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

Miatore, brought casting from the heart of music city, USA, Nashville, Tennessee.

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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. Hi, I'm Tony Miatore, welcome to Why Not Me Embracing Autism and Mental Health worldwide. Joining us today is Anne Grady.

She is someone who's worked since 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 live 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 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 of in story and some of my other stories in a way that I hope resonates with your audience.

I hope we'll 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 jumped that Evan would be a soccer player, and when he was born, it was a very hard birth that was an emergency c-section after months of preterm 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 30 years, and I have never met a baby.

This angry, it's insane." I'm like, "Oh, great, that's the thing, the 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 11 months old. His father left when he was 18 months old, so I found myself as a single mom, 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 anti-psychotic, and then when he was seven, he was in his first pediatric psychospital, 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. At some point, I ended up with a tumor in my salary gland, like it was 2014, and 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 22. 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 22 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.

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, nope, it's not autism, it's just mental illness. And then they realize, nope, it's not just mental illness, it's developmental delays. And then at 17, they're like, nope, it's absolutely autism. And so I think the challenge is, 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 2,000 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 in race. I was in a support group.

So I donated 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, Naomi. And one of the moms in there showed me a poem 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 campsite. We keep circling back to. And the key is to go back to focusing your energy on what you can control. And one of Evan's 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 22, he's still like 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 buffers on, 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. Or just daily practices. Sure. Now in your books, you talk about the brain and various things. What do you wish people new 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.

The ability to put things in a greater context, to plan, to problem solve, to recognize others' 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 19 and trust me, the irony of a depressed

But a lot of people believe that it's weakness and it's 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 that, that, that, that, 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 that 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 has been 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, then 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 16 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 worked 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, boiled 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 2012, so Evan's first hospitalization was in 2010 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 with that 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 2014, 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 to 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.

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 worker at home or anywhere in between. And 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 always 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 car eating 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 dysregulated. 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 10 to maybe a panic level of 5 or better?”

The first thing is to know it's okay not to be okay. We live in this happiness culture.

It's like 10 or 11 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 overwhelm 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 size tumor at my salary 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.

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 cortisol to stress hormone by 23%. And so it retains 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 and 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, your 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. So one is give yourself some grace because it's a hard situation and nobody has a road map.

“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 guide our behavior. What are the values that when decisions get hard and I'll give you an example. When Evan was 15 years old, we had to make, probably the hardest decision I've ever had to make in his life or in my life.

We were exhausted and, you know, I went to his 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. Decision 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 your face was 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 them on care.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. You 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 52 strategies for life-loving work. These are two to three page strategies with action items on each one in a variety of different areas. Strong enough,

choosing courage, resilience, and triumph is based on my TED talk.

Mind over moment, the 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. And they're all in Amazon. And you can find me at angreatiegroup.com. Tell us again, where did you say that your son is living now? He lives in Idaho in a group home. How has that worked out for you being that far away? Has it 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 24-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 20

years to have similar services. And we're still 30,000 on the list. I think it's better for him because he doesn't feel like he's being ranked or managed 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 2000 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. Okay, so he won't go to college.

Okay, so he'll still have a job. So he 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

looking at his phone and their 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 isn't 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, after Evan left, I have a lot of good friends who I was like, I'm going to

start an on-profit. 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 the small ranch in the middle of nowhere

with no monkeys and cows. I had all of these plans to do more, more, 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”

and 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

“better available because you can't get him into a psych hospital. I mean, the only way I haven't had”

a psychotic break in 2021. 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. 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. 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 plug. 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 and brace the discomfort sitting the soft. 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 take in 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 WhyNotMe.world. One last thing, spread the word about WhyNotMe. Our conversations are inspiring guests that show you are not alone in this world.

It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.