As the new school year approaches, most autism parents focus on the tactical preparation: reviewing the IEP, adjusting sleep schedules, and buying school supplies. Those steps matter, but they are only half of what you need. In this first episode of the Back to School series, Lisa talks about the other half (preparing yourself) and the mindset that shapes how much energy you carry into every IEP meeting, every phone call from school, and every decision you make this year.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why tactical preparation is only half of what you need before the school year begins, and why the mindset you bring to it matters just as much.
- How bracing yourself for everything that could go wrong keeps your nervous system stuck in fear and drains the energy you will need once the year is actually underway.
- The three mindset shifts (moving from bracing to acceptance, moving from fear to focus, and then practicing both again and again) that help you move through the school year with more resilience.
Resources mentioned:
Listen Here:
Transcript:
You are listening to episode two hundred and ten of The Autism Mom Coach Back to School Series: Setting Yourself Up for Success This School Year.
Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. I am so glad you’re here and I hope you’re doing well. It’s August which means the twenty twenty-six twenty seven school year is days or weeks away depending on where you live. There are lots of tips and tricks out there about how to prepare your child for the new school year. Create a schedule, shift the bedtime routine, buy school supplies, review the IEP just to name a few.
All of this is important, but these are what I will call tactical steps, and tactical steps are just half of the equation of what you need to do before the new school year, not just so you can prepare your child, but so that you can prepare yourself. This isn’t just their school year, it’s your school year too.
Because let’s face it, as an autism parent, you are intimately involved in the ins and outs of your child’s education and their daily experience, both at home and at school.
That is why in this series I am going to lean heavily into the mindset that you need as the autism parent in the new school year. Yes, I’m going to give you plenty of tactics, but again, those tactics are only one half of the equation, and in my opinion, they’re not even the most important.
That is because as autism parents, we are no strangers to action. We take tons of action all of the time. I’m concerned about burnout. I’m concerned about the energy that you are bringing to these actions.
What is behind the actions? If your actions are fueled by fear and anxiety and dread, they are going to feel heavier, more burdensome to you, and it will lead to burnout faster.
And so in this series, I want to shift you into a new mindset, a new energy as you enter the new school year so that you can show up over and over again for yourself and for your child
Now, I have to admit that for years and years, I was all about the action. As time went on though, and my son got more complicated and advocating for him got more complex, this had to change. I don’t wanna say I was forced to shift from action to mindset, but that’s what happened. Hitting rock bottom over and over again and not knowing what to do, I had to figure out a different way of doing it.
I needed to shift from bracing for what was next and all of the what-ifs to focusing on the present moment and what is actually in my control. And I’m still doing this. Yes, my son is 18 years old, but he will be in the school system until he is 22. And I also have many clients whose children are still in school,
whether they are entering kindergarten or taking their first college courses
In this episode, I am going to share with you the three shifts that I had to make and that I teach my clients so that you can move from bracing yourself to focusing on the present moment and what you can control. And what I’m hoping for you is that this perspective and this shift in mindset will give you more energy to do all of the things that you want to do, to take all of the actions, to be the responsive and resilient parent that our autistic kids need.
Before we get to those three shifts, I want to talk a little bit more about bracing yourself. Bracing is a fear response. It’s the tightness in your chest and the flip-flopping in your stomach when you so much as think about the school year ahead. Maybe you’re walking down the aisle at Target and you see the big school supply sign, or you get a message from the administration, and suddenly you feel tense and tight all over.
In those moments when you find yourself bracing, I want you to stop, and I want you to take a deep breath. And from there, I want you to just notice, what are you telling yourself in those moments? , If you’re anything like me or my clients, it’s something like, “Oh, no, here we go again. I hope this year goes okay. I hope my son likes his teacher. I hope my daughter’s one-on-one aide gets her. What if I get a phone call to pick them up from school? What am I going to do? Am I going to have to leave work?
