The Feather Foundation for SPD

The primary goal at The Feather Foundation is to treat every family with respect, compassion, dignity, sensitivity and consideration to the unique needs of your specific family with an understanding of cultural, ethnic and the diversity in all forms. We honor the family as its own system, seeing that just as no two individuals are the exact same, no family is either. We also are committed to providing you with integrity, honesty, and transparency.

I have designed this site as a means for those of you who would like to get a better understanding of who I am (and I will say it plainly: determine whether you feel like I can help you and myself or eventually members of my team are individuals that you feel would be a good fit for you and someone you would feel comfortable and want to work with) prior to having to set up an appointment. The reason behind this is that anything after the initial 20 minutes of meet and greet would be considered “billable time”. I am also by nature an introvert, so typically I naturally fall into more of the role of listener than speaker. It is not that I don’t have my own voice, but there is a time and a place for everything, and I feel that for a lot of this, it is best kept to the confines of this blog for now. Who knows what the future holds, things are constantly changing, and I embrace both opportunities for personal and professional growth. Someday, I want to actually write the ten thousand educational children’s books that are floating around in my head, but the world needs this more right now.

 I have provided an extensive amount of written content, where I discuss anything and virtually anything pertaining to SPD, my experiences with it personally and professionally, and the story of how this foundation was born. Some of it was what I like to refer to as “the divine workings of the universe” an some of it was driven by something that I was noticing in society at what to me was a very alarming rate, that was putting a near and dear to my heart and soul, population in significant risk. Which I will discuss in great detail in “Feather’s long and winding road”. I felt compelled to figure out why. Because I am like an 4-year-old who wants to know why and how come about everything, but unlike a 4-year-old, I have spent a ridiculous number of years becoming tremendously capable of finding answers for myself via some deep dives into research. 

Essentially, this was more of a perverse curiosity. Initially, I had no idea where the answer to the question I was attempting to discover would lead. Which was right to what is a large population of children and their families in significant need of services which despite my lack of a very expensive piece of paper and the right to put the word “doctor” in front of my name, just so happened to be something I was by my way of understanding, specifically placed in this life at this point in time with the curious combination of skills, abilities and personality characteristics in order to provide much needed assistance for. 

Ultimately, I consider this to be my dissertation, except this one is likely to be far more useful than anything I possibly could have created under the strict limitations of the academic institution’s parameters. If the purpose of a dissertation is to provide something of value to the field, in my personal experience, that has somehow morphed into basically an antiquated hoop to jump through to say you did. And earn yourself that very expensive piece of paper I just mentioned. This was very much a labor of love, and it is extremely meaningful to me. I learned somewhere around year five of grad school  that despite my grandiose plans of creating a meaningful dissertation, that was not going to happen. And I would so much rather have put my time and energy into creating this, than basically jumping through a hoop. I believe I have mentioned I am a bit of a rare breed. 

There is no right or wrong way to read the remainder should you wish to do so. I attempt to present information organized according to content, and have those broader categories summarized in bold and underlined.  I write very candidly, and I attempt to present information in ways that don’t make this feel like you’re now enrolled in Miss Feather’s honor’s program on sensory processing disorder with a focus on neurobiology.  However, I realize that everyone has their own personal ways of both learning preference and interaction preference. I am attempting to cover as broad a range as humanly possible, but I am fully aware that I can’t possibly cover it all. So, as I say on a regular basis, “choose your own adventure”.