Episode 6 - Transcript
With me again is Amy J. Thank you for joining me, Amy. Amy's a parent, and I really value her perspective because she has been working on these concepts and the things that we talk about, and definitely is representative of a lot of your experiences as parents out there. So I hope that her voice represents your voice in some ways, and some of the questions that she might have or her perspective on things will help fill in some of the cracks of the stuff that we're talking about.
So today we want to cover a topic that is fairly in-depth. We're gonna do our best to try to cover as much material as we can for this one podcast, and if it gets too extensive, then we will break it up into other parts and come back and visit this later. So if you have any questions, please just leave it in the comments or [00:02:00] contact us and we'll do our best to fill in any of the missing pieces for you.
Also, a new feature that I'm adding to all my podcasts is what I would call the learning guide and workbooks. I like to turn my podcasts into a master class, so there will be a downloadable learning guide and some exercises that you can do that will help reinforce the learning, and some of the things that we cover in the podcast will be covered in the guide, and also some exercises for you to actually apply the things that we're talking about.
So hopefully that'll be of value as well as we move forward. Anyways, with all that, why don't we get started? Today we're gonna talk about when survival mode becomes the norm, and how you can recognize this and switch and get more in-depth understanding of the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and break the cycle of living in this constant state of distress and stress that you might not even be aware of at this point.
It's like the frog in the boiling water. The water gets hotter and hotter over time, and you don't re- really recognize the levels of stress that are continuing to build up. [00:03:00] Or you may be very aware of, "Wow, we are walking on eggshells a lot. We're tiptoeing around. We are doing our best not to create chaos in our family," so that may mean that we do things as parents that would be designed to keep the peace as much as possible.
But then you start to wonder, "Am I really holding boundaries like I should? Am I pushing forward with trying to hold my son or daughter accountable or helping them learn the skills they need to learn, or am I in a mode where I'm basically trying to keep the peace?" And I'd imagine that it's some of both for most of you, but the idea being that I want you to become more aware of what your dynamics are here and work on seeing if there's things that can be done, or if you're getting caught into these automatic patterns, what can be done to do it.
So basically it's essentially moving from chaos to learning how to dial it into more confidence and calmness, and that's something that probably all of you can relate to as parents out there. Absolutely. I mean, I get so used to, like you [00:04:00] say, the frog in boiling water. I always say you kinda get used to the dysfunction, and when you really see it is when you're out with someone else or you're in their home and you see how they handle things and you realize how totally different you do things in your own house that you've just gotten used to Yeah, for sure.
Yep. So let's talk about some basics first. Maybe the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn system. It's part of our sympathetic nervous system, part of our autonomic nervous system, the things that our brain does on autopilot to keep us alive, like regulate our blood pressure, keep our heart rate going, and breathing, and things like that.
These are parts of our system that is designed to keep us safe. And so the reason why this is relevant is a lot of times you might find yourself in a traumatic situation, whether your son or daughter is one who acts out and may actually tantrum to the level of destroying property or something along those lines, or they will shut down to the point of not functioning for a period of time as well.
And both of those responses are very traumatic [00:05:00] for you as a parent. So understanding how our traumatic systems work, how our bodies respond to these things, can help us gain more awareness and be able to make some changes in how we approach things that'll help us be more effective as parents, and at least stay more calm and not get triggered into these processes without our awareness being involved.
So I'll try to do this as simply as possible. There's two parts of our survival mechanism and two parts of our brain that's working in tandem with one another. There's the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
It's when you get in that survival mode. And then the parasympathetic system is the opposite side of that, when we're feeling relaxed and calm and basically our needs are met and we're in good shape. And that's where our higher cognitive functioning can thrive. When we're in our survival mode, we lose more and more of that ability to make decisions and think through problems in creative [00:06:00] ways.
We get into a very narrow focus, get yourself to safety, deal with this particular situation immediately because we are feeling some kind of impending threat to our safety. So when we're in that mode, we are solving problems. We're solving the problem of getting ourselves to safety or our loved ones to safety, whatever it may be.
What we're not able to do is think creatively about how to solve problems or how to communicate effectively and things along those lines. As you're Parasympathetic system comes, your sympathetic system gets reduced, and it's kinda like they're on a sliding scale. They work with each other. And really, neither one of these, they're not a bad...
The survival mode is just a survival mechanism that's built in. It does us a lot of good when we're under a dangerous situation, but can work against us if we're trying to have a calm and reasoned discussion. Well, and I always get 'em confused. Sympathetic sounds like it's the good one, but it's not.
Parasympathetic is the good one. I don't know how I remember. You want your parachute to open kinda thing, but my sympathetic goes off all the time when I don't need it to, and that's the [00:07:00] issue. You know, I, w- I used to get, because I have two neurodiverse kids, I'd frequently get calls from the school, right?
"Come pick up your kid, they did this," or, "There's a problem." So to this day, even though my kids have been out of high school for a couple of years now, every time my phone rings, I feel it. Like, I feel my sympathetic nerve system kick in. There's no danger there. My phone's not going to attack me. But my brain still doesn't seem to recognize that.
Right. Yeah, that's a good example. And we'll get into the post-traumatic stress or the chronic traumatic stress that we've talked about because that's definitely a manifestation of that. Yeah, it's easier for me even to just talk about the upstairs brain and the downstairs brain. Mm-hmm. So the upstairs brain is the parasympathetic.
When you're in your highest cognitive processes, your prefrontal cortex is fully operational, and the downstairs brain is when you're in that fight, flight, freeze, or, or fawn mode. I like the idea of a staircase. It's like you're going from one to the other, and so you're not 100% in your parasympathetic [00:08:00] upstairs brain, and you're not 100% in your downstairs brain.
But usually you're somewhere in between, and watching where you're at on that staircase or having the awareness of where you are in that situation can be really helpful. So maybe that's the easiest way to talk about it. We'll just use the term upstairs brain and downstairs brain and go from there. But I think we should look at what some of these things manifest as.
So the downstairs brain, the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode will look like basically fighting. Obviously, that's either arguing or being explosive or this might show up in your teen as a, a meltdown and anger or a shutdown. The flight is trying to avoid situations like hiding or escaping or, like, getting into their safe space and isolating.
Freezing, that's an interesting one because it can mean just not being responsive at all. Like, just their coping mechanism at that point if they're overwhelmed will be just to not be responsive, and that can look a lot like the shutdown or the flight as well. The one that is interesting that doesn't get talked about as [00:09:00] much is the fawn, F-A-W-N, so fawning.
And that also could be termed as pleasing as well. The idea that it's you're agreeing with whoever the person is that you're in conflict with. You just agree to avoid conflict. You may mask how you're really feeling and tell everybody what they want to hear to keep the peace in the situation. So that's fawning, and that's one that's really not as talked about, but I do think it is really, really important So the way this shows up in parents is kind of the same thing.
The fighting, we raise our voice, we get more controlling, we double down- Yeah ... on rules. We wanna hold the consequences harder. That's the fight mode. Flight mode, we may just disengage and avoid the conflict en- entirely or just walk away from something that we feel overwhelmed by. Freezing, it might be more like indecision.
Like, we just don't know what to do, so we don't say anything, we don't do anything. We just stop and watch what's happening. And then fawning in parents, this is one that I think probably needs more attention and doesn't get talked about as much. That's when you might give in or [00:10:00] over-accommodate your teen, uh, because y- you may abandon boundaries in order to keep the peace, and so that can become problematic if that's a primary coping mechanism that you have.
And again, that is so common when you're dealing with a neurodivergent teen or young adult because of their either explosiveness or shutdownedness is so extreme, that fawning a lot of times is just trying to do whatever you can to, even in anticipation of a problem, make it easier, clear the pathway, or over-accommodate or enable, essentially, their behavior so you don't end up in that situation.
And fawning is a new one to me, which I find amusing because I'm a big fawner. But I didn't realize how much I was doing it. Well, 'cause you're in survival mode so much, right? And it's just easier to say once in a while, "Yeah, whatever, just go do that," 'cause I just don't have the energy anymore to You know, I think a lot about how my kids fight.
In a teenager, they snap at you. It's very apparent what's going on there. Or flight, [00:11:00] they're in their room with their door shut for 24 hours with their phone. You know, that's pretty... And I haven't had a lot of experience with fawning with my kids. They tend to be fighters or flighters. Mm-hmm. But I've heard from other parents, you ask your kid a simple question like, "Did you take the trash out?"
And they just say yes, even though they haven't done it and they know they're gonna be busted, 'cause it's just easier. Which- Right ... you know, people are like, "Why are my kids lying to me?" Well, it's part of that fawning. But I've also recognized- Yeah, it's not like I'm not gonna find out that the trash didn't...
I mean, you're I know. It, it, you are. You're just like- It's gonna be found out, right? Like ... you think I'm dumb? Come on. Yeah. I'm gonna recognize this at some point. But I get it. In the moment they're just like, "Whatever, I just can't cope with another thing. I'm overwhelmed. I'm just gonna say yes so you go away."
Very moment, it's survival. It's that idea of avoiding the immediate punishment or consequence of saying that you didn't do the thing that you know you were supposed to do. So there's like a survival mechanism in there to avoid the immediate conflict. Although, of course we know as parents, that just erodes the trust and makes things more difficult [00:12:00] in the long run.
Right. Um- Although, I will say, I have a friend who has an ADHD son and daughter, and for whatever reason, her daughter was one of those kids that just told a lot of little white lies all the time, and it drove her crazy until she started to understand, she's not lying to you because she's trying to deceive you.
She's lying to you because she's overwhelmed. Right. Of course. And it makes it a little bit easier to deal with. Right. Or she's concerned about the relationship at some level in that moment. Right Right? Doesn't wanna disappoint her parents or get in trouble- Right ... or, yeah. And again, it could be more even about disappointing the parents.
And so it's tough 'cause as a parent, if you don't know that this is happening, you can misattribute the cause of the lie, right? Like, that they're just being deceitful or disrespectful or something along those lines. But really, it may be a sign that they're trying to preserve the relationship, or they're fearful for the connection, or their attachment may be at risk.
Well, and that's where the understanding of this becomes so helpful. Because what happened to her was every time her daughter did this, where do you think she went? [00:13:00] To the fight mode. Just made her mad, right? Yeah. And then it was- Triggered her into her, you know? It was just this endless cycle. But once you understand why they're acting the way they are and why it's triggering the reaction in you, you can't control it all the time, but the more awareness you have, the easier and the better you are able to handle it.
Right. At least that's what I've found. But, yeah, and I, this is probably the real key takeaway that I want parents to think about in this case, 'cause you can't really control your son or daughter's reactions directly, right? I mean, I think you can inflame them by provoking them, either intentionally or unintentionally, by doing things- Been there, done that many times
that will make it worse, right? And again, with neurodivergent kids, that can be a hair trigger. It can be almost anything that can set them off, or things that you don't even know are gonna set them off will set them off. But you can control, I mean, over time, let me caveat this You can learn to control your own responses more and more over time.
Let's put it that way. I think that's a fair way to say, 'cause I don't know if anyone's completely 100% in control of their responses. Maybe some people out there. But the idea being that if [00:14:00] you recognize this is happening, then you then have a moment to put a little space in between your immediate response to a situation by being able to think, "Okay, what's happening here?"
Or You just give yourself a moment to rethink how you wanna respond to that situation. Because again, it's so easy to say, "That punk's lying to me again," you know, or something like that. You can go through all kinds of thoughts in your head that really just pull you down into your fight, flight, or freeze mode, and then you as a parent are not able to make a good reasoned-out assessment of the situation or come up with a good way to respond or react to this particular situation.
In fact, I wanna get you out of reaction, right? I want you to get into response, responding to a situation rather than reacting. And some of the subtleties of the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode are it's super contagious, and that's- Very ... by design, evolutionarily. Like, if we're a tribe of people walking across a savanna and [00:15:00] all of a sudden there's a cheetah that's stalking us, you know what I mean, if there's a threat to one of us, there's probably a threat to all of us.
