Sunday: Acceptance
Sep 04, 2022Hi there. So the first practice we start with on Sunday is acceptance. How I'm not in acceptance or my clients aren't in an acceptance is when I hear sentences that start with "If only," autism didn't exist. If only I wasn't autistic. If only we'd known earlier they were autistic, then we could have done more and things would be better today. If only I had more friends.
I just want us to be aware that we're thinking those thoughts and I want to share the best tool that we found to increase our awareness of what having those thoughts creates in our lives.
It's the STEAR Map. And what we want to do is look at the situation, autism, and how it's triggering a bunch of thoughts. Which flavor emotions like resentment and frustration and just overall dissatisfaction. And what those do to our actions in some cases, also inactions. And then what results those create.
And I want to step back then once we've been introduced to this and say, "Okay, this situation is autism, here are my thoughts. Those are the emotions."
I want to slow things down and recognize that what our brain is doing is valuable. It's trying to learn from the past, and figure out what we need to do to create what we want in the future.
The trick is, though, that there really are no time machines. So we can't go back and redo have a redo what we can take what we've learned, without some of the resentment and the baggage and figure out what we want to do next.
I mean, what's real, is that that situation exists. We have those emotions and they're there. We really want to notice them and feel them. We need to be vulnerable enough to acknowledge that, you know, life isn't going to always, you know, be positive. Because like if we just tried to turn this around really quick, it could become toxic positivity. Like, "Oh, you just have to see the the bright side of the, of the way the world works."
But really, another thought is, "It wasn't supposed to happen any other way."
Because it didn't. We have autism. We have autistic young adults. We love them all the way down to their toenails. And it's true that there are many ways to interpret what is happening in our lives.
So maybe it was meant to happen this way. Maybe my plan for my life really wasn't as good as what's really happening.
Maybe our children are perfect for us.
But it's hard to get from that resentment. And what if to maybe it's perfect how to close that gap is what we do in the Art of Adulting.
We don't want you to do this alone.
Consider joining us, me and my families who are creating weatherproof confidence together.
Without us, we're not meant to do this alone. Join us.
Bye for now.
