00:00:00 –
Introduction,
Jason and Debbie celebrate the 100th episode of their podcast and reflect on the journey of creating and sharing helpful information for their listeners.
00:01:25 –
Listener Engagement,
Jason and Debbie encourage listeners to send in emails with specific content requests. They appreciate the feedback and want to provide information that is helpful and relevant to their audience.
00:03:37 –
What Matters Most,
Jason and Debbie discuss the shift in their focus from worrying about external measures of success, such as grades and societal expectations, to prioritizing relationships and connection with their children.
00:07:32 –
Being Present,
The importance of being present in the moment and fostering connections with their children is emphasized. Jason and Debbie share how being present has positively impacted their relationships with their children.
00:11:10 –
How We Are Matters,
Jason and Debbie discuss the significance of their own attitudes and behaviors in parenting. They emphasize the importance of showing up with curiosity, compassion, and a focus on connection.
00:15:07 –
Knowing the Difference,
The hosts discuss the importance of distinguishing between typical misbehavior and behavior related to disability, emphasizing the need for boundaries and consequences to help children learn and grow.
00:16:49 –
Building Relationships,
The hosts highlight the significance of maintaining a strong parent-child relationship, separate from performance or behavior, and creating a safe space for children to make mistakes and learn from them.
00:17:22 –
Embracing Screw Ups,
The hosts emphasize the importance of being okay with making mistakes, both as parents and as children, and using these moments as opportunities for growth and learning.
00:18:28 –
Acceptance and Letting Go,
The hosts discuss the importance of accepting the present moment, letting go of expectations, and finding peace and enjoyment in the journey of parenting and supporting their children with disabilities.
00:20:38 –
Learning and Growing,
The hosts emphasize the continuous process of learning and growing as parents, adapting to new challenges, and finding joy in the lessons that come with each situation.
Transcription
00:00:00
You.
00:00:03
Welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast. We’re here to bring you helpful information from leading experts and give you effective tools and support. I’m Jason Grygla, a licensed counselor and founder of TechieForLife, a specialized mentoring program for neurodivergent young adults. And I’m Debbie Grygla, a certified life coach. And maybe most importantly, we’re also parent to our own atypical Young Adults.
00:00:30
Hello and welcome to this special episode of Autism and Neurodiversity with Jason and Debbie. I’m here with Debbie and we are together on this anniversary episode. We’ve actually accomplished a pretty good milestone of 100 episodes today. Yeah. And it’s been an amazing journey to get to this point.
00:00:53
I think about two and a half years or so. We’ve been doing this two and a half years and you start something like this with lots of fear and what’s it going to be like a lot of unknowns. And I think that’s cool thing for me has been that we’ve had one enough things to talk about that we wanted to keep going and teaching and learning and sharing. And I think that’s pretty cool. I think there’s a really low percentage of podcasts that make it past their 10th episode, let alone their hundredth.
00:01:25
Yeah, it’s pretty cool. So thank you for joining us and being with us on this journey. I think it’s been great for us and I think we get a lot out of it as well because of what we go through to prepare and learn and study to try to offer good material and help to our listeners. So thank you for your support and we’d like to ask you to send in emails asking for specific content. What do you want us to cover?
00:01:53
If there’s something that is interesting to you or something we haven’t covered well or something we’ve said that is confusing, let us know. We’d love to have more podcasts as a result of our listeners requesting information. Yeah. And we appreciate you listening and we do appreciate the reviews and the emails that we have gotten and letting us know that it is helpful and we do our best to make it helpful. And I think we’ve learned a lot as we’ve been doing it and just honing in what it is we do and what’s working and why we’ve evolved a lot in our thinking and what we’ve understood.
00:02:32
We’ve fine tuned things. We’ve come to understand what neurodevelopmental mentoring is over the last two and a half years and done a lot of research and work and study. And I think things are going really well. So we’re excited to have you here today. Yeah, so we want to talk about and we were thinking about, well, what do we want to do special for 100th episode?
00:02:59
And I think what it came down to is we want to talk about what matters most. And I think this is really important because when we started out, our parenting journey. We were focused on a lot of the things that now we look back and realize those didn’t matter as much as we thought they did. I know I used to worry so much about trying to get our kids to behave and are they getting good grades and doing well in school and how do we get them into college? And I worried so much about making them do their chores and have a whole different approach.
00:03:37
Now to chores. What are some of the things that you I just remember wasting so much of our resources, time, energy and emotions trying to fit our kids into the societal molds that we’re supposed to school, even church social situations. I remember spending an enormous amount of time trying to get them to play the sports that I really enjoyed, or any sports or anything that I thought would be a typical situation for my kids that I looked forward to. And it was kind of to meet my needs more than theirs. And I think that was a big loss.
00:04:19
Well, you enjoyed those sports and you wanted them to be able to enjoy it. They didn’t enjoy it. That was a hard thing to accept. Right. So that was hard.
00:04:26
Right. And finding we spent so much time and energy, debbie and I, we would fight a lot about and a lot of it wasn’t fight. It was just intense focus and study and thinking and arguing, debating, trying to get the exact right interventions. If we just do this way, if we just do it that way. And we had this idea that there was a solution, a behavioral solution, a modification and an approach that would fix, but it was all procedural and what do we do well?
00:04:57
And sometimes it was like, well, we have to either do it this way or that way. And we were missing what’s the middle well, the middle ground is how to be right. Yeah. And we’ll talk about that more in a minute. But at the time, we were just trying to take molds and apply them.
00:05:12
It was hard. Yeah. And we thought we needed to do it the way we had it done, how we’d been parented and how we saw other people doing it. And times have changed, the world has changed. Even if the parenting techniques were great for the last two generations, they don’t work necessarily for our generation.
00:05:30
And with neurodiversity autism, I remember my identity being so caught up in being a dad because I really wanted to be a good dad. And my identity was more about me and my ego. Not that I was cocky. My ego ideal was just who I wanted to be. And so I had a lot of shame and embarrassment and frustration, and I was impatient with myself, so I was impatient with them.
00:05:55
I used to really worry about what people thought, and I think I was often motivated in certain areas or to emphasize certain things because that’s how people would measure whether you were doing a good job or not. And I was really worried about those kinds of things instead of what I’ve learned is more helpful. And worrying about what other people think isn’t that we were really insecure. I think it was more about, well, we needed to rely and trust others as well. And if everyone else is doing well in these things, then if they’re having judgments about us, we must be doing it wrong.
00:06:31
And I really wanted to do it right. Well, if they think it’s important right, then it must be important how we motivated them, how we interacted. I wasted so much time, and I missed out on so many great opportunities.
00:06:51
I think we did a lot of things well. We did a lot of things right. I think we did too. And I think let’s talk about that a little bit with our next yeah.
00:07:03
For this episode. As we look back, we’ve been doing this now 100 episodes. We just really want to share with you some of the things that we feel like we’ve learned that matter the most. So I think number one most important thing that we’ve learned matters most above everything else. And you probably won’t be surprised by this one if you’ve been listening to our podcast for any amount of time, is relationships and connection.
00:07:32
And to do that, it’s learning how to it really matters to be present.
00:07:40
Yeah. I love this quote by Lao TSU. A Chinese philosopher says that when you focus on the past, you’ll be depressed. If you focus on the future, you’ll be ancient or anxious. Sorry.
00:07:53
But when you focus on the present, you’ll be at peace and you’ll be way more effective and successful in what you’re trying to do and being present. It removes all the fears about the future and the failures about the past. And you’re just able to be the best you and show up in the moment the best way that you can and enjoy that. There were so many times I could have enjoyed the situation in the moment better, but I was too in my limbic brain, in my fear based thinking, and in my own self judgment. Yeah.
00:08:29
And now looking with some of our boys now in adulthood and doing their life the way they do it, we worried about so many things about their future. And now you look at it and you’re like, oh, no, it does work out, and they’re going to have the future they’re going to have, and it’s still continuing to be present with them where they’re at. I do think we did that well. There was a lot of things I could have done better than. I wanted to enjoy them more often, but we spent a lot of time and energy, especially when we were able to home school them.
00:09:04
Just focusing on building foundations of I’m okayness with them and also connecting with them and enjoying them, especially with our younger boys. We took them out. We did a lot of scouting and camping and outdoors and active stuff, which I thought was a huge win for me, but also for them. I think that was a big win. Yeah, I spent a lot of one on one time with them, reading and helping them with their schoolwork, and we’d go to home school groups.
00:09:35
Those were core memories that you did really well. We got involved. We really connected. We would talk about things they learned. They were smart from you teaching them instead of what the public school was.
00:09:46
Teaching was always in trouble. I’m broken. Something’s wrong. Yeah. Principal calling, teacher calling.
00:09:54
But, yeah, that was a big shift in our whole interaction with them. When we started homeschooling seemed to work well for our situation. Took us out of the crises and got us out ahead of the situation a lot, and it didn’t last. There was a time when it was time for them to go back to school, but at the same time, that’s what they needed at the time, and I loved that. We did a lot with them together.
00:10:14
We walked with them. We did when we worked, we worked together. When we schooled, we schooled together. When we adventured together.
00:10:26
The second part is I really feel like how we were, how we are now, how we are in the situation, being present is a huge choice we can make to be proactively, effective, and enjoy the moments. And so how we are not what we do, not even what we say, but how we say it, how we are when we say it, makes all the difference in our relationship as well as with those we’re trying to mentor or parent. It’s been such a huge shift for me to realize, okay, I’m going into this. How do I want to be? I got to calm down or I’ve got to breathe or I’ve got to how do I want to show up?
00:11:10
How do I want to feel as I’m connecting? Right? I want them to know that I love them and I care about what’s the actual goal. I love that our task lists have changed from do this, say that, finish this, to be this way, accomplish this feeling, connect, help them belong, help them feel successful, have a positive experience. We’ve taken it up a level, and I think that’s just a maturity thing, but also a very intentional thing that’s taken a lot of development on our part.
00:11:39
Like, we couldn’t do that very well when we were young and immature and insecure and in crises well, and you thought it had to go a certain way. And now I’m like, I don’t have to have all the answers. I don’t even have to know where it’s going to go. I just know if I go into it with curiosity and compassion and we’ll figure it out, it’ll be okay. And it does work.
00:11:57
It’s not lost a fair who cares what happens? It’s more effective in the moment. We’re able to be more organic and agile and the solutions we come up with are fit the situation so much more nuanced and effective because we’re present and we’re really connected, right? And so if a kid lies and we have a procedure set up and then we have to just do the consequence that came from the line and it didn’t matter what the circumstances were, that was really ineffective. Now if they lie, we can stop and say, okay, what do they need?
00:12:31
What was the cause? What are they feeling? Am I in a good place? Am I reacting? Are they in fight or flight or were they just being snotty?
00:12:39
What was really going on so that we can maximize development and learning and connection.
00:12:46
And I think in all of that, knowing that how we are matters, I focus a lot more on my own sense of well being, taking care of me, being aware of my own stress levels and not engaging when I know I’m like at my max, right? And being able to communicate that hey, I’ve had a long day, can you take this one?
00:13:11
How’s your relationship? If one of us has a better relationship with one of our kids in that moment being a better partners, right? And I think we were in so much fight or flight mode 510, 1520 years ago we started this journey that it was hard for us to ever work as a team and be in our higher brain. Another thing I think has been really important to learn is just how we view them and perceive them how we feel about them. Because now we understand that they are still children, teenagers, young adults and they can be lazy, bratty, jealous and rude, but they’re also overwhelmed in a stress state and trying to figure out tease that out.
00:13:59
The difference between is this just a behavioral? Do they just need us to be patient or do they really need an intervention? Do they need a hug or do they need some type of a consequence? I think that’s we’ve gotten way better at that. It’s not one size fits all.
00:14:15
Yeah, the nuance of what they’re needing. Do I need to intervene here or accommodate more or do I need to just help them be and work through the natural consequences or logical consequences of where they’re at and be that support as they get through that and have my own boundaries on things, knowing when to intervene. If they have just screwed up with a friend group or a club and they’ve just shot themselves in the foot, we don’t always rescue them, but sometimes we go in and try to find a way to salvage it. Other times it’s helpful to let them really feel the impact of what they did so that they can learn. And it’s not about always keeping them comfortable, but it is helping them not be destroyed.
00:15:07
And that’s hard. It’s been a good thing to learn how to know the difference.
00:15:13
Sometimes when they’re misbehaving, they are just a normal kid. It’s not all about disability. And I think sometimes we have a tendency to say, oh, they’re disabled, let’s be really soft and patient and let it go. But then they never actually get parented boundaries or mentored and that’s not what they’re and then bigger consequences later as they continue that and it really undermines them. Right.
