[00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast.
[00:06] Speaker B: 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] Speaker A: And I’m Debbie Grygla, a certified life coach. And maybe most importantly, we’re also parent to our own atypical Young Adults Friends.
Hello. Welcome. I’m so glad to have you here. Jason and I have had a very busy month. One of the things that we got to do recently was attend the autism symposium up in Sun Valley, Idaho, this year. And Sun Valley feels like an ironic name because it was covered in snow, and while we were there, it snowed four inches overnight. But it was beautiful. Beautiful area, beautiful resort.
But what a great conference, and it’s so neat to see the research and the development and the understanding and the collaboration that’s happening on behalf of our autistic and our neurodivergence and their needs. Jason was able to co-present with Jack Hinman of Engage Young Adult Transitions, and they talked about attachment and how it overlaps with autistic and neurodivergent challenges and needs. And we got to hear from some great speakers and different presentations, and there wasn’t a ton of new information for me, but it was so great to hear different topics from different angles and different emphasis.
And one of the big ones that keeps coming through is what I and it’s been on my mind a lot. And it’s this topic around co regulation. And so that’s what I want to talk to you about here is co-regulation and why it matters and what it is and how it impacts our Autistic and our neurodivergence. At Techie for Life, our program, our mentoring program for autistic and neurodivergent young adults where we help them and mentor them with their next steps. We have had students in the past who have gotten very emotionally dysregulated, and sometimes it gets pretty extreme. I mean, once in a while we’ll have a student that just really loses it. Like, as my sister in law likes to call it, they just lose their shiz and break things or get very destructive or verbally aggressive. And so we have to be prepared to handle that and be able to help students with that and help them work through that and learn from it and grow and progress.
And you can see where as a young adult doing that, it can really create problems for them, sometimes really serious consequences to that. And then we often deal with students on the other end of it where they are very emotionally dysregulated, but in a paralyzed, stuck way. For example, they really want to take college classes and complete a class and they have every desire to do it. But they’ve had such a history of failures and struggles and rejection that just walking up and opening the door to walk into that classroom is so terrifying and just they get so frozen and so emotionally dysregulated around that that they can’t attend class. And they need a lot more support and mentoring to be able to kind of get over that hump.
And so it’s really important to understand that self regulation skills are critical. In fact, many, many studies are showing that self regulation skills are what actually contribute to a healthy, fulfilling life, right? Emotional regulation skills contribute to healthy romantic, family, friend and peer relationships. And emotional regulation skills lead to better experiences in the academic settings. And emotional regulation skills help us be able to handle challenges more easily, help us feel more cooperative and just really contribute to that overall sense of well being that I think we all want to have. And we want it for our young people that we love.
When young people have poor self regulation skills, it tends to impact just about every area of their life. And over time, it actually really contributes to mental health challenges and issues. And for our autistic and our neurodivergents, they struggle, right? They have more challenges with emotionally regulating and they need more support. And this is an important area that we can actually really offer support in.
So I want to talk to you about what emotional regulation is first. Let’s start with that. So, emotional regulation is simply the ability to manage emotions and impulses, okay? It’s the ability to manage the lower brain’s, limbic system and nervous system. And it’s that threat response, survival response system, the ability to regulate the lower brain.
And there’s a lot of factors that contribute to why someone might have challenges in that area above and beyond a typical person. So they might have trauma, right? And there’s different types of trauma. Big T trauma which is like a big traumatic event or little T traumas where it’s like smaller traumas consistently over time. And when you think about our autistic and neurodivergence, that’s actually really common to have some big traumas like traumatic events, bullying incidences or major school academic failures or social rejections or just maybe being abused or neglected because of family situations or school situations.
And then also those little T traumas of like always feeling left out, being treated different, being made fun of, not being able to keep up as they get older, exhaustion from kind of that comparison fatigue that a lot of them struggle with is what we call it. And so that trauma piece can really be impact and really imprints on the brain. Negative emotional experiences really create an impact kind of imprint in the brain and can make it hard to emotionally regulate because the brain is trying to anticipate danger. So when it’s had a dangerous experience, it’s trying to anticipate danger and it can get very emotionally dysregulated or it can be hard to regulate.
