#51 | Concerned about her son's struggles.

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 on Facebook
•  SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
• John Denver singing "It's In Every One of Us."
• STEAR MAPPING QUICK START GUIDE by Lynn C Davison
• Reflective Listening Formula Phone Wallpaper
• LISTEN UP OR LOSE OUT by Bob and Dot Bolton
• THE POWER OF SHOWING UP by Drs. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson.
• LivesInTheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene
• The Art of Adulting Course, Coaching and Community

Hi, it's Lynn, your adulting coach. Today's concern comes from Maria Torres, a new member at The Art of Adulting Facebook Page. She just said life goals. his studies he spends too much time on computer games. She's worried that he's not eating and from time to time he has some aggressive outbursts when we try to limit his game time.

These seem to be common concerns among those of us who have autistic young adults. And I'd like to see if I can't tackle those with for Maria and give her some good suggestions for today. First, we want to understand what's happening we're following Barb Avila's process from her book SEEING AUTISM.

We've been to a lot of doctors, therapists, nurses, autism experts, speech pathologist social skills teachers, just a ton of people have helped us in our efforts to help our autistic young adults.

And I want to borrow a phrase from a song that here we have on the Muppets we have. Oh, gosh, I lost his name. Anyway. That wonderful country singer who is singing David Pomeranz' song, It's In Every One of Us. John Denver is that John? I think that's John Denver. Anyway.

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The song starts with the lyrics, "It's an every one of us to be right wise, find our heart open up both our eyes. We can all know everything without ever knowing why. It's in every one of us to by and by."

So I just want to suggest to you Maria, that you probably have some really good ideas about what you can do and to help your young, autistic young adult. What I want to do for you is to give you a pathway to organize all of those ideas.

And so we're going to start with keeping the end in mind. What we really want to do is to help our autistic young adults practice the set of mental tools that help them manage their thoughts, emotions and actions so that they can achieve goals that they set for themselves. That are for them.

Keeping in mind the cource that what we're trying to do is help our autistic young adults on this journey from dependence, being dependent on us, which was pretty much the way they were for the first 18 years of their life when they were dependent on us in the schools to structure their lives, create expectations and scaffold the types of supports that they needed to achieve the results that they created in order to graduate.

Now they're moving up to more of an independent state, where they define what they want and what they're going to do to achieve it on their way to the final stage which is the interdependent stage and that's when we are helping each other out. That's where we achieve our greatest accomplishments when we're doing things not only for ourselves, but also for all of us.

This is the end in mind that I want us all to keep in mind. And you know, it's not the it's not that our autistic young adults haven't made incredible progress along these steps with their skills. It's just that they're probably lagging their peers.

That's the last time I want to talk about that because comparing where our kids are to where a non autistic kid might be is just can be an exercise in frustration. But we've noticed that maybe they're going to take a little bit longer on this journey than someone that doesn't have an autistic brain and that makes sense, because from the beginning, having an autistic brain has made them more anxious and when we're really anxious, at least most of the autistic people that I love, have just have a degree higher of anxiety. It impacts their ability to pick up on things as they go along, because we certainly do not learn well when we're more in an anxious state.

So it make sense that there's been a cascading effect on their learning that they haven't been able to, you know, pick up on stuff as quickly as somebody with a non anxious or non autistic brain.

So let's connect with ourselves first and look at you know, what, how has that what kind of an impact has that had on us? I feel like I spent most of my time for the first 18 years really focusing on just supporting them getting through school. And I never really stopped to consider the impact that having an autistic young adult had on me because I did have some great supports around me some great teachers and counselors and, and social skills teachers and those types of people around me but now that they've graduated from those high school types of supports I find that it's not as easy to find the appropriate support, not only for them, but also for me, as they learn how to do things more independently.

So we really need to connect with ourselves and make sure that we know where we are. What's happening with our own thoughts, emotions and actions, so that we align those with who we really want to be at our core. What is the thing? What are the values? How do we want to show up as the parent of an autistic young adult?

I suggest that, when we connect with ourselves, that we slow things down, that we record and sort our thinking, and that we really take the time to practice some self compassion, because we're just on a different path than many of our peers. And our path is going to  mean that our autistic young adult is going to be in our home longer than where what our peers are experiencing. They may go off to school, they may come back from school. There's more experimentation and regrouping I find with my autistic young adults then what has happened with my peers.

