#16 | How to Forgive Your Autistic Young Adult Children For Symptoms Beyond Their Control

RESOURCES

• Linda and Richard Eyre: ValuesParenting.org: https://valuesparenting.com/
• LivesInTheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene

Today's topic is one I'm struggling with myself. And I'm sure that many out there because I see it on Facebook pages that I visit, have a hard time dealing with all of the challenges that come with having a child with a differently wired brain. And, frankly, let's admit that they don't even have to be all that differently wired for us to have struggles with forgiving them at times.

So, I just wanted to give you a little bit of an understanding of what forgiveness is. Then we'll go to how to connect to our children and connect ourselves so that we can find a pathway forward, and then what's the practice that we use to get to forgiveness? 

The first thought is that forgiveness really is a decision that we make. We decide that we're going to let go of the feelings of resentment, of the blaming, and even maybe some of the revenge towards someone who has hurt or harmed us. That's one way to think about forgiveness is just letting go of the feelings of the thoughts that are creating the feelings that creates those emotions that are no fun. They're just not good to feel. Another way of looking at it is that to forgive is to pardon or excuse someone from blame for an offense or a misdeed. And I know that doesn't always go down so well as a parent. I mean we definitely want to hold our adult children accountable. Though, some might argue that we can't hold anyone accountable but ourselves, but we do want to have the concept of having our kids experience the consequences of taking an action that has a negative impact on other people. And so that whole excuse part is a hard word for me to swallow sometimes, and I just want to reframe it a little bit so that we can go forward somewhere.

When my kids were younger, hey'd say “mom!” and of course they'd expect me to come in and mediate some wrongdoing that had occurred between them. Of course, I wasn't always there. So I didn't always have facts. How could I know? So I read this book, Teaching Your Children Values that Linda and Richard Eyre wrote over 30 years ago or 25 at least.  In it, they advocate that we put our children at a peace place and have them resolve whatever conflict is going on. So they had a peace bench that wasn't particularly comfortable to sit on. I had our children go to the steps going down to the basement and sit on them until they each accepted responsibility for what had happened, that they expressed regret to each other and that they repaired it in some way. Usually a hug or some kind of let's make up for this or a promise that they were going to do better in the future. So that was their three step process that really worked well actually and got me out of the middle of it. It gave them actions to take. They knew these were the steps that they needed to go through before they could come off the peace stairs and sometimes they take 20 minutes. One not being willing to accept their responsibility for the part of the problem and the other one ready to go but waiting for the other person. So it was an interesting and interesting process to witness and I think it taught us some things. I do recommend this book for him with his younger children.

What do we regret? Why do we experience forgiveness? The bottom line is that it really does help us and helps us because it requires that we go to a higher level. It requires us to level up. We have to become a better version of ourselves to start thinking in this way. And so in that I think it's an opportunity to grow and to actually learn and enjoy life more going forward. So I think it falls into the learning category of the 10 domains is that we need to understand how do we get to this forgiveness? And the answer is we have to kind of take ourselves to a different level. 

It doesn't mean however, that if the perpetrator did something wrong, that was egregious and it was really harmful to the other person that we have to agree to be in their presence a lot. I mean, if they have demonstrated  who they are, we need to believe them. I think that's what Mia Angelou expresses when she says when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. So sometimes we do need to distance ourselves from the other person. But again this process of forgiveness is really for ourselves. We may have to set boundaries with that person or protect ourselves if necessary. If somebody has done something that has caused harm or is truly you know, predation, sexual predation, physical harm, those types of things,  we do want to protect ourselves and our loved ones from them. So you do want to believe that they're going to do that. This is not about just forgiving everybody and letting it go. So, but at the same time, we need to forgive them when they don't have to change. That's the tricky part because especially it is handy to know this because if we have to forgive somebody that's already passed on, it's a good thing because frankly, they're not going to change and in some cases it's hard to change and maybe they're just never going to do that. So what we have to do, we have to stop hurting ourselves. I mean, we forgive others when we're just tired of hurting ourselves. We have to let go of the story that we're telling ourselves because you know, it's not our forgiving them isn't going to change them at all. What it does let us do though, is it lets us go and get out of the Drama Triangle. And I'm sure you've heard of the Drama Triangle before. The victim, persecutor and rescuer are the three parts of the drama triangle. Notice if we're playing the victim. That's if we're overwhelmed or struggling or we're afraid the person who wants to create their life intentionally asked the question what result do I want to create? We’ll be mapping this in a second. That's the question if you're the victim, what result do you want to be? If you're playing the persecutor? That's like, you know, you shouldn't do this and grow a rock you know. They are rigid, they're threatened. They're feeling very defensive. They're angry. Sometimes sarcasm comes out and they're feeling very righteous. “Well, they should know by now …. “

What we want to do is become a challenger on that and that is “how can I shift my own thinking to get my desired result”? I mean, we have to challenge ourselves when that story is playing inside of our head “they should know by now and haven't we gone over this enough and it's not fair that I have to pay for everything” and you know, all those persecutor types of roles. Or, by any chance, are we falling into that rescuer role? And that's where we just want to make everything right. “I'll make sure that I don't ever trigger that action again”. You end up walking on eggshells in your household, and making sure that you do everything so that the other person never experiences whatever it is the triggers them.. And that rescuer role, you know, is sort of it suggests that you know, that you're powerful enough to prevent the environment from occurring, something happening in the outside of the situation, and that, you know, better than they know, so, we're gonna do it this way. Because you know, what happened the last time, instead of playing that rescue, what we want to do is become more of a coach and say, what questions can I ask to best support them in their own learning?

