Category: Blog Posts

Like all people, children need to know they are loved and cared for. It is also important for them to believe that someone needs and relies on them. They want to know their existence and presence makes a difference to other people. Listen to your children and support them. As kids navigate new situations and inevitable disappointments, they need to know that they’re not alone. Cultivate a warm, strong relationship.

Talk to them openly about what is happening, and give them opportunities to tell you how they feel, without criticism. Regardless of how you feel about the changes and how you are ready to proceed, you need to know what your child is thinking and feeling.

Be in tune with how each child is dealing with the changes in their life. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to children. Each child is unique and has different strengths and weaknesses. Some can handle more than others. This means spending time with each of your children individually and allowing them to share their own feelings on the matter, separate from the rest of the family.

A key part of developing resilience and dealing with change is emotional management. Teach your kids that emotions are okay! It’s okay to feel. And it’s okay to feel differently than their parents about a situation. They need to know that what they share will be respected and safe.

Answer your child’s questions. Some of them may be painful. You may think your child isn’t old enough to understand. But honesty is vital when helping your children adapt to big changes in their lives. If they can’t get a straight answer from you, who can they turn to?

Be honest about your mistakes. Some big changes come because of mistakes made. Making mistakes is a part of life. Life is about learning something new every day. Sometimes those lessons cause pain, or even permanent scars. It is natural to not want your children to see those mistakes or experience any of the pain associated with them. But know this: whatever stress you are feeling as a parent, your children are feeling it as well.

Use the situation as a teaching tool. Demonstrate to your children that failure is not the end of the world. Show them that it is absolutely possible to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and move on. Be honest with them about what is happening and why. If you are honest, it not only teaches your children a lesson, but it also helps them forgive and start to heal.

• Be aware of the way you describe certain situations and make a conscious effort to turn those comments into something more optimistic.

• Focus less on the problem, and more on the solution. If no solution is obvious, focus on the fact there must be a solution somewhere and that you and your team are capable of discovering it.

• Discuss the smaller, more manageable steps, you can take to solve a problem. What can you do right now, in this moment? It helps you and those you work with focus on what they can accomplish without getting overwhelmed.

• Cultivate a more positive, meaningful start to conversations. If someone asks how you are, don’t lead with the negative (i.e. “I’m tired/hungry/anxious”). Tell them something good that has happened.

• Show gratitude. Discuss things you are thankful for, big and small.

1. 
   Care for your basic needs. As an entrepreneur, you work long hours. That’s a given. But prioritize sleep, healthy eating, exercise, and time with friends and family. Adequate sleep is absolutely vital to function at optimum levels. Eating good food gives your mind the nutrients it needs to make brilliant business decisions. Exercise relieves stress. Time spent with those you love keeps you balanced
2. Simplify your life. The life of an entrepreneur is full of activity and decisions. Don’t make things harder than they need to be. Where you can simplify, do it. For you that may mean using a grocery delivery service or having limited wardrobe options to sort through each morning. Simplify as many things in your life as you can so that you can focus on the areas that will benefit most from your attention and creativity.
3. Get help with the details. To make your vision succeed, there are a lot of teeny-tiny details to work out. Hire someone to help you. You have skills, but you are not skilled at everything. So outsource the things you need to. Let other people care for the details while you continue focusing on what you are best at.
4. Hire a psychologist. People who regularly attend to their psychological health are not only stronger emotionally, but they are less prone to illness and experience a better sense of personal well-being. Engaging in psychotherapy enhances your analytical and intuitive abilities by utilizing the full range of your conscious and unconscious talents. It helps you take charge of your life.

Historically it’s been thought that autism is four times more common in boys than in girls. However, studies are now suggesting that the true ratio is one in two. Why the shift?The current methods for diagnosing autism are skewed toward how autism affects boys. To be diagnosed with autism or Asperger’s, girls need to display more behavioral problems or a significantly higher intellectual disability. Girls with less severe symptoms are more likely to be misdiagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anorexia.