I just want to, you know, be compassionate with myself to know that sometimes, you know, I do compare and despair, and that's perfectly okay. You know, it's not the best thing in terms of trying to get the energy that I want but at the same time, I just want to acknowledge that I'm human. And I'd really like I'd really like for them to be, you know, more capable of solving their own problems and finding their own resources, but they're just not there yet.

That's the word I keep reminding myself isn't they're not there yet.

 I recommend highly that we sort out our thoughts using the STEAR Map because any given situation is out of outside of our control. We have an autistic young adult and they have that kind of a brain and that's not in our control.

But the results of that, you know of them being autistic do trigger some thoughts that produce emotions that generate actions on our behalf and they cause results. And the results always tie back to the thought that we're having.

When we take any given situation and really sort it out into those five categories, we can really notice what our thoughts are creating.

Here's the reason why we we not only want to notice that for ourselves, but we also want to help encourage our autistic young adults to practice this, this exercise of sorting out their thinking, because so often we're not even aware of those thoughts.

The research suggests we have between 60 and 70,000 thoughts a day. 99% of them are just fine. They're automatic, they're helping us get through the day.

On occasion, though, there's 1% of our thinking that is creating a result that really isn't really well aligned with who we are at our essence. So grabbing a hold of some of those thoughts and realizing what they create helps us take responsibility for the results that were that are that we're making happen in our life.

We want to do the same thing. We want to encourage our young adults to do the same thing. That's where they move from being a child to being an adult, is when they take responsibility for their thoughts, emotions and actions that create the results based on the situation that's outside of their control.

If we get them to intentionally think about their thoughts, emotions and actions their T*E*A, their tea, how they're brewing their tea is going to be what is going to create the results in their life.

Let's just start with our own thinking. We have our autistic young adult, he's not adulting yet, and my favorite thought is and that's okay. I love tagging that thought onto any thought that I have. Because it helps me get slow, lower my energy and become loving.

It's okay that they are just where they are. It helps me accept the situation that I cannot control. And then have the courage to figure out what my thoughts emotions and actions are and the wisdom to separate what I can't control from what I can control.

So one of the best ways to connect is to use this reflective listening technique (inspired by LISTEN UP OR LOSE OUT by Bob and Dot Bolton.)

If we can take the time to really connect by listening to them, it will help them feel safe, seen soothed and secure in our presence which will hopefully help them feel the same way over time in the greater community. (See Drs. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson's THE POWER OF SHOWING UP.)

So we want to reflect:

1. Ah, it sounds like and if I hear you saying and if I'm following you or help me understand or I think I'm seeing just an opening that shows that we're not sure what's going on in their minds and we'd like to know more.
2. And the second part is the emotion you feel reluctant, afraid, ashamed, lonely, whatever it is that you can uncomfortable. That's my favorite go to is it's either they're comfortable or they're uncomfortable and you can't miss on that one. Usually you can tell if they're comfortable or uncomfortable, easy. And we want to teach our autistic young adults this one too. So the uncomfortable part versus comfortable makes those emotions that are sometimes hard to peg with words. Very accessible to our autistic young adults.
3. And because you're not getting what you want, you know, a simple paraphrase of what we've been hearing from them as they've been talking and this is where we do connect.

And at the same time, we want to recognize that this is going to be a skill that's going to be developed over time.

Because our kids do well if they can from Dr. Ross Greene He's just fantastic with helping us be respectful of what our children are struggling with and trying and you know, the steps we need to take to help them understand what that we really are on their side and what we would really like to consider some of their ideas when we figure out what we want to do next.

He suggests that we start a list. And this is what I suggest, Maria is that we start a list. You started it already when you wrote down the concerns that you have. Let's get that list flushed out as much as we can and with as much detail as we can.

• Like last week I asked you to clean the bathroom and you never did it or
• The day before yesterday the sink was full of dirty dishes, whatever it is that you're noticing.

Let's start the list of the lagging of the unsolved problems. And when there's an unsolved problem, Ross Greene reminds us that there's always a lagging skill that we need to help them build.

Keeping in mind that we really need to focus on the gain. If we look at our autistic young adults they have made considerable progress since that when they started school, and we need to make sure that we remind ourselves that there's always going to be a gap between the ideal and where we are. And if we focus only on that gap, we're gonna get disheartened.

So we have to remind ourselves to have the gain and that's why when we make that list of lagging, unsolved problems and lagging skills, that we take the time to acknowledge how far we've come in each of the areas in which our young adults currently are struggling.

One of my favorite ways is to get an idea, a little bit more about what it is that they would like to create in their lives. Because that's where we get the most leverage is when they're doing something that they want.

Instead of just saying, "Now what do you want in your life?" because  they're going to say, "I don't know."

But if we interview them using those three broad categories of energy, work and love.

So in the energy category, it's

• how much money do you want to make?
• What kind of food do you want to eat?
• What kind of movement do you want to do?
• How do you want to manage your mind going forward?

Work would be,

• What kind of service do you see yourself providing? what are you interested in?
• What jobs that you've noticed around, as we've been experiencing different places in our community, what kinds of jobs look interesting to you?

And then finally, the third category of love:

• What do you love to learn? I know you love to play video games and you love to hit all the various levels and in you know, do them online with friends. You know, they're designed to keep you there because they truly do provide you with the dopamine hits that give you pleasure, and I get that.
• I want to see if we can't figure out a way for you to love more parts of your life other than just the part where you're gaming or YouTubing or whatever it is that are autistic young adults do to pretty much escape. What's happening in their life, what they're feeling right now? They can dive into those video games for hours on end getting the dopamine hits that keep them in that game, and the people that created those games understand that that's what's keeping men in there too. So they're designed for that.

And we have to recognize them when we want to interrupt them. That that we're asking them to step away from something that's giving them pleasure. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't set some of those boundaries and some of those limits or I like to think this sort of backfilling their life so that if they can find something that they really do enjoy doing, they're willing to give up the time on the game, because they really want to go to work.

In my daughter's case, she just got a job working at a doggy daycare, so she's surrounded by dogs all day long. You know, that's really pretty much starting to fill up her week. So it really minimizes the amount of time that she spends sedentary watching YouTube videos. So it it's it's starting to work this way.

Where they drive the engine of their life they they start steering their life more toward the GPS that they have selected.

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And of course, I'm going to advocate again, Ross Greene's practice: proactive and collaborative problem solving together.

Because this way,

• We first ask,  we agree on the situation.
• We asked them what's their STEAR Map so that they tell us how they are thinking, feeling and acting at this time creating what results that's the empathy step. That's where we really have to practice our own reflective listening and really understand, you know, what are the thoughts that are occurring to them now, then, here's my steer map.
• As parents, we also want to be prepared to present our point of view in a succinct, short, slow, low way, so that they feel the love that we have, we really have their best interest at heart. In fact, we know that in in their lifetime, no one has their best interests at heart as much as we do. So we want to present to them our perspective, what works for us as well.
• So that together we can agree on what steps to take next, what kinds of experiments are we willing to take in our lives as we figure out what works for them and for us to create a life that they love?

So the roadmap is what I present inside the Art of Adulting. We go through each one of these steps, creating a life GPS worksheet for ourselves and for our autistic and adults to guide them for the rest of their lives in achieving what it is that they want.

1. So we figure out who it is that they are at their best, so that we understand that we can make progress and feel peace the whole way. We don't have to wait until we've achieved a certain goal in order to feel good.
2. Then we figure out what's not the mindset, the best mindset that we need to train our brain to work harder for us so that we can get what we want out of life.
3. Commit to those actions. Then self assess. This is them assessing themselves on how well they have achieved the goals, the actions that they agreed that they wanted to do in order to create incremental predictable progress at their own pace.
4. Then garnering the help of the people that we know are going to be so helpful to help to getting the goals achieved. Because we know that we can't do all this all by ourselves. And this is when we listen first to understand then we proactively partnered on it and solve problems together, both at home and you're teaching them such a valuable skill that they will use in the workplace.

So please watch my free masterclass. It's at LynnCDavison.com/welcome.

Just click on any one of the buttons and you'll be able to hear the full process that I will take you through in the Art of Adulting. That will give you a framework a roadmap to follow and that will you can give to your autistic young adult as well to follow to create a life that you all love. That works.

Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai