[00:03] Jason: Welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast.
[00:06] Debbie: 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.
[00:19] Jason: And I’m Debbie Grygla, a certified life coach. And maybe most importantly, we’re also parents to our own atypical Young Adults.
[00:20] Debbie: I am so glad you’re here. So I just had a birthday and so did my son, my oldest son.
We actually have the same birthday. He was born on my 16th birthday.
And I will never forget that moment when I was going through all the papers and important documents that foster care caseworker had brought over and I found him and his brother’s birth certificates. I’m looking at their birthdays to make note of it and realizing that my oldest son was born on my 16th birthday when I was probably imagining and wondering who my future husband is going to be and what he’s going to be like. My future son was being born. So kind of fun.
We had a nice day celebrating and I can no longer say for one month my oldest son and then my next oldest are eleven months apart. So for one month they’re the same age. So for one month all my kids ages were 10, 15, 20, and 30 and then Jason’s 50 and my mom’s 75. So we’ve got some fun numbers, I’m the oddball out, but 10, 15, 20, 30 and 75 kind of fun. But now that ended we had her birthday and now he’s 31 and anyway, super fun.
So we had a good time. And then we’re actually really excited because we’re going to be taking our girls with us this coming week and going to New York to attend and participate in the Alt Fair there in New York City.
And so if you’re in the area, we would love to have you come and meet us and we’d love to chat with you. This is a really great opportunity if you or your young adult is looking for alternatives to college, like the typical unsupported college route. If you’re looking for different options, it’s a great opportunity to see what’s out there and meet with programs and we’re going to be there representing Technique for Life, which is our school and mentoring program for autistic and neurodivergent young adults. And we help them with next steps. So we’re going to be there representing that.
And then we’re really excited because both my girls are in dance and musical theater and so we’re going to go take them to a Broadway musical, Broadway show and they are just so excited to go to a real Broadway show and anyway, should be a fun week.
So I’m excited to jump in and get on this topic today that I have for you. We go around saying the term, meet them where they’re at, and if you’ve heard me say it or other people say it, you might have questions about what does that actually mean? How do you know you’re actually doing it? What gets in the way of doing it, and just why is it so important? So I just kind of dig into that with you right now.
So meeting our young people where they’re at is so valuable if you want to be supportive and mentor growth and development. And for neurodevergent young people who have different developmental challenges and their own unique timelines outside the typical Bell curve, it’s critical that we meet them where they’re at and not where we think they are or where we think they should be or where we would really like them to be, but to actually meet them where they’re at and figure out what that actually is.
Okay, so meeting them is working to understand them, understand their strengths and their weaknesses and their values, which might be different than ours, their interests, their fears, their anxieties, and having a decent understanding of their possible disabilities, their maturity, and their developmental stage or level that they’re at.
And then that’s like, the bigger picture. Meeting them where they’re at and then really meeting them where they’re at in the moments. Okay, what’s stressing them? What are they dealing with, what’s working, what’s not? What is their experience without that sense of what’s going on for them? How can we possibly support and mentor effectively?
I mean, how do we like it? How well do we accept and welcome support and mentoring from someone that we don’t feel like really understands us or really gets us right? We don’t love it when people want to, well, you should do this or you should do that, and you’re like, no, no, but you don’t really understand.
So it’s really like, that desire to meet someone where they’re at is really just like, where are they at? Let’s throw out our assumptions and get super curious. So it makes me actually think about my grandma, who I absolutely love and adore. And she passed away several years ago, but when we were younger, she would come and visit, and we would look forward to her visits, and she would take us and do fun things, and she would give us treats and bring prizes. She was amazing.
And in fact, we would just all cry when she would leave. Like, she’s always like, no, no, no. Happy, happy. Like, she could hardly stand it that we were, like, so sad to see her go, and we would just be crying. But she was amazing, and she was one of those people that would really get in there and serve and give and do and clean the house and do everything she could to help my mom.
And one of the things that she would come and do while I was at school was going to my bedroom and gather up all my dirty clothes and wash them, which could be a wonderful thing, except she didn’t know how to wash my clothes. She would wash them the way she washed them.
She did it in the way that worked for her that she had always done, which was like washing them on hot water, in hot water and then drying them on the hot setting. And it was very efficient and it got stains out, but it would also shrink all of my clothes.