00:15:34
So they need to be able to experience some of those natural consequences and then help them work through them. I think for us, at least for me, I was more imbalanced on the consequence punishment stop their bad behavior. But I do see a lot of parents on the other end that were too marshmallowy, too soft, too, quote unquote, kind. But it wasn’t kind. It wasn’t what they needed.
00:16:00
Sometimes kindness is speaking directly and letting them have consequences so they learn and be real about things. Hey, this happened and this is where we’re at. And this is hard without it affecting the relationship. Yeah. And I love you and I know you don’t want to be in this situation.
00:16:15
How can we work through it? Yeah. That’s another thing that we don’t do anymore. I think that we used to kind of was our relationship would be affected by their performance. And what’s really been important is to always keep a good relationship and abridge the safety net of the foundation of keeping the relationship of influence regardless of what they do, if they will allow it, but still figure out a way to help them grow and have ownership and learn and sometimes hit their head against the wall.
00:16:49
Yeah. Because we all do it’s. Part of being a human is you’re going to screw some things up and how do we work through that? And it’s okay. Yeah.
00:17:02
I think when I did consequences in the past, it felt punitive and it felt like it had to be hard and tough and mean about it and memorable and consistent. Oh, and the consistent thing and oh, yeah. Like so many so many times we missed the mark. Yeah. Missed opportunities.
00:17:22
Yeah. And and that’s another thing we’ve learned is to be okay with our screw ups and to be okay with their screw ups and we’re learning them. We’re trying. And we can be okay in the moment. Right.
00:17:33
Yeah. Be kind to ourselves as we go through it. Yeah. So I think if we could wrap this up because we could keep talking. So if we were to summarize the things that matter most into the thing, that when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, for me, it’s all about enjoying the moments, the connections, the attachments, and enjoying the journey, which we’ve learned to do.
00:18:04
It’s easier to do that now that we’re kind of out of the crises. We saw the light at the end of the tunnel at some point. Now I think we’re kind of out of the tunnel, but I also think the tunnel was self imposed and a lot of crises. I look at some of the crises that we have to manage and work through with students at our school, and some of it’s pretty intense. I think in the past, we would have been rattled, pretty rattled by it.
00:18:28
And now we’re like, no, it’s okay. We’re going to figure it out. It is what it is, and we’ll figure out a solution. And sometimes you can’t take back what’s happened, and you have to move forward, and other times you can go back and repair. Yeah.
00:18:41
So it’s like getting to acceptance quicker, letting go of what we thought it should be or how it should go, and just being able to work through and enjoy the working through process.
00:18:54
I’ve been personally researching quite a bit lately about Eastern philosophy and religion and with Buddhism and Taoism and our goal to be at peace and attain Nirvada and to be one with the universe in the way everything’s harmonious. We’re at peace. We are enjoying the journey because we’re present, we’re attached to ourselves and to others. We want the best. We’re in a non judgmental stance.
00:19:21
I think we’ve prioritized things really well, and it doesn’t mean the problems have stopped, but they’ve gotten a lot less. But it definitely means we’re okay in the journey. Well, because of that, we’ve become so much more effective and skillful and able to support and turn things into good directions. Because of it, we’ve become artists instead of following a bunch of specific, strict rules that don’t allow us to be agile and organic in the moment, which I think makes us a lot more effective. So we can learn, we can be taught, we can grow, we develop.
00:20:10
And that has made all the difference. Yeah, that’s what matters. It’s not the checklist. It’s not the keeping up with societal standards and all of these I don’t know, the worry about other people’s opinions. It’s, hey, we love these kids, and they’ve got challenges, we have challenges, and we can work through them and figure out what works best for us in each situation and always be learning, be learning.
00:20:38
Every new circumstance, each new situation, there’s new lessons to be learned. And that’s kind of the cool part of it, too. That’s where some of the enjoyment comes, is learning from each challenge that pops up, which our kids give us lots of opportunities for challenges to learn from. So thank you again for joining us. We’ve been really grateful for the journey.
00:21:01
We hope it’s been helpful. It’s probably been more helpful to us than to our listeners, but we hope it’s also helpful to you. So we’re just going to keep going. We’re at 100, and we’ll talk to you again at episode 200. So thanks for joining us and celebrating with us on this hundredth episode.
00:21:18
Take care. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Autism and Neurodiversity with Jason and Debbie. If you want to learn more about our work, come visit us@jasondebbie.com. That’s Jasondebbie.com.
