#43 | I want to run!

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 Art of Adulting at Facebook
• SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
• LOVING WHAT IS by Byron Katie and her Facebook Page: The Work of Byron Katie
• SELF-REG by Stuart Shanker
• SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE by Stephen R. Covey
• Collaborative Proactive Problem Solving Process at LivesInTheBalance by Dr. Ross Greene
• THE FIVE THINGS WE CANNOT CHANGE by David Richo
• LynnCDavison.com/welcome

Hi, this is Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize adulting together.

Today's struggle is from a mom at the parents of young adults 13 Plus with autism. Our mom has a 13 year old daughter. Her thought is I want to run for the hills.

She explains that she has to get this out before she explodes. Her 13 year old is impossible. She refuses to do her homework. How many of us have felt like this? It's just impossible.

When she does do her homework, she works on something simple that's not due for weeks instead of letting me her help on the assignments that are either past due or more difficult.

She says she's struggling in math. But severe anxiety won't let her ask for help. So she's failing.

Her mom got her into a learn math tutoring program for homework help. But then she lies to the teachers about what's done and what isn't done.

In fact, our mom explains that she thinks she lies constantly. We never know when she's telling the truth.

She also wears the same five shirts in jeans. She picked holes in the shirts and won't wear anything new.

The daughter said, "The kids at school may not like them. I'll wear them on the weekends but not to school." That's how she explains to her mom how she'd rather wear the clothes with holes in them than the ones without.

She refuses ADHD stimulant medication. So she's on a non stimulant that does nothing but help her sleep. And she mentions later in the post that it's Risperdal. She refuses anxiety medicine.

She refuses to do the smallest things that could help.

It has become infuriating.

She's seen a new therapist this Saturday and our mom really hopes that this woman can help her and we do, too.

We understand. We have been there. thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. Because so many of us can identify with them. 

I'm trying to be as helpful as I can and explaining an approach that just might help our mom. 

As always, I'm going to start with Barb Aguilas approach of trying to understand what's going on with our autistic young adult and with ourselves, then connecting with both them and us and then figuring out what practices might help.

UNDERSTAND

So let's start with understanding what might be going on.

It seems like our autistic young adult, the 13 year old daughter is caught up in the motivation triangle. This is where we seek pleasure in the form of instant gratification, we avoid pain, and we conserve energy. That's what our limbic system, the amygdala in particular, does as part of our brain to keep us alive. It evolved when we were living in caves and in tribes. And it did a pretty good job keeping us alive or our species would not have populated the planet quite as much as it did.

So those default thoughts that she gets that are suggested by her brain are generated by that limbic system that keeps is keeping us seeking pleasure. avoiding pain and conserving energy. Makes perfect sense that both the mom and the daughter might be kind of like, "This is too much. I'm going to conserve my energy. I'm going to avoid my pain. And I'm going to go find something that's a heck of a lot more pleasant than dealing with these lagging skills and unsolved problems."

If you're hearing a little whining in the background, it's because my Yorkshire Terrier is with me today because my daughter is working, and somebody always has to be with her because she's highly anxious.

So the truth is, though, that most of the threats that we perceive today, most of the things that are threatening to us are more are not as much physical as they used to be in caves, you know, the days we were living in caves, they're much more mental.

5:37
I think it's really helpful for us to recognize that that's what our brain is. Trying to do is trying to protect us physically. But the root threats that we have today are more mental, more psychological.

In fact, what we need to do is use our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that helps us solve problems. To deny that false pleasure and actually delay gratification to figure this out.

We don't need to run away. We invite the discomfort. Actually be willing to feel how it feels in our body to be so uncomfortable and take some risks.

Now that's what we would encourage our autistic young adult to do is to, you know, take some risks and some actions that may not feel right at the time, and then actually expend a lot of energy instead of trying to guard our energy we want to actually take massive action, lots of experiments to see if we can figure out what it is that works for us. So that's, I think, just a reframe of what's going on in the situation.

We certainly understand that she has you know that the daughter has a limbic system that's easily aroused, and so she is, you know, because she has an autism diagnosis, we can in most cases infer that. So what's happening is her brain is giving her a lot of thoughts that are alarming.

