Hi, it's Lynn, your adulting coach. I know that we're all here because we want to help our graduates handle stress so that they feel better and can get a job that helps them earn money to fuel their life and all the other benefits of working and just run their life in in their own way. In a way that helps them feel proud about what they're accomplishing. I think it's possible.
Today I want to introduce you to Holly Bridges. She wrote a wonderful book quite a while ago called "Reframe Your Thinking Around Autism." I read it about four years ago and found it quite innovative and unique.
During the pandemic she shared an awful lot of what she teaches for free. I was able to really learn more about it then. I'm just so grateful.
I've practiced both of the activities that she does with her clients in my own home over many years now, and have found them to be useful.
I'd like to explain her thinking as best as I can just to inspire you to go check out her work. Notice that she's got quite a few YouTube videos that can help us really get what she's coming at.
She's autistic and a therapist and when I read her book I found these six takeaways.
1 The first is that mindfulness and breathing and breathing techniques alone don't work for so many people especially those that are autistic they're just not enough.
2 Cognitive therapies only take us so far as well because they're so brain-based. We're all up in our heads and for sure coercive exercise is just fail because no one likes to be told what to do.
3 Notice that executive function and working memory and social skills and all of those higher level functions are greatly influenced by the nervous system. It's not just how we think, it's also how we feel in our body.
4 The good news is that brain plasticity allows us to renegotiate how we operate in the world. I know that there's a big open window before age seven but so many of our kids were diagnosed later in life and it's just good to know that our brain is can be changed. Let's really notices the nervous system and how it's informing it so for the rest of our lives we have room to grow with our brain.
5 She argues that working with the body, getting the body in in a calm state, gives us access and control over our mental emotional and often our social states as well,
6 Creating a safe body space improves coordination communication and self-re regulation at any age
This is a part of how we help our graduates handle their stress so that they feel better and can do more of what they want and create build the life that's really the one that they want.
Holly argues that traditional autism therapies are just in the wrong jungle. They're highly directive. They're very specific toward goals. Yes, okay, they do have that stamp of approval by so many insurance companies so we use them. But we've all read the controversy around them.
She suggests that there's there's a better way and that the autistic person can help guide us there.
So much of the industry is built on figuring out what's going on and kind of working our way through the undergrowth. Practices are based on outdated modalities and procedures and it's backed up by policy and procedure manuals and all kinds of evidence-based practicing. But it's just not the best best practice.
Here's what she suggests we do instead. We help the individual find a safe place in their body so that they can access more of their brain. There's a lot of information coming from the body up to the brain that allows it to access various functions and some are really shut down when we're in that fight or flight state.
She question questions our definition of autism. What is it anyway? We tend to define it as deficits or restrictions or just problems with the way that the individual relates to society.
She asks, "Why are we doing that?" There's a whole world of wonders in an autistic brain. They can do more things better and more things better if we let them, if we encourage them to access all that wonderful brain power that they have.
This research came out just a couple of years ago and the videos that I've been watching of Holly are a couple of years old so I'm not sure that she's had this research. But the study does show of course that there are brain changes in both the of the high level regions involving reasoning, language, social behavior, mental flexibility, and sensory processing. So there are biological difference between brains. This research study looked at 750 samples of a of autistic brains versus a not autistic brain and came to these conclusions in a peer-reviewed journal article. It suggests that there's different wiring. That's the reason why the behavior looks different.
Her main argument is that working with the body works for autistic people. Often we just talk and talk and try to get the brain to line up. There's a lot going on between the brain and the body that we need to access if we want to help them.
She says cognitive behavioral management is excellent It's sorting things out with the thinking but it just leaves um a whole half of us that from the neck down out of the equation and we need to include it.
There's some self-regulating strategies that we put together with the red yellow and green zones. A lot of autistic people tell her, "I understand it but I just can't apply it when things go haywire."
