#40 | Happy at home not taking steps toward independence.

Mar 14, 2022

RESOURCES

Facebook Page Parents of Adults with Aspergers
SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
STEAR Map phone wallpaper
Adulting Definition
Proactive Collaborative Problem Solving at LivesInTheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene
The Art of Adulting on Facebook

Hi, it's Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize adulting together. Today's struggle comes from the Facebook page. Parents of Adults with Asperger's. Our mom has an 18 year old daughter who's happy at home and not taking steps towards creating a life she loves or independence. Let's look at her thoughts. She shares:

That she (her daughter) had a horrible experience at school.
Her daughter has OCD anxiety and health challenges.
She finds that pushing her results in shutting her shutting down and regression.
When they toured the local community college the daughter said, "That was cool but you aren't making me go are you?"
So the mom asks should I just calm down and continue to hope something will catch her interest enough one day?
She does have her permit and can drive but driving scares her. I keep hoping that in time she'll want to try that again.
Should I be looking at SSDI SSI for her I'm so confused.
I want to be doing all I can to help her lead a fulfilling life. But it's so hard knowing what to do.

I get this struggle for sure. We are caught up in a lot of looping thoughts that are just creating confusion. And the sentence I don't know keeps coming up.

So let's understand what's happening with both mom and daughter.

Our limbic system is what triggers the fight or flight or freeze response. And because our autistic young adults have autistic brains, they tend to, not always but in the majority of cases, have sort of hyper aroused limbic systems.

They are constantly scanning the environment for what's going wrong with the with their life and what's going wrong with themselves, which produces a lot of anxiety and always has. I mean, if you look back in their life, you can see that anxiety has played a role.

As Barb Avila says in her book, SEEING AUTISM, anxiety has a cascading effect that happens as a result of that anxiety and impacts their ability to learn. It's very hard to learn when we're in a heightened, anxious state.

So there's just been a number of opportunities to learn that that a non autistic child would have learned from but our autistic child hasn't yet. So you'll hear often that they're five years, you know, emotionally behind or 10 years or seven. No one knows the numbers because it's very individual, that there's definitely been an impact on how much learning has taken place. Some of the skills that a non autistic person may have picked up on already.

In addition to that, as moms, it is so instinctual and important to us to protect our children. So what has happened to us is that we have gone into fight flight or freeze often with our autistic young adults, because we want to protect them. We don't want bad things to happen. Our own reaction has been heightened as well, as we watch the struggles that our autistic young adults are experiencing.

We think we don't know what to do, because it's maybe not similar enough to our own experience as a child as growing up or maybe it is similar and we still don't know what to do.

I would like to suggest that we need to tap into what's happening with our own mindset first. So I suggest that we connect with ourselves and also with our autistic young adult, trying to uncover what are some of the thoughts that are driving what's happening in our lives right now.

There's, you know, 60-70,000 a day so there's plenty of them. And most of them are just fine. 99% of them can just keep on being automatically offered to us.

But there are about 1% of them and that's 1% of 70,000 is 700. There's quite a few thoughts that just may not be serving us, may not be getting us what we want in terms of our feeling that creates the action that's going to create the life that we love that works.

6:41
So let's take a moment and just go back to her thinking. I mean, that was a fantastic thought download, which is always the first step. And she said it provided her some relief at the end. And I understand that that happens with me whenever I get all those spinning thoughts down somewhere recorded somewhere that where I can distance a little bit from them. I'm not as attached to them that way and I can actually look at them. So bravo to our mom for taking the time to look at them.

Let's go back to a couple of them. But let's first look at this fear mapping process, which is the core of mindset management. This is how we manage our mind so that it does produce the emotions that fuel the actions that we need to take in order to create the results that we want in our life.

Let's go to the very first part, though, and separate the facts from the story. What is the situation? Let's come back up here.