And so I think if you wanna look at it from an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense that if one of us gets in our fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode, that it's gonna trigger the whole group, right? Because that's- Mm-hmm ... a survival mechanism. Like a school of fish. If one fish gets triggered, it'll spook the whole school, and that's the way to keep the group safe, right?
So being very aware of if your son or daughter is in their fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode, that's gonna be contagious. You've gotta be really careful that that's not gonna trigger you. And again, that little lie can be the thing that's her fawning mode, and that's gonna trigger the parent into their fight or attack mode, or whatever the mode may trigger the parent into.
But that's an important way, l- maybe a more practical way that this might apply. You've probably experienced that as parents out there, and certainly that if your son or daughter is in the middle of a meltdown how distressing that is to you as a parent, that sometimes you may get super angry and wanna [00:16:00] shut them down somehow or whatever, or stop them from doing this, or you may just wanna leave them and take the flight mode out of there and just get as much distance as possible, but it may leave them in a dangerous situation or not in a good spot either.
Or you may just freeze and not know what to do and not take action at all. Or- Well, and I have- ... you know, commonly, you may go in there and try to fight fire, right? You go in there, like, doing the fawning mode. You're, you're in, like, a firefighter trying to put out the fire by telling them- Right ... anything you can tell them to get them to calm down.
Which may not be the best approach either. So anyways, yeah. Buy a pony if you just stop crying. Right. Whatever we need to do, right? I have found that fight almost always is like gasoline. Almost always. Because usually when I get into fight, it's because they've come at me fighting. Right. And for as much as I've learned from you, and I am proud of myself most of the time, but I'm just gonna tell you a story about my daughter was home from college recently, and she was really tired, right?
It was after exams and whatever. And she was used to sleeping [00:17:00] in the dorm, which I would assume is really noisy, but for whatever reason, there was noise here, and it was bothering her. And I was asleep, my husband was asleep, I thought she was asleep. I think my son was downstairs playing video games, and that was the noise that was bothering her.
So she comes charging into our room at 100 miles an hour, screaming that she can't sleep, and that he needs to stop playing video games. Well, what do you think I did? Yep, I was woken up in the middle of my sleep, and I just responded in kind. It was not a good... And it was a- after all this time, you would think I would have learned.
The one thing I will say that was good about it was she eventually got back to sleep, so did I, and then in the morning, I was able to look at it and say to her, "Look, I know that really what you needed was to have somebody hear you last night and understand what you were going through, and I didn't do that, and I'm sorry."
And it built trust in our relationship. And at the same time, she said, "Well, I know that I didn't make it the easiest on you when I came charging into your room." So the good news is, even when you screw this up, if you have the understanding, and you can look at it later and process it together, it builds [00:18:00] trust in your relationship, which is always important.
But as they're hitting that teen, young adult area where they're s- really starting to become independent and pull away from you, that's really where you need to make sure there's trust there, or you never see them again So that's just my story Back to, right back to the playing the long game, right? You wanna try to- Yep
preserve the relationship even if you're going through some rough times. You wanna try to preserve the relationship so that you do get invited to the wedding, and you do get to see the grandkids and all that fun stuff, right? That's why I think this is so important and why I wanna keep talking about this over time, is if you as a parent can recognize what's happening, then you've got a chance to respond differently.
And it's hard to put that onto your adolescent or young adult if they just don't have the maturity yet to manage their emotions. I mean, that's part of adolescence, that's part of young adulthood, is getting better about that over time. But if you add the neurodivergence to that, it's a longer road, so it's gonna most likely take them much longer to learn these emotional regulation skills, and also just the self-awareness [00:19:00] of when they're starting to slip into the downstairs brain.
But as a parent, it's a great opportunity to model this and to talk about it, right? So even if you do both get pulled into it, after time has passed and you're both back into your upstairs brains, or at least mostly up the staircase there- Right ... that you can talk about it and say, "Wow, we really both got triggered here.
Like, what happened? And let's talk about that. We gotta be careful, 'cause when one of us goes over the edge, we're gonna pull each other over, so I'm gonna try to do better and not get caught up in that." But again, I think as a parent, if you're seeing that happen, you can give yourself just that split one or two seconds of, "Wait a minute, I need to rethink this," and not go charging in, or not return fire, so to speak.
If you're getting fired on, you know, don't return fire. But find some strategies to rethink things. And, and give yourself a chance to think. Don't get in that autonomic, automatic nervous system response where you're gonna go into some sort of self-protection. And again, that idea of when we're in that mode, we [00:20:00] become very tunnel vision, very self-interested, because really our body- Even if it's not objectively the situation where you're under a physical threat, although sometimes you are with a son or daughter who may be really, uh, dysregulated, for the most part your body believes it's in that mode and needs to protect itself, so you become self-interested and selfish.
And again, I say that, I know that sounds like a bad word, but I mean self-interested and selfish in the sense that your brain is trying to protect your body, and that's all it knows how to do at that moment. So the adrenaline kicks in and it puts you in this tunnel vision mode, where like in a crowd, if a crowd gets spooked, that people will get trampled.
And it's not because everybody all of a sudden wants to not care about their neighbor. They just become so panicked and self-focused that they can't see anything else, that they're trying to get to safety and that's all they know. Like even a drowning person, lifeguards have to approach a drowning person very carefully with a very specific technique of swinging up behind [00:21:00] them and grabbing them in a certain way.
Because if they come right up to a drowning person who's in that very deep survival, downstairs brain survival mode, they're just trying to get air and oxygen. They will climb on their rescuer trying to get air and they'll drown them both. So that's what it's like when you're both in your downstairs brain.
You gotta realize that they're not thinking, and they're not in a place where they can exercise their higher cognitive processes. And so if you can recognize that's happening and not let yourself slide into that mode as well, then you have some room to make other choices and try to do something different.
Or at least give them space to go through their process and deal with going through that cycle of into their downstairs brain and then back out again over time before you try to intervene or talk or do something. Well, so I have a question, and I know you've told me this before, but I've clearly forgotten.
