Understanding Emotions in ADHD Behavior

In this episode, Ash and Dusty explore the significant role emotions play in unwanted behaviors associated with ADHD. They illustrate this through a coaching case study focused on a client’s struggle with managing emails, revealing how underlying feelings of guilt and shame influenced her behavior. The conversation highlights the importance of understanding the emotional context behind actions, emphasizing that awareness and acceptance are crucial for clients to recognize and reshape their narratives.

The discussion also delves into the boundary between coaching and therapy, particularly when addressing past experiences that impact present behavior. Ash shares insights on how coaches can help clients differentiate between emotional responses rooted in personal history versus broader societal expectations. By adopting a framework of pause, disrupt, and pivot, clients can learn to navigate their emotional reactions, ultimately paving the way for growth and self-acceptance in their journey with ADHD.

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Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Ash: Hi, I am Ash.

[00:00:03] Dusty: I’m Dusty and this is Translating ADHD. 

So Ash, what are we talking about today?

[00:00:10] Ash: So Dusty, I wanna talk about the role of emotion in unwanted ADHD behavior because when we’re talking about, especially in the early days of coaching a new client, some discreet topic, some unwanted behavior. So often emotion has a role, a pretty big role to play.

I’ve talked about this client years ago on this podcast, but when I’m talking to new clients about what it looks like to coach on an individual topic, I like to talk about this particular client because number one, it’s about email, which I think every single person with ADHD has had or currently has struggles with email. In my time as a coach, I’ve learned that those struggles, while they may look very similar in terms of symptoms, can look very different.

So when I’m talking to a new client about what it looks like to get to cause in coaching, I talk about this client. So we coached on email for three sessions. She was a dual business owner, photographer and she was also founding a software company. She was juggling wearing both of those hats at this time and it was really just an intensely, busy period of time. She had a lot of important work to be doing on both fronts, and was really frustrated that she would wake up in the morning and just be in her email. 

Now, I don’t remember what our practice was after session one other than it didn’t work. It didn’t work at all but she came back for session two. We talked about it some more. Again, it didn’t work, and to this point, it didn’t work so hard, and she was so frustrated by this behavior. She bought a lockbox to put her phone in in the mornings, like a timed lockbox where she just couldn’t access her phone, which by the way, only marginally worked, right, because the impulse was still there, the causation was still there, whatever it was.

So she comes back for the third session and at some point early in the session she said something about these hard emails at the bottom of my inbox, and I was like, ooh, what’s a hard email? And she said, well, for me it’s a very specific email. I’m a photographer. I do family photography and sometimes after I’ve emailed my clients their final proofs where they can go purchase their prints to give to grandma or hang on their wall or do whatever they want to do with them, they will email me back and ask what my favorite photos are.

She told me she didn’t have a good answer to that question because she feels like she’s already chosen her favorites by way of which ones she picked to edit and present to them. So she doesn’t know what to do with that, so they just sit. 

So listeners, what I want you to understand about this story is the entire behavior of “I wake up and I’m in email and I’m spending way too much time attending to email”. Had nothing to do with all of the newer emails that my client was spending so much time on and had everything to do with the guilt and shame of not attending to these old “hard emails”.

We actually spent the rest of the session coming up with a little template for these emails because when she said, “I feel like I’ve already picked my favorites”, I said, that makes sense to me. Could you tell your clients that? And so we drafted a template that effectively said what my client had said to me. Within 24 hours, I got a text from this client that both inboxes were at zero and not on a Friday, I spent too much time way. In a, this cleared the path for me way and the behavior was no longer an issue. 

And so that’s the thing with emotion and ADHD is we will so often have a really powerful emotional response in a certain context. And our behavior, what comes next, is coming from that emotion. But what is that emotion informed by? Well, in my client’s case, it was informed by something real. There was guilt and shame about what she wasn’t attending to, but our contextual brains often drag context forward into new situations.

So there are situations where it can be about something that’s completely not real. And so, so much of the nuts and bolts of ADHD coaching is getting into what’s going on behind the behavior, and more often than not, what’s going on behind the behavior, when we talk about the stories we tell ourselves, like alongside those stories are powerful emotions. Because our brains are so fast, we will have thoughts and will drag that context forward, but we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing. We don’t realize that this emotion that we’re feeling in this moment is connected to something that may not even be present in this situation.

