Watch the webclass, "4-Part Roadmap to Encourage Adulting Actions."

Get the Preview of the workbook, When Autism Grows Up by Lynn C Davison, Adulting Coach, Available in Fall 2022.

Download, "The Quick Start Guide to STEAR Mapping"

RESOURCES

• The Art of Adulting Private Facebook Page
• SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
• STEAR Map Phone Wallpaper
• Alexithymia at ScienceDirect.com
• The Colors of Our Emotions Mood Meter by Marc Brackett
• Mood Meter Phone Wallpaper
• THE GAP AND THE GAIN by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Ben Hardy
• Focus on the Gain Phone Wallpaper
• Reflective Listening Phone Wallpaper
• Proactive Collaborative Problem Solving Phone Wallpaper
• LivesInTheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene - Proactive Collaborative Problem Solving Process

Hi everyone. This is Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize adulting together. Today's struggle comes from Colleen, a member of The Art of Adulting private Facebook page both of her sons are struggling

In the spirit of Barb Avila's SEEING AUTISM process, we're going to first go to understand what’s happening with her young adults based on her thoughts. She tells us that the 18 year old has no idea how to express himself. He hasn't cried since he was a child and he has never been angry. The 21 year old can't get out of the house. That's he's come a long way she says but he can't get himself out of the house. Neither can analyze stories for the protagonist, antagonist or theme. The 18 year old is very quiet and will shut down if pushed to answer an abstract question. And she's found that online school was just awful for him because he learns more from interacting with the students and the teacher than he does just from being instructed online. Both have been diagnosed with autism recently. So there's a mouthful there quite a bit going on.

CONNECT

So let's connect first with ourselves and then also with them, and I'm just checking to make sure I do have a participant Oh, that's me. Okay.

So please do not hesitate to join me here. In order to be coached live. I've finally figured out the tech, I think, and if you're willing to be the first person to be coached I, with my awkwardness on the tech, would love to have you join me. So, here we are.

Let's first connect. And what I want to do is actually take her thought and just put one of them in a STEAR map. So here's what we're going to do. We're just going to do this one at a time.

So the situation is two autistic sons. Just keep it really factual. There's no drama, you know, I have two sons who are autistic, they've been diagnosed. (You might hear my daughter laugh in the background. She has the best laugh.)

So the first thought, I think I'm hearing from you Colleen is, "Something has gone wrong."

It's just, you know, it's not right, what's happening with them. And the emotion and please correct me if you can if you join me here, emotion seemed like there was confusion in there was like sort of, "I really don't know what to do."

So I'm going to just put confusion in the emotion line (if please, you know Collen, make a comment when I post this and let me know if I got some of this right.)

So the action is that she notices what's not right. And you know, we all do this. We all have that inner critic that is noticing what's gone wrong. I mean, our brains are just biased toward the negative.

Freud called it the ego. In religious circles sometimes it's called the natural man. It's just the natural tendency that we have to see where things are different from the way that we expected them to be, or different from the average norm, whatever that we expected. So I'm just sensing that you're noticing what is not right about the situation.

And so the result for you is that you sort of spin, which just just means you got a lot of thoughts that are all kind of running together. 

I'm very happy that you wrote them down because that's very helpful. But your spin, you can't really leave it's better like you can't decide. But it's just you are unsure?

Next step. How about that next step with a question mark? What are you for the question mark? 

We notice what's not right. And we don't know what the next step is. And so I really just wanted to pull it back at this very high level in order to just help give Colleen some compassion, some understanding of the confusion that happens when we're presented with an autistic young adult, and we really want to help them but we're not at all sure what it is that we can do to make things better.

And that's what we do address in The Art of Adulting. There's an awful lot of information in there from other people who are autism experts. In addition to that, I've broken life down into parts and we want to look at each part and figure out what we want. So that's what we do inside the Art of Adulting is try to tease apart what's happening, separated out and to tackle one thing at a time because that's really all that any of us can do. Especially our autistic young adults handling one thing at a time is really the best approach for them. So let me take that.

Let's go back to another one of the questions that she asked. The 18 year old has no idea how to express himself. He hasn't cried since he was a child and has never been angry. So let's see what part of this we can put in the situation line. Okay, so the situation for this 18 year old is that he hasn't cried in years. I guess to be more specific about the number of years you haven't seen him cry would make this even more factual.

And so I'm wondering what your thought might be. And I think it might be similar to something's gone wrong, or I don't know how to help him. I understand that thought because often we do get in a position where we're just not sure how we can help and maybe we're getting some resistance when we try to, have a conversation about this topic.

And we've never confronted this topic before so we don't even really know how do you Google that, "son doesn't express emotion." It's not easy.

But I want to suggest again, that we first understand what's going on with ourselves.

So the emotion here might be I don't know how to help him. It might be like lost or afraid or, you know, just don't know what to do.

And so what happens. In that action line is we don't do anything really, for fear that we might do something wrong and then the result is nothing changes. Right?  

So again, I want to encourage you to come come into The Art of Adulting where I can coach you on this and we can have a real back and forth live conversation about what's going on and trying to understand better, what's happening for you first, because really, we're the ones that can influence our child the most. And we want to make sure that we come to them being centered and knowing that we're going to show up for them the best way possible. So it's really helpful for us to know what's going on first with us.

So now let's go back one more, and let's get to the fact that neither child can analyze stories for protagonist, antagonist or themes. So how do we turn that into the facts? So the fact is maybe the school assignment is to identify the protagonist, the antagonist, and the theme. 

And the thought is they can't do it.

And there's that emotion again of sort of helpless. I don't know how to help them.

So the action is we worry about it. We just worry.

And then the result becomes, I can't do anything to help.

And so I want to just see if we can identify where we're coming from. Take a deep breath and look at the STEAR Mapping process as a way to better understand what's happening inside of our head.

You know, what's the brain offering us? How does the mind interpret it? And where can we wiggle our thinking a little bit to see if maybe something else could be considered here?

So I'd love to coach you live on this Colleen.

So here's another thought. "Online school was awful for him because he learns a lot from the interactions with his teacher and his students, his fellow students."

Let's take that down here again, and let's look at it.

All right, so the situation is online, online learning, online school, and the thought is, it's awful for him.

And the emotion when that happens, I mean, when our kids are suffering, we suffer. Right? So we're just, we're just sad. You know, we don't want this to be the case for our kids. We really want them to be able to get the most out of their education. And, you know, we see the energy that he gets from other people and we want him to be with other people.

So that's what's happening in the action line is we're thinking about you know, we identify why it's awful.

And then the result is it's awful for us, too.

I'm hoping that these examples just taking these thoughts and putting them in this to your STEAR Map helps you understand and helps you see the value they offer.

This process has really helped me a lot with with all the struggles in my life, and in particular, the ones where I'm trying to help my autistic and adults become the beautiful wonderful people and have that absolute glorious life that they love that works for them and will work for them even when I'm gone.

So I really hope that this process will help you understand better how to use a STEAR Map and how to see if it could help your situation.

So that's the best that I can do for now. Anytime you want to join me here at 11 o'clock on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, I am happy to coach you live. So let's just go to we finished the Connect step we use the steer map with a situation thoughts, emotions, actions and results. And this will be included. Links to all of these will be included in the transcript.

PRACTICE

So now what do we do with this situation? What can I offer Colleen?

The first thing I want to offer Colleen is that alexithymia, which is literally means without words for feelings, is very common among people with autism. It's just kind of the way that the brains got wired.

And so how do we help them feel those feelings that are so enlightening and so helpful to us to understand what's going on with us?

And I suggest we use this mood meter. This is from Marc and I've lost his last name. He teaches this ruler approach to schools and teachers all across the nation and is helping to improve emotional intelligence in our schools.

