#47 | Doing too much?

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:

• Parents of Young Adults (13+) With Autism on Facebook
• SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
• AANE | Asperger Profiles | The Big Picture Challenges
• What Autistic People Need (Phone Wallpaper)
• STEAR Mapping Quick Start Guide by Lynn C Davison
• POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE by Shirzad Chamine
• LivesInTheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene
• What All Parents Need to Know About Building Lifelong Executive Function and How Change Happens by Yulia Rafailova

Hey everyone. It's Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize adulting together.

Today's struggle comes from the parents of young adults 13 Plus with autism and the father asks, "Are we doing too much?"

It's a darn good question.

Here are his thoughts. He's wondering, do you feel you do too much for your team? So they can't do things for themselves? If they should?

This is a really good question. And I'd like to suggest that we use Barb Avila's process, again from her book, SEEING AUTISM, where we understand what's going on. Move to connecting with ourselves and with our autistic young adult and then I'm going to suggest some practices that we can take to improve this situation. So what is going on?

9:11
Barb Avila in her book, SEEING AUTISM explained, explains this being able to jointly attend to something with loved ones becomes less manageable, enjoyable and useful. This is where our children have been in their childhood.

This disruption leads to the cascade effect affecting regulation, understanding one's personal agency and one's impact on the world.

So the fact that their brain is differently wired and tends to have not in all cases, but in most cases tends to have a hyper aroused limbic system, which helps, which causes them to scan the environment looking for what's wrong and scanning themselves looking for what's wrong with themselves all the time, which puts them into that fight, flight, freeze. We all are familiar with that. And that's what has a cascading effect on their learning means that their skills are lagging.

There's unsolved problems wherever there's lagging skills, and we need to get on top of that.

So what are the common challenges? we've all seen charts like this, I find this one particularly useful from the ANNE organization where they they actually talk about all of these seven areas Theory of Mind executive functioning, central coherence, flexible thinking, hidden conversation, social pragmatics, and self advocacy.

These are all of the challenges that are resulting from sensory differences from different challenges in regulating emotion and anxiety and from the attention deficits that we see often in our autistic young adults.

And these translate into what our autistic people need. They need productivity, efficiency, predictability, certainty, specificity of language, someone to listen, a side by side thinking coach, somebody who helps them understand what is required. Time to process what's all going on. And I'm going to add the last one, which is a roadmap.

Our kids need structure around life skills, the ones that we're trying to teach them and that's what I would like to offer you is a roadmap that I think will help them. What we need to do is we need to break down the challenge of all of adulting into manageable parts and agree on what we're going to do next.

11:57
So let's connect first with ourselves. When we're asking ourselves that question. Are we doing too much I suggest that we use the STEAR Map. This enables us to take any situation that's happening in our life and break it down into these five categories. 

12:21

1. What's the situation that's the part that's outside of our control? You know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. That's what happens in the situation.
2. The thought, what we're making out of the situation, how we're interpreting the situation,
3. the emotions that that creates,
4. the actions we take,
5. that create our results are all within our control.

And so I think it's really important for us to break everything that's happening in our minds down into this STEAR Map, and also teach it to our autistic young adults.

This is a tool they can use for the rest of their lives to figure out why they're getting a certain result and what, in their control, they can can change. They can change and what is outside of their control that they have to just acknowledge as part of life.

13:14
That's the wisdom that we want them to develop. And it goes right along with that acceptance God grant me the serenity poem.

So here's what I think could be going on with so many of us.

1. Our autistic young adults are the situation
2. where thinking we are doing too much,
3. and that results in some emotions that could be like resentment, shame, confusion, mood, difficult emotions.
4. When we act out of those emotions. We stop doing things we argue with our autistic young adults, we, we you know, say it's gonna be my way or the highway. We, we we go inside and we shame ourselves in that we are doing too much. And we're mollycoddling or there were some quite a few comments in that post, where even therapists were saying it's our fault. We're crippling our children. Lots of things happen in the middle of in that action from those emotions.
5. And the result is we just keep judging ourselves and our autistic young adults for not being good enough.

I want to stop that. I want to suggest that we notice our sabotaging thought habits.

This is from from Shrizad Chamine.

He has a wonderful website called PositiveIntelligence.com. He wrote a wonderful book, mostly consults with businesses, but I think this really does apply to us.

The number one, the number one sabotage is our judge. It's when we think that we're not you know, that things are not the way they should be. And it also shows up as avoidance and as controlling hyper vigilance. Hi hyper emotional.

15:23
Hyper achieving. Can you imagine all these subcategories of sabotaging thoughts? We've all thought of thought of them, their calls are restless. We're just a stickler where people pleaser or more the victim.

These are all the sabotaging thought habits that he has identified that I think just putting them into caricatures like this is really helpful, but the number one is always the judge and we just need to watch ourselves, judge ourselves to notice, oh, that's what's going on.

And watch how often our autistic young adults do this too. I mean, they are really hard on themselves, at least the ones that live in my house, that you know, when they're not doing something right or when somebody is unhappy with them. It can cause a serious meltdown.

I mean, there's a lot of this going on in our lives and I just want us to be more aware of it. Because if we shifted from being a judge from being a sabotaging those sabotaging thought habits, perhaps we would have the same situation which is our autistic young adults.

And our thought could become, I wonder what they want. What is it that they want? Now that they're entering teenage and young adulthood, there's some agency developing thank goodness, they are no longer doing just whatever we tell them to do. They are deciding for themselves and that's what we want to nourish.

We want to nourish that those choices that they're making. So if we're curious about it, my suggestion is always that we do the collaborative, proactive, problem solving process that Ross Greene advocates on his website LivesintheBalance.org. Then we agree on the next steps. See how just that one shift that shift in in that thought I wonder what they want makes a huge difference in the result that we get.

17:29
So I also want to introduce Virginia Satir's change process. She's the mother of family therapy, and she suggested and she's she's no longer with us, but she suggested that the change process and I hope that you can see this okay.

Unknown Speaker 17:49
Let me just bring it forward, says that what we're trying to do is improve our autistic young adults' performance.

• And here we are now with the old status quo. If it's what we're used to, it may not be where we're comfortable, but we're used to it and our brains love things that are the same. It loves to us to be in habits and in our brains just love us to continue to do the same old thing. But we realize that that's not going to work.
• A foreign element gets introduced here. This is that therapist comment or some other person in our life will make a judging comment about how we are enabling our children.

18:30

• This happens and it causes us to stumble into what's going on here. And we initially and our young adults resist the whole concept. Oh, we go into denial. No, we're not. You know, they're fine. I'm fine. You know, they're wrong. I'm right. That's where that resistance happens. I'm not going to change anything. And we really can see that happen with ourselves and with artistic young adults.
• So we just go right into this whole bottom end of chaos. And it's it's can last a long time. Just having one image here is not quite enough.
• And then something happens where we both get, we get or they get a transforming idea, oh, maybe if I did that thing. And then we start to create the change that we want. We start moving up the other side of the curve in integrating that change. into our lives.
• And you know, leaving the change curve victorious. 

That's what my logo means to you that's up here. The new status quo. This is we've set up an objective we've set our GPS on what our goal is, and we made it and that's what might you my logo means to you.

19:51
So what are the practices that really do help us get through that incredible change curve? We know that getting making change happen in our lives, doesn't go in a straight line. We don't decide what we're going to do and just zoom off to, you know, Zoom often just overtime perfectly up to the new change. We know that there's more of a curve going on and it's pretty messy in the middle. It's pretty chaotic in the middle.

So how do we get our autistic young adults how do we encourage how what what can we do with ourselves and our environment to encourage that adulting that we're all looking for?

That's what our end is. What we want to remember is we want to get take incremental steps, you know, we got into this trouble with tiny little steps and we're going to get out of trouble in tiny little steps, remembering that every bit of progress matters.

20:52
We're going to use Ross Greene's collaborative proactive problem solving process.

• We first start out with the situation, what is it that we can all agree on? What are the facts, facts have no drama, just what are the facts?
• Then Okay, start with asking our autistic and adults what their thoughts are. That's the empathy step. Ross suggest that that's so critical because it means that we see them, they see what they we see them and that helps them feel safe, soothe, secure and ready to make a change once we acknowledge what's going on with them. And we can really, really listen well to them by writing what they're saying down by doing reflective listening, which is taking what they said, acknowledging that we're not certain, you know, I think I'm seeing and the emotion, you're uncomfortable because we're asking you to make a change that reflective listening process is golden, and really helps to calm their limbic system down and engage that prefrontal cortex where they can make the decisions that we want to encourage them to make to to change what they're doing.
• And then we present our STEAR Map because this is a solution that has to be created. That works for everybody. So we present our STEAR MAP we've done our work ahead of time. We are in a curious place. We know exactly what our concerns are, we can say them in short, succinct sentences with very little drama, so that they understand exactly what our concerns are.
• And then together we find where that overlap is and we agree on what is the next step.

 22:43
It works what is the next action that they will be willing to try this week? And if we can, we want to encourage a strategic action. For Patricia Chen, a psychologist, a research psychologist did an experiment where she asked a group of, you know, the control group to separate eggs.

She then instructed that the researchers instructed the experimental group to consider these three questions:

1. How else could we do this?
2. Are there things I could do differently?
3. Are there ways to do this even better, she asked the the experimental group these to consider these questions.

And of course, the results. You're not surprised that the experimental group outperformed the control group when they were considering these questions. So these are the questions we want to ask our autistic young adult.

23:49
Our inspiration can come from a lot of places, but wow, Helen Keller of all people really inspires us all:

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task. But my chief duty is to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."

And I just believe so strongly, that this whole challenge of having an autistic young adult as part of our family, is the greatest gift we could have. There's a lot of beauty in autism. There's a lot of beauty in what these struggles bring out in us.

Okay, it's not always pretty. But there's beauty in how we evolve. How we learn and how we grow so we can enjoy each other more every day.

Please come to www.LynnCDavison.com/welcome to learn more about what I offer at The Art of Adulting.

Bye for now.