#28 | They are so angry

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

• SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
• Emotion-Sensation Wheel Phone Wallpaper
• Mood Meter from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence
• 7 Steps to Feel Feelings
• Recenter Ourselves
• Reflective Listening
• ATOMIC HABITS by James Clear
• The Art of Adulting

Hey everyone. I'm Lynn, your adulting coach, I help autistic young adults and their families  systemize adulting together. Thank you for watching this video.

Today's topic is one I see often at the Facebook pages that I visit supporting families with autistic teens, young adults and adults.

"They are so angry and I don't know what to do," or fill in some other emotion they are so unhappy and I don't know what to do or they are so discouraged, and I don't know what to do. So that's what today's topic is and I can't wait to do this. I'm so excited to teach you this one.

We're going to use the framework that Barb Avila outlines in her book SEEING AUTISM: CONNECTION THROUGH UNDERSTANDING. It's such an excellent book. It's a wonderful way to frame up the way that we connect with our autistic young adults.

So we're going to get started in the understand step by looking at our STEAR Map. What's going on?

We're gonna just start out with the very first part: the situation versus the thought. So we're going to separate out the situation and the thought, and this is a perfect example.

"They are so angry." I like to take the word 'so' out of it, because that's an adverb describing how angry they are. And I just want to get to the facts. They look angry or they said these words we can put this up in the in the situation, "I am angry," or they're shouting,you know, they are shouting is provable. We can take a video of it and show it to the world and just from their actions, we could prove that they are angry.

Our thought then now becomes our story.

So the facts can't hurt us. The fact that they're angry is not a problem until we start thinking about it telling our story about it. That, "I don't know what to do." Because that's what creates the emotion inside of us, which is fear. "I don't know what to do," also concretes overwhelm. I don't know what to do can create paralysis, you know, deer in the headlights kind of thing. I don't know what to do, can create in our bodies, just confusion. 

It's a thought, and it's creating that emotion that is getting a stuck.  We really want to pay attention to the connection between separating out the situation, just the facts from our thoughts and our emotions.

Now, finding our emotions isn't always so easy. I love this tool. It's an emotion sensation wheel. And I know it's too small for you to read, but it's going to be in the in the blog post where you're going to be able to look it'll be right there you'll have a connection right to it. If you go to my blog, LynnCDavison.com/blog. Fairly soon after I do this video, it should be there with a transcript and the links.

If you'll notice right in the middle, that's what's called the emotion sensation wheel and then right around the outside there are just six major emotions. This is what somebody thinks are the six main emotions. You can see these emotion wheels all over the internet, and they're not always the same, but they seem to be fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and then happy surprise.

We would in our way of looking at life we would say that these are negative emotions and these are positive emotions. And I want to suggest that all emotions are worth examining, and that this this graphic kind of illustrates the tendency of our brain to look for what's wrong, rather than to notice what's right. And I think it's a pretty good illustration of that.

So they are the first six in the middle. The next group is more specific. Let's break them down to more specific names of emotions.

What I love about this wheel is it on the outside are the sensations, the sensations that happen in our bodies, and I'll talk about those a little bit more.

CONNECT

Next, what happens often though, with the the people that we love, is that they have with it what is called alexithymia. Alexithymia literally means a the inability to Lexi, recognize or describe and then find me emotions.

It doesn't mean that our kids don't, that our young adult the people that we love, who are autistic don't feel these emotions, it just means that it's hard to get a label on them. And that's okay. You know, we're not trying to make our kids poets or authors, not always at least, they don't have to have the precise emotion and I want to give you a tool that will help with that.

And that is this mood meter. This comes from the Yale from Yale, and his name is Marc, and I've lost his last name, but he is teaching all over the country. This RULER approach to helping kids in schools better have better emotional intelligence. And so it has a lot of integrity.

And what he suggests is that we just look at the four quadrants of our emotions, very helpful. So along one quadrant is the level of energy and along the bottom quadrant is the amount of comfort. So all we need to do to help our kids is help them to identify. "Are they comfortable or uncomfortable?"

And in this case, that anger would be pretty uncomfortable. Energy level, is it low or high? When I think of angry, it's, they're kind of in that red quadrant. Which is high energy, low comfort, and that's not a good place for them to be. So you can see how there are four options. And just having them identify frankly, their comfort level in their energy level is going to take you exactly where you need to go to help them so that's why we use the mood meter.

PRACTICE

Then we want to encourage our young adults and any other artistic people that we know to go ahead and feel the feelings. These are the seven steps to feel your feelings. Again, you can find it when you go to the blog, you'll see that this option there's not will be an option there to download the the wallpaper that this is a phone wallpaper design that you can use.

The idea is to name it uncomfortable comfortable.

Find it in your body. This is really what we want to do. Okay, so what's going on inside of our bodies is it in our chest? Is it in our throat? Is it in the back of our head? Is it in our the front of our head? Is it in our extremities is it in our tummy? You know, where is that anger and in my case, it centers right in the middle of my chest when I'm angry and you can see our clench my jaw, and it just kind of like all there and it's read and it's pulsing. What we want to do is see if we can get them to describe it even just a little bit because the minute they can describe it, then they can have a little bit of distance from oh that's what's happening inside of me. It's not me. It's what's happening to me. It's happening inside of me.

The reason why it happens is because our brain, our miraculous lovely brain, translates whatever sentences in our mind, to the emotion to the emotion through a set of chemicals. Somewhere it tells the body to release cortisol or dopamine or all the other different hormones that cause us to feel the sensation in our body.

Back to that wheel, the outside, you know the outside rim of that wheel that I showed earlier shows the sensation. So sometimes if you show this emotion sensation wheel to your artistic and adult or your you know your artistic family member, it helps them sometimes to go from where the weight feels back to what's happening and I just find this has been very helpful tool.

Then what we want to do is we want to teach them how to recenter themselves. This is really cool because they can do this anytime in their life anytime in their day, whether they're with people or not with people because nobody needs to know that this is even happening.

And the steps are we really want to breathe through our nose expanding our ribcage back out through our nose then go up to our eyes and unfocused them.

What does unfocus the mean and why is that so important? It we're unfocused. In our eyes because when you think about it, we're more in a state of high alert like there's a tiger in the bush about ready to attack us. That's what we noticed that Tiger is we have a very focused view of them. It's like tunnel vision. We are focused on that threat and the rest of the world. fades away in an unfocused but we want to tell our brain that things are okay we want to tell our monkey mind. Our friend here little monkey mind. It's okay. We're going to pet it. We're going to tell our mind no everything's okay. I'm going to just unfocus it which is the opposite of being highly focused.

We want to unfocus our eyes and then we want to slightly smile doesn't have to be you know, a clown smile. It can just be a little Mona Lisa smile.

But those actions those three actions, you'll notice they're using your body to calm your brain. So helpful. Trying to think our way out of the hyper aroused state is not the best way it's we want to use our body to calm ourselves down. So we use our body to calm down our brain.

So these are the three steps that we use, we, we breathe, we exhale, we smile and we un-focus our eyes. That's how we physically change our anatomy, which actually changes the way that our brain is engaged and it brings back on that prefrontal cortex that part of our brain that's thinking.

While we're in our prefrontal cortex, we want to find the sentence. What is the sentence that is causing this anger? There may be several of them.

So what we want to do is really, listen, listen, listen, listen to what our children are telling us. You know, why are they mad? Why are they afraid? Why are they overwhelmed? What's going on? And we want to reflect it back to them. So they feel it. They're seen they're safe. It helps them feel soothed, and then they know that they are secure in the world.

We want to practice our listening because our story does matter. The thoughts that we have in our brains string together get us in that washing machine that spin cycle. It gets to the point where we don't even see them. We just know that that story is titled, I'm angry or life isn't the way it should be.

And so if we can find those sentences slow it down, and look at what's causing that spin cycle. We can help our young adults because our brain sees what the mind looks for. So if we tell ourselves we need to really, you know, we're angry because we weren't able to you know, we we weren't able to do something that we wanted to do or we weren't able to buy something we thought was essential or somebody said something or a typical, you know, pattern trigger happen which triggers us right into, into that anger, emotion.

We just need to know what is it because it really matters, what's going on in our in our mind, because that's what tells our brain what to focus on. Our brain can't take in all of the stimulation around us every day. It's called the reticular activating system. It's that part of our brain that decides what we pay attention to and what we don't pay attention to. And it's all it's directed by the thoughts that we have in our mind, and that's why we need to pay attention to what those are and decide intentionally, what are the thoughts that work for us and which ones don't?

And then notice what happens when we STEAR our brain to a thought that works better for us. My favorite way to do this is to just say to myself, and that's okay. Whatever my thought is, I you know, I should have that thing that I wanted, but it's okay. "That's okay" or "But it's okay," somehow tells my brain that there's some wiggle room in the thought.

It's really one skill that we need to teach and encourage our kids to practice because our thoughts, our emotions and our actions, the T E. A, is what drives our brain to notice what's going on. And we want to make sure that we're doing that intentionally.

Now, it doesn't have to be a big deal. All we have to do is do it a little bit better from one day to the next.

This is what James Clear illustrates so well in his book, atomic habits. He argues, and he's right, that what we do each day adds up. It creates the life that we have.

And so if we intentionally focus our thoughts that create the emotions that drive the actions that we want in our life, every day each day, they will add up to a life we love that works for us.

And this is what we want our kids to have. We want them to know this. We want them to know this. If they just they just know it so that when we're gone they have the tool to really manage their life.

And that's why in the art of adulting, we break our lives down into the 10 domains. And we work on how are we going to get 1% Better each week, and then we notice how well we do and we notice when we're not doing what we say we're going to do. What is our T*E*A. W hat's going on with our thought, emotions and actions that are preventing us from doing what we need to do?

He illustrates this in a mathematical way and I love this because if you if you just do 1% worse every day you see the bottom line, you're going to get a little bit worse. But if you do 1% better each day that's 1.01 to the 365th power, then that's how we're going to get 37.78% better at the end of the year.

I'd love it when they reduce these ideas into this into the simple math. It's like we can't argue it's the math, right? We will end up with results that are nearly 37% times better after one year.

And that's why we have to teach our kids that it's not these big gigantic actions that are going to change their lives. It's what they do every day. And that's what we teach. We give them a system. We teach them the tools and the concepts in the skills that they need to know inside The Art of Adulting.

And what we need to do first is to learn them ourselves.

Because once we've learned them, then we teach them.That's our second opportunity to learn them.

And then the third opportunity is to practice.

So we learn the theory. We teach it to our autistic young adults and they can come right in it. Because anybody that joins it's it's a membership in the course for the entire family for one price.

So they go right in, they get their own log in and they can follow along and watch the videos and they're all short and sweet so that they stick.

And then the mastery is what we do together as families.

This is where we practice our skills over and over again and we notice when our kids are making progress and we were and we celebrate together with them when they when they do.

That's the magic of this 1%. Let's do 1% better each day in each of our 10 domains.

Please join me in The Art of Adulting. Let's systemize adulting together.

It's going to I know it's going to work. It's worked so well in my family. It's worked really well with my clients. And I'm very certain that it can work for you.

Find me at LynnCDavison.com/blog. That's where you're going to find all of the videos that I create at The Art of Adulting, my private Facebook Page. 

I can't can't wait to meet you inside of The Art of Adulting. 

Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai