#48 | How do I deal with [insert struggle here].

Apr 04, 2022

RESOURCES:

SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
STEAR Mapping Quick Start Guide by Lynn C Davison
Lives in the Balance by Dr. Ross Greene
LISTEN UP OR LOSE OUT by Robert Bolton
The Art of Adulting Course, Coaching and Community

0:05
Hi! I'm Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families. systemize adulting together. Thank you for watching this video.

Today's struggle comes from a mom at parents of adults with Asperger's. By far the most common struggle that I see starts with, "How do I deal with fill in the blank meltdowns, apathy, buffering on screens, my own difficulties dealing with my life with an autistic young adult. Let's dive into that today.

Here are some of her thoughts. How do you deal My husband has high blood pressure I have depression and heart problems. Our son needs his own place. And we can't afford to pay for it. These are really good questions. We've all experienced them. We have our own health concerns. We have our the concerns of our other children in the household. What can we do to get to peace and calm? It's a good question.

If you're young adult problems seems similar to them drowning in a pool, we have to be on the side of the pool. Ready with a life preserver to help them. We have to be operating at our healthy and our healthiest.

If we're anxious about their anxiety, we're in the pool.
If we're insecure about their insecurities, we're in the pool
if we're overwhelmed with their overwhelm, we're in the pool.
If we're angry about their getting angry, we're in the pool.
If we have a bad habit of thinking about their bad habits, we're in the pool.

We need to get onto the side of the pool with a life preserver.

Now, I get in the pool with my young adults often. There's nothing wrong with us when we do that. But I know how to get right back out when I want to be helpful and peaceful. That's what I teach in the Art of Adulting.

Here's a quick overview of how to solve this problem. And love to work with Barb Avila's framework who wrote the book, SEEING AUTISM. Understand first what's going on connect with ourselves and then decide what to practice to improve our mental health to strengthen how we respond to these types of situations.

So first, let's understand what's going on inside our own brains. The motivational triad explains how our limbic system operates on default.

It's always looking to avoid pain, stay safe, conserve energy, minimize our efforts. And seek pleasure. Find that instant gratification that puts us in the tribe that helps us survive.

It's a great design. It helped us get to the top of the food chain and survive for all these millennials. And we're very thankful for that part of our brain because it really keeps us in a safe spot.

However, today, the challenges that we face are not as physical as they used to be. I mean, we had to run away from that saber toothed tiger. We had to figure out how to feed our families and hunt.

Today, however, since we have grocery stores and a whole lot more modern conveniences, our bigger challenges are more psychological and not more mental. They're trying to stay strong mentally. So what are we going to do to be able to do that?

4:21
Well, let's first with ourselves about what's going on, and then perhaps, figure out maybe, that we're all in the pool together. We're all human beings. Our autistic young adults often are experiencing the same mind traps that we ourselves fall into.

And the best tool is the STEAR Map. This is where we take whatever's happening in life and put it into these five categories.

We look at a situation, just the facts, the facts can't hurt us.
And then there's our thoughts. That's what we make meaning with. We make we decide what is happening and what it means to us. We decide what all that impact is on our lives.
That creates an emotion and oftentimes it's a fear based emotion because that's what our brain is trying to do is to keep us safe so it defaults often, to fear and other kinds of, of uncomfortable emotions.
Which then flavor our actions.
So when we're operating out of fear, we live a certain way versus when we're operating out of confidence. That's a different way to operate.

So it's important that we notice the emotion that we're operating from, and this can be a bit challenging for us, as well as our autistic young adults, as so many autistic people are affected by alexithymia which literally translates to "without words for emotions." It's not that they're not experiencing them, they just can't verbalize what that emotion is.

So I like to default to comfortable versus uncomfortable in most cases with my autistic adults. Sometimes we can dive down and define it more closely because my kids tend to be more on the creative word side versus on the math side. So they they tend to be able to get to the emotion by often just saying uncomfortable is enough to identify what's happening inside of their bodies.

Then we take action and we really want to look at what are the actions that we how do we look if someone is if someone were taking a movie of us, operating from that emotion, what are the actions that we take, and that are the results that we create. dividing our life into these five parts, helps us slow things down all them apart, and understand ourselves better so that we can connect with ourselves and with our artistic candle.

So let's take an example.

The situation is our autistic adults. That's just facts. There's nothing inherently you know with the facts, there's nothing to interpret. It's It's plain. It's simple. It's, you know, just a fair amount. It's something we could prove in a court of law.
They are doing it wrong becomes our interpretation of whatever they're doing.
That causes us to worry.
And often we spin on future failures. So we just think of all the catastrophic things that could occur. And that's what happened with this mom on that page as she was projecting that he was going to leave home and be homeless or, you know, take a lot of actions that probably in her mind would result in catastrophic results. tough. It's tough. I know because I do this, and we spin it. And it's just important to notice that that's what's happening.
And of course, the result always ties back to our thought in that we're doing it wrong. I mean, we really are not operating on the side of the pool with a life preserver. We're in there with them, and we're all getting tired of trying to stay afloat.

