Ann Grady: Resilience and Advocacy : From the Page to Real Life with Stories that Heal.

Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide?
Hosted by Tony Mentor, broadcasting from the heart of Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee.
Join us as our guests share their raw, powerful stories.
Some will spark laughter, others will move you to tears.
These real life journeys inspire, connect and remind you that
you're never alone. We're igniting a global movement to empower
everyone to make a lasting difference by fostering deep awareness,
unwavering acceptance, and profound understanding of autism and mental health.
Tune in, be inspired, and join us in transforming the world,
one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome
to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide.
Joining us today is Anne Grady. She is someone whose
work sits right at the intersection of empathy, lived experience,
and real world impact. She is an author, speaker, and advocate,
shining a light on autism and mental health not just
through research and theory, but through honesty, compassion, and lived truth.
Through her books and advocacy, she challenges the stigma around
neurodiversity and mental illness while giving voices to families, caregivers,
and individuals who are too often misunderstood or unheard. Her
work doesn't just educate, it humanizes. This conversation is about resilience, understanding,
and what it really means to support mental health and
autism with dignity and empathy. She has a great story.
So before we dive into our episode, we'll be back
with an uninterrupted show right out after a word from
our sponsors. Thanks for coming on.
Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
This new book has given me an opportunity to share
Evan's story and some of my other stories in a
way that I hope resonates with your audience.
I hope will help somebody out there.
Yeah. I think that's great and I'm sure they're going
to love it if you would give us a little
backstory on your son.
So I knew something was wrong when I was pregnant.
My doctor joked that Evan would be a soccer player.
And when he was born, it was a very hard birth.
It was an emergency C section after months of pre
term labor. When he was born, the nurse came into
the room and she was like, honey, I have to
be honest.
I've been doing this.
For over thirty years, and I have never met a
baby this angry. It's insane, and I'm like, oh great,
that's the thing a first time mom wants to hear.
Right.
So Evan was born something not right, and nobody believed me.
I started him in early childhood intervention therapy when he
was eleven months old. His father left when he was
eighteen months old. So I found myself as a and
I'm consulting with all of these big companies and I'm
getting on stage and doing motivational talks.
And at home, I was just crumbling. I was overwhelmed.
I was exhausted.
And when Evan was three, he tried to kill me
for the first time. By the time he was four,
he was on his first antipsychotic, and then when he
was seven, he was in his first pediatric psych hospital.
And so I've spent my career. My master's was in
communication and organizational development.
I was already training.
And speaking and working with leaders, but this really shifted
my work from a place of reaction to a place
of resilience and really focusing on building that strength. And
then at some point I ended up with a tumor
in my salivary gland like it was twenty fourteen ish.
I ended up with facial paralysis and a whole bunch
of other things, and then I had double fusion back surgery,
and meanwhile Evan's in and out of hospitals and treatment centers.
I realized that, you know, resilience is wonderful, but it's survival,
it's not growth. And so that led me to write
my new book, Evolvability, Growing Forward when life goes sideways,
because I think for most of us life has gone
sideways on more than one occasion, and it's just a
skill set to navigate it.
Was he diagnosed with autism, serious mental illness or was
it both both?
It was so hard to get a diagnosis for him
because he has so many comorbidities, so ADHD, autism, severe
mental illness, you know, oppositional defiant disorder. He's high functioning autism,
but he has developmental delays. So probably age wise, he's
got three different ages. He's got his chronological age, which
is twenty two, he's got his socio emotional age, and
he's got his academic age.
And so it's just been a.
Lifelong for the last twenty two years, it's been a
journey of acceptance and growth and discomfort and trying to
find a way to, you know, turn that into a
meaningful lesson that people can apply without hopefully having to
go through all of that trauma.
Unfortunately, there is a stigma. I don't like to use
that word, I use perception about autism and serious mental illness.
How do you make people understand where neurodivergence ends and
mental health begins, and of course where they overlap.
