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Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP - Guest
is the founder and CEO of Social Thinking and a globally recognized thought leader, author, speaker, and social-cognitive therapist. She is dedicated to helping people of all ages develop social emotional learning, including those with social learning differences. Across her 35-year career she has created numerous evidence-based strategies, treatment frameworks, and curricula to help interventionists develop social competencies in those they support. Michelle's work also teaches how social competencies impact people's broader lives, including their ability to foster relationships and their academic and career performance. She and her team continually update the Social Thinking® Methodology based on the latest research and insights they learn from their clients. She is a prolific writer and has written and/or co-authored more than 40 books and over 100 articles about the Social Thinking Methodology. Michelle maintains a private practice, The Center for Social Thinking, in Santa Clara, California, where she works with clients who continue to teach and inspire her. Social Thinking also offers a portal for free tools to support students, clients, and children in their social emotional and organizational learning: https://www.socialthinking.com/free-stuff. |
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W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Dr. Sutton: (00:21)
Welcome to Therapy On The Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the director of the Institute for The Advancement of Psychotherapy. In today's episode, I'd speak to Michelle Garcia Winner, who is the founder and CEO of Social Thinking and the globally recognized thought leader, author, speaker, and social cognitive therapist. She's dedicated to helping people of all ages develop social and emotional learning, including those with social learning differences across her 35-year career. She has created numerous evidence-based strategies, treatment frameworks, and curricula to help interventionists develop social competencies in those they support. Michelle's work also teaches how social competencies impact people's broader lives, including their abilities to foster relationships and their academic and career performance. She and her team continually update the social thinking methodology based on the latest research and insights they learn from their clients. She is a prolific writer and has written, and co-authored more than 40 books and over 100 articles about the social thinking methodology. Michelle maintains a private practice, The Center for Social Thinking in Santa Clara, California, where she works with clients who continue to teach and inspire her. Let's listen to the interview. Well, hi, Michelle. Welcome. Thank you for coming in today.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (01:47)
Thank you. Pleased to be invited.
Dr. Sutton: (01:49)
So, I'm really interested in the work you're doing, social thinking, and I've learned a little bit about it. We have somebody that's local here, that does it and she's in speech and language. You know, particularly I don't have a specialty in autistic spectrum disorder, but I'm always kind of interested in how clinicians are working in this way. The kind of work that you're doing with helping folks develop socially. Sometimes I have had some kids that I work with, some teenagers, and some adults that are on the spectrum. You know, I'm always kind of wondering too sometimes because that's not my expertise always and I want to make sure that I'm not kind of missing that when there's kind of the high-level functioning. Particularly, I want to first start off and find out a little bit about you and how you got to do what you're doing. I'm always interested in folks' kind of evolution of their thinking.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (02:46)
So I'm a speech-language pathologist by training, and we all have to have master's degrees. And the place I went to as an undergrad, which is no longer in existence, UC Santa Barbara used to have an autism clinic. So I was just fascinated, just really interested in learning more about the social side of understanding things. So I got involved in that clinic and then at the time we didn't call it the autism spectrum. There was a term like Asperger's and autism and PDD. And so the folks who were coming into the autism clinic were pretty classically autistic and meaning minimally verbal. We have a very limited sense of their intelligence, why they could seem very bright in some areas that are more not language based. They really struggled in learning very literally. And so I went to graduate school at Indiana University which didn't really have a specialty at all in the speech and language program.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (03:47)
I just got offered a free ride so I went. In Bloomington by coincidence, without me realizing it, they had one of the few autism centers in town that were doing its best. It was part of the research group affiliated with the university to really understand the treatment and I'm a treatment person. So I ran over there and started volunteering and got involved in working very intensely in very positive ways. So what we now call positive behaviorism. We haven't had a word for that before. But these were folks who really struggled with traditional learning. They were very, very literal but they were also having tremendous behavioral meltdowns. And so how to create a humane program that also taught them very functional skills while encouraging them to have fun and do field trips out to the community. And it was a wonderful experience. So I learned a ton, you know, back when you can't work with folks who have language, the only way to work with them is observing. So it developed in me a real capacity for looking at nuances and observing, as we're trying to respectfully understand their intentions, what makes them upset. The whole team was focused on this remarkable program.
Dr. Sutton: (05:12)
Finding a way to be attuned without the verbal.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (05:14)
Which is, you know, really all of us need to be in tune beyond, like, what did they say, but what did they mean by what they said? Or how are they really feeling because that happens in language. So, I stayed in Bloomington, Indiana, and worked on this, But now I started to have my children in the early to mid-eighties. So I returned to California, San Francisco area and started working in the hospitals with head injuries. Then learned a ton about what happens when you're born with a brain that loses a lot of capacity, significant capacity due to head injury and stroke. I got to see the exact polar opposite of people who were, you know, had previously been armed with really astute abilities and what it looked like now. And then learn step-by-step strategies as you work with people who've developed brain trauma or head injuries.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (06:16)
To be able to help them start to rehabilitate. And so there, I learned a ton and did that for a number of years and started learning about executive functioning. Which was a term not commonly used at all back in this period of time, which was the late eighties, but it was really central to working with folks who had head injuries. And so in the mid-1990s, my children were now school-aged, everything depended on my children. And so I took a job in the schools and I've always liked older kids. So I started working with high school kids. And started to realize how many of my students were being diagnosed with language disorders because I was the speech path in the school and had the opportunity to work one on one in kind of an educational way.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (07:10)
I was just referred, just endless students of all different diagnoses and it's never been my goal to work on rehabilitating or talking someone out of a diagnosis. The goal is, to understand who this person is, how they're understanding the world, and how they're responding through their actions, reactions, and interpretations. To be able to help them start to engage in a stronger set of learning tools based on wherever they're starting without the idea that we're curing or fixing. If I'm working with someone who's very, very literal. The goal is to not make them an abstract thinker. It's being able to work with how their brain processes information to be able to help them learn more functional abilities in a manner they can learn them with increasing independence. So that's one end kind of working within their own system or kind of abilities.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (08:05)
That's all we really can do. If you try to, you know, push someone outside of their, you know, where they're attuned in their learning center, it just turns into a big behavior program where you're just telling them they're right or wrong. Then that tends to become more punitive and less respectful of where that person is and kind of their existing learning strategies. So then I ended up working and ended up starting my own clinic in the nineties. I actually did a talk because I had been really interested in social and started working with some people on it in private practice. Really just focusing my lens on social learning, social-emotional, and what people may also call social pragmatics. And I gave a talk on it at our national speech and language conference.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (09:06)
Then the room was packed and everybody just wanted more. And so that's where I really started into just having clients. And, you know, if you're a good clinician, you're always learning. You never know, like when a person comes in for help, you don't say, “oh, here's my recipe for your success.” Because the only way to help someone is to actually see how they're interpreting the world, how they're reacting emotionally. Some of our folks come in with a lot of trauma and are very untrusting because it's been assumed that they're just not trying hard enough because their tests are measuring that they have strong intelligence. And so just really starting to understand who am I working with. How do I understand how they're processing and responding to the world to be able to figure out those strategies. The clinic was filled to capacity. I gave a talk to parents about what I had now called social thinking and talked about “what does this mean”, rather than talk about it at a high level, let's break it all down.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (10:19)
And that conference was sold out and then immediately my phone rang off the hook. And then ever since then, my clinic's just been packed. Then I ended up becoming an international speaker on a whole range of topics related to the social and organizational mind.
Dr. Sutton: (10:34)
Great. Well, wonderful. So, tell me about social thinking or how you encapsulate that, or what're the values, the theory-driven behind it?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (10:47)
In a strong manner, I was reacting to the fact that so many of my clients were put in behavior programs and taught that there was one way to behave and this is how you should behave. And obviously, if you are of a mindset where you, as the client are evaluating how people are treating you. You are now creating a lot of behaviors to actually try to make things even worse, to try to just throw this clinician off. So that's where I started really refining. This was in this high school and so I started talking to my folks about, you know, how do you think. So I would ask questions more than I would teach. So for example, an early question that I would ask would be “if you're in a group and no one's talking, then is it a group?”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (11:48)
And they would say, “no, like you have to be talking to be in a group.” And I was fascinated by that because so much of high school is hanging out and finding someone to just kind of share space with. That part of it is spent talking. But a lot of it is this perspective of belonging and understanding. And so I started noticing right away, my folks don't seem to understand the idea of social groups or just groups. And then I would go talk to the teacher and find that the student had no capacity for group work so the teacher was letting him always work by himself. And because of my history and I was working with a lot of adults and head injury and all, I was like, “how are we preparing this person for adulthood? if we're catering to their weaknesses and not providing strategies to help them learn how to understand group think or how people are interpreting them. It's not just them, you know, responding to the world.”
