Growing up, any emotion but anger was a sign of weakness. My mom was emotionally open and honest, but my dad was suppressed and closed off. I would only express my emotions when I was alone and I would close myself off to anyone else. Turns out, emotional suppression is actually unhealthy. While my body could tolerate it as a kid and young adult, as I got older I started experiencing the physical symptoms of stress and emotional repression like migraines and severe muscle pain in my neck and upper back. I finally began working through this in weekly therapy sessions with a psychologist, but if I had addressed this when I was younger, maybe I could have avoided all that pain in my adult years. I wish I could have used a platform like MyCuraJOY to talk to someone about my emotions and learn how to express them.
Caitlyn Wang is an international business leader based in California who has worked and parented in the US and Asia and is intimately familiar with each region’s psychoeducational resources. At Johns Hopkins University, Caitlyn’s work with twice-gifted children gave her an intimate look at how these challenges affect families and their wellness, but it’s her first-hand struggles parenting a mod-to-severe autistic child that motivated her to seek a root-cause solution for families like hers. For over 20 years, she has led marketing, product development, and supply chain in the audio/video industry with teams in China, Taiwan, and the US to bring products from concept to market for companies like Harman, Acer, and Amazon.
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A person in need
A few months ago, I was consoling a friend who had recently lost all her companions, been shunned out of school, and had rumors spread about them for just being themselves. Since COVID-19 quarantine was still going on, we could only communicate through text. She was thinking of suicide and I was just there, peppering…
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