S2 EP 16 - Emotional Safety: Time After Time

Ever wonder why your child completely melts down the second they walk through the door after school? In this episode, veteran middle school teacher and child therapist Suzanne M. Swain, EdS LMSW breaks down what’s really going on in neurodivergent brains—and why it’s not defiance, manipulation, or “bad behavior.” It’s exhaustion.

Suzanne connects the dots between ADHD, autism, sensory overload, food struggles, anxiety, and emotional regulation, all while explaining why routines feel calming (not rigid), why the safest parent often gets the biggest emotional release, and how the senses—especially smell and taste—play a powerful role in comfort and memory. With relatable stories, brain science you don’t need a degree to understand, and plenty of “ohhh… that makes sense” moments, this episode helps parents reframe meltdowns, reduce stress, and build more calm, predictable days at home.

If you’re parenting a neurodivergent child—or suspect you might be neurodivergent yourself—this one’s for you.

Contact Suzanne Swain:
Email: suzanneswain@gmail.com

Website: msmarypoppins.com

Produced By: StellaMix Podcast Productions

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing Safety And The Senses
• 2:27 Building An Inner Safe Place
• 4:06 Cortisol, Anger, And Trusted People
• 7:18 Predictability As Regulation
• 10:50 Procedures Over Rewards
• 12:45 Sensory Feeding Struggles And Autonomy
• 15:10 Meltdowns, Masking, And Exhaustion
• 17:38 Divorce, Change, And Stability

