From Shame to Acceptance: Transforming ADHD Struggles

In this episode of Translating ADHD, Ash and Dusty explore the vital theme of self-acceptance in the context of living with ADHD. They discuss the challenges faced by individuals, particularly those who were late-diagnosed, and how societal values can influence feelings of shame and inadequacy. Through real-life examples and client stories, they illustrate the importance of reframing self-criticism into curiosity, allowing for meaningful behavioral changes and personal growth.

The conversation also emphasizes the power of community in fostering self-acceptance. By engaging with others who share similar experiences, individuals can validate their struggles and find understanding. Ash and Dusty highlight how creating a supportive environment encourages curiosity and experimentation, ultimately leading to a more fulfilling life that honors one’s unique neurodivergent journey.

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Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Ash: Hi, I’m Ash.

[00:00:03] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.

[00:00:04] Ash: And this is Translating ADHD.

[00:00:05] Dusty: Before we get started, quick announcement. I am running a boot camp for folks with ADHD – don’t worry, it is way less scary than it sounds – in October, and you can join it. So this boot camp is meant to be a hard reset on all your physical disorganization. The purpose of it is to help you get your space organized so that you can actually implement all the really cool ADHD hacks and strategies and ideas that you have.

So, you know, if you’ve been wanting to start a jogging habit, it’s probably pretty hard to do that if you can’t find your jogging shoes because they’re buried in a closet, but you can’t get them out of your closet because there’s too much stuff in front of your closet, but you don’t know what to do with that stuff because your bed is covered and cluttered.

So if you’re having that kind of issue, this is for you. How the ADHD Boot Camp works it’ll be a series of eight hour-long body doubles with direction. So if you don’t know how to start or you don’t know how to get organized, I’m there to support you. If you just need the accountability, I’m there to support you. You will be in a community of other ADHDers going through all the same stuff that you’re going through, validating your struggles, working together in community.

You can find out more information about the bootcamp at my website, VancouverADHDCoaching.com, or you can just find me on Twitter and you’ll find more info about it there. And at the end of the boot camp, you will be able to enjoy a space that is, if not totally organized, at least a lot more organized, so that you can find your jogging shoes and put your best ADHD hacks to work on building your new habit.

[00:01:34] Ash: So Dusty, today we’re talking about self-acceptance, and you had a client that you wanted to talk about that you did some heavy work with in that realm. So let’s maybe start there and see what we can parse out in terms of ADHD, self-acceptance and why self acceptance matters.

[00:01:52] Dusty: Yeah, so I definitely find, and I don’t know about you Ash, but I find that this is really different for people who are like late diagnosed, or who are maybe a little older. And I don’t know, like I wonder if maybe it has to do with kind of like our social values like growing up back in the day, because you know, things are different now. But for some of my older clients who are late diagnosed, and for this client in particular, the challenge wasn’t so much how to resolve the ADHD struggles, it was like we couldn’t even get to that point because she was just so stuck on I shouldn’t have to, right?

And it’s so interesting because I feel like when people come to ADHD coaching, they at least kind of know something about ADHD. And you’re, you know, usually the suggestion of like post it notes isn’t like a huge shocker, but even for this client, like just the idea, even just the idea that she needed to write herself post it notes for things was like kind of mind blowing. And there was like this resistance of well, I shouldn’t need to like write these things down to remind myself because they were not, you know, things like, oh, remember to pick up the milk.

They were more like intentions. Like I would say, why don’t we write this down so that you can remember that this is what you intend to do. And there was just this big wall: Well, I shouldn’t have to, right? And it was really hard for her, I think, to get to the point where she could make any meaningful behavioral changes because she was just so stuck on this idea of being like, like being really hard on herself and just like really, like having a lot of shame and a lot of like self, I don’t want to say like self hate, but like self, the, whatever the opposite of self acceptance is.

[00:03:17] Ash: Yeah, I shouldn’t have to. That’s a big limiting belief that this client was carrying. I shouldn’t have to. How’d you make progress with this client? What did it look like to get from I shouldn’t have to, to a place where your client was starting to see change?

