Rules/agreement inside

[TigerLilly]

Hey everyone,
Sorry I haven't had time to reply sooner. It's been a hectic few weeks! Thanks so much for the suggestions. We too are high functioning (at least according to the outside world!). We hold down a fairly high pressure full time job and are pretty active in our community. I think in some sense that is what makes the time loss so scary because there are a lot of expectations put on us and I am always scared of other people "finding out." I think that it is definitely true that when safety is involved it can't always be democratic and nice. I think for us, it's the difficulty of communicating and finding the balance between giving voice to insiders who are younger and being firm that when safety is in question (and to me safety includes risking losing our job or damaging our reputation) that an adult absolutely needs to be in charge. That balance is always hard to strike for us though. We are always going to far to one side or the other and both result in chaos for our system. Maybe it needs to be more of a firm negotiation than an agreement, because I think trying to find agreement will just leave us in chaos.
TigerLilly