Something Shiny: ADHD!

How do you teach yourself (and/or children) how to stop, especially when you want to keep going/overcommitting/hyperfocusing? Like videogames, sugar, saying yes to everyone and being—anything addictive—how do you actually stop? David and Isabelle explore the difference between maximizing your time and actually setting reality checks for time blindness (which is real! We have FIVE MINUTES, after all…), how we experientially learn how to start/spot hyper focus things (when we have opportunity to do them), operationalizing and externalizing tasks, and digging into parenting strategies like punishments and limits (not just for parents, btw). —-It’s a dog whistle, if anyone listens to our show not on double speed, they are our friend, welcome to team shiny. Isabelle is still digesting the idea of what it means to put things down, to pause, to slow down, to ask herself “is now the time to do the thing?” And she wonders if this comes up against how rough time blindness is real. The idea that things are either now or not now. If she doesn’t do it now, when she’s thinking of it, and she has the wherewithal to do it—she’s going to forget it and not do it. She’s gotten ten messages at the same time telling her “multitasking is not great” and find a way to do one thing at a time, and in a sequence. But she does better with more stimulation, so isn’t more is better in terms of keeping more tabs open at the same time? Which David agrees, if we close a tab, we’re never going to remember about the website, we have to have tabs open—the way we see the world, and object relations. When we put things on a table, it just becomes a part of the table. You won’t notice it again until someone says something about it and you have to address it. There is an immediacy to things. David wants to rebrand what multitasking is, we have to find new ways to think of time. There was a TikTok where someone goes “5 minutes is an eternity, but 300 seconds is not an eternity” if David thought he had 300 seconds he might not do so much, but if it’s five minutes he’s going to do ten things like change jacket and switch shoes and start dishes and unload laundry. We will naturally try to maximize what we’re doing in a time frame. And the end of time is a transition—it’s really hard to stop and complete the task. The dilemma is: how many things can we do in this moment in time so we feel like we’ve maximized the 15 pounds of material in the 10 pound bag. There is a lot of starting on 18 things—but then the same thing happens, all those things in motion become part of the scenery, and then we’re stuck without the things we didn’t complete. So when we stack our time with 10 things, we lose every time because we have 5 things we don’t complete. Isabelle is into embroidery, her new hyperfixation—it’s always a loss to put it down, and it hits extra hard to stop hyperfocus. And then there's the thing where she doesn't want to do something and she has five minutes and she’s going to do so much before she gets to her doctor’s appointment. This is not dissimilar to how she habitually overcommits herself. Of course she wants to help, and it's always a yes, it’s always enthusiastic consent. But when she's faced with doing it, she feels total failure, and it connects to the thing where actually she feels like she’s failing even more. David is clarifying: one intervention is just for one person. So for David, he puts on his good day socks and thinks of something to do—so he makes a note. Then, when he has a pocket of time in his day, he looks at his list of things and picks one—he knows he cannot do them all. But then Isabelle wonders: how do you remember to only do one thing? David names that this connects to hyper focus and momentum, like when Isabelle is getting into the knitting—to which she replies, no, it is not knitting, where you count stitches, she cannot do that. This is embroidery, where you stab cloth over and over again and see results real fast. And David wonders, as an adult, you can dictate space and time to do this—but what if you wanted to do something, but you couldn’t dictate the time to do it—it would be sad making, but more than that, you’d want to do the thing MORE. Is this what happens with kids and video games? With a lot of addictive things, like candy, eating— the more rigid we are, the more we reinforce counter control, the more likely they're going to want the things we’re supposed to have. This is how kids with candy in the house don't grow up to binge on candy because it was normalized how to interact with it. This resonates with a book Isabelle has yet to read, Low Demand Parenting (see below) that connects to how limits on screen time, routines, punishments, even gentle parenting techniques that are really reflective and ask the kids to really think about their thoughts and feelings may not easily apply to neurodivergent kids—because they all emphasize self-regulation and executive functioning, which is the whole thing we’re not g

Why is it that I have 1000 planners/calendars/whiteboards and still forget stuff all the time? It’s not you, it’s them: they don’t ask you to attend to them, they are passive things that don’t ask you to attend to them. David and Isabelle dig into why voice assistants (like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri) are a potentially useful neurodivergent accommodation strategy—and no judgment if you value your privacy above the outsourcing your working memory. Covering visual timers, what to avoid if you’re setting up a reminder program, and the power of a slow clap. —-Isabelle does not like to be scheduling, she likes to have scheduled. She does not like to holiday, she likes to have had a holiday season. During the recent holiday break, it was a structureless day, the kids were home, Bobby was working, and Isabelle was in one room all day, and realized how much of her executive functioning short circuited, and also how much her memory is reliant upon changing rooms, and sequences of physical actions, all of which were missing because everyone