What if I don’t get everything I want on the IEP? Do I need to hire an advocate? Do I need to hire an attorney?” You see all of those thoughts that come up, and it’s no wonder you’re bracing yourself. And so when that happens, I just want you to just take a deep breath and start to notice.
You might feel the urge to start catastrophizing and thinking about all the ways and things that could go wrong and what’ll happen and what then, what if. I want you to resist that urge because that is the tricky thing about bracing yourself.
To your stressed out nervous system, this bracing might feel responsible, and it might feel like preparation because you’re a mom who’s been through hard school years, so you’re running through everything that could go wrong, and you might feel like you’re getting ahead of it. But that is not what is happening at all when you are bracing.
When you are bracing, you’re keeping yourself stuck in this fear loop You’re not making decisions, you’re just creating more stress in your own body. A what if is a question with no answer, so your brain fills it in with the worst case over and over, and it makes you pay the emotional cost of that worst case scenario right now when it hasn’t happened and may never happen.
You’re spending the energy that you’re going to need during the school year spinning in fear right now. This is what leads to burnout
So what to do? Shift number one. What is the alternative to bracing for impact? Acceptance. Acceptance is you telling yourself that, “Hey, shit will happen, and no matter how much you prepare, plan, or worry yourself sick, you’re not going to be able to stop it by scaring the crap out of yourself right now.”
In fact, the more that you do that right now, the less able you will be to respond in a grounded, logical manner when it does happen
And that’s the funny thing about acceptance is we tend to view it as something that is passive and really it is an active decision every single time. You have to be conscious, aware, and purposeful to be in acceptance mode. It’s not something that just happens. Now, I was thinking about this in terms of bracing yourself, like the physical act of bracing yourself because I was listening to a podcast recently about the Netflix documentary called The Crash.
Long story short, it’s about a teenager who crashes her car into the side of a brick building and kills two of her passengers. What caught my attention was that in this podcast, I think it was Nancy Grace was asking the experts about the injuries, and they were opining on what the injuries may or may not have been, depending on whether or not the passengers had braced themselves.
And what they said was that bracing before the impact would have created worse, more catastrophic injuries to the body than if it had stayed loose or even unaware
And when you think about that, it’s fascinating because why would you brace? To protect yourself. That’s what we do physically, and that’s what we do emotionally. And the way we do it emotionally usually is by scaring the crap out of ourselves ahead of time, thinking that we’re preparing ourselves for the thing if it happens, or maybe if we scare ourselves enough ahead of time, it won’t happen.
Bracing yourself for the fear or the disappointment, though, of something that might happen does not make you feel any better, and it certainly does not make you any more capable of responding when it does happen. In fact, it makes it worse because you’ve already lived through the experience in your body over and over before the thing even happens, and then you have to live it again for real.
So what does acceptance look like when it comes to an autism parent preparing for back to school? First, this is not a laissez-faire attitude like, “Hey, let’s just see what happens.” You’re still going to do the things. You’re going to create the schedule, create the routine, review the IEP, connect with the staff and the teachers.
We’re still going to take the action, but you’re going to let go of the idea that the school year should go smoothly, whatever you define as smoothly. We’re gonna let go of the idea that there won’t be challenges, that there won’t be things that come from left field that you can never have imagined.
And because we’re letting go of the idea that those things aren’t going to happen or shouldn’t happen, we’re gonna stop pretending that we can control them ahead of time. And so with this decision, what you’re really deciding to do is let go of all of the extra energy and brain power you’re devoting to the what-ifs, to the catastrophizing, to the scaring yourself
And the result is you shift your energy. You can finally shift your energy from what if to if then. What if keeps you spinning in place. If then gives you direction and forward-moving action
Which brings us to shift number two
Instead of running the default thoughts and emotions that keep you braced and pull you out of acceptance, you are going to choose on purpose what you want to think and feel going into this new school year, so that these thoughts, these feelings, this energy is what drives your actions keeping you nimble and enabling you to move through the year with less resistance
So let’s just start with the thoughts. “When you are bracing yourselves, check in. What are you thinking?” It’s those thoughts that are creating the emotions that are resulting in you feeling tight and tense. Those thoughts like, “I can’t handle this.nt.