[00:05:06] Dusty: It’s funny ’cause when you were talking about this, my brain immediately went to she should make a template to have a template response. And then you’re like, then we figured this out. 

Something that’s coming up for me though, as you talk about this Ash, there’s something here that’s piqued my curiosity. I have heard some people hypothesize this idea and I don’t think that there’s any one truth here. This is just sort of people’s different takes on a thing but some people say that rejection sensitivity is actually just C-P-T-S-D. 

There’s sort of two different theories of rejection sensitivity, right? One is that your brain is sort of hypervigilant against rejection. And so it even sees it when it’s not there, right? And I know you’re not only talking about rejection sensitivity, but you are kind of talking about the brain’s ability to make a sort of misappropriate context and be like, oh, this is about this one.

It’s really not, which is what people say about rejection sensitive sensitivity. Like maybe someone’s just feeling tired, you go, hey, how’s it going? They go, eh, and, and then your brain goes, oh no, they hate me. But the other theory that I’ve heard of rejection sensitivity is this idea that actually as people with neurodivergence, we’ve experienced more small, micro rejections and sort of we’ve experienced more outgroup behavior being rejected, being you know, given crap for our behaviors.

And so what looks like rejection sensitivity is actually complex, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypervigilance against real rejections because we’ve had so much of that. And the reason I’m bringing this up is because it kind of reminds me of what you’re saying around like, trauma, right?

This idea that trauma sort of creeps up and it informs the current context even when it’s not relevant. So, maybe this client has struggled in the past with something else that was similar and it led to some really bad outcome. You know, maybe she lost a job or someone got mad at her, who knows.

So all that past trauma is coming up and getting in the way of her being able to do what she needs to do. So my question for you as a coach is, as coaches, where do we differentiate between, what’s coaching in this area and when is it a coaching thing to look back on the past and to think about the story and think about the meaning that we’ve assigned things and how do you differentiate between that and like a therapeutic context?

[00:07:29] Ash: Dusty, that’s a really good question and I’m gonna speak first to going into the past or going negative, which by the way, when you’re taught like straight coaching, all schools of coaching are built on similar skill sets, right?

Whatever coaching school you learned from, however good or not good it was, we’re all kind of operating from a similar set of concepts. This is what we’re trying to do in a coaching session. This is what we’re not trying to do. These are the tools that you use to do it. And one of the big things that I remember being taught is, or I remember hearing along the way at some point is don’t go negative and don’t go in the past because that’s therapy.

But ADHD brains are wired for context. And so sometimes we need to go into the past to understand the present context. 

An example from my own life is I’ve often been criticized for talking too loud in public places. I’m definitely one of those people that when I get excited, my volume goes up and I don’t always realize that. I don’t always realize appropriateness in the setting that I’m in or not in. And a few years ago at a dinner, a friend leaned over and was trying to be kind. I was drawing attention from other tables and she was genuinely trying to be kind. But man, I just had an instant like shame, emotional response connected to all that criticism from the past, right? 

So sometimes we have to go into the past and not even to understand the emotion but sometimes my clients have to go into the past, you know, how we do that thing where to answer a question, sometimes we have to take a meandering path to figure out what the answer is for ourselves. Like sometimes that meandering path takes my clients through their path. So to get to your question of how we distinguish trauma work and therapy from coaching I’ve had several scenarios.

In my coaching practice, where we have gone into the past to a place that was not safe, we’re in this place of curiosity and I ask a curious question and my clients all of a sudden we’re back here. A big part of this as a coach is paying attention to what’s happening in the room, because if there’s a big emotional shift, you can tell. And so as a coach, that is a moment where I have an explicit conversation with my clients about distinguishing therapy from coaching. 

What I tell my clients at this moment is that therapy is about moving through something and coaching is about getting up above it and being curious about it. Coaching is all about curiosity, and so if you haven’t moved through this, in a way that makes it safe for us to get up above it and be curious about it in the coaching context, then maybe we shouldn’t go here. So it’s a conversation with my clients and I have, by the way, had a few clients that paused or stopped coaching work at an intersection like this to go seek out trauma therapy. 

