#26 | I'm Caught In The Middle

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RESOURCES

• Parents of Young Adults (13+) With Autism on Facebook
• LivesInTheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene

Hi there. This is Lynn. Your adulting coach, I help autistic adults and their families systemize adulting together.

Today's topic, "caught in the middle" comes from a one of the members of the Facebook Group Parents of Young Adults (13+) with Autism.

Our mom's son is 17 He was diagnosed with autism in the third grade. Here are some of her thoughts.

• Nobody wants to be around him.
• My family just tolerates him.
• My son hates slurping sounds. (That's also known as misophonia. Loud eating sounds can really bother people.)
• He is bad and uses the F word often.

She feels like she has to defend him. "It's the mama bear in me, " she says.

How many of us have felt this way?

She does understand. "I can see why people get frustrated and upset. They cannot take the angry words, the angry yelling and the words." I understand too.

And that's always the first step. What's going on here?

Feelings do act like they're important. That feeling of, "I've got to defend my son." That feeling seems like it requires an immediate response.

It often happens. You know most feelings often seem urgent and alarming. But they are just feelings. They are our body's reaction to thoughts.

It's actually kind of a miracle. Our brain thinks a thought and it tells our body to create hormones inside of our bodies that make us feel certain sensations in our bodies.

It's miraculous. The whole system was designed so that we would survive difficult situations. And of course since there's not as many tigers in the bush as there used to be our brain notices what's going on that we don't like that there's a gap between what's happening and what we wish would happen and it sends alarms signals.

So what used to be a survival reaction has now, because we're there are so many more people in the world and there are so many opportunities for interactions.

Our brain is just triggered often by these thoughts that create these feelings that are fight flight or freeze signaling to our limbic system, our amygdala, the brain, the primitive brain, that we are in trouble and need to do something.

We do need to pay attention to our feelings, because we need to make sure that we learn from them.

But we also need to balance you know what they're telling us with the front part of our brain where our wise brain exists at the same time. We notice them and then we also kick in our wise brain. We want the part of our brain is in our best interest to guide our actions.

Feelings shout and will override logic if we let them.

What we need to do is slow things down. Breathe. Stop the chatter and notice what is going on in our brains.

If we pay attention, and consider those thoughts and feelings as suggestions, then we can make an intentional decision in the end of how we're going to act. So that we can be the mom that we want to be for our autistic young adults and the daughter and the granddaughter and the friend and you know how we want to show up in the world.

We need to make intentional decisions about the tool to use.

This is how we can connect with ourselves. And it's a helpful tool where we can also use it to connect with others.

So anything that anyone says or does goes in the situation line.

It goes in that situation line.

The situation is going to trigger our thoughts, which are then going to flavor our emotions. And generate actions, which cause the results we get in our life.

And this is the process that not only do we need to use to slow things down, but we really need to teach our autistic young adults to do the same thing.

This is the tool that's going to help them use that prefrontal cortex to become a strategic life creators. It needs training though, because as you can tell automatically it just leaps to these, you know horrendous things and we fight and we argue and all those things happen we distance or we or we have a meltdown or we you know, we get paralyzed. Lots of things happen.

But if we can slow the first part of the process down and kind of pull it apart and look at it and practice doing this over time. It can help us and it can really be a gift for the long term use of our autistic young adults and helping them become strategic life creators.

So here's the STEAR map that I would recommend to this mom.

• So the situation is his son, he's 17 That's a fact than facts can't hurt us. It's the story that comes next.
• So the story that she's telling herself as I'm caught in the middle, that's the thought and I get it. I mean, I've been there. I've been there recently so I understand why it's a logical thought it makes perfect sense.
• And it creates the feeling of being defensive in our bodies.
• And then of course, when we feel defensive we then you know, we worry, we spin in the thoughts and the thoughts just keep going around and around in our head like the like, spin cycle. On a washing machine. And we really cannot distinguish one from the other.
• And then of course, we get caught up in our thinking that is the result.