So now what we want to do is we want to connect with ourselves and then with others, and I'm just so glad that our mom was willing to write all these thoughts down. In fact, she even suggested that just by writing them down she found some relief. And that's because that enables us to sort to get a distance from our thoughts and us so that okay, these are the thoughts that have been offered by my brain but my wise observer,  the smart part of our brain, the part that can watch our thoughts go by, like clouds in the sky, our wise observers going, isn't that interesting?

And that's what writing our thoughts down does for us. And then we want to take the time to pause and suggest that separating out the facts versus the thoughts could be helpful in this situation.

Byron Katie is one of my favorite teachers. She explains that what we need to do is separate our thoughts from the facts because it's our story that makes us suffer.

And she'll tell you a lot about that in her book. And you can find her all over the internet, in particular, on YouTube, and on Facebook, where she actually coaches people three times a week for free. So I think she's just a lovely woman who has done  a great deal of good in the world.

She says that we need to keep in mind that "I could be wrong. This is just a story."

She argues that we said we stand, we lie horizontal and the rest is story. So it's you know, it's a human thing that we tell our story in order to figure out what's going on for us and maybe some of what are our mom's thoughts are, are not working for her.

What we want to do is separate out the facts versus the story. What are the facts and how can we get to those facts and help make them better?

Because we have a tendency to want to control what our children do, especially when they're school aged because we know what the requirements are, that they have to meet in order to graduate and the fact that they're not doing what they need to do. We want to really control that because we think if they would just do that and we would feel better.

Interesting that really that's the motivation is that we just want them to be to fit into our prescribed should statements that they should she should do her homework, she should wear clothing that's more presentable. She should ask for help. And we're into those those shoulds.

The bottom line is that instead we we might want to consider just observing what's going on because the way she describes it, there's there's quite a bit going on. That's worth you know, worth looking at and worth observing. And in some ways we actually feel entitled to

10:25
In some ways we actually feel entitled to better situation a better set of facts.

Just, you know, we do kind of go through this mourning period when we learn that our children have different brains have autistic brains, and we just want you know, we just want the whole challenge to go away. Even though we know that that's not possible. That you know, we love them all the way down to their toenails.

If we really stopped we would consider how amazing they already are and how beautiful their brains really are. That maybe, you know, maybe there's some room in there for us to sort of accept what's happening.

That we have these prescribed list of shoulds that our loved ones should follow and when they don't we feel like they have let us down. And I see that in my own life. I've seen that you know in this in my household often and it's just not it's just good to notice that those are the types of thoughts that are going on and maybe it would be better if I could ban the shoulds in life.

And then let's also connect with this child because as Stuart Shanker says in his book SELF-REG, which is a highly recommended between Barbara Avila and Stuart Shanker, you cannot go wrong.

"When a child is in distress, we feel an almost reflexive need to try and reason in a way we're using our logic. The problem is with the systems in the brain that she would need to process well, intention reasoning, go offline. When she's hyper aroused when she's in that fight, flight or flee, freeze state that her brain puts around when it when it senses critical danger when it's that amygdala puts her in. She truly doesn't register what you're saying. She's really doesn't. It's just not going in."

That's really important because it's so frustrating for us when our kids don't know, you know, we do know what could be better for them. We do think we know what could be better for them. And they're just rejecting it almost feels like a rejection of us as their parents.

That's really important to to notice.

"These behaviors are expressions of her inability in the moment to respond to everything going on, in and around her. The sounds the noises the discomforts, the distractions, the emotions, but we react as if there were problems with a child's character. She's lazy or she's stubborn or she won't change. Worse yet, our children come to believe it," says Stuart.

And I think Stuart analysis he just he's really right on and he suggests a number of things in that book, SELF-REG that I just find very helpful.

But to me, it all boils down to the STEAR Map.

• We need to really look at the situation. That's just the facts.
• And then what thought we have about it.
• Then the emotion that's being created by that thought, and 
• What action we're taking that create the result.
• And our result always ties back to our thoughts.

So if we take the time to separate out what's happening.

So much of it's just it feels like it's just spinning and spinning and it's like in that spin cycle in the washing machine, where you just, we just can't distinguish between one piece of clothing and the other. And it's just a blur, that if we can just slow things down and take the time to realize what's happening, and that we can sort things out and find better solutions.