was on break and out of routine. So she found a cheap system for a voice assistant. And it has been game changing for her family. It doesn't have to live inside her head, the routines, the rhythms. There is an external nag doing the nagging for her and the rest of the family. She wonders why all her planners and lists and things don’t do it but this voice assistant does? David explains that it’s because it comes to you, you don’t have to go to it to get the information. Unless it exploded or fired out papers into the world, you have to attend to it to be reminded. It’s a partner in executive functioning. Instead of having to outsource it to your partner so much. You can program skills, sequences of actions, routines, etc. Kids are learning a whole sequence but I don’t have to teach them all the time. A lot of people ask us for parenting help, and we can talk about all the strategies to do to change behavior. The most important thing you can do is notice when they’re doing something good. When it tells them to do the thing, and they do this thing, you get to come in and celebrate them and notice it. This is a big gift it has given Isabelle and her family: instead of interacting around a stress point, and we get frustrated with the system instead of with each other. You can program it to applaud, and it has a feature where you get it to slow clap, and Isabelle names they have a legit slow clap in the house, and the kids love it. What you’re seeing is why this works, it is a legit intervention. Those kinds of systems are not always helpful for people. Isabelle learned the hard way that it was left on storytelling for too long and wild and they had to wrangle in a more soothing bedtime routine. But as David reminds us, if you’re not listening to it as it reminds you, you will learn to never listen to it. Same as with a visual timer, you have to keep yourself to it, because otherwise you are learning to ignore. Isabelle has a certain feature where she has to answer a question to a reminder, the beeping doesn’t go away unless you interact with it. Also, setting up timers with music, setting environmental cues through music and setting up an ambience with parts of their routine. David never uses timers, because he only uses them when it’s go-time. He’s a person who really values privacy. It’s an emotional battle, unless you’ve gone through the options to change your phone settings, they are listening to it. The different options are essentially a whiteboard that speaks to you, a diary that buzzes after you, a friend that doesn’t forget—you do have those resources if you don’t have this device. This is also so you know you can find options that aren’t digital—but be careful of overly depending on people, because dependency breeds aggression, and that is one of the things about these robot overlords, are you can be as dependent as you want on them and be as aggressive as you want to be and it doesn’t hurt a person. When kids get frustrated with it, or I get frustrated with it, it’s happening to an object rather than to yourself, or someone else. Isabelle casts no judgment on those who choose privacy over these devices, because she tried one out a few years back and she was very much against it, it felt creepy to her. She didn’t really explore it or work with it. The thing that changed her minds was the realization of how much of the working memory and routine and reminders this offloads, the difference is it’s not on her to remember. So she’s like “go ahead and sell me all the dog food, because it's worth it.” David is a good person, he’s not worried about the things it finds out about me…so it would sell me the fruit leather? But it might be so clever it would question if David really wants 4 cases of 500 of them. So David decides he would NEVER get one because he doesn’t.What is Bluey? Isabelle notes: Brace yourself, this show is powerful and not just for kids/parents

Isabelle struggles with the idea of doing 'little yucks' because her to-do list is endless, she never stops, and the demands on her feel endless--how can you even think about what you need or stop to rest without feeling guilty/lost/overwhelmed with unstructured time? David counters with a behavioral truth bomb: the power of knowing your establishing operation. What levers did the environment around you press?-----Isabelle wonders whether she even knows what a little yuck is; she turns everything else in to a big yuck, or a bunch of ‘to-do’s’ — for David, a little yuck helps the larger household, but the timing and the coping of it is just for you. Like doing the dishes so he can prep for a speech, or laundry (even though he had just done laundry) because he wants the option to wear a certain pair of pants. The same energy level existed, it was not on today’s to-do list, and he just did it to keep moving his hands. Isabelle is suffering from a blindspot here: she doesn’t really permit herself to do a little yuck, then return to something you enjoy…but she doesn’t have a to-do list anymore? That feels impossible, she doesn’t know how to not to-do list. David describes how he doesn’t have a written to-do list, it’s connected to a day off physical routine and he calls a friend and then goes for it. But for his to-do list on his day off, when he didn’t have a bunch of things he had to do. He held back from going off the rails and doing too much, he actually held back and stuck to his easy-level plans. Isabelle describes how she does not like to cook or bake, but if she can do it at her leisure, then she enjoys it. She embraces doing it without pressure and she doesn’t feel the chore of it. But the load of things she has to do feels endless, she has never carved out the time where there is nothing for her to do…she doesn’t have the experience of time where something is not expected of her, or she doesn’t expect it of herself. David’s boat is privileged in that he doesn’t have kids and he is not a super person. He is very aware of how much time is taken from someone around childcare, he sees parents doing everything, and doing everything