Hi.

My name is Gregory.  I’ve arrived at this very point (…breathes in  >>>>>+<<<<<  breathes out…) across an accumulation of experiences and relationships spanning four-plus decades, from at least the moment I was conceived to the very seconds passing as I edit these words.  And as you read them?  I will have transformed further with the guidance of lived experience and wisdom of open-hearted relationship.  My life, like any life, is a story.  A complex tale of one organism’s development, influenced by hundreds of main characters, thousands of secondary influences, and at least hundreds of thousands of inputs from humans, flora, fauna, and the myriad momentary contexts across a lifespan.  Interpersonal impacts now forgotten but never truly gone, as well as sensory experiences integrated so completely into the person typing words and attempting to illuminate his story that he…I, couldn’t possibly take credit for whatever human benefit may come from these words.

In the upcoming chapters, I’ll endeavor to communicate a novel framework of human interpersonal interaction. Of relationship. Foundational scaffolding that will describe the impacts of human-to-human influence and suggest pedagogy and praxis.  I’m calling it the Impact-Centered Interpersonal-Influence Support-Framework (ICIISF).[1]

It’s my assertion that this ICIISF framework, explored in Chapter 4, and the novel impact-regarding social-and-emotional (IRSE) pedagogy set upon it, illuminated in Chapter 3, will prove efficacious in reducing harm to and increasing desired outcomes and states of being for supportees of any sort as they interact with and are influenced by supporters of any sort.  This isn’t to say that preordained goals created by supporters, standardized curricula, and/or expert-centered pedagogy will be achieved. Rather, communicated desires by supportees, in relationship with supporters, will be earnestly and mindfully approached.  IRSE-guided supporters endeavor to unconditionally, empathetically, and honestly regard supportees.  This regard informs IRSE practice[2] in service of supportees as they pursue and modify their goals according to internal motivations supported by reliably predictable experiences of validation, acceptance, and safety. 

I realize the previous paragraph includes quite a bit to unpack, and I will endeavor to do just that in each subsequent paragraph, chapter, and section.

Guided by IRSE pedagogy, outward and reliably observable supportee behaviors in pursuit of internally-motivated goals are a result of underlying experience-driven nervous system reflexes related to immediate sensory inputs.  The most ubiquitous therapeutic, caregiving, and educational approaches are informed by what I call impact-disregarding behavioral (IDB) pedagogy.[3]  The behaviors that supporters note and endeavor to change are usually communicated within IDB endeavors as: “inappropriate,” “antisocial/asocial,” “undesired,” “oppositional,” “defiant,” “problematic,” “disruptive,” or similar terms communicating inferiority and/or pathology.  IDB supporters use techniques that, by necessity, disregard the internal supportee experience while attempting to control and manipulate them.  These kinds of inputs are generally[4] interpreted by the supportee’s nervous system as unsafe, dangerous, harmful, and often traumatic. Impact-regarding social-and-emotional (IRSE) supporters do not attempt to modify supportee behaviors, dis-attached from their overall emotional and sensory life experience, to force compliance with or assimilation to external demands.  Rather, they attempt to connect with other humans in manners that facilitate nervous system relaxation, safety, and regulation.  They desire for supportees to feel validated and accepted so that mutually-desired social, emotional, communicative, developmental, and/or relationship outcomes can be achieved more efficaciously, and with less harm, than would be achieved with an IDB approach.

Again, I have arrived here after a lifetime of experiences, all of which inform the IRSE pedagogy I currently endeavor to utilize across my professional and personal relationships as the foundation for any interaction with people for whom I am a supporter, or influencer, with greater power in relationship.  I feel compelled to share the most salient and relevant of those experiences as narrative personal background intended to provide evidence-based justification for the consideration of an impact-centered interpersonal-influence support-framework. My story will also begin to illuminate impact-regarding social-and-emotional endeavors as likely efficacious and reliably humane approaches of impacting human behavior mindfully, consensually, and with genuine and momentary regard to our impacts, as influencers with power, on supportees.

The story will be framed from an evidence-based practice (EBP) paradigm, particularly as was imparted to me as a student and early practitioner of speech and language pathology[5].  Included will be the infusion of external (i.e., published, peer-reviewed, replicated research) and internal (i.e., personally collected, from actual supportees, observations and data) evidence, as well as two equally-important aspects of efficacious and balanced EBP.  First, the supporter’s knowledge, judgment, and critical reasoning acquired through training, professional development and praxis, and lived experiences.  Also, the supporter’s earnest consideration of the personal and cultural circumstances, values, priorities, and expectations identified by supportees, supportee-caregivers, and supportee-communities-of-influence.

Let’s begin.

