Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg) and Speaker 2 (Dr. Gillian Boudreau)
Episode 67: Safety as the Foundation for Everything
[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast. A place where we explore research, amplify autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life, and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Proctor from learnplaythrive.com.
Meg:
Before we get started, a quick note on language. On this podcast, you’ll hear me and many of my guests use identity-affirming language. That means we say ‘autistic person’ rather than ‘person with autism’. What we’re hearing from the majority of autistic adults is that autism is a part of their identity that they don’t need to be separated from. Autism is not a disease, it’s a different way of thinking and learning. Join me in embracing the word ‘autistic’ to help reduce the stigma.
Welcome to Episode 67 with Dr. Gillian Boudreau. This conversation was so deeply moving, it nearly brought me to tears over and over again while I was talking to Gillian. She really cuts to the core of what it means to cultivate safety for our autistic clients and also goes into the details of how we can do that better in our work. I realized the name of this episode really dovetails with the last episode on PDA and I decided to leave it that way because the truth is, we can’t talk about cultivating true safety, like safety at the level of our autistic clients’ nervous systems. We can’t talk about that enough on this podcast or in this world.
I’ll tell you about our guest. Dr. Gillian Boudreau is a licensed clinical psychologist and a licensed school psychologist. She’s worked with children and families across the US for many years with the mission of understanding and addressing our human need for attachment, connection, and effective communication in a way that helps individuals, family systems, schools, and larger organizations reach their full potential. Earlier in her career, Dr. Boudreau developed and directed a comprehensive behavior program in Vermont’s public school system supporting kids with intensive emotional needs, and she currently runs an Oregon-based private practice for children, families, and adults who are autistic and/or have trauma and anxiety. She’s a national speaker on psychological safety, emotional intelligence; she teaches graduate courses on trauma, resiliency, and mindfulness for folks who work with children. You may notice that we’re increasingly platforming mental health providers on this podcast, including folks like autistic psychologist Matt Lowry, and today, like Dr. Gillian Boudreau.
I just want to make sure to tell y’all before we get started that we at Learn Play Thrive have a lot of new continuing education courses in the works. And not just for OT’s and SLP’s, but coming up, we also will have CTE courses for school psychologists and social workers. So, we have a course coming up from autistic SLP’s, Rachel Dorsi and V.Tisi on supporting social and emotional well-being for our autistic clients. We also have courses in the works from a number of new instructors on trauma-informed care, neurodiversity-affirming mental health practices, strengths-based diagnostics, and more. And we will also be announcing the lineup for the 2024 Continuing Education Neurodiversity Summit very soon. This is going to be for OT’s, SLP’s, school psychologists, social workers, and any other professionals who want to attend. We have so much going on. Make sure you are on our mailing list so you don’t miss anything. You can join the e-mail list at learnplaythrive.com or follow us on Instagram, we’re at @LearnPlayThrive. Okay, here is the interview with Gillian.
Hi, Gillian, welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Gillian:
Hi, Meg! I’m so glad to be here.
Meg:
I’m so glad to have you here. And I want to start with your journey of how you got to this place in your work. From what I know, in your work you approach your students from this place of things we love, like power sharing, validation, empathy, instead of the more typical compliance-based quote-unquote ‘therapies’. And this is not where most people start, or honestly, where a lot of us even wind up. Can you share with us a little bit about how you got to this place in your work?
Dr. Gillian:
Sure. And that’s such a generous question. It’s nice to sort of get to think on that for a second. So, thank you. You know, I think it started early. I grew up in a community that was sort of unusual, I think, in the degree to which it really trusted children’s intellect. I grew up in a college town in the Northeast, and it was just a bunch of like, either college professors or old hippies who were really there to empower children as valid humans, and also encourage, like the interrogation of rules and expectations. So, that was like the positive part of it. And then, on the other hand, it was also like a pretty cutthroat academic and perfectionistic community that I as a small human did not fit into super well. Like, I always joke that I just had like, way too many feelings for that space, and I often got pretty burned out from the executive functioning demands. So, I think both the positives and the negatives of my upbringing really set me up to question the context, to question the system. And especially, to question the expectations before assuming that a child is out of step or in the wrong. So, especially if a child is outside of the normative expectation box of the community they’re in.
And then, I think, you know, after that, I was lucky enough to get to study yoga and meditation for a few years already before I went to grad school for psychology. And so, in my early 20’s, I found one incredible meditation teacher, Paula Tursi, in New York City, who I really want to shout out, who I still work with. And to this day, you know, she really focuses on full expression and internal freedom. And she was really generous with me as a young lady, and now still with her, thinking along those lines. So, by the time I got to my clinical psych program, I think I was really listening for the elements of that discipline, and child psychology in particular, that kind of felt like freedom to me, versus the parts that felt like systemic control. And I was also able to go to a wonderful program, Long Island University in Brooklyn, that was also quite supportive of alternative ideas.
So, I think by the time I got into the public schools, which was my first job out of grad school, I was already pretty interested in doing what I could to resist compliance-based systems and to sort of question, the idea that like, if there’s a problem, it’s the kid who needs to change. That said, I still had a ton to learn. And I did start out following a much more traditionally behavioral approach than what I would ever take now, just because that was sort of the blueprint that I came into as a new professional. So, really, my first year of that work was about grappling with what felt wrong and just ineffective about that compliance-based approach. I mean, yes, for the students, but also for myself, and what it did to my internal congruence and my mental health to be kind of doing it that way. And so, finding a more integrated path forward was a big part of my journey in that role, and informs what I do now, too.
Meg:
I love how you talk about this coming from a place of a value that you learned as a child of questioning and interrogating things. And it sounds like you’re doing that from a place of your own values. And I just want to give a shout out to people who are listening who weren’t raised with that value, because so many people, especially our generation — maybe hopefully it’s changing — but so many people were raised to comply, and listen, and not question. And I was raised in a family of rebels and people who challenged the system. And I think it’s so easy to get from there to here. And when I see people who weren’t raised like that who get here anyway, I’m so impressed with them.
Dr. Gillian:
Me too. And, you know, when I work with educators, that is something that I’m keeping in mind, too, right? Because it’s like, you know, if you have spent your whole childhood and adolescence and early adulthood learning and following and maybe feeling safety and some success through a compliance-based system, right, like, if you’re a person, you know — I wouldn’t want that for anyone, but there are some humans who can sort of exist in that without completely like, falling apart, right. And so, if you’re one of those humans, and that’s sort of what you know, it’s such a big leap, right, to try to change your thinking. And I think sometimes, you know, in my work with educators, I’m often encouraging them to do some internal questioning about what it is that a certain students behavior, what is it about that that might cause them to like go urgent, right, or what kind of feels like an emergency about that to them. And I’ve had really openhearted educators sort of say to me, you know, “I really did follow the rules. Like, I did — I really did what I was supposed to do, and there’s a part of me that feels upset that that’s not what we’re asking people to do anymore. Like, I had to do that.” And I think that that’s so real. And such a poignant piece of what we’re having to do as adults who are maybe turning around and doing something different with the next generation or trying to.
Meg:
Absolutely. I think a lot of people who are parenting will recognize that. But it comes up as therapists as well. I had an earlier interview with my child’s preschool director. And in that episode, we talked about how they support their teachers in creating a neurodiversity-affirming space. And one thing that the teachers have told me is that they have their own coaches helping them work through ‘Why did this child’s behavior trigger me? What was it from my childhood that this brought up?’ I know, yeah, your face is so excited. And it’s something that we all need if we’re going to be doing things differently in our work as therapists. And like you said, if things weren’t so hard for us, we know that perspective-taking especially across neurotypes is not a strength. We talk about the double empathy problem a lot on the podcast, that neurotypical therapists aren’t just intuitively assuming the perspective of our kids. I could have a whole episode just praising people for coming to this place where they want to listen and learn. That’s what your story is bringing up for me, is it’s so exciting to have folks here who are doing the work. And it’s hard work. And we’re going to talk to you all about lots of ideas for how we can change things. I want to start with our training. So, one way amongst many, that the training of mental health professionals really diverges from behaviorists is that we’re trained in neurology, amongst other things. In your work, you talk a lot about the brain. And I’m curious how this impacts your work and how you work with educators?
Dr. Gillian:
Yeah, that’s such a great question. So, I really like talking about the brain, because it feels very normalizing, because we all have one. So, I like to sort of position us as just, we all have these sweet, lovely nervous systems, who are actually still evolved for when we were early humans. Our sweet nervous systems, they’re just looking for threat all the time. They’re just trying to keep us alive even if this situation is not life or death. And in fact, our sweet, wonderful nervous systems do believe that connection itself is life or death. And they believe that because we are evolved from the early infant humans who, like, were the best at grabbing connection, right, whose cells really told them to like scream the loudest if they were in distress, to do all those prosocial things that get adults to want to move close to a baby. Like, connection is life or death when we’re tiny. And, you know, I doubt that there was much evolutionary potential to turning off that impulse once we get to be adults who are a little more freestanding. So, really, the kernel of what I talk about in the brain is helping people understand what’s going on for us when we sense that we are not safe. What are the alarm bells that get turned on in the brain?
How massively do those alarm bells shut off are what I call sort of our luxurious brain processes, like empathy, curiosity, being forward thinking. None of that’s going to help you if you’re literally trying to survive. But it’s incredible how many situations our brain does encode as a survival problem. And lack of belonging is one, lack of connection as one. So, I love talking about that, for one, to sort of get us all at the same table of just being like, ‘What does it mean to be a human being trying to live an examined life?’ sort of in this meatsuit governed by this very survival-based machine. And how can we be really compassionate with ourselves and with the other folks navigating that wild, existential situation? And then, I think the other piece of the brain stuff is that it really helps me talk about ‘Cans’ versus ‘Wants’. Because I think — and I mean, I’ve been in this position too — it can feel so frustrating, I think, as a therapist or as an educator, if you’re working with a child and they totally were able to do something yesterday, and today, they’re not doing it, and why would you not assume defiance? Why would you not assume this is a ‘Won’t’? “We gotta nip this in the bud.” When really, what learning about the brain teaches us is that everything is state dependent. And almost not — I don’t really — I think almost nothing is a ‘Won’t’. Because I think people really are doing the best they can all the time. But we’re just so at the mercy of how safe or not our kind of primitive nervous system thinks we are. Because if it doesn’t think we’re safe, it simply will not give us access to the parts of our brain that allowed us to do that really cool thing yesterday.
Meg:
I love this focus on connection and safety. And, you know, you’re trained as a school psychologist and a clinical psychologist. But this is information that all of us need to be able to access to do our work, right. Like, as SLP’s, OT’s, teachers, if we’re in fight-or-flight — which we probably are for a lot of our sessions — if we’re sending kids into fight-or-flight or if we’re just not meeting their basic needs of feeling safe, connected, accepted, or if their needs generally are not being met and we’re not supporting that, they’re not going to learn. Who cares about the shoe tying goal when a child feels fundamentally unsafe. So, it’s like we all have to arrive here, we all have to start here. And I think that, Gillian, we’re gonna come back to this over and over and over in this conversation, and I want to start with fear, stress, anxiety, trauma, these things you talk about a lot in your work. Can you just start us out by defining them and even talk a little bit about how they are often misunderstood by educators and therapists?
Dr. Gillian:
Yes, great. Let’s define them. So, I am obsessed with fear. My whole career is sort of about fear. So, I actually really think fear is the key to a lot. And while there’s all kinds of neurological and psychological data that backs this up, I also just really want to shout out to my meditation teacher, Paula Tursi, about this again, because, you know, she was talking to me about this way before I learned about this stuff. But the data really does support it as well. So, fear, I would just call that the initial alarm signal in the brain. So, we’re really evolved and wired for survival. So, for me, fear is that first hit to the homeostasis of our nervous system when we fall out of what I sometimes call the balance beam of basic safety. So, I think, you know, I would actually call it fear if, you know, for example, like today, if I’m getting on the Zoom for an important podcast interview, and I, for a second, I need to like, re-find the link, right? That doesn’t throw me all the way off my balance beam of basic safety. But it does throw me a little bit off temporarily. I would call that a microdose of fear, right. So, it doesn’t have to be at the level of terror for me to call it fear. For me to call it fear, it actually just has to be that primary first neurological molecular change to the ecosystem of my brain in the direction of threat, rather than safety.
