Well Being Sanctuary

09/05/2026

Calling all Men! Mister Health offers a support system for mens greater wellbeing, share with a friend! https://misterhealth.com/for-providers/refer/step-up-referral/?fbclid=IwY2xjawUITGBwZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR6ytizeGIknZaFEvtdsp2QxCHioHXY82lm-2vTHoqj8w_p2w51-P4YttVMcsQ_aem_pn-o-lAomOsYD-JO27_r4Q

Refer an adult male client to STEP UP™, MisterHealth’s enhanced outpatient program offering individual therapy and therapist-led men’s group support in Connecticut.

09/04/2026

A short text. A shift in tone. Feedback meant to help. For some brains, that lands like a body blow.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is common in ADHD and rarely named. It is not being too sensitive. It is a nervous system that registers social pain at a volume most people never experience. The same offhand comment can land as a 2 for one person and a 10 for another, and the 10 gets replayed for days, over-apologized for, or answered by not trying at all rather than risking it again.

The wave is real and it cannot be willed away. It can be named. Recognize that the wave is arriving. Name it: this is RSD. Then let it pass. A spike is not the truth about worth.

What helps is body first, since the wave is physical: a slow breath out, cold water on the wrists, a short walk. Wait a day before replying, because a perceived rejection rarely needs an answer tonight. And check the read with one trusted person: did that land the way it landed on me?

Brilliant at reading a room, brutal on the self. A therapist who knows RSD can help separate the wave from the verdict.

09/01/2026

Meet Mel Coleman.

Mel (she/they) is a Licensed Professional Counselor Associate, LPC-A, and she is
accepting new clients. She is in network with Anthem, Aetna, Cigna, and Medicaid.

Mel works with people navigating neurodivergence, chronic illness, and LGBTQIA+
identity, and she is not describing those from the outside. She lives them. A lot
of people in those communities have been handed clinicians who meant well and
still got it wrong. Mel knows what that costs.

Her approach is built on acceptance rather than correction. The aim is more room
to live your life, not a quieter version of you that is easier for everyone else
to be around.

She completed her Master's in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Walden, and
her clinical practicum at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, working with substance
use and co-occurring conditions. Her training includes ACT, CBT, REBT, and DBT.

Outside of sessions there are four kids, a dog, and a cat, so she has a high
tolerance for chaos and very little interest in pretending everything is fine.

Sessions are virtual across Connecticut. For people managing chronic illness, or
who cannot reliably get to an office, that matters more than it sounds like it
should. In person availability at our Farmington and Torrington offices.

08/31/2026

My last request:
Please sign to remove the age of diagnosis from this opportunity for those experiencing autism. The waiver is designed to help eligible autistic individuals remain independently in their homes and communities by providing practical, behavioral, social, employment, and daily-living supports.
Services may include:

* Clinical behavioral supports
* Life-skills coaching
* Job coaching
* Community mentoring
* Social-skills groups
* Respite
* Assistive technology
* Individual goods and services
* Personal emergency response systems
* Interpreting services

Urge the Connecticut Department of Social Services to replace the age-of-diagnosis rule with an age-of-onset standard for the ASD Waiver program. Sign now.

08/31/2026

🌟 Shout-out to this amazing clinician! 🌟
Mel has pushed through barriers, grown tremendously as a clinician, and is now ready to help others do the same. 💛
Meet Mel, our LPCA, who brings compassion, resilience, and a willingness to sit with some of life’s more complex challenges.
She works with clients navigating high-conflict relationships and couples work, as well as individuals living with chronic illness and chronic pain. Mel understands that meaningful progress isn't always easy—and she's committed to helping clients navigate the barriers that can stand in the way of healing and growth.
Mel is now accepting new clients!
📍 In-person in Torrington or virtually
💻 Virtual appointments available throughout Connecticut
If you or someone you know is looking for a clinician who understands that progress can be complicated, Mel would love to work with you. 🌱

Mel Coleman, Licensed Professional Counselor Associate. Affirming support for LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, and chronically ill communities, under the clinical supervision of Laura Bertrand, LPC.

08/27/2026

Please take a moment to sign to I can submit the number of signatures along with the letter.

Urge the Connecticut Department of Social Services to replace the age-of-diagnosis rule with an age-of-onset standard for the ASD Waiver program. Sign now.

08/26/2026

Nine hours on one thing. Then a two-minute task that will not start.

AuDHD means autistic and ADHD at the same time, and it is not double the support needs. It is an internal tug-of-war that never fully resolves. One side wants routine, sameness, a plan it can trust. The other wants novelty, spontaneity, the next interesting thing. Both sides are real. They rarely agree.

That is how the perfect system gets built on a Sunday and abandoned by the following week. Not a discipline problem. The same person can need deep rest and constant stimulation in the same afternoon, and hear "too much" and "too rigid" from two different people before the day is over.

Two operating systems sharing one machine, and both of them need feeding.

What helps is design more than willpower. Build a routine skeleton with novelty slots, so the bones of the day stay the same and what fills them is allowed to change. Rotate systems instead of abandoning them, because the switch is the feature rather than the failure. And plan for the week-two drop before it arrives. Decide now what the smaller fallback version of the routine looks like.

08/20/2026

ADHD is a regulation difference, not a focus problem. Once that distinction lands, a lot of things stop making sense as character flaws and start making sense as wiring.

The brain can focus. It focused on the thing that kept you up until 2am. Attention was never the missing piece. Where it goes, and who gets to decide, is the harder part.

An ADHD brain starts on interest, urgency, novelty, and challenge. It does not start on importance. That is why the boring, important task can feel physically impossible while the pointless, interesting one holds you for four hours. It is why the whole project gets written the night before and not touched for three weeks before that. The deadline finally manufactures the urgency the brain had been waiting for. And it is why time blindness looks like carelessness from the outside. If something is not happening now, the brain can file it under "does not exist," right up until it is suddenly, urgently now.

Tasks get put off. Shame follows. Most people carry that shame for years before anyone explains the mechanism to them.

Once the wiring is known, procrastination stops looking like a personal failing, and the practical question gets easier: set the task up with what the brain does respond to. Work beside someone. Set a short timer and tell one person the finish time. Change the room, the tool, or the order. Race the clock, or write a deliberately rough first draft. Put the alert at the start time rather than the due date.

Not lazy. Interest-driven.

08/16/2026

You have probably had the appointment where you explain your whole self to a new therapist and watch it not land. A lot of people never book the second one. That is the appointment Allison Weyward is working to make unnecessary.

She is a q***r, provisionally licensed social worker at Well Being Sanctuary, working mostly with LGBTQIA2S+ and neurodivergent people, very often carrying trauma alongside. Her Psychology Today profile calls therapy an act of resistance. That is not decoration. It shapes the work.

In practice that means strengths before deficits, and a patchwork of approaches rather than one house method: somatic work, parts and inner child work, trauma-focused CBT, DBT, motivational interviewing, family systems, and play therapy for every age and ability, including yours.

Five years in, MSW from UConn. Older teens and adults, plus autistic children. In person in Torrington and Farmington, telehealth anywhere in Connecticut. Accepting Anthem, Aetna, Cigna, and Medicaid.

Reaching out is the hard part. Allison knows that, and she will not make you perform being ready.

08/04/2026

The signs that you're further along than you feel are almost always quiet. Which is precisely why you keep missing them, and why you keep concluding that nothing is changing.

Change almost never announces itself. There's no finish line. No certificate. No single morning you wake up and find yourself fixed. Because we're waiting for something dramatic, we miss the actual evidence, which tends to look like almost nothing at all.

Like this. You hesitated before automatically saying yes to something you didn't want; you noticed the cost first, even if you said yes anyway. The critical voice in your head said its usual line, and for a second you heard it as a voice instead of a simple fact, and didn't quite believe all of it. You wanted something out loud, even just to yourself, and the guilt that followed was a little quieter than it used to be. You let one person see something real about you, and the sky didn't fall, and some part of you quietly filed that away. You rested once without finishing the whole list first; it felt strange, and you did it anyway. Your reaction to the thing that used to set you off was a notch smaller than last time. Not gone. Smaller.

None of those look like breakthroughs. They look like nothing, which is exactly why they're so easy to dismiss. But they're not nothing. They are the real texture of change, and change is almost always far more undramatic than the movies led us to expect.

The bar was never "I have arrived" or "I never struggle anymore." The bar is simply "I'm a little more myself than I was." By that measure, you're very likely further along than you feel.