#34 | Afraid He'll Get Sick

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RESOURCES

• STEAR Map Phone Wallpaper
• Emma McAdam's Therapy in a Nutshell: How to Stop Worrying In a Nutshell
• The Art of Adulting Course, Coaching and Community

This is Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize adulting together.

Today's struggle comes from Danielle Cushenberry who's a member of our Art of Adulting Facebook group. It's a private Facebook page.

She's concerned because her son is very afraid that he'll get sick. She needs help with some language.

Her oldest son had a positive COVID test and the younger son, who is has autism, is in a panic. He's a bit of a hypochondriac, she says. He's very worried about getting sick.

So let's just take the STEAR Map process which we always go to because it's our thoughts that produce our emotions and actions and that create the results in our life.

Lynn Davison 1:57
So let's just try to see if we can possibly figure out what might be going in her son and her autistic son's mind.

• The situation is that my brother's COVID test is positive.
• And the thinking is, I'm going to get sick if I'm not careful.
• He's afraid.
• He doesn't want to get sick so he doesn't touch things. He's, you know, spinning on all the things that he can do to prevent himself from getting sick.
• And that result is that he has worry about the future.

Makes perfect sense.

Lynn Davison 2:34
So it's really helpful for us to look at what's happening in our autistic young adult's mind and brain

Lynn Davison 2:51
The brain is always going to do what it can keep us safe, conserve resources and connected to the tribe, so we have protection from each other.

So the mind though, is different from the brain because the brain is there just to keep us alive. But the mind is watching the brain create these thoughts. And so the mind is how we can steer the thoughts so that they're more productive for us.

Because being in fear turns off the mind. It really turns off the thinking brain and it just gets us into that fight, flight like and flee survival mode where we don't really solve problems well.

Why does this happen often with our autistic adults? It seems like that future fear is a common theme. And it's happened, you know, often in our house as well.

So here might be part of the reason and that is that with the types of brains that they got in the you know, in the genetic lottery, that they live really in the present. So they're very much attuned to what's going on around them. They're aware, their brain is always scanning and looking for the threats in the environment.

That means that sometimes they don't have a lot of episodic memory they don't remember as well when they addressed a concern like this before and we're successful doing it. So that are always aren't always able to access those past memories that say, "Okay, here's what we do."

In addition, because they're so focused on the present, the future is hard for them. To imagine. That's what we need to do is trigger that imaginary part of our brain to say okay, well what are some of the possibilities of things that I could do? This is part of executive functioning, is imagining the the act the possibilities of actions that I could take in the future and create some plans.

So again, it makes perfect sense that our autistic young adults have trouble in this area.

How do we connect with not only ourselves, but also with them to solve this problem together?

So we go back to that fear map again, and I want to just make sure that we understand what's going on in our own brains. And please, don't think that I'm suggesting that there's only one thought on this situation.

The brain comes up with 60,000 thoughts a day, they say, the research suggests. So what we're just trying to do is try to get a hold of some of the thoughts that are going on in this situation, and then figure out which ones you know what what's happening as a result of those thoughts. And then what are the results that they're creating? And then pick the thoughts that work best for us.

So my suggestion would be to write down all the thoughts that you have on this situation and then find the one that is the stickiest of all of them and put that in a STEAR Map. And that will help you.

Sorry, I'm getting distracted, Danyelle. And now I really do hope that this is going to be helpful to you.

So what is the practice and why we do next?

Well, once we figured out where our thoughts are, and we figure out how to center ourselves, we can do that just the most helpful, neutral. calming presence in our artistic young adult's lives so that they feel comfortable coming to us and asking us for help solving these kinds of problems.

I turn to one of the resources that I enjoy so much, Emma McAdam. She has a YouTube channel therapy in a nutshell, and it's free. I have bought a couple of her courses. I think she's just got so much integrity with the way that she presents her information. She's a licensed mental health therapist. I think she's worth worth looking at. And here's what she suggests that we do. These are the points that she makes in one of the videos and I'll I'll make sure I can do a link to that in the in the transcript.

She says first there's good worry versus bad worry. I mean worried about the future is going to be part of our lives. It's just part of our brain. It's part of that critic that lives inside of all of our brains. That's always going to be you know, saying, "Oh, watch out for this," and "You screwed up on that."

It's just part of our brain that some of the some of its good I mean, we do want to consider what our actions could create in the future. So that's good worry. And maybe you know what, out of the situation in our lives might change. I mean, we just had a couple of years of learning how, you know, having a virus can make a lot of things a lot of things different in our lives.

Lynn Davison 7:44
Bad worry is when we get caught up in that rumination that's in cycle or we just keep worrying, worrying, worrying. It causes us to kind of collapse in on ourselves and not really, you know, just go to protection and hiding mode.

We have to notice whether or not we're kind of in a good worry where we're really considering what we should do in the future versus a bad worry where we have shut down on ourselves.

Because the truth is, is that everything is figure-out-able there. Is a next step that is probably a good choice. We don't have to make be 100% in all of our decisions. We don't have to be 100% Perfect. We can try a few things and see what works.

I love Marie Forleo his book, everything is figure out a bowl she's an incredibly successful creator of content and has an amazing YouTube channel and business that is really inspiring. So I love her saying that she borrows from her mom, which is everything is figure-out-able.

So, you know really what we want to encourage our artists, again adults to do is always ask for support. And we need to ask for support.

These are themes that keep coming up in our lives. And we really need more than just, you know, casual information from there's a lot of good stuff out there. We also need more than that. 

A process, a formula that we can rely on that's going to help us figure out how to navigate life going forward with an autistic young adult and for the autistic young adult.

Because autism affects the way that we think and so it's going to affect every part of our life. So we need to get to give them a framework, a didactic way of looking at life and figuring out how to make each part of their life a little bit better, just a tiny bit better each day.

And seeking help when they need it and and pushing themselves out of their comfort zone so that they can try new and different things. So that's the next thing we want to do.

Then we really want to put the mind to work on this problem. Okay, what are the problems the let's get some data. Let's look at some numbers. What's the probability that even if I did get sick, you know, what's the probability that something really bad is going to is going to happen?

Have I taken the steps the precautions that I need to take which, you know, social distancing and masking and and hopefully vaccinating so that the prospects of having a very bad illness are diminished.

They're not going to go to zero and we just have to accept that there's going to be part of life that is going to be a struggle. It's not always going to be easy, but we can handle it because it's all figured-out-able.

So please join me at Lynn Davison.com/welcome.

Learn about The Art of Adulting where I teach in that course a systematic way for our autistic young adults and us to create a life we love that works.

It really helps us slow things down. Take them apart and approach each aspect of our life in a more systematic way, so that we can notice the progress we're making, which is encouraging to our brain and our hearts, and is so important for us to know that we can create a life we love together that works.

Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai