It is uncomfortable not to know what we're here for.

It is uncomfortable to think about being mortal, about life being limited and temporary.

These are scary things.

And just to speak to our own experiences to some extent, broadly because kids don't always want us to go into detail about our deep emotions about our past experiences, but broadly speaking, to find some space to validate what kids are going through because it is uncomfortable stuff.

Welcome to Beautifully Complex, where we unpack what it really means to parent neurodivergent kids with dignity and clarity.

I'm Penny Williams, and I know firsthand how tough and transformative this journey can be.

Let's dive in and discover how to raise regulated, resilient, beautifully complex kids together.

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Welcome back to Beautifully Complex, everybody.

I am excited today to have a therapist Matthew Fish letter with me and we're going to talk about a topic that I went through with my own kid several years ago that I think a lot of our nerd divergent kids find themselves in this place at some moment in time and parents don't know what to do to help because it can feel really heavy and sometimes dark.

And so we're going to talk about kind of how to navigate these existential crises that sometimes are nerdivergent.

Teens I would imagine even young adults have.

But Matthew, will you start by letting everybody know who you are and what you do.

Sure?

So, I'm a psychotherapist, I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.

I'm a parent myself.

I'm a neurodivergent person.

I'm licensed to practice psychotherapy in Maryland.

In California, I work with adults often parts that are navigating anxiety, identity, and the deeper questions that come with being human.

I can talk more about what that looks like.

I feel like we'll touch on it along the way.

We'll kind of get there.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I think the existential crisis and I don't know if crisis is the right word, but I'm sure we'll navigate that together in this conversation as well, is sort of part of the human experience for a lot of people, and it can be really difficult, you know, as human beings, we all have struggle at times we all have differences, we navigate the world, we take in the world differently, and sometimes our kids get into these places.

I know for my own kid, it was kind of this loop and when he felt like he couldn't get out of that loop or couldn't get unstuck, it got really heavy and really difficult.

And fortunately he was working with a therapist some I don't think he was really engaged that point, honestly, but it was really difficult.

So I'm really wanting to understand where we go as a parent.

What can we do that would be helpful.

But let's start by really defining what as existential crisis is, and if you want to change that terminology, feel free to do that as well.

Yeah.

One thing, the word crisis is often thought of as being kind of when something's at a catastrophic level, and in psychological terminology or even in the terminology of existentialism, the crisis is referring to kind of a turning point or a potential pressure point in development.

So an existential crisis isn't always a sign that something's wrong.

It can be a sign that a young person's kind of waking up to life's deeper questions.

Yeah, in that sense, it's development.

That's not a disorder.

It's not a true crisis.

They're in existential crises.

Someone can be in a psychological crisis.

Someone can be at risk of not being safe.

But gotcha, the term crisis.

It's sort of the psychological turning point when someone's really starting to ask themselves those big questions, like what's the point of all this?

Who am I?

How long will I be here?

What happens after I die?

It's not just about being like sad or confused about starting to get in touch with the deeper truths about being human or being alive on the world.

I was just going to ask you if kind of this search for purpose also is in there would also be included?

Yeah?

Absolutely, Who am I?

What am I going to get out of all of this?

What is going to give me a feeling of fulfillment and purpose?

Yeah?

And where do you see this sort of start start to ramp up?

Maybe are there sort of signals for parents that would say, oh, we might be getting to a point where are they're really struggling with this, with these thoughts, with these questions.

It's hard to say, because kids of any age can vary in how much they're talking to parents, if you're hearing questions like why am I going to college?

Or what's the purpose of all of this?

Or a kiddo talking about a sense of purposelessness.

Of meaninglessness could also look like kids that are withdrawing from friendships or social interactions, kids that are struggling in classes, struggling with grades, or in school.

He's not necessarily a sign that your kid is losing touch with their goals.

It's a touch that their brain is kind of reorganizing and reevaluating what am I doing all of this for?

So some of those questions then maybe are a signal to us to have conversations with them if they're open to it.

To have conversations with them, to ask if they'd like to have a conversation with somebody if not with a parent, with a counselor with someone at their college, with a college advisor, with someone in the community.

But yeah, it's these big realities of being a person that these kids are often coming into contact with, and especially for neurodiversent kiddos, having a sense of the challenge of kind of organizing the thoughts in such a way that they're able to really make header tails out of it.

It can be disorienting in and of itself.

And when there's a kiddo that or young adult that is having a harder time maintaining focus even and just in their own thoughts can be harder to process.

Yeah, I hadn't really thought about the fact that that executive function challenge that a lot of neurodivergent folks have would also make it difficult to sort of work through all these thoughts that you're having and trying to find answers.

I hadn't even really thought about that.

That's such a good point.

And that's a tough one, because a kid can find themselves in the midst of trying to piece this together, and a bus could go buy outside the window and suddenly there's a sort of reverie about what's going on over there.

In any number of ways, that the thoughts can get derailed, or even that the process can get the wires crossed internally.

Right, And I had read a statistic years ago that it's more common to have this level of kind of deep thinking about meaning in kids who are also gifted.

Do you think that still holds true?

I do.

I do, And that there can be a degree of like hyper focus on something that once a kid's brain starts to get wind of these existential realities in the world around us, that they can get more focused on it in trying to understand stand it.

And depending on what they read, for example, they may find some existential writer that was more hopeful about meaning being something that we create, something that we discover and uncover with time, or something that's a bit more nihilistic that there is no meaning to be found.

And those are kind of places where we can diverge into a more hopeful or more cynical sort of attitude, especially for neurodivergent folks who who might dive into something so they want to learn more about it, read more about it.

Yeah, with more technology now they have more access to information, but they have access to lots of different viewpoints, and certainly an optimistic viewpoint, it would be more helpful for a teenager in development who's trying to figure it out and find their way.

I know that you talk about how an existential question can really be healthy growth and not actually a problem.

Do you want to talk a little bit more about that and how we, as the caring adult in their world, can lean into that same sort of attitude and mindset about it.

These existential questions, who am I?

What does it mean to be alive in the world, to be able to some degree make my own choices and to want those choices to lead to a meaningful life.

These are uncomfortable questions.

These give rise to certain kinds of anxiety.

I like to call them existential anxiety, not my term.

And it can be uncomfortable for the kids asking the questions.

It can be uncomfortable for the adults to whom the questions are being posed.

Well, if my kid asked me, how do I live a meaningful life?

And I'm in the midst of let's say, being Sandwich generation, caring for the generation above me, the generation below me, my parents, my kids, I'm wondering some of these same questions in a very different context.

So as parents understanding the questions themselves and the discomfort with the presence of the uncertainty about these things, not having the answers to the question, it can give us a window into what things might be like for our kids, and it can give us a window into how as parents, finding that centeredness in being aware of what's going on for us can help us to connect with the kid that's in front of us asking these questions, even just to say it is uncomfortable not to know what we're here for.

It is uncomfortable to think about being mortal, about life being limited and temporary.

These are scary things.

And just to speak to our own experiences to some extent broadly because kids don't always want us to go into detail about our deep emotions about our past experiences, broadly speaking, to find some space to validate what kids are going through because it is uncomfortable stuff.

Yeah, it's very uncomfortable stuff.

I can feel it in my body as we're talking about it, like ooh, I don't know.

It's hard to think about these things, I think for most people.

But then we add like that uncertainty, as you said, can bring with an anxiety and a lot of our neurodiversent kids crave predictability and certainty, and so this is way outside of that for them.

That I think adds another layer maybe of discomfort or anxiety or struggle with maybe feeling stuck in that place.

And a lot of us like don't do well with uncertainty.

I don't do well with uncertainty, Like I would rather know these things, But how do we teach them that, like some things sometimes are unknowable and how to sit with that.

We're in certain ways wired to be uncomfortable with uncertainty as humans, I think, and wired to try to move uncertainty towards more information, towards certainty.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable because we're drawn to find some solution.

We're drawn to find how can I get more information to understand what I can do?

And that's essentially what kids are doing when they're coming to parents or others with these existential questions, and especially like you mentioned, those that are on a neurodivergent path themselves, can really rely on knowing what's coming next, understanding why am I doing what I'm doing, and it can help to get through that thing.

And when it comes to why am I doing this at all and not having a concrete answer to it that there's real buy into, it can be really it can be really uncomfortable.

So just validating that it is uncomfortable.

I think of something that I that I went over with my son.

He's six now, but I think he was probably four.

He would ask me a question and I would say, I don't know, not necessarily a deep existential thing.

But why is this this way in the world or how does this work?

I don't know.

And he would say, well, I don't know either, And I would say, we don't know together.

It's a hard thing not to know.

And here we are, we're both not knowing what the answer to this is.

Mm hmmm.

I like that together piece that you put in there.

Now it's not it's not in isolation.

And he would say, I like not knowing with your daddy as comfortable as we can possibly be, and not knowing it's nice not to know with someone else.

Yeah, Yeah, that togetherness makes such a difference.

Yeah, And it doesn't necessarily take away from the scariness of not knowing.

It may diffuse it a little bit, kind of disarms it a little bit that like, okay, if I don't know, and that's scary, but also this other person doesn't know and they're scared, but they're also okay in this moment and they can stay present and connected with me.

Maybe not knowing is a little bit less unsafe then it feels maybe it's tolerable mm hmm.

And it's an adult not knowing sometimes that too, is like I'm only a kid, but an adult doesn't even know, and maybe give them some relief that maybe they're not supposed to know this thing yet, maybe you know, or maybe it is a truly unknowable thing.

But yeah, that sense of like, let's not know together.

It feels like such a relief to know that somebody else can also have that feeling and be okay, but be in it with you and you're not alone in it.

And it's a lot of what I do in therapy is finding pathway to be in that place of not knowing with my clients, whether they be young neurodiversion kids or older adults in between.

People often will come to therapy looking for answers, looking for some kind of rescue from what's going on inside, and in part recognizing I don't have the answers, I can be here for the not knowing and we cannot know together what to do about this.

That can be a really powerful place, whether with my own kid or with people that I'm helping, because it's hard not to know.

We're in a big picture, there's a lot of not knowing going on right now.

For sure.

It's uncomfortable, very yeah.

Very uncomfortable.

Yeah, I think a lot of us are sitting with the discomfort right now and trying to regain that ability of being able to sit in the fire kind of.

And we're all here listening to this podcast not knowing together and it's confusing.

Yeah.

Yeah, that doesn't make it go away as much as we want it to.

Yeah, it's just not much you wish for someone to come and say the unknown is no longer.

We know what's going to happen.

Yeah, it's all for certain.

Wouldn't that be great?

Maybe not?

I mean there's some beauty in the in the journey at least to discovering things and figuring them out things that are completely uncertain and unknowable.

Maybe there's not as much joy in that or in that path.

But yeah, And then when neurodivergent kids, we're also adding this layer of the fact that a lot of them feel things more deeply and maybe notice things even that others might not notice.

Something that I might not see.

All the time my kid sees it or sees a different perspective or ask a different question.

I thought of things like that, and could that be amplifying what happening for them when they're asking these big questions when they're sort of struggling with what their path looks like or what the meaning is.

Yeah, I can add to the intensity of call it groundlessness of if there's nothing underneath me, where do I go?

And it can add to the weight of that feeling.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about the shared existential journey that you talk about between kids and parents.

When I saw that, I was like, Ooh, that could have been good to know way back when, right Like, I didn't think about the fact that we could sort of have this journey together.

I was thinking about, Oh, this is so hard.

He is really I mean I think he was depressed or close to depressed, Like it was really really difficult, and it was something I hadn't thought about.

So I would love for you to kind of walk us through what that looks like.

I think you've talked to about it a little bit in saying like we can not know together what other parts of it are there?

I think really comes through in the idea that we can grow our connections with our kids when we are not focusing on fixing, but we're working on accompanying them in the nut knowing where are they?

We try to sit with them and look out their window with them, kind of the window of their journey.

When we walk beside them in their questions without being focused as parents on giving them the answers, on fixing the presence of the question.

That's where the real connection and growth can happen for both the kid and the parents.

Yeah, and I would think that connection would alleviate some of the aloneness that someone might feel when they're having these big questions what's the meaning for me?

Right where am I supposed to be going?

One of'm a I supposed to be doing?

Those sort of things can feel automatically super alone.

So just having that person to feel like they're walking with you or just sitting with you.

I wrote down fixing as you were talking, not fixing, because that's our instinct as parents.

We want to fix, We want to lead because we want our kids to be happy, but that's not always the best way.

And noticing the discomfort that we have as parents before we respond to our kids can be incredibly helpful when we're able to do it.

When we can notice in ourselves where the discomfort is.

When we can regulate ourselves, that gives us a more regulated and more centered jumping off point to really connect with and hear our kids and from there be with them alongside them as they're trying to navigate these questions, as they're trying to find their own answers for themselves.

I'm thinking we were talking this is I think a funny anecdote.

We were talking about the wish for someone to just come and give us the answer, the wish for someone to just tell us what is the meaning.

And this came up a few weeks ago with somebody who brought up the sort of the metaphor of I wish that Ed McMahon, may this may be dating us.

I wish then.

Would just knock on my door and show up with a check that tells me the next thing I should do with my life and give me absolute clarity that this is going to be fulfilling, This is going to fill me up.

And what we arrived at in talking through that metaphor was that in the absence of that Ed McMahon at our doorstep, finding the little Ed McMahon inside and listening to him, finding that piece inside that's scared of not knowing and that can find there's some sense of direction for the next best.

Thing, the next best thing, the.

Next best thing in the sense of the next thing I can do that's the best among the options.

Mm hm.

And you were talking about regulation.

I'm wondering about pulling the body in because we think that you know, we're having questions.

It's a mental mental health thing, but our body is what triggers us to feel unsafe or safe.

And when we have these questions and there we don't have answers.

We're feeling unsafe, we're just regulated.

We're just wondering if there are things that we can do, like somatic exercises, regulation exercises.

Could those help also with getting through this period.

For parents and for kids.

Yeah, but in the sense of parents starting from noticing their dysregulation, their sense of like ickiness and discomfort, the awareness of that, the noticing of that is a starting point of kind of separating from it, getting to a place where we can make a choice about what did you next?

And by noticing, oh, I'm feeling tightness in my stomach, my heart rates increasing, my palms are sweating.

By noticing what's going on in our bodies, we can be able to then make a choice about what we're doing with our bodies.

With the body, and that has the effect of slowing down the stress response in the brain.

It creates a kind of loop.

It's the standing one of the standing theories about this that the brain dysregulates the body, and the brain notices that the body is disregulated and further disregulates the body.

And when we can notice that we're in that loop, we interrupt it.

And when we can say I'm going to take three deep breaths, necessarily counting or doing it a certain way, but I'm gonna breathe in and breathe out, and breathe in and breathe out.

One coworker used to ask me when they saw that I was disregulated and I was working in a clinical case management job, used to ask me, Matthew, are your feet on the floor, And I would look at the floor, Yeah, let me check there they are.

Something relatively simple can help us to feel more centered and present and aware of what's happening in our body, and that creates that pathway to make more choices about how we're responding.

So when we're uncomfortable being asked these big questions from our kids, when we can take a deep breath for ourselves, we can ask ourselves probably inside where are my feet are they on the ground.

That actually allows more blood to the areas of the brain where you can select how you want to respond to your kid, as opposed to saying, I don't know, go do your laundry.

Right, yeah, yeah, that reactive response.

Yeah yeah, that's a big question, man, what's going on?

Right?

Yeah?

Such good stuff.

And I think connection to you, like, if we can lean into connect more of our kid really fostering that relationship, that will help as well.

It's not a direct I'm going to do this and I'm going to see an outcome with what you're struggling with, but it settles the nervous system.

Connection is regulating, you know, we know that that sense of we're on the same team, we're doing it together, as you were talking about earlier.

And there's so many ways that we can try, just little small things.

Five minutes of connection.

You know, most teens will tolerate a few minutes at least, especially if you're asking about something they're interested in, right, But you know, what is a connection point that you can weave in that can really help as well?

A lot of the stuff I didn't know back then that I do know.

Now, I can think of a lot of ways that you know, I wish I had had to focus on regulation and just regulation, but that connection is really so so valuable.

Yeah, I'd say a big takeaway is in recognizing that these questions aren't something to solve, we can contextualize them as invitations to connect.

When a kid is talking about these big questions, these are invitations to connect.

And when we can regulate through our own anxiety, our own discomfort, we can help our kids to approach these questions not from that reactive place, not from a place where we unintentionally might add to their anxiety, but where we can connect with them, foster that connection in the not knowing and in the fact that that uncertainty is uncomfortable.

But we can get through that uncertainty.

Yeah, which is tough because we're wired to pay attention to that discomfort and to try to avoid it to protect ourselves.

So we're trying to override all this nature within us and our biology to do that.

But it is possible.

We just have to go at it with attention and take some of these pauses and breaths and regulating moments.

As you were describing and remembering that we don't need the perfect answer, We just need to.

Be there a good reminder.

Yeah, we let everybody know where they can find you to maybe connect work with you, learn more.

Yeah, I welcome contact questions about what I've talked about or people that are looking for support.

They can find me at growingpresent dot com.

Awesome, and I will link that up in the show notes for everyone.

I appreciate you being here and sharing in this tough conversation.

Like these conversations are not easy to have.

When we think about things that are difficult, it can create responses in our own nervous systems, but this is how we get through them.

This is how we help others to be able to sit with that discomfort too.

So I really appreciate you being here and sharing some of your wisdom and your time with us.

Thank you so much for having me, Penny, It's pleasure.

I will see everybody in the next episode.

Take good care.

I see you.

You're doing hard and meaningful work and you don't have to do it alone.

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