#61 | Trouble finding time to coach your autistic young adult?
May 04, 2022Watch the webclass, "4-Part Roadmap to Encourage Adulting Actions."
Download, "The Quick Start Guide to STEAR Mapping"
Do you have trouble imagining that you could have time to coach your young adult? I understand. I definitely struggled finding time at first with my autistic young adults. Then I realized that if I had a strategy and really took what I was teaching them down to what I could write on the back of a napkin that we could be successful encouraging our autistic young adults to look at their thinking.
It's really important that we help them notice their thinking, because we become what we think about. And the more I noticed that it was their thinking that drove their anxiety, their lack of action, their escaping into gaming and screens. I knew we had to address the root cause. What are their thoughts?
Here's the tool. When we sort out what's happening in our lives into these five categories, the situation, the thoughts, the emotions, the actions and the results, we can slow things down and pull them apart and look at it separate from ourselves.
We can take a very small percentage of those 70,000 thoughts that we have each day and look at them, because most of the 70,000 thoughts are just playing, they are automatic. They help us get through the day. We produce what we've always produced and our brain loves to think them.
Every 1%-2% of those thoughts could take some examination, and it's really important to catch them and record them and look at them together. Our autistic young adults need productivity. They need to feel like they're making a contribution in an efficient way. They're always looking to conserve their energy in a predictable way because that helps them feel safe and helps that sometimes hyperactive amygdala of theirs to calm down enough so that they can put their prefrontal cortex online and learn some things. They love the certainty and the logic of the STEAR map; it says here are the parts of what happens and why in your life. It happens every time 100% of the time. Having that specificity of language helps them to identify with the message that we're encouraging them to learn to identify to process to figure and out what's going on. Our warnings will sit better with them. When we put them into STEAR Maps with them we can help them understand how the situation is triggering the emotions that we've all had. That flavor, that triggers the thoughts, that flavor those emotions that we all have, that generates our connection or our inaction and creates the results in our lives.
What we need to remember to do is to slow things down. Bring ourselves down into our center, where we're low, at a low arousal point and feeling the love that we have for them. All the way down all the way to their toenails. We just love our kids and we want to help them create a life they love that works. I believe so strongly that every step of progress matters.
And so yes, we are going to meet resistance. I did. And it took a few years to convince them. And thank goodness my daughter went to a positive psychology class and our community college which reinforced the messages that I was saying so she didn't just hear it from me. And that was so helpful. Then my daughter helped my son! She does this coaching with him too when I'm not even there.
It's amazing to see how this tool has become a part of their everyday vocabulary, and a part of our common language so we can use it to solve our problems together, which just cements our connection and helps them become more interdependent with us; that independence step and into the interdependence with us that we so desire.
Please come to my website and learn more. www.lynncdavison.com. I really believe that this is the best, the most important tool that we need to teach our autistic young adults so that they can create a life they love that works.
Bye for now.
