As Lisa’s son approaches his 18th birthday and she navigates the conservatorship process, she opens up about the fear of what’s next. In this episode of The Autism Mom Coach, Lisa shares the bittersweet reality that her son needs a much longer runway than “graduate at 18 and fly,” the grief of watching his peers reach milestones he won’t, and the seasonal triggers that reactivate anxiety for so many autism parents. She then replays her earlier episode on anticipatory anxiety, walking through a coaching session with a client who was dreading taking her own son for a blood draw, to show how getting calm and grounded first makes it possible to plan, problem-solve, and handle hard moments.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why anticipatory anxiety is a completely natural response for autism parents, especially around seasonal triggers like the start of the school year, and why normalizing how hard parenting is can bring real relief.
- How being in fight-or-flight pushes a parent into all-or-nothing predictions, and why regulating yourself first is what restores your ability to reason, troubleshoot, and prepare.
- How one of Lisa’s clients used grounding, advance planning, and her own expertise on her child to get through a dreaded blood draw, and why the reminder “I can handle it even if I don’t want to” is worth repeating to yourself.
Related episodes:
- From Refrigerator Mom to “Tough It Out”: Why Autism Is Not Your Fault (Ep #179)
- What Is an Expert? Why You Know More About Your Child Than You Think (Ep #169)
- Being Unbothered: How to Stay Regulated When Your Autistic Child Pushes Your Buttons (Ep #197)
Resources Mentioned:
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Transcript
You are listening to episode 176 of the Autism Mom, coach. The fear of what’s next. Hello everyone and welcome to today’s podcast. This podcast is going to be a little bit different. The first part of it is going to be me just sharing my thoughts about what’s happening. I’m going to fill you in on a few things in my personal life.
And then I am going to play an episode that aired several months ago at this point called Anticipatory Anxiety. And by the time we get to it, you will see why. Next, I want to thank everybody who participated in the survey that I sent out in my mailing list and on social media last week. I really appreciate all of your responses, and I am really excited to announce.
The winners. I will do that in an upcoming podcast episode, and you’ll be receiving an email with a notice of your prize and for everyone who filled out the survey and provided an email address, you will get a participation prize and that is going to be, you will be invited to a small group coaching.
Call with me this fall. I don’t have a date just yet because fear of what’s next. I have a bit of uncertainty right now about next steps with my own son. He is turning 18 in a matter of days at this point, and so I’ve been busy with things like filing court papers for involuntary conservatorship. And that’s a process whereby my son will need to be served with the papers.
The court is going to appoint him, his own attorney, and we’re going to have some really frank conversations about what it’s going to look like when he turns 18. He’s so excited about the idea that when he turns 18, he is an adult, which he says to me, technically, mom, that means. I can play any video game I want IE Grand theft auto, to which I say, yeah, sure, that’s fine.
But there are so many important serious things that we need to think about as special needs parents when our children turn 18 because. Some of them are not going to be equipped to make decisions for themselves without the input or the guidance of a parent. And luckily, there are steps that we can take ahead of time to make sure that we still get that input, whether it’s doing a conservatorship guardianship.
Power of attorney. It really depends from state to state. It also depends on your child’s diagnosis, and so for us it’s going to be involuntary conservatorship, which essentially means that I remain his legal guardian. For me, that’s really bittersweet, bitter because 18, this is the time where your child is supposed to fly, right?
Not so much for most of our children, even the ones who are highly functioning, our children need a longer runway than we. Our children typically need a much longer runway than the, you graduate from high school when you turn 18 and then you go to college. I don’t know how well that works for. Most kids, but it certainly doesn’t work for our children, and that is something I’m going to get into much deeper in future podcast episodes.
But for today, I wanna pivot to the experience of feeling that fear ahead of time, that anticipatory anxiety about what’s next. And I’m hearing things like, okay, so with that, I want to pivot to the topic of the fear of what’s next or anticipatory anxiety. One, it’s completely natural. There is nothing that we as humans hate more than uncertainty, and the future is always uncertain.
And then add to that for parents of kids with autism. We have some proof of concept. We have some data. We have some evidence of things going sideways of difficult times, and so it’s really easy, especially at the beginning of the school year, and I’m seeing this in so many of my clients, it’s like their PTSD is getting triggered.
A few of them had really rough school years. Particularly at the beginning of the year, and it’s like as soon as the calendar shifted to the first week of school, their anxiety accelerated, and that is such a natural response for us to have, especially as autism parents. We live in a very. Charged environment.
And so there are going to be seasonal things that trigger us both so that it’s natural that there will be seasonal things that will trigger us, whether it’s because of a memory of, oh my God, not the bus again. How are we gonna get ’em on the bus? Or, oh no, I have to find four babysitters for five days a week because of the juggling all the schedules.