Instead of this focus on behavior and outcomes and how we are to other people and our own self-management which is all pretty much at the intellectual level. She suggests that anxiety, the state that we find ourselves in and we see our autistic graduates in often, is a body state. We need to address it at the body level. 90% of what's going on when anxiety is happening is at the physical level and a lot less at the intellectual level.
Our bodies operate without us being in charge. That's a good thing because then we can breathe, our digestive systems, and a lot of other systems in our body are not directed by our intellect.
We need to notice, too, that when we're in fight flight or freeze a lot of our intellectual capabilities are shut down. That's what causes that kind of immobilized behavior that we see, that dear in the headlights look, that let me go to my room where I feel safe and be on a screen so that I don't have to face the discomfort of being in that shutdown state. It's really important to notice that what they're trying to do is just feel better more often.
When they try to understand what goes on often we haven't given them the language, the awareness of what's going on in their body. So they just feel like they've failed which is another failure on top of others that we tend to focus on and that labels them and creates a lot of shame.
So she suggests that autism is often a lot about the body. We know that evidence show that autists often gave lots of gut problems, digestion problems, aversions to taste, food intolerances gluten and lactose, sensory things that happen where many of the autistic graduates that I know have to have comfortable clothes, that sense of balance, that sense of um where am I in space and that touch thing where if they're in a shutdown state, sometimes the last thing they want is more sensory input, so don't touch them. A kind of a pain so intense, just a "I've got to get out of this painful situation because I just can't tolerate this." Good to know.
We see these results with autistic people more than we do with a non-autistic population: diabetes, high blood, pressure high cholesterol, bowel disease, eating disorders, anxiety depression and substance abuse, which is just overdoing it to try to feel better. All those things tend to be comorbid often with autistic individuals.
The answer she suggests is within the polyvagal theory by Dr Steven Porges. He endorses her work, she's in touch with him on a regular basis. He worked originally with the autistic population and now is working more with the general population, but his research really backs up what Holly practices.
Here it is in a nutshell the body has a learned response to p pain and fear that and can go into an involuntary shutdown as a safety mechanism so it can either be a shutdown or a meltdown where it's just, "You've got to give me space, you've got to get me out of this situation, and I'm going to make it loud and clear that this is not working for me."
She explains the what's going on with poly vagal theory in such a wonderful, accessible way.
On the right side of the equation we're in the parasympathetic system. Sometimes it helps us to think of a parachute that's nice and soft and calm. It's when the social engagement system can turn on and we're all connected beautifully with our eyes, our ears, our voice, and our heart. It's where we want to be more often.
What can happen is when we notice some kind of stimulant either in the environment or inside of us, we can go down to that immobilized state, the sympathetic State, and there's a whole sliding scale of room there.
When we are immobilized our body does that on purpose because our brain has told it that there is a threat, the lion in the bush, and it takes all of our body systems and it focuses them on that threat. So our eyes are focused, our brain is focused, different bodily systems are turned off like digestion. Our ears are focused just on that threat. That's where we find our graduates often when we take them into situations where they just feel overloaded.
There are 12 cranial nerves including the poly vagal nerve. They regulates our smell, our vision, our eye movement, our hearing, the information sent to the brain about what's happening with our face and our mouth, eye movement sideways, lots of things going on with the sensory input, the facial nerves the vestibular hearing and Balance, the vagus which is involved in everything. the sensory motor. autonomic functions like glands and digestion and the heart rate.
That's what's happening when we're focusing on that threat. Our heart rate goes up and our breathing goes up. The spinal the head turning muscles and the hypoglossal which is our tongue and our speech and our swallowing. In our family that there was a lot of speech therapy because some of the development, of helping the language be developed, their speaking was interfered with by having an autistic brain often, being in that fight or flight situation.
