#42 | Her son rants

Mar 16, 2022

RESOURCES

Parents of Adults with Aspergers Facebook Group
SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
STEAR Map Phone Wallpaper
4 Steps to Set Boundaries PDF
The Art of Adulting on Facebook

Today's struggle is from the Parents of Adults with Asperger's. Mom has a 28 year old son and he rants.

Here are her thoughts.

He has good insurance. A good job.
He owns his own house and a car.
I upset him a lot this morning. I feel terrible.
He calls three to four times a week at least ranting about what's going wrong. The bills the house the car, sometimes several times a day.
I'm self employed, and it's starting to affect my ability to get things done.
Yesterday there were four calls at least one hour total.
This morning the first was at 6am.
I told him, I'm tired of urgent calls all the time.
He said he's going to move back to where we lived before.
He has no friends here.
And I am physically and emotionally exhausted. He has given given up drinking, pot and energy drinks, which sounds like he's moving in a great direction.
But I don't know where he can find friends and I messaged him an apology.

So let's just take a moment and send this mom upon check empathy. We understand. She's in a tough position, obviously loves her son incredibly, and he's done a lot of really good things in his life. He's created a life that works for him. Pretty much. But right now he's having trouble with his mindset.

I would probably say there's a pattern of him having difficulty managing his mindset, because he does tend to notice what's gone wrong in the world a lot. And then he tries to figure it out by talking out loud to his mom.

So let's use the process that Barb Avila outlines in her book SEEING AUTISM and she does a terrific job of explaining why these are the three steps of understanding what's going on connecting with ourselves and with our autistic and adult and then figuring out what's the practice that we need to put in place.

So in the understand phase, we want to figure out what is going on. Her son is ranting about things that are out of his control and he's just angry and upset and very troubled by a situation that he's finding himself in and why is it that he doesn't have any friends or doesn't have another way to address this problem?

Well, our gives us some insights in autism instead of social reciprocity where we bounce back and forth with some ideas and we have a conversation where we're exchanging thoughts. And we're both focused together on that problem. Providing the child with reassurance that would be the process that would happen with a child with a non autistic brain.

Instead, our autistic children are left to their own devices because that's not a soothing process to them. So they turn more to the predictable elements in the environment and it becomes a mechanism to cope to feel safe and grounded.

So they reject the social reciprocity challenges and move more into the factual predictable elements in their environment and they miss opportunities to grow their social skills.

When we think about it this way, there's just a whole cascading effect on our autistic young adults' development in the social realm. And we can see this for sure, because they're, they tend to lag behin their age peers in their social skills and social reciprocity in particular.

So, on top of that, because we prefer things to be fixed, what we end up seeing is that it's hard for them to find the virtuous mean of being flexible. Instead, we find that they don't have too little which means that they'd be very fickle. They really have too much too much fixation on what what is predictable.

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So they kind of become obstinate in their thinking and fixed in there thinking. So it's a challenge for autistic young adults to kind of get that balance between being flexible and being too flexible, or getting into the middle. Being obstinate. You know how to move from obstinate to flexibility, not easy.

The only thing that's going to help, it doesn't come naturally. So the only thing that's going to help them is a lot of practice.

Before we suggest them that they practice we need to connect with ourselves and with them to make sure that we really have a good idea of what's going. What are the thoughts, emotions and that are driving their actions and ours?

So, I recommend STEAR Mapping because when we look at life and divided out into these categories of the situation of thought, the emotion, the action and the result, and the result always ties back to our thought. When we separate out and slow down what's happening, sometimes we can get some insights on why this is: where why we are where we are and why they are where they are emotionally.

So let's just take take her thoughts.

The situation is she has a son and
her thought is I upset him terribly this morning.
So she feels terrible.
And so she kind of pushes back at him too, in terms of trying to you know, stop this because this is making me feel awful. And then she ruminates about it afterwards. Which makes perfect sense because we love our children down to their toenails and we don't want to do anything that makes them lives worse. We want to be there to help them make their lives better. So we think about it over and over again. Oh gosh, this is a difficult one.
And the result is that we're upset so we've upset him. We think we've upset him. And of course our result is that we're upset.

So I don't want I mean that upset makes perfect sense.

We do want to take the time to feel that feeling. We want to name it. It's very uncomfortable. It's kind of high energy. It's like Ah, why did this happen? And then we when we look forward in our body that upset is worried around our heart and it's pulsing.

But if we can relax into it and breathe in through our nose. You know just what's going on inside of our body. It's kind of miraculous that our brains tell our body to secrete hormones that cause these vibrations in our bodies. That's what they are is vibrations in our bodies. And we can feel them. As long as we don't keep generating more sentences that create more of that upset feeling, we can actually process it and let it go over about a period of just a minute or a minute and a half.

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So when we can picture it, the color, the shape, the movement, the size, where it is in our bodies, and we can say to ourselves, this feeling is caused by sentences in my brain, or it's just a sensation like pain from a wound and we can't change that. But we're working in this case on the feeling coming from the sentences in our brain.

So we process it until it subsides and then we can move on to solving the problem.

So here's another way to look at this. I don't want her to jump to this idea too quickly because we really do want to get in touch with our feelings and what they're telling us what they're indicating to us. They're important pieces of information that we need to pay attention to to navigate the world.

But in this situation because I only have a short period of time I'm going to suggest that there's another way to process what happened. She could you know the sons said some words. How she thinks about it is her choice. And it's the way we think lavers our emotions and the way our emotions inspire our actions is really important to look at so that we understand that we're the one that's creating this reaction, that we're creating this result.

