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 Techie for Life, a specialized mentoring program for neurodiverse 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.
00:00:29
Hello, welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast. I’m Jason Grygla. I’ll be your host today, and we’re going to talk today about the overlapping triad or trifecta, that keeps our neurodivergent, children, teens, students, and clients stuck, unmotivated, unwilling, and that is the three areas based all in anxiety. They’re all anxiety related. They are one, PDA, or pathological demand avoidance.
00:01:05
Two, OCD, where they get stuck in their head, a scratch, and somewhere in between the desire to do something and the actual action, they blip out. And it is an obsessive compulsive in negative. And it’s kind of interesting because instead of wanting to do something, their brain obsesses and blinks out, and it’s kind of a glitch in the matrix in their brain. And the third is paralysis by analysis, where they just overthink everything all the time. And those three things together, they’re all anxiety related.
00:01:47
And so the umbrella of anxiety and when I say anxiety, I mean concern, worry, tenseness, stuckness. And you can have somebody who has just one of the three or two of the three. I find it really common with those who aren’t motivated or they’re motivated and can’t. I find it really common that they have all three. Sometimes it just looks like they’re self sabotaging because they’re afraid to be happy, or maybe they’re just lazy.
00:02:22
The most common scenario is they really care, which is how OCD and how paralysis by analysis works. And it’s also somewhat related to pathological demand avoidance. Even if they want something, if they feel like the external thing expects them to do it, then pathological demand avoidance or PDA, says you can’t move, freeze, be paralyzed. If we really care about something, then fear of failing at that turns into if you try, you’ll fail. Or you could fail.
00:02:57
Is it worth trying? But I want to try. But what if you fail? Okay, is it worth trying? But I want to try, but what if I fail?
00:03:06
And maybe they’ve learned that failing is worse than trying, so they just don’t try. And that would be the paralysis by analysis. The OCD piece is where the brain literally has physiological pathways, neural pathways that get into an intense rut and a block, and like I said, a scratched record where it reverts to don’t do it, or something bad is going to happen if you try. And they’re all related and they’re all similar and they suck. They make it so hard for somebody who wants good things.
00:03:50
A classic example would be, what if I talk to a stranger that I just want to be friends with. What if I talk to them and I fail? What if I say the wrong thing? What if they don’t like me? And now you’ve got analysis by paralysis.
00:04:06
But also earlier that day their parents challenged them in a great mentoring way. Hey, I challenge you to talk to one person today that you would like to be friends with and just say hi and see if you can sit by them for lunch. That’s the only thing I want you to do today. If you can do it, I’ll be really proud of you or impressed. And because the child teen really wants it but someone else asked them to do it and challenged them, there’s an immediate, I have to do it myself.
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I have to make my own choices. They want me to do it. What if I let them down? They expect me to do it. So then I’m not making my own choice and then I’m not the owner of my own choices, so I can’t do it.
00:04:45
And that’s what PDA looks like inside. And then the third thing is your mind just starts spinning and obsessively thinking about all of it and all three together is like one plus one plus one is not three. It’s like one plus one plus one is six or nine or twelve. And that’s where you end up getting 20 and 25 and 30 year olds that just can’t get motivated. They just can’t get themselves over that hurdle.
00:05:14
And if they could, and if they would and if they do, typically all the chains of anxiety slough off and they break. So a lot of times if you can get them to do it, once the stuckness starts to disappear and fade and the obsessing goes down, the paralysis goes down and the feeling of I can’t do this because other people want me to or expect me to goes down. And then it’s a little easier because you have a new neural pathway, a new experience comes in and says, wait, I like that. I want to do it next time a little bit better. And if you’ll remember we talked about neuropathways and how they work in a very simplified version, but of a practical functional description, is an experience comes in, we have an immediate reaction and then out of our lower brain, we get into our higher brain and say, wait a minute, what would I have rather done?
00:06:16
What could I have done different? What would I like to do different next time? So our neural pathway has a reaction, but then it has the ability to shift as we reflect and we’re intentional about that next exposure to the same stimuli. And so that’s how the brain grows and it builds new neural pathways. I’m uncomfortable with how that went, so next time I’m going to do it a little bit different.