Dr. Sutton: (12:53)
So it's not necessarily just the behavior they're exhibiting, but also trying to help them think of their behavior in relation to others and that kind of groupthink.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (13:02)
Well, as I've gotten more and more involved in this, we do try to understand the behavior, but we don't focus on the behavior. A lot of us are trying to figure out the intent and the intent involves thinking. And so trying to understand what do you think that person was thinking or feeling, and that leads to prediction. So now you have to infer, and this is not just in our face-to-face social world, this is actively expected in the curriculum. With our younger age group of curriculum kindergarten, first, and second grade being a very literal set of facts. But by third grade, as the brain evolves, it's expected that you're starting to do a lot more prediction and influencing. So I was noticing that a subgroup of my students really could not advance to that prediction. Whereas others of my students had more ability yet still were relatively weak compared to their peers. And so they were often by themselves and the more they were by themselves, the more anxious they got, so the less willing they were to try. So I was starting to identify different cohorts of learners if that makes sense.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (14:25)
And then trying to understand, based on how they're perceiving and understanding themself and others, where do we begin helping them learn?
Dr. Sutton: (14:37)
From my understanding of ASD is that one of the hallmarks is that theory of mind. That kind of difficulty with putting oneself and the other's experience and understanding the intent or from their perspective and so on. So you're saying that in the social thinking work, it's again, not only kind of helping with the social skills type stuff, but really trying to strengthen that ability for that kind of imprints.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (15:10)
Well, the theory of mind is the ability to try to imagine what somebody else is thinking and doing. So, we'll show a kid a picture and he is stealing something in a store, so he's slightly like looking at the cash register, but he's putting a candy bar in his back pocket. And then you're asking students, what's happening here? And they're like, “oh, the boy's just shopping.” And you know, that would be our more literal or non-observant. Social observation and social interpretation are related to obviously how literal a person is in their language. So trying to learn where different students were and how quickly and efficiently they were interpreting was a definite beginning place.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (16:03)
But then I found wherever I was with someone, if they had language and they were using language as their primary form of communication, it doesn't have to be spoken language. It can be augmentative communication language, it can be sign, but it just has to be a system of language. If they have language that's where social thinking comes into play.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (16:31)
So our methodology is not for the entire autism spectrum. It's for those who can start to understand the world based on what people are saying to them and then within that there are different abilities. And so when we're working on the theory of mind if someone absolutely does not understand that this person was stealing the candy in the pocket. We're gonna get some very basic information to try to just get them to understand these people have different thoughts,
Michelle Garcia Winner: (17:05)
How do you, what does that person know versus what are they thinking? So basics of the theory of mind, but when you're getting into what we call, what used to be called Asperger's syndrome. It now is called level one of the autism spectrum or ADHD or bipolar, or just behaviorally disordered, because it gets very murky with all kinds of diagnoses. Now you have people who can actually tell you when you do a test, how people are thinking, but think about how long you have when you're taking a test. Most of our tests are not time-stamped. So it's not that you have to tell us within milliseconds, you actually get to stare at that picture. And in the next five seconds, you tell us what's going on. So I started to see, “oh, okay, this person's passing all the tests because you're getting all this time, you know, seconds matter.” And that in real-time, spontaneous speed, that's where they can't keep up.
Dr. Sutton: (18:06)
They have a hard time kind of.
Dr. Sutton: (18:08)
If it's slowed down and they have the time to kind of process it but in real-time and kind of social interaction, it's much harder.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (18:16)
Yeah. If they could step away and study it, like they could be analytical engineers or step away and study the code, they can start to make sense of applying it.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (18:26)
And even though they're very bright, they're not tuned into a lot of social inferences, so they're not imagining how other people may think and feel as efficiently. And how is it that you want people to think and feel about what's going on and start to just study that social interpretation system? Which are both feelings and how we are perceiving, and thinking in the world, and just unpacking this in a very user-friendly way.
Dr. Sutton: (19:00)
So with social thinking, are you doing this in groups? Are you doing this individually? What's it like?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (19:09)
Yeah, so you could do either or both. My favorite is both where I can work with someone individually and really help them specifically with their learning. Where they are in their learning and then work on, “now that you're learning these ideas, like who's thinking about whom in this group right now. Or what do you think that person really meant by what they said?” And just taking it down, exploring it, getting people to realize what their brain was having a bit harder time with. Then take it into the group with specific goals about like, I have kids who are constantly having their bodies turned away in a group
Michelle Garcia Winner: (19:53)
They are trying to participate, but their shoulders are shifted away. Their chair is pulled back and they don't realize that immediately people don't see them as really aligning with the group. They may think that they've got an attitude, and they see them as unwilling.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (20:10)
And so how to understand even how to pull your body into the group or how, when you enter a group, how you enter into a physical space where people see you as wanting to be in the group.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (20:22)
And what's fascinating about that is when you do that like I've had teenagers who are considered behavior problems and then you bring them in and you stand, and this is the value of a group. You stand in a little bit of a group and then you have them leave the room and practice walking in. As we're building awareness of how we interpret each other's space and the teenager will walk in and stand two feet behind the group and I'm like, “what's going, going on?” And he goes, “it doesn't feel comfortable to be that close to people. And so then we, we talk about, and then each of the teens, if you have a group, one of the great values is that it's not just me giving feedback like social is something we all interpret. So someone's in the group. It doesn't mean they're unable.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (21:08)
It means they're working on something and they can be very good interpreters of the other kids in the group and actually be quite articulate if you build language to explain about. “Well, you know, you didn't do that really well because you still stood like a half foot behind. And so it felt like you didn't wanna be with us.”
Dr. Sutton : (21:25)
Well, it sounds like there's gotta be a huge overlay between anxiety and discomfort and avoidance of discomfort and these social situations. Just like you're talking about that one kid who is behind because they don't feel so comfortable. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (21:48)
So a lot of the work I've done is observational. A lot of the things we talk about we've been at this now for 26 or 27 years of working with clients. And right now my caseload is all Silicon Valley Professionals. I'm only working with mature adults between like 40 and 75. Some of them have been really very successful in their career, but not successful in their social and emotional life. So a lot of divorces and just, you know, breaking all of that down. So, remind me of your question.
Dr. Sutton: (22:26)
So yeah, just kind of the overlap between anxiety, discomfort, and the avoidance of discomfort and the kind of aspects of ASD.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (22:38)
So as I was saying, our guys are folks, women, and, men can be strong interpreters. They realize when they're being rejected or they realize that they don't know how to get into a group. Like they see everybody standing around at lunch and then they lay off, they don't know how to do it, but they don't know how to tell someone that they don't know how to do it. So now they'll go be by themselves or they just, depending on their personality, they can just go in and try to just mess up the groups, you know, because they want attention. Everybody wants attention. That's crucial to our being, as humans.
Dr. Sutton : (23:12)
You want that connection.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (23:13)
Being recognized as someone who exists in your space. And so I started to realize that there was a link between, how able you are to interpret. We talked about that earlier, whether you're very, very literal or, more abstract. Like, you're able to interpret a number of things, a lot of things, but there's a link between social self-awareness because these are all abstractions. How do you interpret social self-awareness, what is social self-awareness? It's your awareness that people around you have thoughts and feelings about whatever space you're sharing. So it's like, if you're standing in a line at a store, you're aware that there are other people who recognize you as existing in that line. And what's really important is that social is not about interacting. That's part of it but it's how you share space. It's how you make sense to others. It's how people understand your intentions that are all part of us being social. So when you work with someone who's very, very literal. This is the pattern we see very weak social attention. And so basically they don't have great social awareness. And those three things we think are really strongly linked.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (24:32)
This means a kid who doesn't have awareness, really weaken attention, and not interpreting. You can kind of start to think about these things going together. Although if you go to research are all defined separately. Now you go into a store and that kid just like pushes everyone away and goes to the cash register is not trying to be rude.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (24:52)
He just doesn't see, he doesn't have the awareness to read the situation. If he doesn't have situational awareness, then he is not attending in that situation to the dynamics. And so he's responding in a way that's more route like you go to the cashier and you buy. Then it is to interpret what's happening around me. With my folks who have strong intelligence and are considered more able in the social awareness at tension, usually don't have trouble doing something as basic, as standing in a line. Where they really struggle is the abstract dynamics of group work in the classroom. In initiating and developing peer-based friendships. And I say peer-based because usually these kids, if you're working with them before they become adults, often their best friend at school is a teacher. They'll go hang out in the teacher's classroom constantly at lunchtime or any time. And then the teacher feels good about these kids clearly, but they're not really realizing that this person doesn't have, or the teacher doesn't know how to help them have the ability to help themselves with peers.
