, we have certain beliefs, our educational system has certain beliefs, and we we adopt these beliefs as being truths. And so when something is different from what we believe, then it's just natural for us to think there's something wrong. I often describe like, for example, labels. We look at we look at statistical data, we look at norms, and anything that falls outside the norm we consider to be abnormal. And if something's abnormal, then we want to place a label on it. And we want to place a label on it so that we know what to do to fix it, basically and unfortunately, what's happening is this is sending messages to our children that are not supporting them at all. And this is what was really starting to hit me in the heart. Was, you know, these kids would come to me and they'd actually confide in me at times. You know, why do I have to keep coming here, what's wrong with me? And it would break my heart, because there's nothing wrong with them. They're They're beautiful, beautiful souls that and their gifts weren't being recognized and honored, and we were pigeonholing. You know, often we pigeonhole these children thinking that they need to be a certain way to be successful, and then they can't be successful because that's not their nature. That's not who they are. They can be successful in another way, but not the way we're trying to guide them to be successful. So they lose their desire, or not so much desire, but they they build, they start to create their own beliefs, that they're not capable of being successful, that they're a failure, or that that there's something wrong with them. So I just think it's very important that we recognize, you know, these differences, and honor them. Yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 8:13
well, and as someone who works with a lot of different parents, and I've also volunteer at a local after school program where I get to work with all sorts of kids. I hear a lot about I hear the word sensory issues that I don't know if issue is the right word, sensory differences, I guess would be the a better word, you know, sensory sensitivity or and I'm wondering, because it seems like a really broad term, and I think most of the time I know, for me, when I hear sensory I think of like, oh, they don't kids that don't like the little seam at the tip of the sock or the tags and the shirts bother them. But it's I'm also learning that it's bigger than that. Can you tease it apart a little bit for listeners and share with us a little bit around what constitutes sensory differences? Yes, I know that's a huge question,

Shelley Francis 9:15
but you were right what you said, though, that's what I realized too. Now, just a little background. When I started working with these children, I actually had no training in working in these areas. I started working with auditory processing disorder before that was a known term. I started working with children with autism before I knew what autism was, right. So this I was very new in the area. I was just trying to help out parents, because they were coming to me with these concerns, and I was open minded enough to to really embrace it and do something about it. So when parents would come to me and they would tell. Me, quite often their child was sensory. What they were referring to was really tactile sensitivity. Or, just like you said, having to cut their cut the tags out of the clothes, wear their socks inside out. You know, couldn't stand water being touched or changing clothes. Or, you know, I was up in the northeast at the time, so, you know, changing clothes for the season was very difficult for some of the kids, and this is what I came to originally understand what parents were were telling me about their child being sensory. But over time, I started realizing sensory meant a whole lot more than that, because sensory we got, if we think about it. It's our sensory system that receives information from what's going on around us, and it's what the receipt the information that's receiving is energy. You know, we now know that everything is energy. So we're receiving different types of energy through our sensory system. It's a receiver. Basically. We learn in school that we have five senses and that we receive information from the world around us through these five senses, and this is what connects us to the world. But there's so much more. There's so much more information out there to receive than just information through our five senses. And so

Casey O'Roarty 11:24
for these kids, is it more? Is it, you know, because I can be in a room, I can, you know, or driving right when we drive somewhere. And the kids, my kids are teenagers, and they like to listen to music loud, which I'm, I'm good with that most of the time, but once we pull into a parking lot, I have to turn the music down, because I it just I feel too overwhelmed with loud music and lots of cars and people and looking for a place to park. And so I, what I say to the kids is like, it's just too much noise clutter for me right now, and that and for but another person could have the same experience, and it's not a big deal the music. So is it with the sensory differences that in the kids that you're seeing? Is it really their you use the word receiver, so if their system, sensory system is if we consider that their receivers, so they just kind of are tuned to a different frequency, or are tuned to and the energy might be the same that they're that's coming towards them, but how they're experiencing the light or the tags or the sounds or whatever is coming at them is just experienced differently for them. But is that accurate? Yes,