Brain injury can cause issues with emotional regulation, disabilities, learning differences, a lot of the traits of being autistic and neurodivergent have to do with executive functioning skills. And executive functioning happens in the prefrontal cortex and often they will have different challenges with the functioning of the prefrontal cortex or even just the actual responses in the nervous system. And then you have things like being sensitive to being overstimulated or needing more stimulation. So if they’re under stimulated or they’re overstimulated, they’re going to have more trouble being able to emotionally regulate.
So there’s lots of things that can contribute to why someone gets emotionally dysregulated. Now the next important piece that I want you to understand is that there’s three developmental stages of self regulation. So the first one is we could call other regulation. And that’s typically in that developmental stage of infants. They come into this world, they have very sensitive nervous systems and very underdeveloped brain pathways and they are not able to regulate themselves. Even temperature wise, they don’t have great temperature regulation, they don’t have emotional regulation skills. So they need comforting, they need someone to come in and take care of them and feed them and nurture them and take care of their different needs. And it’s actually really positive thing that they have sensitive nervous systems because when they feel hungry they really cry and they let you know when something’s wrong and it helps the caregiver to be able to tend to the infant. So that first stage of emotional self regulation skills is actually completely dependent on someone outside of us as an infant, we’re dependent on our caregiver.
The second stage is called co regulation. And that’s what I really want to emphasize in this episode. And that stage is where they’re starting to have some self regulation skills but then they also need outside support. So it’s not as intensive as an infant needs, but they’re still a need, they’re still developing regulation skills and so they rely on the people around them to help them be able to regulate. We call that co regulation. We as caregivers play a large role in the development of regulation skills and then as someone progresses in their development, then they develop their own self regulation skills where they’re able to just self regulate. It’s this process of very dependent on outside of us other regulation and then co-regulating together and then eventually developing that skill to be able to regulate on your own.
Now when we look at autistic and neurodivergents who have brain difficulties already in place, right, and extra challenges sensory wise, socially wise, they have more co regulation support needs. They’re going to need more co regulation than a typical brained child. Often. Not always, but often. And so it’s going to take a little more from the caregiver to be able and the people around someone that’s autistic or neurodivergent to help them regulate.
The other challenge is they often are going to need that co-regulation support for a much longer period of time. It’s going to probably take them longer to be able to develop those skills. So we have to keep that in mind. And so that’s our role when we go into this as a mentor and support parenting a child or if you have an autistic or neurodivergent in your classroom, they are going to need more supports and they’re going to need them for a longer time and they’re going to need them. I mean, we have young adults and really we all get emotionally dysregulated, but the level of needing that co regulation tends to be higher for our Autistic and our neurodivergence.
The other piece in this to understand is that behavioral compliance focused approaches that maybe you’ve been raised with in your home and it’s kind of seeped into your parenting style or very common in classroom settings, these behavioral compliance focused approaches can actually exacerbate Dysregulation. In fact, they actually sort of push on nervous system threat response when we implement punishments, it’s kind of fear based and it’s to kind of scare them and this is bad. If you don’t do this thing, you’re going to have a bad punishment. That creates a nervous system threat response trigger in them.
Rewards also do that. It creates a sense of like, I have to have that reward to survive. And it’s actually a nervous system survival response. And so if those kinds of approaches are being implemented in your home or in your school, you’re actually exacerbating Dysregulation. And sometimes those approaches, a teacher will even up the ante or we as a parent will up the ante. Well, if you don’t calm down, then I’m going to ground you from your game system or take your screen away. And what we’re actually doing is we are co-escalating instead of helping them co regulate. So we really want to be aware of that.
The other issue with behavioral compliance focused approaches is you’re creating a power differential. I’m above you, you’re below me. I’m putting my will on you. I want you to do this thing. I’m going to punish you if you don’t or I’m going to reward you if you do. And it creates a power differential. It is a demand and it feels often like a threat, especially for an Autistic or neurodivergent who’s already kind of a little bit in that nervous system threat response, right? Like that little t trauma. They’re already kind of in a nervous system activated state and then someone comes in with demands or from a position of power trying to change our behavior. That can create a nervous system threat response where someone gets very emotionally dysregulated. And the problem too with that is for them to comply creates a lot of stress. So they’re having to willpower their way through mask. They’re having to people please. It creates a lot of stress. And so what happens over time is that nervous system dysregulation just gets more and more and it can cause a lot of mental health issues later on, so it can cause mental health challenges later on.
