 Good day and welcome back to the Asperger's Crew for YouTube channel with your host, as always, Mr. Thomas Henley. Today we are going to go into a short... short autism video on autism and grief. As I said in one of my update videos before, this series of videos, this type of videos are going to be loosely based on my Instagram posts. If you want to go check out the actual posts that I make, you can follow me on Instagram, at Asperger's Grove, same as my YouTube channel, very easy to find. Anyway, let's get into autism and grief. Really, the ignition for this video has come from my grandad's anniversary, which was last week, last weekend. You know, it's always a really, really difficult time because being autistic, being a lexophymic, it's very hard to kind of categorize the emotions that I'm feeling. It's very hard to sort of deal with the negative effects of, you know, coming to the yearly realization that my grandad is no longer with me. I was thinking a little bit about the ways in which it may be different. Obviously, the grieving process is a tough time for anybody. It's a horrible experience. It's something that many, that many or most human beings have to experience at some point in their life. It's a very natural thing. I'm going to go through sort of a list of different things that make approaching and processing and dealing with grief particularly difficult as an autistic person. I'm going to be looking at the different traits. Specifically, if we go for number one, specifically the first one is a lexophymia. It can make it very difficult to, I guess, notice or categorize those background emotions. We did it a little bit different this year. We decided to go out and do something, you know, do something fun, do something as a family. One of the things, you know, that really helps me in the grieving process is taking time to think about it. It's kind of like, you know, when you're obsessed with something, when you're thinking about something a lot and it's really getting to you. The best way to approach that usually is to designate an amount of time during the day or a specific time of the day where you can think about it. Maybe for an hour you could write or you can make art or you could just jot down your thoughts or just think about a certain thing that's upsetting you. And leave it at that once that's over until you approach on the next day. That's kind of the way that I approach this because being the person that I am, I'm very sentimental and very emotional and, you know, I like to give my emotions and my thoughts to my grandad. You know, he's not here but it helps me to kind of process how I'm feeling about it. Pay attention to some of the really great and positive memories that I've had with him. Not obviously when he passed away, there was a lot of sadness, a lot of emotional pain. I hadn't really experienced that deep sadness in a long time. I'm severely depressed and depression is a lot different to being sad. There's no rhyme or reason for it in a lot of cases for me. It's just there and it just sort of infests my life in different ways. Being sad, there's a reason for it, it's cathartic, it's a good, it's a healthy emotional reaction to something that is negative. So I like to think about the way that I approach grieving as taking a period of time to think and feel. When I think and when I feel my emotions are going to rise, I'm going to be able to notice that I'm sad, notice the love that I have for my grandad, notice all of those emotions that are inside of me because I'm thinking about it, I'm in a sense giving it space to grow as much as it needs to, you know. It's not the most positive thing to feel but it's important to feel that emotion to understand it and to understand how you feel about it. Where it comes an issue for me is if I don't approach it in my own time, if I don't actively seek out the thinking and the emotions, it tends to just exist in the background and affects me in ways that I can't notice. There's background emotions. It's like being on a steady dose of a medication all the time, like every hour you're taking a med and small doses and for me it's like when you take your medicine at the end of the day, it's like to sleep or antidepressants is the specific time of the day where I get all of the dose out of the way. I hope that makes it easy to sort of understand my approach to it. I feel the weight of every memory that I have and I allow myself to feel the negative feelings and feel the positive feelings. It's just in my experience a lot more productive for me and a lot more meaningful to me when I set some time aside. So number two, we're going to number two, we're moving, moving quickly. Change can leave you unsure of how to move forward. When someone passes away, they leave a hole in your life. Depending on how much interaction you've had with them, depending on how deep the connection is, how often you talk, how many things you do with them on a regular basis, maybe if they're a part of a hobby or just there in the background in your house or they're ready to see you every week after a hard week and you can talk to them and chat to them. You know, that makes up a part of your routine to some degree and usually people make up a very important role in emotional and social needs. When someone is removed from your life, there's a lot of anxiety and dysfunction because there's so much that you've got those emotions of grief and all of that stuff to process. You also have, you know, this hole that in your routine you may feel like you're in deep water, you don't know where to go or how to adjust things and where to get your emotional social needs that this person has left, you know, left a hole in that need. You know, it can impact you quite a lot and it's important to recognise the roles that this person played in your life and also try and think of ways to get your needs met, the needs that they met before and can't now and obviously this takes time, but it is important and it will make you feel a lot more comfortable and be able to process the emotions a lot easier once you're in a stable place. So we're going on to the very last one and it is the difficulties with the social aspect of grieving. There are situations where you're at funeral or you're around people who knew this person either quite closely or loosely. You know, this sort of feels to be some kind of expectation to talk about it sometimes and at the same time, if someone else is struggling due to their passing you may feel like there's a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety on you to try and fix it, try and fix the whole. This whole approaching the social aspects of it can be very difficult for us because if we haven't learnt how to behave in this circumstance either through knowledge or experience it's going to be a lot harder for us because we lack the inherent skills that we're born with the inherent skills of socialising and cognitive empathy and understanding the social nuances and reading the room, etc. And so it can make social events either very stressful or you're always worrying about it all the time or on the other hand you could say something that is inappropriate to that situation or you're not reading the room right. Just to give myself again as an example I am a very emotional person I'm very sensitive and supportive to my loved ones but when you add the grief when you add the dissociations into thought the frequent sort of thinking about it the low mental health that comes with being sad and difficulty with cognitive empathy and sometimes you don't read the room right and you get it wrong you say something and it upsets people and it could be very small things like the tone of your voice or your body language or your facial expressions or your level of interactivity there's a whole host of different reasons to why people can read you differently and when the other people are struggling like yourself it can make them a little bit less tolerant to that kind of stuff it has happened and it's often very nerve-wracking because you're always thinking I want to do the best for this person and their family and you're kind of on a bit of a limb you really want to help but at the same time you don't want to say the wrong thing it's more likely that we're going to say the wrong thing because of our inherent lower social skills and cognitive empathy and I like to find it so there's a lot of things in that and I'd love to hear how if you have any positive ways of dealing with grief I would definitely fully appreciate that how do you deal with your grief is there anything that you can share with others to help them in this time I'd really love to hear that so that does our little short video it's actually short for the first time with the over-promising short video so I hope this helps and I hope you have a lovely day and don't hesitate to get in contact follow the social medias website ThomasHenley.co.uk for modelling for public speaking for all that lovely jazz and of course the Fortiotti podcast which will be coming very soon he's saying it for a while but it is, I've got them recorded for season two I've got some really cool guests coming out so definitely try and subscribe to that Spotify Apple Podcast and yeah have a lovely day keep yourself hydrated and I was Auti's tensor to not get all the liquids in I'm the same if you haven't eaten today try and get some food in you and yeah I'm probably going to go to the gym later have a nice shower have some dinner and then I'll try and chill out it's been a hard week last week and yeah see you later folks oh that's a bit callous a bit blunt um thank you for watching once again and I'll see you in another episode on the Asperger's Growth Channel see you later