And if we can move from that rescue role to the coach role, you can get out of that Drama Triangle and really make some improvements in the way that things happen in our lives. So one of the things that I just want to caution us and that is that we just don't want to subsequent to a positive thought that we don't believe. And let's look at how that just might happen. 

Let's say here's the something happened and our thought is, “oh, he's doing the best he can right?” But do we really believe that?  Is it truly the best he can do or is it possible, but you just might be able to grow and better manage this type of situation. And so that's where we go back and forth. Oh, maybe he can control it. Maybe he can't control it. And then we just, you know, we just don't you know, we're trying to believe something that we're not sure is true. So we don't hold them accountable, we don't solve problems, nothing changes. And that's what I want to caution us against is that let's just not default to a thought that we think is going to help but we really don't believe it. 

What we want to do is give ourselves the gift of writing down all of our thoughts. Just do a thought download out what's going on, what our brain is offering us, what our brain the one that you know wants to protect us, keep us safe, keep us efficient, and keep us searching for pleasure, because that's gonna propagate the species and we know that's, you know, what kept all of us and humankind alive. We want to move to the prefrontal cortex and actually plan and sort out what we're going to do. So let me just offer a thought and trust me, I don't know that this is gonna work for anybody else. But let me explain. We have this problem the situation is, you know, some problem happening some fraction. The thought is we'll figure this out. Maybe we can figure this out. Maybe you can even put the word maybe and then maybe we can figure this out together. And that makes me feel activated. Like I am energized. I am ready to tackle this when I say we're going to figure this out. I am already and so I'm going to advocate the collaborative solutions practice that Dr. Ross Greene promotes. It's golden it's when you figure out what the situation is. Then you figure out you ask them the empathy step out there thinking and feeling about it. Then you figure out where you are in terms of your thoughts and feelings. And then you ry to collaborate together and find that overlap and you agree to take the next step. That's how we feel.

We take that scientific perspective and say, You know what, let's figure out what's gonna work in the future for both of us and let's just try one thing, and we'll keep trying not everything we try is going to work and then designates a failure. It just seems that we're learning what works. We're going up that learning curve.  Because at least you're on that path. And I also suggest strongly that you really want to go to Dr. Ross Green’s website and notice that most of the of the challenges that we face probably fall into these categories. So here's the list. 18 categories, nine on each side? And I just I just love how this list is facing you. Oh, yeah. That's because they have difficulty persisting on a challenging or tedious that's why they aren't getting the homework done. You know, or the work done in your class at the college. And he keeps dropping the class and that's what we need to you know, focus on this because the problem right there are overshare difficulty handling unpredictability, ambiguity, whereas my finger parrot is novelty, uncertainty, whatever. This is just a golden list as far as I'm concerned. So you want to go to screens website and look for the Alsop assessment of lagging skills and unsolved problems. They'll be in the notes below. Find it download this page and you will go oh my gosh, this man knows  my children. So I think it's really worth doing. To get to that, get to that point where you can actually find time figure out what's going on and add it to your list. Yes, have a list of the unsolved problems, that the lagging skills that are happening with your child, your adult child and then stack rank them and decide which way to tackle first because what we'll find is once you tackle one, the other ones get easier to tackle. Gotta get to this work. Because this is how we get this is how we train ourselves to accept and to accept responsibility. Figure out you know why it's not working the regret piece, and then figure out how to repair it and how to go forward with better behavior in the future. 

So it's forgiving them for things that they've done. But it doesn't mean that we give them a blank slate, except that you're done. And you know, we really want to take the time to understand what's going on, as Barbara Avila says in her book, understand what's going on from their perspective, and our perspective. One of the thoughts we need to find our thoughts. We need to help them uncover their thoughts, their emotions, how to really use the problem solving process that Barbara Avila advocates and then practice that's experimentation, the solutions that we come up with together. 

So, if you would like more information about what I think are problems on both sides, which makes eight common mistakes that we make on systemizing with our autistic young adults. The link will be in the notes, please go to my website and download this free PDF and then sign up for my free masterclass which is the four part roadmap to systemize Self Reliance with our autistic young adults. It's going to work.  I know we can do this work together. I know that we can have a better place for everyone which is to make the world work for everyone. And we can help our autistic young adults create a life they love that works for all of us together. Bye for now.