It's a great question, and I'm not a psychiatrist or
a neurologist or a neuropsychiatrist, but I can tell you
with Evan it was so hard to differentiate and pick
those apart because the behaviors were also intertwined, so it
was virtually impossible. That's why he got his first autism
diagnosis at four. But then they thought, no, it's not autism,
it's just mental illness. And then they realized, nope, it's
not just mental illness, it's developmental delays. And then at
seventeen they're like, nope, it's absolutely autism. And so I
think the challenges it doesn't matter what the label is.
What matters is how you treat.
It and respond to it, and it's so sad because
you know, to your point, Texas has the least mental
health benefits of any state in the country. The slogan
here used to be thank God for Mississippi, but now
we are dead last. So it's just heartbreaking. Evan lives
two thousand miles away from me in Idaho because he
can get the services he needs there and he cannot
get them in Texas.
So yeah, it's a lot.
We always had this idea in our minds of what
we thought life could be, and of course what it
could be for our kids. What were the moments that
you were forced to unlearn the thoughts you had learned?
Then you had to look at things completely different than
what you was taught and how you was brought up
and raised.
I was in a support group, so I donate a
portion of all my book proceeds to the National Alliance
on Mental Illness, and I've been part of their classes
and support groups. Know me and one of the moms
in there showed me a pome about going to Holland.
And this person had planned this entire trip and they
planned this whole vacation and they ended up somewhere other
than Holland, and they're like, it doesn't mean it's a
bad vacation. It doesn't mean it's a bad place to go,
but it's just different than what you expected.
And so for me, this journey.
Of acceptance has not been It's not a steady state.
It happens in moments.
Right.
Evan was here over the Christmas holiday and we had
some moments where I slipped back into like non acceptance.
And so I think, I don't think anybody gets there
and lives there permanently.
I think it's a campslight we keep circling back to.
And the key is to go back to focusing your
energy on what you can control. And one of Evans
doctors said something to me once that really stuck with me.
He said, you know, you need to practice the art
of zen and I said, great, how do you define that?
And he said, it's knowing that you've done everything you
can and releasing yourself from the outcome.
And as parents, that's so hard to do because you
want to protect your.
Kids and just because he's twenty two, he's still likes
seven years old mentally, and it's hard to do that.
You know, Yeah, now you brought up resilience. Resilience is
sometimes misunderstood. Of course, some people have their definition. So
what does real resilience look like for you? Then let's
bring it to your son. How does it look for
him in getting through his autism and of course his
serious mental illness.
So everybody has a resilience buffer zone.
Right, life happens to you and you could have one
person who has a setback and it tables them, and
another person who has the same setback and they just
get back up. Right, So everybody, through genetics, through life experiences,
childhood experiences, everybody has a different size buffer and resilience.
You can't always reduce the stressors, but you can build
your capacity to absorb them in a way that doesn't
damage your health or your well being.
And that's how I view resilience. It's not just.
Getting back up, it's extracting, meaning it's understanding how to
use that discomfort to get stronger. For Evan, it's hard
because he doesn't understand a lot of that. So for
us we practice more of the skills of resilience rather
than calling them resilience.
They're just daily practices.
Sure. Now, in your books you talk about the brain
and various things. What do you wish people knew more
and understood more on how the autistic brain processes trauma
and then of course how mental illness processes it differently.
I think the.
Biggest thing to know is that way more people than
you think are on the autism spectrum. A lot of
people that I work with didn't even get diagnosed into
late adulthood, and so I think there are so many
people who don't even realize they're on the spectrum, and
the biggest challenges they see are with executive functioning skills,
This ability to put things in a greater context, to plan,
to problem solve, to recognize other's emotional state and be
able to regulate your own emotions, social cues, all of
those components.
And then you get into mental illness.
And it's also a spectrum, just like autism is, right,
so it's not like you're either bipolar or not depressed
or not. Lots of people experience symptoms. When it becomes
an illness is when it starts to impact your quality
of life, your relationships, your.
Ability to function.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression at the age of nine,
and trust me, the irony of a depressed motivational.
Speaker is not lost on me.
But a lot of people believe that it's weakness and
its biology. So I think there are some people who
use mental illness as an excuse. I'm depressed, I'm anxious,
Therefore I can't do dut dut dut dut dut. And
for many people that may be true initially, but for
most of us, we can start to practice these skills
and build these muscles. It doesn't take the illness away,
it doesn't change who you are fundamentally in your brain,
but it does start allowing you to practice skills that
help you recover faster, that help you feel better and
live better.
Now, if this next question is too personal, just tell
me no and we'll move on to something different. Okay,
you mentioned you were a single mother. Unfortunately, autistic parents
have a very high divorce rate. Was that part of
the reason that caused it? And if it was, how
did you handle it raising this autistic child that has
severe mental illness as well?
So it was part of it.
My ex husband was an alcoholic and thought that Evan's illness.
Was my parenting ability, as did our pediatrician.
Right like, if you were a better mom, if you
were more consistent than our kid would be fine, And
so I found myself in a place of sheer exhaustion.
I mean I was.
That's how I ended up with a tumor in my face, right, Like,
you just can't operate at that level of exhaustion. But
when I started to date, when I thought about getting remarried,
before I would ever go on a date with my husband,
We've now been married for sixteen years, but before I
would even go on a date with him, I told
him all about Evan. I explained it after we were
together for a while. Then I introduced him to Evan,
and I'll never forget it. It was one of our
first dates with Evan there and he had an absolute
and total meltdown in a restaurant, flipped a table, scared
all the people out, And so you're there trying to go.
I still really like you, and I still want to
date you, but I get it if you want to
leave now, because you've seen what this can look like.
So it's hard, and a lot of parents get divorced.
You blame each other, You run out of skills, you
run out of energy when you're going on empty, when
you're just trying to survive the day, it is incredibly
difficult to pour time and energy into the relationship, and
relationships need time and energy and work. And when you're
giving all of that energy to your kids because you're
just trying to survive, it's very difficult to make time
for yourself. One of Evan's therapists told us very early on,
my husband Jay and I that we needed to have
a date night once a week where we did not
talk about kids, we did not talk about work. We
work together too now, so it was you know, you
don't talk about work, you don't talk about kids, and
you realize very quickly in a relationship how much of
your daily interactions boil down to logistics, you know, scheduling
and what we're going to do for dinner and how
we're going to get from here to there. And that
was really helpful for us because it forced us to
find other sides of us that we could nurture and build.
When did you stop and decide, you know what? I
have to write a book about this.
In twenty twelve.
So Evan's first hospitalization was in twenty ten, and one
of the ways I tried to cope with that we
lived at the Ronald McDonald house for two months, and
I basically had to leave my home, my job, my
everything to go be at the hospital with him. And
one of the ways I started coping without was writing
a blog about our experiences, about what I was learning
about what we were going through, and people reached out
and would say, you know that it was so helpful
to them that they felt alone, that they didn't realize
other families were going through similar challenges, and so it
really just became a way to help myself therapeutically cathartically.
But as soon as I realized it had meaning and
value and helped other people. One of the greatest skills,
whether you're trying to grow or bounce back, is to
make meaning of challenging experiences. You know, they don't erase pain,
but they give it a purpose. And so it's like, Okay,
how do I use this to make meaning out of
a really tough situation that I didn't ask for, didn't want,
but have, So what do you do with it? Well,
I didn't want other families to have to do all
of the work to recreate that wheel if they didn't
have to, So I just started pouring it into books
and my first book came out in twenty fourteen. My
newest book, Evolvability, will be out in two weeks. And
so yeah, I've got four of them, and I just
am learning still. So every time I learn something, I
write it down so somebody else can learn from it
as well.
What's the response you've seen from the books. I'm sure
it must be pretty good.
I've been so incredibly grateful for the response.
You know. I'm in front of audiences ranging from corporate
audiences to nonprofit to government agencies. I work with leadership teams,
I work with small groups, large groups, everyone in between.
And so when I get to see all these folks
and they buy books and I get to sign them,
the beauty is we connect and they respond back and
they share with me feedback or I'll see them at
the next event. Because I work with most of my
clients on an ongoing basis, the thing that I hear
most is, well, it's funny, so it's easy to read.
I try to, you know, make it not too serious.
But the other thing is I take really complex neuroscience
and psychology and dumb it down to where I can
understand it. And so my thing is always talk to
me like I'm three years old, so I can understand it.
I don't need all the theory, I don't need all
of the background, but I do want to know what
the strategy is and how I practice it. So the
thing I hear is thank you for making me laugh,
thank you for making it simple to understand, and most importantly,
thank you for the really practical skills that I can
use at work or at home or anywhere in between.
Can you give us an example on how you take
things and make it more simple for people. This way
they'll get a better understanding about what you're talking about.
Sure.
So, if you think about the brain, there's so many
complexities that are involved with this amazing organ It boils
down to being a survival machine. Your brain is all
looking for ways to keep you alive. It doesn't care
if you're happy. It doesn't care if you're rested. It
doesn't care if you're in love or feel work life balance.
Your brain is only there to keep you alive, and
so to do that, it magnifies anything it perceives as
a threat. That could be a car careating at you,
or a snarky email in your inbox, and anytime that happens,
we lose the ability to regulate our emotions, We lose
the ability to problem solve, to have our immune system
function effectively, to regulate ourselves to any higher level thinking
is impossible when you're disregulated. And so I teach people
how to use that understanding of the brain to shift
the way it works, because you can change your brain
just like any other muscle.
You just have to know how.
What do you tell people when they're struggling. What is
the first step they do? How do they get from
a panic number ten to maybe a panic level of
five or better.
The first thing is to know it's okay not to
be okay. You know, in this happiness culture, it's like
ten or eleven billion dollars a year just in the
US alone, and your brain's not supposed to be happy
all the time. So what I find is that when
people are struggling, they feel like they're broken, and we
mistake discomfort for danger. So part of it is understanding
that just because you feel stress and anxiety and overwhelmed,
just because it feels bad, doesn't mean it is bad.
It's changing your relationship with the discomfort. So, for example,
one of the things that I believe is the reason
my face recovered. I had facial paralysis as a result
of this avocado sized tumor at my salivary gland, and
the doctor said, your nerve is too far gone.
It's not going to recover.
And I said, well, can you give me some physical
therapy practices.
Something I can do? And he said, I want you
to practice gratitude.
And I was like, seriously, come on, like I need
physical therapy, not a gratitude practice. Like he you know,
he knows that this is my field, and so he said,
go research it for a month.
I want you to go.
Research the academic studies related to gratitude and then you
come back and you tell me what you think. So
I did, and you know, there are thousands of studies
that document the physical and mental health benefits of it.
Just looking for something to be grateful for.
Drops cortis all the stress hormone by twenty three percent,
and so it retrains your brain to look for what's
right instead of what's wrong. Now, I can't prove that's
why my facial nerve recovered, but I am telling you
I integrated it into my day, so it wasn't like
an extra thing.
I started practicing.
While I brushed my teeth in the morning and at night,
I think of three things that are.
Going right in my life and why I'm grateful for them.
I'm not even kidding.
Within three or four months, my face came back after
they said it wouldn't. Now obviously I can't. You know,
it's not causation necessarily. But what gratitude does is it
puts your brain in a state of safety. And so
for Evan, you know, every day, I'm like, tell me
the best thing that happened to you today, Tell me
one thing you're proud of yourself for.
Tell me one thing you're excited about tomorrow.
And it doesn't take the hard stuff away, but it
does train your brain to offset it by looking for
the good stuff as well. And that's a really powerful
shift in not only your body chemistry, but your mental
health and your well being.
Looking back, now, you're an author, you're a speaker. Of course,
you're a mother. What message do you hope that families
who are walking the same path that you are walking
or you have walk what do you hope that they get?
And of course understand when they feel invisible, judged, or
just out of options.
One it would be give yourself some grace.
I mean we do it as professionals, but as parents
we compare ourselves to everyone under the sun. Well, you know,
little Bobby over there seems to be getting a long
finding class. I must be doing something wrong as a mom.
I think the first thing is to give yourself some grace.
You are doing the very best.
You can with the resources you have available right now.
If we could do better, we would do better. Right.
So one is give yourself some grace because it's a
hard situation and nobody has a roadmap.
The other would be to anchor yourself in what matters most.
So what we did for our family is we decided
on three values that we wanted to go our behavior.
What are the values that when decisions get hard? And
I'll give you an example. When Evan was fifteen years old,
we had to make probably the hardest decision I've ever
had to make in his life or in my life.
He was not.
Safe, We were not safe, our daughter was not safe.
We were exhausted, and I went to a psychiatrist and
I said, look, I feel like I'm failing. I don't
want to send him away, but there's no programs in Texas.
The only thing we can find that will take him
and be good for him is an IDAHO. I don't
want to send my baby away and use our life
savings to do it. And he said, well, what's important
to you? I said, well, our family. Family is my
number one value and he said, okay, what choice would
reflect that? And when you make decisions out of stress
and exhaustion, it's so hard for your brain. Making decisions
under pressure is exhausting. When you know what your values are,
it doesn't make hard decisions go away, but it does
make them clear. What would someone who values their family
do in this situation? What kind of parent do I
want to be? And what would that parent do in
this situation. So you're faced with so many decisions, so
many problems to solve, such limited resources. I would say,
join a support group, take classes, educate yourself. Surround yourself
with people who are kind. I can't tell you how
many friends I had to let go of because of
the judgment, because well, everybody else's.
Kids are fine.
I'm not sure what your issue is, but I had
to let go of those people in my life. You
have to surround yourself with people who will accept.
You and your family as you are, and be patient
with you.
And it's hard to do, but give yourself grace, frame
your decisions and your values, and make time if you're
in a partnership with somebody else, especially when you're in
a partnership, make time for that relationship, no matter what
you have to do. Before we could afford it, we
hired somebody. We found him on care dot com and
he ended up being our savior. His name was Michael,
and he was in our house six days a week,
and we couldn't even afford to pay him.
At one point. He was just doing it.
Out of the goodness of his heart. But you need respite,
can't run on empty right.
Right now, you have written four books. Tell us about
the books where they can find them, and of course
where they can find you.
So all of my books are on Amazon. I've got
fifty two strategies for life, love, and work. These are
two to three page strategies with action items on each.
One in a variety of different areas.
Strong Enough Choose, Encourage, Resilience and Triumph is based on
my ted top Mind over Moment Harness.
The Power of Resilience is my third.
Book, and then My newest coming out in a couple
of weeks is Evolvability Growing Forward when life goes sideways,
and it's a six pillar framework for adapting, leading, and
thriving when life does not go according to plan. They're
all in Amazon and you can find me at annngradygroup
dot com.
Tell us again, where did you say that your son
is living now?
He lives in Idaho and a group home.
How has that worked out for you being that far away?
Has it held? We helped? What kind of difference can
you see? And how is he doing?
It helped in that it gave me some perspective, some
space to be able to see things clearly. But it's
hard because I miss him, you know, and we don't
see him as often as we'd like. I think last
year we saw him five or six times. Is it
helping him? It's helping him to feel like he has
independence and autonomy. He lives with two roommates, he has
twenty four hour staff. I am beyond blessed that we
were able to find this program because I've been on
a waiting list in Texas over twenty years to have
similar services, and we're still thirty thousand on the list.
I think it's better for him because he doesn't feel
like he's.
Being rancormanaged by mom and dad.
And I think it's given us some space to focus
on our own mental health and our own physical health.
Because you spend so much time caring for whoever it
is that you're caring for as a caregiver role, that
it's easy to end up depleted, and it forced us
to take a step back. You know, a week after
he went to that school, my husband fell off a
ladder and broke his hip, his arm, and his ribs.
When we went to the er, the doctor said, did
you have something emotional happen lately? And we said, yeah,
we had to take our son two thousand miles away
and leave him at a boarding school because.
We can't care for him.
And the er doctor said, most falls happen after an
emotional incident because you're literally off balance.
So it's given us time to get our balance back.
Of course, having that balance in life is very crucial.
Have you noticed a big change in him now that
he's living where he's at. I'm sure he's on medications
and hopefully they're working. So have you seen an improvement
in him? And do you think his life is better
for it.
Well, he's stable, So I mean, your definition of success
changes as a parent with a kid with special needs.
I started out going, okay, so he won't be a
doctor or a lawyer.
That's okay, all right, Well, so he won't go to
an ivy league school, that's okay.