And I like it because it's so simple. So on one axis, it's the low energy high energy and on the on the bottom axis it's low comfort, high comfort. So we don't have to have our kids identify exactly what emotion they're feeling. We can just see if they're revved up or if they're calm, and if they're comfortable, or if they're not comfortable. And I think most of us can get to that point.

We're not trying to turn them into you know, authors and poets who can parse out one emotion after the other. We're just trying to identify: are they comfortable or not comfortable? And I think that this mood meter that's offered by them is really the the easiest way to approach it.

There are others that you've seen; the feelings, you know, circles and then they go from the six main emotions and then they go out. Those are also helpful but as a starting point. Let's use what they're using in schools today to help kids understand what emotions they're feeling.

Then the second idea that I want to offer you is that when we focus on the gap between the ideal point up here and where we are, which is this cute little guy. Stick Figure. When we are always looking at where we would like to be versus where we are. Dan Sullivan and Dr. Ben says that they call that being in the gap.

And of course we want to identify where we want to go; we want to have that ideal pulling us forward, getting us toward the future. It's the way that our brain works and it's marvelous because it's helped us create all these wonderful inventions and helped us improve our lives over time. Of course, we want to have that ideal but if we're always focusing on what the gap between where we are and the ideal, we're frankly gonna be miserable.

So I just want to remind you that gap is always going to be there. Even if our children, you know, level up, there's always gonna be another thing that we want for them.

So understand that that gap is there for a reason. But it's also not where we want to live all the time.

What we want to do is measure our progress backward. We want to look at where we are versus the starting point and I'm sure that your sons have made it like you said, tremendous progress. And so what we need to do again, is, you know, remind ourselves that things we are making progress that may not be as quickly as we want. It's frankly never going to be as quickly as we want. But that's okay. And accepting where we are now. And noticing where we how far we've come is really going to bring you some peace, and that's what I wish for you.

And then of course, the other suggestion I have is always to do the best we can to reflectively listen to our kids, so that we understand what the thoughts are that are driving their actions, their emotions in their actions.

Then we can help teach them that STEAR Map tool that will help them understand better what's going on between their mind and their brain and how to manage it.

How to drive their brain better, and how to set their view on that GPS of where they want to go and take the next step to get there.

So that's my recommendation is that we do that as often as we can and then we collaborate using Ross Greene's proactive collaborative problem solving process where we:

• State the facts of the situation.
• Ask what their point of view is. 
• Notice what our point of view is, and we've done this in advance so we only have a few points to make and we can make them succinctly.
• So we spend most of our time listening to where the overlap is so that we can agree on what's the very next step that we're going to take together so that we can build on their strengths.

There's always going to I mean, I am the most awkward dancer there is, well maybe not in the whole world, but it makes me feel you can tell I definitely feel I think that way. And so it's just not something I was born with; I just can't do that very well. I also cannot throw a ball worth more than 10 or 10 or 15 feet. I've never been able to get a ball throwing thing down at all. I mean, there's several parts of my intellect that are not as strong as say with my father and my brother are both geniuses in math and I could care less about math.

I mean, we've all got this incredible umbrella of characteristics. And we're all somewhere on that bell shaped curve on each one of those spokes.

We just want to identify where their brain works best and then see what we can do to build a life around what works for them at their pace.

That doesn't mean that we don't push them out of their comfort zone because we sure have to. Or that we don't set limits because we definitely have to have boundaries. And we definitely have to teach them life is going to have its own boundaries and they need to learn how to work within those. Not that at all.

It's just let's see if we can design a life for them in each of their 10 domains that fits what they want. And that takes them on that very next step. And that's where their highest motivation is going to be is where they want to take the next step. And let's see what we can do to teach them to create a life they love that works.

So please join me. Come on in. Join us, the parents and the autistic young adults who are part of The Art of Adulting at lynncdavison.com/blog. I'd love to have you inside and I'd love to be able to coach you on all of these topics.

Bye for now.