We see that a lot at Techie for Life, students that are highly anxious, and then they get depressed. What happens over time is they just quit. They can’t meet up to the high expectations or achieve the awards, and they keep getting punished. They just give up, or they start getting angry and resentful and fighting back. The other challenge with these behavioral compliance approaches is that when you’re implementing punishments around behaviors that they already maybe don’t have the capacity to actually do, like, they really struggle with emotional dysregulation.
So if they get angry and they break a pencil or they throw something or they have an outburst because they’re emotionally dysregulated and they can’t control that, they’re literally in a state of it’s just this reactive state that correction, that negative punishment imprints on their brain and imprints around correction. And so then they have this negative experience with correction, and it creates problems for them where they become very intolerant of any kind of rejection or feedback or correction because it’s such a negative experience that they’ll avoid it. They’re not receptive to it. That really creates problems because they do need mentoring and support, and they need to be able to have feedback, we all do, to be able to grow and progress and develop.
And so if they have this negative experience around behavior like correction, I mean, down the road, it really starts to impact them. We have a lot of students at our school that are so sensitive to any kind of feedback or advice or correction, pointing out something. They’re so sensitive, and it takes a lot of work to be able to build up tolerance, to be able to handle, like, yeah, I’m a human and I make mistakes. We all do to really emphasize that because we can’t grow and progress unless we’re willing to make mistakes.
You can’t learn how to do something new and do it perfectly the first time. There’s going to be a lot of mistakes before you start to maybe get the hang of it. So that’s one of those other challenges when we’re punishing as we create such a negative experience, and it’s a very nervous system escalating dysregulated response that we trigger when we use those kinds of approaches.
So how to co-regulate, how to support them in co regulation, there’s lots to that. I’m just going to touch on a few, and then I’ll do more in another episode. But one of the biggest ones is to be aware of when someone is getting dysregulated, you want to catch it when they start to show signs of it. We don’t want to wait till they’re in a full blown, very emotionally dysregulated meltdown state. Okay. We want to catch it sooner. So it takes practice and being in tune to someone to be able to recognize, oh, my goodness, I think they’re getting a little stressed. I can tell they start doing that thing that nervous tick or they’re starting to avoid or maybe they’re getting a little agitated and we start to pay attention to those cues that they’re getting Dysregulated and you can intervene. Intervene sooner. We don’t want to wait. It’s always going to go better if we can catch it sooner if possible.
The second thing is you’ve got to be aware of your own Dysregulation. So catching when you’re starting to get stressed and one of the things I want you to watch out for is to be aware of that natural tendency that we all have to want to try to fix the kid so that we can regulate. So if I’m feeling stressed and I want my child to behave differently so that I can feel better, I am expecting the child to create my emotional regulation and we’ve got that backwards.
We actually want to stay emotionally regulated or become regulated again, rely on our own self regulation skills and then we can go in and be able to be supportive to that child so we can’t expect children to change so that we can feel regulated. We actually have to regulate first and then we can go in and support their regulation. Now, if you’re thinking, what if my kid like I’ve done all these things and I’m offering co regulation and I’m trying to support them and they’re still just so emotionally dysregulated, I want to offer to you that it can take time. We’re playing the long game.
There are things that you can do and you might problem solve. What are things we can do to their environment to help them be more emotionally regulated? Maybe removing some demands, maybe taking some things off their plate or the environment, maybe it’s too overstimulating or maybe it’s not stimulating enough. So there’s things you can do in their environment to help also.
Now, if you’re noticing that you’re very emotionally dysregulated and you’re getting triggered and maybe it’s around certain things or certain times a day or certain things that your child does routine or young adult. If you’re noticing that you are very dysregulated, and you’re having a hard time getting emotionally regulated and self regulating. I want to offer to you that there’s nothing wrong. It’s okay like you’re human. And if you’re struggling with this, I highly encourage you to go seek a good therapist or a good coach or support friends or family that you trust and get some support in that area and help look at it. Take a look at it and figure out why you’re getting triggered, when you’re getting triggered and what are some ways that you can regulate and take care of yourself so that you can stay more emotionally regulated. It’s too important to not address this. Our young people need our help. They need that co regulation to be able to develop hopefully the skills to be able to self regulate later on.
That’s what I’ve got for you in this episode. This is an ongoing topic and I’ll have more in my next episode about ways to help support skill development. Hope you have an amazing week and 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 at JasonDebbie.com. That’s JasonDebbie.com.
