Speaker A: You. Welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast.
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.
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. We’re going to be talking about emotion regulation, skill building for this episode. And if you haven’t listened to my previous one on co regulation, go back and listen to that one. And I have heard from several of you that got a lot out of that episode and had new perspectives on it, and some of you hadn’t even heard the term before. So I’m glad that you’re finding some help in that one. And we’re going to continue to build on that topic in this episode for so many years.
When we were parenting, my oldest boys that we adopted from foster care, we got them when they were seven and eight, and they had so many challenges and issues and background of abuse and neglect. And we started pairing them. We were young parents taking them on, and we were doing everything we could to help them. And I would come up with these elaborate behavioral charts, sticker charts, okay, if you do your job and you do your homework and you don’t hit your brother. And we had all these different things, these kind of problematic behaviors that they were exhibiting that we were trying to address and change. And we would start a system and we would get into it, and it would be like we were all excited kind of that honeymoon period and, oh, this is going to be so helpful. We’re going to really do this. And we’d be all determined, and then we’d go along and reality would hit. It would be hard to implement. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t working like it did in the first week. And then pretty soon we’d realize this is not working. It’s not helping. We’re not able to follow through on it. It’s not doing what we thought. And so, oh, we must just have the wrong system. We need to try a different system to motivate our boys to behave better. And that was one of my first mistakes, thinking it was a motivation issue.
But then I would do like a token system and same thing, honeymoon period. Oh, this would be so great. We’d start doing it and we’d see these, like, a little bit of improvement in behavior and then reality would hit and it would be less effective, and it wasn’t working like it had the first week. And then we’d realize, oh my gosh, this is not working. And so then I would try again. And after many, many attempts at this, I started to realize that there was a pattern and it was about every three months or so. I was starting a new system and it was not working. And if I could go back with what I know now, it would have been a very different experience.
What I want to talk to you about today and the tools that I want to give you are going to have a big influence and positive effect long term. And it’s actually when you focus on this and work on this, things get easier to do and it gets more effective over time. Generally speaking, when we focus in on emotional regulation it builds our connection and relationship with our young person which when you have a stronger connection and you’re more attuned to them and their needs and where they’re at developmentally, your relationship improves and you end up doing so much less corrective kind of parenting. When there’s good strong connection, there’s so much less need for that. When there’s not a great relationship, then there’s lots more need for correction. This is a big contributor to building your relationship and it’s actually a lot easier than you think.
It feels sometimes hard or challenging when you’re first working on this or implementing it or trying to do it. But it’s easier than you think and it actually takes less time than you think. And for me, a lot less effort than a lot of these other external approaches that I grew up with and that a lot of people still try to teach or tout. When you work on the internal, the external stuff a lot of times works itself out. This is important. And when our kids don’t have the skill of emotional regulation, things get harder over time. The gap and the lag, developmental lag between them and their peers gets bigger and they struggle even more socially which leads to more emotional dysregulation. So over time, if we’re not focusing on this or helping them develop these skills, it will get harder and it can escalate and the consequences can worsen. And so I love focusing on this because you get such a great payoff for your efforts. Maybe not immediately like that little honeymoon period I was having with those token charts, but over time, big payoffs.
There’s a few things to understand that I want to share with you and then I’m going to actually get into some specific things that you can look at to actually do. The first thing is when we talk about emotional regulation, which means the ability to manage your emotions, right? To manage your nervous system threat survival response. And what you’re really doing when you’re managing that is like you’re managing the hormones and chemicals and things like the amount of adrenaline that gets released into your body. You’re managing how stressed your reaction is, right?
We often think when we talk about emotional regulation that it means being calm, right? If someone’s emotionally regulated, it means they’re calm. But that’s not actually accurate. When we talk about emotional regulation. It means that our energy level matches the circumstance or task at hand. Okay? So for a lot of our students at Techie for Life, our program mentoring program for neurodivergent young adults, we help them with their next steps. For a lot of our students that come in, they actually are low energy. They’re very, very calm. Like, almost so calm that they can’t get anything happening in their life. So their emotional regulation is like that other extreme where there’s little motivation and they can’t get themselves out of bed and they’re just frozen up or locked up. And so being emotionally regulated means being able to, like, hey, it’s time to go. It’s time to get out of bed. Let’s get moving. Let’s get things happening. That ability to bring energy to an environment, or if they are anxious, stressed uptight, to be able to down regulate, to be able to calm down. So the energy level matching is what really managing our emotions is about and being able to emotionally regulate to match that energy to what’s needed.
