Speaker A: 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.
Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast. I’m Jason Grygla, and I’m going to be speaking to you today. It’s been a while. We’ve been busy and having a lot of great experiences. It’s good to be back with you. I’d like to talk to you today about one of my least proud moments as a father. One of the things I really valued as a father, and I still do, is helping my children become competent and capable and giving them experience.
So one Christmas, I decided that it was going to be a really great idea to buy my son a bicycle. It was going to be a lower end of mountain bike, but something with some gears. And instead of having the store put it together, I said, no, no, leave it in the box. Because I want me and my son on Christmas morning to have the experience of building the bike together so that I can show him how to inflate tires, how to put the chain back on if it falls off, how to adjust the brakes. And he was probably nine or ten.
And well, it was a great idea until it wasn’t. And so what happened was on Christmas morning, one son got a skateboard and the other son got the bike, and some of their friends on the street got bikes and other things they could ride around immediately. And so when Lee, who was my son, opened the box with a bike in it, he was perplexed because he couldn’t just jump on and ride it. And I said, Lee, I got your mini tool set, and I wanted to build this with you together so that I could help you figure out how to use it and how to make it work.
So already he was a little probably frustrated because everybody else went right outside to play on their new Christmas toys. And Lee and I were in the garage, and there I was feeling guilty that it wasn’t ready for him to just get on and ride. And so it went from, I’m excited to have a great experience with my son and give him some building experience and some confidence to I’m feeling guilty, he’s impatient. I’m wanting to hurry and get the bike done so he can go out and play.
And it shifted from having wanting a great experience together to the performative behavioral action of get the bike fixed, get it finished, and get it out. And my son, being autistic, didn’t know how to help well, didn’t remember which tools were which wasn’t very handy. And that was a perfect storm for probably one of the worst Christmas experiences we’ve ever had. It went from, let’s hurry and get this done, to, dad, I hate this bike, and I’m never going to drive it. In about 10 minutes. That’s all it took. And he didn’t drive it for probably two or three months. He didn’t touch the bike because it was such a negative reminder of our experience.
And I can tell you it went wrong immediately when I said, okay, I need you to get me a Phillips head screwdriver, not a flathead. And he came back with a flathead, and I was totally impatient, and I said, I’ve taught you the difference, like, 20 times. It’s the other kind. And then from there, it just got worse, and eventually he threw the tool down. I felt bad because he wasn’t out riding his bike anyway. I was upset. I got impatient. I yelled. He got upset, he yelled. We both completely lost our cool. And I went from a higher brain, creative, mentor thinking situation in my brain to a lower brain, highly reactive, not regulated situation where I caused us to have a horrible experience.
Now, my son was already going from higher brain to lower brain, excited about a new bike, but also everyone else is out riding their bikes, and I’m not. It was my job to create a positive experience because I’m the parent and he’s only eight or nine years old, and I was immature, and I didn’t stay in a good mental state. When we go into lower brain, we become reactive, we become selfish. We start to think of tasks, and we make people into objects. Instead of focusing on the relationship, and we start focusing on behaviors and the short term immediate outcome of, am I going to get this done? Versus am I going to have a long term relationship and benefit.
The lower brain is a horribly reactive, unwise, immature, negative, destructive place to be. There is almost hardly anything that’s good that comes out of the lower brain. If the lower brain kicks in and says, Danger, look out, that’s great. But if we stay in the lower brain just trying to survive and react, it never goes well. Our legs freeze up if we’re literally in danger of being eaten by a mountain lion or a lion.
I watched a seal on Instagram, a little video clip running after someone on the beach, and it scared them so much that their legs wouldn’t move, and they fell over. And the seal was still, like, 20 yards away, but they couldn’t get their feet underneath them. And as soon as they stood up, they fell over again because their legs wouldn’t work. It was like a nightmare. And watching them in their lower brain, in their fight or flight, being so paralyzed that they couldn’t run, made me laugh so hard at how silly the whole thing is.
And now I look back at that experience with my son Lee and the bike, and I think how sad and how silly I was that I allowed such trivial, meaningless things to dictate whether or not I had a positive experience. I wanted to spend time with my son, I wanted to have a positive experience, and that would have built our relationship. But instead I spent time with my son and had a negative experience, which actually was more harmful than not being with my son at all.
Those are the two parts of building any relationship, is the time you spend together a lot or a little, and the experience you have either positive or negative. And I had overall trying to raise my boys, the intensive negative experiences did so much harm and damage because they were in their lower brain and not regulated, and it allowed me to be in my lower brain and not be regulated. That our positive experiences were far and few between compared to what they could have been. As much as I wanted to be a good father, I was not good at it. I had my moments and I’m not kicking myself. I did the best I could for the time, but I didn’t know then what I know now, and I really appreciate what I know now, but I feel bad for my boys because they were who I cut my teeth on.
As a parent, I wanted to just tell that story and have a great example of what it means to have positive experiences, to stay emotionally regulated, to ensure that we build relationships of influence and not allow ourselves to just be tossed around by our emotions. They aren’t real. They aren’t necessarily healthy. It’s easy to not be intentional with our emotions and our experiences, and it takes a lot of maturity and wherewithal to conquer them and to use the wind and the waves to push our sailboats in the direction that we want them to go.
I hope you do better and I hope you learn quickly how awesome it is to be able to control our regulation in our emotional states and choose to take the high road and have positive experiences. And that’s all I wanted to share with you today. And thanks for joining and we’ll talk to you again really soon. Bye.
Speaker A: 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.