And so, stress. At this point, I almost never talk about stress, because I feel like stress is sort of a not super useful euphemism, really, for fear. And this happens in my work a lot, you know, folks are really used to talking about like, “Oh, stress and burnout.” I really like to instead say, could we call that — could we call stress fear? In a radical sense, could we call consistent burnout at work — is there a level of worker exploitation to that? Like, you know, let’s really, let’s really call it what it is because the impacts of these things are so powerful, right? So, I think most things that we call ‘stress’ actually are fear to some degree. However, stress does speak to kind of a chronicity or a happening again and again over time, that fear may not necessarily. So, sometimes when folks are talking about stress, I do start to think about something called allostatic load, which basically is what happens to our nervous system when we are in a chronic state of trying to deal with uncertainty that we can’t personally solve with any single action our human body could take, right.
So, if we go back to evolutionary psychology again, our nervous system really likes to scan for uncertainty. When it finds uncertainty, our nervous system likes to go into a heightened state, you know, fight flight or freeze, in the hopes that we can use that heightened state to neutralize the threat or the uncertainty and come back to homeostasis, right. Like, that’s an arc that our nervous system really likes. But the modern world and especially, you know, modern education and therapy spaces, we’re dealing with uncertainty that’s way bigger than us that’s really abstract. There’s no way that any one thing we’re going to do in a moment is going to take out the whole uncertainty. And so, what can often happen with allostatic load is we just stay at a heightened state. And our poor, sweet nervous system just cycles between, “What if I try a flight response? What if I try a fight response? What if I try to freeze response?” And it’ll just keep kind of buffering and circling and keeping us in that chronic state of hyperarousal, if we don’t do something different, which I can mention in a second. And so, I would call that maybe stress. Stress for me is either sort of a too soft euphemism for fear, or might speak to the experience of allostatic load.
Meg:
Is that another way of saying chronic fear?
Dr. Gillian:
Yeah, the chronic response to fear, exactly. And particularly uncertainty, which I think in our mammalian brain, uncertainty and fear are pretty close together, because we tend not to feel safe unless we really feel like we know what’s going to happen.
Meg:
What about trauma and anxiety? Defining that, but also talking about maybe how they can be different for autistic people, both by virtue of their neurotype, and from being autistic in a world that’s set up for neurotypicals?
Dr. Gillian:
Yeah. So, trauma… Man, I’ve been working and talking about trauma for a long time. And the way I talk about it now is different than how I might at the beginning. So, I come from the psychology world. Sometimes the psychology world will try to kind of link up with a medical model in a way that I don’t know is always super helpful. I wonder if maybe psychology is doing that to sort of, like, try to legitimize itself when it’s like, I don’t actually think we need to become medicine in order to be legitimate. Like, we’re studying the magic and the mystery of human consciousness, like we’re okay. But I do think that when psychology does try to move too close to the medical model, you know, we get into this very diagnostic place. And the, you know, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is a big part of this. So, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual likes to talk about trauma as measured by what happened, right? So, was the event life or death enough, right? Like, did you have reason to feel really unsafe enough, which — for it to be coded as ‘trauma’ — which I think is completely nonsensical. What I think is important about trauma is how it hits the nervous system of the individual. And then, how that hit can make a person more vulnerable to a chronic experience of fear. So, for me, I think trauma gets encoded in the human nervous system when something happens that is too fast, too much to process in the moment, and that we felt alone with. So, I think it’s actually more of like a feeling of being at the wrong end of a firehose, if you will, that really seems to create trauma.
And so, then, anxiety. So, if we go back to this idea that fear is maybe sort of the primary molecular hit, kind of destabilizing the brain, fear can then manifest as multiple challenging emotions, kind of depending on the person, right. So, I think we get an initial hit of fear. Some people might experience that as anxiety, right, which is, you know, pretty straight ahead like worry, avoidance, panic, those sorts of things. But I also think some humans can feel fear, and that will go right to the experience of depression and sadness. Some humans will feel fear, and that will actually manifest first as anger. So, fear is really different than the anxiety, sadness, or anger that may come from it. And there are some really cool studies that really back that up, especially if we look at anxiety and depression, two things that might look pretty different, right. One looks very scared; one looks very sad. But in fact, they often appear at the same time. And when they do, it’s usually the fear piece that hits first. So, even depression can really be sort of a hopelessness and helplessness that comes after feeling kind of fearful for so long. So, yes, if we do think about anxiety with autistic kids, every time I’m asked to talk about this, I have a moment of being upset with myself that I don’t know the statistic, right. I’m like, “Oh, gosh, yeah. What is that?” I don’t know how many more autistic kids show up with anxiety than neurotypical kids. And then, I go back to the research and I remember it’s because — this is an estimate, right. So, the studies are pretty wildly different in what they show. You know, a recent study was like, you know, showed that autistic kids were at like, 84% or, you know, 78% or something, and neurotypical kids were, you know, at like, 8%. I doubt that it’s that big of a difference. But we do know that it’s a really big difference, right, that autistic kids are experiencing anxiety. I feel comfortable saying at a rate at least twice what we see in neurotypical kids and probably much more than that.
