#53 | Was I insulted?

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RESOURCES

• Parents of Adults with Aspergers on Facebook
• SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila
• PositiveIntelligence.com by Shirzad Charmine
• The Drama Triangle phone wallpaper

 
Hi, it's Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize adulting together. Thank you for watching this video.

Today's struggle comes from The Parents of Adults with Aspergers.

It was a really juicy post. It had more than 135 comments on it, which really says it resonated with a lot of us. Our mom is concerned that she was just insulted. And let me just go through some of her thoughts so you can get an idea of what was happening.

"Am I being silly or was this meant as an insult? My post was about how I feel my son was failed not only by me, but by countless other people. He's 19 and he's still not officially diagnosed, but I've known since he was two years old. Know-it-all as holds like this is why I stayed to myself and I don't share my son's struggles."

"I have found a plethora of services that met each need for my son is what the Post said that she was reacting to. The help is readily available but requires a commitment from the caretaker to search it out and find it."

That was the response.

UNDERSTAND

So let's take the time to understand what's going on here. And it's really something that I have struggled with for all the years that I've been raising our children, we have six ages 25 to 52 and they are all alternative learners. Several have been diagnosed with autism.

And yeah, this stuff comes up. It comes up from not only strangers like this one on the Facebook posts but also from members of the family. I was told that I was enabling my son, others have been told that they are ruining their children by professional therapists.

You know, this happens and we need to figure out what's going on so we can become more confident in the way that we respond and closer to who we really want to be in as you know, are our ideal self. So let me just suggest that what's happening here on both sides is that there's some sabotaging thoughts happening.

And the first sabotager, this comes from Chamine Shirzad and his website Positive Intelligence, and he wrote a book of that name as well that I just think is really worthwhile for any human being to to read his book because it frames up some of the thought habits that we fall into in these very clever characters which makes it easier to separate ourselves from it and recognize when it's happening in our lives and in the lives of the people that we love so that we don't necessarily get caught up in the drama. We'll talk more about that in a minute.

1. The first saboteur is the judge. That saboteur is always available. He's the number one judge in place. Anytime something happens our brain just immediately leaps to judging whether or not that was a good or a bad. Remember that union symbol is it a black or a white? thing that just happened, circumstance, situation that just happened. And there's a reason why that Yin Yang symbols has been around so much because we just as human beings, we love to classify things in terms of black and white. It's something that we see often with our children. And we also notice that we do it as well. That's the judge.
2. The next one is the avoider that's when we don't want to have anything to do with him. These are all the the other patterns of thinking that fit underneath that judge.
3. The controller where we want to decide how things are going to happen.
4. The Hyper achiever that's the one that says that I am going to be so great that no one can touch me because look at all the things that I've achieved in my life.
5. The hyper rational person says, well, that's not a rational thought, you know, so therefore, it's invalid.
6. The Hyper vigilant is always scanning for what's gone wrong. We often find that people with autistic brains tend to be hyper vigilant because that's just the kind of brain that they inherited in the genetic lottery.
7. We're restless we want something else to do to distract ourselves from whatever's happening.
8. Or the Stickler is the one that says you didn't turn off the lights the other night, you know what if you had, it may have been better. 
9. The pleaser is the one who says, you know, whatever you want, annoying to do it.
10. The victim is the one that's going oh, life is just so hard.

I love the way that Chamine Shirzard put these into these caricatures so we can start to recognize that our thought patterns do fall into some of these categories. And it's really helpful for us to notice that.

So I think there was a bit of judging happening on both sides of this equation, though.

I think our mom has such a great sense of humor because she's just the question behind being salty. I think that's a great because or wasn't just meant as an insult to salty. I just think that's a great describer of an emotion.

CONNECT

What we want to do next is then connect with ourselves and figure out what is the truth for us what is really happening for us.

I argue that this is the most effective tool. Now it has helped me so much in the last five years, in my parenting and in my life in just in the amount of learning and enjoyment that I get out of it.

When we separate what's happening into these five categories, we notice that there's always this situation which is outside of our control, and that's going to trigger our thoughts which produces our emotions, which generates our actions and causes our results and the results always tie back to the thought.

The thought is what drives the whole thought, emotion, Action, Result chain. It's really helpful to know that so that we can accept responsibility for whatever we create in our lives.

I argue that this knowing that we are the ones that create the results in our lives is to what we have to make sure that our autistic adult find truthful as well and see if they can practice this because then they will move from being an emotional child to an emotional adult when they totally accept responsibility for their results.

Now they're not going to go in a straight line from child to adult, they're gonna wave back and forth but over time, I've seen it happen in my household where more and more my two adult children who are still living at home with me are able in and the ones that are not living at home with me are able to notice Oh, I see what I was doing there and take responsibility for it and figure out how to wiggle the thought that's not getting them the result they want. And then they feel much more powerful.

So when we give our power away to the other person is what we want to stop doing. We want to start recognizing that okay, they said that, but it's up to me how I respond.

I just want to remind us that anything anyone says does or doesn't do belongs in our situation line. It's it's it's outside of our control. Let me just put that one in there and it is outside of our control. I don't think it's going to let me have all those it stops it 45 characters or something so sorry.

