#12 | Too Much Noise

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Today I want to answer a question from Elaine. Her son is 24. She shares “I'm having a hard time setting boundaries with him. He's quite entitled, which I know is my fault. And he's having a hard time with this movement. He's also in recovery. My son has a hard time focusing and he gets super upset. It's very noisy, especially when he does homework. He wants us all to leave the common space and not to use the kitchen, which sometimes we can accommodate. But we can't always and it's fireworks if we can't accommodate his needs.

I get it Elaine, these types of situations really trigger us; there's just nothing we can do to make our young adult happy. And so I want to see if I can help you and him solve this problem together.

First, it sounds like focus is his struggle. And that makes a lot of sense. Our kids have brains that are primitive brains and on high alert. When they're always on high alert, it means that their anxiety is triggered, it frankly cuts off our prefrontal cortex with our wise brain is just relegated to the background while our primitive brain keeps us alive. And we love our primitive brain it serves a really important purpose. The trouble comes when we overuse it. And that can create a cascade of effects that makes us less capable of coping with whatever situation life hands us and we know it's going to hand us a lot of different situations. So I get that focus is an issue for your son. And it's an issue for members of my family as well. And we've we've come up with several strategies that have helped us tackle that.

The first thing is helping him understand what's happening. His primitive brain is trying to keep him feel safe, efficient, and belonging. And in particular, that efficient piece is what seems to get really frustrating for our kids. If they can't focus now it becomes a real trigger for anger. It's like get out of my space, stop creating problems for me. And it makes a lot of sense. Though when we think about it with our wise brain there's got to be a better solution out there. So the first thing we need to do is help your son know that you see him. If he knows you see him, he'll feel safe enough, soothed enough and secure enough so that you can start to solve this problem together. So when listening to him, the biggest most important piece is that we acknowledge how he's feeling. He may not always have words for that, but you can just say you are really uncomfortable. We're not trying to be poets here. We're not trying to parse out just exactly the emotion but you're really uncomfortable. You're really frustrated. You're really angry. Whatever the emotion is, please take the time to reflect that back to him. And if you can tag on, because it's hard to focus, because and then the thought you're having a hard time focusing. That's what he's thinking. That's what's triggering his emotion of frustration. So if we can acknowledge that's what's happening with him. Oftentimes, it's like, going hitting a balloon, and it just sort of deflates and goodness, somebody understands what's going on with me. That's the first step. We really need to listen up to our kids.

The second thing we need to do is we really need to problem solve this together. And not in the middle of this blow up that he's having as the primitive brain has just turned off his prefrontal cortex; its going to take a while to come back online. He doesn't want to hear about a solution right now. He needs to get whatever's in front of him done until that tension is off of that, here's where I am. Here's where I want to be until the rubber band is slacked off of it. He just isn't gonna have any room in his brain to listen. So let's problem solve, but not in the middle of the problem. Let's get it to a separate part. If you listen to the the video that I did yesterday, it outlines exactly the problem solving (the proactive, collaborative problem solving process) that Ross Green has promoted across the country in schools, and we need to use it as well in our homes. He's very generous with his resources at his website, Lives in the Balance (I can't remember but in the last video, it has all the details about that). You really want to go to that website. You really want to download his resources and please use this process. It starts out with first, you describing the problem. Then you listen to your son's thoughts and feelings about it. Then you share your thoughts and feelings about it. And then hopefully the two of you can come together and come up with a solution that you're willing to experiment with. That spirit of experimentation is what's important. Because what's happening is that you know, our brains go right to the all or nothing thinking. It's either you cut out all the noise, or I can't study and we know that there's some room in there. There's many other options that we could explore, but the brain immediately goes to that all or nothing thinking because it's easier.

It's easier for our brain, it's more efficient for our brain to think it's one or the other. And that's what our brain loves. It loves to be efficient. So we have to kind of break that all or nothing thinking up into a little bit of flexibility; a little bit more room to come up with solutions that are going to work for us, but not in the heat of the moment. Because that's not when when things are going to work. Yeah, all or nothing thinking helps our brains compartmentalize and organize our information. So in some ways it's useful but if we overuse it again, that's when it becomes our only coping skill or only problem solving skill, it's really not going to get us what we want out of  life. So they're just likely hundreds of other options rather than those two extremes.