Dr. Sutton: (26:15)
What are your thoughts on this, I'm just thinking about some of the kids that I've worked with and it seems like the spectrum even goes beyond ASD. That, you know, there are some kids that aren't Asperger's or autistic or so on, but they have that kind of thing. They have a hard time fitting in with kids their own age. They get along more with the adults or so on, or some of my clients that have been through trauma, you know, as like a high schooler they have a hard time relating to their peers who maybe weren't forced into maturing. And having to kind of, you know, take on adult roles or experiences or so on. What are your thoughts on kind of those aspects?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (26:59)
I never from the beginning, because I was very familiar with autism, but I knew that the work I was doing extended, beyond the autism spectrum. I was reading so many case histories as I was having a lot of students. And there was always this overlap of autism and ADHD, autism and language disorders, and autism and behavior problems. Or leave the autism out, you know, avoidant, attachment issues, and avoidant personality disorder. And I was fascinated because I saw such similar kinds of learning capacities, but not similar diagnostic labels. Which made me think this, you know, what I'm developing is not about somebody's diagnosis. It's about where they fit in terms of what level, how literal are they, how aware are they, and what level of attention they have.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (28:04)
What do they want for themselves if they have that ability? And when you work with folks who aren't interpreting, they have it harder and are more involved. So I was very involved with the parents in the high school of the kids who have more limited and in their social interpretation. And then with the higher folks, just like, what do you want for yourself? It's not about, “I'm gonna teach you, go how to hang out with eight kids.” It's like, “how many people do you feel comfortable with?” And, you know, we ultimately talked about with teens, like “you go to a party” and the kids are like, “well, I wanna be at the party, but I get sensory overwhelmed if I stay.” And I'm like, “well, how long do you wanna be at the party?” “Well, I want to be there for 15 minutes.” I'm like “fabulous. Now in those 15 minutes, what can you work on for your peers at the party to feel like you're actually part of the party?”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (28:56)
Because you know if you have a social, and emotional learning difference, you don't know how to help yourself kind of learn more abilities. But, you know, anxiety is not something that we have control over. Like if your anxiety moves in when they sense that you're vulnerably weak in different areas. And so then as a speech pathologist, you know, I'm trying to work with mental health at the school, but we're more classically putting kids in buckets of, “oh, it's just anxiety.” And I'm like, well, it's not just anxiety. Anxiety's coming from a weakness in social, and emotional understanding. So how do I help them understand after they're trying? We're engaging in more awareness and learning, even with those most capable students, and helping them show that they're doing a really great job interpreting, or let's keep working on that. And then we started once they became more familiar with how to understand the social, and emotional world. One of the ways is that we teach social thinking vocabulary, think of their eyes, body, and the group, every group, every time people are together, there's a plan. What is the plan? And as they became more aware, then we could start helping them understand strategies for anxiety management. So we didn't usually start with anxiety management right away because your anxiety is totally fair.
Dr. Sutton: (30:30)
Yeah. It's kind of understandable given the circumstances.
Dr. Sutton: (30:36)
So I like that. So kind of you're breaking it down to those three areas and I was, you know, as you're describing the situation of the person at the grocery store or something like that, just kind of walking right up. It also makes me think about like some of the clients with ADHD, you know, because they know in the frontal lobe also self-perception is affected. And so the person might be impulsive or not paying attention. And then just walk up to the cash register, not seeing that there's a whole line or something like that. And then, so that kind of aspect of the social attention, although usually, they're probably pretty socially aware that. Once they do attend to it realize, “oh, that's like not the thing to do or something.” Whereas you're saying somebody else might not have that aspect where they just, you know, they need to buy something. They go, and they're not really, you know, thinking about how the others are thinking about them.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (31:28)
So this is where we overlap. I was presenting at a conference years ago and a psychologist came up to me and he goes, “do you know, you're doing cognitive behavior therapy.” And I'm like, “what's that?” Because I really wasn't familiar with mental health. I was very much familiar with social and realizing emotional. So I went and looked it up and it's, you know, your thinking affects your behavior. You have the ability to shift your thinking to be able to shift your behavior. And then your thinking and behavior become more aligned towards your own goals. And so I was seeing that, you know, with my students is that helping them depending on their age. You know with little kids, we're teaching some very basic awareness and they usually trust us because they're little. But by the time you're working with a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old or a 17-year-old, they've been living with this quite a while, they haven't found, they've noticed that they've not been included. They know their intentions are good and they're angry or depending on personality, they're just filled with anxiety and pulling themselves out and just saying, “no that's for everyone else. Everyone else is happy to hang out. I'm really happy sitting in my teacher's room doing math.”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (32:51)
And so they start to justify their aloneness. But the bummer is, as you could explain as a psychologist that the human mind is not designed to be singularly alone.
Dr. Sutton: (33:06)
Yeah, that kind of primary drive to be connected to others. Like you're saying maybe they might justify like, “oh, I don't want to”, but it kind of, you know, maybe dulls the pain of being alone or feeling rejected or so on.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (33:23)
And I do wanna say, as I imagine some parents are listening or other professionals, so togetherness is just one other person. It's not looking at what all the high schoolers are doing. And, I've had my students who become very frustrated because, at school, the mental health person is saying, “look, you're not part of groups, go join a group.” And the kid is so mixed with anxiety and he is not highly socially competent. He really doesn't understand how people do that. Another student had said, “it's like magic. The bell rings at school and everyone just pops into groups.” And so being, you know, being able to work with them from where they are, and then understanding.
Dr. Sutton: (34:04)
Multiplying the complexity too, right? It might be easier to interact with one other person and kind of be aware and try to if that's something that's not a strong point. But then yeah, you get 10 people and it's not just 10 times, it's kind of exponential in all the different dynamics.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (34:23)
And I think that's really freeing for a lot of folks, because I'm like, “Hey yeah, actually social is not, it doesn't even begin with being people. It begins with awareness of people.” That social brain does not develop by doing it. It develops by attending, by developing awareness. And so I'm, you know, very familiar with the developmental literature, and then by coincidence, both of my daughters had babies a year ago. They each live 10 minutes from me and I'm watching this little boy and this little girl just develop these different levels of awareness in their first year of life. To the point, you know, where they get stranger anxiety because they're very aware of who they know and who they don't know. But a baby who's not aware is just going to anybody or going to nobody, you know, depending on it.
Dr. Sutton: (35:13)
Definitely. Now how about working with kind of that literal versus kind of abstract when somebody is very literal? You're kind of saying that rather than trying to get them to not be literal and focus on getting them more abstract, kind of, working within their paradigm. How do you approach somebody like that differently than somebody that can think more abstractly?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (35:40)
So literally when you're working with a person who is very literal and not interpreting, we begin with teaching, what a thought is and what a feeling is. We often want to pair it with something. We will want to pair it with something that they're enjoying. And a lot of our guys enjoy more slapstick kinds of TV shows or movies. They need slapstick because slapstick is a very literal comedy whereas, you know, they may be 15 years old. They may never have had an appropriate diagnosis or, you know, people have just treated them as if they have limited learning abilities. And then we start just, “what is a thought, what is a feeling?” We hold up little brain bubbles, you know, we have visuals for feeling. And then we start talking about one of the harder things we do is feel things inside of ourselves. It's easier to be judgemental of someone else than it is to be inter, you know, personally aware weirdly. Like we do react to what goes on in us, but we're more knowingly reacting to what we think someone else is doing.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (36:56)
Like if my intentions are good and you see me as rude, many of my clients go, “well, that's your problem, because my intentions are good.”
Dr. Sutton: (37:04)
It's also that like attribution bias, like the person's like, you know, “that's an angry person.” But then when they get angry they feel like, “oh, well there was a reason that was a conflict or something like that.” That would kind of put somebody in that attribution, but we have enough information to put it in context.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (37:21)
Exactly, I'm glad, appreciate you adding in the psychological vocabulary for these. And so when you're working with someone who's, you know, I believe that there's more a social, a spectrum of social cognitive learning, social, emotional. Then it is about diagnostic labels because when you actually get into the treatment, it's understanding how this person's processing and responding. And so when they are quite limited in their learning abilities, at the time you meet them, we want them to be motivated to be there. So we want to have them look at something that might be interesting or be able to understand that they have thoughts and feelings. So a lot of times I'm the person who messes everything up. I'll come in the room and everyone knows they're supposed to sit in chairs. They're quite literal.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (38:12)
They're 15 years old and I'll just come in and sit on the table and I wait for people to react to me. And then I'm like, “are you having a thought?” And I'm like, “what is your thought?” And they're like, “you should not be on the table.” I'm like, “how do you feel? Are you feeling comfortable or uncomfortable?” And it’s literally from me giving them experiences that disturb their thinking and helps them to recognize what a thought is. And this is a very slow process working with older kids, but a lot of times we don't.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (38:46)
The biggest challenge I see out there is that we just assume, Hey you're a 15-year-old kid who's now in high school clearly, you know what thought and a feeling is, so you're just not behaving.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (39:08)
So I just, Michelle, you need to work with this kid on getting him to behave and it's like, “yeah, Good luck with that.”
Dr. Sutton: (39:15)
I also do cognitive behavioral therapy. So that kind of looking at those aspects of what is the thinking that's leading to that behavior because that's where so much, you know. It's so important to be able to kind of intervene if we can understand. And I know that you know, somebody that's on the spectrum. I mean, one of the hallmarks also is kind of the rigidity and the thinking and having a hard time with that. My mental flexibility as part of cognitive behavioral therapy is noticing a thought and thinking about, you know, maybe that's not true with a capital T. Maybe if we took, you know, 20 people in the same situation, they might think about things differently. And what do you do when someone is, you know, very concrete like that? Or are you trying to help them gain awareness of their own concreteness?
Dr. Sutton: (40:05)
I was also thinking about how there's a podcast, this American life episode that I really like where there's a husband and wife. And that husband, you know, they learned that he's got Asperger's back then. And so he kind of starts keeping notes on everything. For example, when his wife is, you know, singing along to the radio, don't change the channel in the middle of her singing. Like again, because some of these things just didn't occur to him. And, the literalness, he was trying to write down every kind of rule that he was learning.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (40:39)
I'll try to translate everything to social rules. If I have a client named Robert, I'll call it Robert's rules of order, as trying to make it very concrete. Which, you know, it makes sense because when you really look at abstract thinking everything drills down to some kind of fact. Like if you look at science, science can get incredibly abstract but every science abstraction will rest on a bit of fact. The social world is a little trickier because every inference that we're making, every assumption we're making rests on how we're interpreting the situation, which may not be a fact. And so it's actually, that's why there's many who are celebrated for their great science minds, struggling with the social and they'll go, “Hey, they're really smart at science so just get them to be social.”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (41:39)
And I'm like, actually you're coming from a different thinking base. So, you know, then we work with families and we work with students on the goals and really helping people to understand. It's not about developmentally outgrowing a diagnostic label. It's not about getting this kid to behave right away. It's about helping them understand what's happening around them and things to notice and to even understand. Like when you're in a class, you are sharing space with 10 other kids, and 20 other kids. So the way I teach this is I have used a lot of objects, but I prefer Popsicle sticks because they're very easy. And so like, if it's a teacher, you can get big Popsicle sticks and smaller ones at an art school store. So when I have really literal kids it's those who are struggling with a classroom dynamic.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (42:42)
There's which you can still be what we consider more able socially, but be seen as a behavior problem. And rather than just think this is a behavior it's like, what is it? You don't understand? So we set up the class. So here's my example of one of the more able kids by school measurement. He's a kid. Who's like, you know what? I sit in a group and I'm just talking to one kid, and I know I'm not paying attention. And this is a kid who's got kind of an obstinate personality, many would say. I think he's, you know, in many ways charming and has a great sense of humor if he knows when to use it at the right time and place. But he pops off jokes in the middle of serious teaching.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (43:28)
So working with him on awareness of the dynamic. I give him the Popsicle sticks and I go set up your classroom for me. Well, there's a teacher, she stands here and there's like 15 kids, 20 kids in my class. So we put out 20 Popsicle sticks and I go, “where are you?” And we often give him a different color who you talking to and so he'll show it. And he's talking to this girl and so we'll angle those two Popsicle sticks. And he goes, the teacher gets so mad at me. She tells me I'm interrupting the class, but I'm not interrupting the class. I was just talking to this one girl. And I'm like, I could see how you make sense of that. Let's see it from the teacher's perspective and maybe from the other kids. So we've talked about, “Hey, everyone in this group has thoughts. Everyone in this group has feelings. It's a fairly small room.”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (44:17)
The teacher's trying to teach. You are talking to this other girl, you're kind of laughing, joking around. Now, who's paying attention to what? what are the kids around you thinking? You know, being aware of social awareness. Are they interpreting it? Attend, interpret, awareness. And we end up talking about actually the entire class because some of our kids can be quite noisy in their interactions with others in a group. Even though we consider them like that, that's the kid, who's considered the behavior problems. They go, “oh, this is totally intentional.” So then we will angle all the Popsicle sticks to kind of get all these kids, you know, like that each stick represents a person. Everyone was sitting straight looking up at the teacher. Now we angle all the Popsicle sticks to kind of look at this kid's interaction with the girl. And I'm like, you know, you thought you were only talking to the girl, but everybody was aware. Yeah, everyone's attending. And now people are having thoughts that you are trying to disrupt the class. And this kid who's, you know, got tattoos and has a bad attitude looks at me and he goes, “oh my God, I had no idea.”
Dr. Sutton: (45:34)
Just wasn't again aware.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (45:37)
That kinda, of just that level of dynamic. And of course, we never teach this stuff. And so, you know, I think with our biggest behavior disorder. Let's just, you know, of course, there's a number of different factors that lead to behavior disorders. But, and it really comes down to when you're working with older kids who can talk about this, how do you want to be perceived?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (46:05)
What is it you want?
Dr. Sutton: (46:07)
When I think that was something that I was listening to, another podcast you're talking about is the kids and adults who are higher on the spectrum that are closer to almost neurotypical. Sometimes end up getting treated the worst versus somebody who is less functioning maybe people are like, “oh, like they kind of know that this person has some issues.” So they're kind of maybe a bit more compassionate, a bit more gentle, or so on. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (46:35)
I've actually addressed that when in my conferences because it's not about the weakest functioning being considered the most negatively. It's really about our assumptions of how we think you should function. So if you see someone and the weaker you are in your cognitive capacity, it's often very obvious to people who are untrained because the person's not aware. They're not tuning in to what's going on around them and we cut them slack. We'll see, they might be talking to themselves. They might start pacing. We give them less slack to the folks that we interpret should know better. And so those are the ones we could become very critical of in our house, with friends, and in institutions like schools. And so it's, you know, each of us have judgments, you know, I work in my company, I have 20 employees.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (47:35)
We're all here to do the job together. But everybody's interpreting each other in terms of who's easy to work with. Is there somebody that I struggle with because social is something that the brain just does without even realizing it? How many judgments or feelings are forming? And so we absolutely see those who are the most subtle. So we'll often call these kids subtle but significant because a lot of times they'll say, “well, they're just high on the spectrum. They're really smart so they should know better” or “this kid has ADHD, so he'll never be able to, you know, figure this out. He's just too impulsive.” And it's like, well, wait a minute, stop. And think, you know, what is happening? Give yourself that momentary pause, which is part of cognitive behavior therapy. And then I was trying to figure out where our work goes because it is, without knowing it, CBT based, but we kind of go off on this arm of social cognitive behavioral therapy.
Dr. Sutton: (48:34)
It's like really kind of going into the nuances of those social.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (48:39)
Yeah, and drilling down and creating language, like thinking with your eyes, brain in the group, and body in the group.
Dr. Sutton: (48:46)
Well, I think this piece too, is about the person that someone feels like they should be able to do it, but they're not doing it. You know, I do a lot of work with kids and adults with ADHD. And that oftentimes is a big place where they also get a lot of shame because you know, people are acting like they're supposed to do it. And even for kids with ADHD, it's like, they know what to do, you know, but they just can't put it into action. So, you know, oftentimes they feel like people are picking on them. So I imagine somebody in this situation too, where people are getting frustrated because they're not acting in an expected way. Can oftentimes see that, as you know, being packed or criticized. And kind of like you were saying about that kid, that's oppositional like, you know, they might not even get what they're doing wrong and feeling like, why is this person mad at me.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (49:35)
Now take the opposite personality type. Those who are not understanding the nuance of these group dynamics want to get their message across but are so flooded with anxiety that they're just frustrated. And so I was working with an engineer who's in a company you've all heard of and he came in and was referred by a psychologist because he's showing up with Asperger's but also major anxiety disorder. So it comes to me and I'm like, well, full disclosure, I'm a speech-language pathologist. So my primary focus is not going to be on your anxiety, but instead, what does your anxiety have to do with, you know, what's behind the anxiety? And so we would start it from a problem. A lot of this is problem-solving, right? As you mentioned, flexible thinking and understanding you have choices. So this is a highly trained engineer master's degree, very successful in the pod of his job.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (50:40)
Not someone who's effectively talking to people but doing his work and having a lot of judgments about people who are idiots or not doing their work well. But not knowing, not even understanding the managerial system, as you get hired in these jobs, you don't even know what to do with your manager. He had one friend. It was his wife who they met in school and they got married and then beyond that, he just didn't know what to do with anybody. And so we started with problems. We started looking at, okay, what's the problem? And I do a lot of social, emotional problem-solving and then imagining from there. It took a few years for him to really feel quite able to realize that his anxiety was a flag for a problem that he was struggling with solving rather than things that he, you know, it's not about stopping being anxious. It's about when you can figure out the problem and understand who to communicate with and what happens to your anxiety. And at that point, your anxiety's gonna keep trying to show up because anxiety has deep roots. But you actually can tell that it doesn't need to be there. Like I got this, I know exactly what to do.
Dr. Sutton: (51:55)
That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today. I really love hearing about the work that you're doing and I like, you know, just kind of breaking it down to those kinds of three aspects. And just, you know, it just sounds like you're doing great work and really deconstructing, you know, all those little aspects of social. Really kind of helping clients to kind of take those little building blocks and put them together and strengthen that.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (52:20)
Yeah, absolutely. So I have a website which is social thinking.com. And my goal from the beginning, even though it's a private business is to share information. So we have a lot of free articles and we have a lot of free webinars, which should extend all the way over to organizational abilities. So I never want someone to have to start by buying something. I want them to start by understanding how they, you know, just give them some basic idea.
Dr. Sutton: (52:47)
Get some information.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (52:49)
And so we have a lot of free resources on our website. So feel free to go on what topic you're interested in.
Dr. Sutton: (52:56)
Perfect. And I'll link to that in the bio, on the website. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (53:02)
I appreciate the interview too. Thank you very much.
