I am a caretaker for a girl with special needs. She can’t walk on her own, has a trach (breathing tube), is non verbal, has a feeding tube, and is sometimes drools. I take her to therapies and our dayhab program and we just hangout and have fun together everyday. I think she is amazing! However, when I tell people what I do for a living, people don’t know how to digest it, they don’t really express any interest, or they make her out to be some vegetable with no thoughts. I often get called a babysitter! I am in no way a babysitter! I know how important I am in her life and for her family. But when people act disinterested or belittle what I do, or the girl I work for it is infuriating! I take it way more personally than I should. How do I separate their inability to see the beauty in someone different, or their discomfort, from my own emotions and self worth?

Here’s another one. I am a huge people pleaser and often when someone does something that really bothers me, in the moment I tell them it’s no big deal and not to worry, but after I end up frustrated with myself because I wasn’t as honest as I should have been. In the moment I truly feel like I’m saying the right thing though, it’s not until after that I get frustrated with myself for not expressing what I felt, but in a a reasonable way. How do you teach yourself to do that in the moment and feel comfortable enough to speak freely when it could be off putting to others?

Hi Mel! Oh man I have so many questions… I am in the middle of reading your High 5 Habit book and identify with a lot of what you talk about. I feel like my “problems” are stacked, like they are all connected and effect each other, and even if I address the very bottom issue in the stack it won’t necessarily effect the other issues. I will give you an example, I am a people pleaser! I have a sh*t ton of learning disabilities and went to a bunch of different private schools growing up. My teachers were always sending me the message that I wasn’t good enough, I couldn’t do it. They actually would sometimes tell me I couldn’t do things. I was pulled out of school for teachers treating me badly as well. As a result I always tried to befriend adults because I knew at some point they wouldn’t like me, maybe showing them in the beginning how cool I could be, how nice I was would effect how much they hated me later on. I learned people would never really like me for who I was, and that was stacked on my learning disabilities, people seeing me as less because I didn’t understand things the way they did. The learning disabilities are never going to go away, so how can I detach the two issues that I view as connected? Hopefully this makes sense. I love you and everything you do for yourself and for us, thank you!