#19 | Entitled: When What Is SHOULD Be Different

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 TOOLS by Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels

Hi, It's Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize Self Reliance through my course, my coaching and my community. Thank you for watching today.

Entitlement is our topic and it's when what is should be different. This comes up a lot in all of our lives. And it's a little tricky when we're helping our autistic young adults decide what to think and what to do about that.

So, let me explain what I think it is. It's when we expect the situation as we've talked about the situation in our STEAR Map, the situation to change so that our thoughts will change and our emotions will change. Therefore, our actions will change and our results will change. So we expect that exterior that outside to change to line up with what we think is how things should be.

That's usually a recipe for frustration. When I hear the emotion frustration it's often when we think things should be different than they are today.

We see this in our autistic young adults, when they complain about the way things are going. They're not going the way that they thought they should be. When they should have, you know better quality Wi Fi. They shouldn't have to go to school when they don't like the teachers. They shouldn't have to get a credit card because it's a pain and it doesn't they don't understand why why they should develop their credit record.

It's when they're complaining about the to do that's in front of them that they really you know, can come up with all kinds of reasons why they shouldn't have to do that.

It's when they refuse to follow our rules. When they don't you know the boundaries we put in place when they when they refuse to put their phone away before they come to the dinner table.

It's when they ask for more than is reasonable to ask for. In particular, when they're looking for a better quality $1000 to $5,000 bed or a $10,000 electronics setup or a bicycle that is nice or or motor bicycle. It's when they're asking for more than is reasonable then what they understand fits into the family budgets.

And we actually ask for more, too. What we asked for is that they don't have a meltdown. It's when we try to arrange their environment so that they don't think thoughts that produce those off those anger, emotions that cause them to blow up and hit people or damage things. And the result is that they are justified in thinking how they're thinking. And often though, sometimes, they actually are pretty remorseful, but we in particular, we want them not to have you know, they are our young adults, I don't want him to blow up. So I'm afraid so I'm going to arrange his life in such a way that we minimize the chances of a meltdown. And therefore I live in fear.

That's what happens because we end up walking on eggshells around them, trying to make sure that the bad stuff in life, the uncomfortable stuff in life, doesn't happen for them.

So if this is you know our STEAR Map it's our young adult asking us to buy something and it's expensive. And we think we can't afford that. Our emotion is when there's just not enough to go around. So we're in scarcity. We were growing and then finally our energy becomes scarce. That thought line ends up in our results line almost every time.

Another example is that our young adult, you know, is there and we think if I don't please them, they'll melt down. And so I'm in fear all the time. And then I arrange their life around, you know, avoiding the meltdown. And then I'm not pleased with how things are going and I'm exhausted,you know, I'm just frankly, exhausted and out of energy to, you know, keep a range in life so that they'd like it.

And I realize that no one else is going to do this for them once my runway runs out,

So I have to figure out a way for them to create what they want, and deal with the things that life is going to put in their path. I mean, that's what's real for us.

So the question I want us to ask ourselves, and I've had to ask this question so many times I mean, this is perfectly normal for us, perfectly normal reactions to these to that some of the challenges that we're presented with.

I just had to ask myself, "What if I'm wrong about that?"

I mean, I've had to get really good at being wrong. I've had to be willing to wonder whether or not I'm making the right choice. I wonder whether or not my thinking can shift just a little bit if I can just steer my thoughts a little differently. Maybe I'll get a result that in the long run is better for all of us, the whole family.

That's what I've had to learn to do, and why I advocate that this systemizing self reliance is a challenge for both the parents and for the child.

We all need to get familiar with this with the theory behind changing and thinking and breaking our lives into, you know, the domains of deciding what we want. We have to get more familiar with the theory of living a successful life. Practice the tools that interest us that seem like they could work for us, and then master them so that we in turn can help our children, our young adults, understand the theory themselves. Practice what seems appropriate for them what they're interested in practicing, so that they can master their life.

I believe that we're in the biggest challenge of making this transition from being defined by school to being defined by what they want in life is a challenge for both the parent and the child and we both have to go on this parallel learning journey together.

So what if we were able to steer our thought to something like, "there's my young adult asking me for this. And I'm thinking, I wonder how they will afford this. What can they do to be able to buy what it is that they think is really important?"

And so I get curious, and I take my myself, and I look at my thoughts, and I take both me and my young adult together. Maybe with my parenting partner as well through the proactive collaborative problem solving process that Ross Greene advocates in that you've heard before in my videos. I really believe that we need to understand the situation and agree on what's happening, and then ask them for their thoughts. That's the empathy step, and then present our thoughts, our STEAR Map, and then collaboratively agree on what steps we're going to take next. And then we do it.