Shelley Francis 12:43
absolutely. I believe that's exactly what's happening, and it can be different from different senses. So you could be hyper sensitive with touch hearing, you can be hypo sensitive, which means not having enough information, not stimulated enough with, say, your visual system. So yeah, there can be this whole mixed bag going on, which I feel like is really important when we are doing an evaluation or when we are looking to help a child is to look at all their different sensory areas and see how they're all receiving the information, and also to look at, not only where there may be disorganization or weaknesses, but also where their gifts are. You know, where their superpowers are, and that is so important, they need to, you know, everybody needs to know that, that they're awesome. Yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 13:44
I'm hearing this as this isn't necessarily, this isn't a child problem. This is a this isn't everyone else problem. This is and so what is the typical parent seeing that is leading them to explore the possibility of sensory differences the parents that are bringing their kids to you for an evaluation, what are the, you know, what? What gets them to the point of being curious about the if that, whether or not that's going on, and what's the typical age that we can expect? Because there's some development, you know? I mean, gosh, there's so many things to consider as a parent, right, like development and mood, and are they hungry? And, you know, is it, have we had a big transition? There's so many different layers of life experience happening all at once. How? What are some indicators for parents that, no, you know what this is. This might be a sensory difference. And I want to go and get some some more information.

Shelley Francis 14:41
Yeah, well, you know, certainly there, there are times when there are significant developmental delays and that, you know, that's not real. That's not what I'm talking about here, too. You know, there are, there are significant delays that we. Acquire attention in order to help a child to feel good about themselves and feel comfortable, you know, with themselves. So so when there are, you know, significant speech delays, for example, I'll use that as an example, because it happens quite often where auditory processing delays will get missed because they're concentrating on the speech development, but not realizing that in order to acquire speech development, you need to have a good, strong auditory system, right? Because you have to receive the information before you can give back the information, and that's something that a lot of people miss. So if there's a speech and language delay, and they're not having any understanding that there may be an auditory processing delay. Also, that's positing the speech and language delay, then the services can help the speech problem, but then as a child gets older, they may have more language difficulties because the auditory processing difficulty was never addressed. So there are reasons to to look at weaknesses and want to strengthen and improve these weaknesses, just for, you know, the overall, you know, just to help the child overall. But the problem is, is when we focus on these weaknesses, and we, we don't, we don't really focus or look at their strengths, right and and that's what, that's where I think the downfall lies, because these children then just feel like there's, there's so much wrong with them, but they're never really getting what's right with them, what's good with them, what's what's awesome about them. And that's where I think, you know, we miss, we miss the boat sometimes, and that's what I try to help people understand, but also to understand that, you know, there's more to for example, behavior. It's one of the things I write about in the book that you know, when a child is processing the world differently through their senses, then their behaviors are going to be different. So so what happens is we as a society look at a behavior and if it's not a normal behavior, then we want to again, label that behavior and try to fix that behavior. But what if that behavior is completely normal for the way that child is perceiving the world or perceiving through that sensory system. You know, this is very important, because we're trying to get rid of a behavior that's actually helping them cope and adapt with their disorganized sensory system. Yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 17:54
I have a mentor in positive discipline, and she works a lot with schools in Seattle. She's the founder of sound discipline, which is a nonprofit, just do a little plug. And she talks about, specifically, kids who have been exposed to are experiencing trauma. And she talks about how often the problem we see as a solution to a problem that we don't know about, which I'm hearing, that's what I'm hearing in what you're saying is, you know, and behavior that we adults kind of label as misbehavior tends to just simply be, you know, what we perceive as non compliance or not cooperative or not what we want them to be doing in the moment. However, I'm hearing you say that is actually serving a purpose for that child and and perhaps a solution to, like Jodi says, a problem that we don't know about. And so I'm thinking about the people that are listening right now, Shelly, who are home and or not home, driving, who knows what they're doing. Hi, listeners. And you know, I'm thinking about how I listen to information and podcasts and and I start to put it whatever I'm hearing up against what I'm seeing with my own child. So I understand and I love that you keep bringing us back to gifts and strengths, and we're going to get there. And right now, I want to just support the listener who's thinking to themselves, but how do I just like, yes, you know, if there's speech delay, if there's big milestones that aren't being met, but, and I'm also thinking about this sweet little one that I get to work with every week, who I've been told, has some sensory differences, and I feel really at a loss sometimes, because the behavior that's showing up, that might be her making sense of her world is so disruptive and so difficult to navigate when I've got other kids that I'm also trying to work with and. Just curious. And I think this can go right everyone. This can go for any child, right? It's like, how do we honor and connect with the child in front of us, while also holding space for and honoring the rest of the room? So there's like 100 questions in what I just said. So for the listener, back to the listener who's thinking like, Wow, I wonder. I have been having some challenges with my child. I'm wondering if maybe this could be part of of what's happening. What are some typical ways that kids with sensory differences? What are some typical behaviors that show up that maybe on from the parent or the adult perspective, are seen as, you know, problem behaviors, but are really the sensory differences manifesting for the kids? Are there typical things, or is it pretty unique to the child? Well,