She had a horrible experience at school. Is that a fact? Or is that a thought? I would suggest that's a thought.
She has OCD anxiety and health challenges. The health challenges there's no question the way that she describes some of the things that her daughter has to do every day as a result of her health challenges sound indeed challenging and they are going to impact her energy levels.
Okay, we know that in terms of the OCD and the anxiety. I guess those are diagnoses. Sometimes I just want us to pause and notice that those are labels of behaviors. And I'm a big believer that behaviors can change. So I'm not sure, I don't think those are facts. I think that she has OCD and anxiety is a thought and I probably a lot of people are going to argue with me. I just believe that maybe we label it anxiety because it just makes it easier for us to talk about it. And that's perfectly legitimate. But she doesn't have anxiety she couldn't have a blood test and have them come out and say up she's got anxiety. Well maybe she could do an MRI scan of her brain and the amygdala looks a little different from a non autistic brain. Okay, that you know that makes sense. There's some biologic, biochemical bio, you know, neurobiological differences there, that we can make a fact but has anxiety. I just want us to pause and say, we see a lot of anxious behaviors would be more of the thought that I would find helpful.
Pushing her results in shutdown and regression makes perfect sense. I understand that's a good description of what happens. I still want to remind us that that's not the fact. The fact is the daughter. This is our thought about her.
"That was cool, but you aren't going to make me go." That's a fact. That's actually a fact because it's a quote we could have taken a video of her that day and proven it to the entire world that she said those words. Now the question is, how are we going to choose to think about it?
Should I just calm down and continue to hope something will catch her interest enough one day, so I changed this from it's that's obviously a thought. And I would just change it from a question to, "I wonder if I should just calm down." You know, that wonder creates curiosity in our bodies. And I suggest that maybe modifying that thought just a tiny bit, might help her get might help our mom get to a few more thoughts, and a few more actions and an emotion of Curiosity will always inspire lots of different options.
She has her permit. Now. That's a fact she could produce the permit. And she can drive and that's a fact we can take a video of her driving, but driving scares her. Okay. That is still a part of this story. Right? What did she do when she was driving? Pull over the side of the road and breathe heavy and not be able. That would be more of the fact and then of course our thought would be this is really scary for her.
I keep hoping in time that she'll want to try it again. That definitely is a thought for our mom.
Should I be looking at SDS, SSI SSDI or SSI? That's a good question. Let's turn it into a statement of, "I wonder if I should be looking at SSDI," because that's going to drive that curiosity again and just add wonder at the beginning of a lot of our sentences. It inspires the curiosity that drives some actions of doing some research or, you know, making a list of the things that need to be considered, which is a very productive way of looking at some of these.
It's so hard knowing what to do. I'm so confused. That's a version of I don't know.

11:31
I don't know. Frankly, I was stuck in that for a number of years and it produced a depression dip. I don't recommend that. I think, "I don't know," frankly, is a lie.

I proved that to myself because I didn't know the very next action to take in my life. But thinking I don't know produce this confusion which just made me you know, depressed and anxious and not willing to try anything.

I could feel that depression, the weight, the anxiety, that churning inside of the of my chest and my stomach in particular just sort of made my intestinal tract, go into knots.

I don't recommend that sentence and I would suggest that when we hear ourselves say that, we need to say, you know, in our own heads, "I don't know, but I'm going to figure it out. I don't know exactly, but I'm going to figure it out. There's got to be a better way to to do this."

That's my recommended way at least, to take that sentence having been there and done that. I found that that works better for me.

"I want to be doing all I can to help her lead a fulfilling life." We really need to look at that sentence. I want to be doing all I can to help her lead a fulfilling life. Okay, that's all right. But it sounds like when I hear that sentence is that you've taken on most of the burden of creating a life that she loves that works.

And parents, everybody, this will not work. We cannot fix what needs to be done now.

Okay, here's what's happening. They've transitioning from school where a lot of things were defined by them and us, by school and us and that you know, got them through because what was expected was clearly defined. I mean, they had to pass in order to get a diploma.