We were talking, you were talking about how as they're maturing they'll get better at this. How does the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex... I don't understand, and really I shoulda done better, 'cause my prefrontal cortex is fully cocked and I so, don't [00:22:00] wake me up is the bottom line. Don't wake me up.
But when can we all expect the prefrontal cortex to get there? How does it work? What does it, how does it fall into this- Nervous system stuff Yeah, that's a good question. And I don't know what the ac- absolute latest research is saying about that, but it seems like that age keeps getting older and older.
It used to be early 20s is when they felt like the brain was fully formed. 26 was what I had heard But then it, then it got up to 24, then 26. Now I think it might be pushing even higher than that. Like, it might be almost into our 30s, and you mentioned in another conversation we had that there's some research that says that technology may be actually stretching that out farther.
Like, the idea of being on screens may be delaying some of that development. This is not authoritative or anything along those lines at this point. No. I'm not a researcher I don't think any of us know for sure at this point But the good news about brains is they've realized they're much more plastic, even more than we thought.
So they are changeable. We can work on things. We can improve even when we're older. But the trick is if they're not fully formed yet, they may not have [00:23:00] the maturity or the capability of doing some of these things. And again, I don't know what the biological underpinnings of all this would be for a neurodivergent brain versus a neurotypical brain, but we do know that they definitely have different ways of processing that seems to be evident in their behavior and how they describe things.
But really, the proof is in the pudding for the most part from that a- most kids, if they can do well, they will. If they could manage their emotions better, they would do so. They would- Right ... they would try. So I always like to assume that they're doing the best they can under the circumstances. And so even if you have a 25, 26, 27, 30-year-old, they may still be working on some emotional regulation stuff that other people may have picked up in their late teens or early 20s.
I do think that awareness about it and learning about it helps at least get your brain thinking about what it's doing instead of autopilot. This is an interesting discussion because it's meta in some ways that [00:24:00] we are trying to train our prefrontal cortex, our upstairs brain, to understand what's going on with our downstairs brain, so then we can have a little bit more influence or control over it.
Maybe that's evolution in a nutshell, right? That our prefrontal cortex is a new thing that humans developed, that now we can think about stuff, that we have that capability that not a lot of other animals that we know of are able to do that. And so that's that evolutionary key that we can use our prefrontal cortex to Understand and perhaps override some of these autonomic systems.
And you can hear some interesting anecdotes too about, say, yogis who can really reduce their heart rate and almost go into a hibernation of some sort, right? Yeah. That they can control their autonomic nervous systems more than the average person because they practiced it, or they got good at it, or they worked on it.
So at any rate, we can regulate our breathing to a certain extent for sure. That's one thing that we have some control over. But obviously if we get oxygen deprived enough, [00:25:00] our brain will take over and make us breathe right? So there's some limits to that, but I think there's also some opportunities. And again, if we talk about how to regulate and we talk about breathing, breathing is one way to trick your autonomic nervous system into believing that things are okay, and that's why breathing exercises are an important kind of coping mechanism that's commonly talked about in therapeutic and meditation literature.
Things like box breathing or just taking two or three really slow deliberate breaths will signal to your autonomic nervous system that everything's okay. So it's a way to- So maybe- ... override that ... if, if I'd woken up in the middle of the night and taken those three deep breaths, I might've had a better shot at...
I'm, I'm just, I'm serious though. Yeah, no, true. But, but then you'd have to be... I mean, that's a tricky one, 'cause you are- Yeah ... you know, you are asleep. You know what I mean? Right. Right. So it's like you're coming right into consciousness. You'd have to be thinking pretty quick, you know what I mean- Yeah ... to, to catch that- I'm not a deep sleeper
and do something about it. I'm not a deep sleeper, so I probably, I probably could pull it off. My husband, on the other hand, could not. There's nobody in there. When he's asleep, he's asleep. But I was just thinking about [00:26:00] what a parent can do when you're in that moment, right, that y- you're in that fight or flight and you have that split second where you can make a choice.
If you take those three deep breaths, it's at least something physically you can do to help yourself make a better choice. Is that true? I mean, I'm just trying to- Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, we can do a whole other video on some of these techniques on how to regulate and co-regulate, which we, we probably should, right?
We'll, we'll get there. Right. Yeah. And, you know, maybe we'll get to some of that now, but while we're on the topic, certainly breathing exercises are one of the most common things. Or if you think about the fight, flight, or freeze mechanism, if you go for a walk or remove yourself from the situation, that's a good way.
It's, it's like you're simulating getting out of a dangerous situation, right? So if you're saying, "Hey, I need to take space. I need to take a time out," or, "I need to take a break. I'll be right back." So you let the person know that you're getting overwhelmed or distressed and you need to take a break, but you will come back.
I think that's an important part of that. If you just leave, then they might pursue you or or feel- Right. Well, plus [00:27:00] you're modeling ... uh, abandoned or something. Yeah, and you're modeling. So the idea of, yeah, you wanna try to telegraph what your actions are, but again, that takes a certain amount of awareness on your part to say, "Hey, I'm getting overwhelmed.
I can start to feel the anxiety coming up," or, "I feel like I'm getting angry," or, "I'm getting tense, so I need to take a break. So I need to now let the other person know, 'Hey, I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed. I'm gonna take a break. I'll be back in about 15 minutes'" or something like that. Then if you leave and go walk, you know, walking is like you're taking action to do something, right?
So your body starts to think, "Oh, okay. We're solving the problem. We're taking action." So sometimes that helps with anxiety and other things, like y- you just walking or moving forward or moving in your environment is a signal to your autonomic nervous system that you're doing something to solve the problem, like if you're running away- Interesting
from a predator or something like that, right? But again, it, it takes that. Then this is the key and why I like to talk about this. If you know it's coming on, you get better at recognizing it in yourself, and then can also become more aware of when it's happening in your son or daughter. In fact, it may be easier to see it in somebody else.