Dr. Sutton: (53:04)
Great. Take care.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (53:06)
Luck with your work.
Dr. Sutton: (53:07)
Thank you for joining us. If you're wanting to use this podcast or continuing education credits, please go to our website at therapyonthecuttingedge.com. Our podcast is brought to you by the Institute for The Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing in-person and remote therapy in the San Francisco bay area. IAP provides training for licensed clinicians through our in-person and online programs, as well as our treatment for children, adolescents, families, couples, and individual adults. For more information, go to SFIAP.com or call 415-617-5932. Also, we really appreciate the feedback. If you have something you're interested in, something that's on the cutting edge of the field of therapy, and think clinicians should know about it, send us an email or call us. We're always looking for advancements in the field of psychotherapy to help in creating lasting changes for our clients.
Welcome to Therapy On The Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the director of the Institute for The Advancement of Psychotherapy. In today's episode, I'd speak to Michelle Garcia Winner, who is the founder and CEO of Social Thinking and the globally recognized thought leader, author, speaker, and social cognitive therapist. She's dedicated to helping people of all ages develop social and emotional learning, including those with social learning differences across her 35-year career. She has created numerous evidence-based strategies, treatment frameworks, and curricula to help interventionists develop social competencies in those they support. Michelle's work also teaches how social competencies impact people's broader lives, including their abilities to foster relationships and their academic and career performance. She and her team continually update the social thinking methodology based on the latest research and insights they learn from their clients. She is a prolific writer and has written, and co-authored more than 40 books and over 100 articles about the social thinking methodology. Michelle maintains a private practice, The Center for Social Thinking in Santa Clara, California, where she works with clients who continue to teach and inspire her. Let's listen to the interview. Well, hi, Michelle. Welcome. Thank you for coming in today.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (01:47)
Thank you. Pleased to be invited.
Dr. Sutton: (01:49)
So, I'm really interested in the work you're doing, social thinking, and I've learned a little bit about it. We have somebody that's local here, that does it and she's in speech and language. You know, particularly I don't have a specialty in autistic spectrum disorder, but I'm always kind of interested in how clinicians are working in this way. The kind of work that you're doing with helping folks develop socially. Sometimes I have had some kids that I work with, some teenagers, and some adults that are on the spectrum. You know, I'm always kind of wondering too sometimes because that's not my expertise always and I want to make sure that I'm not kind of missing that when there's kind of the high-level functioning. Particularly, I want to first start off and find out a little bit about you and how you got to do what you're doing. I'm always interested in folks' kind of evolution of their thinking.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (02:46)
So I'm a speech-language pathologist by training, and we all have to have master's degrees. And the place I went to as an undergrad, which is no longer in existence, UC Santa Barbara used to have an autism clinic. So I was just fascinated, just really interested in learning more about the social side of understanding things. So I got involved in that clinic and then at the time we didn't call it the autism spectrum. There was a term like Asperger's and autism and PDD. And so the folks who were coming into the autism clinic were pretty classically autistic and meaning minimally verbal. We have a very limited sense of their intelligence, why they could seem very bright in some areas that are more not language based. They really struggled in learning very literally. And so I went to graduate school at Indiana University which didn't really have a specialty at all in the speech and language program.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (03:47)
I just got offered a free ride so I went. In Bloomington by coincidence, without me realizing it, they had one of the few autism centers in town that were doing its best. It was part of the research group affiliated with the university to really understand the treatment and I'm a treatment person. So I ran over there and started volunteering and got involved in working very intensely in very positive ways. So what we now call positive behaviorism. We haven't had a word for that before. But these were folks who really struggled with traditional learning. They were very, very literal but they were also having tremendous behavioral meltdowns. And so how to create a humane program that also taught them very functional skills while encouraging them to have fun and do field trips out to the community. And it was a wonderful experience. So I learned a ton, you know, back when you can't work with folks who have language, the only way to work with them is observing. So it developed in me a real capacity for looking at nuances and observing, as we're trying to respectfully understand their intentions, what makes them upset. The whole team was focused on this remarkable program.
Dr. Sutton: (05:12)
Finding a way to be attuned without the verbal.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (05:14)
Which is, you know, really all of us need to be in tune beyond, like, what did they say, but what did they mean by what they said? Or how are they really feeling because that happens in language. So, I stayed in Bloomington, Indiana, and worked on this, But now I started to have my children in the early to mid-eighties. So I returned to California, San Francisco area and started working in the hospitals with head injuries. Then learned a ton about what happens when you're born with a brain that loses a lot of capacity, significant capacity due to head injury and stroke. I got to see the exact polar opposite of people who were, you know, had previously been armed with really astute abilities and what it looked like now. And then learn step-by-step strategies as you work with people who've developed brain trauma or head injuries.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (06:16)
To be able to help them start to rehabilitate. And so there, I learned a ton and did that for a number of years and started learning about executive functioning. Which was a term not commonly used at all back in this period of time, which was the late eighties, but it was really central to working with folks who had head injuries. And so in the mid-1990s, my children were now school-aged, everything depended on my children. And so I took a job in the schools and I've always liked older kids. So I started working with high school kids. And started to realize how many of my students were being diagnosed with language disorders because I was the speech path in the school and had the opportunity to work one on one in kind of an educational way.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (07:10)
I was just referred, just endless students of all different diagnoses and it's never been my goal to work on rehabilitating or talking someone out of a diagnosis. The goal is, to understand who this person is, how they're understanding the world, and how they're responding through their actions, reactions, and interpretations. To be able to help them start to engage in a stronger set of learning tools based on wherever they're starting without the idea that we're curing or fixing. If I'm working with someone who's very, very literal. The goal is to not make them an abstract thinker. It's being able to work with how their brain processes information to be able to help them learn more functional abilities in a manner they can learn them with increasing independence. So that's one end kind of working within their own system or kind of abilities.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (08:05)
That's all we really can do. If you try to, you know, push someone outside of their, you know, where they're attuned in their learning center, it just turns into a big behavior program where you're just telling them they're right or wrong. Then that tends to become more punitive and less respectful of where that person is and kind of their existing learning strategies. So then I ended up working and ended up starting my own clinic in the nineties. I actually did a talk because I had been really interested in social and started working with some people on it in private practice. Really just focusing my lens on social learning, social-emotional, and what people may also call social pragmatics. And I gave a talk on it at our national speech and language conference.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (09:06)
Then the room was packed and everybody just wanted more. And so that's where I really started into just having clients. And, you know, if you're a good clinician, you're always learning. You never know, like when a person comes in for help, you don't say, “oh, here's my recipe for your success.” Because the only way to help someone is to actually see how they're interpreting the world, how they're reacting emotionally. Some of our folks come in with a lot of trauma and are very untrusting because it's been assumed that they're just not trying hard enough because their tests are measuring that they have strong intelligence. And so just really starting to understand who am I working with. How do I understand how they're processing and responding to the world to be able to figure out those strategies. The clinic was filled to capacity. I gave a talk to parents about what I had now called social thinking and talked about “what does this mean”, rather than talk about it at a high level, let's break it all down.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (10:19)
And that conference was sold out and then immediately my phone rang off the hook. And then ever since then, my clinic's just been packed. Then I ended up becoming an international speaker on a whole range of topics related to the social and organizational mind.
Dr. Sutton: (10:34)
Great. Well, wonderful. So, tell me about social thinking or how you encapsulate that, or what're the values, the theory-driven behind it?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (10:47)
In a strong manner, I was reacting to the fact that so many of my clients were put in behavior programs and taught that there was one way to behave and this is how you should behave. And obviously, if you are of a mindset where you, as the client are evaluating how people are treating you. You are now creating a lot of behaviors to actually try to make things even worse, to try to just throw this clinician off. So that's where I started really refining. This was in this high school and so I started talking to my folks about, you know, how do you think. So I would ask questions more than I would teach. So for example, an early question that I would ask would be “if you're in a group and no one's talking, then is it a group?”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (11:48)
And they would say, “no, like you have to be talking to be in a group.” And I was fascinated by that because so much of high school is hanging out and finding someone to just kind of share space with. That part of it is spent talking. But a lot of it is this perspective of belonging and understanding. And so I started noticing right away, my folks don't seem to understand the idea of social groups or just groups. And then I would go talk to the teacher and find that the student had no capacity for group work so the teacher was letting him always work by himself. And because of my history and I was working with a lot of adults and head injury and all, I was like, “how are we preparing this person for adulthood? if we're catering to their weaknesses and not providing strategies to help them learn how to understand group think or how people are interpreting them. It's not just them, you know, responding to the world.”
Dr. Sutton: (12:53)
So it's not necessarily just the behavior they're exhibiting, but also trying to help them think of their behavior in relation to others and that kind of groupthink.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (13:02)
Well, as I've gotten more and more involved in this, we do try to understand the behavior, but we don't focus on the behavior. A lot of us are trying to figure out the intent and the intent involves thinking. And so trying to understand what do you think that person was thinking or feeling, and that leads to prediction. So now you have to infer, and this is not just in our face-to-face social world, this is actively expected in the curriculum. With our younger age group of curriculum kindergarten, first, and second grade being a very literal set of facts. But by third grade, as the brain evolves, it's expected that you're starting to do a lot more prediction and influencing. So I was noticing that a subgroup of my students really could not advance to that prediction. Whereas others of my students had more ability yet still were relatively weak compared to their peers. And so they were often by themselves and the more they were by themselves, the more anxious they got, so the less willing they were to try. So I was starting to identify different cohorts of learners if that makes sense.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (14:25)
And then trying to understand, based on how they're perceiving and understanding themself and others, where do we begin helping them learn?
