#54 | It's always no!

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Download, "8 Common Mistakes Parents Make When Systemizing Self-Reliance With Your Autistic Young Adult."

RESOURCES:

• Parents of Autistic/Asperger Teens on Facebook
• SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila
• FLEXIBLE MINDSETS by Julie Dunstan and Susannah Cole
• Parents of Young Adults Phone Wallpaper
• Adulting Is...  8.5 x 11
• STEAR Mapping Quick Start Guide by Lynn C Davison
• AUTISM DISCUSSION PAGE ON THE CORE CHALLENGES OF AUTISM by Bill Nason
• 4 Steps to Set Boundaries 
• LivesintheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene

0:23
Hi! It's Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize adulting together. Thank you for watching this video.

Our struggle today comes from the Parents of Autistic and Asperger teens on Facebook. Our mom says it's always no. We get that. We hear 'no' a lot.

She says that her son who's 18 homeschooled in the 12th grade, refuses to go to college refuses to get a job.

Any idea how to convince him after a whole year of training and the answer has been no?

Yeah, I have seen this and in my own household, and we just we have six kids ages 25 to 52. All our alternative language learners, several are on the autism spectrum. We had to figured this one out.

So let's borrow Barb Avila's process where we understand first, then we connect with our autistic young adults. And then we practice. We figure out what works. She outlines this process beautifully. In her book SEEING AUTISM.

So what is going on? Well, we know from the motivational triad that our brains, our primitive brains, the limbic system in our brains, wants to seek pleasure through instant gratification, avoid pain in order to stay safe and conserve energy by minimizing our effort. That's just the way that our brain was designed to keep us alive. And that's why we survived survived all these millennium.

Yet we also know that that's not going to work in today's world in today's world.

• We need to go to the intentional motivational triad, where we deny false pleasures, like spending a lot of time on screens or meeting or other activities that are really just designed to distract ourselves from what's going on in our lives.
• We need to invite discomfort. We need to be willing to take some risks.
• And we need to expend energy, massive energy in fact, experimenting with what works and what doesn't work so that we can figure out what works for us at our pace.

So we know that this is the case, but how can we convince our alternative learners are autistic and adults to figure this one out? Well, I turn to today, Julie Dunstan and Susanna Cole's book FLEXIBLE MINDSETS IN SCHOOLS. I interviewed Susanna, and she gave me so many helpful insights. And in fact, she summarized her entire book in one page, and I refer to it often because it helps me understand what's going on with my children, with my young adults. And with my older adults, older, young, older adults, yes, adult children.

She reminds us that what we want to do in the having a flexible mindset is a matter of being aware of what their thinking, is reminding ourselves that we can do things, and executive function strategies, which we know our autistic young adults struggle with.

We know that initiating activities and getting organized and putting together a plan and sustaining attention all of those things are are just come with having an autistic brain. Those are the challenges that they often face. And so we just know that that's what's going on. Okay, then why does it create this automatic 'no' that we get all the time? 

4:30
She gives me this wonderful diagram that I thought was so helpful.

• In an unproductive struggle what we have is a self limiting mindset. So we resist risk. We don't We reject risk. We we don't want to take it on because we just you know, are done with putting ourselves out. We just got through, you know, 12 years of schooling. And what we just want to do right now is what we want to do. Make sense? I've seen that.
• So sometimes we can move them to the safe surface thinking where they're still protected, and they're avoiding risk, but at least they're talking about in some ways,
• But we really want, our goal is to get them to this place where they are productively puzzling on how are they going to create a life they love that works. How are they going to apply their wonderful brains that got them through 12 years of school now, and to creating a life that works for them? Because they got to practice doing this while we're still here. And that includes taking on the risk.

So it's just so helpful to me to see oh, that's what's happening. They're either unproductively struggling or they're just doing surface thinking.

6:17
Let's start with the end in mind. As parents of young adults. We have three roles.

1. We are to encourage them.
2. We are to warn them, and
3. we are to be consulted.

That we keep our relationship strong so that they are comfortable insulting us and we give them all kinds of opportunities in casual settings, in planned settings, to ask us questions about whatever struggles they're facing.