That is because as autism parents, we are no strangers to action. We take tons of action all of the time. I’m concerned about burnout. I’m concerned about the energy that you are bringing to these actions.
What is behind the actions? If your actions are fueled by fear and anxiety and dread, they are going to feel heavier, more burdensome to you, and it will lead to burnout faster.
And so in this series, I want to shift you into a new mindset, a new energy as you enter the new school year so that you can show up over and over again for yourself and for your child
Now, I have to admit that for years and years, I was all about the action. As time went on though, and my son got more complicated and advocating for him got more complex, this had to change. I don’t wanna say I was forced to shift from action to mindset, but that’s what happened. Hitting rock bottom over and over again and not knowing what to do, I had to figure out a different way of doing it.
I needed to shift from bracing for what was next and all of the what-ifs to focusing on the present moment and what is actually in my control. And I’m still doing this. Yes, my son is 18 years old, but he will be in the school system until he is 22. And I also have many clients whose children are still in school,
whether they are entering kindergarten or taking their first college courses
In this episode, I am going to share with you the three shifts that I had to make and that I teach my clients so that you can move from bracing yourself to focusing on the present moment and what you can control. And what I’m hoping for you is that this perspective and this shift in mindset will give you more energy to do all of the things that you want to do, to take all of the actions, to be the responsive and resilient parent that our autistic kids need.
Before we get to those three shifts, I want to talk a little bit more about bracing yourself. Bracing is a fear response. It’s the tightness in your chest and the flip-flopping in your stomach when you so much as think about the school year ahead. Maybe you’re walking down the aisle at Target and you see the big school supply sign, or you get a message from the administration, and suddenly you feel tense and tight all over.
In those moments when you find yourself bracing, I want you to stop, and I want you to take a deep breath. And from there, I want you to just notice, what are you telling yourself in those moments? , If you’re anything like me or my clients, it’s something like, “Oh, no, here we go again. I hope this year goes okay. I hope my son likes his teacher. I hope my daughter’s one-on-one aide gets her. What if I get a phone call to pick them up from school? What am I going to do? Am I going to have to leave work?
What if I don’t get everything I want on the IEP? Do I need to hire an advocate? Do I need to hire an attorney?” You see all of those thoughts that come up, and it’s no wonder you’re bracing yourself. And so when that happens, I just want you to just take a deep breath and start to notice.
You might feel the urge to start catastrophizing and thinking about all the ways and things that could go wrong and what’ll happen and what then, what if. I want you to resist that urge because that is the tricky thing about bracing yourself.
To your stressed out nervous system, this bracing might feel responsible, and it might feel like preparation because you’re a mom who’s been through hard school years, so you’re running through everything that could go wrong, and you might feel like you’re getting ahead of it. But that is not what is happening at all when you are bracing.
When you are bracing, you’re keeping yourself stuck in this fear loop You’re not making decisions, you’re just creating more stress in your own body. A what if is a question with no answer, so your brain fills it in with the worst case over and over, and it makes you pay the emotional cost of that worst case scenario right now when it hasn’t happened and may never happen.
You’re spending the energy that you’re going to need during the school year spinning in fear right now. This is what leads to burnout
So what to do? Shift number one. What is the alternative to bracing for impact? Acceptance. Acceptance is you telling yourself that, “Hey, shit will happen, and no matter how much you prepare, plan, or worry yourself sick, you’re not going to be able to stop it by scaring the crap out of yourself right now.”
In fact, the more that you do that right now, the less able you will be to respond in a grounded, logical manner when it does happen
And that’s the funny thing about acceptance is we tend to view it as something that is passive and really it is an active decision every single time. You have to be conscious, aware, and purposeful to be in acceptance mode. It’s not something that just happens. Now, I was thinking about this in terms of bracing yourself, like the physical act of bracing yourself because I was listening to a podcast recently about the Netflix documentary called The Crash.
Long story short, it’s about a teenager who crashes her car into the side of a brick building and kills two of her passengers. What caught my attention was that in this podcast, I think it was Nancy Grace was asking the experts about the injuries, and they were opining on what the injuries may or may not have been, depending on whether or not the passengers had braced themselves.
And what they said was that bracing before the impact would have created worse, more catastrophic injuries to the body than if it had stayed loose or even unaware
And when you think about that, it’s fascinating because why would you brace? To protect yourself. That’s what we do physically, and that’s what we do emotionally. And the way we do it emotionally usually is by scaring the crap out of ourselves ahead of time, thinking that we’re preparing ourselves for the thing if it happens, or maybe if we scare ourselves enough ahead of time, it won’t happen.
Bracing yourself for the fear or the disappointment, though, of something that might happen does not make you feel any better, and it certainly does not make you any more capable of responding when it does happen. In fact, it makes it worse because you’ve already lived through the experience in your body over and over before the thing even happens, and then you have to live it again for real.
So what does acceptance look like when it comes to an autism parent preparing for back to school? First, this is not a laissez-faire attitude like, “Hey, let’s just see what happens.” You’re still going to do the things. You’re going to create the schedule, create the routine, review the IEP, connect with the staff and the teachers.
We’re still going to take the action, but you’re going to let go of the idea that the school year should go smoothly, whatever you define as smoothly. We’re gonna let go of the idea that there won’t be challenges, that there won’t be things that come from left field that you can never have imagined.
And because we’re letting go of the idea that those things aren’t going to happen or shouldn’t happen, we’re gonna stop pretending that we can control them ahead of time. And so with this decision, what you’re really deciding to do is let go of all of the extra energy and brain power you’re devoting to the what-ifs, to the catastrophizing, to the scaring yourself
And the result is you shift your energy. You can finally shift your energy from what if to if then. What if keeps you spinning in place. If then gives you direction and forward-moving action
Which brings us to shift number two
Instead of running the default thoughts and emotions that keep you braced and pull you out of acceptance, you are going to choose on purpose what you want to think and feel going into this new school year, so that these thoughts, these feelings, this energy is what drives your actions keeping you nimble and enabling you to move through the year with less resistance
So let’s just start with the thoughts. “When you are bracing yourselves, check in. What are you thinking?” It’s those thoughts that are creating the emotions that are resulting in you feeling tight and tense. Those thoughts like, “I can’t handle this.
My child is behind. The team is against us. I don’t know what to do.” All of those thoughts create that fear energy. And so we’re not trying to get rid of the thoughts, we’re not trying to ignore the thoughts, we’re trying to find thoughts that can support us in moving forward.
So for me, I had to keep it really simple and as factual as possible. So thoughts like, “I can handle challenges,” which is objectively true. I’ve handled lots of challenges in the eighteen years of parenting my son. Challenges are part of raising a kid with special needs. Again, a statement that I view as factually correct that feels better than, “I can’t handle this,” or, “This shouldn’t be happening.
Our life is so hard. Everybody’s against us.” Another thought: I can handle the discomfort even if I don’t want to. This is a conversation I have with my clients all the time. That “I can’t” isn’t really an “I can’t,” it’s a “I don’t want to,” and of course you don’t. Nobody wants to feel the discomfort of getting a phone call from the school about their child’s behavior.
Nobody wants to feel the discomfort of disagreeing with the team at an IEP meeting. Nobody wants to feel the discomfort of asking for more, asking for changes, holding others accountable, including their kids. Nobody wants to do it, but that does not mean that you can’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.
And that is something to remind yourself of. The resistance that you have is to the discomfort that you will feel, but that discomfort doesn’t have anything to do with your actual ability to handle whatever happens. Because the proof is in front of you. You have handled all of the hard times up until this point, and you will continue to do that The point of this mindset shift is to take the resistance out, to make this easier on yourself.
It’s like taking away the drag that you are bringing with you with all the negative thoughts and emotions. So thinking about it this way, you have to walk up a mountain, and you have a backpack with you. Your decision is whether or not you fill the backpack up with 100 bricks or you don’t, and that is what I’m talking about here.
I am not denying that this is hard, that it is challenging, and that we have a lot that we need to confront always as autism parents. What I’m saying is that there are simple things that we can do. Simple, not easy. There are simple things that we can do to lessen the burden on ourselves so that we have the energy, the capability to keep going, to do the things, to fight the fight
Now, there is no one-size-all when it comes to finding new or better feeling thoughts. This is fully subjective. It’s up to you. So say the thoughts out loud and notice what happens. Do you feel a shift in your body? Do they feel true for you? Have you been able to let go of some of the tightness with the thought?
If so, that’s a great thought to start with. Again, keeping it simple. “I can take this one day at a time.” Just releasing the pressure. If that feels better to you than, “I can’t do this. This is going to be a long year.” Then go with it. Okay? This does not have to be a happy Instagrammable thought.
It just has to be a thought that feels better, that creates a better feeling in your body than those default thoughts that are creating the bracing, the tensing, and the fear
Now, if you’re stuck on thoughts, you can also come at this from the other direction and start with the feeling. Ask yourself, how do you want to feel this school year? Now, confident would be great, but for a lot of us, thoughts like confident and optimistic, they’re like a bridge too far right now, and that’s fine.
You don’t just throw your hands up if the first emotion that you think of doesn’t seem realistic to you. Dig deeper. What about emotions like committed, determined, purposeful
Advocacy, leadership. These are not happy-go-lucky, light emotions. These are emotions that require work, but they carry a much higher, more useful energy than fear and dread and frustration do
As autism parents. We do a lot, we take a lot of action. But if you are taking that from fear and anxiety, you also know how the simplest of actions can feel like moving a boulder uphill. This is me right now.
I have been, parenting a child with autism plus OCD plus anxiety for eighteen years. We have been through a lot. From hospitalizations, ER visits, nine one one calls, out of district placements, more IEP meetings than I can count. I’ve done a lot. Action is not the problem. But right now, . I’m feeling the bracing of the new school year because, yeah, this is not my first rodeo, and I have seen things start out well go to crap pretty quickly, and I don’t forget that. My body remembers it. And so I am having a hard time doing things that should take seconds. Filling out forms, signing my name to a release of information.
That doesn’t take any time in the world, but they are sitting in my inbox because all of the fear, all of the dread that I have about the school year that is coming up makes those things that are so simple feel as hard as walking up a mountain with 100 bricks. Okay? So this episode, just know, this episode is not a lecture to you or a lecture to anyone.
It’s also a reminder to myself. I am doing this work now, too, in real time. I understand how
fear can tank your energy, And it can set you off on the back foot, and that is of no help to you, and it’s certainly of no help to your child
But noticing this in myself, noticing opening up my inbox, seeing the email, feeling that tenseness in my stomach, and just being able to notice it, notice what’s happening, and where I’m trying to refocus myself is on the emotion of being focused. Focused on right now, what is the next task I need to do one day at a time?
Because that is all I can control. And right now, I need to break it down in that small of a chunk for myself because that’s where I am right now. So if that’s where you are right now, that’s fine too. It’s meeting yourself where you are and finding the ways that you can redirect your energy, redirect your thoughts, redirect your emotions so that you are not going into that default mode and then spinning, because it is so easy to do, especially when you’ve been at this for a minute and you have a lot of reps, you’ve seen a lot of things.
It’s real easy to go into that negative downward spiral. And so it takes a really conscious effort to redirect yourself back to the thoughts and the emotions that are going to move you forward and are going to support you no matter what happens this school year
Which brings me to shift number three
Rinse and repeat. Just like we do not expect our kiddos to pick up a skill after one try, two tries, maybe 100 tries, it’s the same for us. Especially when it comes to thoughts and emotions that are so deeply ingrained in our nervous system, it takes purposeful effort to redirect yourself over and over again
You’re going to catch yourself bracing. You’re going to catch the catastrophizing thoughts. You’ll be standing in that aisle at Target, or you’ll open the email okay this is normal, this is natural, this is your default
I was once in a training for a type of therapy, it’s an offshoot of CPT called ACT, and it’s called ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy.
The presenter was talking about the work that is involved in shifting default thoughts and emotions, and for that she gave the example of children’s rhymes like Mary Had a Little Lamb or the Itsy Bitsy Spider. We’ve all heard those as kids.
We’ve probably recited them to our own children. They’ve been ingrained over and over again. Now, imagine that we find out that the lamb wasn’t actually a lamb, it was a dog, and the spider actually wasn’t a spider. It was a centipede
And now think of the effort it would take for you if you were singing that song or singing those rhymes to your children. Every time you got to lamb or to spider, you’d really would have to stop and be like, “Oh, no, no, no, it was a centipede. Oh, no, no, no, it was a dog.” It would not be your default. Your default would always go to Mary Had a Little Lamb, right?
The Itsy Bitsy Spider. And so the fact that you might revert back to what you always knew, to what you always did, isn’t the problem. It’s expected. The work is redirecting yourself back to the new information or to the thoughts and emotions that you want to think now. The point of this work is the rinse and repeat, the redirecting over and over. And again, it brings me back to my own work with my kiddo and his own work with his OCD.
It’s never that those OCD thoughts aren’t going to be there. It’s the decision about how much you want to engage with them and how much power you want to give them. And so again, rinse and repeat, redirecting yourself to the way you want to think, to the focus that you want to have Not because you’re trying to transform yourself into some sort of happy, positive Pollyanna, but because you are working on giving yourself the energy that you need to show up as an autism parent.
There are so many things that pull at our emotions and our energy, and we don’t want our thoughts to be one of them. I mean, they will be. By default, it’s going to happen. But the more you’re able to notice it, the more purposeful you can get.
And just so you know, this is not work that you do once and it ends. I’m still doing it now every day. I have been certified as a coach. I’ve been coaching clients for over six years. It’s still part of my daily work because as autism parents, the challenges we face are not one and done. They are evolving, and with that, we need to evolve as well.
And so if you find yourself going back to your default, absolutely you will. But just reward yourself, even with your own internal praise when you catch it, you notice it, and you decide not to engage with it. All right. That is it for this week’s episode of the podcast.
Moving from bracing to acceptance, from fear to focus, and then doing it again and again. In the next episode, we are going to turn to action, and we are going to answer the what if questions ahead of time to help you set yourself up for success.
My child is behind. The team is against us. I don’t know what to do.” All of those thoughts create that fear energy. And so we’re not trying to get rid of the thoughts, we’re not trying to ignore the thoughts, we’re trying to find thoughts that can support us in moving forward.
So for me, I had to keep it really simple and as factual as possible. So thoughts like, “I can handle challenges,” which is objectively true. I’ve handled lots of challenges in the eighteen years of parenting my son. Challenges are part of raising a kid with special needs. Again, a statement that I view as factually correct that feels better than, “I can’t handle this,” or, “This shouldn’t be happening.
Our life is so hard. Everybody’s against us.” Another thought: I can handle the discomfort even if I don’t want to. This is a conversation I have with my clients all the time. That “I can’t” isn’t really an “I can’t,” it’s a “I don’t want to,” and of course you don’t. Nobody wants to feel the discomfort of getting a phone call from the school about their child’s behavior.
Nobody wants to feel the discomfort of disagreeing with the team at an IEP meeting. Nobody wants to feel the discomfort of asking for more, asking for changes, holding others accountable, including their kids. Nobody wants to do it, but that does not mean that you can’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.
