In this episode of the Translating ADHD podcast, Asher and Dusty explore the concept of “positionality,” or what they call having “a case of the I don’t want,” a common experience for people with ADHD where tasks feel overwhelming or unappealing, leading to avoidance and resistance. They discuss how this resistance can manifest in different ways, such as feeling stuck before even starting a task or struggling with opposition even when motivation is present. Both hosts share examples from their personal and coaching experiences, highlighting the importance of recognizing and naming these feelings to better manage them.
The conversation delves into practical strategies that help overcome this resistance, including breaking tasks into manageable steps, pairing unpleasant tasks with enjoyable activities, and using techniques like reverse Pomodoro to balance productivity with breaks. They emphasize the value of flexibility, mood management, and intrinsic motivation—encouraging listeners to find what works for them personally. Ultimately, Asher and Dusty stress that while these challenges are ongoing, they are manageable with the right tools and mindset, and that progress, no matter how small, is a meaningful step forward.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:02:07] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash.
[00:03:14] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[00:04:08] Asher: And this is the Translating ADHD podcast.
[00:08:04] Dusty: Alrighty friends. So I just want to remind you that the ADHD bootcamp is coming up in June. It is a big mega body double that I run. It’s like basically a bunch of time that we get together to organize your home. Your doom box is room by room and just kind of figuring out where the problem areas are.
If you’ve ever thought to yourself, I just need a huge, uninterrupted chunk of time. And I could really just kind of go through these drawers and just get everything organized for once and for all. This is that time. Spoiler alert it’s definitely not going to be once and for all, but I’m going to be there helping you, keeping you on track.
We’re working as a crew. We’re taking lots of breaks, and along the way we’re going to learn some things about ADHD friendly stuff, inventory management. So if you’re interested, go sign up at https://www.adhdstudio.ca/ – it’s always a blast. And our next coaching demo with me is going to be June 11th at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT.
[01:03:03] Asher: Listeners, live coaching demos are for our Patreon subscribers only. So if you are not currently a subscriber and you would like to join in on these live events that we have once a month, you can visit the website https://www.translatingadhd.com/ and click on the Patreon tab, and for $5/month, you gain access to these monthly events with either Dusty or myself, and you gain access to our podcast, Discord.
I am also still taking new clients. If you’ve been thinking about ADHD coaching and you’re worried about affordability, I do offer a sliding scale. Visit my website https://coachasher.com/, to fill out the form to get started. And if you do need a sliding scale, bring that up in our first conversation and we will talk about how to make that work for you. So Dusty.
[01:46:08] Dusty: So Ash.
[01:47:11] Asher: You want to tell our listeners what we’re talking about today?
[01:50:01] Dusty: Oh yeah, we’re talking about oppositionality or what I like to call having a case of the “I don’t wants”.
[01:56:17] Asher: Oh, I get the “I don’t wants” a lot. I actually tackled one of my
I don’t wants” this weekend because one of the strategies that works well for me, interestingly enough, because body doubling does not work for me, but having someone come over with the express purpose of helping me with something is a surefire way to get me started on it.
And so I had a friend come over last Saturday who loves doing yard work. So it was a win-win, and we spent a couple of hours in my yard. The funny thing about yard work is I don’t dislike it. Once I get started, I’m okay and I can do it for a good amount of time. And having someone else here helping me means that I am not going to not work – I will stay at it for however long I have help for and no longer.
By the way, as soon as he left I was also done doing yard work, but we did spend a good couple of hours in my yard on Saturday and got quite a bit done.
That kind of brings up one of the things that can cause oppositionality – we can look at something and without breaking it down or without getting started on it, it can feel like this insurmountable task. And that’s what yard work feels like to me. I was genuinely surprised at how much we were able to accomplish in a couple of hours.
Even though I lived in this house for five years, I ought to know about how long it takes to do yard work stuff, but I had built this up to be just an unsolvable problem. No amount of effort or labor is going to get my yard into a reasonable state when realistically, two people for a couple of hours put a huge dent in that huge, massive list and everything that needed to be done and gave me a better idea, a more realistic perspective on what’s needed now, which is going to make it much easier to reengage with that task in the future, even without help.