It was important to move through that thing as we had hit sort of a dead end in the coaching until this client could move through that thing. But I’ve also had scenarios where my clients have had real big trauma in their past, but they’ve done enough other work that we can talk about that period of time. 

And not that it might not have some negative emotion in the moment, but we’re able to stay curious. Right? We’re able to stay curious about what, from that past thing are you pulling forward into the now and how is that impacting your now? What are the stories that you’re telling yourself here and now?

I’ve also read some really interesting papers that looked at ADHD youth who had had significant past trauma. So think about children that have been in the foster system, etc. and what’s really interesting is it’s really hard for clinicians, especially with children, to distinguish between what is ADHD and what is trauma, because those responses, those emotional responses, they look really similar.

But in a coaching context, you can tell when they’re very different, right? You can tell when it’s “a story” you’re telling yourself vs. this is context that you’re dragging forward and applying. This is one thing that was said to me one time that I’ve somehow made a rule for myself that I’m having an emotional response to every time I bump up against it. Or this is something that I’ve otherwise accepted about myself. I’m a loud mouth and I don’t care anymore. And if you tell me today to quiet down when I don’t need to, that’s your stuff and not my stuff. There’s no actual trauma there, there was just an unlearning and an unmasking, right? And in order to unlearn that behavior, that masking behavior, I first had to be aware that I was doing it in the first place.

[00:12:33] Dusty: I would totally agree with you because the thing is there’s no way, I think, to effectively coach someone or to connect back to what’s powerful for them without traveling through the realm of “emotion and history” land, right? And I think for me, often, people at the beginning when I’m doing consultations, they’ll sort of ask me the difference and I’ll sort of try to be differentiated a lot like you as well.

Like the difference being if something’s coming up for someone and it’s really hard, they probably need to spend time working on that with a therapist, but if they can identify how the past connects to the present, it’s just about making that connection because we’re looking at what is it, what’s the story you’re telling yourself about this?

And what I often tell clients is that personal growth is really slow. We think it should be this thing where you do something for a month and then you’re like, wow, I’m a totally different person. But instead it kind of feels like walking or it feels like climbing a mountain, where you start climbing one by one step, you look back, you’re only like a foot off the ground. You’re like, oh, this is taking forever. But, if you just keep going one foot in front of the other, one of these days, you’re gonna turn around and you’re gonna be halfway up that mountain, or at the top of that mountain and you’re gonna be like, oh my gosh, look how far I’ve come. But it won’t feel like you’ve come very far. It’ll feel like you’re just slogging away forever. 

So a lot of the times when I’m working with clients and they are changing and they’re growing, it doesn’t feel good at all and it doesn’t feel like anything at all. It just feels like the same old crap. So what ends up happening, because to them it feels like nothing is changing, they stay in that old story of who they were, they haven’t changed. So they’re like, oh, I’m a person who’s too loud, or I’m a person who’s messy, or I’m a person who’s not good at making decisions, whatever, right? 

And I will tell clients that often, they will outgrow their stories faster than they’ll update their stories. So they will have changed, but they don’t actually realize it so they keep telling the same old story and it’s my job as their coach to point that out and to hold onto all the examples of all the ways that they did change and do different things. 

Often we have to do sort of this manual update, right? Like we look back at who they were and we go, that story doesn’t actually fit you, it’s just the habitual story that you tell. You’re used to saying that about yourself, so you still continue to say it, but let’s recognize that that’s actually not really an accurate depiction of where you’re at now and that there’s merit in updating it. 

I think the same can be true of the emotions that we have had and what they meant to us, what the contexts were, and recognizing that they don’t have to mean the same thing now. Things can be scary, but that doesn’t mean that there’s gonna be consequences or you can feel a knee-jerk reaction of shame, but that doesn’t mean you have anything to be ashamed about or that anyone’s even trying to shame you.

[00:15:12] Ash: Dusty, a thought I just had as you were talking, was thinking more about what does this work look like when we’re finding this intersection of powerful emotion and unpacking the stories behind that emotion? And what we’re doing in coaching is we’re doing two things. Number one, we’re doing awareness because so often with ADHD, we’ll have the emotion and we don’t really know what old crap we’re dragging forward that’s causing that emotional response. We’re just unaware of it. That’s that. That contextual brain that’s so disorganized but can call up stuff in context so quickly but without distinguishing, does this apply in the here and now? So, awareness is the first piece. What’s the stuff going on here? 

And as a quick example of that, I had a client who, at the time we were working together, was trying to change industries because he had been fired from a job and told by his last boss that he sucked at this and should probably find a new line of work. And that’s the place in which he came to coaching – finding a new line of work because he’s “not good at this”. And over the course of our coaching work together this was a thread we pulled on for a long time because we touched on it multiple times in the context of different coaching topics. More and more about that situation came out and it turned out his little company had been bought by a huge company.

His expectations for performance went way up while his resources went way down. So yes, while there might have been ADHD in the mix there, and that certainly didn’t help the situation, what happened in terms of why? The fact that he got fired had less to do with him and more to do with how quickly things changed in a way that made it impossible for him to do his job well in that setting.

But all he’s carrying forward is “I’m bad at this, I’m bad at this, and I need to find a new line of work”. So here we’re building this awareness about, okay, there’s more to this story than just what was said. And my client is now seeing that story differently. He’s seeing himself in that picture, he’s seeing the nuance, he’s seeing what was his stuff in that scenario, but also what wasn’t.

So that’s the awareness piece and the second piece is then acceptance. To be neurodivergent in modern society, we’re always going to struggle. We’re always going to stand out in ways we don’t want to. We are always gonna be met with some amount of misunderstanding. We’re always gonna be misunderstood to some degree, and getting to a place of acceptance where you can recognize something about yourself and either create change around it, be more aware of it, or just not let it be your stuff if someone else is criticizing you. Especially for something that is completely innocent or harmless. 

I had a boss ream me out for how I organized my email. She was very threatened by how highly organized I was, but my high level of organization was necessary for my ADHD brain to juggle all of the different balls I had in the air at this particular job. I couldn’t do it any other way. She told me I wasn’t allowed to organize my email like that anymore because when I was out of the office, she couldn’t find what she needed in my inbox. And at the time that was very upsetting for me and I was down about it, and I was very, very concerned about my ability to keep my job there. Especially since I wasn’t allowed to use supportive structures that worked for me that weren’t harming anyone else, or a  structure that anyone else had to use except for, on the rare occasion, when I was out of the office.

And so that’s a story I could have carried forward for a long time, as I had yet another boss I can add to the list of bosses that thought I was a bad worker. But in reality, that situation had nothing to do with me and everything to do with her and her being threatened by me. I don’t have to carry that with me. 

Even the stuff that is ADHD, we talked last week about remembering people when you meet them and how, when people get upset with me if I’ve only met you once, like if we haven’t traversed that place from I met you once, or I’ve been introduced to you to or I know you in some way, like we’ve had a deep chat or we clicked in some way. If we haven’t crossed that threshold, I’m gonna have a really hard time remembering you, and I’m gonna have an even harder time if you walk up to me and expect me to just know you by your name and your face. The next thing I will usually ask when somebody does that is, oh, where did we meet? Or, what did we talk about? Because my brain needs context, so help me fill in that context. And then the pieces will start to come back. But when people get offended by that, that’s not my stuff, I genuinely don’t get upset by that anymore. I have ADHD and this is going to be a lifelong problem for me, and this is one that I just can’t solve/fix, right?

There is no tool or system or structure that’s going to change the way that my brain commits people to memory. I don’t have to let that have an emotional impact on me anymore. So that’s really the meat of what we’re doing when we’re talking about working with emotion and ADHD coaching.

It’s about awareness. Where is the emotion coming from? What’s real here? What’s not actually true about myself? And then, being able to stand in that acceptance, now that you have a realistic picture of who you are, instead of the one picture of I’m the worst employee in the world, or I am so socially inappropriate all the time, or whatever other stories you might be telling yourself, now you have a nuanced and clear picture of yourself. Strengths and challenges in the same picture. And who cares what anybody else thinks, right? That’s the opportunity to get to acceptance and change, start to change the emotional response, start to not have an emotional reaction where you would’ve had one in the past.