And as a teenager, like clothes we had back then and kind of the financial situation we were in, it was devastating to realize all my clothes had shrunk and they didn’t fit me anymore and what was I going to do? And I would ask her, Please don’t wash my clothes. Like, I’m good. I don’t need you to wash them. I wash my own clothes.
I was really careful with them. I would wash them on cold and then on a very low, gentle, delicate cycle or hang them to drive. Every time she’d come, I’d ask her, hey, don’t wash my clothes. I’m good, Grandma. And she would still just go into my room. We don’t even think she realized. She would just get into her swift movement of taking care of things and just gather up my clothes and go wash them and then I wouldn’t have anything to waste.
So I did finally get smart, and I started making sure I didn’t have any dirty clothes. I made sure I did my laundry right before she came. And then as I was dirtying poles the week she was there, I was like hiding them in a drawer so that she wouldn’t go in, wash them and shrink them because didn’t have a lot of clothes as it was. So it was kind of devastating.
I think of that as she meant, well, she had the best of intentions, and she had her own reasoning for why, even though I’d asked her not to. And I don’t think we want to be doing that.
As parents, I think we can do better. I want to talk about the main thing that I see that gets in the way of our being able to truly meet our young people where they’re at and understand what they’re actually needing and what their experiences so that we can collaborate with them.
And it’s not things like their disability. Their disability is not what is getting in the way of us meeting them where they’re at. It’s not their lack of communication. It’s not their meltdowns. It’s not the teachers that we’re dealing with in school districts and the pesky, family members, okay?
It’s not their confusing behaviors or their stubbornness or their rigidity. The thing that gets in the way is our own mental trauma. And this commonly shows up in the form of shoulds and shouldn’ts they should be doing this, they shouldn’t be doing that. This shouldn’t be happening.
Or it shows up as our judgment of them. Like they do something or they tell us something. We’re like, oh no, this is bad. And we kind of go into panic mode, or its judgment of ourself, I’m not a good enough parent because if I were, they would be doing this or they wouldn’t be doing that.
Or it’s beliefs like I don’t know what to do or nothing ever works. And then our brain starts to spin and finds evidence for why we don’t know what to do or why nothing works. And we can think of all the reasons and examples from the past of why things aren’t working.
Or it’s the thought of the what ifs, right? What’s going to happen if? And then our brains get super creative at finding all kinds of worst case scenarios to drum up and fabricate in our brains. And if any of this sounds familiar, you must have a human brain just like me.
The problem with drama is that it sends us down a rabbit hole of brain spin. Spin that just keeps feeding our lower brain threat response. Spin that keeps us distracted from the young person that’s right in front of us, that needs our mentoring and support.
It’s distraction from who they are and where they’re at and what’s going on for them. Awareness of their behavioral, emotional, and mental state is the thing that you need to be able to meet them where they’re at.
I encourage you to start meeting them- not diving into your brain’s. Drama. All that drama, the thoughts, the stories, the beliefs that keep your brain just playing on repeat keeps you in that spin. And instead of being present with your young person in that moment when it’s happening, when you meet them where they’re at, and you bring your focus to the here and now, you dial in. You tune into their mental, emotional, behavioral state. You tap into your intuition. You connect with them from a place of empathy for their experience.
And I can’t stress it enough what empathy does for them. I mean, think about what it does for you when someone is empathetic to you and really just hears and takes the time to understand and the best they can, right? That’s the best we can do. Even just taking that time and effort is so amazing in and of itself. And then we can start focusing on how can we mentor, how can we support, what can we do or not do, how do we back off? Like, I don’t need to do your laundry. You got it.
We get tuned in to what’s actually needed. If you find that your mental drama just keeps getting in the way and then you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed, come find me or find another coach. It can help so much to work through the same trauma thoughts and work through those and process through those so you can get to feeling good again and be able to be there for the people that you love and care about the way that you want to be.
I hope you find this helpful, and if you do, if you’re getting value and benefit from the show, I would love it. It would be the best birthday present to me if you would go and just take a minute and give us a five star review and just share a sentence or two about how this podcast has helped you or what it’s helping you with or an AHA that you’ve had from listening here.
That would be the best birthday present. I don’t need stuff. I would just love to have more people be able to find this information and get the help that we’re all needing. Let’s support each other in this.
So I hope you have a great week, and if you’re in New York, come see me. I’ll leave a link to the information about the Alt Fair and the show notes, and you can get the details on it. And take care.
[13:07] Debbie: 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 at jasondebbie.com.