So we really want to notice when that's going on. That's the very first step. That kind of awareness is golden if we can connect with our sounds and see that that's what's happening. Wow.

Now we can see what's going on. And we recognize Oh, that thought on caught in the middle is optional for me. There's so many other ways to think about this situation.

In fact, there's probably 7.9 billion different ways to think about it because there's 7.9 billion different people in the world. And it's very obvious that we don't always think the same. So we've got some options that we can explore there.

So my suggestion to her is that okay, we found son who's 17 and he's been diagnosed with autism. And the thought that works for me now is, "I'm not responsible for them. I'm not responsible for other people's reactions. I can't be in their head, creating the thought. They only can do that. So I'm not responsible for other people's reactions."

And that gives me such relief. Now I can breathe.

And of course, I'm going to suggest that we start making a list of these things when they happen. Ross Greene calls it his assessment of lagging skills and unsolved problems list and just put it on your phone. Text yourself. send yourself an email where whatever you want to do start listing the things that happen that need work that suggests that there's a lagging skill in that they're not response-able. They're not deciding how they're going to respond.

There's a good example of, you know, a lagging skill. And an unsolved problem could be something that happens on the regular that needs to be addressed.

So we just keep that list going and then Remembering of course, that we're only responsible for our reaction, not there's not anyone but our own. Whenever someone has something happens in our life. Something that someone else does, it goes in the situation line of our STEAR Map. 

So the practice is that we're connected with ourselves, we found some space to breathe.

The practice we want to do is we want to use Dr. Ross Greene's proactive and collaborative problem solving process. And if you Google his name, he has an amazing array of tools for us for free at his website, LivesInTheBalance.org. I believe, I'll make sure that there's a link to it in the transcript of this video.

This process is golden. This is where we take the situation and we just describe the facts because remember, facts can't hurt anyone. Just the facts. When we are talking to our autistic adult. We start with the facts. Can we all agree on the facts?

Then we ask them what's going on with them? What are their thoughts and feelings? We really listen. I mean, we scribe those thoughts. We write them down or take them out of their brain and we put them on a piece of paper so that our autistic adult can see what's going on in their own brain.

And the third step is we share our thoughts and we remember to keep them short. And if we can possibly do it, you know, sometimes these conversations occur in a car and you're driving so they can't. We can't write them down but if we can possibly make the discussion we're having visual with them so they can take the information in from their ears, and their eyes will hear it you know, we'll up the chances that they'll hear what we're saying. What our concerns are what we think needs to happen.

And then together. The fourth step is to come up with a solution a first step that we're going to experiment with, and that we're kind of curious, is this gonna work and we puzzle on you know, what is the best thing that we can do now, and then we keep recycling back through the process.

To continue we level up the skills that we have and then our young adults have because we need to make sure that they are equipped for adulthood and for life when we're not around.

We notice the progress we're making always look backward to measure our progress. We don't look toward the ideal because there's that ideal is always there's always going to be a gap there between where we are and where we ideally would like everybody to get along and all this you know, these fantasy thoughts and the minute that you know there's always going to be that gap and that just makes us fall into despair.

But if we notice how much  progress we've made, if we notice the gain, then we will have a feel for the future actions that we need to take with our autistic young adult.

So please, this is just an example of the kind of coaching that I do and that my coaches will be doing in the art of adulting I really believe this is what we need. These are the skills and tools that we need to show up like the parent that we want to want to be the common presence in our young adults life so that they can become strategic life creators and we can celebrate their progress recording and progress. A recording stopped when we looked at the what understand what was happening.

That's where we noticed that our feelings were driving us. We connected with our STEAR Map where we looked at the situation, the thought, the emotion, the action and the result and we pulled them apart.

We came up with another thought that could work better for us.

And then we're going to practice using the STEAR map in the proactive, collaborative problem solving process that Dr. Ross Greene shares.

I know this works because we're doing it all the time at my house and the progress we've made amazes me.

I hope you give it a try. Bye for now.