Shelley Francis 21:02
there's certainly typical things. There's things I've seen quite often in my practice. Obviously, one of them would be hearing sensitivity. That's something that brought a lot of children in to my practice over the years, and that is very disruptive to the family, to the family dynamics. You know, when you can't, you can't take your child into a grocery store or into a Home Depot, or, you know, your rest of your family wants to go to Disney World, or you want to go to a show, and the one child with earring sensitivities can't go.

Casey O'Roarty 21:38
It's too loud, it's too much. Yeah, it can be, yeah,

Shelley Francis 21:42
it can certainly be disruptive. So there certainly are things that can be done. You know, we do know, with brain plasticity research, that we can change the way the brain processes information, through exercises, through different programs that are out there. I mean, these are very, very important. I'm not downplaying this at all. So there's a lot of things out there that can be done. I think, though, what what's important is understanding, understanding what's behind it totally, and understanding that, you know, these are physical senses, and that, yes, we can change the way we the way we interpret and the way we're perceiving the world around us. But there's more than our physical senses, and there's, you know, I'll use the example, the child going into, say, a grocery store, a Home Depot. You know, a lot of times parents would say to me that their child would have meltdowns in crowded places, and they think that it has to do with the sound, but then there'll be some place where it's not loud and they'll have a meltdown. And so trying to put your finger on what exactly is pausing the meltdown. What? What? What is this child perceiving? And this is where I think we have to go beyond their physical senses, and this is where we have to realize that there's more going on than what the physical body is perceiving, because there there are energies out there that sensitive children are picking up on that aren't physical and that could be causing that, the overwhelm that can be causing the meltdowns. They can't handle a lot of the different emotions, a lot of the different energies that are around. So it can make it very, very difficult, because in our society, we always look for external reasons, yeah, what we can see exactly and but that going beyond what we can see and exploring something different is what I really trying to shine a light on, and that these are actually the gifts. These are the beautiful gifts that so many children are coming in with today. So yes, we focus on the physical. We focus on on what's causing a lot of these behaviors and problems, but, but we are always looking at the external for the answer. What if the answer is someplace else? And that's the question I'd like to bring up

Casey O'Roarty 24:19
that is exciting. Tell me, can we let's dig in with Tell me about that, those inner senses and that energy that you just barely tapped on there, because I think that, I think that's so powerful,

Shelley Francis 24:33
yeah, yeah. And this is what I think is happening today, too. So many of our children today are being born extra sensitive, and it's not just sensitivity, but the physical senses. It's sensitivity inside. And this is a beautiful thing. I'm going to start with that, because I believe this is the evolution of humanity. This is what we eat in the world. We know. Body can deny the fact that we need more people that are empathic or empathetic and compassionate, and that's what that's what we're getting. We're getting these beautiful children with these beautiful open hearts. The problem is we're putting them into these old, outdated paradigms that are not supporting them. Yeah, the we'll use the education system as an example. The education system is based on a competitive paradigm, and these children don't thrive in a competitive paradigm because they're so empathy and compassion is our true nature. It's what we come into this world with. So anything that goes against that is going to be a little difficult to kind of manage. And so when a child comes in with these emotions, these senses, is what I call inner senses, heightened, then they have a harder time allowing them to go to sleep, because that's basically what's happening, and that's that's might be kind of going into a different direction

Casey O'Roarty 26:02
here, but what I like to go there, what I like

Shelley Francis 26:05
to understand is that these are natural gifts that we all have. I do believe that children today have these at a heightened level, and they we come into the world with these beautiful, beautiful inner senses, a heart wide open, but we come into a physical body in which ha and our physical body has to connect and and connect to this world, and it connects to the world with these physical senses, with our five physical senses in the process of making these connections, What typically happens is our inner senses start to go to sleep, and we start to really become part of this world that we're living in through our senses and perceiving everything around us from the external. And that's that's great. I mean, it's important that needs to be done in some ways. But if we can do that and still maintain strong connections with our inner senses, with our heart, with our compassion, with our intuition, if we can find the way to balance both the physical and the inner, then we are going to be able to navigate this world with more peace, with more grace and with more ease. Oh,