[03:55:04] Dusty: Yeah. I certainly find that this is something that’s present for a lot of my clients. We’ve been talking a little bit about some of the differences between, like ADHD and AuDHD, and I do find that sometimes it’s more intense for my AuDHD clients. There’s a version of oppositionality that has this idea of PDA or pathological demand avoidance.
And my understanding of this, because I’m not an expert, is that it’s still a sort of hotly debated topic as to whether or not it’s a real thing or a subset of a profile of autism. There’s a lot of debate around the concept. My understanding of the discussion is that there are some problematic ways that it’s being characterized, basically, that you kind of have to let people do whatever they want, even if they want to be a jerk kind of thing.
I’m summarizing it, but there’s pushback from both sides of the community where there’s some debate around autonomy versus personal accountability. It’s very interesting. Anyway, sidebar.
A lot of my clients struggle with this, not all of them, but some of them. And it’s so frustrating because you can make the perfect plan, you can put a lot of effort into setting things up for yourself the right way, you know, setting the stage, priming the pump, all that jazz and when the like moment of truth comes, everything should work. But your brain is just like, nope, I’m not doing it.
It’s like when you have a little kid and they really want to be in ballet or something. You buy them expensive things, you pay for all the lessons, they happily go to all the lessons and they get on stage and they just throw a fit and refuse to do the dance.
It’s just as frustrating for my clients as it is for anyone else. Asher, the interesting thing about our oppositionality is, from my perspective, the tools for ADHD, like hacks or the ADHD approaches to this. They’re primarily cerebral or cognitive, right? It’s about how you talk to yourself because again, there’s what I always say to clients, there’s no alarm in this world.
There’s no amount of post-it notes that are going to be so effective that they will force you to do a thing that you’ve decided not to do. Right? People will often say, oh, alarms don’t work for me. Post-it notes don’t work for me. And actually they do work. The alarm will go off and the person will go, oh, I’m supposed to do x, y, z, but sometimes there’s a knee jerk reaction of, “I don’t want to”.
And I’ll say no, that alarm worked. It did what it was supposed to. It’s supposed to remind you that you’re supposed to do a thing. But if you have said to yourself, I don’t want to do that, there’s nothing the alarm can do about that and there’s nothing that post-it note can do about that.
[06:24:11] Asher: And to add to that, sometimes we don’t realize we have that knee jerk reaction so quickly. We don’t realize the story we’re telling ourselves or the conversation we’re having with ourselves. I have a couple of examples that breaking that down was kind of what was needed to have a different experience.
One client, and I’ve talked about this client before, but it’s such a helpful concept that I’m going to talk about it again, describes these two voices in her head as the rebel and the drill sergeant. So the drill sergeant is beating yourself up – you should, why aren’t you, why can’t you do it, what’s wrong with you?
The rebel is the opposite of that – who says I have to do this? Me. I don’t have to do this. And so sort of understanding those two voices, allowed us to bring a third voice into the conversation. That third voice being her. What do you want? And so for her, it was attaching to better positive outcomes.
One of her big coaching goals was she was working full time and in school, and she wanted to break the pattern of doing things at the last minute that had plagued her throughout her academic career. She knew that at this stage of life, working full time, being married, having dogs to take care of, she could not pull all nighters the way she could when she was just in school.
And so bringing herself into that voice and bringing this concept of taking care of her future self, and then noticing over time the better experiences she was having when she was doing that, that was the “solve” for her.
I had another client just this week who talked about the guilt when something’s been on the to-do list for quite a while, and now it necessarily has my attention for some reason.
So there’s the guilt and shame of not having done it and then there’s this magical thinking that I’m just going to hurry up and do it all right now. And not only am I going to do it all, and this is relative to work tasks for him, not only am I to do it all, I’m going to drag in these other related tasks and hurry up and knock it all out.
And again he didn’t realize that that’s the story he was telling himself. All he was noticing was the resistance to engage with the task and what wasn’t or isn’t happening. For him, he needed to break something down into realistic steps. He’s a manager and he’s a new manager, so he’s learning how to be a manager and there’s this tension between this need for planning and this discounting the value of planning or the time that it takes. So planning oriented tasks is his job. And there’s some false belief that that shouldn’t take any time and or it’s not worth spending the time on. Alongside that there’s no realistic sense of what is a first step or a next step.