The next thing I wanted to address in your comment was that your thought that it's really hard and it's all my fault. I think I counted three times you said he's having a hard time or I'm having a hard time. I just want you to give yourself a break with compassion. Notice how you're using your current self to judge your past self. It’s a thought that sounds like I should’ve known better. I really hope to notice that thought and realize that you did the best you could with what you knew at the time and what you had as a toolbox at that time. Really.

I can tell by the way you're trying to help. You're just that kind of a mom who really loves her kids down to her down to their toenails and wants to be the best mom ever. So I know that your thoughts and your feelings were in the right place; they came from love. So please give yourself some compassion. We all need to give ourselves more compassion. You know, we're really earning an Ivy League education, educated and raising our kids, because this takes more energy raising an autistic kid. It takes more energy than raising a non autistic kid. I know we have six of them and I've raised both. And I can tell you that it just takes more energy. But the payoff is so amazing. When our kids get it and they really are able to become and create who they want to be, it's so exciting because the struggle has been there. So, we just have to be compassionate with ourselves that we did the very best and are doing the very best that we know how. it's all my fault or it was my fault just may not be a useful thought for you. That's what we talk about in the Art of Adulting is we notice the thoughts that that we're practicing and we decide is this a useful thought or is this a thought that I should try not to think about as much and work on deconditioning that thought and work on replacing it with a thought that really does work better for us which was I did my best. I did the best that I could at the time.

Your brain offers us 60,000 thoughts in a given day. That's a ton of thoughts to manage. So all what we're trying to do is just grab a few of them, look at them and say “are these the thoughts that are going to create the life we love that works”? And if we can teach ourselves how to do that, imagine the magic that can happen when our kids do it as well. That's what I'm trying to help all of my families and young autistic young adults do is to slow things down a little bit and look at those thoughts and think, “is that getting me the result I really want”?

If first we feel ashamed and feel our own pain, then when we notice that when we say “it's all my fault” the shame we feel and the actions we take; we get smaller. We lose confidence. We lose energy. Sometimes we start spinning in our own thoughts and our sleep isn't as good. I mean the consequences of thinking those thoughts on a regular basis can have a real impact on the energy levels we bring to our life. So, of course your thoughts created those things in the past; it makes perfect sense. And right now, I know that those thoughts are optional. I can choose the ones that I practice. So the thought that I like is “my thoughts created emotions and actions back then just like they do now”. I mean to me that just frees me up to relax and say, “oh, okay, now I can decide, intentionally the thoughts that are going to work better for me”. So what I experienced in the past wasn't good or bad. There's that black/white thinking again. It was how I thought back then, and how I coped back then, and now look at me.  I'm able to grow and learn from looking at those thoughts to decide is that something that really works for me?

Another thought I want to suggest to another option I want to offer you is that sometimes we think our kids shouldn't experience pain or that we shouldn't experience pain, but that's how we grow. How are we supposed to grow if we don't have the downside? The pain. That Yin Yang symbol has been around for a lot of years, showing us that there's the happy times but they have a kernel of darkness and the dark times which has a kernel of light. And that's how we grow. So the thoughts that we had were not good or bad, right or wrong. They just were. So see if you can find compassion for that brain of yours, that’s just trying to keep you safe and alive and belonging.

Maybe start playing with the idea that if thoughts created pain in the past, they're creating your pain now. So maybe play with the idea that nothing went wrong in the past and nothing's gone wrong now. There's just us, our brains, the emotions we feel, the actions we take, and it's all totally fine. All we have to do is solve whatever problem is in front of us; take that tiny little step to experiment to see if we can figure out something that might work better for us in our family.

I know that if you sit down with your autistic young adult they, in a calm time will understand that you cannot clear out the kitchen and not make any noise for those extended periods of time with studying. And perhaps the noise canceling headphones white noise machines or some other options may be the solution for him. (But it's really good idea if he comes up with the idea for us. You know, our young adults certainly love implementing their ideas before they love implementing ours). So just consider hopefully, that with compassion, that nothing in the past was wrong, or right. It just was and maybe we can move on from there.

So I want to just encourage you to come to www.lynncdavison.com and check out the Art of Adulting there and see if you are interested in joining our course and our coaching in our community because we sure would love to see you there. Bye for now.