And that is something to remind yourself of. The resistance that you have is to the discomfort that you will feel, but that discomfort doesn’t have anything to do with your actual ability to handle whatever happens. Because the proof is in front of you. You have handled all of the hard times up until this point, and you will continue to do that The point of this mindset shift is to take the resistance out, to make this easier on yourself.
It’s like taking away the drag that you are bringing with you with all the negative thoughts and emotions. So thinking about it this way, you have to walk up a mountain, and you have a backpack with you. Your decision is whether or not you fill the backpack up with 100 bricks or you don’t, and that is what I’m talking about here.
I am not denying that this is hard, that it is challenging, and that we have a lot that we need to confront always as autism parents. What I’m saying is that there are simple things that we can do. Simple, not easy. There are simple things that we can do to lessen the burden on ourselves so that we have the energy, the capability to keep going, to do the things, to fight the fight
Now, there is no one-size-all when it comes to finding new or better feeling thoughts. This is fully subjective. It’s up to you. So say the thoughts out loud and notice what happens. Do you feel a shift in your body? Do they feel true for you? Have you been able to let go of some of the tightness with the thought?
If so, that’s a great thought to start with. Again, keeping it simple. “I can take this one day at a time.” Just releasing the pressure. If that feels better to you than, “I can’t do this. This is going to be a long year.” Then go with it. Okay? This does not have to be a happy Instagrammable thought.
It just has to be a thought that feels better, that creates a better feeling in your body than those default thoughts that are creating the bracing, the tensing, and the fear
Now, if you’re stuck on thoughts, you can also come at this from the other direction and start with the feeling. Ask yourself, how do you want to feel this school year? Now, confident would be great, but for a lot of us, thoughts like confident and optimistic, they’re like a bridge too far right now, and that’s fine.
You don’t just throw your hands up if the first emotion that you think of doesn’t seem realistic to you. Dig deeper. What about emotions like committed, determined, purposeful
Advocacy, leadership. These are not happy-go-lucky, light emotions. These are emotions that require work, but they carry a much higher, more useful energy than fear and dread and frustration do
As autism parents. We do a lot, we take a lot of action. But if you are taking that from fear and anxiety, you also know how the simplest of actions can feel like moving a boulder uphill. This is me right now.
I have been, parenting a child with autism plus OCD plus anxiety for eighteen years. We have been through a lot. From hospitalizations, ER visits, nine one one calls, out of district placements, more IEP meetings than I can count. I’ve done a lot. Action is not the problem. But right now, . I’m feeling the bracing of the new school year because, yeah, this is not my first rodeo, and I have seen things start out well go to crap pretty quickly, and I don’t forget that. My body remembers it. And so I am having a hard time doing things that should take seconds. Filling out forms, signing my name to a release of information.
That doesn’t take any time in the world, but they are sitting in my inbox because all of the fear, all of the dread that I have about the school year that is coming up makes those things that are so simple feel as hard as walking up a mountain with 100 bricks. Okay? So this episode, just know, this episode is not a lecture to you or a lecture to anyone.
It’s also a reminder to myself. I am doing this work now, too, in real time. I understand how
fear can tank your energy, And it can set you off on the back foot, and that is of no help to you, and it’s certainly of no help to your child
But noticing this in myself, noticing opening up my inbox, seeing the email, feeling that tenseness in my stomach, and just being able to notice it, notice what’s happening, and where I’m trying to refocus myself is on the emotion of being focused. Focused on right now, what is the next task I need to do one day at a time?
Because that is all I can control. And right now, I need to break it down in that small of a chunk for myself because that’s where I am right now. So if that’s where you are right now, that’s fine too. It’s meeting yourself where you are and finding the ways that you can redirect your energy, redirect your thoughts, redirect your emotions so that you are not going into that default mode and then spinning, because it is so easy to do, especially when you’ve been at this for a minute and you have a lot of reps, you’ve seen a lot of things.