It’s such an interesting question, right? How much of that is about autism, and how much of that is about trying to navigate a system that was set up by neurotypicals for neurotypicals? I don’t know. The way my brain works, I don’t honestly know how we would ever separate that out. Because even if we’re looking at differences in brain structures between autistic kiddos and neurotypical kiddos, for one, the size and shape of a brain structure itself, right, even the level of activation of the brain structure itself is not the whole story. And for another, our brain structures change in their shape and activation based on our environment. So, I think what we know is that it is hugely stressful for autistic kids to be navigating a world built by and for neurotypicals. So, that’s really where I focus. I really tend to assume that, you know, and I even will say to many, many clients, like, my sense is that there’s no reason why autism itself needs to cause suffering. And that a lot of times where it does cause suffering, or where it does maybe cause some of the quote-unquote ‘symptoms’ that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual likes to use to sometimes pathologize autism, for me, that’s usually where autism meets fear. That’s usually where autism meets anxiety that we see things go in that direction.
Meg:
Yeah, this has come up a lot on the podcast. I think it was autistic OT, Sarah Selvaggi-Hernandez, who said it first on this podcast that we don’t know what an uncompromised autistic person looks like.
Dr. Gillian:
Oh, what a great way to say that. That’s beautiful.
Meg:
Yeah. And a number of folks have said that the DSM is looking at autistic trauma behaviors.
Dr. Gillian:
Mm-hmm. Yes, I think that’s absolutely right.
Meg:
So, I want to circle around to one of the other big themes in your work, and it’s something that we love to talk about here, too, which is power. Can we tie fear and power together? How do fear and power exists? Let’s go with education. How does this happen in schools? And how does this impact kids?
Dr. Gillian:
Gosh, this is my favorite thing to talk about. I love talking about fear and power. So, fear consolidates power where it already was, right? So —
Meg:
Hold on. Fear consolidates power where it already was. Okay.
Dr. Gillian:
Because fear shuts down a lot of our brain. It causes us to go to, you know, kind of shortcut thinking. And it also causes us to get really grippy and really hoardy, right. So, if a human already has power — so, in a school, that might mean that they are an adult, dealing with a child, right. So, that can be a power dynamic. It can also mean that they are an administrator dealing with staff. It can also mean that they are a white individual dealing with a black individual. It can also mean that they are cis individual dealing with a trans individual. Whoever came into that situation with more power, if they get scared, they’re going to grip up and hoard their power harder. On the other hand, if there’s somebody who came into the situation, this constructed situation, with less contextual power, right, so if I’m a child, if I’m an autistic child, if I’m a black autistic child, fear is going to artificially cause me to look less powerful and less capable than I really am. And that’s related to the research on stereotype threat.
So, the research on stereotype threat basically says that if I’m a person who I know is negatively stereotyped against in a space, and I’m asked to do a task that falls into what I know I’m not expected to do well, and if I’m observed by whoever seems to be the power holder in that situation, I am not going to do well. So, like, a very, sort of a very surface level example of this, right, so, you know, I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s. Girls were not considered to be like, great at math and science, whatever. Okay. So, you know, if women in my demographic are set before a panel of men, and are asked to do a series of puzzles or problem-solving games, will score in a certain way. On the other hand, if we’re given the same exact set of things to do, and that same situation, and we’re told it’s a math test, the data shows we’re likely to do worse, right. And so, this pops up in a ton of populations, right. So, if we know that somebody’s waiting for us to fail, that’s going to make us kind of scared and stressed out. That’s going to shut down our higher order processing. Guess what? In that particular situation, we probably are going to struggle in the way that we were expected to struggle. And so, this sets up such a dangerous cycle that I try to teach about and help people interact in schools all the time.
So, for example, if a well-meaning educator — let’s say a neurotypical, well-meaning educator, right — because of the double empathy problem, this person is already set up to be kind of wary and skeptical of an autistic student. So, if they’re not, if they don’t know that, if they’re not interrogating that, they’re probably going to spend a lot of time worrying about what their autistic student might do, right. They might be like, “Oh, I hope this kid doesn’t refuse to do their work,” or, “I don’t know, I might have to call for help today if the student has what looks to mine neurotypical brain like a tantrum,” right. So, if a well-meaning educator is coming into a space kind of flustered like that, that’s going to change how they interact with an autistic student in typically one of two ways, depending on how stress works for that educator. They’re either going to go into a fight mode, and really kind of lean in, scrutinize the autistic student more than they might other kids. They might get more punitive; they might start using terms like ‘Nip it in the bud’. Or they might do the opposite. They might really lean out; they might get avoidant. They might not stop by that student desk very often, because they don’t want to incite a tantrum. They might just sort of wait for other service providers to come in and connect with that student. Either way, the autistic student who this neurotypical educator is having all these feelings about is going to experience threat. They’re either going to experience ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m being demonized’, or they’re going to experience ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m being ignored and abandoned’.
And in a world where connection needs are just as life or death to the amygdala in our brains as anything else, now the autistic student has essentially caught the fear of the educator, right. Because emotions are so contagious. So, now, guess what? Yeah, that autistic student might begin demonstrating some of the autistic trauma responses that are present in the DSM-5. If we don’t really get clear about how that happened and the connection between the expectation and the behavior, it would be easy for that educator to then say, “Oh, I was right to worry about this kid. Let me worry harder,” right, let me either get more punitive or more avoidant. You can see how now it just can become a total house on fire, when really, if we can get the power holders to learn how to regulate themselves so that they are able to keep an open mind, so that they are able to not sort of wait around for kids to do things that they were worried about, right. If we can get them to change how they are or are not spreading an energy of fear in the classroom, that is the best predictor of behavioral change in students that I know of.
Meg:
This is so helpful and something I think all of us who work with kids need to hear over and over and over again, that they can catch our fight-or-flight response. Most of us, if we haven’t done some work around this, don’t even recognize it when that’s what’s happening with us. So, I think there’s really a lot for us to process there. Most therapists understand the importance of co-regulating with our autistic clients. And I want to circle back to that briefly in just a minute, because they think there’s something that we might often do that’s sort of superficial, the idea of co-regulation, but not actual co-regulation. But before I shift, I want to linger on power for just another moment. I can imagine a number of therapists saying, “Well, you know, I work in a school, but my sessions are really child-led and I let the kid make a lot of choices,” or teachers kind of being able to think about the ways that kids do have power. And I’m wondering if we’re often unaware of how much power we hold as educators and therapists. Can you talk a little bit more about what power even means in this context and why it matters?
Dr. Gillian:
Yeah. I mean, institutional power is such a major one, right? And I think about that a lot in my work that, you know, when I’m sitting with a client already, the power is off, because I’m the person who has like, whatever, a degree next to my name, right? Like, in this constructed situation with a client, I am thought to be the expert; I’m supposed to be the expert. And that will default me to a position of authority, where that may not be appropriate, right. I mean, especially in a therapeutic space where we’re really working to help kids understand their own needs better. We’re really working to help kids communicate in a way that’s authentic to them in an OT space where I think we’re working to help kids understand how their nervous system works, and how their muscles work, and how, you know, sort of the physical humanity that they’re in, right, how to work with that. That’s so personal, right?
And I think when we’re doing our jobs right as therapists, we’re helping build self-trust in the people that we’re working with. We’re really helping people build their own sovereignty over what they need as far as communication and everything else. So, when we don’t recognize, even just because we are in the position of being the professional, how hard we need to work to invite the other person into a position of power in that space, I think we can lose a lot. So, even if we’re not acting, controlling, or domineering, just the position that we hold is going to create a weird power gradient unless we address it. So, you know, just being a teacher, just being a taller person, right. Like, all of these things can really put the person we are engaged with in kind of a one down spot. That can be kind of unconscious on both sides, right, but that can really block the ability of the person we’re helping to be the expert on their own experience and to learn to trust their own inner compass, which I think is really what we want to do with kids.
