Love Therapy: The Care Only You Can Give
I have spent a lot of time with my son in a children’s hospital. When you’re there long enough, you start to notice more than the monitors and routines. You notice people.
Being surrounded by other parents of disabled and medically complex children is both comforting and heartbreaking.
There’s a shared understanding that needs no explanation. I have watched parents soothe children through fear and pain. I have listened as families gently redirect attention away from the beeping machines, or as I have heard them collapse into a cot at the end of an exhausting day.
What has struck me most over the years isn’t the medical care. It’s the deep, indescribable love.
Occupational therapy.
Physical therapy.
Speech therapy.
Appointments.
Assessments.
Paperwork.
Meetings.
Research.
More research.
👆
These supports matter and have their place. But they are built around goals, data, and outcomes.
What parents provide is different.
I’ve come to call it love therapy.
Love therapy is not measurable, billable, or something you can document neatly in a report.
Love therapy is about being.
It’s sitting beside a sick child when there’s nothing left to say. It’s holding the hand of an anxious teen who’s already heard too many explanations. It’s lying down next to a restless little one when your own mind is racing with worry. It’s staying present even when your arms, your body, and your heart already feel heavy.
Family caregivers are uniquely qualified in love therapy because we listen with tenderness, encourage with heart, and hope with an unrelenting energy that keeps us going even when the system wears us down.
We carry our children to therapy. We trust professionals when we have no choice. We ask questions. We question again. We advocate. We second-guess. We try, and try again.
And through it all, love therapy runs in the background, holding everything together.
Therapies measure progress. Love therapy holds a child when nothing else can.
At the end of the day, no matter how many people assess or intervene, we are the experts in our children’s lives. No one knows them as well as we do. No one replaces the steady presence of a family caregiver who shows up again and again.
Nothing replaces love therapy.
Nothing exceeds it.
I’ll leave you with something our ENT once said to me, in the middle of all the appointments and uncertainty: “Keep doing what you’re doing.”
If children in hospital rooms can survive because of a parent’s love, what is your presence doing for your loved one every single day?
You’re doing important work.
Even if nobody else sees it.
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The challenges can be great so much of the time with a child with special needs, and greatly magnified when they are sick. Parents as caregivers rarely or even never having any down time with no worries to recharge their tired body, mind and soul… yet continue in this so important role as love therapist for their child, always giving all that is needed and more. Wishing you and all parents of special needs children more lightness in their days and nights, more answers, less worries with all that they have to do and provide for their child. It takes incredible courage to navigate this journey.
Oh, gosh, Suzanne. You raise such good points about parents never really having down time. It’s almost impossible. Even when given respite, the concerns never go away … so the mind never rests. I know that for me, my mind doesn’t even fully rest when I sleep. Thank you for this message and for your wishes. Indeed, the journey is a courageous one to trek.