It’s real easy to go into that negative downward spiral. And so it takes a really conscious effort to redirect yourself back to the thoughts and the emotions that are going to move you forward and are going to support you no matter what happens this school year
Which brings me to shift number three
Rinse and repeat. Just like we do not expect our kiddos to pick up a skill after one try, two tries, maybe 100 tries, it’s the same for us. Especially when it comes to thoughts and emotions that are so deeply ingrained in our nervous system, it takes purposeful effort to redirect yourself over and over again
You’re going to catch yourself bracing. You’re going to catch the catastrophizing thoughts. You’ll be standing in that aisle at Target, or you’ll open the email okay this is normal, this is natural, this is your default
I was once in a training for a type of therapy, it’s an offshoot of CPT called ACT, and it’s called ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy.
The presenter was talking about the work that is involved in shifting default thoughts and emotions, and for that she gave the example of children’s rhymes like Mary Had a Little Lamb or the Itsy Bitsy Spider. We’ve all heard those as kids.
We’ve probably recited them to our own children. They’ve been ingrained over and over again. Now, imagine that we find out that the lamb wasn’t actually a lamb, it was a dog, and the spider actually wasn’t a spider. It was a centipede
And now think of the effort it would take for you if you were singing that song or singing those rhymes to your children. Every time you got to lamb or to spider, you’d really would have to stop and be like, “Oh, no, no, no, it was a centipede. Oh, no, no, no, it was a dog.” It would not be your default. Your default would always go to Mary Had a Little Lamb, right?
The Itsy Bitsy Spider. And so the fact that you might revert back to what you always knew, to what you always did, isn’t the problem. It’s expected. The work is redirecting yourself back to the new information or to the thoughts and emotions that you want to think now. The point of this work is the rinse and repeat, the redirecting over and over. And again, it brings me back to my own work with my kiddo and his own work with his OCD.
It’s never that those OCD thoughts aren’t going to be there. It’s the decision about how much you want to engage with them and how much power you want to give them. And so again, rinse and repeat, redirecting yourself to the way you want to think, to the focus that you want to have Not because you’re trying to transform yourself into some sort of happy, positive Pollyanna, but because you are working on giving yourself the energy that you need to show up as an autism parent.
There are so many things that pull at our emotions and our energy, and we don’t want our thoughts to be one of them. I mean, they will be. By default, it’s going to happen. But the more you’re able to notice it, the more purposeful you can get.
And just so you know, this is not work that you do once and it ends. I’m still doing it now every day. I have been certified as a coach. I’ve been coaching clients for over six years. It’s still part of my daily work because as autism parents, the challenges we face are not one and done. They are evolving, and with that, we need to evolve as well.
And so if you find yourself going back to your default, absolutely you will. But just reward yourself, even with your own internal praise when you catch it, you notice it, and you decide not to engage with it. All right. That is it for this week’s episode of the podcast.
Moving from bracing to acceptance, from fear to focus, and then doing it again and again. In the next episode, we are going to turn to action, and we are going to answer the what if questions ahead of time to help you set yourself up for success.
Between now and then, all I want you to do is start noticing your own bracing. Notice what you’re telling yourself. Notice the emotions that you are feeling. When that tightness shows up this week, catch it, take a deep breath, and find a thought, find an emotion that feels better to you
I will talk to you next week. For those of you who want to go deeper into this work right away, you can work with me one-on-one as your coach. This is what I teach all of my one-on-one clients in our coaching program, and it’s also what I teach clients in the membership program. If you are interested in working with me in either of these capacities, schedule your phone call now.
Take care.
Thank you for listening to The Autism Mom Coach. If you are ready to apply the principles you are learning in these episodes to your life, it is time to schedule a consultation call with me. Podcasts are great, but the ahas are fleeting. Real change comes from application and implementation, and this is exactly what we do in my one-on-one coaching program.
To schedule your consultation, go to my website, theautismmomcoach.com/work-with-me and take the first step to taking better care of yourself so that you can show up as the parent you want to be for your child with autism
it’s also what I teach clients in the membership program. If you are interested in working with me in either of these capacities, schedule your phone call now.