Maybe if we shifted our thought about our young adult is melting down. My thought is, "I wonder how to teach reactive discipline to them? What are the steps that they need to learn about to better understand how the situation is triggering thoughts? And their thoughts them are influencing their emotions, and those emotions create those actions like, you know, storming and hitting and destroying things."

And then, "How am I going to teach them how to slow things down, so that, you know, they can figure this out?"

And I go out and I learn from others. I get a coach, I work through how to implement this in our house, and I take the steps that I can control because the point that we all have to recognize is that we cannot change anyone else on ourselves. And And amazingly enough when we do change ourselves, sometimes we get some openings in there so that we can make those those steps toward helping them create helping them practice reactive discipline.

Because none of us are entitled to comfort.

I think that's what is the core message from a lot of the work that I do. Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels outlined in their book the tools their first tool is called the reversal of desire and this is my lovely drawing of their drawing.

And let me explain it the the comfort zone right here is where we would love to stay. Unfortunately, no, if we stay there, we get trapped in it. We just keep cycling through the same behaviors that we've always had. And, and we get trapped in a small world, the world where we're comfortable.

We see this a lot with our autistic young adults. They get trapped. They want to stay in the room. They want to stay on YouTube, they want to play as many games for as long as they can. They just get trapped in where they feel comfortable.

The trouble is that as humans, we desire things. It's just part of our nature. So our desire has to drive us through that pain, that Wall of Pain, that wall of discomfort to the world of endless possibilities on the other side. Because we know I mean, you've heard the saying, "No pain, no gain," and that applies not only to working out but also to growing our brain, growing ours skills, growing our understanding of how the world works, and what we need to do to create a life that we love.

So they advocate, and it's been a challenge for me, but the thought I'm practicing right now is, "Bring it on; I love pain."

So when I see something's going to be uncomfortable, I do my best and it's it's it's a practice. I do my best to look at it and say, I want to do this. Let's bring this on. This is a great challenge for me.

That's what we learn about in The Art of Adulting. And that's what I can help you with again, theory and then oh, that practice how does that apply to the particular situation I'm looking at? And then eventually, you know, can I master being able to accept the pain, the discomfort that's required for me to grow and model that for my autistic young adults so that they understand that life is is all about pain and learning?

I mean, if you look at the hero's journey, you know, we they drop into a challenge, you know, and they have to beat those dragons. And then when they come back they have they figured it out and they're strong enough for not only themselves but also for two.

And that's what we're trying to do is help our kids understand that this hero's journey, the hero's journey that we their parents have been on is one that they're going to be on in their adulthood.

And we're not going to sugarcoat it. It's it's going to be tough.

And that's on purpose because that's how we grow. So what of course we want to do though, is recognize that there's a zone of, okay, so there's a zone of comfort. Then there's this zone of tolerance and then there's this zone of just intolerance.

We want to get to that mean that virtue, that virtuous mean of right in the middle. We don't want our kids to stay in that zone of comfort. We don't want to push them past what they're capable of doing. We want to find that middle ground, that zone of growth that works for them.

So what are the skills? What are the steps, what you know, what's the tiny, incremental step that we can take next, that will demonstrate to them that they can do the uncomfortable and do it anyway, that they can work through that fear factor of trying something new, doing something that they've never done before? As long as we break it down into parts that they agree they are willing to take.

Because we just can't stay where we are human beings. We are just constantly evolving. And we have you know, that's just our nature. So we have to help them learn how to do that evolving, how to push themselves through that discomfort. To the other side, where they learn and they grow.

This is what we do at the Art of Adulting. We learn the theory, then we theory the practice the tools and the concepts behind creating life that we love that works and mapping out what we want in each of our 10 domains and our thoughts about them. And then we practice, we decide in advance what's that one step that we're going to take over the next week. We practice that we practice evaluating ourselves on how well we did that, so that we understand that is us that's determining what we want, and we're determining whether or not we're getting a good grade or not. It's no longer somebody apart from us.

And you know, we're noticing what are the thoughts that are coming up? What how are we going to what's getting in the way of us taking the actions that we know we need to take in order to create that life that we love that we've agreed we're going to do but somehow we don't do them. So we look at those every week.

And then then we know you know where we're being realistic about our own expectations and where we need to wiggle them a little bit and steer our map your life toward that GPS point that is exactly where we want to be. And once we figure that out, and sometimes this is like a parallel process. It's very much a parallel process where we figure it out and learn while they figure it out and learn and hopefully we can learn together and become, you know, create that kind of interdependent family that was what we had in mind when we got started on this parenting journey. So please take the time to watch my four part roadmap to systemize Self Reliance with your autistic young adult and let me know what you think.

I hope this is helpful and I can't wait to talk to you. Bye for now.