Casey O'Roarty 27:29
Shelly, I did not know we were going here. I am so excited about this conversation, because that makes perfect sense to me, and the way that I think about it, is being born into, you know, our souls being born into the world. We are as close to our purest nature as we can be, maybe, until, maybe we're looking at death. But and through, like you said, we enter into the world in a physical body, not only that, but we are in relationship with other beings in physical bodies, carrying their own baggage and their own armor, and slowly over time, I appreciate that you used the language of our inner senses go to sleep. The way that I think about it is our inner that inner knowing, our intuition, our connection to Source or God or universe, really becomes kind of buried like I just imagine that it's layer upon layer of experience and relationship, and then the new belief systems and habits and and so much of our life is spent like in a very inauthentic surface level existence, very reactive versus responsive and thoughtful and and farther and farther and farther away from this true knowing, the true nature that we show up as. And so yeah, makes me so excited to talk about this, as my listeners know, I love this conversation. And so then yes, and we have these little people, or not so little people and and and so is one of the ways this is a totally off topic. Well, not really, but is one of the ways, because I think that I might have one of these highly tuned in empathetic I think I have two, but one in particular, and as she's moved through kind of the traditional schooling model and and the traditional kind of life story, anxiety is really showing up for her and, and I've shared this on the podcast before, the you know, quote treatment, the support that has really been helpful for her is Reiki and energy work. And I think that, I think that probably she will be some sort of energy healer. But at, you know, at the age that she's at right now, make trying to make sense of that, especially when her peer group is like, not even tuned in to anything like that, is part of the the experience, the anxious experience that she's having. Does that make sense to you in this context? Yeah.

Shelley Francis 29:59
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that is so, that is so why I'm here, yay. I mean, that is so why I'm here on this earth right now is to help people understand this. I'll give you a little background real quick. I started my practice and really started specializing in children with learning disabilities because of this challenges and the struggles that my brother had growing up okay, and he was 2027, years old at the time, and he was suffering from severe depression, and a lot of it, I found, was because of the way he was processing the world. Specifically, he had severe auditory processing disorder and ADHD, but it wasn't recognized back then, right as we're talking about in the 60s. And so it wasn't really recognized back then, and he grew up with a lot of issues with self esteem and and fear failure and things like that, and so I really wanted to reach out and help as many children as I could. Not have to suffer like my brother did, and that was my motivation. But as time went on, and as my practice, you know, over the years, as I said, I started seeing more and more children that are sensitive. I started realizing that I'm here to help children like me, not like my brother, because I grew up extra sensitive and sensitive, emotionally sensitive, with my inner senses, and it was really, really hard to navigate the world in many ways. And it does cause, it can cause a lot of anxiety issues and stress and and things like that. And what happens with sensitivities, with these inner sensitivities is, you know, these children feel things so much deeper than what we've come to know, and they have a hard time with these feelings. And when we look from the outside in at them. We can't understand it because we're not experiencing it. But when you have the gift of empathy, you can understand what somebody else is feeling, and not only can you understand what they're feeling, but as a child, what happens is, because no one's given you the tools to work with it, you take on the energies of the people around you, and you don't know how to release it, you don't know what to do with it, and it can cause all kinds of inner turmoil. So

Casey O'Roarty 32:32
how do you support so back to the gifts and strengths, right? Because I, I'm, I'm, I'm with you, I'm, I'm drinking the Kool Aid. I totally see that while it's a challenging time in the world, historically, culturally for sure, to to be so heart open, considering all the things that are happening currently and plus the just, just the simple journey of parenting and doing all the things I do. See that open heart and sweet, sensitive, empathetic nature as a gift, for sure, and we gotta get people out the door, yeah, and you know, and support them in learning life skills and all the things. So how do you so we're talking about a paradigm shift. So what is the paradigm shift, and what are some practical tools for people that are listening, if one they want to, just because I love you, listen to my podcast, Shelly. So, you know, I am, I am all about conversation and going to the source, right? So me, my kids are 13 and nearly 16, probably will be 16, whoa, by the time the show is aired. But you know, when we're talking about sometimes it's younger kids, right? Sometimes it might be school aged kids, but I would think that going to the source and just being really curious and open to hearing about the experience that our kids are having is a starting point. What are some other I hate the word tools, because it sounds like, how can we manipulate this? But really, what are some other ways that parents can be with their kids, who they have an inkling there's some inner sensitivity going on, and maybe, you know, maybe they just are uneducated and don't know where to go with it. What are some baby steps?

Shelley Francis 34:27
Yeah, you know, the there are things, you know, I do use the word tools. And one of the reasons why use the word tools, I

can't think of another word right now to use, but meditation is a tool. You know, a tool. It can be just something that you you teach someone to use in their own way. Yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 34:54
I don't really have a hang up with the word tool, but in that moment, I was like, why does this feel weird?

Shelley Francis 34:58
Yeah. And I'm like, Well, I don't know how to, I don't know you can use the word tool,

Casey O'Roarty 35:06
permission to use tools,

Shelley Francis 35:08
but, but, yeah, but, you know, just, first of all, I think knowledge is really important. I think understanding, not just knowledge, but understanding. That's the difference. Um, understanding is more of a knowing. And knowledge, you know, is more of what's programmed into our brain, and understanding why, why these things are happening, and understanding the the gift and the beauty behind it and the reason for it. And you know, these, all these understandings I think are very, very important, and that's what I wrote. The book was really about understanding. Great, but now it's like, your question is, what everybody's asking is like, Okay, now what do I do with this understanding? What do I do to help help my child? And one of the things is, first of all, like the reason why I say understanding is because we're all creative beings ourselves, and when we understand things from a very deep level, then we can use our own knowing and our own creativity to to provide what's necessary. Um, I know that doesn't always help. Sometimes we need some other information. But I do believe that that the power in our own our own knowing and our own creativity and our own understanding is very, very, very powerful, very important.

But basically, you know, once we understand this, first of all, parents, adults, we already have all these programs downloaded on, you know, on our hard drive. I mean, they are there, and it is really hard to release and get rid of them, yeah?

Casey O'Roarty 36:53
And by that you mean kind of our go to response to life, yeah,

Shelley Francis 36:57
our self limiting beliefs, right? And children, though, don't have these programs yet. They're programming them every moment they're programming them, but there, it's easier to help them now than it is to help them have to relearn everything later, right? Which is why I really, you know, wrote the book and really trying to help parents understand, let's help our kids when they're young or as early as possible, so they don't have to go through as much of these, you know, challenges that we've had to go through, that other sensitive people have had to go through in the past, and plus the fact that it's more difficult today, because there are more external challenges than ever before. You know, I'm not taking taken away from that. So, you know, I mentioned before meditation. I mean meditation, being able to to be still, to quiet the mind, to be able to go within. These are very important tools. These are very important things that we can do. I think that parents, you know, if they can learn to help themselves, we help ourselves, to strengthen our own inner senses and our own inner gifts, then we can better understand and help our children as well. So some of these inner gifts, the gift of courage, for example, courage, resilience. You know, resilience is something that comes from inside, and it helps us to to really go through the challenges of life with ease and grace, and we can build resilience. There's a lot of people that think that resilience, you know, we're either born with it or we're not born with it. I believe it's a it's a gift that we all are born with, but when we attach to the external over and over and over again, and we start to believe in everything we see through our physical senses, then we start to lose that resilience within us. Do

Casey O'Roarty 39:00
you I kind of talk about resilience a different way, but I think we're saying the same thing. Yes, it's there, and we get to practice strengthening it. Because I you know another thing that I think, and perhaps this might be the flip side of the misunderstanding, when our kids have external or internal sensory differences is we want to protect them and we want to keep them safe and comfortable, and that is not a service either. And the resiliency. You know, we're all born with muscle tone or with muscle in our body, but if we're not moving our body and flexing those muscles on a regular basis, we can't really depend on those muscles to support us in our physical life, right? I think the same would be true for resilience if we're not allowing our kids not. Overly, you know? I mean, obviously, yeah, but being, you know, and I'm thinking, I'm wondering too Shelly, you know? And I'm guessing I know the answer to this, but I'm guessing that all of this sensory conversation, whether it's the physical or the inner, energetic sensory experience, is all on a continuum, right where, you know some, you probably see some of the more severe, or maybe not, you probably see everybody on the on the continuum. But I'm guessing there are those that are sensitive and yet can step into discomfort and, or, you know, however that looks and and can either fake it till they make it or roll with it. And, you know, get some little internal recharge later, while there's others that can be crippled, yeah, by the experience.