So the second thing when you look at developing emotional regulation skills is recognizing that negative emotions are part of the human experience and nothing’s gone wrong. If we’re having negative emotions, being emotionally regulated does not mean I never feel negative emotions. Humans are not supposed to be happy all the time. In fact, that would be extremely creepy if everybody was like, walking around with a smile on their face and always happy, happy, happy. My dog died, but I’m happy. No, we’re supposed to feel sad. We’re supposed to feel different emotions as part of the human experience. What makes being a human interesting? You would never go watch a movie and with just happy, smiley people, the whole movie like, that’s boring. Nobody wants to watch that. You want to watch someone struggle and the arc of the story and the different emotions that the movie takes you through, that’s what makes a movie interesting. And you emotionally connect to it because there’s an emotional experience with it.
So negative emotions are part of being human and actually part of emotional regulation is being able to get comfortable, or at least more comfortable with uncomfortable negative emotions. That’s part of being able to emotionally regulate, being able to sit with sadness and be in that sadness and feel it in your body and feel the experience of being sad or feel the experience of being disappointed. Those are normal, healthy, natural emotions to fill. So many of the challenges in our world right now that people go through and addictions and problems are because people are trying to get away from negative emotions and they don’t know how to just be in their emotions. So being able to emotionally regulate is being able to manage yourself in those emotions. And our young people are getting their cues from us. They’re watching. So if we freak out because we’re sad, oh, no, this is bad, I’m sad. They’re going to be like, oh my gosh, sad is bad. I don’t want to feel sad. The more we’re okay with our human emotions and being in them and allowing ourselves to experience those emotions, the more our young people can be able to feel comfortable, more comfortable in those uncomfortable negative emotions too. And sometimes it’s even like the happy, good emotions, being able to celebrate and feel good about something you’ve accomplished or something you’ve experienced or a positive thing that’s happened and be able to express that it’s okay to be happy and excited about things, right, the full range of human emotion. I just want to make sure that we keep that in mind when we think about emotional regulation.
And then the other thing in this that’s that’s important is when we’re practicing and wanting to support emotional regulation, skill building. I think the general tendency, I think there’s more of a tendency to want to try to fix things outside of us so that we can feel good inside and be emotionally regulated. And I want to encourage you to actually focus on embracing the emotions more than reducing. So there was a Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonagle, and she published a book called The Upside of Stress and talks about and shows the evidence for the positive benefit of embracing stress in our life. And when we focus on being able to handle stress and be in the stress and work through those emotions of stress and even recognize stress as being a positive part of our life and really a healthy life is going to have a certain level of stress, because that means you’re growing and developing and taking on challenges and life’s. Interesting that there’s much more positive impact there than just always focusing on reducing the stress. So learning how to lean into stress and work through it versus trying to just remove it and not have anything in our life that we feel stressed about. So I think there can be a real advantage if we’re trying to support that skill building of emotional regulation, to lean into the emotions of it and the stress of it and embrace it.
And then if we need to do things externally to reduce the stress, tackle that next. But lean into the embracing it first, sitting with it, being in it, being okay in it. Like this is a part of life, accepting that this is a part of life. And then if we need to take some of the demands or expectations off or adjust things or support ourselves externally more, then for sure. But I encourage you to look at that internal piece first. How do we do this? How do we actually support building the skills of being able to emotionally regulate?
The first one, the most crucial one, the most important one, I would say, is your relationship. Focusing on being warm and responsive in your relationship, connecting and being attuned to your young person being their safe place and their safe person in their life huge. When we have a safe person in our life, that person we can talk to or go to with any of our problems or challenges, and there’s zero judgment. They love us. We know they love us. They’re rooting for us. When you have a person like that in your life, you can handle the challenges and stresses so much easier than if you’re just feeling completely alone. So being that safe person for our young people and being in relationship with them where that you’re delighted to see them and you have unconditional positive regard for them, that when they walk in that room, you light up and you smile and you’re happy to see them, even if they’re a challenging kid, right? For them to experience that from us builds so much safety. That alone is huge. For them to be able to more emotionally regulate that there’s people that love and care about me and actually light up when they see me helps them know they’re safe in the world and that helps them have emotional regulation.
Now, we do look at environment. One of the things that you would look at to reduce stressors would be what is the environment and what’s going on? What’s triggering the stress? What’s triggering the emotional dysregulation? What are the patterns and looking at that and looking at maybe we reduce demands or we lower expectations or have more appropriate expectations for where they’re at developmentally. We might want to reduce environmental stressors for our autistic or neurodivergence if there’s a lot of busy, distracting things on the wall that can just create such a level of stress that they can’t emotionally regulate when it’s time to sit down and focus on something that takes mental exertion. So you might look at the environment that they’re in and are there stressors in that physically, you always want to do the checklist of, like, if they’re really emotionally dysregulated, are they hungry, angry, tired? Are there medications current? They forget to take a medication. If there are medication, how is their nutrition like some of those basics? Have they gotten exercise? Those basic physical environment or physical body needs? We want to make sure that those are being taken care of before we go to oh, no, they’re so dysregulated. We need to solve this problem for them. Maybe it’s just that they can’t manage that problem because they’re hungry or they’re super tired and they didn’t sleep well and they haven’t or they’ve missed a couple of days on their medication or whatever it might be. So you always want to kind of look at that.
And one of the ways to engage where they’re at stress wise and if we need to reduce some demands or adjust the environment that they’re in is looking at are they engaged and participating and good in their environment or are they avoidant shutting down or are they getting dysregulated on the other end of being really loud or angry or uptight and tensed up and that kind of thing. Relationship the environment. Maybe there are things we do to help reduce some of the stresses so they can emotionally regulate better.
We can also mentor ongoing skill development. So this can look like if you’re holding boundaries and what I mean by boundaries, not punishments or rewards or anything like that, but boundaries are what am I going to do with my time and resources and energy? What am I willing to do or not do? And I’m going to hold to those, right? I’m going to hold my boundaries, but holding them with love, lovingly. We don’t have to be angry when we hold boundaries. And if we are implementing consequences, are these natural consequences? Are they logical consequences? And when we implement those or we allow them, we’re not running in to rescue them and keep them from experiencing the natural or logical consequences. If we’re working with them in those consequences, we’re looking at, this is the natural consequence of the choices or what you’ve done, and I love you and I’m going to be with you in it and through it. So I’m not going to rescue you from them necessarily unless it’s really going to be damaging for them and I’m not going to just put them on to punish, right? I’m looking at. How can I support a young person as they experience and go through the natural and logical consequences that come with being a human on this planet? Being with them in that and through that helps them build emotional regulation skills to work through it and then learn from the experience and hopefully and maybe not repeat it again and develop some maturity through that. We want to practice emotional awareness, being aware of where we’re at emotionally and helping them notice where they’re at emotionally.
There was a study called the Tarantula Study, and it’s as awful as it sounds. This was brought to my attention by Dr. Neff, who’s an autistic and ADHD that’s also a psychologist. And I follow her on Instagram under Neurodivergent insights. And she talked about this study and I just love this. So the Tarantula study was psychologists from the University of California conducted an experiment with 88 participants who had a fear of spiders. And they were asked to get as close as they could to a spider and even touch it. And so in the study, they divided the participants up into four groups. They were given different prompts, okay, so different things that were often taught to help somebody be able to handle fears or to emotionally regulate. So the first group, they asked them to just label, just say, I am feeling whatever it is about the spider. I’m feeling frightened by the spider. Just label the emotion that they’re experiencing.
The second group was asked to reframe the experience of the spider. So to say something like, this spider can’t hurt me. So they’re afraid of the spider, thinking, the spider can hurt me. They were told to reframe it. The spider can’t hurt me. As they walked closer to the tarantula, some of you are like, oh, no way. Tarantulas look really big and scary, but they’re actually very gentle. The third group was distract, so it was like, think about anything else but the spider as you walk closer to the spider. So typical distraction technique. And then the fourth group was just asked to just simply exposure, right? Exposure exposure therapy. Just don’t say anything. Just go up to the spider.
Okay. So, of these four groups, one of them was able to get much closer for a longer time and show less symptoms of distress, like sweaty palms or anything that might show that they were really stressed about being close to that spider. Which one do you think it is? And it’s so interesting, but it’s the one where they labeled it just simply labeling the emotion that they were experiencing. I’m feeling frightened by this spider. That group was able to, one week later, get much closer with less distress to that spider. So what does that tell us? Being able to just have awareness of what emotion you’re experiencing can help you emotionally regulate and be able to handle stressful things. But the challenge is for our autistic and our neurodivergence because they have a hard time sometimes labeling their emotions.
A lot of times when I’m coaching students that are school techie for life, some of them have a really hard time being able to tell me what emotion they’re feeling and being able to tell me how they feel it or experience it in their body. They’re like, I don’t know where I feel it. They’re very disconnected. They’re very up in their head, and they’re not really attuned to their body. Being able to have the emotional vocabulary and help them have the awareness, because we can see the physical, what they look like. If they look stressed, maybe their shoulders are tensing up or their face is grimacing or their fists are clenched, but they don’t know what they’re emotionally experiencing. So sometimes they need our help to say, hey, you look really stressed or you look worried or you look anxious or you look embarrassed or whatever emotion it is that you’re kind of noticing. Hey, it seems like you’re feeling this helps them start to connect that physical experience of an emotion with a label, with being able to identify it, and that helps them actually be able to emotionally regulate. So I love that one. That really sticks out in my mind is that awful tarantula study. So next time you get near a spider, I want you to label the emotion that you’re experiencing.