Or it could just be. That sadness and I know I’m feeling it now. This is the year that my son’s peers are in their last year of high school. And so I’ve done myself the favor ahead of time of muting most people on Facebook that would fall under this category. ’cause I don’t begrudge them their happiness, but at the same time, I’m sad enough, I don’t need to double down on it.
But I’m sad, but I’m sad enough about this. I don’t need to double down on it by really indulging in all of the pictures of his classmates and what they’re doing. Like I just don’t need it. I’ll probably see it out in the neighborhood anyway, but just back to the point of there are gonna be certain times of the year, certain circumstances, certain triggers that bring back into us that anxiety of, oh no, I don’t want.
To happen again. What if it happens again? And so first, I just really wanna completely normalize that for you. Unfortunately, it is really normal and one of the hardest things that I’ve had to learn as an autism parent is normalizing the fact that things are really hard. There’s just no other way to put it.
They’re really hard. That doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. It doesn’t mean you’re not doing enough. It is really just the way it is. It’s difficult, it’s challenging, but when you normalize that for yourself, for me, the more I was able to normalize that this was the situation, these are the circumstances that I’m in, it brought me some relief and interestingly.
The most relief I’ve ever had in my time as an autism parent is when it was crystal clear that I was completely out of control. Despite all of my efforts to gain control, to be in control, to grasp at control, I actually felt the best when I realized 100% that I had completely no control. It was a relief in some weird way.
It was like the universe finally saying, there is nothing you can do. This is what the situation is, and now you have to decide how you’re going to show up in these circumstances. And so I wanna offer that to all of you in this. Anticipatory anxiety of whatever’s next for your child. I know for a lot of you who listen to the podcast that what’s next is school.
For some of you, it’s new residential placements, new group homes, new experiences. We do everything that we can to support our children and prepare them in the ways that we can, and then the rest of it. We have to save our energy because life will happen. It will unfold. There will be challenges, and the fact is you are going to be more resourceful, more resilient, more capable of managing those challenges and navigating them if you haven’t exhausted the crap out of yourself with all of the anticipatory anxiety, because the truth is the anticipatory anxiety doesn’t move you forward.
It actually just drains your energy. And it reinforces this idea that your fear of brain has, is that I can’t handle this when in fact you can. You can handle it. You don’t want to. I don’t want to either, but we can handle it. And what I really hope for all of you is that more than just handling it as in just gritting your teeth.
Getting through it that you can handle it by giving yourself and giving your child a lot of grace and compassion because again, this is hard. Alright, with that mini little sermon, I am going to replay a previous episode called Anticipatory Anxiety. Enjoy and I will talk to you next week. This topic was inspired by a recent coaching session with one of my clients who was really dreading taking her son for blood work.
Her son is 12 years old and non-verbal, and he has resisted blood work in the past. So when she came for coaching, she was so nervous because she was really focused on everything that could go wrong and the consequences to her son if she didn’t get this blood work done because he needed it for school.
This is what anticipatory anxiety is. It’s the fear or worry about something that might happen in the future, and it keeps you in a what if loop. Now your brain is doing this as a way of preparing you for the danger or discomfort, and it thinks that it’s being helpful by scanning for the worst case scenarios.
But in reality, it keeps you stuck in that cycle of fear and in situations, especially like the one that my client was going into where she was taking her son into a doctor’s office. Your fear shows up in your energy. So my goal when working with this client was to get her in a place where she could feel calm and relaxed no matter what, because her best chance for this doctor’s appointment being successful was going to be her ability to stay calm when her son reacted.
The things that I hear a lot from clients is they think that being anxious is good in that it prepares them, and maybe that’s true to some extent. I actually don’t think our anxiety and stress in most situations are helpful to us. I think that we are so chronically stressed that we’ve learned how to get things done in spite of how anxious we are.
While that stress and fear might give you a bit of an energy burst, ultimately it drains you emotionally and physically because that constant worry takes a toll. And even more than that, when you are in a state of fight flight, and that’s exactly what’s happening. When you’re having anticipatory anxiety, you’re bracing yourself, you’re walking on eggshells, you are in a state of fight flight.
And when that happens, that means your rational brain is offline. You are just in reaction mode. And so essentially when you think about our kids, when they get dysregulated, they’re in fight flight, their rational thinking is not really online. That’s why it’s so important for us to adjust our ways to meet them where they are.
But the same goes for us when we are in fight flight. We’re not bringing our best thinking to the table, so our reasoning is off. We tend to think more in always, never. All or nothing, and that’s exactly what my client was doing. She saw this upcoming trip as either going to be successful or a total disaster, and no matter what steps that she took to prepare herself and to prepare her child, she didn’t think it was going to be enough.