So it's outside of our control.

What we want to do is we want to take some of our thinking and just see what it's producing for us for so that we become aware of so if we come back up here and grab this thought my post was about how I feel my son was failed not only by me, but also by countless others. That's a really important thought to look at.

So here let's just say let's just look at this. And now okay, I feel my son was failed not only by me, but also by countless other people.

We're gonna put that in the thought line, because it's it's not something that everyone on the planet can agree with. 

10:00
It's not something we could prove in a court of law. It's a reaction to the situation of having her son. That's the situation.

Here's her thought I feel my son was failed not only by me, but by also by countless people.

If it were me, that if I thought that thought that would make me feel hopeless. It also might make me feel is it possible to feel inadequate? That's not going to fit in adequate. Okay, so if we can just kind of feel not always are inadequate, or just gonna be that makes me feel inadequate and hopeless.

Okay, so when I'm inadequate and hopeless, what I tend to do is I tend to avoid and I tend to blame other people. I tend to go to that blame, that's not my fault. You know, that gives him get the support he wanted and it's their fault you know, and avoiding the responsibility for whatever I create. I'm not saying please please do not.

Stephanie, this is this road we're on. I feel like this is the Ivy League School of Parenting. I feel like we have been challenged in ways that people who have non autistic adults just haven't experienced.

They are able to turn to the traditional schooling and traditional approaches and traditional pathways and find that the outside world supports them every way. It's very supportive of where they're going and supports their children and it's like if you're in that lane, it though it just moves faster than you know. It's like having your you're in the river of what everybody else is doing. So it just carries you forward.

And we are not in that river. We're in a different River. We're in a river with a lot more boulders in it and a lot more churning in it because we don't have all the answers. We don't know what to do in many cases. To help the situation we have to really reach down deep inside of ourselves and figure some stuff out and do what we can to contact other people that can help us. This is this is a more challenging stream.

I don't know anybody that wouldn't argue that there's either you know, a stream or post fast or there's a one over here with a rapids and I feel like we're we've been in the rapids a lot and that has created for us an opportunity to learn and grow through that which is never pleasant. Well, it has different degrees of pleasantness you know sometimes you just learn something quickly. But for me, it has not been very pleasant this part of learning and growing as a parent of a number of children who are not at all the light like I used to. I mean, I would love it if I've gotten to the same. At least I could have gotten good at you know, parenting two ofthem. But no, every single one of them is different.

And they all have these challenges that I just didn't understand. I didn't know enough when I got started and that's what threw me into my depression dip  right after 911 and only 911 but the fact that we our youngest was diagnosed with more like, you know, with a different brain, and it just made life. I just kept saying to myself, I don't know, and that's what threw me into a depression.

We've all you know, we've all had to crawl our way out of the learning curves and they don't go like they don't go straight up like that. They just they don't go like that straight up. They go, you know, in ways that are much more difficult. We go into this dip, and we learn a few things and then we come out and we learned a few things and then there's more when we go back into the pool of learning, which is very uncomfortable. We've all done this. 

14:33
I just want you to know that is very, very normal, very common, to fall into this kind of thinking pattern and it sure makes sense felt a lot of us or 135 of us wouldn't have responded to your post.

So I just want to suggest that that's you're fine. You're just fine right where you are.

It really helped me when I started to notice my thinking and what it was creating. And I really wanted to move away from being the victim of any given situation to the powerful person that was creating the life that I love that worked for me and for my family. And that's what I want to do.

I'm just going to suggest that you know, we can start off with the same situation and that's our challenge is to keep the situation the same but to see if there's any wiggle room and our thought.

Our thought I can tell is that he's he was failed by me and others in that that's okay. This is what I try to do with most of my thoughts that previews you know those motion is like hopeless and inadequate that really don't fuel me to solve whatever problem is in front of me.

What I try to do is just hang on, and that's okay. And I try to figure out what's okay about it.

And there's another way I'm going to suggest one other way. We can also put in front of this is, "Maybe he was failed by others and by me, maybe, maybe not."

We can just kind of wiggle that a little bit in I'm hoping that it will get a little bit more uplifting. When I go and I try to you know when I blind myself who maybe I just didn't do that right? When I add the word project maybe instead of I just didn't. Maybe on top of that I find it I kind of get more thoughtful. I I think that's an emotion. I get more curious you know, where can I find the lesson in this situation?

And then I go to the action of kind of, you know, trying some experiments. Like can I just try that sentence on for a while for the next week or so "Maybe he was failed by me and others but maybe not."

Maybe if I just try that sentence on for a while just that experiment. That one experiment could help me get to the result. The result was from maybe he was found by me and others but maybe not is maybe it's me. It's okay. For him. It's okay? So okay, I guess yes, that's where I want you to get to the result I want you to get to eventually. Not right away.

This is not a course in positive thinking. This is course in wiggling our thoughts. This is a an approach that we can say okay, any given situation that happens in our lives, there are literally 9 billion ways to think about it. You know, however many people there on there are on the planet. That's how many different ways this particular situation could be thought of. So, if that's the case, and maybe I can think of another you know, couple, three different ways this still sounds truthful to me, still sound like there's an element of truth in there, but that I really could learn. 

Maybe that would, would fuel me better. Maybe that would take care of my heart in a better way. And then I will take the actions that I need to him, which is just to experiment with thinking. Maybe his life has really turned out just about the best it possibly could.

And maybe we still have struggles at age 19 And we maybe we still don't have a diagnosis, and we didn't have a diagnosis, or two or three.

19:00
I'm trying to respect their privacy, but we don't have we didn't get diagnoses until they were over 18 either, for several of them. So that's not a failure. on your part. That's just the way things went.

Maybe the case now is that it would be helpful for them to have one because then they can access more services and you can get some kind of a financial foundation underneath them with any government programs that exist in your area, in your part of the world.

So, you know, maybe it's turning out just the way it should and maybe, you know, we're kind of lucky that he's been able to manage a lot of life pretty well. Not all of it. But you know, compared to his autistic peers, he's pretty much right, you know, in a pretty good place.

I mean, let's, you know, let's see if we can wiggle our thought a little bit, that maybe he was failed by me and others, but maybe not. So that's my suggestion.

PRACTICE

And then with the practicing, I really do want us to understand that what we're learning here in the practices is not only going to benefit us, but also if we model it and describe it to our children in terms of sharing what our thoughts have been that we can teach them the this way of thinking and encourage them in managing their own lives. And that's how they're going to turn into adults. And that's how we can rest assured that they're going to be able to make good decisions for them even when we're gone.

So one suggestion I have is that if we want to defuse some of these judging thoughts that we all have, is that we can say to ourselves:

• oh, I'm having that thought that oh, that's you know, that's interesting.
• I'm noticing that I'm having that thought or
• Another one is to  say that thought in the most ridiculous voice like you know, this past home, where is it? No, no at all assholes. Like this is why I stay you know, to myself, you know, I mean you can almost just give yourself a little bit of a singsong voice
• or sing it to the tune of your favorite song.
• Or when that thought arises say to yourself, Hey, thanks, mind. That was awesome. Really appreciate your contributions.

We do think 70,000 thoughts in any given day, and not all of them are going to be the ones that are going to be valuable to us. I mean, most of them are pretty automatic, and they're helpful. But there's still a few that, you know, most of we don't even pay attention to, but there's a few we ought to notice and pay attention to.

And if we want to defuse our own judging thoughts, this is kind of a way to do it.

Because what we want to do is we want to notice when we're in the Drama Triangle, and so it's just what all humans do. So when we're playing the victim, this is when we're overwhelmed, struggling, afraid, worried. We're just you know, insulted, whatever.

It's really helpful to us to move from the victim role to the creator role and say, What results do I want to create? So for our mom, I'm sure she just wants to help him create a life that he loves that works is gonna work when when her runway runs out. I know that's what she's interested in learning about.

And sorry, my phone should not have to turn that off.

I think, "What what do I want?" is really the best question for ourselves. Then if we do find ourselves playing that persecutor role, which is kind of what we stepped into here, when we, when we call it this, the person responded with an asshole and no at all and that sort of thing. That's kind of a you are being a jerk. And that's when we are feeling threatened and defensive and angry and sarcastic and righteous. And we've all been here. We have all been here, you know, we

23:11
you know, I mean, we do this because, you know, we're so caught up in what we're trying to do. You just don't need somebody else saying those words. Instead, though, but we can't prevent the the situation the situations these things are going to happen.

Like I said, family members will say these things professionals will say these things. People on Facebook will say these things it's gonna happen.

When they say those things, we want to move from the persecutor to the challenger and who says, "What's my intention? How can I shift my own thinking to get my desired result?"

And that's where that STEAR Map comes in really handy because we slow things down, we can notice our thoughts and I'm so glad she put them on Facebook because that's like a thought download. We know what was on her mind.

Then we got 135 other people telling us what's on their mind as well. And they were very, very good comments.

And we all understand. You know, we've all been in this position. It's, it's part of being a parent, and particularly a parent of alternative learners that people just don't get, because they haven't been there and done what we've done.

And then the last one, sometimes we do fall into the rescuer role. And I've seen myself doing this with my children where it's like, why not? Let's just take care of this. And that's where I think that they don't, they can't handle it, you know? And I feel like I'm, you know, here, let me show them how,

We really do need to notice when we're in that rescuer mode, a coach, that's the mom coach, that we're trying to be asks the questions of their child that can support them in their own growth.

I just think this is such a great summary of where we need to watch our own thinking if we couple that with the STEAR Map and the various saboteurs that are included in the positive intelligence.com website. I think we can really get a handle on how to handle ourselves when these types of things come up and act still in a in a way that's very consistent with who we are in a truthful way.

We're not trying to be Pollyanna, saying, "That's just her thinking and anything she says is fine. She can say whatever she wants." That's not the case.

It's how am I going to manage my own thinking, so that I can show up as the mom that I want to be?

And that's what we practice together in The Art of Adulting. There's so much in there that I can't wait to see you there. I can't wait to share it with you because what I've learned I just believe has made a big difference for me and for my family, and I hope it will for you too.

Bye for now.