So he'll go to a community college's okay. So he
won't go to college. Okay, so he'll still have a job. Okay,
So we won't have a job.
But at least he's not in jail, he's not on drugs,
he's not drinking.
Your bar changes.
The good news is that he's not aggressive, violent, or
out of control anymore. The bad news is that he
doesn't really want to get out of bed or participate
in life, So he spends an inordinate amount of time
lying in bed and you know, looking at his phone,
and there are staff that try to get him up
and moving. You know, we try to get him up
and moving, but that's been our greatest challenge and it,
you know, still is a daily struggle to get him
to brush his teeth and take a bath and all
of those basic things that your kids just do until
they don't.
Right you're out on the talk circuit. You're doing what
you do. What does your life look like now being
out there and advocating to help the people that need
their help.
Well, it's you know.
I after Evan left, I have a lot of good
friends who I was like, I'm going to start a nonprofit,
I'm going to do a podcast. I'm going to like
we moved out into the middle of the country, Like
we sold our house in Austin and I have this
small ranch in the middle of nowhere with donkeys and cows.
I had all of these plans to do more and
more and more, and then I realized that sometimes stillness
is the only way to heal.
I do a lot of events.
I travel, I speak, I do training in professional development,
I do virtual programs. But I'm still in the mode
of trying to heal, and so I advocate as much
as I can. At my speaking events, I talk about
mental health. I try to reduce the stigma of mental illness.
I serve as a sounding board for so many people
and mentor a lot of people who are struggling. But
I'm still in my own phase of healing and evolution
and trying to figure it out too I think we're
all just doing the best we can.
That's all you can do, is the best you can do.
Are you advocating to the legislators and the people in
your state that can help make change.
Absolutely, I've testified in front of the Texas legislature. I'm
very involved with, you know, making sure that I'm writing
my congressman, writing my senator, making sure that I'm advocating
for these mental health bills to pass, because I think
when you're standing in a legislative session, it's one thing
to hear it on paper. It's another thing to have
your child not have a bed available because you can't
get him into a psych hospital. I mean, the only
way Evan had a psychotic break in twenty twenty one,
he was in the er. He had injured himself, he
had injured staff, and neither of the two psych hospitals
would take him.
One had no beds. One said he was too severe
and if he couldn't get a bed, then he'd be discharged.
He wasn't better, but he'd be discharged. What I want
people to understand.
Is that you have to advocate for people who can't
advocate for themselves. That also means small things like being
kind to people when they're struggling. Right, you don't know
what anybody else is going through. We're all doing the
very best we can. So it's not just enough to
advocate at the highest level. You're advocating in daily interactions
for people who might not be able to advocate for themselves.
Right Right, Is there anything else you'd like to tell
our listeners about what it is that you're trying to do.
I think my biggest takeaway would be don't mistake discomfort
for danger or something to be avoided.
That's where the growth happens.
If you feel uncomfortable, take the next step, like take
one action, reclaim your sense of agency.
Anything that you can do.
To fuel your energy or at least keep it from draining,
like most of us are attached to this five inch
piece of hardware with no pulse.
Right, it's a simple mental health strategy.
Sleep with your phone in a different room, and if
you're saying, well, it's my alarm clock, they make those.
There are things that you can do daily, micro habits
that you can take, and I outline a ton of
them in this book because I wish somebody had been
able to hand me, you know, a guide to say,
here's what you can do to protect yourself mentally, physically, emotionally.
So anytime you're uncomfortable, you're building the capacity to build
resilience and to go to your next level of evolution.
Embrace the discomfort. Sit in the suck. It's not comfortable,
but it's where all the growth happens.
Yeah. Absolutely, well, this has been great, great information, great conversation.
I really appreciate your taking the time to join us today.
Thank you for all of your advocacy work and bringing
awareness and I absolutely love your show and I appreciate
what you're doing in this world.
So thank you for having me.
Oh it's been my pleasure. Thanks again, thanks for taking
time out of your busy schedule to listen to our
show today. We hope you enjoyed it as much as
we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know someone
who has a story to share, tell them to contact
us at why notm dot world. One last thing, Spread
the word about why Not me, our conversations, our inspiring guests,
the show. You are not alone in this world.