We needed to make sure that they showed up and all that so it was pretty clearly defined.

Now that they're moving into young adulthood. All the expectations are up in the air. We they don't have a defined roadmap. I mean, we know already that the roadmap that someone without an autistic brain follows does not work for our children. We need to come up with an original roadmap that works just right with our autistic young adult together.

We don't know the answers anymore. Only they know what the answers are that are right for them. And we can do our best to encourage to warn and to be there to be consulted. That's our role as parents of young adults.

I want to encourage all of us to put the monkey take that monkey, and I have him here on my desk just to remind me with his little tags still attached. I'm not sure why I did that. But anyway, my daughter gave this to me one Christmas, but to take the monkey from our back and put it should we share it with our autistic young adults.

Because we cannot solve this problem for them. They have to solve the problem of how do they create a life that works that they love by themselves for themselves. So now that that's in the wrong place, okay, now here I'm back.

Alright, so this is what we do in The Art of Adulting. And so let's just figure out the third stage again borrowing Barb Avila's, understand, connect and then practice formula that she lays out beautifully in her book SEEING AUTISM.

Let's agree on what it is that we're we're aiming for here. We are aiming for this definition of adulting. Practicing the set of mental skills are mental tools that help us manage our thoughts, emotions and actions so we can achieve goals set by us for us. This is what we want our autistic young adult to do is to decide what they want and go for it and create it for themselves. Every little inchworming step, one thing at a time, at a pace that works for them.

16:16
So they build up those victory experiences where they got it, they did it, build those up, which helps to build confidence.

And that confidence is really important in their motivation, because they may really want something but if they don't have the confidence that they can go get is the part of motivation that drives them will be diminished. We want that we want that for them.

So how do we do this? I highly recommend that we follow Dr. Ross Greene's proactive collaborative problem solving process and I'll link to his website in the transcript because he nailed it.

What we do is we look at the situation and we agree on what the facts are. Then we listen to our autistic young adults with their all of their thoughts and their feelings. And that Listen, listen, listen, shows them respect. Because this process has to really respect who they are. And it helps them feel seen safe and soothe so that they are secure in the relationship with us. And then can transfer that secure feeling to the outside world. So important that we follow this process.

Then we remind ourselves that all we have to do is get 1% better each day on each of the 10 domains in their lives.

Inside The Art of Adulting we explain how to break life down into 10 mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive domains so that we can work on one part of life at a time, one step at a time. That's how it's gonna work.

It is because if we just you know, take it apart and decide who we want to be and we help our autistic as parents. We want to be their coach, the best coach we can be.

And our autistic young adults get to decide what their identity is. And then Okay, now that we've decided that how to what are our expectations in each of the 10 domains, and that's what we do inside of the art of adulting.

We take the identity, what virtues are most important to our artistic young adults, so that they're consistent with who they want to be. That's really important because who we want to be is the person that whose expectations we most want to meet. Those expectations are that we most want to meet and when we don't, that can lead to depression.

And then we manage our mind use our mind to train our brain to work harder for us to steer toward our destination instead of going off in the weeds, and spending all of our time in false pleasures like watching YouTube and playing games and eating and all of the things that our brain says are necessary for us to survive, but they used to be in caveman times. They're not today.

So we need to steer our brains. We can't let it operate on default.

Then what actions do we need to do? And those actions are so important that we take those one step at a time and then actually think my definition on the slide is reverse. And then we listen first to understand each other because we know that we cannot, we cannot succeed alone. And then we proactively problem solve together to create predictable incremental progress one step at a time.

So please join me in The Art of Adulting. You'll find the transcript and resources that I've mentioned in this video at my website, slash blog. I would love to see you there and I cannot wait to meet you because we had to figure this out.

We have six children, ages 22 to 52. And three have been diagnosed with autism. So we've been down this road and we're figuring it out. One step at a time and I'd love to do that with you as well.

Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#40 | Happy at home not taking steps toward independence.

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