He’s always thinking in terms of how can I knock this out the quickest while never actually getting to, how do I get started? What’s the first step? How do I even engage with this? And the combination of the guilt, shame and also the overwhelm of I don’t know how to do this, causes him to back away from the task before he engages with it at all.
[09:48:24] Dusty: Yeah. I think it’s so important to figure out what’s going to work for you, but also I think maybe have a couple of different approaches, because I’m not trying to say that I personally don’t struggle with our positionality at all. I just don’t think for me, it’s one of the biggest ways that my ADHD manifests. But I still personally, you know, cope with this as I know you do.
Ash, I was going to say, you know, part of it is this mental strategy and making sense of it. Right? So when you’re talking about the rebel and what was it? The rebel and the…
[10:20:26] Asher: Drill sergeant.
[10:22:03] Dusty: Like the rebel and the drill sergeant to me, that sounds a lot like sort of internal family systems, which I don’t know a lot about, but several have said they are kind of helpful. So, I think you’re hitting the nail on the head here by just having language for it and just being able to say, I feel very oppositional or I have a case of the “I don’t wants” too or it’s my PDA.
Whatever way that you can verbally make sense of it and name it – you should do it first. Next, do I have tools for this? Yes, I have tools for it or no, I don’t. And maybe I know what to do about it. I think how you approach these tasks can both depend on the type of task and where you’re at.
There’s layers here. Where are you at with your executive function? Do you have a lot of executive function but you’re just feeling resistant or are you also exhausted? Are you also going through a lot because that’s going to, I think, influence the approach that you take. For me, sometimes I just have to accept that the task, like your client, is going to take way longer than I thought it was going to take.
I have to kind of relinquish control and make peace with the fact that this is not going to get done as quickly as I want it to, but progress over perfection, like any progress, is better than nothing at all. Right?
This is where black and white thinking gets in our way. It’s like, oh, I’m going to do what I have to do, all of it. I certainly can’t do all of it, so I should do none of it. Something that’s helped me personally is using reverse pomodoro in conjunction with giving, like accepting that it’s going to take longer, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen.
So for me, let’s say I have some horrible task, you know, it’s whatever, it’s my taxes and it’s a multi-step task and each step is dreadful. For example. I’ll give myself permission to pare it down to just the most tiny, tiny, basic task. Let’s say I need to go through all my expenses and all my receipts and check them. Okay, well, the first step is just getting my receipts out, just getting them. And perhaps my receipts are even in multiple places, so even that task feels overwhelming.
So I might give myself permission to do something really, really pleasant, like play Stardew Valley – I love it. I think you don’t play a lot of video games, but a lot of my clients and I love Stardew Valley in particular, because the format of the game is such that you play like a day, and a day is a set amount of time, and then there’s this sort of natural break, much like watching short episodes of something.
But Stardew Valley has the additional benefit of the music being very soothing and calming, and you’re doing things in the game that are kind of productive. So it’s almost false dopamine. It’s sort of like synthetic dopamine, right? So I’ll play a day on Stardew Valley, and then at the break, I’ll get up and I’ll be like, okay, just get receipts out of your wallet. Okay.
Then I’ll play another day. Just go downstairs and get receipts from the envelope where you keep them downstairs. Okay. And so, like, in the course of an hour, maybe all I’ve done is gotten those receipts together, but I’ve managed to get the receipts together, and I haven’t got myself into a crying mess doing it. And then, slowly, slowly I’ll do one small task either in between shows or as we were saying earlier, I really like yard work.
I find I do it as a way to procrastinate. So I’ll go outside and do one yard work task, but then I’ll be like, okay, when this one task is done, small task, come in and do a bit of the other task. And then the reason I call it a Reverse Pomodoro is obviously because I’m spending a lot more time doing the pleasant thing.
The short break is actually a short amount of productivity. And so in the course of an eight hour day, a person might not get the whole task done, but you’ll at least be 10 to 15% ahead of where you were. And if you were just going to not get it done that whole day anyway because you were going to freeze up and procrastinate, well, you already weren’t going to get it done, right.
So part of this is admitting, okay, day after day, I’ve been telling myself, I’m going to do this. I’m not making any progress. At least just, you know, in the example of getting my taxes done, at least just getting my receipts together is progress. But I find that for myself personally, I will end up getting some momentum maybe after 3-4 hours, once the task is started.
Because again, sometimes it’s actually just about task initiation and being locked up there once I kind of, you know, I’ve got the receipts and now I’ve opened the spreadsheet and now I’m opening the software or whatever, but I’ve done it by taking lots of breaks and doing pleasant things that I want to do eventually.
I find that often I will hit a point where I’m like, all right, I’m going to sit down and do this. But the beauty is that even if I don’t, I’ve broken it down in a way where I know what the next step is and I can chip away at it like that.
I recently had to do this. I had a big backlog of a lot of small admin tasks. None of them were major, there were just a lot of them, and I just had this huge resistance to doing any of them. So what I would do is whenever I was going to see somebody and do some socializing, I would take my laptop with me.
I would say to my friend when I got there, whoever it was, I’d say, hey, I really need you to body double me to just do this one admin task before we go to the movies or play this game, or go to the park or whatever we’re going to do. Can you just force me to sit here and do a ten minute task and over the course of a week, I just basically took my laptop around with me everywhere.
I dropped the kids off at school, I’d stop and do one small admin task on my laptop. I’d, you know, go to the gym and in the parking lot, do one small admin task. I just had to spread it out. I couldn’t just sit there. Maybe I made hours worth of work, but there was just something about it that felt too hard for me to just sit and grind out these tasks.
In a way it was more painful, but it was also the only way I could get it done. So making it easy, I think, is one thing. But there’s also something to be said here about mood and “I just want tos” I’ve been talking a lot, so I want to pitch it back to you.
But when I say mood, I mean are there things that you can do to actually want to get over the I don’t want to go and get to a place where I do want to, or a place of motivation? And before I get into what works for me or what I’ve seen work for my client, Ash, I’m curious if you’ve seen anything effective for your clients or for yourself to actually change how the task feels.
[16:10:06] Asher: That’s a good question, Dusty, and I think that coaching process has a great answer here because one of the things that I am consistently doing with all of my clients, and something that we’re really bad at as people with ADHD, is connecting to and learning from our actual experiences. So as a client starts to have different experiences engaging with these tasks instead of putting them off, not carrying around the guilt, the shame, the anxiety, the the panic, not having to frantically and urgently do things at the last minute, that unto itself starts to become the reward right?
That ability to connect to my future self and recognize that I’m going to feel so much better, or I do feel so much better when I stay on top of these things. How we get there looks very different from client to client. I have one client who has this really interesting system. This is an ADHD client, and it was really helpful for him to start color coding his tasks.
The type of tasks that he feels opposition towards is a great task, and just naming it, understanding that that is a particular type of task that I do not like to do was really helpful. And then setting some very small and manageable goals around great tasks. So right now I think the goal is to do one great task a week.
And we’re not attached to which one, that gives him some flexibility and choice. It also gives him some amount of ability to adapt to both circumstance and context mood. But we’ve been at this for a while, and his biggest noticing is when I am on top of my gray tasks, or when I’m on top of enough of them that I don’t feel like I have this looming, overwhelming, gross backlog that feels better.
And so there is motivation on his part to stay after this. And this is something we keep coming back to. I said, the goal right now is once a week. We’ve played around with this concept now for months, in our coaching and there are times when gray tasks do become harder to do and we revisit and we have to retool.
But there’s that intrinsic motivation – I did it = feels good – when I’m on top of this. So I want to come back to this. I want to readjust and figure out how I can keep doing this. Interestingly enough, it was also helpful for him to recognize when a task isn’t gray, so his favorite color is purple.
Purple tasks tend to be things that he’s doing, things that are for him, things that he enjoys doing, things that are typically not hard to engage with. And so something that has been really helpful for him is to recognize when a purple task temporarily becomes gray, when it hits some point, some wall of awful, some challenge for him that introduces that oppositionality that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
The thing that was hugely important about that for him is with the purple task, he’s naturally motivated most of the time to attack that almost to his own detriment in the way of latching on, hyper focus and having a special address. I can get to that degree, but certainly engaging and oppositionality are not the challenge.