That is what happens to you when you are in a state of fight flight. So what to do when you find yourself in that place of anticipatory anxiety. Maybe it’s a upcoming IEP meeting. Maybe it’s getting your child on the bus, maybe it’s getting them out of bed. Whatever it is, be in tune with what is happening in your body and in your brain.
That’s where you need to go first. We have to take control of ourselves before we can take control of the situation. So in this situation for my client, what I did is I helped her ground into the present moment by doing EFT or tapping. This is a scientifically proven way of interrupting your stress response First, interrupting the stress response, grounding into safety.
And then what we did was instead of picturing this. Appointment going terribly. I asked her to tap into the best case scenario. What is it that you want to achieve from this trip? And in this case, it was her son getting his blood drawn. So I walked her through the practices with the tapping, where we normalized the feelings of anxiety that she was happening, but we also made space for her son and his anxiety and letting him have his emotions and how she would be able to keep herself calm even when he was upset, so that she could support him in the ultimate goal of getting the blood test completed.
So once she was more regulated and grounded, she was able to use her reasoning and her rational thinking to troubleshoot and to problem solve. One of the things that she did was she identified some of the obstacles to getting blood the last time, and that was once her son got into the room. It took a lot of time before the blood was actually going to be drawn.
The technician wasn’t prepared. There was a lot of chatter. How are you doing? How is school going? My client as the expert on her child. She knows that these are triggers for her son. So she had a very direct communication with the doctor about the setup, but she did this from a calm energy, not a freaking out, stressful mom kind of energy that as we all know, doctors tend to ignore.
Did it from her power, from the being the expert on her son laying out very clearly. This is a very stressful situation for him. Here are the things that we can do to make this go smoother. Now, does this mean that once you’re calm and once you’re grounded, that nothing will go wrong? Absolutely not. We cannot control our children, but we can control our energy around them.
So imagine my client walking into this doctor’s appointment with her son being super nervous. Her son would pick up on that energy and he would freak out too, which is actually what happened before. The more we’re able to keep ourselves calm and regulated and grounded. The more we can offer that to our children.
Remember, we are their environment and they are tuning forks for our energy. In addition, when we’re able to stay calm and focused, we’re able to problem solve, able to troubleshoot. We’re not getting into that always, never all or nothing. Fear of thinking. So that means if and when something does go wrong, you’re able to handle it even if you don’t want to, you are able to handle it.
So what I did with my client is we even prepared for the worst case scenario, and in her mind, that would be leaving the doctor’s office without having her son’s blood taken. And she knew that even though she did not want this to happen, if it happened, she would handle it. That she could handle it. And just having that reassurance and that calm gave her more confidence to do the things that she needed to do to support her child in the best way that she could during the appointment.
Another decision that my client made when she was calm and grounded was when and whether to preview this to her child Again, relying on her expertise on her child, she knew from past experiences that telling him the night before would mean that he wouldn’t sleep the night before. He’d have a lot of nervous energy, so she told him the day of the appointment, so there was less time between Revelation and the appointment for him to overthink about it and get upset.
These are the decisions that you can make when you are calm and grounded, implementing those decisions when you are calm and grounded. Because all of us have had the experience of making decisions while we’re in fight flight and implementing them while we’re in fight. Flight doesn’t always go so well because of our energy, our reactivity, and because we don’t have access to our best level of thinking.
All right, so how did the appointment go? The good news is her son had his blood drawn, so victory. There was some resistance, but he eventually did submit to having the blood safely withdrawn. And so this was a victory and prove to my client that she can handle these situations even if they don’t go the way she would like to.
Even if they take way more effort and energy than she thinks that they should take for a child who’s 12 years old. She knows that she can handle it, and that’s one of the most important messages that we need to give ourselves all of the time. You can handle much more than you think. You have handled much more than you ever imagined that you could.
Now, of course, that’s not the same as wanting to handle it. You might not want to handle it, but you can, and it is important to remind yourself of this because the more calm and confident you are in any situation, you’ll be able to lend that to your child. Alright, that is it for today’s episode. If anticipatory anxiety, walking on eggshells, bracing yourself, white knuckling it through the day.
If any of that resonates with you, you will want to attend my webinar tomorrow night. Stop walking on eggshells and start parenting with confidence. If you register for the webinar, you will get the re. So for those of you who would love to participate, but you can’t make it tomorrow night, that’s okay. If you register, you will receive the replay.
Alright, that is it for this week’s episode, and I will talk to you next week. Thanks 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, the autism mom coach.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.