Dr. Sutton: (14:37)
From my understanding of ASD is that one of the hallmarks is that theory of mind. That kind of difficulty with putting oneself and the other's experience and understanding the intent or from their perspective and so on. So you're saying that in the social thinking work, it's again, not only kind of helping with the social skills type stuff, but really trying to strengthen that ability for that kind of imprints.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (15:10)
Well, the theory of mind is the ability to try to imagine what somebody else is thinking and doing. So, we'll show a kid a picture and he is stealing something in a store, so he's slightly like looking at the cash register, but he's putting a candy bar in his back pocket. And then you're asking students, what's happening here? And they're like, “oh, the boy's just shopping.” And you know, that would be our more literal or non-observant. Social observation and social interpretation are related to obviously how literal a person is in their language. So trying to learn where different students were and how quickly and efficiently they were interpreting was a definite beginning place.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (16:03)
But then I found wherever I was with someone, if they had language and they were using language as their primary form of communication, it doesn't have to be spoken language. It can be augmentative communication language, it can be sign, but it just has to be a system of language. If they have language that's where social thinking comes into play.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (16:31)
So our methodology is not for the entire autism spectrum. It's for those who can start to understand the world based on what people are saying to them and then within that there are different abilities. And so when we're working on the theory of mind if someone absolutely does not understand that this person was stealing the candy in the pocket. We're gonna get some very basic information to try to just get them to understand these people have different thoughts,
Michelle Garcia Winner: (17:05)
How do you, what does that person know versus what are they thinking? So basics of the theory of mind, but when you're getting into what we call, what used to be called Asperger's syndrome. It now is called level one of the autism spectrum or ADHD or bipolar, or just behaviorally disordered, because it gets very murky with all kinds of diagnoses. Now you have people who can actually tell you when you do a test, how people are thinking, but think about how long you have when you're taking a test. Most of our tests are not time-stamped. So it's not that you have to tell us within milliseconds, you actually get to stare at that picture. And in the next five seconds, you tell us what's going on. So I started to see, “oh, okay, this person's passing all the tests because you're getting all this time, you know, seconds matter.” And that in real-time, spontaneous speed, that's where they can't keep up.
Dr. Sutton: (18:06)
They have a hard time kind of.
Dr. Sutton: (18:08)
If it's slowed down and they have the time to kind of process it but in real-time and kind of social interaction, it's much harder.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (18:16)
Yeah. If they could step away and study it, like they could be analytical engineers or step away and study the code, they can start to make sense of applying it.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (18:26)
And even though they're very bright, they're not tuned into a lot of social inferences, so they're not imagining how other people may think and feel as efficiently. And how is it that you want people to think and feel about what's going on and start to just study that social interpretation system? Which are both feelings and how we are perceiving, and thinking in the world, and just unpacking this in a very user-friendly way.
Dr. Sutton: (19:00)
So with social thinking, are you doing this in groups? Are you doing this individually? What's it like?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (19:09)
Yeah, so you could do either or both. My favorite is both where I can work with someone individually and really help them specifically with their learning. Where they are in their learning and then work on, “now that you're learning these ideas, like who's thinking about whom in this group right now. Or what do you think that person really meant by what they said?” And just taking it down, exploring it, getting people to realize what their brain was having a bit harder time with. Then take it into the group with specific goals about like, I have kids who are constantly having their bodies turned away in a group
Michelle Garcia Winner: (19:53)
They are trying to participate, but their shoulders are shifted away. Their chair is pulled back and they don't realize that immediately people don't see them as really aligning with the group. They may think that they've got an attitude, and they see them as unwilling.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (20:10)
And so how to understand even how to pull your body into the group or how, when you enter a group, how you enter into a physical space where people see you as wanting to be in the group.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (20:22)
And what's fascinating about that is when you do that like I've had teenagers who are considered behavior problems and then you bring them in and you stand, and this is the value of a group. You stand in a little bit of a group and then you have them leave the room and practice walking in. As we're building awareness of how we interpret each other's space and the teenager will walk in and stand two feet behind the group and I'm like, “what's going, going on?” And he goes, “it doesn't feel comfortable to be that close to people. And so then we, we talk about, and then each of the teens, if you have a group, one of the great values is that it's not just me giving feedback like social is something we all interpret. So someone's in the group. It doesn't mean they're unable.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (21:08)
It means they're working on something and they can be very good interpreters of the other kids in the group and actually be quite articulate if you build language to explain about. “Well, you know, you didn't do that really well because you still stood like a half foot behind. And so it felt like you didn't wanna be with us.”
Dr. Sutton : (21:25)
Well, it sounds like there's gotta be a huge overlay between anxiety and discomfort and avoidance of discomfort and these social situations. Just like you're talking about that one kid who is behind because they don't feel so comfortable. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (21:48)
So a lot of the work I've done is observational. A lot of the things we talk about we've been at this now for 26 or 27 years of working with clients. And right now my caseload is all Silicon Valley Professionals. I'm only working with mature adults between like 40 and 75. Some of them have been really very successful in their career, but not successful in their social and emotional life. So a lot of divorces and just, you know, breaking all of that down. So, remind me of your question.
Dr. Sutton: (22:26)
So yeah, just kind of the overlap between anxiety, discomfort, and the avoidance of discomfort and the kind of aspects of ASD.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (22:38)
So as I was saying, our guys are folks, women, and, men can be strong interpreters. They realize when they're being rejected or they realize that they don't know how to get into a group. Like they see everybody standing around at lunch and then they lay off, they don't know how to do it, but they don't know how to tell someone that they don't know how to do it. So now they'll go be by themselves or they just, depending on their personality, they can just go in and try to just mess up the groups, you know, because they want attention. Everybody wants attention. That's crucial to our being, as humans.
Dr. Sutton : (23:12)
You want that connection.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (23:13)
Being recognized as someone who exists in your space. And so I started to realize that there was a link between, how able you are to interpret. We talked about that earlier, whether you're very, very literal or, more abstract. Like, you're able to interpret a number of things, a lot of things, but there's a link between social self-awareness because these are all abstractions. How do you interpret social self-awareness, what is social self-awareness? It's your awareness that people around you have thoughts and feelings about whatever space you're sharing. So it's like, if you're standing in a line at a store, you're aware that there are other people who recognize you as existing in that line. And what's really important is that social is not about interacting. That's part of it but it's how you share space. It's how you make sense to others. It's how people understand your intentions that are all part of us being social. So when you work with someone who's very, very literal. This is the pattern we see very weak social attention. And so basically they don't have great social awareness. And those three things we think are really strongly linked.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (24:32)
This means a kid who doesn't have awareness, really weaken attention, and not interpreting. You can kind of start to think about these things going together. Although if you go to research are all defined separately. Now you go into a store and that kid just like pushes everyone away and goes to the cash register is not trying to be rude.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (24:52)
He just doesn't see, he doesn't have the awareness to read the situation. If he doesn't have situational awareness, then he is not attending in that situation to the dynamics. And so he's responding in a way that's more route like you go to the cashier and you buy. Then it is to interpret what's happening around me. With my folks who have strong intelligence and are considered more able in the social awareness at tension, usually don't have trouble doing something as basic, as standing in a line. Where they really struggle is the abstract dynamics of group work in the classroom. In initiating and developing peer-based friendships. And I say peer-based because usually these kids, if you're working with them before they become adults, often their best friend at school is a teacher. They'll go hang out in the teacher's classroom constantly at lunchtime or any time. And then the teacher feels good about these kids clearly, but they're not really realizing that this person doesn't have, or the teacher doesn't know how to help them have the ability to help themselves with peers.
Dr. Sutton: (26:15)
What are your thoughts on this, I'm just thinking about some of the kids that I've worked with and it seems like the spectrum even goes beyond ASD. That, you know, there are some kids that aren't Asperger's or autistic or so on, but they have that kind of thing. They have a hard time fitting in with kids their own age. They get along more with the adults or so on, or some of my clients that have been through trauma, you know, as like a high schooler they have a hard time relating to their peers who maybe weren't forced into maturing. And having to kind of, you know, take on adult roles or experiences or so on. What are your thoughts on kind of those aspects?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (26:59)
I never from the beginning, because I was very familiar with autism, but I knew that the work I was doing extended, beyond the autism spectrum. I was reading so many case histories as I was having a lot of students. And there was always this overlap of autism and ADHD, autism and language disorders, and autism and behavior problems. Or leave the autism out, you know, avoidant, attachment issues, and avoidant personality disorder. And I was fascinated because I saw such similar kinds of learning capacities, but not similar diagnostic labels. Which made me think this, you know, what I'm developing is not about somebody's diagnosis. It's about where they fit in terms of what level, how literal are they, how aware are they, and what level of attention they have.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (28:04)
What do they want for themselves if they have that ability? And when you work with folks who aren't interpreting, they have it harder and are more involved. So I was very involved with the parents in the high school of the kids who have more limited and in their social interpretation. And then with the higher folks, just like, what do you want for yourself? It's not about, “I'm gonna teach you, go how to hang out with eight kids.” It's like, “how many people do you feel comfortable with?” And, you know, we ultimately talked about with teens, like “you go to a party” and the kids are like, “well, I wanna be at the party, but I get sensory overwhelmed if I stay.” And I'm like, “well, how long do you wanna be at the party?” “Well, I want to be there for 15 minutes.” I'm like “fabulous. Now in those 15 minutes, what can you work on for your peers at the party to feel like you're actually part of the party?”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (28:56)
Because you know if you have a social, and emotional learning difference, you don't know how to help yourself kind of learn more abilities. But, you know, anxiety is not something that we have control over. Like if your anxiety moves in when they sense that you're vulnerably weak in different areas. And so then as a speech pathologist, you know, I'm trying to work with mental health at the school, but we're more classically putting kids in buckets of, “oh, it's just anxiety.” And I'm like, well, it's not just anxiety. Anxiety's coming from a weakness in social, and emotional understanding. So how do I help them understand after they're trying? We're engaging in more awareness and learning, even with those most capable students, and helping them show that they're doing a really great job interpreting, or let's keep working on that. And then we started once they became more familiar with how to understand the social, and emotional world. One of the ways is that we teach social thinking vocabulary, think of their eyes, body, and the group, every group, every time people are together, there's a plan. What is the plan? And as they became more aware, then we could start helping them understand strategies for anxiety management. So we didn't usually start with anxiety management right away because your anxiety is totally fair.
Dr. Sutton: (30:30)
Yeah. It's kind of understandable given the circumstances.
Dr. Sutton: (30:36)
So I like that. So kind of you're breaking it down to those three areas and I was, you know, as you're describing the situation of the person at the grocery store or something like that, just kind of walking right up. It also makes me think about like some of the clients with ADHD, you know, because they know in the frontal lobe also self-perception is affected. And so the person might be impulsive or not paying attention. And then just walk up to the cash register, not seeing that there's a whole line or something like that. And then, so that kind of aspect of the social attention, although usually, they're probably pretty socially aware that. Once they do attend to it realize, “oh, that's like not the thing to do or something.” Whereas you're saying somebody else might not have that aspect where they just, you know, they need to buy something. They go, and they're not really, you know, thinking about how the others are thinking about them.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (31:28)
So this is where we overlap. I was presenting at a conference years ago and a psychologist came up to me and he goes, “do you know, you're doing cognitive behavior therapy.” And I'm like, “what's that?” Because I really wasn't familiar with mental health. I was very much familiar with social and realizing emotional. So I went and looked it up and it's, you know, your thinking affects your behavior. You have the ability to shift your thinking to be able to shift your behavior. And then your thinking and behavior become more aligned towards your own goals. And so I was seeing that, you know, with my students is that helping them depending on their age. You know with little kids, we're teaching some very basic awareness and they usually trust us because they're little. But by the time you're working with a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old or a 17-year-old, they've been living with this quite a while, they haven't found, they've noticed that they've not been included. They know their intentions are good and they're angry or depending on personality, they're just filled with anxiety and pulling themselves out and just saying, “no that's for everyone else. Everyone else is happy to hang out. I'm really happy sitting in my teacher's room doing math.”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (32:51)
And so they start to justify their aloneness. But the bummer is, as you could explain as a psychologist that the human mind is not designed to be singularly alone.
Dr. Sutton: (33:06)
Yeah, that kind of primary drive to be connected to others. Like you're saying maybe they might justify like, “oh, I don't want to”, but it kind of, you know, maybe dulls the pain of being alone or feeling rejected or so on.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (33:23)
And I do wanna say, as I imagine some parents are listening or other professionals, so togetherness is just one other person. It's not looking at what all the high schoolers are doing. And, I've had my students who become very frustrated because, at school, the mental health person is saying, “look, you're not part of groups, go join a group.” And the kid is so mixed with anxiety and he is not highly socially competent. He really doesn't understand how people do that. Another student had said, “it's like magic. The bell rings at school and everyone just pops into groups.” And so being, you know, being able to work with them from where they are, and then understanding.
Dr. Sutton: (34:04)
Multiplying the complexity too, right? It might be easier to interact with one other person and kind of be aware and try to if that's something that's not a strong point. But then yeah, you get 10 people and it's not just 10 times, it's kind of exponential in all the different dynamics.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (34:23)
And I think that's really freeing for a lot of folks, because I'm like, “Hey yeah, actually social is not, it doesn't even begin with being people. It begins with awareness of people.” That social brain does not develop by doing it. It develops by attending, by developing awareness. And so I'm, you know, very familiar with the developmental literature, and then by coincidence, both of my daughters had babies a year ago. They each live 10 minutes from me and I'm watching this little boy and this little girl just develop these different levels of awareness in their first year of life. To the point, you know, where they get stranger anxiety because they're very aware of who they know and who they don't know. But a baby who's not aware is just going to anybody or going to nobody, you know, depending on it.
Dr. Sutton: (35:13)
Definitely. Now how about working with kind of that literal versus kind of abstract when somebody is very literal? You're kind of saying that rather than trying to get them to not be literal and focus on getting them more abstract, kind of, working within their paradigm. How do you approach somebody like that differently than somebody that can think more abstractly?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (35:40)
So literally when you're working with a person who is very literal and not interpreting, we begin with teaching, what a thought is and what a feeling is. We often want to pair it with something. We will want to pair it with something that they're enjoying. And a lot of our guys enjoy more slapstick kinds of TV shows or movies. They need slapstick because slapstick is a very literal comedy whereas, you know, they may be 15 years old. They may never have had an appropriate diagnosis or, you know, people have just treated them as if they have limited learning abilities. And then we start just, “what is a thought, what is a feeling?” We hold up little brain bubbles, you know, we have visuals for feeling. And then we start talking about one of the harder things we do is feel things inside of ourselves. It's easier to be judgemental of someone else than it is to be inter, you know, personally aware weirdly. Like we do react to what goes on in us, but we're more knowingly reacting to what we think someone else is doing.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (36:56)
Like if my intentions are good and you see me as rude, many of my clients go, “well, that's your problem, because my intentions are good.”
Dr. Sutton: (37:04)
It's also that like attribution bias, like the person's like, you know, “that's an angry person.” But then when they get angry they feel like, “oh, well there was a reason that was a conflict or something like that.” That would kind of put somebody in that attribution, but we have enough information to put it in context.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (37:21)
Exactly, I'm glad, appreciate you adding in the psychological vocabulary for these. And so when you're working with someone who's, you know, I believe that there's more a social, a spectrum of social cognitive learning, social, emotional. Then it is about diagnostic labels because when you actually get into the treatment, it's understanding how this person's processing and responding. And so when they are quite limited in their learning abilities, at the time you meet them, we want them to be motivated to be there. So we want to have them look at something that might be interesting or be able to understand that they have thoughts and feelings. So a lot of times I'm the person who messes everything up. I'll come in the room and everyone knows they're supposed to sit in chairs. They're quite literal.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (38:12)
They're 15 years old and I'll just come in and sit on the table and I wait for people to react to me. And then I'm like, “are you having a thought?” And I'm like, “what is your thought?” And they're like, “you should not be on the table.” I'm like, “how do you feel? Are you feeling comfortable or uncomfortable?” And it’s literally from me giving them experiences that disturb their thinking and helps them to recognize what a thought is. And this is a very slow process working with older kids, but a lot of times we don't.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (38:46)
The biggest challenge I see out there is that we just assume, Hey you're a 15-year-old kid who's now in high school clearly, you know what thought and a feeling is, so you're just not behaving.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (39:08)
So I just, Michelle, you need to work with this kid on getting him to behave and it's like, “yeah, Good luck with that.”
Dr. Sutton: (39:15)
I also do cognitive behavioral therapy. So that kind of looking at those aspects of what is the thinking that's leading to that behavior because that's where so much, you know. It's so important to be able to kind of intervene if we can understand. And I know that you know, somebody that's on the spectrum. I mean, one of the hallmarks also is kind of the rigidity and the thinking and having a hard time with that. My mental flexibility as part of cognitive behavioral therapy is noticing a thought and thinking about, you know, maybe that's not true with a capital T. Maybe if we took, you know, 20 people in the same situation, they might think about things differently. And what do you do when someone is, you know, very concrete like that? Or are you trying to help them gain awareness of their own concreteness?
