 Good afternoon Aspergist legion welcome back to another video. My name is mr. Thomas Henley always gotta be mister and Today we're going to be talking about color coding emotions now If you've been a part of my channel and if if you've seen any of my other autism parenting videos You may be wondering at this point why you subscribed to me because I'm not making that many of them recently So today I'm going to give you a little bit of another another little parenting tip for autistic children Something that helped me a lot when I was a teenager one of the difficulties of Being autistic and being on I was going to say being on the spectrum Kind of one in the same in it. You know being autistic and being a teenager can be bad There is a lot of emotional issues that come from autistic children a Lot of it is due to socializing and not being able to fit into a box that society has for us fitting the norm and Although that's not something that is Always gonna apply to a child a lot of the time they can be alienated bullied and Just generally have a low quality of life. So color coding emotions Can be a very important tool For making your child aware of what emotion they're feeling in order to make the world a bit more of a stable and Concrete place if any of that interests you Make sure to stick around for the video. I'm sure you'll find it useful growing up in teenagehood for myself as an autistic adult Was one of the most excruciatingly torturous Times in my life about around about primary school. I was completely fine. Yeah, sure Maybe I had a bit of issues around misbehavior, you know, not really understanding people's social boundaries And quite often a lot of that was just because I didn't understand. I didn't understand the social rules But when I went to teenagehood I Started to feel a lot of emotions when you go through puberty It kind of screws up everybody to some degree It makes you evaluate yourself and other people Makes you feel a lot of sadness and happiness and emotion and joy and excitement and fear and a lot of that can be very hard to deal with But when you're on the autistic spectrum When those things are already hard to deal with it can be sort of amplified You can make it a lot harder for an autistic person to thrive especially at school secondary school when I was around the age from the age of about 13 to 15 I Didn't understand what emotions were. I couldn't tell what emotion I was in unless it was Extremely extremely intense. So a lot of autistic people report that they will sort of be in on a baseline all the time and then Suddenly it'll come out of nowhere and they'll get very stressed or they get very overwhelmed This usually conflates with a meltdown and one of the difficulties with not being able to understand your emotions firstly You can't catch them early and tackle them yourself and do productive things that are going to make the situation better and secondly How are you going to form social relationships with people if you don't understand what mood you're in and if someone says hey you're in a bit of a rubbish mood if you're looking a bit angry and The autistic individual says no, I'm not why would I be like that although it may be completely self-evident They may not understand that they're in a certain emotion and they will deny it because It's not apparent to them. They can't perceive it as well throughout my teenage years I Grouped my emotions grouped Sort of different personalities that I thought at that time I Would you know attribute the color black to a certain way of being sort of being a bit dark Not necessarily anxious little bit angry little bit annoyed a little bit nihilistic and Negative and then I would have on the other side like sort of a pale Blue which is one of the colors that I both two colors that I liked a lot and the pale blue was sort of just feeling a bit glum and sad and very Feeling very submissive and Anxious at the same time as being quite compassionate and I had these personality groups for myself when I was younger to help explain emotions to me because Let's let's talk about the truth People don't define what emotions feel like a lot of people for a lot of people there is disparity on what Each emotion should feel like what the physical sensations. How does it make you think and? And because there is such a confusion about that. There's no concrete description of how that feels Autistic people can't apply Themself to that Obviously you can learn and you can develop that but it takes a long time even now I struggle Realizing what emotion I'm in and it really requires me to be very sensitive in my Sort of a viewing of myself to see what's changed from now and before I can't remember what mood I am before I was in before because I'm not experiencing it right now And that is another thing I struggle with a lot and I think a lot of autistic people do as well There is a lot of obstacles to all these kind of things But color coding emotions can be a very important tool to help with this the mere Coding of emotions is not something to sort of give them a list of you can't just Give them a list and say happy yellow Angry red. It doesn't work. You need to help them attribute different feelings and thoughts and Physical sensations to certain colors in order for them to understand what emotion they're in. It's kind of like saying I Don't know if there was some sort of you know different cultural thing like You could compare that's a terrible example What am I talking about I was gonna compare it to squids and somehow let me think of a comparison It's a very difficult thing to do to try and Understand all of the aspects of something and why they differ if you have no idea what they are Same way, you know in the same way you can sort of conflate that with you know, jealousy and anger There's a very sort of Intertwined things and it's sometimes it's very difficult to distinguish Which one's which this is just an example for a neurotypical person But with an autistic person this sort of gap between our emotions is very large a lot of the time we can You know simplify it down to feeling happy or sad or angry or afraid and those are sort of the main ways that we express emotion Because they are so drastic in their effects on us one of the ways that I started to You know understand my emotions first was through physical sensations. I was trying to tell trying to log and And You know so remind myself of the different Feelings that happen on my way to having a panic attack when I was younger So it would you know, it would start on my legs. I get very uncomfortable on my legs I get a lot of nervous energy and then I'd find myself repeating tasks over and over again and Even even if it wasn't doing anything and For me now I can see that that's you know quite a thing that's intertwined with what anxiety is about From the research that I've done at uni and the research I've done in a spare time And that has been extremely helpful for me getting in that an idea of What anxiety is the second way is? Trying to view How you are in a certain emotion. So you're trying to Identify the ways of thinking that you have When you're in a certain emotion so that from the four patterns and the ways of thinking that are differing you can Put your finger on exactly What that emotion could be these are two ways of understanding emotions and these have been the main ways that I've done this When it comes to complex emotions like hate and love. I mean We could have a whole nother video on that But if you are finding that your autistic child is struggling a lot try color-coding things and try going through these things with them Not attributing your own feelings about what happens when you you feel it have emotion you need to pitch stuff to them pitch stuff to ways that they are maybe feeling Make some notes and try and help them Categorize the different feelings that they have in the emotions to a specific color I just to a specific word like happiness or sadness can be a very useful tool a very useful tool and It is one of the main ways that I coped when I was at school that round That was a good run unintentional I'm gonna take it anywhere So that just about wraps up the video autism parents you worry as you understanding goddesses and gods that help autistic people Integrating such a confusing difficult overloading world My heart goes out to you. Thank you so much sticking by us and if you are part of the parental group that's trying to cure us and and God for God's sake just you know train us to be obedient slaves using dog-like behavior Get yourself out of it But anyway, as I said if you like the video, please Give it a like and if you have any specific questions about how to do this or you have any Questions related to helping out your child direct them to my social media accounts I'd ask Burgess growth Facebook Twitter Instagram go check them all out I also have a podcast called the 40 auto podcast that if you are Interested in learning more about different people's experiences with autism and Mental health Go check them out. They might be useful and good to listen to especially if you like my soothing deep monotonous autistic voice Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video. See you later