you need or everything your child needs, you can’t really do both. The messages from society is “you’re not allowed to take care of you,” or “you’re supposed to take care of other people.” This feels more like a “mom” thing than a “dad” thing—but it's not accurate. When we’re talking about trying to find the little yuck in Isabelle’s life, the equation is different. For Isabelle, in her world, there are several agents of chaos that enter and are rerouted to priority, and there’s never a moment where she can’t be interrupted or distracted from whatever is happening. There isn’t enough time to feel the thought “I have a lot of energy and there’s nowhere for it to go.” She thinks of a meme she saw where a woman ushers her family out the door. And she finally has time to herself; does she sit and stare at a wall or does she panic clean? Isabelle really struggles with making a decision with what to do with her time when she doesn’t have the constant demands, the volley of little yucks stops, but then why does she choose a little yuck? David goes really complicated, with this thing called an establishing operation. The behavioral word for how a little rat, trained to run a maze, is rewarded by a drop of water; the rat loves the water and does lots of work for the water, but rats don’t naturally love water this much. So the establishing operation is to withhold water from the rat for 24 hours first: the establishing operation changes the reinforcement of the reinforcer. So the yuck meter for Isabelle is totally blown out. So you have to take into account what is the establishing operation for her—and it might be that what do you do to make this time guilt-free or how you set it up to make it yours. What can you do so you don’t feel bad for watching 3 hours when everyone gets home? That really rings a bell for Isabelle; it really connects for her around the challenge of what it means, to even sit down. She really doesn't ever sit down. She recovered from a fractured pelvis because she didn't sit enough. This means changing her relationship to resting or hitting the pause button and carving out the unique, new structure, when she is on her own, or has a lot of energy, or has the agency and privilege to exercise it. She has to change her establishing operation. David names that you have to give yourself the real reinforcement that you need, and not trick yourself into doing chores (that would normally ‘reward’ you with a different set up). Isabelle names that recent training with Hallowell and Ratey (see ADHD 2.0 book link below) is that rumination neural network in the brain is designed for creating problems, and another neural network runs when you’re not doing anything, and another neural network is task positive (you’re trying to do the thing). Now with neurotypical folx, you can flip

Isabelle and David catch up and grapple with those moments when you have a ton of energy or anxiety or excitement, and you tackle way more and up the difficulty on your video game of life, instead of going for an easy win. The way we tend to think more is better when it comes to interventions or accommodations when actually it’s the little stuff. The power of the little yuck, and also the way we buy 4 cases of fruit leather and only later consider where we will store them. -----David is sharing how time doesn’t make sense (5 minutes v. 299 seconds=2 different things). Isabelle names how she tries to operate this way all the time or much of the time, remembering all this Team Shiny stuff, but it really is such a hard thing to acknowledge that her working memory is as poor as it is. Whaddayamean nobody moved the keys? (except past her, who forgot she moved the keys?) She gets so angry at herself, maybe now that she knows more about ADHD/attentional variability/ND — she is kinder to herself faster, but she also gets angrier. David names that anger is a path toward adaptive humor—“are you kidding me?” Can turn into a laugh moment or it can turn into berating yourself more. David had a beautiful ADHD moment. David has a bonus at his job, and what does he do with a bonus? Is it a vacation? A box of chocolates? A piece of furniture? Video game? The rule that we have is that anything labelled like this is getting a treat. Bonus or treat yo’self. David decides he’s going to get the best fruit leather than exists, and he decides to order it. First thought: This is excellent, this is funny. Second thought: I can’t wait to tell everyone about this, this is so cool. Third thought: Wait a minute—how much space does this much fruit leather take up? Fourth thought: Does it go bad? Fifth thought: Does it need to be refrigerated? My cats won’t get into it….What did I just do to myself? He is excited and terrified about much fruit leather. He minimizes his impulsivity. What shipping option did he pick? No idea. It doesn’t say what kind of shipping. It reminds Isabelle of how fascinated she is by a ‘lifetime supply’ prize of things: how much is a lifetime supply? Like a steady supply? All at once? How much did you buy exactly…are we talking, pounds? David got 4 cases, so he could pick the flavors. Isabelle-that might be an elementary school’s summer camp order. She thinks you could polish this off, using her kids as a baseline. Will he keep enjoying fruit leather 100 fruit leathers in? David knows that we don’t enjoy the next bite as much as the first, it does wear off. He’s not going to Golem them, he’s going to share the fruit leathers. The last time he had this thought, it happened with Jordan almonds. But they also break people’s teeth and not everyone likes them. Isabelle is delighted because every Polish baby shower and wedding shower, and it was just little baggies of them. Isabelle throws in three fun food facts: frying food is originally to preserve the food without the refrigeration, so fried food, it keeps longer. When you coat something in sugar, or in a salt, it keeps longer. Isabelle also thinks about learning what is the first thing to put on a cut? David responds…not hydrogen peroxide or alcohol, and Isabelle