Shelley Francis 40:55
Yeah, that's trauma. You know, entangled trauma for a sensitive soul, is a recipe for disaster. I mean this to me, this is why we have all these school shootings today. Yeah, yeah. I live here in South Florida, and I happen to be across the street from the Parkland shooting earlier this year. When it happened, I was there with my mom having a CAT scan done across the street. And unfortunately, my mom actually ended up passing away seven days later from something we didn't even know. We never even got diagnosed. She was perfectly healthy the day before. But what happened? The reason why I say this is because, you know, I had started writing this book about three years ago, and with things going on in my family, I I had to put it aside. And then when this happened, and my mom passed, like I said, seven days later, and I happened to be across the street from that shooting. I always knew, when I started writing the book three years ago that I was going to try to shine a light on why kids were doing these, these horrible things. And so when I happened to be there, I just knew at that moment that I had to finish writing the book, and I basically wrote 85% of the book The next two months after and so that's why, you know, I'm bringing it up. This is a conversation or a topic that is very important to me to have people understand that is, you know, entangled trauma with a sensitive soul. I have a place in the book where I write about when, when does a sensitive child become a narcissist? And you know what happens is that, as I said before, when you have these heightened sensitivities, you feel things on such and such a deep level that shame and guilt just paralyze you. Can paralyze you, and you have to you. Many of his children feel like they have no other alternative but to shut down their senses. They have to shut it all out because they can't handle it. They haven't been given the tools or or haven't been shown how to develop and cultivate these beautiful gifts and and it feels like a burden and a curse, and it has to be shut down. And I believe that's what happens. So, yeah, this is, this is important topic. You know, I, I wrote this book because I want, I think that it's important that we understand that we're not going to solve these problems with external answers, right? We have to look beyond the external, and we have to start helping, helping our children work through these things. And something that came up when you were asking, I know I'm rambling a little bit,

Casey O'Roarty 43:31
but Oh, it's okay. This is a ramble, free zone. I mean, a ramble, okay. Zone.

Shelley Francis 43:37
Okay, good. When, when you were saying, you know, asking about things that we can do. One of the things that popped into my mind was something called, well, I had behind my, behind my home, they were building up some little lakes a few years ago. And in order to build the lakes, it was a golf course, and they had to, they had to dig up all the they dug up all the fairways and put lakes where all the fairways were. And but in order to do that, they had to get rid of all the chemicals and everything that was in the soil. And so something that I was told was, and I love this saying it was the solution for pollution is dilution. So and they had to bring in dirt to fill in with the dirt that was already here in these big mountains, and it was like a five year project, and in order to then use the dirt, because it was so many, so many chemicals in the dirt that they had diluted in order to use it. So that got me thinking, and that saying that the the solution to pollution is dilution. So I think about the heart as this beautiful part of our bodies, that this is our soul. This is the energy that comes from our heart. It's just this loving, beautiful energy, and it has the power. To dilute the other energies. And when we can teach how to keep the heart open and dilute the negative energies that are coming from our mind, from the self limiting beliefs, from societal beliefs, the old paradigms, the more we can open our heart and put out more of the loving energy, the more we're going to dilute the negative energy. So the solution to pollution is dilution, and that's one way of using this beautiful heart energy. The problem is we have to teach how to use this beautiful heart energy, but still protect the heart from being hurt,

Casey O'Roarty 45:42
right? Because something you mentioned especially, and I've worked with some, I've done some coaching with some people who consider themselves empaths. And it is a practice. It is, it's, it's, it's a practice to be able to have an open heart without taking in, letting the energy of others overtake you, right? Yeah, I, like the I worked with one client, and we talked about, you know, instead of like I at, for some reason, a visual of a like French doors came to mind. And I said, so, you know, the if the Open Heart is the doors wide open, you know, is it possible to maybe have them open, but perhaps they don't have to be all wide open. And then also that exchange of energy doesn't have to. And this isn't my wheelhouse, but it's just like the world, according to Casey right now, like putting energy, you know, two people standing across from each other having an experience, the energy can land between them. It doesn't necessarily need to be like flowing into the other person. Does that make sense?

Shelley Francis 47:00
Yeah, you you're going to pull out of me a little peek into something that I'm creating. Right now. I wasn't planning on going here, but you're bringing it out. So thank you. As as an audiologist, you know, one of the other things I specialized in was working with hearing impaired individuals and using hearing aids. And over the years, I mean, I started, you know, back in the mid 80s with hearing aids, and they were pretty, pretty simple. But today we have very sophisticated technology within our hearing aids. And one of the things that that has developed over the years is the ability to filter the frequencies through a hearing aid so it only allows the frequencies that a person needs to be amplified without over amplifying the frequencies that they don't need to be amplified. And this how I

Casey O'Roarty 47:55
think I see where you're going.

Shelley Francis 47:59
Individual here, you know, with their own unique hearing loss, right? So one of the things that I've been working on is visual visualization, and visualization that's a gift of our inner senses, and many children will be gifted in this area. So that's a really good avenue to use to help them develop some of these practices, and that is, you know, visualizing, or, you know, creating a high pass filter to be placed around their heart. And a high pass filter, you know, normally in hearing aids, we use low pass filters, so that means that, you know, everything will be amplified except the low frequencies. Well, with a high pass filter, we're allowing high frequencies come through, but we're filtering out low frequencies. So low energy frequencies are are being filtered while the high pass is allowing only high frequencies to come through. And so it can visualize placing this high pass filter around our heart energy, or around our aura, around our you know, whatever you want, whatever works for you.

Casey O'Roarty 49:22
Oh, I love that Shelly. I'm excited for that work. I'm gonna follow you so I can hear more about it, because I think that's so powerful. It's like the empath aid instead of the hearing aid. Oh, man, I could, I mean, obviously, it's probably obvious to everyone listening. We could talk about this for a really long time, and maybe I'll just have to have you back on so we can dig deeper into this, because it's a topic that I think is so important, and the time is now to be in the conversation and broadening our understanding of energy. Compassion and empathy. So thank you for this conversation. And the question that I always end with, that I'm going to ask you right now is, in the context of understanding and loving our sensitive kids, our sensory kids, what does joyful courage mean to you? Shelly,

Shelley Francis 50:19
well, it's, it's definitely, their, you know, joy, joy and courage, or two of the beautiful inner gifts that that live in our heart. And it's funny. It's funny. You asked that because I, before the interview, I actually was, was thinking to myself that, you know, I was a little nervous about this. This is all new to me. Putting out a book was new to me. Um, you know, I was very comfortable sitting in my office and having people come to me for so many years, and now I'm going out into the world and in a different way of being seen and heard and and it, it can cause a little bit of anxiety, and, you know, nervous about it, but what I thought about was that, you know, it tapped into my own gifts of the heart, and realized that joy and courage helped me to get through being nervous about coming out and being seen and heard. So their joy and courage are are beautiful gifts of the heart that we can develop in our children that can help them navigate this world.

Casey O'Roarty 51:30
I love that. How can listeners find you and follow your work?

Shelley Francis 51:36
Yeah, well, my website is meet.com

Casey O'Roarty 51:40
Okay, and listeners don't forget all the links will be in the show notes. So meet shelley.com where else?

Shelley Francis 51:45
And then, well, Facebook and all the social media is also meet Shelley. That's it. And where can they find your book? Is

Casey O'Roarty 51:53
it on your website, Amazon, all the normal places? Yeah, it

Shelley Francis 51:57
is on it's on Amazon. It's on my website. I'm hoping to get an audio version of it soon, but right now it's on Amazon and also my website,

Casey O'Roarty 52:08
great. And just to remind you listeners, the title of the book is no child left unwrapped, understanding and honoring the gifts every child is born with. Shelly, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Shelley Francis 52:19
Thank you, Casey. I just really, really have enjoyed this

Casey O'Roarty 52:26
joyful courage community. Thank you so much for tuning in each and every week. Big thanks and love to my team, including my producer, Chris Mann at pod shaper. Be sure to join the discussion over at the live and love with joyful courage group page, as well as the joyful courage business pages on Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to the show through Apple podcast, Spotify, Google Play. I Heart Radio, really, anywhere you find your favorite podcasts. Also, I mentioned Patreon at the beginning of the show. Check it out. Www.patreon.com/joyful patreon.com/joyful, courage. This is where you can contribute to the show and take advantage of patron perks like content rich monthly webinars and deeper discussions about what's being shared on the podcast. You will like it. Www, dot P, A, T, R, E, O n.com/joyful, courage. Any comments or feedback about this show or any others can be sent Casey at joyful courage.com I personally read and respond to all the emails that come my way. So reach out. You can also sign up for my bi weekly newsletter at joyful courage.com just go to the website. Sign up for that. Take a breath, drop into your body, find the balcony seat and trust that everyone is going to be okay. Big Love to each and every one of you have a beautiful rest of your day.

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