Meg:
What would you like to see therapists learning how to do? And I’m talking here, especially like OT’s, SLP’s, we’re not trained as mental health therapists and we’re existing in these learning spaces with kids who are experiencing chronic ongoing — I want to say stress — fear and kind of trauma from their environments. What would you like to see happening in terms of our ability to co-regulate with our autistic clients?
Dr. Gillian:
Okay. So, there’s a radical answer to this that’s a little like, abstract, and then there are concrete answers that I’ll get to. But I mean, I think if — I think the best thing we can do as adults in any space with kids, but especially in schools and therapeutic spaces, you know, we have a huge amount of power in what we model. And I think a lot of what drives the fight-or-flight response in well-meaning adult practitioners is trying to do things right. Any kind of sense that we might get in trouble with someone, right, whether that’s a boss or a regulatory agency, right, like, especially in schools, but even in therapy spaces, it’s just, I mean, everyone is worried about getting in trouble with someone. And I think that’s even how you can diagnose how much power you have in a space. Like, how many people could you get in trouble with, versus how many people could get in trouble with you, right? That’s really what a compliance-based, dare I say, sort of hierarchical capitalistic system wants us to think about, is who do you got to worry about, and who’s got to worry about you. Which really takes us out of a spirit of collaboration and working together. So, adults have a huge amount of power in what we model. So, how about we model freedom? How can we, as the adults in spaces with kids, get ourselves as internally free as we can? That happens through building our own internal basic safety, that happens through interrogating our own inner child scripts about where we might be inadequate, where we might get in trouble, where we have to prove that we’re okay and deserve to be here, right? Like, that energy is going to transfer right into the kids that we’re working with. And that energy is also so human. We all have that, of course we do. But how can we work with it? How can we get ourselves more free from that?
So, again, what we’re modelling is freedom. Internal freedom through self-trust, basic safety, so that we raise the next generation, autistic and holistic alike, to trust themselves and their new insights. So, if compliance-based methods, I think, maintain a status quo that I think we all know, we’ll definitely be obsolete in the foreseeable future anyway, right. Like, the like, quote-unquote ‘jobs’ that we’re trying to prepare our students for, they haven’t been invented yet. We don’t know what they are. They might actually not include sitting quietly at a desk, they may very well include rolling around on the floor and thinking of cool ideas in the way that many of our students are so ready to do, right. So, we don’t want to make assumptions about what the status — that the status quo is even going to be here anymore, let alone be modelling this sort of fearful ‘I don’t want to get in trouble’ adherence to it. So, let’s model freedom and trust in ourselves and each other so that we can welcome all brains, all insights because it’s really the new ideas and the unexpected insights that are going to be the most important anyway as society transforms. So, that’s sort of the top-down very idealistic answer to that.
And then, the granular answer is we got to really get our adult urgency out of the space. So, if trauma is partially about speed, right, fear is partially about speed, too. Like, our sweet little mammalian systems, you know, if we’re like hunched over and scurrying around and rushing around, that’s going to tell our brain, “Oh, there must be some kind of threat. Let’s be sure that we like, fire up all, like, the fear chemicals.” On the other hand, if we’re literally moving and talking slowly, listeners to this podcast will recognize I’m not the best at modelling talking slowly, I’m working on that all the time. But like, if we can get our own bodies — not even calmer yet, calmer is the goal, sure. But if we just start with slower, if we force ourselves to move and talk more slowly, our nervous system will respond because our nervous system will say, “Well, she wouldn’t have the time to be moving and talking that slowly if it were an emergency.” So, okay, let’s stand down a little bit. Let’s, like, pull back on the stress chemicals, maybe we can open up some parts of the brain that are more related to learning perspective and empathy.
And that’s a real internal interrogation for adults, too, because then we got to figure out, well, what makes us go urgent, right? Like, what does urgency feel like in our bodies? What are the subtle cues of that? How can we interrupt it? Like, when do we want to start using a grounding strategy, like what are five things I can see in a space, four things I can hear, three things I’m touching, two things I can smell, one thing I can taste. When do I want to start breathing out twice as long as I’m breathing in? These are all ways to hack into what’s called the parasympathetic nervous system, which takes us out of a fear state, right. So, the slower we can be, the less attached to outcomes we can be, the less worried about getting in trouble we can be. That allows us to no longer meet kids with this very adult-driven, agenda-driven feeling of urgency and rush. And just that will help the autistic students in our midst by at least a factor of 40%, I would say so. Even if we just start there, I think that’s going to make a big difference.
Meg:
Yeah, that’s radical. It is. And it’s not easy. I want to observe that when you talk about our nervous systems, you say something like ‘Our sweet little nervous systems’. And I’m curious, my interpretation of that is that you’re modelling self-compassion, too. For people who are listening and going, “Oh, I’ve got to get better at that! I’m terrible at being regulated in my sessions, I’ve got to get better at that,” my understanding — and correct me if I’m wrong — is that it actually starts with being kind and accepting and less urgent towards ourselves.
Dr. Gillian:
Because that’s how we build internal basic safety, right? And like, dare I say, secure attachment to ourselves. You know, Kristin Neff is such a rockstar in the science of self-compassion, right. And she has this wonderful website, selfcompassion.org, that I use a ton in my work, because it really is true that molecularly, we will create an environment of conflict and terror inside of ourselves if we’re screaming at ourselves, which we often are. Whereas we will start to create an environment of common safety when we can access kindness and compassion. And we often don’t want to do that, because we’re afraid it’ll make us lose our edge or we won’t work hard anymore. That’s not what the science says. The science says that if we can stop terrorizing ourselves, not surprisingly, our brain gets less scared and our full capacity unlocks and we’re actually more effective.
Meg:
Off to therapy we all go. Thanks, Gillian. [Laughs]
Dr. Gillian:
Well, on that topic, I also just want to point people to there’s a parenting program actually called the ‘Circle of Security’. But if folks Google ‘Circle of Security’ and then ‘Shark music’, there’s an incredible video that I use all the time in my work that really helps adults start to turn towards their own childhood experiences that might be causing them to go urgent when kids are behaving in a certain way, but also really encourages a spirit of compassion about that. Because if there are things that we’re working on, it’s just our own inner children that are doing it. It was just some adaptation we learned early on, like nothing nefarious is going on. It just needs some love, and care, and insight.
Meg:
I will link to that in the show notes. Thank you for that resource. If you are hoping that folks listening today have one big takeaway or if you want to bring us back to one key point before we wrap up, what would you hope that one takeaway would be?
Dr. Gillian:
The takeaway is freedom = good, compliance = bad.
Meg:
Yes! [Laughs]
Dr. Gillian:
Yeah, hard stop. Yes.
Meg:
Yeah, I’m gonna put — we’ll make posters, T-shirts. Play Spark, are you listening? We need t-shirts.
Dr. Gillian:
Cooperation = good, right? Like, I’m not saying that we don’t work together. But we got to do it from a place of authenticity. And compliance is the death of authenticity, or even being able to feel into what our internal authenticity would be. Compliance is a great way to train kids out of their ability to recognize what’s authentic for them.
Meg:
Thank you so much. Tell us what you’re working on now and where we can find you online.
Dr. Gillian:
Yeah. So, I think the best place to find me online right now, I work a lot with a wonderful organization called the Vermont Higher Ed Collaborative. And so, there’s a three-part webinar that my beloved colleague, Joelle van Lent, and I recorded in the fall. It’s called ‘Healthy Power in Schools’. So, I can send you that that link as well. But basically, there’s a three-part webinar that folks can find that is a deep dive into a lot of what I talked about today through the Vermont higher ed website. On April 26th and 27th, the PINE Program, which is the Program for Inclusion and Neurodiversity Education, is hosting an online summit. So, I get to be a presenter at that summit on the same fear and power stuff. And then, I’m also really lucky to be on a panel. I’m talking about how we can better set up our schools to support the needs of autistic students. And I’m also on the interwebs. My Instagram is @CalmConnectionPsychology, and I have a website where I’ve done some blogging and plan to do more in the coming weeks at gillianboudreauphd.com.
Meg:
And that’s Gillian with a G. I’ll link to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for this talk today.
Dr. Gillian:
It was so wonderful to be here with you.
[Ending music]
Thanks for listening to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast. Visit learnplaythrive.com/podcast for show notes, a transcript of the episode, and more. And if you learned something today, please share the episode with a friend or post it on your social media pages. Join me next time, where we will keep diving deep into autism.