And so, in his case, if we applied that model that that map, we would say okay, Mom said words and remember that is his choice, how he interprets the words that you say.

We can't make somebody else upset. We can't take upset and put it in their body. It's something that they create themselves.

So the way that he's processing your words is what's causing his upset. That's such good news because he has the choice about how he processes your words, what his thoughts are. We want to give him the power to choose the thought so that he understands that he is creating his life.

This is so powerful when we give our kids back the power. When they realize that it is their thoughts that are creating their emotions. They just get a sense of themselves. They develop some self confidence. It's a great tool.

First we have to master it before we can help them learn how to do it and it's a process that takes a while.

Another way that I like to think about this as okay,

this is my son and daughter, they said words.
Those are their thoughts, and I'm glad I know what they're thinking that keeps me centered. I'm glad I know what they're thinking.
So I listen and reflect their feelings over and over. And over again.
And I only offer options when they ask so they feel safe consulting me I'm not giving them advice unless they ask for it.
And that way the result is that we connect and we know our children better.

So this is where I'm we're headed toward in the art of adulting is to try and create those connections with our children. So what do we do to better connect with them?

These are again Barb Avila's ideas. I think they're fantastic and they're almost there outline beautifully in her book. This is a whole part of her book. Each one of these is a chapter.

The first things she suggests is that we don't rely on auditory processing alone, that we add whatever written visual in parts of this visual, put it down, we write it down somehow with them so that we can have joint attention, and it just helps process the words better.

In this case, maybe you could text you know, while he's talking. You could send them a text that says so you're feeling really agitated, and or you've been really uncomfortable. And this is, you know, because of the bill that you're that you're unhappy with.

That we also allow for processing time. That's why these rants tend to take a long time because they're really processing through their thoughts.

We declutter the environment that we needed, we were in person, we wouldn't, we wouldn't want to try and solve this kind of a problem in the middle on the lap of a crowded room and a lot of voices we would want to take them someplace where the auditory overload would be dampened and the maybe in a spot where they're familiar we used to go to the peace couch all the time with my daughter, and that really helped.

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We also want to make sure that we respect what their sensory needs are and their sensory processing so that we were more sensitive to what all those impacts of the light, the sound and the textures whatever could have on their ability to jointly pay attention to what we're trying to work through.

So okay, now, what's the practice? How do we do this proactive partnering with our autistic young adults?

And I suggest that we, again, use the steer mapping process so that we understand what's going on with not only them but with us, also with us.

So we really do take the time to write down what our thoughts and feelings are about the situation and what possible thoughts and feelings they might have. So that when we come to the problem solving process, together we have we're very centered in the message we want to send it's uncluttered, and we have even some visuals. I like to go in with a piece of paper and start writing as we talk together.

Because Barb suggests and I agree that partnering with a person with autism takes purposeful and artful planning. The purpose of partnering is to guide a child or person of any age with autism to connect and share control.

Often what we see is they're trying to get a control and we want them to have the control and we also want to have our control so we want to share what's going on with both of us.

She also suggests that the manner in which we offer a bid for engagement with a person with autism can either be fast and lobbed well across the room without the chance of it being received. Meaning if we just make this very long sentence and describe everything that's going on, and it's like that's just not gonna work for them.

Or we can first wait for the receiving player to indicate their readiness, so when our autistic child is ready to listen, we can wait for that so that we can it can be successfully hit back and forth and back and forth so that we can solve our problems together. She's got some really good insights in this book about how to solve for the social part of autism.

This is what we're trying to do is we're trying to get our autistic young adults we're trying to help them practice the set of mental tools that help us manage our thoughts, our emotions and our actions so that we can get those results achieve those goals that are set by us for us. That's what we want them to do. We want them to practice of themselves.

When we go into that proactive problem solving process, we look at what is the situation and we agree on the facts. Then we move to what's your steer map, what's ours to your map, and then where do we overlap so that we can agree to take some steps, to experiment and see what would work for both of us.

In this case, I'm wondering whether or not our mom might want to consider setting a boundary and here's how we would do that.

In this case, we would identify the request, though. We're thinking what is it that we really want? Okay, so maybe she wants him to call after eight in the morning. And she wants him to talk for 30 minutes, no more than three times a day. I don't know what her criteria are what was going to work for her, but I'm just gonna use that as an example, for this boundary setting.
Then we decide what we will do if they don't honor our request. For example. I'll text you five minutes before and time is up and I'm gonna warn you one minute before and then I will hang up if at the 30 minute mark. Okay, so that's what we're going to do. We are in control of this situation, and we can create the response and practice this so that they understand that it's predictable and is going to happen every time.
The third the third step is where we do the problem solving process. And we have to say to them in our Deerman up when we share what's going on with us look when you do this. I'm going to do that because I have to have my time to get my work done. And you must understand that I want you to tell me what's going on. I want you to consult with me. I love you. I love listening to what your thoughts are and we have to put some boundaries around it. I have to do that so that I can get my work done. And that's where her STEAR Map would be, you know, loving and centered and encouraging a lifelong relationship with her son where they can be interdependent with one another but that it works for both her and for her autistic itself.

So these are my best thoughts for our mom. And if you'd like the transcript of this video, or links to any of the resources that I mentioned in the video, please go to www.LynnCDavison.com/blog so that we can solve these challenges together.

Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#42 | Her son rants

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