So let's look at a different thought.

Notice how we keep the situation the same. We're never going to you know we love our young adults are down to their toenails. We we really are never you know we don't want that situation to change.
What we want to do is we want to figure out is there a thought that can bring us an emotion that triggers an action that is going to create a result that is more of what we want. And so I advocate for, "I wonder what they want," as an alternative thought.

8:54
Now that may be too big of a step. So they're doing it wrong might be the step that they thought we'd keep with and that's okay. And we can go off and find out what's okay with that. But I'm sort of skipping the interim steps in here and notice that I that I know what those are because I've had to figure them out too, because it's really hard for me to get to get from, "They're doing it wrong," to "I wonder what they want." I mean, you know, this is not easy this parenting game.

So I'm just going to suggest that if we can get to that point where we're wondering what they want, and we're operating more from curiosity that we can use the collaborative, proactive problem solving process that Ross Greene advocates on his website Livesinthebalance.org.

He's written several books, and he tours all over trying to help educators incorporate this process into schools and encourage adults and parents to incorporate it at their homes.

So the result is, when we go through the back, problem solving process together, we take steps together toward them, building a life that they love. That works for all of us.

Okay, how do we practice this proactive partnering that you advocate?

Well, first, we want to keep the end in mind. What we want to do is help our autistic adults practice the set of mental tools that help them manage their thoughts, emotions and actions so they can achieve goals set by them for them.

And we want to do the same thing we want to be in that adulting space as often as we can possibly be because that's helping us to get what we want out of life.

So we're going to move to the intentional motivational triad. We're going to, instead of seeking pleasure all the time, we're going to deny false pleasures and delay our gratification. Because, you know, sometimes it just it feels good to indulge in that self pity of oh my god, that's my life is so hard. And I get that. It's just it's kind of a false pleasure because it really doesn't get us where we want to go.

So if we can deny that false pleasure, we can take ourselves through this work this mental work, to build strength in how we respond to our lives. We're going to get the result that we want and we're going to model for our autistic adults how to get the result and we're going to help them encourage them to learn how to do these steps as well.

We want to spend energy, instead of conserving it. We want to keep trying as many things as we can. We don't want to stop with the first idea that we have if it didn't work. We want to come up with more ideas and figure out what part of that idea worked and what part of that idea didn't work. And keep moving forward with experiment after experiment after experiment until we create a life that we love that works.

We want to be okay with the discomfort. Those uncomfortable feelings that we're going to have because we have to take the risks to change. Not to change the situation, not to change the situation but to change our reaction to the situation. We have to keep trying instead of trying to stay safe all the time.

One of the ways that we really need to be strong is by deciding to reflect when we listen to artistic young adults.

Here's the formula.

It seems like...
You're upset..
Because you're not getting what you want.

Really quick reflection. We decide to reflect because listening helps our kids feel safe, feel seen, feel soothed, so that they feel more secure in the world and can get what they want out of it, find their place in the world.

13:29
And the inner process of reflecting. This is this is a skill that takes time to to learn inside. We have to be still enough inside to take it in, take in what they're saying. sort it out. sort out what it is that you know, is the essence of what they're saying sum it back up, and then say it back to them in our own words.

I've found that this reflective listening is a critical tool. It's not one we're ever taught in school, though it sure would be helpful if people could learn this from the beginning and practice it for all of our school years. Can you imagine how much better we would be able to solve problems together? I'd sure like to advocate that this reflective listening process is key.

And if you want more information you can read LISTEN UP OR LOSE OUT by Robert and Dorothy Bolton. I had the pleasure of meeting them. And they just were fantastic people who created a group that taught listening skills throughout the country, actually even throughout the world.

So we take our listening skills and we take our STEAR Map and we come together with our autistic young adults. And we collaboratively proactively solve problems together.

The proactive part of solving problem. This process means that we don't try to solve the problem when it's when we're in that agitated state. We solve it when it's when we're calm. When we can come together. We can sit side by side and try to solve the problem. You know in a peaceful way together.

We start with what's the situation, just the facts. What is that part that we can all agree on that we can even prove in a court of law if we had to.
Then we ask them what is your STEAR Map? So we try to understand you know, what are their thoughts and their feelings? What actions have they been taking and what results have they been getting in this situation?
And of course, because this process has to work for both of us then it's time for us to share our STEAR Maps and if we've respectfully listened to everything that they say when they're sharing, our young adult is so much more likely that they'll be willing to listen to our STEAR Maps.
And then we find where the overlap is and what can we agree to do to experiment with what might work.

This process is golden and will make a big difference when we practice it together.

So come check out The Art of Adulting it's my monthly program where we create a our Life GPS and help our autistic young adults create theirs. We study the theory, learn the practices and master the skills to create a life we love that works together.

I can't wait to see you there. Let's do this work together.

Bye for now.

20:12
I've never lose out by Robert dot Bolton and the pleasure of meeting them and they just were fantastic.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#48 | How do I deal with [insert struggle here].

Stay Connected