Well, [00:28:00] let me rephrase that. It's definitely easier to see it in somebody else because we're biologically programmed to pick up on that information. If somebody's getting dysregulated, we need to know because they may be becoming a threat to us. So we are keyed in to this in other people. So yeah, you're more likely to see it in somebody else before you see it in yourself.
But again, seeing it in somebody else is also like a signal to yourself to say, "Okay, where am I at on this? Because they're gonna pull me into it if I don't pay attention." Right. And another side note, but it's an interesting piece of this, is that when you're in that mode, you feel like you're in the right place, and that's why it's hard to override it.
Mm-hmm. Your body and your brain are in total communication with, "Hey, we are in a dangerous situation. We need to survive." And that's more important than anything else that's going on right now, right? No matter what is happening, even the safety of your loved ones or your son or daughter, because if you feel like you're in a great and a threat situation, then the highest priority becomes that.
So it's hard to override that [00:29:00] system once it gets started because it's trying to save your life. So- Catching it early on and being aware of it is the key. To sense that you're slipping into it. If you can sense it, then you're probably still aware enough to do something about it, but it still takes a lot of effort because you feel justified.
Like, "Well, that kid just lied to me. What a punk. This kid's being a punk. He just lied to me." Yep. All of a sudden you're there instead of going, "Oh, they must be concerned that they're gonna get in trouble right now, or they may be worried about our relationship, so they're trying to protect the relationship."
So that doesn't mean you just let them get away with lying, unless of course you're into freeze or fawn, then you just let them lie away and okay, you go along with it, right? But- That ... but you could say, "Hey, I want you to take a minute and re-answer that. Take a minute, think about it, and answer again.
You're not in trouble. You know, I just need to know." So you can maybe do some things to help them get out of that automatic knee-jerk fight, flight, or freeze response, and then come back and feel more comfortable to tell you the truth. Particularly if you lay the groundwork like, "Hey, it's safe right now.
If you didn't take out the trash, that's okay. I just would need you to [00:30:00] go do it if you haven't done it yet." Which also builds trust again Yeah, because they may be seeing it as a relationship issue, and maybe in the past it has been if they've not taken out the trash or not done their chores, and it's become a big area of conflict in the relationship, or they feel embarrassed, they feel like they should remember it, but they can't remember it for whatever reason.
If their ADHD or autism is getting in the way of them being able to accomplish a task that they know they should be able to do, then that can be embarrassing or humiliating. So there may be a lot of reasons why they may not be telling you the truth in that moment. That if you give them some space either to rethink or to calm back down and get out of that immediate trauma response essentially or that immediate fear response, that they can maybe have a better conversation about it.
Particularly if you lay the groundwork as a parent that it's safe and it's okay, and we'll solve the problem. If it didn't happen, we'll work on it. You're okay. It's not the end of the world. We just need to talk about this and solve the problem. Then that might give them more opportunity to do that. But i- if you fly right [00:31:00] into your counselor's brain, then you won't be in a place to be able to have that kind of conversation right, because you'll be upset already.
But again, this is super important because it's modeling how to regulate your behavior. So by you regulating your behavior in that situation, you are vicariously teaching them by example how to regulate their emotions. And that is, it's one of the most powerful ways to do it. So if you can show that you can manage your emotions under certain circumstances, then it gives them an example or something that to see that it's possible, and then you can take those opportunities to talk about it and make it more transparent, more explicit about how you do that.
You can say, "Wow. Yeah, initially when I heard that, I got a little bit like, 'Oh," But then I thought, 'No, let's talk about this and solve the problem.' I took a step back. I thought about it. I said, maybe we should just have a conversation and see if we can solve this problem. And sure enough, that helped you be able to tell me what's really going on, and then we got the trash done, and everything was fine."
Right? So- Yep ... you can take those [00:32:00] opportunities to dissect those little moments that help them see that it's possible and also experience it as possible. But- Well, I mean- ... every time they're falling into it, you're falling into it, then they just say, "This is how life is." You know? It's so worth the investment.
Yeah. It really is. Understanding it and, I mean, it took a- I don't wanna mislead parents out there that you're gonna do this, and tomorrow everything's gonna be better. It's a process that happens over time. But the more you are able to have those moments where you can model it, you build trust. They may still tell you white lies for a while, but once you get there, unfortunately, and I'm just gonna share this from my own personal experience, a lot of the stuff that My, I had s- my son first, then my daughter second.
They're both neurodiverse, but we parented the way we were parented, right? And I don't know, it was just my way or the highway was a lot of the parenting that both my husband and I got, and, and that's not gonna [00:33:00] always work with kids who really just truly are not capable of doing certain things at the same time as their neurotypical peers.
And so for years we were pushing, pushing, pushing until we started to understand better and sadly went through some pretty difficult times, but once you build that trust, over time your relationship with your kids changes so much in such a positive way. They share with you. They don't lie about bad choices.
They call you when they've made a bad choice. I mean, the benefits are... I wish I had discovered it sooner, and so I hope that parents who are watching this are... It's not easy, right? But it's worth the investment of understanding it and trying to manage your own emotions on a regular basis because it will pay back in spades later on [00:34:00] Yeah, absolutely.
And again, this is kind of a pre-installed software that we have, or hardware really with some software on top of it if you wanna look at it that way. The brain stem is the hardware, and the software is the triggers that take us into that. And I, I like the point that you brought up about if we're not careful, we go into autopilot ourselves, which is how we were parented.
Essentially- Mm-hmm ... if we're not paying attention at all, we will revert back under stress to the same kind of techniques that were used on us or against us or for us you know, whatever. Depending, sometimes it's all good. Sometimes it's good stuff. I don't wanna say it's all bad. We might revert to some good parenting that our parents did.
But yeah, we will fall into that unless we're really paying attention, and that's where that automatic software that's installed was us watching how we were parented or recording that or whatever, right? It's this program that's in there, that if we're not paying attention, that's what we'll go to when we're in the moment.
And again, like I said, sometimes it can be good. You know, our parents probably did a lot of good things too, but they weren't likely... How do I [00:35:00] wanna say this? I mean, maybe some of us are neurodivergent as parents too, so I don't wanna rule you out. But they're probably using very traditional parenting techniques in terms of holding consequences and using fear sometimes to get us to do what we're supposed to do or not do.
That's one thing I hear from parents all the time. "Man, if I would've said that to my mom or dad, I would've been, like, dead or something. They would've just kicked me right out of the house, or bad things would've happened." And really you can't do that with a neurodivergent kid because they are operating...
They're not processing the world the same way, so the same techniques are not gonna be effective. In fact, they could be very harmful and damaging and can backfire for sure. Can I add something there? Please. One, one of the things that I think a lot about with both of my kids is that they get a lot of negative messages from the rest of the world.
At school everybody's telling them to, "You have ADHD. Sit down. Be quiet. Do this. Do that. You never..." So they get all that at school, and then they come home and they get it from you. It doesn't mean that you have to let them get away with everything [00:36:00] either. It just means they just need to be handled a little bit differently.
And- That's something that I wish I had known. You know, my kids would always come home from school and have huge meltdowns, and I was like, "What is your story?" You know? And I, I was tired, I came home from work, I had to make dinner, I didn't really feel like dealing with blah, blah, blah, blah. But once I started to understand how much it took for both of them just to survive that day from everything is just...
And you're getting all this negative messaging, it really made a difference in the way I handled them. I didn't take the meltdowns as a personal affront. You know what? So what, so you eat out. Fine. I'm not cooking tonight. Whatever. You know, not everybody can do that all the time. I get that. But you do the best you can in the moment.
But that, again, is so important in terms of building trust, because if they're hearing the same negative messaging from you that they're hearing from their school and everyone else. And a- a- as a parent, I will say one of the biggest challenges I had, too, was, you [00:37:00] know, you're out at a playground or something, and your kid hits another kid, right?
And they're, you know, all the parents are looking at you like you're some, like, horrible person who doesn't... Your kid just got disregulated. Sorry. You do what you have to do. For a long time, I listened to everybody else telling me, "Well, you should be doing this, and you should be doing that." Well, it worked with their kids.
Their kids were neurotypical. Not gonna work with mine. So I got out of that developmental derby very early on. If you know you have a neurodiverse kid, get out of that derby, because it'll make you do things to please other people. It's just not worth it. Yeah. I love that term. How'd you say that?
Developmental derby. Developmental derby, yes. "Well, my kid's reading three books." Let's claim that term. That is awesome. "Is your kid reading yet?" You know, that kind of stuff. Right. And you're just like- Right ... "Come on." Like, can we not just be supportive of each other? I understand everybody's insecure, but that's why you're saying that to me.
You're not saying that to me because you're proud of your- Yeah, like somehow you're like, "Hey, I'm a good parent. You're a bad parent," right? Right. You suck. That's what it looks like. If your ego's tied up in how your kids behave, then you're in trouble already, because I swear, [00:38:00] neurotypical or not, they will sense that, and they will go against everything you want them to do just to, you know- Never say your kid won't do something, 'cause here they come nevering- Yes
like they've never before- Yeah, exactly. Yes ... or whatever the saying is. Well, not, not, do not curse yourself or forecast like that- Yeah ... 'cause it will come back to bite you. Yeah, if that judge not lest ye be judged, right? It tends to come back so. Yep. It sure does. But like you said, get out of that developmental derby because you're not in the same...
You're in a different ballpark, and it's not necessarily a bad one. It's a different one. And why I wanna just keep doing this and keep doing this is for that reason. If parents understand what's happening, then they can respond logically. I mean, I think parents are responding logically to their neurodiverse kids with neurotypical parenting, but it's just not right for their brain structure or their brain, the way that their brain processes.
So that is just so important, I don't know how else to say it, that if you can learn about it, understand what's happening, then you can respond appropriately and respond in a way that's gonna be helpful, not [00:39:00] reinforcing what they're getting out there in the neurotypical world because again, back to that software idea, if they're getting that all the time, that's the software that's getting written for them.
That's how they're gonna b- feel about themselves. That's how they're gonna see the world. That's how they're gonna perceive themselves. So like you're saying, if we're reproducing those same patterns at home that they're getting at school or out in the world or in their jobs or wherever they are, we're then contributing to the problem, right?
We're not understanding their uniqueness. We're not helping support it and helping them find ways to be successful in this world that's not necessarily built for them culturally in many ways. So we need to help them learn to navigate that and appreciate their differences and find their strengths and do the best they can to get down the roadways, but they're in a different race, so to speak, and it's not really a race, right?
'Cause even that's all crazy. We talk about what we do in terms of what a traditional trajectory for a kid should look like. 12 years of school, then another four years of college, and then a job that they work for [00:40:00] 40 years, and then they retire. I mean, like, this is just... It's all stuff we made up, right?
It's kinda how our culture works, but it's not necessarily how it has to be or how it even should be. It's just what we do. So I like parents to take a step back and just say, "Okay, why are we so concerned that our son is wearing the same hoodie for the last two or three days?" There, there might be some social ramifications to that, but is it really worth getting into a big battle over?
Sometimes it, it does need to be talked about and addressed, but if you understand the neurodiversity, and you maybe can find some ways to Come up with strategies to rotate stuff. I don't wanna get into the weeds on that. So it's not that you don't address it, but you don't approach it from the same framework, so- Right
uh- You don't look at them and say, "Well, like everyone's gonna think you're dirty and a loser if you wear the same sweatshirt." But sometimes stuff just does come out like that, right? Yeah. You're trying to help them- Yeah ... figure out how to navigate the world, but there's probably a more positive way to do it.
Right. Or in your own mind, you're, you're embarrassed, again, back to that same rat race- Yeah ... where you're thinking other [00:41:00] parents are gonna think I don't take care of my kids, or that I think this is okay. That's where parents get in trouble. They feel like it's a reflection on their parenting, and then to a certain degree some of that is somewhat based in truth, right?
But, but our children are their own souls, right? They got their own minds. They got their own ways of doing things. They have their own personalities, and they're gonna do things their way a lot of times. And so our job is just to help guide them down that path best we can, and understanding their neurodivergence and how it applies in their specific situation.