[00:03:35] Dusty: So a couple of things. In particular, this is one of my clients who came to, I, so I run like drop in coaching in an online community that I run called the ADHD studio, and all the drop in coaching is like essentially public, like anyone can come and listen and anyone could come and be coached. So I think for this client in particular, it was really helpful to have the validation of hearing so often other people struggling with the same things and having other people saying that they related to her in real time as we were talking about it because it made it pretty clear that this was not like just a moral failing on her part like no, this is like part of the diagnosis

And I think there’s so many things about ADD where that’s not quite clear, like what’s listed in the DSM or on a website or a description of ADHD doesn’t really match like how it plays out. And so there’s so many people who think that like they’re the only ones who can’t manage their money, or who like forgot to pay a bill or who like let food rot in the fridge for the 18th million time, right? And then when you get other people saying that they have the same thing, it goes a long way towards helping you realize oh this is not just me. So part of it was that.

And then part of it was just like, I think again, we talked last week about the spirit of sort of like curiosity. And for me, I always try to frame things for clients as like experiments. Anytime, if when I do a consultation with someone, I say, okay, here’s the thing, we’re going to be like scientists. Right? We’re going to be two scientists proving a, we’ve got a hypothesis, right? In this case, the hypothesis is if we put up a post it note reminding you of your intention, we hypothesize that will help you remember your intention.

But just like science, even no result is a result. So we’re going to go, we’re going to run that experiment, and we’re not here to look at should you run this experiment or shouldn’t you. We actually, we just want to know does this work or doesn’t it. And I think framing it like that as an experiment takes a lot of the pressure off of people.

First of all it gets them out of the moral framework of should I need this or shouldn’t I? Because now I’m engaging their curiosity. But it also makes it okay for there to be any outcome. So I think for her what the, what part of the block was is like, well, I don’t want to try something and then it still fails. And then I have the additional shame of you know, I’ve put in the effort and you know, and I still am, you know, this, cause maybe you’ll try this ADHD hack and you’ll find out, no, it’s not ADHD, it’s that you actually are just a jerk, or a failure, or a loser, or something, right?

And so if we frame it as an experiment, and not like everything is riding on the outcome, it becomes lower stakes. Oh, you know what, let’s just F around and find out, for lack of a better term, right?

[00:06:08] Ash: Yeah, this is something that Cam and I talked about a lot previously. And the language we used is detaching from outcomes. I do the same thing with my clients. I don’t ask them what their actions are. I ask them what the practice is. The notion of we’re just trying this on. It’s just practice.

And whether – and there’s no pass fail here – whether it goes really well or really poorly, or you don’t do it at all, we will have some new information about what this uniquely is for you. And doing that with a client, particularly a client who is struggling with self acceptance, who sees things so much in terms of pass, fail, right, wrong, I’m doing it right, or I’m doing it wrong, or please help me, please give me the solution, the answer really makes sense.

A lot of space for that client to get out of that headspace and into a more curious headspace. And so this has me sort of wondering about the relationship between curiosity and self acceptance, because that’s certainly something happens in coaching so often. What do you think?

[00:07:24] Dusty: Yeah, well, I mean, I think the important thing here is okay, self acceptance is not the same as self approval, right? I think that’s where people get it confused, right? Just anything, accepting what is, radical self acceptance or any kind of acceptance, it’s about coping.

And so you know, you know, my, my big thing is I do a lot of work with ADHD and pregnancy. And so I’m also like a certified doula, and I promise this is related. But you know, when people are coping with late with when they are having pain in labor, we say, okay, you can suffer or you can cope. And the difference is accepting that you’re going through this, right?

If you’re afraid of the pain, like the pain of labor or the pain of anything, right? If you’re afraid of pain, like research shows that your brain will actually register that pain more strongly, you’ll feel it more strongly because you’re also in fear. If you know the pain is going to happen and you accept it, you don’t have to like it, you don’t have to love that’s happening, but you can say okay, I’m, this is gonna suck. This is gonna suck, I’m gonna hurt, and I’m gonna get through it. If you’re, then you’re coping, and you actually experience that pain differently.

And I think this is a hundred percent applicable to like almost anything, but especially like the pain of coping with ADHD struggles, right? If you are resistant, and you’re saying I shouldn’t have to, you’re essentially like that, you’re in that place of fear, right? And so that there’s gonna be the pain of struggling with these issues on top of the distress of feeling like you shouldn’t have to.

And if you are accepting that’s the way you are and that these things exist, you don’t have to like them, but it makes it easier to cope with the pain of ADHD struggles. And that’s gonna, I think, open up the space to be able to be curious. 

[00:09:01] Ash: Really well said. And I love the parallels you drew there to pregnancy and pain because it is such a similar thing. I often tell my clients that success and struggle are not mutually exclusive, that two things can be true. I also want to call out that I see another side to that.

I shouldn’t have to write, which is sort of denial. One way to not accept oneself, right? I shouldn’t have to. This isn’t real. Why me? And the other side of that is I’m always going to be this way. I’m stuck like this. I have ADHD, and it just is what it is, and I’m doomed. And either one of those places don’t make room for success.

And it’s really tough with ADHD because the struggle is the big signal. It’s the thing that we pay attention to. I will so often be talking to a client who will be recounting their previous week. whatever their practice was, and they’ll be telling me a story of struggle. And in that story, I will hear success. I will hear wins. I will hear previous work that we’ve done showing up.

I have one client in particular who is notorious for this so much so that we laugh about it. And it’s become a part of our coaching work is she’ll show up, and we’ll have had a particularly hectic week. Let’s say she got sick and she wasn’t at work for several days. And a couple of other things happened along the way.

She’ll be telling me the story in the language of failure of why she didn’t do whatever our actions were, whatever she intended to do that week. But within that, I will hear so many wins, all of these frameworks that we set up at work, all of these practices that mean that she’s not nearly as behind or struggling nearly as much under these unusual circumstances as she would have been when we started working together.

And I’ll call those out for her. And it’s so interesting to me how clients will do that. They’ll only see the struggle and the failure, and they’ll completely miss where they’re being successful.

[00:11:15] Dusty: Yeah. It’s almost like a bit of a meta thing because one of the things we know about ADHD is that we have very binary black and white thinking, right? All or nothing thinking. So I see that often a lot with clients, too, right? That all or nothing thinking – either I’ve completely achieved my goal or nothing counts.

And so, in a a very paradoxical way, accepting that you struggle with black and white thinking can also kind of allow you to recognize when you’re in black and white thinking and admit maybe I’m not being, like, super fair to myself about this, right?

[00:11:46] Ash: Well, and I think that’s where let’s talk about what accepting means. I think the idea I love that you said that acceptance isn’t necessarily approval. Yeah. I love that language because it, and it’s an important distinction. But when you accept, then you’re able to name it without going to an emotional place about it, without beating yourself up about it.

Oh, I’m doing the thing. Oh, why am I here again? Oh, you know, that sort of catastrophizing that we can do that becomes a complete spiral. It completely disrupts that when you can just name it in a neutral way. Oh, I’m engaging in that black and white thinking in that all or nothing thing that I do, and I’m noticing that right there when we talk about pause, disrupt, pivot, that’s that pause moment, the opportunity to then have a different experience Because you’re naming it in a way that doesn’t take you into that limbic system, doesn’t take you to that place where you’re responding automatically, that place where afterwards you’re like, okay, I keep repeating the same behavior pattern and I don’t know why. It’s an opportunity to disrupt.

So when we talk about acceptance, this is getting to the heart of what we really do, is being able to look at and examine what is true for you and your ADHD experience, being able to name what is going on without beating yourself up about it, without judging yourself for it. Just as a neutral – back to, we’re to scientists, right?

Being able to just sort of say, okay, all right, I’m here. And I’m recognizing that I’m here, which is already a new and different experience is being able to recognize it in the moment. And that new and different experience is where the opportunity is.

[00:13:40] Dusty: Yeah, and I think like curiosity begets curiosity because I think you need curiosity. It’s like a sandwich You need curiosity for acceptance and then acceptance breeds curiosity, right? If you’re curious about what exists, then by, it’s that by its very nature you have to accept it, right? Because you’re going looking, you’re like, you’re curious like, how does my ADHD show up? Right?

And then you notice it and then you’re like, okay, well now I’ve learned that this is how my ADHD shows up. So you can accept it. And then once you accept it, I think you can be more curious about what it means, right? Because if I think that I shouldn’t have to put up a post-it note to remember my goal, well, that means then obviously I’m inferring some like moral meaning from what it means if I do need to put up a post it note, right?

But what if it meant something else? What else could it mean? Right? I think there’s just so many directions, like there’s so many things that you can do with curiosity that are such a much more interesting conversation, you know?

Than just did I do it or didn’t I? Or should I have to or shouldn’t I? Those are not very interesting. But even with what you’re saying, you know, when someone’s Well, what if I’m like this you know, Oh, I’m going to be like this forever. I’m even curious okay, well, what have you, what if that’s true?

If that’s true, which I’m not saying it is, but if it is true that we can’t improve on this, what else can we do? How can we still, what, you know, what are the options? Even I think in a very bleak place, there’s always something to get curious about.

And there’s so many directions that curiosity can go that you can, I have a lot of interesting conversations, and curious about a lot of things that are way more like meaningful and compelling than just should I or shouldn’t I have to? That’s kind of boring.

[00:15:12] Ash: Meaningful, compelling, and informative. I have a client who actually loves the language of experiments. We do frame our practice as an experiment because that is something that works really well for him. And he is someone who If you’re looking at him from the outside in and trying to make some assumptions about this person with ADHD as an ADHD coach who has worked with a lot of people with ADHD and as formerly a professional organizer on the face of it, it would look like . Two of his big challenges are over-systemizing things using technology. He is a software developer and he loves to fiddle with technology to make it work well for him. And there’s definitely challenge in there, but there’s strength too. And the other one is capturing way too much data and information, just notes on notes.

And so, a typical approach to this would be to break those patterns, right? To how do we simplify? How do we move away from this? But that is not at all what this client needed. He needed some modification, but What we discovered along the way is number one with the capturing information, there’s something about retention for him there.

So even if he’s never going to go back to those notes and look at them ever again, there was value for him in capturing that information. It’s something we’ve actually built into our experiment protocol in our coaching. Is whatever the experiment is, his practice, part of his practice is to go back to the notes, if it’s helpful to do so and reflect on them.

So you see that there’s choice there. And by virtue of being able to recognize what notes are and what they aren’t for that client, right? He was able to let go of a lot of storytelling around that. Like why do I take all these notes and I never go back to them? What is the point? Well, the point is retention number one and number two, and this brings it back to the technology piece.

The other thing as a software engineer, as a problem solver for a living, he also finds a lot of value in being able to search back and call up those notes. At some future point in time, that’s unknowable right now where they might be helpful. That’s something that has been critical to him at work, numerous times being able to pull up old data and have all of that information and Have it be searchable and findable.

And so for him bringing that same practice into his home life, it is worth it to take those extra steps to tag, to categorize, to organize a little bit on the off chance that particular set of notes might be useful to him in the future. So bringing it back to curiosity, you know, As an ADHD coach, this was surprising to me because most of the time in a, with a client like this the goal is kind of to move away from the need to do all of this extra work.

But for this client, there was value in there is value in that work. And now that he understands what the value is and what the value is. isn’t, we can take the parts that work and build on that and we can let go of the stuff that isn’t working. The rabbit holes of, Oh, I can craft a technology solution to this, but I’m not thinking about whether I should or whether it’s going to be helpful for me.

He better understands what constitutes helpful versus am I just going down a rabbit hole because I can do it because it’s something that theoretically could be done.

[00:18:59] Dusty: Yeah, and I was going to say you were saying oh, bringing it back to curiosity. And I was going to say bringing it back to self acceptance. I heard the self acceptance in you know, first he was like, well, why do I even take all these notes? And now he can just accept that he needs to take the notes.

It doesn’t have to be about using them, right? There’s more, there’s greater self acceptance around something that he does because he understands why he does it. And you know, with ADHD, it’s so hard to understand why. You do or don’t do things and you and I were kind of even talking about this I was saying like ADHD is sort of like an onion, right?

Like the more you get to know yourself you start to realize like more and more things that you do have some like ADHD flavoring in them. And like things that you would have thought were like totally not related at all – like my favorite one, and I know like we’ll maybe talk about this on a future episode, but like my favorite one these days is like talk, like telling people hey, just so you know, if you were an adult with ADD who really struggles to manage money and you are feeling super ashamed, embarrassed about that, just so you know, everybody’s having that struggle.

Well, not everybody, but like a lot of people, because everybody thinks that’s just them or the hygiene thing, right? Again, for me, it’s so normal because I do this every day, but I forget that there’s all these people out here who think that they’re the only ones who have a hard time taking a shower have a hard time brushing their teeth, like, When you find out that stuff isn’t just like you, and it’s no, that’s an ADHD thing it’s huge for a lot of people.

[00:20:19] Ash: I was joking with a friend of mine who is also neurodivergent last night – actually we were talking about dinner habits -and we’re both single men, right? So, cooking is hard. Eating is hard. It’s all hard. And I was talking about the emergency frozen pizza, which is something I used to judge myself for because I will eat a frozen pizza once a week. No joke. I will eat a frozen pizza once a week.

And so I started not keeping frozen pizza around. Because the story I was telling myself is I will eat healthier, and I will cook myself better food if I don’t have an easy option. What actually ended up happening is I was spending an insane amount of money on DoorDash because there was no frozen pizza.

And so the joke that he made that I love so much was sometimes a win, sometimes a lose. You win the day by getting a frozen pizza in the oven, even if you’ve done nothing else. And it made me laugh at the time, but it’s also so true. And when you’re able to come from that place of, okay, I can’t get there today. I can’t get to the shower today. And you’re able to accept that and move on from it, that again creates opportunity in that day that didn’t otherwise exist. Because if you stay stuck on, well, I can’t even get in the shower, what are you going to do? You’re going to keep beating yourself into the ground, and you’re not going to get traction in any direction that day.

Versus, okay, a shower is not happening right now. What else could happen? And not necessarily what else could even productively happen, but just, okay, I’m moving on from showering. That is not happening. And it’s okay. I’m at home. My clients can’t smell me, which is a lovely by product of what we do here virtually.

You can see like my hair is pretty gunky today, actually. Like it’s kind of crispy. Uh, I had to like, a bed head, so I kind of had to wet it and redo it. And because of the product I use, it’s a little crispy and gross. Like I wouldn’t walk out of the house like this, but it’s good enough.

[00:22:21] Dusty: Looks good. I don’t know. It looks good from here.

[00:22:22] Ash: Yeah, exactly. It’s good enough. And so this is nuance, right? This is a place between all and nothing where would I walk out of the house like this? No, I would not. But is this good enough for what my day looks like today? Yes, it is.

[00:22:41] Dusty: Yeah, it’s so funny to me because I feel like, I don’t know, I’ve been doing this so long that my whole, I feel like my whole life is so queer and neurodivergent friendly, like queer and neurodivergent geared that like everything, you know, there’s been a level of self acceptance where we do everything around here in very different ways, I think.

And but I’ve, you know, so I mentioned at the beginning of this, at this episode that I’m doing the bootcamp and often in years gone by, I would do some organizing along with the people in the boot camp. Like I would go through some doom boxes. And this one year I decided to go through all these old journals that I have just that I’ve been dragging around.

And I was like, you know, I never finish a journal, so there’s one third of it is written in, and then three thirds. So I was like, I’m just gonna, you know what, I’m gonna go through each one, I’m gonna take out anything that’s meaningful and relevant, and keep it and compile it, and just get rid of these This big heavy box of books and every single journal had like at least two to three entries that were like Why am I like this?

Like i’m the worst. I should be dead I hate myself like a lot of really dark like negative self talk and this was like, you know These are everything from like teenage Years right up to my late 20s like really dark stuff And then there would be the ones where there’d be the entries where it’s like I’m gonna do better starting tomorrow like starting next week like this and then there’d be like pages and pages of like new routines new habits and like things I wanted to do and like You could just see all of those getting abandoned and then it would like loop back around to what is wrong with me?

I’m like the worst piece of crap in the world da and it’s so funny cuz like You know, obviously I felt so sad reading all that stuff. I was like, man, that, that poor person. And then now, you know, if you walk in my house, there’s a lot of, I think procedures that we have and ways that we do things that are a little, you know, not necessarily the way that other people would do them, but they work for us.

Right? Because we just, we accept that’s how we gotta do things around here.

[00:24:27] Ash: That’s really the goal, isn’t it? Is a life that fits. That’s what I talk to my clients about is this process, is about a crafting a life that fits for you, not a life that fits for a neurotypical, not the way anyone else would do it, but the thing that works for you.

[00:24:48] Dusty: Well, exactly. Yeah, like all those notes, when I go back and look about the things that I was trying to do that I kept failing and then beating myself up about were, you know, just the same stuff as everyone. Keeping a clean house you know, engaging in creative practices, being a good friend, being a good partner you know, taking care of myself, and and like self improvement.

And I feel like You know, now more than ever I’m really happy with who I am, and I’m feel, I feel very successful in most of the areas that I’d like to feel successful, but how I got there looked totally different than how I thought it would look, you know, as evidenced by all the abandoned notebooks and attempts, right, that just didn’t work for me, and so first, before I could progress, I had to say, I had to accept, right?

