Journey to Finding the New You by Frances Victory (review)

Parenting a child with special needs can be stressful, challenging, and exhausting. Besides the weight of constantly trying to meet your child’s needs, there’s also the challenge of advocating for his needs with his school, health care givers, and others (who may or may not see his needs and offer effective help). As one site notes, “Many parents also report feeling like the joy has been sucked out of parenting when experiencing burnout. This isn’t just about feeling tired; it’s about being completely overwhelmed by the constant demands of caregiving.”

Dr. Frances Victory is a special needs mom who understands parental burnout. She’s been there, done that, and has written a workbook based on her own experience to help other parents navigate these challenges:

I believe mothers and fathers need a resource that would force them to stop for a moment and actually think about themselves and the world around them. A tool they could use to become physically, mentally and emotionally stronger. They wouldn’t be reading general information about the important of being the best parent. He or she would have a tools to create a concrete and personalized plan so that they could become the best parent.

I received a copy of this book for the purposes of this review; all opinions expressed remain my own.

An Overview of This Workbook

Journey to Finding the New You: A Self-Development Guide for Parents of Children with Special Needs gives parent “an opportunity to make any desired changes to help improve your well-being, so you can better advocate for your child’s needs.” Dr. Victory kept the workbook short, sweet to and to the point because she knows parents of special needs kids are busy. Her workbook is meant to be marked up, highlighted, filled with your own notes about your own experience and ideas.

This workbook is divided into two parts: learning about yourself and creating personalized, effective goals. It helps parents:

• learn more about themselves
• think about the role of other people in their life
• remember their accomplishments
• choose the best methods of self-care
• develop goals
• feel empowered as they work on their own needs all within the privacy of their own homes!

The first part guides parents through self-reflection questions on your life, changes you wish you could make, things you want to do, your routines and activities, people in your life, and more. Dr. Victory then talks about the importance of having helpful, supportive, caring and positive people in our lives, and letting go of toxic, hostile, negative and hurtful people. She encourages parents to identify who these people are in their lives and then express appreciation (to positive figures) and set boundaries (for negative figures).

Positive and loving people improve our psychological and emotional well-being. These warm and supportive friends and family are the ones that we cannot live without. They encourage us to go forward and accomplish our goals. As a parent of a child with special needs, you need a strong support system.

The second part guides parents through applying what they’ve learned in the first part to create personalized, effective goals for themselves. Dr. Victory says, “Now that you’ve learned a few things about yourself, ask what are the changes you’d like to make? What do you need to make these changes? How would these goals improve your quality of life?” Often, as special needs parents, we are too stuck in today’s challenges and problems to look very far into the future. We are exhausted with just putting out fires. Dr. Victory encourages parents to look at what is working and not working and use that information to make a plan that will also work.

Journey to Finding the New You guides parents through setting SMART goals, with specific examples. There is spaces to write out your plan for success here. Goals aren’t just dreams in the sky that we might do someday; goals are something specific that we have a plan to make happen. And when it doesn’t happen, Dr. Victory provides advice for picking yourself up when you fall. She provides examples of self-care for parents and space to reflect on how you incorporate self-care into your life. Finally, she ends by encouraging each parent to have their own personal mantra, with more examples and space to develop a saying that will help keep you going when its hard.

To be a good parent, you need to take care of yourself so that you can have the physical and emotional energy to take care of the family. ~ Michelle Obama

My Thoughts on Journey to Finding the New You

Dr. Frances Victory has written a compassionate, practical workbook for parents of children with special needs. Her personal experience adds veracity to her upbeat, positive encouragement throughout the workbook. Too often as special needs parents we get bogged down in the details that we cannot change, the things we cannot make better for our kids. Dr. Victory encourages us to change our perspective, to see the good things in our lives and to carefully yet deliberately create a better life for ourselves and our children.

I think Dr. Victory’s book is a very practical approach to self-care, which has become a huge buzz-word in our society. Despite the awareness of the need for self-care, it can still be associated with selfishness or seen as a justification for a shopping addiction or TV show binge. Dr. Victory focuses on practical, healthy, individualized self-care. She also addresses the judgement that parents can face when they aren’t simply pouring themselves into their kids all the time.

We applaud people for putting others’ needs above their own. Why can’t I care about my son’s needs and my needs with equal passion? Why does one have to take precedence over the other? Does everything in the world have to be a comparison, a competition? It’s obvious I’m capable to caring deeply for more than one human. I have three children. I care for all of them equally. But somehow if I care about myself as much as I care about my children, it’s looked down upon. ~ Kristina Kuzmic

Journey to Finding the New You is currently available only on Dr. Victory’s website. She notes, “Each family has a different exciting path ahead of them. But every person must remember to FIRST work on their own self-development and transformation. Parents must stay PATIENT, always be REALISTIC, ready for CHANGE.” She also offers several workshops for parents.