In this episode, hosts Ash and Dusty delve into the complex topic of boundaries and toxic relationships, especially as they relate to individuals with ADHD. They explore the increased vulnerability of people with ADHD to manipulative and exploitative relationships due to factors such as poor working memory, low self-esteem, and a tendency to people-please. Ash and Dusty discuss how these traits can lead ADHD individuals to doubt their own recollections and trust others too easily, often placing them at risk for uneven power dynamics in their relationships.
The hosts also emphasize the importance of recognizing one’s own boundaries and the necessity of setting and maintaining them. They highlight the challenges that ADHD individuals face in centering themselves in their own experiences and understanding what is acceptable to them. Ash and Dusty stress the value of introspection and the role of coaching in helping individuals with ADHD develop a stronger sense of identity and purpose. They conclude by discussing the need for ongoing negotiation in relationships and propose a future episode dedicated to exploring Boundaries 101 for a more in-depth understanding of this crucial topic.
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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. Dusty, you want to tell our listeners what we’re talking about this week? [00:00:12] Dusty: We’re talking about boundaries and toxic relationships. [00:00:17] Ash: Whoo. You and I both know a little something about that. [00:00:19] Dusty: Yeah, I feel like it almost kind of naturally segues from what we were talking about last time around power dynamics in intimate relationships, right? [00:00:27] Ash: Absolutely. So where do you want to start? [00:00:30] Dusty: So it’s interesting, Ash. There’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that people with ADHD are at a heightened risk for exploitative relationships, like manipulation, gaslighting, toxic relationships and uneven power dynamics, and I have a few theories as to why this is. I don’t know – this is sort of social science validated.But if you think about it, people with ADHD have worse working memory. So they’re, they’re kind of, it’s easier to convince someone with ADHD. Like, oh, you didn’t say that. Or like, I didn’t say that. Or that’s not what happened. We’re used to being wrong, right? We have what Cam calls the “ADHD 1 Down” perspective.
So I think we’re more. We’re more primed to be told that we’re the one who did something wrong or that we have something to make up for, that we need to apologize. And then on top of that, many people with ADHD have struggled with low self esteem and they have poor boundaries and they’re people pleasers.
[00:01:24] Ash: And people-pleasing especially affects women, right? Because women are socialized to respond in ways that men are not. But, by the way, this affects everyone. I have been impacted by toxic relationships in my own life. So. We’re not just talking to women here. We’re talking to everyone, just some awareness around who it’s likely to impact the most.And yeah, Dusty, that thing where you don’t trust your own brain enough and you’re coming to a conversation in good faith, right, you’re exhibiting empathy. I think that’s another really common trait for people with ADHD. So much so that, to my knowledge, I can’t think of a client that I’ve ever had that didn’t struggle to find that balance between empathy as a strength and leaning into people pleasing or being used in some way.
Uneven dynamics, right out of the goodness of their heart, right out of caring about someone else’s struggles, so you’re coming to the conversation with good faith and with empathy. Which means you’re then trusting the other person when they say no, I didn’t say that or no that’s not how that went or no, that’s not what it meant and because we’re really bad at remembering what we know as people with ADHD, that pattern can repeat for quite some time before we start to realize it. If we ever start to realize it.
[00:02:53] Dusty: Yeah. That’s actually a really good point, Ash. I find that people with ADHD have a high degree of authenticity, and so one of the things we mistakenly do is we assume that everybody else is like us. That they’re being honest, that they’re being forthright, that they too are presenting their authentic feelings.And all of these things, when you put them together, are what a manipulative person is really looking for. And I’m not saying they’re doing that, like, consciously, that they’re these villains in some castle going, “Aha! This is the perfect person to exploit!” But if you’re someone who is a taker, or like, is kind of an energy vampire, or like, has some toxic traits and you meet somebody who is a people pleaser and a giver and doesn’t set boundaries and is easy to push around, it’s easy to dominate with your opinion and say oh, no, that’s not what happened. It’s this other thing. Well now you’ve got the perfect person, right?
[00:03:44] Ash: Exactly, Dusty, which is why one piece of advice that I give to people who think they might be in a situation like this, who have ADHD, is to start keeping some notes or records for yourself. Note down if you sat down with your partner or with a friend and you had a conversation and you came to some agreements or came to some conclusion, write that down so that if later if that’s challenged, if your recollection is challenged, you have some way to trust your own memory.Another thing that really helped me in a situation like this was talking to other people who had been in similar situations, right? Because hearing that lived experience, that’s a big part of why people listen to this show, right? They’re hearing language put to their lived experience that deepens their own understanding of ADHD. And so if you know of someone else who has definitely been in a relationship like this, that person is probably a great resource for you.