[00:21:17] Dusty: Exactly. Very well said.

[00:21:19] Ash: Thank you.

[00:21:20] Dusty: I think that this is a good episode. I think for people who don’t really understand what coaching can do, I think this really illuminates part of it. Because it’s not just about oh, help me do the “thing”, right?

On one level, it’s help me do the “thing” and on the next level it’s help me understand what’s hard about the “thing” for greater self understanding. And like the third level is sort of helping me change how I relate to myself and change what it feels like to be me. You know? 

And that’s not to say that like we, as the coaches, are the ones that do that. It’s the clients doing all the work. Because they make the choice to have that flexible mindset and explore that or not. But I think that people can be very intangible, with how we link that to this and how it completely changes, right? Your ability to be productive or get something done. I think if people haven’t had this experience, it’s hard for them to understand those invisible connections because you just see that surface level of “I can’t do Task X”. So teach me a skill I’m missing to do Task X when actually the root of Task X is this emotional experience of redefining what it means or redefining how it impacts you. And we can’t do that without first understanding and exploring it.

[00:22:36] Ash: I wanna give one more example because in this client’s case, it wasn’t even connected to anything personal. Like nothing in her personal history or context, and this is a common thing for those of us with ADHD – you said this a few weeks ago on the podcast, Dusty. We look around and see the best of everyone else, and we don’t see where other people struggle. So we think that we ought to be amazing at everything. 

So this client, we actually didn’t work together that long because she got what she needed when we got here. This client, as a single parent – she had a partner but they didn’t live together – but they were in that place in their relationship where they were talking about buying a place and moving in together. She was also thinking about making some career moves, but her finances were just a mystery to her, and she carried a lot of embarrassment and shame, and embarrassment and shame in the realm of I’m not a proper adult. I’m not adulting correctly and everybody else can understand this, it doesn’t make any sense to me. And the breakthrough moment we had around finances, I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it reminded me of when my dad died, because my dad was the household money manager for my parents. My dad is the one that taught me how to manage money, and he and I think about money really similarly. If one of us needed to figure out a money thing, we’d talk to each other about it because we thought similarly and could help each other kind of work through that dilemma. When he died, my mom was, who was very intelligent by the way, really having such a hard time with daily money management and it kind of made me realize that it was just a difference in cognition and types of intelligence or modalities. Who knows? I didn’t coach my mom to find out, but I was recognizing that trying to teach her. The way that I would do it or the way that my dad would do it wasn’t going to help her. She needed somebody to translate into a way she could understand in order for her to be able to make sense of money. 

I shared this with my client and that right there was just such a breakthrough moment for her because, I think for the first time ever, my client considered that maybe not everyone just intuitively understands finances. Maybe understanding numbers and finances is a particular skillset that people have and maybe that even has nothing to do with my ADHD. It’s just not an area of strength for me. 

And that right there allowed her to bust through guilt and shame and seek support because she had a number of supportive people that were totally willing to help her with finances and dig in and help her understand how to do it.

But she felt so stupid in not knowing, that she was afraid to ask. She was afraid to be embarrassed and look dumb or look like somebody who doesn’t know how to be an adult. That actually ended up being the end of that coaching relationship because that realization was really, more than anything, what that client needed. Getting a handle on understanding finances enough to understand what the opportunities were or weren’t moving forward was really what that client needed, and we got there. Just by way of doing what we call in coaching, normalizing. Just normalizing that you are not the only one, and here this client is, and again, no, no personal context.

Nobody ever berated her about her finances and she was always able to keep up on them enough that it wasn’t life ruining, but just this general sense of everyone else on planet Earth knows how to do this. Every other adult is better at this than me, and therefore, I’m so stuck in my own shame about not being good at this, that I can’t see a path forward here. 

[00:26:38] Dusty: That’s it. And it’s not even necessarily the case that someone had to shame her. Like my mom, you know, as much as I loved her and she loved me very much, she rarely had a harsh word to say to me, but I would hear the way that she would talk about other women’s bodies, right?