But he recognized this pattern of, I put things down and I don’t go back to them and I don’t know why I do that. And that frustrates me because I want to engage with this thing. I was previously really super engaging with this thing, and then one day I put it down and I never picked it back up.
Why did I do that? Well, why did he do it? Because there was opposition already there that he wasn’t recognizing. He was expecting to have the same level of sort of natural motivation and ease of engagement with this task that he had before, when there was a barrier in the way that was making that not possible at that moment in time that he wasn’t seeing as such.
[20:04:03] Dusty: I like the idea of just doing one small one and then you still have that choice. To me, that does kind of feel like it’s somewhere in between the making it easy thing – you just have to do one – but then there is also the mood because you can choose the one that you most feel like doing.
For myself, it’s so frustrating to me that I still do this, but so often I literally forget how easy it is for me to change my mood around a thing and then make myself want to do a thing. There are just tasks that I consistently never want to do, like putting on makeup or practicing the guitar.
I don’t want to do those things. I feel like a drag. Literally. The difference between me wanting to do those things, like having internal motivation and feeling like I have to force myself to do it, is passively absorbing content. If I watch a makeup tutorial, I’ll be like, whoa, I got to go try that. Or if I watch a music video or literally anything about music, music theory, guitar, etc. all I have to do is sit there on the couch and intake it, and then I will just naturally want to get up and do it.
So for me, a really big shift that I’ve made is instead of putting on my to-do list to play a guitar or do makeup, I’ll go watch a guitar tutorial or watch a music video because that seems easier. The barrier is lower and it’s like, if I actually shift to that, then I will want to.
And a lot of my clients do this with cleaning. They’ll listen to cleaning podcasts or they’ll use an app like Binge or Sweep. They’re shifting to a thing that’s adjacent that doesn’t have the same resistance, but they’re using that thing like a trampoline. Almost. Because once they hit that trampoline, they get more air and they can get into the task.
So that’s kind of a cool thing to think about. What do you know that will put you in the mood? But once you know that thing, don’t just squirrel that information away, shift it right. Make it, I need to open the Sweetpea app versus I need to clean the kitchen.
[21:56:06] Asher: Dusty similarly, but a little different than that, it can be helpful for my clients to pair something they really like with something they don’t like. You described a version of that with the reverse Pomodoro. But what I’m talking about here is if a client has a particular podcast, they really love listening to, then maybe they will listen to that podcast while they cook dinner and pair those things together.
Do they love to cook? No. But does it feel much more rewarding to spend that time doing a non-preferred task while they get to do something that they really enjoy alongside it? Yes it does. A slightly different take on that is setting the mood can sometimes be helpful. You mentioned Stardew Valley earlier. I have put in a lot of time into Stardew Valley. I love that game.
[22:41:19] Dusty: Oh, okay okay, okay. I thought that for some reason you weren’t a gamer person, but yeah, I love that one.
[22:46:16] Asher: No, I’m definitely a gamer. I’ve put a lot of time into Stardew Valley, so interestingly enough, you were describing the soundtrack earlier. I have the soundtrack on CD and so putting that on because of the nature of that game can be a way for me to set the mood to like, okay, I’m going to just grind stuff out on my farm in Stardew Valley.
I’m going to spend the duration of this 45 minute CD grinding something out for myself. I had a client years ago, this was during the pandemic, who was struggling. We had just designed all of this supportive structure around her time on campus, and then time on campus went away. And so we were readjusting to now, how does this all happen in my apartment? How do we rebuild this structure?
Part of what was important to her was the supportive environment of the library for studying and so making some minor adjustments to the way her living room was laid out, just moving a couple of things around so that she could sit in a comfortable study position in that space. And putting on a particular soundtrack was the way that she sort of set the mood to then get into a study headspace.