Even if they don’t often open up or talk about it, because one of the things about abuse cycles is once you’re out of it, you don’t want to invite it to start again, right? So you want to shut it down in every way possible and you tend not to talk about it.
[00:05:08] Dusty: Yeah, and it can be traumatic right and I want to also just flag here, like, you know, we’ll segue into talking about boundaries eventually, because I think that’s a really key principle here. But I also want to kind of make a note that, like, these types of situations exist on a continuum, right?So there’s everything from like, straight up, like, abusive, toxic relationships. And then there’s also situations where you get into, like, a really toxic parent child dynamic because of ADHD, where, maybe your partner isn’t necessarily abusive, but things have taken a really unfortunate turn and there’s resentment. There’s control because of your partner not being sympathetic or understanding around ADHD or even maybe outwardly ableist, like, “oh, don’t blame your ADHD”. This isn’t real. You just suck. Right?
And then, you know, sometimes we’ve got partners or just people in our lives, it doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship, but sometimes we’ve got people in our lives who have their own problems, their own trauma, their own triggers, their own mental health issues and they may not be managing those as best they can.
So sometimes you end up in a really toxic situation, even if the other person doesn’t intend it, but that does also run the gamut. Like, the unfortunate thing is that there are exploitative people out there. They’re not walking around advertising it, right? You never think it’s gonna happen to you.
And if you are the kind of ADHDer who walks around assuming that because you have a good heart and because you are authentic and because you always try your best and you attribute that to everyone else – it’s such a foreign concept for so many of us to recognize that there are people out there who don’t have your best interest at heart, who are trying to manipulate you on purpose, and they are like, they’re looking for an easy, you know, they’re looking for a patsy, right, for lack of a better word – it just is so foreign to us that it never even occurs to us. But the reality is like, and I said this in the last episode, that’s why you don’t want to skip steps.
You don’t want to skip steps, whether it’s a romantic relationship, a friendship, a business partnership, even with a roommate or a shared living situation. If you haven’t seen how that person is when they’re angry, if you haven’t seen how that person is when you say no, if you haven’t seen how that person handles disappointment, like, you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into, even if you feel, like, they’re like me, I’m like them, we’re great, like, they would never do that to me.
How do you know? You don’t know that. You’re basing it on an assumption because you’re over relating. How you are to how they are. And that’s where I think we get into trouble is when we skip those steps. And when we don’t know how to set and hold healthy boundaries from the outset.
[00:07:45] Ash: Dusty. I just want to appreciate how well articulated that was because it’s a hard thing to describe or put into words if you haven’t been there. And certainly, as you were saying it I got a little emotional, because that was a hard lesson that I did learn the hard way and I’m In some ways, I’m glad I’m here now, right?I have a much healthier perspective, I think, when I approach any relationship be it a friendship, as you said, you already named all the types of relationships, I suppose I don’t need to do that again, but I have a much healthier perspective when I approach any relationship now, and I’ve quit assuming, and I think it’s so easy to do with ADHD because so many of our best, closest friendships are formed on that instant spark, right? That, oh, we just click, and, so often those are the people that are with us for a very long period of time, but sometimes they’re not.
Sometimes, unfortunately, what you’re being shown early in any type of relationship with somebody is not the full picture. So we’re not saying lose that enthusiasm. I still approach new friendships and new social situations with enthusiasm, but I’m careful about how much I give of myself to anyone else until I’m sure, and this is a phrase that I like to use to describe this until I’m sure I know them like that, right? Until I am sure or as sure as I can be that I know this person well enough that I can put a level of trust in that relationship.
[00:09:20] Dusty: Yeah. And I want to say a great resource for this is Carolyn McGuire, who wrote Why Will No One Play with Me? I saw her give this excellent talk about intimacy buckets. And so she actually talked about it like a bullseye, like the level of sharing that you do with people. And so, we tend to overshare, right?And she kind of talked about, you know, there’s the coworker at work that you’re just work colleagues with and then there’s the coworker that maybe you’re closer with, maybe there’s the person in the grocery store lineup, and then there’s your very best friend.
And so there’s these levels of how much vulnerability and authenticity we have with people. Sometimes people with ADHD, quite problematically, have that same level with everyone and they don’t realize that it’s not appropriate. So, Carolyn’s a great resource on that and at the end of the day, when we’re oversharing, we’re also giving that person, who may not be a safe person, like, a lot of ammo on us, right, that they could turn around and use later. And again, you never think that someone’s going to act like that, because you would never act like that.
I think the turning point for me in, what I would say was my most problematic relationship, but in a couple of relationships, was recognizing that my black and white, like, justice thinking was actually the biggest thing getting in my way. For me, I have a lot of black and white all or nothing thinking, and that looks right or wrong in terms of social situations, and I always wanted to be right. Meaning, that I always wanted to do the right thing and sort of like nail the social rules and I would get really stuck on oh, but I did all the right things and like always trying to prove that I was the good one and that I followed the rules and that I did, you know, everything above board. And really, everybody’s playing with a different set of social rules, which frustrates me to no end. But especially when you’re in an abusive or emotionally manipulative situation, it’s really so important that you stop worrying about being the bad guy.
That was the best advice I ever received. To leave an abusive relationship when someone told me, you need to get comfortable being the bad guy because you’re never gonna prove to this person that you’re not. This person keeps setting up these hoops for you to jump through for you to prove yourself and you keep doing it, but all you’re doing is giving them the power because you’re like, ‘no no no but I didn’t do that’. They keep making you out to be the villain and you keep exerting energy to prove that you weren’t the villain. Ever since I stopped doing that, Ash, it is shocking, I so often see that as a feature in other relationships where neurodivergent people are being exploited.
They’re still caught in this dynamic of needing to be heard and prove that they weren’t wrong, that they weren’t the bad guy. And it’s like, sometimes no matter how right you are, you need to situate the fact that you were right with yourself and stop looking for that external validation from a person who is deliberately not giving it to you.
[00:12:08] Ash: Yeah, getting out of a relationship like that really requires you to stand firmly in your own truth – whatever the consequences – and unfortunately, there are consequences more than once in my life. I have had a relationship that put wrecking balls through other relationships that I thought were immutable, that I thought were people that would be with me for life.And yes, that was hard, but I had to stand in my own truth. I had to get out, and I had to not worry about the collateral damage. And something that I didn’t really fully realize in either situation until afterwards was – I didn’t do that. The other person did that. The other person put a wrecking ball through those friendships.
[00:13:02] Dusty: This is also true even of work relationships. I see this with clients where they’ve been treated really unfairly by their employer and they just can’t let go of the need to let the employer know how they weren’t wrong. But what you just said, Ash, I think is really key when it comes to boundaries. Because I think one of the areas where we struggle to set boundaries as people with ADHD is that we don’t situate ourselves at the center of our own experiences.We’re always relying on everybody else’s judgment of what’s happening. For so many years, I had no idea that I was walking around in a state of constant high anxiety socially. And when I would be in a social situation that I was uncomfortable in, I would primarily be worried about the comfort of everyone else around me.
And if somebody else made a situation uncomfortable, or made me feel like I did something wrong, even though they were the one introducing the discomfort, I would get all…I’d start doing what we call “fawning”. And I’d try to make everything, you know, better. And there was a point in my life at which I started asking, ‘wait, how does this person make me feel?’
How do I feel in this situation? And that’s really only when I started recognizing how often other people were making situations uncomfortable. That one fact revealed to me where the toxic people were in my life because I had a couple people in my life who had no problem taking a comfortable social situation and making it uncomfortable and then making that my problem but again, I was letting them make it my problem because I wasn’t registering ‘oh, this person has now made me uncomfortable’.
I don’t like that. That doesn’t work for me. I don’t like how this person makes me feel. I was only primarily wrapped up in ‘how does this other person feel’ even though I’m uncomfortable, but I’m primarily worried about them. So what’s hard about boundaries is situating your own experience at the center of your own experience and figuring out what is okay and not okay for you.
[00:15:15] Ash: Dusty, that’s a really good point. And that’s also an incredibly hard thing for those of us with ADHD to learn how to do. That’s at the center of the work that I do with my clients is learning how to put yourself in the picture and learning how to be in choice. But it’s really hard to put yourself in the picture.If you don’t know yourself, if you don’t know what you want, if you don’t know what you like, if you don’t know what is okay or not okay for you, and perhaps this should be a future episode, there’s a couple of great papers out there. And this is something that I have absolutely seen time and time again in my coaching practice is that ADHD people don’t form a strong sense of identity.
By the way, listeners, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have one, right? So much of the work that I do in my coaching practice is helping people unearth questions of identity and purpose and connecting those two things together. And it’s such a fun process because the stuff is already there, we just have to learn to unlearn that behavior of trying to fit into everyone else’s mold, trying to learn the rules, trying to learn what we should and should not do.
And at the same time, there’s this work of introspection to get in touch with. Who we actually are, what we actually like, that’s part of why coaching is such a great space for that particular type of work, because coaching is about making a discovery about yourself and maybe not knowing what’s true or not true and then going out and getting some evidence by way of whatever your practice is that week, whatever you’ve decided you will do or try and not attaching to it’s a success or not a success, but just adding some context to the mix.
So while that is a super important point that you’ve made Dusty, it is also yet another reason why ADHD people are so much more likely to end up in a situation like this because we may ourselves genuinely not know how to answer the question of what we want or what is okay for us. And we may not know how to find those answers.
Okay. Is it okay? We’ve only got like five ish minutes. So I thought we’d pivot on. So some more like explicit boundary comfort.
So we’ll probably talk about that more in a future topic, but let’s bring it back to boundaries. And I will say that the one other big learning that I had in my last situation and after is my boundaries are mine to know and uphold and nobody else’s, right? A couple of the relationships that I lost in the fallout were because I set a boundary that other people were not willing to uphold.
And I made the choice to step away at that moment because I knew what the boundary necessarily needed to be. And I knew that I didn’t have space for anyone who wasn’t going to uphold that boundary. So it’s nobody else’s responsibility to uphold your boundaries. And by the way, that’s an important thing for those of us with ADHD to hear too, because boundaries can’t, the concept of boundaries can be used as an abuse tactic.
You’re violating my boundaries. You’re not living up to my boundary. You’re…
[00:18:32] Dusty: Oh yeah, or as I was once told I get to yell at you because you keep crossing my boundaries and I told you that if you cross my boundaries, the consequence would be that I yell at you. [00:18:41] Ash: Yeah. [00:18:41] Dusty: Not how boundaries work, people. [00:18:43] Ash: Yeah. So boundaries are all about the person setting the boundary and when someone else sets a boundary with you, you get to be at choice about whether or not that is a boundary that is okay with you, whether or not that is a boundary that is fair that you can live with or not.It’s not up to you to uphold every other person’s boundaries in your life or even to know them all if they haven’t been communicated to you. It is up to you on either side of that equation to be at choice and to recognize that there is a choice there. Just because someone else says there’s a boundary doesn’t mean you have to respond to it by upholding that boundary.
[00:19:30] Dusty: I think that’s a really important point that you just said there, Ash, because with ADHD, sometimes we can struggle to remember and to follow boundaries, even if it’s our intention. And I just want to, I think what you’re saying is like, boundaries are a negotiation.So if you set a boundary with me, Ash, and I’m really struggling with it because of an ADHD challenge, that’s something we can talk about and figure out a way that we can both get our needs met. Or, like, if I set a boundary with my racist uncle, and I say, you can come to my house for dinner, but you are not allowed to make racist remarks in my house, my uncle can decide that that’s not okay for him, and that he wants to be free to say whatever he wants to say, which means he’s not going to come to my house for dinner anymore. Right? So I think when you’re talking about not upholding someone else’s boundaries – that’s a little bit like what you mean. You can choose if someone else’s boundaries are unreasonable or they just aren’t going to work for you or you don’t agree. Like it doesn’t mean that you get to disrespect someone or push past their boundaries, but it means that you can be like, you know what? I actually can’t do that. And that’s where relationships really are a negotiation. And I think that, again, is quite hard for us with the whole, like, black and white thinking thing and, like, rules thinking thing. I wonder, Ash, like, maybe next episode we should do, like, a Boundaries 101 episode if you’d be into that.
Because I do think people would benefit from more examples and if you’re kind of new to the concept of boundaries some of the foundational principles I’m really keen on. And I was just gonna say this as an example. This is why we don’t like to enforce hugging, kissing and touching on kids anymore, right?
We kind of talked earlier about that. Like what are my needs? How do I center myself? If you have been socialized since a young child, like, oh, your grandma wants a hug, hug your grandma. If your grandma being more offended that you don’t want to hug her is more important than you not wanting to be hugged, then you’re teaching that child that their needs or what makes them comfortable and uncomfortable in their body comes secondary to the discomfort of someone else, right?
And so we used to, up until recently, really socialize children this way. And that plays out, especially, you know, as a person who grew up in a heteronormative environment, the way that men felt that they had a lot of entitlement to, to my body or, you know, getting close to it, touching it, whatever.
And me feeling like, okay, well, I would rather be uncomfortable myself than make this other person uncomfortable. Like, that person’s making me uncomfortable, but their comfort is what is the priority for me rather than mine, right? And then also, you add in layers and then it becomes dangerous, right?
You want to set a boundary with a man touching your body, he might get angry, he might hit you, he might call you a frigid bitch, which has actually happened to me. So there’s all these layers, right? But, we can kind of see how there’s this evolution of how people may not grow up or be socialized or have the community support to understand what their boundaries are to center their own boundaries. I think that example of letting kids say when they do and don’t want hugs, because that’s something happening to their body, and what happens to their body, or to anybody’s body is more important than what you want to do to their body.
So like, kind of going back to last week again, right? But at the end of the day, yeah, it’s no wonder that people don’t always know this kind of thing, right?
[00:22:46] Ash: Absolutely Dusty. And I love the idea of a Boundaries 101 episode. So let’s definitely pick it up there next week. For this week, we are out of time. So until next week listeners…I’m Ash. [00:22:58] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:22:59] Ash: And this was the Translating ADHD Podcast. Thanks for listening.