00:06:40
And we can’t help but our brain changing and either reinforcing the stuckness from an anxiety lower brain place or the brain starts to shift and change and grow. Neuro. Neuropathways exposure is a really good thing. Peer pressure, external pressure can only be used sparingly. And if they’re close enough to the ridge, that a little push gets them over it because they were close enough already.
00:07:13
I remember growing up at Lake Powell where we jumped off cliffs a lot. And if people pressured and pushed them to jump one, they were either less and less likely to do it and they would dig their heels in because they were feeling less and less control and more and more out. Of control, which makes us be in our fight or flight paralysis place. Or they don’t get in their higher brain and they react out of fear that they’d better jump because everyone expects them to. And they almost always got hurt because they weren’t in their higher brain thinking about how should I jump, how should I land, keep my legs together, keep my arms in.
00:07:51
So when we do act out of the lower brain and not out of the higher brain, it just causes problems. We’ve gone over that and over it. That’s why it’s such a simple critical place to view and start is are they in their lower brain? Because if they are in this situation with lack of motivation or movement or lack of action, the anxiety based PDA obsessive compulsive thinking and the paralysis kick in and kick our butts. And it happens to me.
00:08:26
It’s not like just neurodivergents experience this. We’ve all experienced it. And it seems to be really prevalent and harder to overcome in our neurodivergent loved ones. If I could think for a second, if there was any other advice I’d give you, it’s stop and help them have ownership in what they’re doing without letting on too much that you really want them to do it. Two, don’t make it into a big deal because then they overreact and overstimulate, which shuts them down as well.
00:09:01
I talked about that in my last podcast about being overstimulated. And three, I would give them some easy steps to expose themselves, expose themselves to and push up against and lean into the thing that they want that would be good for them. And using the cliff jumping analogy off cliffs into water at the lake, I would say I want you to start by jumping off the very bottom step and they jump off at one feet and then 2ft and then 3ft. And if they don’t stop, if they just keep going and they realize I’m doing it’s not that big of a deal because they’ve done it incrementally. Their fight or flight brain is less likely to kick in until they get up to about 15 or 20ft.
00:09:49
And then they’ll stop for a second and realize, oh my gosh, I am really high. I say, Wait a minute, you just jumped off 2ft lower. Go back down and jump off down there and they get down there. But now that they’ve thought that a little higher 2ft higher was such a big deal, they’re kind of freaked out about the lower one, too, because now they’re back in their lower brain, so they actually have to go. Back down the cliff to a place where they’re really comfortable and they have ownership and they’re not overthinking it and their anxiety is not kicking in and choose to get back into their higher brain and say, I’m going to jump.
00:10:21
I want this. It’s fun. And then they move back up, but then they get a little further the next time. That’s how development works, incrementally with intentional pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone, but having control and knowing what we will and won’t do, and then having some people there to guide us, to encourage us and say, if you jump from that high, you’re going to get hurt, because they might be overly confident, who knows? And I love being able to mentor and be an influence, not to see them jump off the cliff, but when they come back up out of the water, they’re so proud and excited about what they’ve done.
00:11:03
I love that feeling and I think we could have that a lot more if we learned to mentor in a way that helps them stay away from PDA, out of their obsessive compulsive thinking, out of their paralysis by analysis, by lowering their anxiety and helping co regulate. And that means keeping things light, being fun, front loading, explaining what we’re going to do, but they don’t have to do it if they want. Letting them sit there and be so uncomfortable on their own that they’re like, I want to do that, and like, oh, okay, fine, instead of when we go to the cliffs, I really want you to jump. It’s going to be great. You’re going to have so much fun.
00:11:44
I want you to go jump. It’s just something I’ve enjoyed my whole life, so you need to do it. That is such a set up to fail. So hopefully this helps shift a little bit of your thinking and understanding, motivation and how hard it is for our neurodivergent loved ones to get out of their way and do what they actually want to do. Because that’s really the issue is they want to do it.
00:12:09
Sometimes the more they want to do it, the harder it gets. Thanks, and we’ll talk to you real soon. 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