Transcript

Framing Safety And The Senses

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Well hey y'all, it's a beautiful day to bust some cognitive distortions. My name is Suzanne M. Swain, EDS LMSW, and I am a veteran middle school teacher as well as a kid therapist. So today I want to talk to a little bit about being neurodivergent and figuring out what your baseline is, how to feel safe, and what makes us feel safe. So let's try something. Think about a time when you felt your most safe. Okay. So take a second, think about that. But let's add an addendum to that. Let's add something. All right, everybody. Now ask yourself a few questions. One, does it involve food? Did you get a yes on that? Or did it involve it smelled really good? Are you catching on? Because it's about the senses. So we're going to talk a little bit about the senses and how that affects memory. But basically, how we can get overstimulated and how neurodivergent folks have a different way of expressing their burnout. So we want to recognize some of those signs. And especially in kiddos, I see it all the time. Kids are burnt out. And I want to explain to you a little bit of brain science as to why they may act the way that they do. So you can understand like the after-school meltdown and what that's about. So we're going to talk about all those things today. Should be a really good episode, especially if you have a child at home that is dealing with ADHD or autism, any kind of neurodivergent social kind of issue that they're going through. Maybe this will help to enlighten you a little bit as to some things that have worked for me over the years and some new information that we have. So that's what we're going to be doing today. I hope you enjoyed the food episodes. I really had a lot of fun with them, especially learning about the brain science and whatnot. So hopefully you found that useful. And coming up, we have some other episodes on divorce and a few big heavy hitters before the end of the season. We're going to make 20, 25 episodes. So looking forward to that. I want to thank all of you for your support of the show. If you like the show, please share it with a friend and let them know that we are here and hopefully can find some good information and direct them toward an episode that you think may be of value. All right, let's do this. So, safety. We talked about where did you feel the most safe and did it involve food? Your senses are very important here. We talk about your sense of smell and your sense of taste are right near your long-term memory. So in your brain, they just kind of live right next to each other. So you actually imprint a lot stronger with a sense of smell, or especially a sense of taste, because that's multi-sensory. Like it has a smell, it has a taste, it has a all these different things, it has a texture. So we make a lot of very long-term permanent memory. So if you think back to when you were little, you probably were eating something, or maybe you were watching something, something that was moving that you thought was really interesting, like an animal or even TV. I mean, mine was a TV thing. So think about where you feel the most safe. Now try to think of a place where that's imaginary that you would feel super safe. So try to picture that now. Like what would it look like? What colors would you put in there? What decor would it have? You can create your little safe space in your brain. If you haven't built one for yourself, take a minute and do that today. Just take, hey, I'm gonna create a safe space in my mind so you have somewhere you can picture when you start to get stressed out. That's been very helpful to a lot of my kiddos because they can go to their imaginary safe space and nobody has any idea where they're you know that they're doing anything. So that works out really well so it doesn't draw attention. Okay. So when you have a safe space and you feel contentment, you're around people that or animals as well, that you feel safe and protected with. And to feel safe and protected, that means you're calm and you feel a sense of positivity and you're not worried, which means when you're upset, you have a lot of cortisol, which is a hormone that can really do a lot of damage. I call it the wrecking ball. And cortisol actually can make you gain weight. A lot of kids who are overweight just have a lot of anxiety. Please check them for anxiety before maybe shaming them for any kind of food issue when maybe there isn't a food issue at all. It's just a cortisol issue. I do get on the soapbox about that, having been one of those kids. So there's that. You also are have some issues with feeling safe and anger. Because you're around a lot of people that you love, when you feel safe, that is also a place when kids and many adults feel like they can express anger. So I always say thanks. I'm like, thank you. Someone gets really mad and just like screams and yells and kicks and whatever. I mean, hopefully it doesn't hurt anybody, but you know, they get really upset and they just word vomit, so to speak, when it's all anger. Sometimes they don't mean what they're saying, but they just have to get out the negative energy. And I kind of think of it like Stranger Things when they have like the stuff coming out of the kids, like all the black smoke and whatnot, and it's like Vecna coming out. So I lovingly call it the Vecna period when people just kind of flip out and go after people. So it's okay because it's like a pressure cooker, and when someone diffuses all, that means that you are playing a role of safety because they wouldn't do this in front of someone that they're scared of. Not in a heart, not at all. They will go to the person they feel the most safe with and then unfortunately let them have. Now, this obviously can become abusive and things like that. So we don't want to, this is an occasional sort of thing. But if your kiddo is having meltdowns when they come home from school, but you're the one they always go to when they have a meltdown, in a way that's kind of a compliment. So flip the switch. Think about it differently. If you're a kiddo and you're listening to this right now, think about who you go to, who's your person that makes you feel better. Well, identifying that and maybe telling that person, say, look, I just want you to know that I feel really safe. You can always write this down too. I I feel really safe when I get angry and I know I can go to you and you'll make me feel better. That would be pretty brave to say, but it means something. And when you have a lot of stimulation throughout the day and you're just constantly on the go, I mean, school is so overwhelming in the sense of having a sensory experience. Yeah, it's a lie. So some kids just get really wound up. And I was one of those kids, I used to love learning so much, and I would get done with my work. It was like a challenge, and I felt like it was I was training for some sort of Olympics, but then I'd finish my work and I was mad because I had nothing to do. And then I would race pencil boxes down the hall and do things I probably shouldn't be doing. So they shipped me off to kindergarten to read. They could have, I could have helped to work in the office or like given me a job of sorts. And so giving a kid's a kid a job is also a way to build safety and predictability. So we want to make sure that predictability is really a big thing when we're talking about the concept of safety because predictability is regulation. And predictability is often kind of misunderstood as like rigidity and being like really rigid and but for neurodivergent nervous systems, it's really a way to regulate. Research actually shows that people who have autism and ADHD in their brains, they have heightened sensitivity to uncertainty. So that increases baseline anxiety. So they already are at a place of higher anxiety. This is why I still think that a lot of people are misdiagnosed with ADHD when they actually have an anxiety disorder, and then ADHD becomes sort of a symptomatic sort of things where they are behaving in such a way because it's more of a fight or flight thing. So you have to kind of determine which road you're going, or if in fact they are ADHD, and that to me I can tell a big difference. But you just have to learn to read those signs. But they have a heightened sense of sensitivity. So when things feel uncertain and they don't really know what's going on next or what the plan is and have a procedure, then they don't know what to do. So when expectations shift suddenly or rules are kind of vague, the brain interprets that as some kind of a threat. So predictable routines can reduce this load, this cognitive load, as they call it, and it frees up the executive functioning to start thinking more clearly. And this is why consistency works, even when a lot of reward systems don't work so great. They really don't. When they're little, yeah, but as they get into middle school and things, they can all work collectively toward a goal. But individual reward systems tend to kind of go by the wayside because it's more about getting procedures. So having a predictable routine every single day. Like when you get up, do this. I also know that I have to put myself on a routine, and if something goes off my routine, I kind of get cranky. So, but it's pretty normal stuff. Like I just get up and I have a certain process, and I want my coffee, then I want this, and then I gotta go take a shower and so on. So that's fine. Create a livable routine that's something that you can do to start your day to launch you. And kids, adults, no matter who you are, that's a good thing. So you're just releasing that cognitive load issue and you free up that executive functioning. And a shower can be a great way to do that. So if you're ever really stressed out, go take a shower and then switch it on cold for a second and then turn it off and go back to warm. But it just kind of wakes you up and lets your brain reset. But consistency works even when those reward systems fail. Remember this. So just being consistent and saying, okay, every week we're gonna do this because this is our reward. It's a procedure. There's a guy named Dr. Harry Wong, and he wrote a book called The First Days of School, and he talked about this. He's like, procedure, we don't have rules, we have procedures. Kids like procedures, they are safe. And this is what we do, that's how it goes. End of story. No discussion. And it's not mean or cruel, it's just what we do. It's kind of like with a dog, you're like, we're leaving and going in the car. Okay, let's go. I'm gonna do this now. Okay, I'm gonna follow you. They just, it's just procedure. So Steve's a good example of that. He stays regulated because he just follows procedure. When procedure breaks, that's when he gets out of line. So if he sees Henry across the street, he'll freak out and because it's broken his normal procedure of doing whatever he's gonna do at that time. So when the brain interprets a threat, predictable routines can be sometimes the only thing that can then bring you back. So in any case, food. So feeding struggles are kind of rooted in that sensory processing, and we kind of talked about that a little bit, but we also need to talk about how anxiety and introsphen are kind of the issue. So up to 70% of kids with autism, they tend to experience a lot of feeding issues or food issues, and a lot of times it's because of sensory overload, like the texture's weird. They can also become really good chefs. I've seen a lot of kids with autism have a wonderful flavor palette. Once they learn how to read food, it's almost like its own language. And so you can really get into some cool multicultural things when you have just not too many things at once, just one, like study one culture and then eat one dish from that food, food group of that culture. And so I've seen some really cool things with that. And kids with ADHD, cooking can be a multi-sensory, quick-paced kind of thing. So for this episode, we're talking a lot about ADHD and autism, since that seems to be what I get a lot of questions about. Pressure-based feeding, though, activates the nervous system and it suppresses appetite and digestion. So when you pressure somebody to eat something and they don't want to, you're activating their whole trauma response. And it's like, no, and you're it's actually making it worse. So just normalizing, being like, okay, this is what we do. We're gonna eat broccoli, but we're gonna put cheese on it. That's it, period, done. And it's just a thing, and it keeps showing up until it becomes normalized. Normalization is the easiest way to make things more regulated. So there isn't stress. So when you have kind of autonomous feeding, when you kind of do what you need to do and eat on your own, it increases that intake over time, and people start to eat more and they have less cortisol, so they bring their appetite back. And just like Steve, when he's calm and unobserved, he's safe and he eats his food and things like that. Animals don't clean themselves usually when they don't feel safe. So what do you do when you feel safe? Do you have a certain shirt you like to wear or something like that? You have your comfort things, and that's important to recognize and say, I'm really stressed out, go get my comfort things. So the meltdown. If the meltdown's gonna occur, I need you to know it's not that someone's trying to manipulate you. Okay, so when a kid has a meltdown or someone has a meltdown from neurodivergency, they are not trying to manipulate you. They are exhausted. It's called neurological exhaustion, as you might expect. A lot of people do what's called masking, and it's the kind of thing where you feel like I thought it was called just extreme etiquette. I was very worried that I would be weird if I did the wrong thing. Like, and so I spent all day of my days like, oh my gosh, what if this is I don't want someone to make fun of me. And as a big kid, I was always hyper-aware of people's judgment. So when you're a kid, you start to mask sometimes, and that is where you take on kind of a different persona, fake it till you make it, kind of thing. And that unfortunately requires so much self-monitoring, so much checking yourself, that cortisol just goes through the roof and emotional fatigue starts to happen. And maybe home's the only safe place where that nervous system can actually release some stress. So a meltdown after a good day is actually a sign of trust. So, as we said before, you know, the safe person is the one that catches the heat. Hate to say it. So also when you're dealing with the topic of divorce instability, it's kind of the same thing. Divorce becomes traumatic when they don't have any predictability anymore. Kids see divorce as an explosion at the end of the road and they don't know what's going to happen next and how to navigate that. That lack of predicta predictability can sometimes be more critical than the fact that maybe that your family is changing and that your folks are getting a divorce for whatever reason. And rather than seeing the benefit, like, oh, okay, I have two different households, I can have two different bedrooms, I can seeing them. There's some pretty cool positives. But when you get that sort of, it's a gut punch. I mean, I remember my best friend had that happen to her when we were in elementary school. And the poor thing, I mean, it was like someone just took all the wind out of her. And to a kid, that's their whole world. So we have to just kind of remember what that's like to be our worlds are small when we're in middle school, when we're in elementary school, when we're even in high school, our worlds are they get bigger as we get older. So when that world changes, our predictability starts to go out the window. So one of the best things I think you can do, and as a teacher, also as a therapist, is to say, please at home, provide a very consistent, not authoritarian or anything, not like a dictator, and we don't want that, but just say, that's what we do. Kind of like Harry Wong. He's like, okay, it's seven o'clock, this is what we're doing. Happy, fine, peaceful, not angry in any way. And it just makes people feel a little bit better, a little bit usual. If you're a boss, for example, maybe think about that as a strategy for being a manager and think calm and predictable and fun and happy and joyous. So that can make everybody be a lot more regulated and be more productive. So you can try like a visual schedule and consistent transitions. If you're a teacher, watch your transitions and just give the brain a minute to prepare rather than react. We have to put people into preparation for learning and getting that imagination cooking, so to speak, rather than turning on anxiety in her reactive mode. So you have two choices. You can either go anxiety or imagination, and I'm gonna pick imagination. So now, also if a kid is dealing with grief or anything like that, obviously cortisol is an issue. And let's just say that a pet or a family member or somebody has recently moved on to greener pastures, and I'm so sorry about that. But maybe they can find a little bit of peace in thinking about the positive things and the predictability of knowing that this person will be always looking out for them in some way and whatever your faith decides. So we just need to create that sense of predictability. I know that's I keep hammering on this, but I do believe that you will find peace in this new year through regulation. I'm gonna work on it too. I've gotten myself recently looking at some ideas of how to just kind of bring more balance back into my life and kind of reassess things, obviously, with what's happening with my health and whatnot. So just taking things a little slower and realizing I need a schedule, I need to follow that, and that's where I'm healthiest and I feel the best. So may even get me to the gym this year. You never know. Folks, let's have a conversation today about what you need to feel safe. What you need in the morning, at night before you go to bed. Like, what is it that you need to do to just make you feel good and safe and protected? Safe, whole, happy, they say. So think about that. Focus on that this week and definitely stay clever little foxes. Have a good one.