[24:00:17] Dusty: So what you just said there about pairing things that you don’t like with those that you do, it’s so important. I often will suggest that clients make this shift because clients will come to coaching all the time like, I really want to paint my nails and give myself a manicure. Maybe what I’ll do is I’ll promise myself that if I do this, then I can do that.
And I see that fail so often because clients will be like, well, if I do x, y, z, I can have a cookie. But then their brain goes, well, I know I can just have that cookie. That’s a made up rule. You made that rule up so you can just eat the cookie, right?
So the thing is shifting from the idea of a reward. If I do x, then I get y – use the reward to make the task more pleasant. As you say, Asher, often when I have to do stuff like taxes or admin tasks that I don’t want to do, I’ll do it on the couch with my laptop while watching a show that I like, right? Or I’ll send emails in the bathtub, or I’ll go to a park that I like.
Yeah, the thing that is enjoyable, either intermittently or as you’re doing the thing, obviously it’s a little bit hard to do your nails and give yourself a manicure while you’re doing other stuff. But yeah, you know, I do this as well a lot with cleaning. I’ll have all my apps like Disney, Netflix, everything on my phone, and I’ll just put a show that I like on while I’m cooking and I’ll use headphones or I’ll put on a show that I like while I’m cleaning, usually one that I’ve already seen before, like reruns of Star Trek or something.
But I just find it so much easier to actually do a sort of mind numbing cleaning task if I’m also having some entertainment.
[25:33:25] Asher: Just so you know, I listen to shows, which, if you are a Fish Fan and like each show, is kind of its own unique thing. So there’s always something to discover there. Similar to that, I like putting on a Fish show that I haven’t heard before, or one that I know that I really like. It can be a way to kind of keep my brain engaged while I’m doing the thing that otherwise feels boring or mind numbing, as you said.
[26:02:16] Dusty: So we can talk about this forever. But just to kind of summarize, I think what we both agree here, the first and most important aspect of this is naming it, understanding that if this is a symptom of ADHD or if it’s an experience you’re going to have, whether you call it the “I don’t wants” or gray tasks or PDA or I’ve got my drill sergeant finding language that makes sense and resonates for you so that when you’re in this feeling, you don’t just get stuck in it, but you actually, externalize it so you can kind of hold it in your hands and look at it and go, oh, I’m having this experience.
And then the next thing is knowing what works for you and maybe even combining things. Whether you break it down, make it easier, give yourself more choice so that you’re getting out of that feeling of a loss of autonomy, like what Ash was saying with his client, being able to choose, asking for help, accountability or mood management, making the task fun, gamifying it, finding a way to make it feel pleasant, finding a way to add in value. Reverse pomodoro.
There’s so many ways that you could cope with this. And I will say, people with ADHD are so brilliant, you could look on all the vast corners of the internet, Reddit, TikTok and just find more and more and more different iterations of these strategies that are cool and unique. So, don’t get frustrated, don’t give up hope.
You’re probably always going to have to cope with this, but it is coachable. I don’t know if that’s a word. But just knowing that there are things that you can do so that you don’t just get stuck and frustrated and get behind, that’s really, I think, at the heart of this, right? Ash?
[27:28:03] Asher: I agree, Dusty. The one last thing I will say is sometimes when we’re facing something like this, it can freeze momentum on everything, right? I’m not engaging with this thing, so I can’t do anything else. I’m not allowed to do anything else. You alluded to this earlier with the idea of the reward. I’m not allowed to have the reward until I do the task, but more so than that, it will prevent us from doing other tasks that need doing because we feel the pressure of this thing looming, but we are so unable to engage with it.
So alongside everything you just said, one more thing I will throw in is sometimes I will ask myself if I just can’t, if I just cannot engage with that thing, my shift will be, well, what can I do? And then I put effort in a different direction. And sometimes putting effort in a different direction then helps me approach the thing that I’m avoiding because I’m getting some amount of momentum going and sometimes it doesn’t.
But it at least prevents that complete freeze that can happen when there’s something that you’re avoiding and you’re struggling to get past that oppositionality or avoidance to action on.
[28:39:17] Dusty: Totally so well said.
[28:41:25] Asher: All right Dusty, let’s wrap here for this week. So listeners until next week I’m Ash.
[28:46:01] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[28:47:00] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