So the proactive partnering part that I recommend, is again, Stuart comes back with "There isn't a single child who with understanding and patience can't be guided along a trajectory that leads to a rich and meaningful life. Both but stereotypes of the difficult child color our views as to our own hopes, dreams, frustrations, and fears as parents."

He's seen this. We've all felt it. We all have been part of it and I just encourage all of us to recognize that every one of our children can be led guided down a trajectory that leads to a rich and satisfying and meaningful life.

Barb Avila advises us to get low, get quiet, and get predictable to help our autistic young adults the most.

15:23
So she also uses this quote in her book and I think it really helps us remind ourselves that,

"To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of our destination. It means to know where we're going so that we better understand where we are now. So that the steps that we take are always in the right direction."

Thank you, Stephen Covey. This is from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

So I just want to remind us that what we're trying to do here is raise our kids so that they practice adulting. It's practicing the set of mental tools that help us manage our thoughts, emotions and actions back to the STEAR Map, so that we can achieve goals set by us for us. So that's the end in mind. What we want to do is help our autistic adults become the adults that they're capable of becoming.

It's going to take time, it's going to take a lot of practice, but as long as we keep the end in mind, and we have a plan, we can do it. I know we can do it.

I'm going to lean heavily also on Dr. Ross Greene, who advocates the collaborative proactive problem solving process, where we keep a list of what the problems are, and we try to solve it using the what's the situation just the facts we asked them to share their STEAR Map first, that's the empathy step. We share our STEAR Map which we have prepared in advance, and it has few words so that they can grasp what it is that our concerns are. And then we decide on what we can do to experiment with what might work, the whole process just is golden.

And if we solve 1, 2, 3 problems together this way, so many of the other ones will will also be solved.

Because what we have to remember is these five things we cannot change. this is from David Richo's book.

1.  Everything changes it ends. This is not going to be the way things are always going to be and in some cases, that's a relief.
2. Things do not always go according to plan. That's for sure.
3. Life is not always fair. We have that one. As parents of autistic adults.
4. Pain is part of life. We know this, we just don't want to accept it sometimes. 
5. People are not always loving and loyal all the time.

That there's other things that are going on that are motivating them to to behave less than what we would hope they would behave like.

As long as we can accept these things are as things that we cannot change, then we can come up with solutions that will help us move from:

• Okay, that's all right. I get what's going on, to
• Oh, that's good. We're gonna learn something together here, to
• Autism is a gift. It has helped us all become a better version of ourselves.

So please join me in the Art of Adulting, where we take this whole process and we divided up into these four parts where:

• We clarify who we are at our best, both the autistic young adult and the parent and so that we can find peace in the progress that we're making, incrementally.
• We look at our thinking and become much more aware of what our thoughts are creating, and how we can better steer our minds to the things that are going to solve our problems. Better for us, we're going to create better results.
• What are the set of actions in each of our 10 domains? If we divide if we slow down, divide life into the 10 domains, and agree on what it is that we're looking for in each of those 10 domains that gives us the end in mind back to Stephen Covey, Stephen Covey. It's just so I'm going to write down what do we expect for ourselves in each of the 10 domains, and then have our autists make an adult start to put together what they expect of themselves? It's actually a lot less anxiety when we're acting consistent with who we want to be.
• And then the people side is where we listen first to understand them proactively partner to be understood and solve problems together. And that's a riff on another Stephen Covey Habit who believes strongly that our first objective is to understand and then we can work together to be understood.

This is what we work on in the art of adulting. Because even though your daughter's going to, you know, someday grew up and leave the house, those are always going to be concerns.

So we want our children with the very best roadmap that we can possibly think of that that's going to help them become who they are. Answer the question of who they are.

So please visit me at LynnCDavison.com/blog if you want a transcript, and links to the resources. you can tell it's spring and in my part of the world, I'm getting the allergies again. Resources that I'm mentioning in this video, and the link, you know, please come to my blog.

So it's just LynnCDavison.com forward slash blog.

And I'm happy to to share all that I can with you and hope that you'll join me in The Art of Adulting.

Thank you for watching this video. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai