#23 | Meltdowns: How We Support Response-Ability Through Self-Regulation

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

• Click here to download the phone wallpaper image, "Self-Reg Practices 5 Domains" from Stewart Shanker here.
• Click here for the Infographic, What is Self-Reg from Stewart Shanker.

Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Davison. I help autistic adults and their families systemize the creation of a life they love. That works. Welcome, and I'm so glad you're here watching this video.

I really want to emphasize during this presentation, how coaching helped me and how it can help you. So I want you to see how we can support response-ability, the ability to choose our response through self regulation, and hopefully, help our children or young adults feel more confident that in the way that they manage their responses to things that can trigger them in the past and grow their brain.

Some of those things that have been difficult for them, and then they have confidence that they can create a life they love, by addressing and learning from every challenge that they face in their lives. Because we all face a lot of challenges in our lives.

So today, I really am going to rely heavily on Stuart Shanker and his book, SELF-REG. It is a marvel of an accomplishment how he holds everything together. He's very generous at his website, self-reg.ca. And there's tons of information and videos to watch there that are really worth taking the time to do because this is at the core of how we want to feel better, and help our kids feel better as well.

So the whole purpose of this book is we want to figure out what the stressors are, that are creating the responses that we're getting that our children are getting that are not defiant, but are neurologically faced in that is so important. Because we think at first that it's intentional that our children are having these hard times. And what's really happening is their neurological system is just on overload. We can take concrete steps to make that less likely to happen in the future. 

So here's his entire thesis in a nutshell, and I realize this is hard to read, but I'm showing it up to you in this form so that you know that you can download this image as a phone wallpaper image and upload it to your phone, in your photos. In fact, I advocate that you set aside an album you create an album called The Art of Adulting, and you put these images in. I have several of them and there's even more in my course. It really in a nutshell, helps us understand what we need to do to really help our children develop that response-ability that's going to see them through every challenge even when we're gone. 

So the first step and there's five steps and there's five domains and they're both in this lovely image. I love how the parent and the child are connected. You can see the hearts and all you have to do is imagine that child taller than the mom probably now that they're young adults, and it's the same process it applies. 

So the first thing we need to do is to just reframe the behavior that we're seeing. It's neurologically based. It's not intentional when they go into those meltdowns, and they are totally in that feeling and just raging or crying. It's just the circuits are overloaded. And I want us to continue to do that for ourselves as well, to have compassion when we watch that happening. Because it's difficult to watch’ we’ll get to that in just a minute. But if we can reframe this, sometimes people say we're either learning or we're succeeding, like there's no failure. My view is that we're learning all the time. We're learning what works and what doesn't work. For us and for our autistic adults. These are all customized solutions that we create, and we practice and we practice over and over again, so that they become a habit, part of the way that we respond to life. 

The second step then is to recognize the stressors, and they're usually in five domains, and they are biological, like noises and crowds, visual overstimulation, and not enough movement. You know, when your body just hasn't moved enough to regulate, like sleep, sugar, junk food, those of biological reasons, and we really have to be the detective here to figure out what's going on. 

The second domain is emotional. Are we having difficulty coping with strong emotions? Yes, we wouldn't be in a meltdown. And they're either comfortable or they're overexcited and they're just not able to come out of that overexcitement point, or they're uncomfortable. That's when we see the anger and the fear come up when you won't leave the house, when they're angry enough to hit things or us. That's the emotional realm. 

The third is the cognitive. We have difficulty processing information. We know that having an autistic brain is much more a linear thinking brain. So sometimes it takes a little bit longer to process things. And when a person is feeling pushed, that time is not available. Let's say they're going to pick up a prescription and they know this prescription is really important. It's a stimulant man, and it really is important to them. And some things gone wrong in the system that it can't get it somebody thinks they didn't have enough time between their last prescription or whatever. It can be complicated because it's a highly regulated, controlled substance so, maybe they're just being pressed so much they're being asked six different questions at the same time, and they can't answer. It makes perfect sense that that would overload their neurology. 

Then there's of course the social part, difficulty picking up social cues or understanding their effect. And the effect of their behavior on others. There's just so many opportunities in the complexity of social so we know that that's going to be a trigger if they have to go to a wedding, or if they have to go to a doctor or a dentist appointment. All those social things can really trigger. 

Then of course, the last one is pro social. This is when they're partnering with us or with someone else, and they have difficulty coping with other people's stress. And the last one that's interesting to me because I see this happening in my family is their sense of injustice, their dignity that someone said something that shouldn't have been said, or that somebody is not being treated well. That's a pro social domain. And we do see that trigger folks and autistic people that I love. 

So I think it's really helpful to have those five categories and to be able to vote on which one Oh, that's the one that they're treating. That's their triggering. Why because they're not just sensitive to but are left drained by all those different stimuli, you know, like sound, smell, touch, cognition, social complexity, all of it. They're just drained. 

And this is from his book. I'm gonna use several quotes because I really believe this is a, this is one of those you will need to have in our library. So when we see them drain, then we recognize Oh, yeah, that's why they need to have so much more time to regroup after something difficult. Of course, you know, the first strategy is to reduce the stress. Yes. Okay. So how can we do that? Well, I advocate as does Dr. Ross Greene is that we keep a list of unsolved problems and planning skills, and we just, you know, notice what's going on with our kids because if we can do that, and notice what's happening with us, this is the key when a child is in distress, we find an almost reflexive need to try to reason in a way. The problem is that the systems in the brain that they would need to process well intentioned, recent offline when they're hyper aroused. They're their brain is not working at that point, that prefrontal cortex. They're caught in that responsive limbic system or they just fight, flight or freeze. They truly don't register what we're saying. And this is really important that we recognize that trying to reason their way or explain it, or tell them the solution does not work. And, you know, why don't they just do what they say it won't because at that point, their brain is totally offline, though to reduce the stress.

Now, how do we do that? So my belief is that we not only reflect in our listening to enhance their stress awareness, like you're feeling. I believe that what really has to happen right now is we reflect both the emotion and the meaning of what's happening those two things. So the other day or going to a dentist appointment with my 25 year old daughter, and she loves having an iPod when she's on in the chair because then she can listen to her favorite music and it helps to soothe her ear around anxiety about the procedure. But when she got in the car, she couldn't find her iPod and we have plenty of time. Can we please just check it out? Check out her pockets. Check out the seat and the house. I just had it you know, I could see the meltdown. Just that she was overloaded. So she ran back in the house, could not find her iPod. And thank goodness came back out. And I'm in the car. I said okay, what do you want to do? I get that. Okay, so I think we have two choices here. I mean, I see that you're really upset that you don't have your iPod but you do have your phone. So maybe that would help. No, I don't have the right to your phone. Okay. All right. So that's not not an option. What do you want to do? Do you want to cancel the appointment and come back later? Or do you want to suck it up and see if we can just get through this? Well, let's just do it. So it was her decision to go ahead and go with the doctor's appointment and the dentist's appointment she did really well. They happen to be playing some of her favorite music in the office. I was so impressed by her ability to recover. Years ago this would not have been possible, but she's just growing up and I'm just watching her manage herself better and better every day. And I think it's because she's more aware that her thoughts create her emotions. We've been working on that for years now. And she took a positive psychology class at a community college nearby and it's all starting to gel.

So I'm telling you that what I'm teaching you and what I want to teach you in the Art of Adulting has really worked for my autistic adult. So this positive reflection enables us to really notice what's happening with her. So when she's being reflected back the emotion and the meaning of what's happening right now, you feel seen, and the reason for this lies in a phenomenon calm limbic resonance. Our limbic systems are hardwired to respond in kind when confronted with someone who's ELSS around a limbic system, positive or negative. So because I had taken several deep breaths myself, and we have a system in place for handling these difficult situations, I was able to remain calm. And reflect well for her so that she could figure this out. This is why laughter is contagious, and if someone shouts angrily at us, instead, we instantly want to shout back and reasonably seen road rage or seeing the argument escalate so quickly via texting it's this limbic resonance that's going on and that's why it's so important for us to be response of all so that they can see that we're okay and reflect to them what's happening and just keep reflecting and it will calm down. And thank goodness we were in a car, so it was very private. So, you know, we were able to do this together and I felt really, really good about it. 

So, here's what I had to do. These are the steps that I had to take. I had to be calm right there. I had to quiet the surface of my mind. As Jon Kabat Zinn describes in Wherever You Go, There You Are. I had to notice my thinking and you might see your maps and notice the parade of thoughts going across my head. I didn't want to have to reschedule this meeting. There she goes again. Oh, gosh, I feel so terrible when she loses society, because it's such an important little for her. You know, I haven't noticed all my thinking then. And then I have to pick one or two. Okay, how do I want to think in that situation? My thought was, I want to be there for her.

Okay, that helped me be calm. And the way that I did that was by reflective listening over and over and over again and loving the decision makers as to the next step. So what we want to do then is of course, be aware and listen with our eyes as well as our ears. And that to me, the golden ticket is reflective listening and noticing what's going on as an expression of genuine puzzlement, not judgment of puzzlement, what's going on, and then continuing to reflect on my state of mind and body and in her state of mind and body, and then some wonderfully successful trip to the dentist. 

Because here's what we have to do. We rarely figure out what our child's stressors are at that moment. Sometimes, though, now that they're young adults, we've started to notice the patterns but we still have to test them. So that's that hypothesis testing version of the trial and error system you used when our kids were when our kids were newborns. And now we're doing that self regulation detective work as their parents. So we are doing what we can, noticing, keeping lists of what the unsolved problems in writing skills are and addressing them.This is very possible. 

So what we want to do in our fifth step, of course, is to develop custom strategies to promote responsibility and practice them that are not going to become a habit, that part of our lives. You know, the first time we've been practicing this type of responsibility over and over again, she's not quite there. I know I'm helpful. And actually, I'm pretty sure that she probably could do this herself. But she's not quite there. She doesn't trust herself just yet. That's what we need to develop is that trust, that self confidence that she'll be able to do this and we're going to continue to do this for the rest of our lives. Because the real lesson lesson here, and I love this quote, is that parents need to become just as aware of what sort of activity causes them to go into a state of diminished energy and heightened tension in the office or in a business or money troubles or partner; misalignments or whatever the reasons are. We live in the aware of that, because that does affect our results. We need to become aware that just like our child, we are much more likely when we're in a low energy high tension state to explode over something that our child says or does. Then we're more calm and relaxed, and we know those explosions are not the best response. We would like to choose our response. And that's why we're working on becoming responsible. 

In looking at the tools that I teach in coaching. I can tell you it's helped me. Sometimes I get stuck on something and I need a coach to help me a little bit so that my emotions, actions and results are aligned with what I really want to create in my family in the world. 

So please join me at the Art of Adulting on Facebook, download my Eight Common Mistakes that Parents Make when Systemising Adulting with their Autistic Young Adults.

So that's how I know what they are. And please watch my Five Part Roadmap to Systemising Self Reliance with your Autistic Young Adult, it's free. It's not just a sales pitch. It really has the distillation of what we have learned as a family over the last 30 years. And you know it really does work so you will leave with a framework that can help you go forward, I promise. 

Join me at the Art of Adulting and you can message me there. I'm happy to learn more about what struggles you and your family are facing. 

Bye for now.