Behavioral and preliminary neuro-imaging suggests that autism manifests differently in girls. Scientific American has a must-read article outlining some of these differences. Here are some highlights:

1. Females can more easily mask, camouflage or compensate for ASD symptoms than males.
2. Girls obsessively focus on reading, looking for rules for social life so they can connect and fit in.
3. The difference between typical and autistic development in girls is in their intensity. They may refuse to talk about anything other than their topic of interest.
4. Autistic girls exhibit less repetitive behavior than the boys do.
5. The pastimes and preferences of autistic girls are more similar to those of typical girls rather than stereotypically male interests.
6. Girls with autism are more likely than autistic boys to pretend play; they just don’t put themselves into the story.
7. A study published in 2014 by Baron-Cohen and his colleagues found that “66 percent of adults with Asperger’s reported suicidal thoughts, a rate nearly 10 times higher than the general population. 71 percent of them were women, who made up about one third of the sample”.

Kevin Pelphrey, a leading autism researcher at Yale University’s Child Study Center says, “Everything we thought was true of autism seems to only be true for boys.” For example, his (unpublished as of yet) studies show that the brain of an autistic boy uses different regions to processes social information such as eye movements and gestures than a typical boy’s brain does.

Yet that’s not true of girls. Each girl’s brain “looks like that of a typical boy of the same age, with reduced activity in regions normally associated with socializing.” So according to the tests, these girls appear to be normal. But they’re remarkable different from typical girls of their age.

I experienced first hand many of these things when I was raising my autistic daughter. Until she was diagnosed, I was frantic. I know all too well that hopeless feeling of watching a child struggle in life and not knowing what to do.

Do you suspect that one of your female family members has undiagnosed autism? With a proper diagnosis, you can begin the process of helping her live a better life. If you live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA please contact my office and schedule an appointment.

You can read my story and that of others’ in my book, Out of Mind – Out of Sight: Parenting with a Partner with Asperger Syndrome (ASD). Click on the image below to download a free chapter.

Interestingly, studies have shown that motivational self-talk works best if you refer to yourself in the second or third person (“You can do this. Insert-your-name, you’ve got this.”) It distances you further from the experience, enhances your self-control and lowers your anxiety more. As a result, it helps you to be more objective and less emotional. (Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan has published a pdf of his findings. Click here to read it.)

A recent New York Times article gives further insight on how instructional self-talk benefits you. For one thing, it blocks out distractions so you can focus better. It also employs the feedback hypothesis, namely by hearing it out loud you can visualize the object, which makes your brain connect to its “file of information” on that object.

For example, in their experiments, they asked people to locate a specific item out of series of random items. Those that spoke the name of the object out loud located the object more accurately and quickly, because their brains retrieved the visual image of the object.

So, no, you’re not going crazy if you talk to yourself out loud. It’s a smart thing to do – with one caveat – make sure your self-talk is always positive and encouraging. Negative self-talk is very damaging. It can even change your brain chemistry.

When you’re controlled by habitually negative patterns of thinking, it’s time to seek professional help. If you live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA please contact my office and schedule an appointment. I also offer online therapy if that works best for your busy schedule.

Does neuroscience fascinate you? Why not review some of my past articles. Simply type “Brain Science” into the Search Box on this page and enjoy!

Two Caltech biologists, Le Chang and Doris Y. Tsao, experimented on macaque monkeys to see how the brain responds to facial images. (Their recognition system seems to be very similar to ours.) They found that:

● “The face recognition system consists of face cells grouped into patches of at least 10,000 each.

● There are six of these patches on each side of the brain, situated on the cortex, or surface, just behind the ear.

● When the image of a face hits the eye’s retina, it’s converted into electric signals.

● These signals pass through five or six sets of neurons and are processed at each stage before they reach the face cells.

● The face cells receive information about the shape, dimensions and features of a face.

● 50 such dimensions are required to identify a face.”

When a monkey looked at a face, the biologists were able to reconstruct the facial features, just by monitoring the pattern in which the monkey’s face cells were firing. Take a look at the images in the New York Times article. It’s amazing how similar these reconstructed images are to the real ones.

The finding are, at this time unconfirmed in other labs. But this could be a monumental breakthrough. I’m excited to see if this will lead to new ways we can help those with ASD perceive facial expressions. That would be a fantastic discovery indeed!

If you’d like to learn more about how the autistic brain works, I provide online education specifically for families with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). My focus is on applying neuroscience and psychology to improve your relationships. And if you have specific issues you need help with, you might qualify for online therapy as well. Contact my office and schedule a session.