The best you can, as a parent, try to become an expert on your own kid and understand what's going on there, and then learn some strategies and some ways to help them navigate and help them learn the life skills. Because, again, we keep d- hitting the same drum, but it's not that you let things go, it's just how you might approach them.
So it's not that you don't hold boundaries, but you find a different way to hold those boundaries. And you work much more with them and try to help them learn the [00:42:00] skills they need to learn, but also understanding that some things are gonna be more difficult for them than it is for other kids. But they may be really, really talented at things that other kids just can't do.
So sometimes it's just a matter of finding what those strengths are. Right. So we will digest this podcast and figure out what the next best step is, 'cause we have other stuff that we definitely wanna talk about. Learned helplessness is an outcome of some of this, and what I would call parental PTSD and post-traumatic stress for parents.
We like to talk about it in our support group as chronic post-traumatic stress. That's how it feels. Yeah. Continuous post-traumatic stress disorder. But I kinda like the idea of chronic. It's always there because as a parent- You end up in that fight, flight, or freeze mode a lot because of the nature of trying to walk on eggshells.
That's the definition of walking on eggshells. That's the chronic post-traumatic stress, because you are trying so hard to not tip the scales or do something that's gonna disrupt or send your kid into a meltdown, that you start [00:43:00] acting from that downstairs brain more than the average parent would be because you're in that situation.
So you do get into survival mode, and that's where that chaos or survival mode or that constant stress that parents are under, and that takes a toll on everything. It takes a toll on the other siblings. It takes a toll on your marital relationship or your parenting partner relationship. It's hard on the extended family who may not understand what's going on, and so it strains those relationships.
It can make it harder on you socially in the neighborhood or wherever else that you may be, or at church or wherever you hang out that the other people are not going to be understanding. It's so challenging, 'cause you don't wanna... You remember the last time you tried to hold that boundary and what happened.
Yeah. And so it's hard to hold that boundary again, even though you know it's probably in the best interest of everybody, because you're afraid of what happened before. Yeah. Yep. So you end up running in the fawning mode a lot. Yep. Where you're just trying to snowplow all the obstacles out of the way and- Yep
make it as smooth as possible because if there is a bump, that bump can be catastrophic even if it's just seemingly little to other [00:44:00] people, or to ourselves. It may be something that makes their life very difficult for a period of time, and hence your life very difficult for a period of time. I think about all the stress here, like lost time at work, having to run back and forth to school, or trying to get them to school, or being late to school, or getting them dressed in the morning, or getting them back and forth, dealing with calls from the school.
Just all the stuff that goes along with this, it becomes all-encompassing, and that's so hard for parents. I don't want that to be your life. I want you to be able to do what you need to do to take care of your son or daughter. And again, by nature of the situation, it is gonna be more time intensive just like with any disability, right?
Any child with a disability, by nature, it's gonna need more support. It's gonna take more time, effort, and energy. But there's things that can greatly reduce that. Ways of understanding and approaching problems and being aware of this fight, flight, freeze, or fawn dynamic in our autonomic nervous system, in our upstairs brains and downstairs brains.
All those kind [00:45:00] of things can help you reconceptualize what's happening and then take more effective action that will actually help instead of throw gas on the fire, right? A lot of times it feels like, "Let's just hold the consequence" or, "I'm gonna take that phone away," or, "That's it. You've lost tech access."
And then all of a sudden your attempt to hold a consequence just dropped an atom bomb on the house, right? Because then it went from they're already upset to now it's catastrophic. So- Yeah ... finding out ways to hold boundaries that doesn't trigger that additional- Meltdown or next same thing, you're just not holding consequence at all because you don't wanna even go there, so you end up not holding a boundary, and then they don't learn what they need to learn.
And so yeah, we go round and round. Well, when we talk about continuous traumatic stress disorder, one of the things that I hope you'll cover, 'cause it's been really helpful for me is, and you've asked this a million times, you know, what are you afraid is gonna happen? And did it occur to you that it might actually work out this time?
Because when you're in that... But, but I mean, I'm serious. Yeah. It's true, though. No, really. [00:46:00] You ask that all the time. We're back to learn- learned helplessness, right? That's how those signals all, all- I said we all, we all react the same way. I mean, you asked it yesterday in our group, and everybody reacted the same way.
And it's, you know, I- there are many times that things have worked out. It's just your, your downstairs brain wants to focus on the ones that didn't. Yeah. Well, again, that's that survival mode, right? It's been so catastrophic and so challenging and so traumatic that you're geared up, you're already in that mode preemptively because you're under that kind of chronic stress.
But, but yeah, and so that's where we get back to that learned helplessness, where you've had enough of those situations that your son or daughter learns learned helplessness as well, but you as a parent do, too. And I wanna talk about that from both sides of the coin because usually if it's talked about at all, it's talked about in terms of a teen's self-esteem- Yeah
or a child's learning, but really you as a parent are susceptible to those same dynamics. And so- Yeah ... you're like, "No matter what I do, this is gonna go wrong, so I can't do anything." Or, "No matter what I try, it's not gonna make a difference." And if you get into that [00:47:00] mindset, which would make sense based on your history and your experience, sometimes you've tried a lot of things that just made it worse, so why would this time be different, right?
And so you're prepared for the worst, or you just have no belief that anything you do is gonna make a difference, and that's that learned helplessness piece. And so either you do nothing at all, or you just get into that autopilot. You're under so much stress that you're just repeating the same dynamics, holding the traditional parenting stuff, or how you were taught to be a parent.
You go back to those kind of techniques, and then it just makes it worse, so then it reinforces the learned helplessness, right? Like I tried to hold a boundary, right? I tried to take away the phone. I tried to restrict their technology, but then they threw a fit and broke a window or trashed the house or ran away or whatever it might be, right?
It was so catastrophic that then the next time you're like, "Oh my gosh, I don't wanna go through this again." So either you do nothing, or you get frustrated enough and then go back to the old parenting programming and recreate the issue all over again. So [00:48:00] it's a tough dynamic, but this is the kind of stuff that happens so commonly.