The Supporter’s Knowledge, Judgement, and Critical Reasoning Acquired through Training, Professional Development and Praxis, and Lived Experiences.

I believe most practitioners of human-service professions would assert that lived-experiences are the most critical aspect and driver of day-to-day praxis[6].  We make momentary and improvisational decisions based upon the full context in which we are influentially participating, and while those decisions are certainly informed by training and professional development, they are momentarily controlled by the integrated wisdom of lived-experience.

Allow me to start there…with my lived experiences, their accumulation, and the existential, or experiential, threads that flow from then to now.  You will now enter a narrative between me, now, which will be clear by the use of personal pronouns (I, me, our), and Gregories past, which will be clear by the use of impersonal pronouns (he, him, their).  Sections of me and him will be separated by the symbol I created to remind myself to breathe in…pause…and breathe out.  I use this convention, in combination with a trigger/content warning here that I will be discussing personal traumas.  Not in great detail, but with enough specificity that it’s important to illuminate at the outset.  Here comes that first breath…

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At this moment, I professionally present as, a.) A person-centered, actively-listening, impact-regarding, neurodiversity-affirming, and trauma-informed clinician with, b.) An explicit professional and degreed background in speech-language pathology, who is, c.) Proposing a unifying support-framework based on two interdependent factors: impact-centeredness and interpersonal-influence.  I, the Gregory communicating with you on August 11, 2024, am also endeavoring to illuminate, d.) An impact-regarding social-and-emotional (IRSE) pedagogy that, e.) Exists upon a complex spectrum of impact and influence which has been dominated, for at least 7 decades, by impact-disregarding behavioral (IDB) endeavors; endeavors ubiquitously infused with radical behaviorism and applied behavior analysis (ABA).

And what of Gregories then?[7]

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It’s critical to recognize the lived-experiences, perinatal environment, and genetic contributions of my parental lineages. That sets Gregory on a distinct trajectory even before he breathes his first independent breaths outside of the womb.

Mom loved Gregory unconditionally from the moment she knew he existed.  She took her final breaths with him a few feet and a COVID-sealed partition away.  She championed him from conception, in the winter of early 1974, to the very end, in the late fall of 2020.  She was raised by people who loved her but held important and impacting secrets of breathtaking trauma and abuse throughout her entire life, and she attempted to protect him from all of it.  However, she could never extricate herself completely from the actual abusive and gaslighting relationships that shaped and impacted her growth and development and, by proxy, Gregory’s as well.

Gregory’s biological father, also Gregory, came from a severely and abusively patriarchal Sicilian-Catholic family.  Senior assuredly contended with masked mental-health contributions and the traumas of both his abusive upbringing and the infathomably violent Vietnam War, including verified Agent Orange poisoning that would eventually, presenting as cancer, take his life. 

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I have only a handful of clear memories of him, and all of them are torturous and traumatic, occurring between the ages of birth and ten.

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Gregory’s step-father, who Mom married when he was ten and remained with until her death at 6:18 p.m. on December 14^th, 2020, did the absolute best he could across 36 years.  Notably, the best he could do included extensive secrets, lies, emotional abuse, pathological selfishness, and the requisite gaslighting[8] required to remain in control and ahead of one’s self-created and self-preserving narratives.

These are the primary caregiver-support inputs on which the contextually-threaded Gregories socially and emotionally developed between the ages of zero and 26.

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I now understand that I am 2e, or twice exceptional, both gifted and neurodivergent as well as anxious and depressed.  I identify as AuDHD, which is a portmanteau of Autism and ADHD.  After having read Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal text, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” I also realized that I carry the impacts of traumas which would most likely be labeled, “complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (cPTSD),” though van der Kolk’s research, proposal, and definition of, “Developmental Trauma Disorder,” most accurately describe my experiences and presentation.

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Gregory, in public Kindergarten (1980), was consistently punished for bad behavior.  He sat, as punishment, in the corner of a separate closet, the space where student coats and lunches hung and momentarily unused teacher materials loomed from shelves above.  This may not have happened daily, but also it may have.  Trauma memories are notoriously unreliable.[9]  The Kindergarten teacher told Mom that Gregory was advanced academically, but socially challenging and uncontrollably non-compliant.  A local Catholic church, where Mom played and worked bingos, offered a full scholarship to take Gregory.  There, One Nun decided that punching Gregory’s head while a rigid metal whistle poked from between index and middle fingers was the appropriate punishment for his inherent badness.  The Head Nun of the school, who happened to like Gregory[10], offered to take him under her wings and protect him from One Nun and his inability to behave in ways that appeased One Nun.  Gregory was commanded to perform various chores (e.g., banging chalk-filled erasers against an outdoor wall, organizing files, sanitizing, etc.) created by Head Nun when he finished in-class assignments with One Nun.  Typically, those assignments, which Gregory would perfectly complete within several minutes, were structured in 15-30 minute blocks.