Another thing that can help with building the skills of emotional regulation is when we have consistent, predictable routines at our school. Again, using this as an example, we have a schedule and they go and exercise four times a week and it helps build in that predictability they know that’s going to happen. It’s just what we do and it kind of relegates some of that to their subconscious. They know what to expect and what to do. So that can be really helpful. It can help someone keep exercising if they know I’m going to exercise at this time, on this day. And so that can help reduce some of that stress and help emotional regulation. But we also want them to be able to handle the changes, right? Because life throws changes at us and things don’t go as planned or we have to adjust or change.
One of the things that you can just build into things and that’s what we do is with the exercise, we build in variety within that structure. So they’re exercising differently each of those days. Often they’re going to the gym one day or they’re going on a walk or a hike one day and then the next time they’re going and swimming or they’re going to go play pickleball. So we’re building in variety within the structure. That can be really, really helpful if there’s some consistent things that you do as a family or if you’re a teacher in your classroom that kids can count on. And then we build in variety within that. And then if there’s a change up, we maybe front load that or just know that they’re going to maybe struggle through that change. And they’re going to need some co-regulation. They’re going to need some support from us to help them co-regulate, to be able to manage the stress of that change. For our autistic neurodivergents, that’s a big challenge a lot of them have. So we want to be able to have that variety. There’s a couple of other things like I did mention exercise earlier.
Exercise is huge for emotional regulation. Building a culture of getting up and moving or taking breaks or we as a family, we go for walks after dinner or we always are in some type of sport or physical activity and you build a culture around that, of this is what we do. We move our bodies. Our bodies need movement to be able to function properly.
And then along with exercising, is breathing. Like simply breathing is such an important skill and tool to use to be able to motion and regulate. I love to say, oh, I’m feeling really stressed, give me a minute, I’m going to take a few breaths and I model that, okay? And there’s different breathing techniques you can try. The latest one I heard about that’s actually supposedly outperforming the other techniques is to breathe in like quickly and then breathe in again. Another quick one even a little bit more, and really fill your lungs and your diaphragm, your stomach with air, with oxygen, and then to slowly breathe it out. And doing that for like, five minutes can have incredible benefits to help us emotionally regulate and reduce stress and be in almost like a reset your emotional state, reset your nervous system. So we can model that. We can show it, we can incorporate into our life, and our kids will pick up on that. So those are some fun things.
Oh, the last one I wanted to share, which is so interesting when I was doing some research for this topic, is how childhood games really teach emotional regulation skills. So if you think about those games that you play out in the yard and like freeze tag, having to freeze and wait, that’s emotionally regulating. Like, I’ve got to hold my energy and freeze, or red light, green light, we’re going, and then we’re stopping. We’re going, we’re stopping. Simon says, freeze dance. All of these fun childhood games, those are teaching emotional regulation skills in a fun way, in a non threatening way. A family game night, playing board games, there’s all kinds of it’s in a fun environment where we’re practicing, waiting our turn. We’re practicing winning and losing. We’re practicing the interaction. So there’s some really great skill building that can happen in fun environments and through play. Just some ideas to get you started. This is obviously not an exhaustive list. There’s lots of different things. But just to get you thinking about ways to be able to incorporate that emotional skill building that have nothing to do with correction or punishing or consequences, just being a human and practicing these skills.
Now, you might be thinking, well, what if this isn’t working? What if my kid isn’t learning this? Or I’ve been trying and it’s just too hard. They can’t do it. They’re just so emotionally dysregulated. Some kids have a harder time with this. And so I want to offer to you that know that it does take time for some kids. Some, you’ll see immediate changes. You start implementing some of this and co regulating one of them when they’re stressed, recognizing when they’re stressed and being there with them in it and helping them calm. You’ll see immediate results. Some kids, it takes longer, and sometimes it’s through trial and error. What’s going to work for you, what works for your kiddo. But I want to encourage you that it will get easier. And as you practice, you’ll know what to do quicker. And over time, they’re going to make improvements. And so I just want you to remember that we’re playing the long game here. A child learning to walk, and they fall down. They don’t just give up, right? Like, they keep at it. And just that process of focusing in on emotional regulation skill building, if we’re focused on it and we’re helping them learn these skills and even talking about, hey, I want to help you be able to handle stresses, and these are some things, and let’s practice some different things. And how does that feel to you. We’re playing the long game.
And so sometimes it’s a little bit of trial error, sometimes it takes longer than other times. Sometimes you’ll try something that works really quickly and just know that it’s a process. And I don’t want you to give up on it, because this is an important skill and it’s worth it. It’s worth the work, it’s worth the effort in focusing in on this. And of all the things you can focus in on this one’s, one of those easier ones that you get that bigger payoff. So many positive outcomes for kids that can develop the ability to emotionally regulate. So I hope this is helpful and I hope it gets you thinking. And if you’re having success with this, I would love to hear from you. You can reach out to me on Facebook or Instagram. I’d love to hear if you’re having some wins with this. And I hope you have an amazing week and take some emotionally regulating deep breaths and exhales and have a great time. 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.