It happens in neurotypical families, too, by the way. I don't want to say this is totally that. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's just more emphasized or more likely or more prone. Let me say this. Families with neurodivergent kids are more prone to these dynamics becoming very exaggerated. Yes. They're, they're bigger, they're more dramatic, they're more ensconced, so to speak.
They're harder to change. But- If you know something about this you can start to do things differently, and you can break that learned helplessness cycle and start to see that, wow, you know, maybe it didn't go perfectly, but it, it definitely went a little differently this time, and it wasn't quite as bad.
And then over time you get better at, wow, this thing that used to really be a big problem, we figured out how to work around it. We figured out how to work together to solve this problem, or just some of the little adjustments that I made as a parent didn't trigger our son or daughter as much as it before.
And so you can find ways to hold the boundaries and to help them learn the life skills [00:49:00] that they need to learn to become independent without these traditional methods that are literally gonna blow things up worse and then ruin your confidence as a parent, and then either have you give up or just keep trying to redo the same thing over and over again just doing damage.
Unintentional damage for sure, but damage nonetheless to your relationship with your son or daughter, and then also their self-esteem underlying all that, and really your self-esteem as a parent too. It can be like, "Wow, maybe I really am a bad parent. Maybe I am at fault here," or something along those lines.
But really I want you to know that there is a way out of this and there are things that can be done, and really a lot of times it is pretty simple adjustments, but it does take the understanding behind it because it's counterintuitive. Like, everything in your- It is ... your gut is gonna tell you, "I've gotta hold this boundary here."
But if you understand that if you do, then it's gonna have this effect, then you recognize, okay, I gotta override that software that was installed on me on how to parent a neurotypical kid and adjust [00:50:00] this for my son or daughter's unique ways of processing the world. And if I do that, over time you see it makes a big difference.
So you can go from that constant chaos or stress and day-to-day walking on eggshells to getting more and more confident, more and more peace, and really understanding that hey, you can do this. You just need a different model, a different roadmap, and a different way of looking at it, or otherwise you'll keep reproducing the same dynamics over and over again, and- Nobody wants that
I don't want you to experience that. Yeah, I don't want you to experience that. No. And it's hard because you probably are as a family somewhat isolated anyways because the nature of the situation makes it harder. So you may not even know how hot the water is, you with me? Because you don't have a lot to compare it to.
Maybe you go over to a friend's house and be like, "Wow, this is different. These... The kids do what you tell them to do, and they do the thing? Like, what is going on here? They have conversations with me and they get off the video games when you ask them to, or they help clean up the kit?" All the stuff that you may be struggling with.
You may not recognize [00:51:00] how much accommodation and how much of the fawning or the freezing that you've done just to try to survive- And I don't want you to live that way. I want you to live in your upstairs brain where you're creative and relaxed and things are going well and your relationships are moving along better.
If you can understand that and change your perspective and change the model that you're using, then you've got a really good chance of changing the outcome of a lot of this, so. Yep. The more you understand it, the less power it has over you, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So that's why I do this, and I want to try to help as many people as I can and educate.
So gaining as much information and understanding, and then something that's tailored specifically to your son or daughter, again, because you can learn a lot about neurodiversity and autism and ADHD and OCD and those kind of things. Um, but again, you still have to know how to apply that to your particular child.
Situation. So... And that's even true with neurotypical parenting books. There's some really good principles in there, but you still need to figure out how does this apply to my son or daughter's personality and their w- ways of doing things. So, [00:52:00] uh, that's why I created Neurodiversity University, is to try to help with all this.
So please go to the website and reach out if you want to know more. Yep. The training is super helpful, and the parent group is super helpful because you do feel less isolated, because you recognize there are people out there facing exactly the same things. And it's validating as a parent to know that it's not you.
You're not a bad parent. You just have a tough kid who needs something a little bit different. That's all it is I mean, they say there's the, you know, kids don't come with a handbook, right? On how to raise them. Yep. But neurodiverse kids definitely don't come with a hand- you know, the handbook that you might get for the neurotypical kid still needs to be adjusted.
But yeah, there, this is a- another, a whole nother realm, so to speak, of complication. But it's not that it's really that hard, it's just that it's different. Yep. So I mean, let me back that up. It can be hard from a emotional situation. All the stuff we talked about can make this very hard, but if you understand what's [00:53:00] going on, then the adjustments become more intuitive.
Once you kind of see it, you're like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, like they may be lying to me right now, but this is for a way different reason than what their brother might lie to me about," or something like that, right? Yep. Or what the neighbor's kid may lie. That's a whole different situation. So if you can see it, you can do something different, and that's what I really want people to take away from this.
And so that's why I talk about the upstairs brain, downstairs brain, 'cause the more awareness you can get on one on yourself, then you can help them, uh, regulate their emotions as well. But also it gives you a chance to respond rather than react. And once you have that ability to respond and you have the knowledge base behind it to know how to respond or what would be a different way or a way that's gonna work well for your son or daughter, then that's the key right there.
Then you can do both. You can actually respond versus react, and you'll know how to respond in a way that's effective. So, so join us. And our Neurodiversity University really helps you figure out how to apply it to your own situation too. Right. That's the real benefit. Yeah. So it's a combination of, yeah- Yeah
getting the full information about what's [00:54:00] going on, and then that's where the one-on-one coaching or the group coaching that we do can help you dial it into your specific son or daughter. So reach out, come join us. We'll be happy to see you and help you through this journey. So once again, Amy, thank you.
Appreciate it. Appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. It's fun to be here. And, yeah, we'll, we'll keep at it 'cause there is just so much to talk about. It really is. So much to talk about. Yeah. So we'll see how this comes out, and we'll decide what our next venture will be. But if you have any suggestions, please reach out to us and let us know.
Or if there's parts of this that you wanna know more about for us to zoom in on something, happy to do that as well. So yeah, just reach out and we will go from there. But thank you for joining us. Take care. Yep, bye-bye.