My mom was always very, very thin and she talked a lot about how she would work out as a young woman, and she would make these comments about other women when we were out. And then if I ever said something to her like, oh, I lost some weight, or oh, I’m starting an exercise, she’d be like, good for you. She’d be so happy for me. She never called me fat. She never said, oh, Dusty, you need to. She wasn’t that mom that was like, oh sweetie, are you sure you should have another piece of whatever…she never said anything like that. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t really internalize fat phobia.

Maybe your client was never shamed, but if the people around her were good with money or the people around her made comments in passing about people who are bad with money or irresponsible with money or that everyone should just know about it –  we just pick these things up. We’re very sensitive.

[00:27:38] Ash: Exactly Dusty. And that’s kind of the point I was trying to make is sometimes this stuff can come from our own discreet context or context more broadly.

Like in this case, this is coming from your family of origin’s context. It wasn’t directed at you, you were never shamed as an individual for your body, but still you’re hearing these messages over and over again and that ADHD thing where we start to build up masks, right? We start looking at everyone else for “how do I human correctly”? How do I “adult” correctly? That’s how we end up kind of stacking up these rules for ourselves, these ways of things we should do, these things we should know without even realizing it. And yes, sometimes those things come from very discreet events of our own, like my client who was let go from that job, or some of my other clients who trauma, actual trauma, did have a role to play in some story that they’re carrying now, but sometimes they come a lot more subtly than that from our family of origin or even from the cultures we grew up in.

I grew up in the middle of nowhere in a pretty culturally nondiverse area, and so there are a lot of things that I picked up that I needed to unlearn just because I only had exposure to a pretty monolithic population for the first 20 years of my life. I just, I didn’t have any other context. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

So before we wrap up for today, Dusty, because we are nearly out of time, I just wanna pull an old gem from the “Cam and I” days. The concept of pause, disrupt, pivot, because when I’m working with clients on heavy emotion, that’s the model that we’re often using because you’re not gonna go from zero to I have a completely different emotional response in this same situation overnight.

Even with more awareness, even moving towards acceptance, it’s going to take some amount of practice. So in this context, the opportunity with pause, disrupt, pivot is, are you able to pause after that emotional response and before the behavior, and connect back to the awareness of where that previous behavior would come from, because that’s what makes it possible to then disrupt that behavior and pivot to a new experience. 

I always tell clients that the pause is the hardest part. So don’t kick yourself if your first noticings are in hindsight. In hindsight, I see how that was emotionally driven, behavior informed by this, and I want to have a different experience there because even in hindsight, you’re building awareness about where that behavior is actually coming from and you’re creating the opportunity to get closer.

In time, when it happens, you will have that pause moment. So the opportunity here is just to notice. Notice the situations where you have a strong emotional reaction, maybe get thrown right into that defensive crouch into one down, into that catastrophizing spiral where it goes from one small thing to I’m the worst person in the world. And see if you can’t get a little curious and find out a little something new about what really did kick off that emotional response? What context are you carrying around that you’re applying to this moment now? And is it real or not real? What’s the opportunity there? 

And something I often ask my clients is, what’s the different experience you want to have, particularly in a situation like this? So if the experience now is you tell me I’m too loud and I burst into tears, which has happened multiple times in my life, what’s the experience I wanna have?

Well, more than anything, I wanna be able to keep my calm and contextualize, right? Contextualize, are you policing my behavior when it doesn’t need to be policed and when my loudness is not a problem, or are you being my friend and saying, “hey Ash, like half the restaurant is staring at us. And so I don’t care, I love you, but maybe in this context you might want to be aware of your volume because I know that you are often not aware of your volume”, right? Those are two different things, but the ability to stop and distinguish between the two and then react appropriately and show up in the way that I wanna show up versus showing up based on the shame yucky emotion than if I’m in tears, right?

I’ve already had a reaction and the situation is kind of over from there. But if I’m able to pause and evaluate and be at choice about what happens next, that’s where you have a different experience. So listeners, I think we’re gonna dig into more of this type of stuff next week, but we are well out of time for today.

So until next week, I’m Ash.

[00:32:34] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.

[00:32:35] Ash: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.