First, I had to accept myself and the way that I was and my ADHD, and then I could find solutions that actually worked. And paradoxically, as a result of taking all that pressure off myself, I was actually able to achieve like more than I thought I could ever achieve. And this is like one of my first common struggles with a lot of people is they’ll say, you know, we talk about being gentle with yourself or being kind with yourself.

And I don’t know about you, Ash, but I’ll have so many clients that are, they’ll say I’m scared to take the pressure off myself because I’m so used to being hard on myself and being hard on myself is the only thing that works. I’m worried that if I stop being hard on myself, I’m just gonna completely fall apart or I’m just gonna be like a complete hot mess.

So they’re scared to relinquish like, the one tool that they have. And I was the same way, right? But paradoxically, it’s only through letting go of the need to like, be really hard on yourself and beat yourself up and should all over yourself, that you can actually make good decisions. Real lasting meaningful progress and you know these days like there’s so many things I thought I would never be able to have or do or be and like I have and I have all those things And I’m able to be all those things and do all those things through self-acceptance.

[00:26:34] Ash: So listeners, you might be asking yourself, how do I get there? Cause what Dusty just said is absolutely true.

[00:26:40] Dusty: Am I saying that I’m better than you guys? No, just kidding. I’m not. I’m not. Listen to me. I’m better than everyone. No, I’m not. There, honestly, I don’t know about you, Asher, but I have some clients where I’m like, damn, I don’t know if I should be coaching. They’ll be like, yeah, I’m really struggling with XYZ, and they’ll be like, eight times more, or I’m like, oh my god.

[00:26:59] Ash: Yeah. I used to, I don’t worry about that so much anymore, but I’ve definitely had those moments or you know, I’ve had a couple of clients who like, relative to like my success are like wildly successful. And it’s Oh, I’m a little intimidated by you and you’re like wild success.

What can I offer you? That’s interesting. That might be a funny thing to actually talk about at some point, but I, so let me bring it back. Everything Dusty said is absolutely true. And you’ve heard me say similar things about my own journey on this show before. So that begs the question, how do you get to self acceptance?

And the answer is awareness and practice. So developing more awareness about who you are and your ADHD, what’s going on behind the behavior, what is true for you, what can you name, what language can you put to this experience, so that the next time you’re having it, you can name it. You can practice that ability to pause.

I’ve said this a million times on this show. And we talk about pause, disrupt, pivot. The pivotal moment is the pause because. There’s no opportunity to have a different experience if you’re not able to pause in that moment and notice what is happening. But when you can, and when you can name it, that’s the opportunity to then disrupt, pivot, and have a brand new experience.

And it’s not all or nothing. It’s not once you’ve done it once, you’ll catch yourself every single time in the all or nothing thinking. But. The more you practice it, the better you get at recognizing it, and the easier it becomes to have that pause disrupt pivot moment over time.

[00:28:48] Dusty: I wanted to loop back around to something, but just on, on what you said there, Ash I totally agree. Practice is so key. And so hard for us. Right. Cause we’re like, so results oriented. And so all or nothing. And like the anecdote that I give to people, like for, I don’t know about you, but like one of the biggest struggles that I had with my ADHD was like emotional regulation and just like managing big emotions.

Like I’m a really big emotions person. And when I started trying to practice better emotional regulation, it was exactly that. It had to do with a lot of awareness, which is hard in the moment when you’re dysregulated. And so I’ll always share with clients how it happened for me is I would have a big like meltdown or I’d get really upset about something.

And then like hours later I would be like, Oh, that was that. That was the emotional dysregulation. So what I could have done was XYZ. And then, over time, it got to the point where I’d have the big meltdown or the big emotional outburst. And then almost immediately after, I’d be it was a lot closer, I’d be like, Okay, so I just got really dysregulated and I need to calm down.

And then, finally, I got to the point where the awareness happened Well the meltdown like I’d be in the middle of a big you know Steam would be coming out of my ears and I’d be like, I’m really dysregulated right now I need to go like blah blah blah and then eventually it finally got to the point where like just before it happened Like finally and then this was you know took Place over maybe like a year or more like now I’m at the point where if I’m about to lose my cool I can catch it and be like whoo like I got to take a pause I got to do some re-regulation stuff here But I couldn’t get there until I was first at the place where like I had big Blow ups and then later was like oh, yeah, okay I see what I see that was that and that I think applies whether you’re talking about a social faux pas and a social behavior you want to change and of procrastination or avoidance behavior.