Because what we're trying to do is to encourage them to practice a set of mental tools (that's executive functioning) that help them manage their thoughts, emotions and actions so they can achieve goals set by them for them. That's our end goal and it's really helpful to keep that in mind.

And I advocate what has only worked for me, nothing else works for me, this is the only thing that works for me.  If I get slow things down, break them into pieces, if I get my arousal down to a lower level so they don't notice the panic and mirror that it sets off their amygdala and they just go into fight or flight, you know, or freeze mode, which is not going to help us you know, activate the prefrontal cortex where we solve problems and that loving pieces they can sense that. When we're in a space, we really just love them for exactly who they are where they are right now, they can tell that we're ready to help them productively puzzle on whatever issue that they're facing.

And the best way I have found to slow myself down and so I have taught this to my autistic adults and they are using it, not as regularly as I'd like Not always, but at least we have a common vocabulary to solve our problems together using the STEAR Map, will we take the situation, okay, that part's out of our control, but we recognize that our thoughts, our emotions, our actions and our results, our T*E*A creates our own results. And we do have a lot of control over those parts of how we're thinking of those parts of our lives.

We can take every single situation that we find ourselves in and divide it into these five categories. Really helps us to slow things down and recognize what's going on both outside and inside, in our minds, in our hearts and in our actions that are creating the results.

It's my opinion that if we get our you know, once our autistic young adults, except that they are the creators of all of the results in their lives, that's when they cross the threshold from childhood to adulthood.

So what do we do to encourage this way of thinking? And it's not you know, we just we need to figure this out. There's not any one answer for the way to do this. Each one of us is unique and each one of our children is, you know, are as unique as, as you know, anything that's in nature. I mean, there's 8 billion of us on the planet. Everybody's brain is really different and you know, the other reason why they're called autistic is because there's a cluster of characteristics that they have, that people have identified as autistic. It just means that they have a brain that works in a certain way.

What we want to do is we want to shift our perspective, from the product, what we want to have happen, to the process, then we can get the pressure off of us.

I love the way in THE PRACTICING MIND, Tom Sterner writes this because I have needed to remind myself of this on a regular basis, that my frustration with what's not happening, is not going to get it's just going to put pressure on both of us. And what I need to relax and do is relax and help teach them the process of problem solving the process of putting together a life plan, the process of of deciding what they're going to do in any given day, and celebrating each night what they did get done and then setting up what they're going to do the next day.

It's such a marvelous I love it. It's just a marvelous puzzle that we can solve together. As long as we keep an eye on the process and not so fixed on the one thing that didn't go right today. 

11:05
It's really helpful, that we identify you know, that that we noticed that we can fall into this trap. And I don't know if you've ever run into Bell Nason since the autism discussion page on Facebook. He did marvelous work there and I'm so grateful to him for creating three books. Out of the myriad posts that he put out on that page, so that I can now refer to him on a regular basis. Because he's a psychologist who worked with this pot with an autistic autistic population for over 30 years and their parents and gets what our struggle is all about.

And what he's warning us about here is that we identify what we don't like or what we desire, before we evaluate what they need and what they desire. It's just a trap. It's a natural trap. We want to solve the problem and move on. That's what our brains are made for: solving problems.

So we just have to recognize and notice his warning that we really want to notice all before we get too far, we want to notice what it is that they need and what they desire.

And notice also I love the way that Julian Susannah witness in that quote, for flexible mindsets in schools, that we want to make sure that we're not closing the window unlearning, because what's happened often with our kids is that they're so afraid to fail. They they're in kind of a power struggle with us which frankly shouldn't happen when they're in high school but now it's happening right now in their 20s because they have a little lagging development going on as a result of having that autistic brain that is often in fear, which shuts down learning as well. So they have lagged behind their non autistic peers in learning some of these, you know, strategies on how to control their lives. So we kind of maybe got a little off a little bit easier in high school, but now it's really coming home where they want to control their lives. So they're sort of a powering and control struggle going on.