The Vagus Nurve she says, and Stephen Borges backs her up, goes from both bottom up and top down. It's a has a busload of information that it's trying to help us assimilate and figure out what to do next. That vagus nerve influences our kidneys, our gallbladder, our colon, our bladder, and our gut, all of those things. The HPA axis: the hypothalamus, the pituitary, and the adrenals, that whole stimulation of oxytocin and social connection. All of those hormones, especially when we're in a good place, can help support social connection.
It also protects the nerves by producing more myelin that helps us to feel safe and resilient. Without it we quickly short circuit.
So the New Vagus system -- we want to help it be in that happy place. Where the old Vegas system is constantly on alert or Frozen.
Serotonin is definitely affected. It's the hormone that gives us that deep peaceful state. It's very much involved in mood, anxiety psychosis. That's where a lot of our medications are targeted.
Dopamine the excitement hormone. We're on the right track.
It's all influenced by that vagus nerve and it's synthesized in the brain and the kidneys plus half of it in the as well so very much affected by the systems in our body that determines what kinds of hormones are told to be secreted.
So when we have our digestive system on alert, that's when we're not in that happy vagal nerve state. It's seized. That's why it's not too hard to figure out why the digestive system is very involved.
Holly suggests that 80% of our sensory information goes up to the brain. So attending to what's happening in our body helps our brain function better.
When we are overstimulated by too much, that's when we can go into a shutdown. We want to get to a calm home state where we teach our gut and our brain to read sensory information in the body in a positive way, where we are effective at figuring out what's going on with our bodies so that our brain can interpret it in a productive way.
So we want to teach people with Autism how to feel like this, in that calm, happy state.
And we need to be in that calm, happy State because if we're not, they pick up on it pretty well .
If we can co-regulate with them so that our bodies and their bodies are in a good place a lot of it involves unlearning the responses that we have taught ourselves a very long time ago.
When we stay centered on the student, that's when we can make real change happen.
She argues that looking at movement with attention, being slow, being more subtle, being more aware. Staying with flexible goals that are are varied so that our brain is interested in them, with lots of access to our imagination and our dreams and our enthusiasm and our belief turns that learning switch on. When we use the body to make this happen.
Just paying attention to what are they fascinated by what are they learning, by what are their thoughts. Tuning into what's really happening inside of them, we can help go from this frozen state to a much more flexible open state.
Of course, that's what we want for all of our autistic graduates. Where the information flows up and down smoothly.
There are two activities that she uses in her therapy that I have also used in in our family.
One of them is just a simple Fitness ball. You lie on the floor you put your feet on the ball and you need it like a kitten kneads their mama's body when they're nursing. Just knead it gently, gently for a couple of minutes and then we set it down and then we put it back up again and we gently gently put it make it happen just gently kneading and then back down and then back up again and then gently kneading just as many times it's such a wonderful peaceful feeling when we lay flat and have that gentle motion. it tells our brain that things are okay.
The other activity that she suggests is a hand massage where we massage the key points where the nerves end in our hands. Here's the diagram of it. You can see that we rub it six to nine times and then we hold it there for about a half a minute to a minute and then we release. We keep going around our hand, rubbing, holding and then releasing to gently sooth slowly. Move all around our hand in a way that helps our brain.
Notice that both of these techniques help the body know that it's safe.
I'm going to go back to the one of the first pictures I showed you which was her approach. Up here in the upper lefthand corner, the fellow that's doing that ball activity is Danny Reed from Asperger Experts. Holly is the only person that he endorses. He believes that her therapies help autistic people and that by using them we can move from that protective space that defended space to a connected space. He's very discerning. She's the only one that he believes can help our autistic graduates.
So I really encourage you to visit her website and I her YouTube videos. I will link to those in the show notes here.
I really want us to remember that often when our autistic graduates are in a meltdown or a shutdown, they're not being willful. Often it's their nervous system that is just overwhelmed.
I hope that this overview of Holly's work has helped you notice and get curious about a whole other way of thinking about how to help our autistic graduates handle stress so that they can connect better with the world and with us and build the life that they want.
Bye for now.