Gregory, in Catholic school (1981 – 1984), also met an adult who would critically impact the trajectory of his next three-plus decades.  In the rectory connecting the school to the social hall to the church, Gregory participated in speech therapy with a woman contracted by the church through either the local school district or intermediate unit.

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I don’t remember her name.  I only remember that she dressed in flowing layers with exotic patterns, fingers and neck adorned with shiny, colorful, clanking jewelry.  She may have smelled of incense and patchouli, but this may be plausible fiction.[11] She had a treasure box and she both praised and rewarded me unconditionally.  I remember no punishment.  Only love and laughter and self-confidence, pride and safety.

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By the time Gregory left that church, its early elementary school, the speech clinician they contracted, and the city and state where he’d lived for 10 years?  He required no additional speech therapy.  The school district where he landed, in Milford, Connecticut, was filled with educators quite like the speech therapist; unconditionally regarding, kind, humane, authentically interested in, and often amazed by, Gregory.

Gregory, between 1984, or Fifth grade, and 1999, marking his clinical fellowship year in speech/language pathology at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, became a model student.  Perfection, influenced by the inputs from his first ten years of lived experience and undiagnosed neurodivergences, giftedness, and cPTSD; and perfection, as defined by standardized and assimilationist metrics.

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I look back now and I recognize a boy who was desperately seeking the external validation that he was gaslit and indoctrinated to believe was existentially and definitionally, “Gregory.”  Also, a boy hypervigilantly attempting to avoid the perceived inevitability of rejection and abandonment.  I see a person harboring self-loathing and, often, rage-driven hate.  He broke a lot of material objects, particularly when the internalized pressure-cooker of masking and avoidance became too overwhelming to maintain or control.  He yelled and argued, became indignantly stubborn in the face of any uncomfortable interaction and/or challenging information, which he experienced as shame, embarrassment, and worthlessness-verification.

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In 1993, a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh living off-campus and while walking from his apartment to a class, Gregory witnessed an interpersonal event that would, much like the experiences with the speech therapist at the Catholic school, modify his life’s trajectory.  Perhaps not modify as much as offer abrupt illuminating insight onto the full path that led from then’s then (his earliest impacting experiences and memories) to then’s now (an awareness of and commitment to the alleviation of harm and suffering).

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I recall walking on one side of a city street, cars parked and packed along either side, on a cold and snowless December day.  From the other side of the street and moving toward me, the sounds of a baby crying, a child tantrumming, and a woman’s exasperated, angry, shouting voice.  A corresponding break between parked cars permitted me to see a Mom, baby in her right arm dragging a stroller with her left, and still the wailing of a child.  And there, several feet behind, walking considerably slower than she, a toddler.  I recall the Mom stopping, turning, and forcefully dropping the baby into the stroller.  I recall the baby bouncing up and landing back in the stroller, but at an awkward sideways angle.  I hear the baby’s cry intensify.  I see the Mom walk back, grab the child by their arm, and pull them up, dangling, then turning toward the stroller.  And there’s nothing after that but me standing there.  Processing.

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In 1995, completing applications for graduate school, Gregory writes an essay about the incident witnessed.  In conclusion, Gregory commits to a professional and existential drive; to, in all interactions with children, offer unconditional positive regard and be a kind, positive, building-up influence.  Gregory believed that just an ounce of love could begin the process of healing gallons of anger, abuse, and trauma.  Gregory believed that there was no reversing the impact and trajectory of a person awash in unconditional positive regard and empathy.[12]

Gregory became a licensed and certified speech and language pathologist and spent his clinical fellowship year at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where he became increasingly weary of the demands and decisions of a non-profit behemoth run like a private corporation and suspect of the practical impact of his ability to deliver what felt, to him, like fast-food style therapy in a pristinely structured, clinician-led, decontextualized setting where children exited their real worlds to be controlled, manipulated, and fixed.  He left the field of speech and language pathology to join AmeriCorps (1999) which would lead, a year later, to his application and acceptance to the Peace Corps as a Deaf education volunteer in Kenya.

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One of my closest cousins had a Deaf child, and I participated in American Sign Language (ASL) classes at The Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and Community College of Allegheny County for many years.  While an AmeriCorps volunteer, I served at an after-school program attached to a community-based human services organization.  As that year-long experience approached a closing, I applied to several graduate programs offering PhD degrees in Speech/Language Pathology, and I applied to Peace Corps.  Seeing my credentials, training, and ASL experience, the New York Peace Corps office called and offered me a slot in Kenya, which I almost immediately accepted.  This journey allowed me to completely extricate myself from the traumas and experiences threading to that moment, and to exist entirely independently for two-plus years.  I’m certain I didn’t realize this then, but it’s fairly clear now.  I was escaping the relationships that defined me as much as I was approaching an endeavor that resonated with the buried “Gregory” I believed I wanted to discover and become.

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Which happened. Gregory lived through a harrowing break-up with a Deaf woman he came to need, though he would have claimed, “love” at the time.  He survived several muggings, a dental trauma, exposure to tuberculosis, and other threatening experiences.  On September, 11^th, 2001, after having completed morning chores and taught early elementary classes, an official U.S. Government vehicle entered the school complex to inform Gregory about terrorist attacks.  In December of that same year, during school break, Gregory would spend holiday in Mombasa, a Muslim city, during Ramadan, and find peace, comfort, and community among both his Peace Corps volunteers and his various acquaintances across the city.  Gregory would also meet, teach, and be taught by Moses Chege.

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I believe that Moses Chege was the first person I came to support with undiagnosed Autism and giftedness, as well as the anxiety, depression, and cPTSD emerging from, I’m convinced, existing as a Deaf, Autistic child in a school and immediate culture influenced by the extremely punitive, ableist, patriarchal, and supremacist pedagogical methods of the colonizing British. I didn’t know it then, but I had a sense that Moses was different and also gifted and capable beyond what ANYONE, including most of his classmates and Deaf elders working and participating in on-campus vocational programs, believed or showed him.  Moses flinched. Moses ran away.  Moses hid.  He was, at times, selectively mute.  At other times, extremely fidgety and talkative, though not with contextually-relevant or even necessarily understandable language.  But his art.  His use of crayons, chalk, or any medium available of putting idea to paper or wall or ground or floor.  Was stunningly unusual and impossible for me to ignore.  It was bold and textured, akin to Mark Rothko paintings and also Jean-Michel Basquiat’s visual communication, but entirely Moses Chege.  I have written about and recorded audio stories of Moses.  He is with me, in memory and spirit, to this day.  He was the first person to teach me what that commitment I made on that street off Pitt’s campus entailed and meant.  I began to grok[13].  I observed his demeanor, his presence, his communication, and his social confidence modify and expand over the years of my service.  I felt the impact of authentic, empathetic, and unconditional relationship and I saw the outward impacts of what I now call impact-regarding social-and-emotional pedagogy.  Moses and I mutually-benefitted from each other’s regard and presences.

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Gregory returned from Kenya in 2002, experienced what many call reverse culture-shock, felt the necessity for another escape; and researched, applied for, and was hired to be a founding educator of KIPP: South Fulton Academy.  That entire experience; from enthusiastically landing in Springtime Atlanta, Georgia, and earnestly attempting to create, write, and teach the art AND the health/physical education curricula for 5^th graders; to dejectedly leaving after an extended period of actual rejection, definitional failure, and depression, just as Fall transitioned to Winter; lasted 9 months.

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While there isn’t space here, particularly given the fact that I want to build this story as succinctly as is possible and necessary, to fully explore the “Knowledge Is Power Program,” “Teach for America,” or the U.S. movement toward charter schools and so-called, “School Choice,” it’s important to mention at the very least the following.  A significant reason I encountered the lowest emotional vignette of my life was that I was entirely unaware of the ableist, classist, and white-savior foundations of the entire context into which I walked AND ALSO I still had no idea about the impacts of my unexplored adverse childhood experiences as well as my neurodivergences and giftedness.

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Gregory moved to Pittsburgh between Christmas and New Year’s Eve of 2003 and one of his University clinical practicum supervisors hired him to be a school-aged SLP with Pittsburgh Public Schools.  In the summer of 2004, Gregory was asked to serve the extended school year at a preschool campus. Shady Lane School.

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I’m sitting here feeling a lot of emotions. Moist eyes.  An emotional song in my ears.  (“Good Day” by The Philharmonik, if you’d like to connect to this experience with additional sensory inputs and you have the ability to do so.)  I am still at Shady Lane School[14].  It began in June of 2003 and here, in February of 2022[15], I continue to discover my life’s work and passions with administrators, educators, children, families, and the surrounding communities of Wilkinsburg, Oakland, Shady Side, Squirrel Hill, Point Breeze, Homewood, Larimer, Regent Square, Wilkinsburg, Edgewood, and Swissvale.  The years at Shady Lane included wonderful personal experiences, including becoming a spouse, a step-parent, and a pet-caretaker; exploring creativity through singing in contemporary a cappella groups, podcasting, writing, and learning to play various hand percussion instruments; entering self-employment and purchasing (well, financing) a new car and a house for the first time.  I’d become what many call, “a grown-up,” though the Gregory through even those times still sought validation and definition from others, reflexively and unconsciously masking his underlying emotions, trauma-reactions, and neurodivergent tendencies; avoiding self-confrontation or any exploration of foundational fears of rejection and abandonment.  But he began to awaken.  The process was powerfully influenced by, a. Donald Trump’s ascendency, presidency, and continued influence, b. The global COVID pandemic and our myriad harm-disregarding and de facto eugenicist reactions as a species, and c. The racist, classist, ableist, homophobic, transmisic, misogynistic, and kyriarchal unmasking of overwhelming swaths of his friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, community members, and those just one or two degrees of separation from his momentary lived-experience.  It was an emotionally painful journey.  One additional event, however, would finally demolish the tower of Gregory’s (and Gregories) survival-driven elaborately-constructed existence, set upon a precarious and maternally-maintained foundation, and propel him…me…to the very moment you take your next breath.

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The following piece was written on December 15^th, 2020, a day after Gregory lost Mom to COVID. 

TRIGGER and CONTENT WARNINGS:  If a personal description of experiencing the loss of a deeply-loved-one to COVID seems like a thing that might trigger emotions you wish to, at this point, avoid?  Please move directly over this section and find the next centered demarcation. Like the one just below.  So you truly know that it’s safe to re-enter.

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Day 1.

9:40 a.m.

All is calm. All is bright.

Have coffee. Brian Eno’s, “Ambient 1/Music for Airports” in my head. Lots of love and support from folks. It’s all been and is being received. Please know that.

Just, a lot of numbness.

I should explain myself.

…

Day 0.

6:18 p.m.

All was tenuous.  All was dark.

My Mom had made a peaceful transition after having been disengaged from all life support.

I was numb.

…

Then…anger, sadness, rage, joy, laughter, tears. Memories and cycling thoughts, unpredictable emotions. Optimism and pessimism and the feeling like I might actually explode out of my skin…then the numbness.

Eno helps.

The nurse played Motown for Mom as they removed each piece of life support.

Josie. That’s her name. You know her, and if you don’t, you know someone like her.  It might be you. She would never have forgiven any of us if we’d made a more selfish decision.  Repeatedly threatened to haunt us if we kept her body on life support knowing that she would have no quality of life otherwise.

She was, if nothing else, ALIVE.

Mom transitioned with “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and then “Dancin’ in the Streets.” It was fucking beautiful.

I had no idea what I was walking into.

We’d already “visited” her from our homes. Maura, from palliative care, organized and supported us. Her nurse, Jessi, brought us into the room with an iPad…Zoom for Final Farewells. We told her we loved her and we let her know that she could and should let go and be received by whomever she would be received.

The call ended. The world paused.

Then a social worker, Jocelyn, called me. Indicated that they could get me in. 

To the hospital.

I never really processed what that meant. Didn’t think to ask.  I assumed I would be with Jocelyn, Maura, perhaps a doctor and hospital administrator in a separate area.

I got dressed, and my wife drove me to the hospital. I walked in and…it was surreal. Cinematic.  Specifically? Like a Kubrick film but without any of the overt menace.  Still menace, though.  So much menace.  And quiet.  Just…unsettling quiet.

The guard indicated where I should go, and I walked.  Numb. Eventually (I don’t have specific memory here), I landed at a double door. Someone buzzed me in, and I entered the most intense of intensive care pods. A nurse approached, walked me to the end of a hall, room 16. There was so much equipment, so many screens, and several thick clusters of seemingly dozens of tiny tubes. There was an office chair for me. I was with her, across a distance of 10 or so feet, a sealed door, and, I can’t impress strongly enough the amount of equipment…but still, with her.

I was her everything. She always said that and she always behaved as such, and thusly it was fitting that the universe conspired to place me right there. Right then. It was gentle and compassionate and peaceful and had I fair warning of PRECISELY what I would be given the privilege to witness and support? I’m certain I would have balked. I would have hidden. I would have avoided.

That’s not what the universe had in store for me, and I appreciate that most of all.

And you know what? That I walked through all of those fears, the existential dilemma of mortality that so often stops me in my tracks and crushes any ability to even think, let alone move? That’s all her. My Mom was the alpha, the one person who supported and encouraged and loved me…with all of my quirks and oddnesses and extraness and passion and anger. All of my crusades and endeavors. But also all of my anxieties and fears and trauma-reactions. I was only ever brave enough to take risks…because of her.

So it was absolutely fitting that she was the one who drew me to my greatest fear, THE…greatest human fear of all.

And it was beautiful. I’m telling you it was fucking beautiful.

(Takes a deep, deep inhalation.  Holds. Exhales. Sips overproof whiskey.)

Now…you’ll recall I also mentioned anger. My Mom took risks and I was never quite able to impress upon her the seriousness of the world around us. I’m angry at her…but also I’m angry at all of us.

Each time a person needed to go into Mom’s room, they donned extensive personal protective equipment. I laughed at one point because one of the suits looked like a damn proton pack. Ghostbusters’ style. So there I am laugh-crying and internally performing the Bobby Brown rap from, “On Our Own.”

The universe delivered levity. The universe always delivers levity when levity is due.

Death is much less scary than I’d ever imagined it to be. I mean, everything that we imagine is never as whatever as we imagined…because it just is what it is.  We exist in each moment.  Death allows neither dillying nor dallying about the past or future.  It beckons us back.  To the moment.

The moment.

Hold in your heart these doctors and nurses, social workers and palliative care people, the technicians and docs and guards and every person who decides to walk back into the hospital to care for careless people.

Jesus.

I felt so much remorse and compassion. I felt suffocated…trying to express my appreciation for all of them. And then I couldn’t find my way out. The hospital was authentically Kubrickian in that sense.

Down the elevator to T2, follow the purple arrows (they weren’t actually purple and) across another tower and toward the, wait, is THAT where I should have turned? and fuck I just want, just NEED to get back to my spouse, in the parking lot, where is the parking lot?!

And still the quiet.  Unavoidable quiet.  Wait.  No. With subtle minor-keyed Muzak Christmas dirges like exit music for the grief-stricken.

Stickers on the floor six feet apart from each other. Is that six feet? I don’t think it is.

(Oh.  Did you know that the 6 foot thing is just a rule of thumb and it turns out 6 feet of distance is actually not nearly enough? Now you do. You can easily research it because I encourage nobody to take me, or anybody, necessarily, at their word.)

I walked…and the hallways stretched out. Time and space warped.

Please just, if you do nothing else in remembrance or honor of my Mom, perhaps your parent or spouse or friend, and all of the people who take care of the careless, stop spreading this goddam virus and STOP spreading misinformation about this virus because of how you feel or what you believe. It’s all the same. People are dying. And the 99 percent or 97 percent or whatever percent who don’t die? Heart damage. Lung damage. Blood damage. Immune system damage. Extensive rehabilitation. Lingering disabilities. Systemic damage about which we don’t even yet know. Long-term? We have no idea. Perhaps all of you who had it and had mild symptoms or were asymptomatic…perhaps there’s some fate waiting 5 years out. 10 years out. 10 months out. WE. DON’T. KNOW.

Care about humans. That’s all I’m asking. Care about humans.

Thanks for being.

Love yinz.

-G

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What I did not know when I wrote that eulogy and pandemic missive could fill volumes.  For now, I will repeat a paragraph from near the start of this section, but with one critical modification.  Instead of illuminating how I professionally present, I will share how I existentially present.

As of this moment (June 3, 2022)[16], the Gregory that I experience is a forty-seven year-old cisgender, heterosexual, physically-abled, relatively socioeconomically-stable, Standard American English fluent, Catholic-baptized but existentially agnostic white man.  I am neurodivergent, defined by the acceptance of defined labels including: ADHD, gifted, anxious, depressed, and developmental trauma disorder.  Since acknowledging and embracing that complex neurodivergent existence, which occurred somewhere in the vicinity of the spring of 2020, I have engaged in extensive professional development.  I’ve accumulated, consumed, organized, synthesized, and integrated vast information across various fields[17] offering relevant evidence.  I found, or was found by texts, articles, social media, podcasts, TED and related-but-unaffiliated talks, and, most critically, other vulnerable and impacted people who have experienced and continue to experience the toxic stress and traumas of merely existing in a world that demands compliance and assimilation to impossible and unconscionable standards.  And I’ve continued to engage in the praxes of speech and language therapy as well as impact-regarding social-and-emotional coaching and bridging given the wisdom and guidance of all that came before losing Mom integrated with and informed by all experienced since.[18]

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The Supporter’s Earnest Consideration of the Personal and Cultural Circumstances, Values, Priorities, and Expectations Identified by Supportees, Supportee-Caregivers, and Supportee-Communities-of-Influence.

It’s a harrowing task to even consider illuminating how I’ve done these things across the span of my now twenty-six-year-old career; the impacts, across my professional lifetime, on people who I served well before I’d seriously considered considering the impacts of my behaviors on others.  I hadn’t until quite recently even KNOWN ABOUT the lived-experiential and often traumatic social, emotional, behavioral, and neurological contributions to MY dysregulated behaviors and masked, hypervigilantly-appeasing existence.

The one area of my life within which I have always attempted to intentionally attend to the impacts of my inputs, explicitly seeking ways to move beyond even human-to-human service without attachments (i.e., a mitzvah[19]) and explicitly toward mutually-beneficial human becoming…was when I donned the pediatric speech-language pathology mask.

>>>>>+<<<<<

Oh wow.  An actual moment of insight here[20].  What is about to come out of my fingers never existed in the world and there it arrived in my head as I’m about to give it to you.  With subsequent editing, of course.[21]

It’s stunning me, now…after having been compelled to travel back to the immediately previous section and read through the threaded-Gregories exploration…I’m wide-eyed, processing the paragraphs connecting me to that validating, encouraging, unconditionally regarding, empathizing, and, likely herself[22] well on a path to becoming[23], speech and language pathologist…the one who I encountered at the school with that One Nun who physically traumatized me…and the Head Nun who didn’t abuse me but also never offered direct validation or comfort…after I’d encountered the Kindergarten teacher who’d placed me, often, in the corner of a musty closet because I was eternally a broken and unfixable bad boy…after I’d encountered a biological Father who perpetually and unflinchingly terrorized me as an infant and toddler because of…(and this is also just coming to me)…a powerful internalized hatred of femininity and…because we all possess femininity…a powerful internalized hatred of self…passed from Father to Son…to son…for perhaps many generations…how many generations (?) and why the reflexive disdain of women and experiencing emotions (?!)…in the Del Duca clan.

Okay, I can’t continue forward.  I’m closing up shop for the night, taking some time to process all of this, and I’ll be back to write again.  Later.

>>>>>+<<<<<<

It is later.

I wonder if I wasn’t donning a speech/language pathologist mask as much as I was removing all of the other self-protective masks and mechanisms and actually revealing a deeper, truer Gregory across my professional career.  I wonder if I wasn’t caring for previous Gregories for years.  Seeing myself in the existences, struggles, and impact-disregarding relationships of the myriad individuals I intentionally influenced across the decades.  Which is a potentially dysfunctional and dangerous position; an influencer who is subconsciously attempting to ameliorate his own traumas by treating others.  One can easily imagine such a dynamic having unintended impacts on supportees without a supporter even realizing or imagining to realize.

I can, today, after the decades-long additive and accumulative self-work, confidently communicate that my consideration of supportees’ existential realities is relatively clean of uninspected, unresolved, and unregulated behavioral reflexes, trauma-reactions, and dysfunctional, self-protective interpersonal defense mechanisms.[24]

>>>>>+<<<<<

Internal Evidence from Data and Observations Collected from An Accumulation of Individual Supportees, and External Evidence from Scientific Literature Pointing In a Direction of Efficaciousness.

As previously mentioned but not elaborated, my initial professional training occurred at the University of Pittsburgh in the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Education, and the Department of Communication: Science and Disorders, between 1992 and 1999.  I began practicing as a speech/language pathologist immediately after exiting graduate school and completing my 9-month clinical fellowship year.  I have maintained a Pennsylvania license and national accreditation through the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association without interruption since initially acquiring them.  These accomplishments require approved and peer-reviewed professional development hours yearly.  It seems both pretentious and unnecessary to elaborate each hour spent accumulating and synthesizing both internal and external evidence, though if I am to communicate a complete evidence-based argument for the consideration of my proposed framework and pedagogy, some brief justification is important to the endeavor.  And here that is: Beyond the required professional development of my state and accrediting body, I have consumed and integrated many hours of additional research and evidence.  Considering conferences, texts, articles, recorded lectures, professional podcasts, related media, and the day-to-day praxis of evaluation, treatment, continuous progress monitoring, and evidence-informed modifications of treatment across various communities and populations of disability and neurodivergence, the total time numbers at least in the low tens of thousands.  Please also note that you will find embedded, linked, and cited research and evidence throughout the book.

>>>>>+<<<<<

And there you have it.  A consolidated evidence-based exploration of my lived experience pointing toward an impact-regarding social-and-emotional pedagogy and a support framework of impact-centered interpersonal-influence.  If you feel compelled to continue, I encourage you to continue to the next chapter.[25]

Actually, please proceed to the endnote.[i]

[1] The reader may be best served here to read the very brief Chapter 2, “Glossary of Critical Terms for Section I,” particularly if any of the terms here or upcoming disrupt the flow of readability.

[2] Through bridging and coaching, two IRSE techniques that will be introduced in Chapter 3, further elaborated in Chapter 4, then expanded and functionally contextualized in Section II.

[3] Chapter 5 will explore lineages of praxis and practical contextualizations for both IRSE and IDB endeavors.

[4] An assertion informed my lived experiences and accumulated evidence as both supportee and supporter.

[5] From the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), EBP definition and resources.

[6] Again, readers may be served by reading Chapter 2, which provides a succinct glossary of critical terms.  However, I attempt to illuminate and elaborate less-common or novel constructs within the narrative contexts surrounding important terms like, “praxis.”

[7] Yes, Gregories.  Even the human who began writing this book in 2021 is not the same human typing the words you are currently reading, and the human who wrote those words as you read them now is not the same as either of the previous existential iterations.  The thread, or flow-of-momentary-lived-experience, is the most tangible and consistent thing.  Not decontextualized past Gregories.

[8] Wikipedia remains a good and accessible resource for preliminary research, providing constantly vetted, researched, and professionally-maintained encyclopedic illuminations of many things, including gaslighting.

[9] As Emily Salier wrote and the Indigo Girls sang, and I’m paraphrasing here, “A curse and a blessing are one and the same.”

[10] One learns quickly that playing the role of clown, or precociously cute kid, or any number of performative masks donned can cause potential abusers to relax, laugh, and show all of the outward signs of approval and validation.  The head Sister thought I was cute and amusing.  One Nun did not.  So I worked the game as best I could.

[11] Remember that Indigo Girls lyric?  The line immediately after, “The curse and the blessing.  They’re one and the same,” is, “Baby, it’s all…such a treacherous game.”  And it is.

[12] Looking back now, I must have encountered the words of Carl Rogers before Gregory from even a few hours back believed.  I’d always believed my introduction came in a graduate level counseling class.  And while certainly that course provided a deeper understanding of Rogers and Person-Centered Therapy, it’s clear now that I’d at least read him earlier.

[13] From Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 novel, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” comes the verb: grok. (Reference)

[14] I’m going to leave this paragraph.  However, I am no longer at Shady Lane School. Please continue reading and the story will unfold.

[15] I’m smiling at myself, here on 8/11/24, having persevered quite a bit in the intervening years.  Sorry to steal you away again from the story, but also this is part of the story!

[16] Again, I am leaving this date and paragraph, as it illuminates an important moment in time which is not THIS (8/11/24) moment in time.

[17] These include Speech/Language Pathology, Early Childhood Development and Education, Psychology, Psychiatry, Palliative Care, Interpersonal Neurobiology, Pedagogy, Neurosciences, Nursing, Medicine, Social Development Studies, Disability Studies, and Sociology.  Likely there are other fields I’ve encountered along the way which I either didn’t process as such or even realize I should process as such.  I prefer to provide explicit credit and gratitude when possible, and I apologize if I’ve inadvertently neglected to credit a field of study where credit is due.

[18] A final thought from 8/11/24 for now: Things have changed.  I’m going to add an endnote to this chapter that updates my story to this moment.  But please, continue above.

[19] I encourage the reader to here: navigate to the reference, and then scroll to the bottom of the article and note the, “See Also” section.

[20] “Here,” here, is February, 2022.

[21] But not much and, when necessary, only to improve readability.

[22] I remember her as a woman and cannot predict if they identified or identify to this day as such, but please indulge me the pronoun that Gregory then FELT. If that makes sense.  If it doesn’t, please reach out to me.  Thank you.

[23] Ah, the concept of, “becoming.”  It can be found in many places, I’m certain, but the places where I found it, or from where it found me, include The Tao Te Ching as interpreted and communicated by both the poet Stephen Mitchel and the irreducible rascal Alan Watts, also the book,  “On Becoming A Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy,” by Carl Rogers.

[24] Reference material, should you be interested in reading more about defense mechanisms.

[25] Even if you have already read the next chapter’s non-alphabetical Glossary, I recommend re-reading it, particularly in preparation for the subsequent chapters and to perhaps ensure more fluid and continuous readability as you encounter unusual, uncommon, and novel terms, particularly as I’ve contextualized them within the proposed framework and pedagogy.

[i] In the spring of 2022, I lost my job at Shady Lane School.  The details aren’t important beyond the fact that the entire administration changed within several months and I remained well beyond when I should have also moved on.  I wasn’t ready to move on.  The universe had other things in store.  After a several-month period of having no job and needing to use high-interest loans to proceed forward, facing rejection after rejection in the job market, I landed on my feet with a wonderful, welcoming, and safe non-profit as an employment and educational coach for autistic and neurodivergent teens and young adults.  I’m going to end the chapter here, knowing that I will revisit and expand the work I’m now doing in later chapters.  The upcoming chapters, 2 – 4, will illuminate the emergence of my framework and pedagogy with infant, toddler, preschool, and early elementary school populations.  That my journey has followed a developmental trajectory is both fitting and convenient!