Like it’s all the same thing, right? The awareness has to be somewhere and even if it’s really far from the event, it’ll get closer. And what I had wanted to loop back around to say was, you know, you said, how do we get to self-acceptance? And I just wanted to add, I think a layer there is also community, right?

It is so important to see your struggles validated and to talk to other people who can understand what you’re talking about. Just before you and I met today, I was giving a talk for a company and I was talking about it. Changing values and morals and I was talking about like latent ableism in society and I think like it like there’s one kind of ableism where it’s oh, you know, let’s not, you know, put ramps and buildings like not even thinking about the fact that some people don’t use their legs, right?

There’s sort of like very You know easy to identify forms of ableism like that or people using ableist slurs, but there’s a kind of like much more Damaging ableism I think in that we have a lot of things that we see as moral In terms of personality, right and this relates back to that onion thing Like how much of this is my adc and how much of this is my personality like We see things like having willpower and self-discipline as being a moral thing, being not needing.

I once had a client come to coaching and we talked about needing sort of external structures to get things done. And she said, yeah, but how do I do all of this without needing external structures? I don’t want to need external structures. And I was like, I’m so sorry, that’s not how this works. Because for her, it felt like there was something morally deficient in that.

And so we moralize a lot of quote-unquote, personality, like you know, strengths or flaws, which are actually like very neurobiological. And so when you have so in this talk that I was giving this morning, you know, I was saying like stuff like lateness, right? There’s that saying, Oh, if you’re late, it means that you don’t value other people’s time.

Well, that’s a cultural assumption of neurotypical people. That is not what it means for me and it’s probably not what it means for a lot of neurodivergent people. So if you and I are friends on Facebook and I see you post that as a meme, that tells me that you’re like not a safe person and that you have like latent ableist like thoughts that are going, you’re not going to understand me, right?

And that makes me more closed off to you. So I need to be in a community of people where When I’m late, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s okay. It doesn’t mean you give me a free pass. It doesn’t mean I can make everyone wait around for hours. It just means that you’re not, and I know Cam talks about this a lot, right?

Like that neurotypical people fill in the gaps with their own assumptions, right? But it doesn’t mean the same thing. And we need community who understand where we’re coming from to help us get to that. It’s easier to accept yourself when other people accept you and when you’re accepting others, right?

[00:33:00] Ash: So, love both of those points, really appreciate your clarifying that practice and getting to that pause disrupt pivot doesn’t start with pausing. In the moment, it starts with cultivating awareness over time after the fact, which is so much of the work that we do with our clients as we create this curious space where we can examine something like an emotional dysregulation moment or a repeating pattern of behavior in terms of procrastination or avoidance and get it.

Get better language around it. Get more understanding around it. And the more we understand it, the easier it is to get a little closer in time to the thing itself over time, because just by talking about it, we’re keeping it in our awareness differently, too. So really appreciate that. And that second thing, community, so huge.

You said earlier that my life is so neurodivergent and so queer these days that I almost forget what it’s like to operate otherwise. Same, by the way.

[00:34:01] Dusty: Love that for us.

[00:34:03] Ash: My kickboxing gym which is highly neurodivergent. So that was a sort of a lucky find and also a lot of self employed people, so I find a lot of camaraderie there as well, which is really nice. And then there are a couple of queer organizations that I’ve gotten involved with since coming out that again queerness and neurodivergence is it’s not quite a circle as a Venn diagram. But certainly there’s a higher proportion than normal of neurodivergence in queer circles than not.

And so again, yeah, being surrounded by people and just being surrounded by people where you can articulate things like the frozen pizza thing with my friend. Right. Which was just such a funny little joke, but also such a point of. really mutual understanding. And hey, yeah, sometimes that’s the same for me too.

Sometimes for me, getting a frozen pizza in the oven is winning the day and that is okay. And I’m not judging you for that. I see you, and I experienced that too. Such a huge thing. Dusty, I think this was such an awesome episode today, and I’m really stoked to do more with you in the coming weeks.

But for today. I do think this is a good place for us to wrap.

[00:35:14] Dusty: You know, we could talk about this forever.

[00:35:16] Ash: Yeah, we absolutely could. So listeners, until next week, I’m Ash.

[00:35:21] Dusty: I’m Dusty.

[00:35:21] Ash: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.