And then of course, the question that they are always asking and frankly all of us ask is, "Am I stupid?" Another way to look at that is, "Am I good enough?" And you know, "What's gone wrong in my life?" Those are the two fears that are universal to all human beings, and we sure see it happen with us with ourselves and with our autistic adults. So what we want to do is co-create the solution to whatever struggle they're facing, whatever expectation they're not meeting in our lifetimes.

I'm with the parents who responded to this post by saying, look, it's either school or it's work. And I guess that's what we do in our household. We set boundaries, either you're going to school, or you're pursuing some kind of a paid, paid or volunteer opportunity that's going to get you toward a pain, being able to sustain yourself in life. We set that boundary and I think setting boundaries is a clearly the responsibility of the parents. We need to tell them this is what's going to happen. If you don't you know, if you don't do this, this is what I'm going to do. If you don't work or if you don't learn and you know, if you're not in school, and I really with the parents that we need to set that out.

But at the same time we need to normalize not knowing the answers to a lot of these struggles that they're facing. We didn't know them. We didn't know how to create a household and a family we learned if I'm doing and so there's not, you know, we didn't know how to create a life that we love now. I mean,  it takes time.

And we're not explicitly taught how to do this. And you know what? With our kids, it really helps them if we explicitly teach it. It really does. Take life divided into parts and decide what they've already created what they want next and listen, and you know, have them evaluate themselves on their progress. It's just a magic formula that works.

So we you know, that feedback we need to say okay, when we make a mistake, or you know, fail. Some people say we're either we're either succeeding or we're learning. I think that's a great framework for you know, the failures that exist because we do have to learn what it is it's going to work for them, and how is the pacing of their work? And their learning that will work for them?

And so that we can create that parent, young adult partnership, so they can connect with us so that we can do our third role which is to be consulted by them, so that we stay responsive and authentic and consistent and committed, and solution oriented.

15:58
That's how we keep that window, so that they will learn with us. They will do the self directed learning that they really have to do.

And of course, the process that I advocate is always from Dr. Ross Greene's website LivesintheBalance.org, where he generously shares exactly the resource with resources we need to implement a collaborative proactive problem solving process. We collaborate because we want them to be a part of the solution. So that they'll execute it. We want to be proactive, so that we solve the problem not in the middle of the problem. But in another time, when our arousal is lower when we can slow things down, we when we can be more loving.

1. So we look first at what is what is the situation just the facts. You didn't let the dog out and so she messed on the rug. That's the situation.
2. @hat's your what's your stomach? What do you think about that situation? What are your thoughts, emotions and actions and what results are you creating? We need to know those things. We need to start with them first. That's the empathy step. That's what Bill Nason is and let's look at what their needs and wants are first.
3. To make the process appropriate. We share them in the next step ours to your map. Okay, given that situation, here are my thoughts, emotions, actions, and my result. And I want you to notice those as well. But because we are strategic about the way that we solve our problems with our autistic young adults, we've thought about this ahead of time, and we've crystallized it down to the core aspects of this struggle. We want to be short and concise and we don't want to go on and on with lectures and stories. Because our autistic young adult only have a certain amount of attention and we know that so let's be strategic and really prepare for these proactive problem solving conversations.
4. And then of course, the last step is okay, so what can we agree on? What are we going to try to do next? Can we make sure that whenever she wakes up from a nap, she is always given the opportunity to go outside? Can Yeah, that could mean you know, six or seven or eight times a day. You know, we want to make sure that our little you know, fluffy Love Ball, gets a chance to do the right thing and the opportunity  as often as we can.

And then of course we go in we execute and we see what happens and then we'll come back into this problem solving process again, you know if to see what worked and what needs to be improved.

Because every step of progress matters with our children with our adult young adult children. We love them all the way down to their toes. And we want to notice. Our brain really needs to see the evidence of progress as it is so soothing.

And so we need to make sure that we are taking the time to notice each step that they take toward the life that they love. That works for all of us.

So please join me at my website here and at the blog, where you'll find a transcript of this video and links to all the resources that I mentioned here.

And just know that we can do this and let's do it together. We were never meant to do this alone. Let's do this together.

Please join me and I really appreciate you watching this video. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai