A Deep Dive into Autistic Burnout in Children with Jodie Clarke

Debbie:
Hey Jodie, welcome to the podcast.

Jodie Clarke:
Hello, thank you for having me.  

Debbie:
As I was mentioning before we hit record, someone in my community posted about your book in the discussion board and was like, this book connected so many dots for me and it’s called Stop the World I Want to Get Off, a guide to understanding and supporting the recovery of autistic burnout in children and young people. And so that piqued my interest right away because I need that book for myself as a parent. And then I was so excited to just kind of introduce you to my listeners who are raising kids who are navigating this. So that was a very long winded welcome

Jodie Clarke:
Great. I mean, it’s interesting for me because as a practitioner, I’m based in the UK. And, you know, you put something out there and so often you don’t really know where it ends up or whose hands it ends up in and you just hope that it’s out there doing something helpful for somebody. So, yeah, it’s always great feedback for me when I hear that, you know, people, you know, in all different places are. are exploring, finding it useful as a tool on part of their journey. Yeah, it’s good.

Debbie:
Yeah, yeah, it’s exciting. Well, would you tell us a little bit about your, I guess your your why like how you got into this being an area of interest for you and why you felt so compelled to provide this resource for parents?

Jodie Clarke:
Yeah, gosh, it’s quite long winded. You know, my sort of neurodivergent brain tends to go around the houses. So pull me up if I start going off on too many tangents. My journey started actually when I was a lot younger, before I realized I was neurodivergent. I applied for a job when I was about 17, working in what was sort of known to be a children’s home. I suppose back then I just thought it was sort of like an orphanage, I suppose. I’m not really too sure that I really understood what sort of a job I was applying for anyway. I got this job and I had the interview outside of the home and then went to the home to sign a contract and very quickly was thrown in the deep end of it was a what we call or did call a respite unit for children and young people with complex medical needs and learning disabilities and a lot of them were obviously neurodivergent. And I was very quickly fascinated by the way these children were communicating, weren’t always using words, but staff understood what they were communicating. I just sort fell in love with these children and young people and how they communicated and what they communicated. And actually when I first started, I was really young and really quite naive and quite small. And I think the manager said that I’d last two weeks, like behind my back. I actually continued there for about four years I think. I went off and went to university and did my psychology degree but came back but from that point I had a real sort I now know is a special interest in autism in particular. It was only when I came away from that job and had other jobs with you know it was always sort of with vulnerable young people, youth offending teams, young offenders, young people who were sort of disengaged from systems. And when I had my own children, I think my daughter was about seven when I recognized there were some really, really big struggles. I read an article and to this day, I’ve never been able to find it again, but talked about autistic girls in particular and masking and the way that neurodivergence can present differently for some people, particularly, you know, people born or assigned female at birth. And it just ticked every single box of my daughter. It was just like this revelation. Like, I knew an awful lot, well, I thought I knew an awful lot about autism and being autistic, but clearly only knew quite a small amount. And Well, like many neurodivergent people, again, didn’t know I was neurodivergent at this time, I deep dived. I wanted to know all there was to know about masking, autistic masking. All there was to know about, you know, this presentation that we sort of suppose, assigned to females. But, you know, we know that that’s not just the case. I just deep dived because I needed to understand my child so that I could know, support her and make sense of her struggles and how she was presenting. And it just literally just went from there. And then of course I went on the very typical journey of recognizing that well, if my child’s neurodivergent and everyone’s like, well, no, she does that because you do that. And no, she’s anxious because you’re anxious and all the typical sort of things that we hear sometimes as parents of neurodivergent kids, I was neurodivergent. Yeah, my sort of career had taken a little bit of a turn anyway, or starting to take a bit of a turn because I’d had my third child and wasn’t really coping working with local authority and high caseloads and was sort of burning out and dropping balls. Okay, I just sort of in some ways into private practice, but with the support of another colleague actually who’d done the same thing. So yeah, my first sort of special interest, suppose, or passion within, you know, specialism within understanding neurodivergence and autism in particular was autistic masking. And that sort of was sort of like not exactly my starting point, definitely my starting point in terms of really deep diving. And it just sort of blossomed from there. just, like people always say like, I get quite a few people say to me, how did you get into this work? And, you know, how did you get to where you are? I’m like, to me, it just all feels like a bit of a fluke. It just all feels very organic, or incidental. For me, it’s like a coaster, but an epic journey as well. I talk a lot about journeys in relation to neurodivergence and rewilding and And we all have such different journeys in terms of, you know, getting to that point of recognizing ourselves as neurodivergent people. But yeah, it was definitely the catalyst, I think, realizing that my daughter was actually. And it took me till she was seven to realize that even though had some, you know, what I thought was quite a good understanding of autism. So yeah, and then of course, I deep dived on autistic masking. I ended up doing a master’s in autism because I was trying to advocate for families and young people. And I felt like in meetings, I wasn’t being taken seriously. I wasn’t being heard. I wasn’t being listened to. In fact, to the point where I actually had a school senco quite rigid and not really hearing the young person’s voice that I was trying to advocate for.

She actually turned around and said to me, what qualifications have you got anyway? Yes, we don’t talk about her much anymore, but she was quite problematic. know, in some way she did me a favour because I was like, okay, I’m going to go and get a qualification then. I sort of became quite invested. I was supposed to just do a year’s post-grad. certificate in autism and then just got really invested in the field and Dr. Luke Bearden’s work, who was my lecturer and supervisor and ended up doing the full three years masters that just took me on a whole other level of journey really. A deep dive that I was talking to somebody about this the other day and I can’t remember who but I spent three days in London as part of my post-grad certificate. I spent three days with Dr. Luke Bearden and a couple of guest speakers lectures. And every day I came away feeling really emotional because for the first time, because I wasn’t really ingrained in the autistic community at that point, but for the first time, I was listening to somebody who was saying things that completely aligned with my heart. Like it was honestly like everything he was saying was absolutely singing to me. And it was the first time I’d heard anybody say things along the same lines of what I was trying to achieve for the children and young people that I was working with. So, you know, obviously I was going to become quite addicted and obsessed at that point. because it was just, yeah, a really powerful moment in time in my life that I was like, wow, okay, I’m on the right page. So I did my full masters and my whole masters at that time was all on autistic masking and children and young people. Yes. Three years of study in autistic masking and research in autistic masking as part of my masters. It was just an unfortunate natural, I say unfortunate because of the way that sustained masking leads us to is burnout, neurodivergent burnout. There’s plenty of research that links sustained masking and that feeling of unsafety to neurodivergent or autistic burnout.

And unfortunately within that time as well, by that point I’d already recovered two of my own children from burnout, not necessarily having the language or the resources to know what was happening to them, but having an understanding enough of them and how they experience the world to know that. that they’d been pushed to way beyond what they could manage. So I knew that I wanted to keep focusing on burnout, you know, alongside my personal life professionally, I was, my work was gaining more traction, particularly around masking. And so, you know, naturally again, I had more and more families coming to me whose kids were in crisis. And I think even more concerningly was that not only were they in crisis, but when they’d tried to access mental health support or support through schools or that the support had actually caused further harm in some cases with the approaches being around building resilience and pushing through. And as parents, we are sort of conditioned and brainwashed to follow those that have some sort of power imbalance over us or you know, deemed to be the professionals and, you know, when you’re in crisis with your child and you’re feeling scared and lost and fearful, you’re going to, you know, grasp onto anyone who, you know, claims to have the answers. So, I think I was really fortunate in some ways that I don’t know whether by that point when my own kids had experienced this level of crisis that I’d managed to build. some level of self-awareness and become back in touch with my own instincts as a parent. So many of us have those instincts sort of suppressed, I think, from sort of neuro-normativity and societal expectations. And I think I was fortunate that I’d started to feel some of that again. I just, I literally just supported my kids through instincts. Particularly my youngest, when he hit burnout, we had COVID, so everything shut down anyway. So that was fortunate that actually the whole world had stopped. So we were able to easily get off of it, get away from it, recover from it, decompress from it.

So yeah, it’s been a journey that’s been sort of orchestrated from personal experience, professional experience, the incredible insight from the various families, parents, children, young people. I always feel immensely privileged, although I don’t like the word privilege because we shouldn’t have to be having these conversations, but privilege that families trust me and share with the hardest moments. with their children, it’s devastating and I, how can you just sit on that? How can you sit on that with all of that insight from various different people and not put it out there? Because, now, and there still are periods of time where I have so many people contacting me looking for support and everything they’re describing is absolutely typical of neurodivergent or autistic burnout. So the book was written because although I knew I wanted to research and I potentially wanted to do that via a PhD. A, I didn’t know if I had capacity or would manage that and B, I didn’t want to wait to get the information out. I wanted to empower as many people as possible. I wanted to prevent further harm. At that moment in time, I think my focus was parents. I want parents to have information that validates and supports them. I suppose my PhD that’s come second to that is now much about, and actually a lot of my work now is very much about, I want professionals to know this too, because they’re the gatekeepers, they’re the ones not maliciously, but inadvertently sometimes offering support and advice that isn’t great, Yeah, so an epic journey, really. I was thinking about it the other day because I’ve been actually just recently asked to write a chapter in a book some people that I feel very imposterish alongside. And they’ve all been very kind. But it’s been seven years since I sat in that room in London. It doesn’t feel like seven years.

Debbie:
You mentioned earlier that this was kind of a fluke that you ended up here. And I feel the same way about the work that I do. This was not part of my career plan at all. I made a complete pivot. But what I appreciate so much about what you’re doing and the fact that you have lived experience, it’s a deep area of interest, but you’re sharing it in a way that is helping so many people. It’s a journey that benefits many. I’m just grateful for that because this is, as you and we’ll talk about after the break, having a child who’s in autistic burnout is an incredibly difficult thing for a parent and it’s incredibly difficult for our kids to experience. So I will say that Autistic Burnout for me has been on my radar for the past couple of years. We’ve done I think only one or two episodes on it in 500 episodes. But it’s something I’ve been learning more about. I feel like more people are talking about it. But what I hear from a lot of parents is there’s confusion. And maybe this is because of the mental health providers they’re talking with. But there’s confusion about anxiety, depression, oppositional behavior, and then the neurodivergence and then parents don’t know what am I treating here? Is this burnout? Isn’t this burnout? So I’d love to hear how you would describe burnout or what it might actually look like in kids and teens in a way that parents may not be aware of.

Jodie Clarke:
Yeah, god, that’s like, there’s so much within that because, you know, again, I get asked a lot, how do we know if it’s depression and how do we know if it’s burnout? And firstly, like there’s loads and loads of overlap. loads of overlap, the two can co-occur. But because the treatments are, I mean, it depends on where you are in the world, but because particularly in the UK, the depression, the treatments for depression, we know can, and this has actually come from adult research because the research isn’t there with children and young people yet, but it’s anecdotally what I would see when working with children and young people. But we do know that the treatments or typical treatments for depression such as, you know, CBT that’s certainly not been adapted or sometimes antidepressants medications can actually worsen autistic burnout. Essentially autistic burnout is a result of the environment and the demands within the environment outweigh our capacity as neurodivergent people. That medically, you know, through medication or through CBT, which places the onus on the person to adapt and change, is going to be setting people up to fail. Because then they’re going to potentially go through that treatment and then go back into the environment that caused the harm in the first place. you then got sort of the compounding trauma of going back and failing in inverted commas because the environment is still just far too much. So generally what I will say to families is, let’s look at this as burnout and let’s look at how we would support this, you know, this child. with burnout and take it from there because actually just having that very low demand, curious, trust the child will when they can approach going to be beneficial across the board. In terms of recognising autistic burnout, again, the adult research is there. There’s not loads of adult research. I think that was, know, we’re only looking in the last five, six years that this has become. more pronounced within research.

But what we do know is that it’s been categorized into sort of three things. So an increased frequency or intensity of meltdowns or shutdowns. And increased, again, research says increased sensitivity to sensory stimulus. But I would also argue that sometimes in children we see an increased need for sensory input for regulation. So if we take into account ADHDers who, you know, will sometimes use sensory input on their bodies, whether that be through loud music or bouncing on a trampoline, we sometimes see these kids be sort of slightly more hyper seeking well when they’re in burnout. We can have the same child showing different extremes as well as different sensory stimulus. decreased function in particularly executive functioning and just a general deterioration of quality of life. So when we talk about this in relation to children, we will see children that are, and I’m talking extreme burnout, crisis level burnout. We see children who are no longer able to manage the sensory input of clothing and self-care. So things such as brushing teeth, brushing of hair, showering, bathing, changing clothes. I’ve worked with far too many children who have been unable to actually even have the sensory input of clothing on their bodies. So they live for continued days, weeks, months wrapped in soft blankets with maybe just some underwear on or they live in the same pair of pajamas that have to be sort of extracted maybe to wash every now and again and put straight back on. My own son was unable to wear shoes, forgetting even about pants and socks, which were an absolute no-no and still are. Wasn’t even able to put shoes on his feet. So we see that a lot. We see massive differences in sleep. So we see kids who are either unable to sleep or they’ll be exhausted as high levels of exhaustion that comes in with that sort of functioning category, high levels of exhaustion. It’s not necessarily exhaustion that obviously can just be early night and you’ll be fine. Sort of it’s a deep in your bones exhaustion. know, but we see kids that are unable to sleep. We see a lot of kids that turn nocturnal. So they’ll be sleeping all throughout the day and then they’ll start creeping around the house at night. I think one of the things, you know, that I speak to parents a lot about around this is again, having the insight from various different children, young people that have been able to share this that makes complete sense in my brain when it’s explained is that at nighttime, the demands are honest or lessened. So If they’re awake in the day, there’s an expectation to why don’t we try for school today? Or why don’t we go out and get out for a walk for your mental health? Or why don’t you come downstairs and get some treat in the kitchen where there’s other people? Or why don’t you get dressed? Or how about we try for a shower today? Or grandma’s popping over. Do you want to come and say hello? So there’s all of these demands.

Whereas at nighttime, even just the sounds. When my son hit quite a severe burnout, he was only four. But that coming September, all of his friends were starting school, his little preschool friends, and we lived opposite the school. So even just the sound of the mums getting, because they parked all along the pavements, the mums getting out the cars, the chitter-chatter, the kids going into school at nine o’clock in the morning coming out again at three, all of those external demands on us, even from outside of the house, the sounds of cars on the road and. knowing that everybody else is seemingly functioning and getting up and going to work and going to school and so forth. So night times are a time where there’s no demand. The expectation is to do nothing at bedtime, at nighttime. So that is a time where it feels safe to potentially get something to eat out of the kitchen or wake up and have some downtime on your phone. I think most of us appreciate that time between our kids being asleep and our bedtime to the point where sometimes we stay up far too late because we just enjoy, particularly if we’ve got kids that don’t fall asleep particularly early and we don’t actually get that time. It’s the same concept, you know, kids are seeking that time where nobody’s going to harass them to do anything or even external demands, even if as a parent we’re completely able to take that hands off approach. The outside world isn’t there.

So we see big differences in sleep. We see big differences sometimes in food. You know, I do a whole talk around food and burnout and around how food places a demand on every single aspect of us. From a sensory perspective, it hits every single sensory part of our body, from our interoception to our proprioception to our sense of smell, sight, everything. But also from an executive functioning perspective, there’s, we’ve got to decide what we want to eat. We’ve got to then potentially prepare it or at least manage it coming from a shop or ordering it in some way. So. And then we’ve got the social demands that come with food, even if it just involves actually coming out of our room to go into the kitchen where there’s potentially people or if you come from a family where the expectation is that you sit and eat around a table with other people. So many demands associated with food. In burnout, our nervous systems, our sensory systems are absolutely a capacity. which sort of probably should have gone back and said that in the beginning, like in terms of what I see autistic burnout is, is a form of self preservation. It’s our nervous systems, our sensory systems saying no more. Like if you continue to put any demands on yourself, you will cause yourself irreparable damage and trauma. We can’t talk about neurodivergent burnout without talking about trauma because Unfortunately, when we hit crisis point, will be elements of trauma within that, amongst that, intertwined with that, because generally neurodivergent kids are very resilient and they do keep pushing themselves and pushing themselves, which is why it makes me so cross when the narrative is like, they just need to be more resilient. And I’m like, do you know how much resilience they’ve had within this? very unaccommodating world already. They’ve pushed themselves to the point of a mental health crisis. In fact, some of them will again, in recognition of recognizing burnout, quite often we will see children get physically ill because the stress on their bodies impacts their immune systems. So it’s not unusual for me to meet families where the child has crashed out with throat infections, ear infections, water infections. Chronic fatigue, tight syndromes, all over body pain.

So some kids that push themselves trying to push their brains and their nervous systems through it, their bodies will take over and they will be physically, medically ill. And then that can sometimes signal the need to stop. And actually for the ones that are, you know, the kids that are carrying an awful lot of sort of internalised ableism, and this certainly comes from personal experience with one of mine, is that when they got severely ill with a really high level of water, like high level of infection, water infection, it was like, I could probably stay off school now, couldn’t I, because I’ve got to take antibiotics. and that was a legitimate reason in their mind. not to take a break because everything that happened up to that point of the mental health crisis we were in and the extreme meltdowns that we were experiencing every single day and me saying I think you just need to take a break sweetheart, I think we need some days off it’s not socially acceptable is it? There’s a stigma attached to that but physical illness thankfully I obviously didn’t want it to get to that point, but thankfully came so that I could say, yeah, no, you probably shouldn’t be in school if you’re on antibiotics. And again, thankfully, which is the wrong word completely, it took three lots of different antibiotics in several months for that infection to clear. So that gave us a really nice space to recognize that actually when we removed the demand and, you know, we removed the demands of the world and in particular school. things might gradually start to feel a little bit better. So anyway, I digressed. Signs of burnout, eating, talked about sleeping, meltdowns. We can see various other types of mental health, ill health come into place. Obviously, you’ve got anxiety, social anxiety, not wanting to leave the house. And that being quite an obvious sort is an obvious sign and symptom. We sometimes see kids develop OCD traits, symptoms. Mutism, situational mutism.

For some kids we see high levels of regression and there’s lots of talk about regression and obviously regression used to sort of be part of we thought we knew about autism. Certainly in, your child would be diagnosed if there was a certain level of regression, but there’s much more sort of movement towards recognising regression as a burnout now and we will see some. regression of skills. I don’t like the word regression, which is why I don’t know why I can’t articulate that, but you know, we will see a difficulty. I think because for me regression is, yeah, there’s a loss of skills, but some that’s about a nervous, for me, that’s about a nervous system, sensory system response, like not being able to for yourself, feed yourself is because the brain’s capacity and executive functioning is shot or the sensory system is shot. So, you know, the feeling of the cold on our bodies while we’re getting undressed is, you know, we just can’t, we just don’t have any tolerance for that. In terms of, you mentioned briefly oppositional we do see high levels of demand avoidance. have a lot of conversations with parents where they’re saying to me, is this burnout or is this PDA? And I’m like, okay, although in time it would be helpful to understand that, at this moment in time, again, we’re going to take really similar approaches. Any human being will be demand avoidant. when they’re at capacity. the same way that, you know, the example I always give is being a parent to three kids and, don’t really do school runs anymore. But, you know, that, that morning where you’re running late, you know, maybe for a doctor’s appointment, dentist appointment, school run, and it’s taking you all morning to get everybody up, get everybody dressed, pat lunch boxes, pack bags, make sure they’ve got PE kit, make sure they’ve got dinner money or whatever, you know, all of the demands that come from just that system. And literally you’re about to go out the door and one child turns around and says, can I take my toy from upstairs? Potentially that’s going to tip you over the edge. Potentially you’re going to go, no, no, no. Because right at that moment in time, your capacity is full. Like you do not have capacity to take on one more demand and that’s going to tip you over the edge.

And I say, I give this example quite a lot. And then I think, I wonder if that’s more about my neurodivergence and whether I have people experiences. But for me, is a demand too far. So if you imagine that as a child, your nervous system has gone into self preservation mode and stopping you from, you know, keep pushing yourself past capacity, are absolutely going to avoid demands. It’s self preservation. It’s important and actually, I celebrate when kids say no, because I work with so many kids who fawn and mask, who want to please everyone around them, even their parents, because, you know, they love their parents and they know that there’s pressure potentially on their parents. You know, we have this awful system in the UK where if kids don’t attend school, the parents risk being fined and taken to court. So you’ve got these kids that keep pushing themselves through and at a point where they say, no, I’m like brilliant. Because they’ve been trying to say no for a long time. And they have needs, they should have said no a long time ago, but because of the pressures on them, they haven’t.

So if we have a child who we give autonomy to and we allow them to say no to us and we respect that, we’re deemed to be the problem. We’re deemed to not be good enough parents. And I’ve got three neurodivergent kids who now brought up in a way where they do have autonomy over how they live their lives and they do have. a relationship with me that is safe and respectful and we have conversations and negotiations and safety is obviously not just about physical safety but that emotional relational safety and I just don’t think our systems are set up for that. So part of the journey that I end up on with parents which again is a massive privilege is actually okay. As parents we have to undo some of the learning that we’ve done, I mean I go as far to say brainwashing and conditioning, we’ve been taught as parents that this is how, is what makes us a good parent and actually particularly when we’ve got neurodivergent kids, particularly when we’ve got children who have you know heightened nervous systems, anxiety driven need for autonomies, we absolutely have to unlearn a lot of stuff and tackle the stigma that comes from that of, you know, the people around us, society, family members, it’s hard work.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s one of the biggest challenges and you talk about it in the book too is parents want to do right by their kids and they’re often getting shamed by others for the choices they’re making. Okay, so I feel like we’re getting a pretty good picture of what this could look like. And you’ve started to kind of talk about this idea of demands and giving our kids autonomy. But let’s go a little deeper into that and what you know, and I’m using air quotes, if you’re not watching this on YouTube, like what recovery looks like, I think recovery is a tricky word, too. But you know, just talking about how we can best support kids who are in burnout. What are some of the best practices?

Jodie Clarke:
Yeah. There’s so much to say here and I feel like I’m going to miss stuff out, but I’ll try to pull from my brain as much as I can. But essentially, yeah, we want the nervous system. So we want to create a feeling of safety, perceived safety for that child. And we start off by removing demands, demands as much as physically possible. There’s a bit of a caveat to this that I feel like I need to mention here because I can just imagine, I know absolutely justifiable responses when we talk about this is being able to pull your child from school, being able to say no to the world comes with an awful amount of privilege. Most parents end up having to make financial sacrifices and not everybody’s able to do that. cut hours, give up careers, so forth. But also, even on a more serious note, is that when we go against the grain as neurodivergent parents of neurodivergent kids, we are absolutely at risk of parent blame and being falsely accused of fabricating illness, particularly if we’ve got a child that masks. And I’m not going to delve into this too much, but there’s an awful lot of research out there that shows the heightened risk of neurodivergent parents in particular. of neurodivergent kids. We are a marginalised, stigmatised community. Now, if on top of that marginalisation, you’re multiply marginalised, so, you know, if you’re a person from global majority or you’re queer or you’ve got that added layer of discrimination and stigma and marginalisation.

So, sometimes the advice that I give is still the right advice, but it’s not always easily and safely done for everybody. And I think that’s really important to mention that. But that aside, we need to remove demands. So if our child is not choosing to come out of their room and spend most of their day on an iPad, we’re letting go of that. If our child is only managing to eat bags of crisps all day, we’re letting go of that. If our child doesn’t brush her teeth for a week, we’re letting go of that. If they spend day and night in their pajamas, we’re letting go of that. And it’s a really scary process because as parents we’re like, gosh, what if their teeth fall out or, you know, what if they end up with skin infections or, so there is obviously a balance. We’re not going to risk our child’s health. You know, if there’s something seriously wrong. But we are also just going to trust that they will when they can and also trust that they will respond to the natural consequences if things get serious enough for them. So we’re putting an awful lot of trust in our child and we’re also putting an awful lot of acceptance to talk a lot about acceptance of families. This is where we’re at at the moment. It doesn’t mean we’re going to be like this forever. It doesn’t mean that your child’s going to be like this forever, but this is where we’re at right now. And we’re just going to go with I’ve got some really nice visuals to explain this.

I’ve got another book that’s been written for children and young people called Young Autistic and Burn Out that sort of sits alongside Stop the World. It’s written at a different time, but I felt like I needed to empower children and young people as well. So I was really lucky and had 10 young people who wrote this with me. And what we’re essentially doing is calming that nervous system and developing circles of safety. So the circles of safety will start really slow. I’m going to try to find a visual because that’s how my brain works better. Whatever feels safe to that child at that moment is what we’re going to stick with. So if a safe food is bags of crisps and a safe place is their bedroom and safe people is only mum, what we’re going with. That’s just what we’re gonna do. If their only safe activity is playing Roblox, that’s what we’re gonna go with. And we’re gonna stabilize that nervous system. So we’d start off here with this, sorry for people that are listening on podcasts, I just realized that it’s only good for YouTube, but the book is available. So we’re gonna start like really, really small and just stick with what feels safe. Safe clothing, safe people, safe foods. When we do that, when we allow kids to do that and we stabilize their nervous system, what we naturally start to see is that they then feel safe enough to expand on that circle and bring in something else, something new. Maybe they’re gonna try a pair of nice comfy joggers today and get out of their jammies. Maybe they’re going to fancy something different to eat today or have we got some of those nice hash browns in the freezer that I used to like. Maybe they’re gonna manage to go in the garden and play on the trampoline. And they’re generally, their worlds will slowly start to naturally expand. And of course, you know, as parents, we might need to scaffold some of that. They say, well, I feel like something different, but I can’t quite decide. But what we’re not going to do is be throwing suggestions at them all the time. Or how about we go and do this today? Or blah, blah, Because that instantly is going to feel like a demand to them at that moment in time. What I think again is important to say here is that we have to start as a family, as a support network, building a new world. What we can’t do is expect them to go back to how things were before. Some kids will try to, and then sometimes, unfortunately, go into crisis again.

But if we put them straight back into a society or a way of living that caused the harm in the first place, with no adjustments, with no additional support, we’re just going to end up going backwards and forwards. Most of us as neurodivergent adults will talk quite a lot about spending most of our lives going in and out of burnout until we can get that balance right with our work lives, or not right, but as energy accounting is possible. And so alongside the journey of letting the child just be, We have parents that like, will you work with my child? No, not right now because they’re not in a place where somebody new can come into their lives. Like I know you want to do and you want to fix because we love our kids and we’re scared and we care about, you know, their wellbeing. But right now we just have to be, be emotionally available to them. be there when suddenly a special interest emerges and they suddenly fancy, don’t know, researching something alongside somebody or whatever, or go into, I don’t know, an event or a museum or whatever it happens to be. But alongside that, we have to go on our own journeys, which you sort of touched on this a little bit about what are the demands and expectations are there? Whose needs are they meeting? Are they meeting the needs of our child? Are they meeting our needs as individuals who are so often late recognised neurodivergent and have our own masking and trauma to unpick? Are they the needs of society that actually aren’t aligned with the wellbeing of our children? And how do we break away from that safely? How do we non-conform? this is why I talk about the term rewilding, how do we rewild, how do we get back in touch with our roots and living in a way that is conducive to our neurology and our thriving and our wellbeing because mean, I would argue that the rat race nine to five, working yourself ragged to afford the big house and the nice cars on the drive isn’t really conducive to most people’s wellbeing but particularly for us as neurodivergent people, we are very easily particularly when we’re maskers and when people pleases and we’re desperate to sit under the radar and fit in, we will work ourselves into the ground to achieve the picket fence Instagrammable life. It’s, you know, harmful to us as adults as well. So it’s so hard, so hard to go against the grain. you can’t underestimate that at all.

And you know, had this conversation with someone the other day, it’s like, so many of us end up when we’re recovering our child and we know what our child needs and we’re in touch with that now and we’ve done the research and the understanding, but we’ve still got our foot in both camps because we’re scared. We’re masked for our own safety, for our own protection. So hard to like jump from the known pathway of how a human being is supposed to live. And you end up on, you know, a pathway of the unknown. kids, one of mine has never been in school. He’s never learned to write or read in the same way that other kids have. I don’t know what his pathway will look like. What I do know is that he’s very self-aware, very good at energy accounting, and his mental health is better than what it’s ever been. That is the foundation that anybody needs to achieve what they want to achieve and be who they want to be and thrive. Success to me isn’t him having a high-powered job with a massive salary and a big house, you know, that’s reframing what success looks like. So, you end up with this bigger picture. You think, you know, you’re just working through recovery of a child in a mental health crisis, and then you strip it back and you strip it back and you strip it back and suddenly you’re like, wow, all got some work to do. And it’s got, it’s a roller coaster. It’s an absolute roller coaster. And at times it’s epic and freeing and liberating and stunning when we see our child re-emerge as to who they are, really who they are and these interests. And it’s honestly the biggest privilege of my job is working with kids who I meet. version of And then I meet their true authentic thriving version that just slowly emerges. It’s like they cocoon. I was thinking like a caterpillar, like it cocoons and it decompresses and it stabilizes and then it re-emerges. meet kids that go on these beautiful journeys of rewilding and self-exploration and trying on who they are and that. how they show up in the world and how they present are honestly stunning.

Debbie:
You’re trying on who you are from a place of safety.

Jodie Clarke:
Yeah. Working out who you are beneath the mask. Yeah, and it’s great. I love that part of my role and the privilege of going on this journey with families. And yeah, it’s epic.

Debbie:
Yeah. my gosh. First of all, I feel like this has been a little master class. I do have so many more questions, but I think we’re going to wrap it up for now. And we’ll have to bring you back because. Yeah, I think this is such an important topic and your lens is so optimistic to and real like this is an unconventional path and that is super uncomfortable, but it’s so worth it. If we continue to zoom out and look at what are we actually doing here? What are our goals for our children? And you know, I love your redefinition of success. So let me name the book again. It’s excellent. I had a chance to read it and I learned so much I highly lighted a ton. I took a lot of notes. It’s called Stop the World I Want to Get Off a Guide to Understanding and Supporting the Recovery of Art of Autistic Burnout in Children and Young People. And then as Jodi said, she has a piece of book that’s written more for children and young people called Young Autistic and Burned Out. another resource. Is there any place you would like people to connect with you or any last thoughts that you want to share with?

Jodie Clarke:
Yeah, I feel like you said that there’s so much to say about this topic and there’s so much more nuance that goes around burnout and recovery. I just urge people that if only some of this has been relatable, keep exploring this. It’s not just about actually being autistic. This is just about being neurodivergent as well. So just to bring that in as well, a lot of people will say to me, can you be ADHD and in burnout? And I’m like, absolutely, yes. thing as well is the book is written about children, young people, but I’ve had so many adults come to me and say, my gosh, it was actually really helpful for me as an adult. But yeah, there’s lots to talk about here, like the rewilding, the recovery. There’s lots more on my website. So if people have felt like, gosh, they want a little bit more, wider sort of talks and resources on my website. But yeah, I mean, if like you said, listeners come back to you with questions, then I’d be more than happy to keep talking because this is such an important topic. And yeah, I’m just massively passionate about making sure we get as much information out there as possible to empower people.

Debbie:
Yeah. Well, thank you for that. And I will take you up on that offer. And listeners, I will have links to Jodi’s website and books and other resources in the show notes page. So check that out. And Jodi, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for what you do in the world and how you support families and for everything that you shared today.

Jodie Clarke:
Thank you.