Dr. Sutton: (40:05)
I was also thinking about how there's a podcast, this American life episode that I really like where there's a husband and wife. And that husband, you know, they learned that he's got Asperger's back then. And so he kind of starts keeping notes on everything. For example, when his wife is, you know, singing along to the radio, don't change the channel in the middle of her singing. Like again, because some of these things just didn't occur to him. And, the literalness, he was trying to write down every kind of rule that he was learning.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (40:39)
I'll try to translate everything to social rules. If I have a client named Robert, I'll call it Robert's rules of order, as trying to make it very concrete. Which, you know, it makes sense because when you really look at abstract thinking everything drills down to some kind of fact. Like if you look at science, science can get incredibly abstract but every science abstraction will rest on a bit of fact. The social world is a little trickier because every inference that we're making, every assumption we're making rests on how we're interpreting the situation, which may not be a fact. And so it's actually, that's why there's many who are celebrated for their great science minds, struggling with the social and they'll go, “Hey, they're really smart at science so just get them to be social.”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (41:39)
And I'm like, actually you're coming from a different thinking base. So, you know, then we work with families and we work with students on the goals and really helping people to understand. It's not about developmentally outgrowing a diagnostic label. It's not about getting this kid to behave right away. It's about helping them understand what's happening around them and things to notice and to even understand. Like when you're in a class, you are sharing space with 10 other kids, and 20 other kids. So the way I teach this is I have used a lot of objects, but I prefer Popsicle sticks because they're very easy. And so like, if it's a teacher, you can get big Popsicle sticks and smaller ones at an art school store. So when I have really literal kids it's those who are struggling with a classroom dynamic.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (42:42)
There's which you can still be what we consider more able socially, but be seen as a behavior problem. And rather than just think this is a behavior it's like, what is it? You don't understand? So we set up the class. So here's my example of one of the more able kids by school measurement. He's a kid. Who's like, you know what? I sit in a group and I'm just talking to one kid, and I know I'm not paying attention. And this is a kid who's got kind of an obstinate personality, many would say. I think he's, you know, in many ways charming and has a great sense of humor if he knows when to use it at the right time and place. But he pops off jokes in the middle of serious teaching.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (43:28)
So working with him on awareness of the dynamic. I give him the Popsicle sticks and I go set up your classroom for me. Well, there's a teacher, she stands here and there's like 15 kids, 20 kids in my class. So we put out 20 Popsicle sticks and I go, “where are you?” And we often give him a different color who you talking to and so he'll show it. And he's talking to this girl and so we'll angle those two Popsicle sticks. And he goes, the teacher gets so mad at me. She tells me I'm interrupting the class, but I'm not interrupting the class. I was just talking to this one girl. And I'm like, I could see how you make sense of that. Let's see it from the teacher's perspective and maybe from the other kids. So we've talked about, “Hey, everyone in this group has thoughts. Everyone in this group has feelings. It's a fairly small room.”
Michelle Garcia Winner: (44:17)
The teacher's trying to teach. You are talking to this other girl, you're kind of laughing, joking around. Now, who's paying attention to what? what are the kids around you thinking? You know, being aware of social awareness. Are they interpreting it? Attend, interpret, awareness. And we end up talking about actually the entire class because some of our kids can be quite noisy in their interactions with others in a group. Even though we consider them like that, that's the kid, who's considered the behavior problems. They go, “oh, this is totally intentional.” So then we will angle all the Popsicle sticks to kind of get all these kids, you know, like that each stick represents a person. Everyone was sitting straight looking up at the teacher. Now we angle all the Popsicle sticks to kind of look at this kid's interaction with the girl. And I'm like, you know, you thought you were only talking to the girl, but everybody was aware. Yeah, everyone's attending. And now people are having thoughts that you are trying to disrupt the class. And this kid who's, you know, got tattoos and has a bad attitude looks at me and he goes, “oh my God, I had no idea.”
Dr. Sutton: (45:34)
Just wasn't again aware.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (45:37)
That kinda, of just that level of dynamic. And of course, we never teach this stuff. And so, you know, I think with our biggest behavior disorder. Let's just, you know, of course, there's a number of different factors that lead to behavior disorders. But, and it really comes down to when you're working with older kids who can talk about this, how do you want to be perceived?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (46:05)
What is it you want?
Dr. Sutton: (46:07)
When I think that was something that I was listening to, another podcast you're talking about is the kids and adults who are higher on the spectrum that are closer to almost neurotypical. Sometimes end up getting treated the worst versus somebody who is less functioning maybe people are like, “oh, like they kind of know that this person has some issues.” So they're kind of maybe a bit more compassionate, a bit more gentle, or so on. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Michelle Garcia Winner: (46:35)
I've actually addressed that when in my conferences because it's not about the weakest functioning being considered the most negatively. It's really about our assumptions of how we think you should function. So if you see someone and the weaker you are in your cognitive capacity, it's often very obvious to people who are untrained because the person's not aware. They're not tuning in to what's going on around them and we cut them slack. We'll see, they might be talking to themselves. They might start pacing. We give them less slack to the folks that we interpret should know better. And so those are the ones we could become very critical of in our house, with friends, and in institutions like schools. And so it's, you know, each of us have judgments, you know, I work in my company, I have 20 employees.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (47:35)
We're all here to do the job together. But everybody's interpreting each other in terms of who's easy to work with. Is there somebody that I struggle with because social is something that the brain just does without even realizing it? How many judgments or feelings are forming? And so we absolutely see those who are the most subtle. So we'll often call these kids subtle but significant because a lot of times they'll say, “well, they're just high on the spectrum. They're really smart so they should know better” or “this kid has ADHD, so he'll never be able to, you know, figure this out. He's just too impulsive.” And it's like, well, wait a minute, stop. And think, you know, what is happening? Give yourself that momentary pause, which is part of cognitive behavior therapy. And then I was trying to figure out where our work goes because it is, without knowing it, CBT based, but we kind of go off on this arm of social cognitive behavioral therapy.
Dr. Sutton: (48:34)
It's like really kind of going into the nuances of those social.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (48:39)
Yeah, and drilling down and creating language, like thinking with your eyes, brain in the group, and body in the group.
Dr. Sutton: (48:46)
Well, I think this piece too, is about the person that someone feels like they should be able to do it, but they're not doing it. You know, I do a lot of work with kids and adults with ADHD. And that oftentimes is a big place where they also get a lot of shame because you know, people are acting like they're supposed to do it. And even for kids with ADHD, it's like, they know what to do, you know, but they just can't put it into action. So, you know, oftentimes they feel like people are picking on them. So I imagine somebody in this situation too, where people are getting frustrated because they're not acting in an expected way. Can oftentimes see that, as you know, being packed or criticized. And kind of like you were saying about that kid, that's oppositional like, you know, they might not even get what they're doing wrong and feeling like, why is this person mad at me.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (49:35)
Now take the opposite personality type. Those who are not understanding the nuance of these group dynamics want to get their message across but are so flooded with anxiety that they're just frustrated. And so I was working with an engineer who's in a company you've all heard of and he came in and was referred by a psychologist because he's showing up with Asperger's but also major anxiety disorder. So it comes to me and I'm like, well, full disclosure, I'm a speech-language pathologist. So my primary focus is not going to be on your anxiety, but instead, what does your anxiety have to do with, you know, what's behind the anxiety? And so we would start it from a problem. A lot of this is problem-solving, right? As you mentioned, flexible thinking and understanding you have choices. So this is a highly trained engineer master's degree, very successful in the pod of his job.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (50:40)
Not someone who's effectively talking to people but doing his work and having a lot of judgments about people who are idiots or not doing their work well. But not knowing, not even understanding the managerial system, as you get hired in these jobs, you don't even know what to do with your manager. He had one friend. It was his wife who they met in school and they got married and then beyond that, he just didn't know what to do with anybody. And so we started with problems. We started looking at, okay, what's the problem? And I do a lot of social, emotional problem-solving and then imagining from there. It took a few years for him to really feel quite able to realize that his anxiety was a flag for a problem that he was struggling with solving rather than things that he, you know, it's not about stopping being anxious. It's about when you can figure out the problem and understand who to communicate with and what happens to your anxiety. And at that point, your anxiety's gonna keep trying to show up because anxiety has deep roots. But you actually can tell that it doesn't need to be there. Like I got this, I know exactly what to do.
Dr. Sutton: (51:55)
That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today. I really love hearing about the work that you're doing and I like, you know, just kind of breaking it down to those kinds of three aspects. And just, you know, it just sounds like you're doing great work and really deconstructing, you know, all those little aspects of social. Really kind of helping clients to kind of take those little building blocks and put them together and strengthen that.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (52:20)
Yeah, absolutely. So I have a website which is social thinking.com. And my goal from the beginning, even though it's a private business is to share information. So we have a lot of free articles and we have a lot of free webinars, which should extend all the way over to organizational abilities. So I never want someone to have to start by buying something. I want them to start by understanding how they, you know, just give them some basic idea.
Dr. Sutton: (52:47)
Get some information.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (52:49)
And so we have a lot of free resources on our website. So feel free to go on what topic you're interested in.
Dr. Sutton: (52:56)
Perfect. And I'll link to that in the bio, on the website. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (53:02)
I appreciate the interview too. Thank you very much.
Dr. Sutton: (53:04)
Great. Take care.
Michelle Garcia Winner: (53:06)
Luck with your work.
Dr. Sutton: (53:07)
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