Hi, it's Lynn, your adulting coach and founder of The Art of Adulting, where we increase independence with our artistic graduates.
Dr. Gabor Mate is a retired physician. For the first 20 years of his practiced general medicine and then the last 10 years he spent working with addicts in the on the streets of Vancouver.
He suggests his that this quote from his friend is so true. "Only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth."
He saw a lot of truth and a lot of suffering in his patients and in the addicts.
He suggests that when our inner critic voice says, "You don't deserve it. You can't do it. You haven't got what it takes," that we need a compassionate listener to help us sort this out.
He reminds us that the wisdom of that inner critic voice is and was to ensure our survival. It's just that we overdo it today. It's not as necessary as it used to be.
In fact, the shame, guilt and anxiety we live with for our very existence, can be addressed with compassion.
That's why I found these five levels of compassion so helpful when I'm trying to help my autistic graduates outsmart the struggles that came from come from the inevitable pain, fear and work that we all have to face in life, because they creates a lot of anxiety.
1. The first level is ordinary compassion. That's when we watch them suffer and we just feel bad about it. We'd sure like it to be different. That's compassion at the foundation.
2. Our second level is when we not only feel bad for your suffering, but want to understand why the suffering is happening. And that's where we learn as much as we can about the nature of autism and the impact that it has on our loved ones.
3. Then, we can level up to recognition compassion, which says that, "I don't see myself as different from you. We may have different degrees of suffering on various levels, but we all suffer from the same thing.
We want to soothe ourselves from the outside. That's when we escape screens. or food or alcohol or whatever pleasure that if we only experienced it, just enough to get the pleasure from it. But when we overdo it, and ignore the life and ignore the actions that we have to do in order to create a life we want, that's when we create suffering for ourselves.
We want to get satisfaction from that activity. And here's the problem. We can't get enough of something that almost works. And it almost works for us to escape into whatever form of media we prefer, or eating or indulging in whatever other kinds of activities that we that are, you know, just regular that are great pleasures. It's just when we overdo them and we keep looking for satisfaction from them, when it's just not ever going to quite do it.
We're all doing it to fill the emptiness that we carry inside of us. That part that asks, "Am I good enough? Is my life going the way that it should?" And our desperation to fill that emptiness when things aren't going the way we want, when there's a gap between where we are and where we'd like to be. We forget about all the progress we've made, because our brain causes us to focus on 80% of the time: the gap between where we are and where we'd like to be because it thinks it's necessary to do that for our survival. That's why 80% of our thoughts are negative. And 95% of them are the same thoughts that we had yesterday.
Sometimes we're not totally honest with ourselves in the way that we manipulate to try to fill that emptiness. We don't tell ourselves what's really going on. We blame it on someone else or something outside of our control.
4. So the fourth level of compassion is the truth. Sometimes the truth is painful and uncomfortable. The truth is that we all wrestle with pain, fear, and work. There's going to it's going to be what we're going to deal with for the rest of our lives. And for our autistic graduates, they're gonna be on their own someday and we'd sure love to see them flourish.
It's just that right now they're caught up in the parasympathetic anxiety which pushes them down to inaction, freezing. It's perfectly normal. It's the way their brains and our brains were designed. But we have to figure out how to deal with that fear.
5 And that's where the fifth level of compassion comes from. The possibilities: they are whole and complete and wonderful human beings that may need some help leveling up in the areas of their life where they're not getting what they want. Make sense we all need help none of us can do all this life on our own.
So please come join us in the art of adulting where we apply these concepts to increase independence with our artistic graduates so that we all build the life we want together. Bye for now.