learned that doing that messes with the skin barrier because you scrub away all the good stuff, its then more likely to get infected. Which is shocking, because you'd think more is better. David *names that that’s why soap works: it’s the bubbles! And the friction! That makes soap work. THIS MORE IS BETTER is something we see in clinical work all the time. People throw in so many ADHD interventions, and it fails, and actually…less is more. Like simple things, like where you put your phone at night. Isabelle’s metaphor of late is the idea that we often do all or nothing, but we get bored with playing the video game at easy, and instead of upping the difficulty to medium, we think we have to make it extremely hard, and then you die right away, and you get extremely frustrated and then you quit the game. Here’s Isabelle’s boring task: she needs to go through the kids clothes. What does she do, she then signs up for three consignment sales and figure out delivery dates, and then it raises the anti, and it makes her feel like she’s doing something, but she overwhelms her stimulus load, and then passes her sweet spot so darn fast. David names that easy level on this game is just collecting clothes and putting them in one spot. Medium is putting them into a sort. And super hard level is taking them there and not having them in their house. David notices that people don’t even see the easy options. And then Isabelle also opened three other games, to play at the same time. The more games we’re playing, the harder it is to get into a rhythm. All the interventions he knows are habits and rhythms. David doesn’t really know how to distinguish anxiety or excitement, he’s getting all excited for a party, and the settings

In a panel recorded live in front of an audience at the 2023 Eye to Eye National Friends and Allies conference, David and Isabelle sit down with Eye to Eye co-founders David Flink and Marcus Soutra, Eye to Eye student leader Kayla and an Eye to Eye student leader’s parent Claudia to discuss what it is like to be neurodivergent—or a parent to a neurodivergent kid—across different generations. Part three of three. To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org In this part, we cover the everyone’s favorite accommodations, how to confront stigma, and what everyone would say to their littler selves. ——David (Kessler) asks: what are everyone’s favorite accommodations? For Marcus, who was stuck carrying a giant suitcase to listen to audiotapes, audiobooks were originally not his favorite. He’d get the material two weeks after everyone else and it made him stand out in a way he didn’t like and kept it secret. Then he was working with a 10 year old kid through Eye to Eye, and the kid made a mold of his ear for an art project, saying that he doesn’t read with his eyes, he reads with his ears. Now he listens to every email he receives and sends, it’s how he reads; thanks to resources like Audible.com, it’s everywhere. It’s not just about the perception of the tool, it’s about the availability of the tool. If he could travel back in time to speak to a younger version of himself, because Kessler has a button he can press to make this happen, but only for a short time, Marcus would tell himself that “you’re not broken. The system is.” (Pause for applause). Isabelle wonders if there could be a time travel sound effect and after Flink suggests a Chewbacca noise, Kessler obliges. Claudia’s favorite accommodation is asking students what they need, and listening to them about what type of structure they like. Some like more, some less, some need a quiet room, some need to get up and walk around. David asks, is this essentially giving students the agency back? She agrees. And if she could go back in time, she would tell herself “Everything is going to be okay.” (Pause for snaps galore). After a tough rock-paper-scissors round, Kayla goes next. Kayla’s favorite accommodation is speech-to-text, she’ll step out of the classroom and talk it into her phone. Going back in time, she would tell herself “don’t listen to everything your peers tell you.” (Pause for snaps). Often the hurtful words don’t have anything to do with you, they have to do with what’s going on for them, like a kid who came up to her after saying something hurtful confessing that he was just hiding his own dyslexia. The second thing she would say is “Do you. Don’t think about the way people look at you because of the accommodations you use, or the things you need to do, because at the end of the day, it’s all about making an even playing field.” Her getting extra time on a test is to level the playing field. Flink goes next and shares his least favorite accommodation was getting extra time on tests, because it was him still having to do a test poorly designed for him. As an adult, it's his favorite accommodation, because he now sees it as kindness to have extra time for how he learns and thinks. If he had a time machine, he’d tell himself: “look, you’re going to have to have a strong backbone, but keep your wishbone strong, too.” Isabelle just asks, before we ask questions, that we close the time travel loops and return to the present moment. (Cue Chewbacca noise and a small disagreement about whether Star Wars technically involves time travel). Now it’s time for questions from the audience, the first one being: How is everyone doing? Everyone is doing well, considering they just shared something so vulnerable in front of hundreds of people. Another audience member asks: How can we educate ALL our students? How can we set it up so that we don’t feel stupid or incapable? Kayla starts: building communities, like with Eye to Eye, where there is a place where you have allies and you can see people going on to do great things, like Kayla witnesses when attending the Eye to Eye conference. Claudia names that schools and teacher trainings are underfunded, and they want to learn more and be better equipped but they’re not able to afford those trainings. She also wishes for students with single parents and those who don’t have the means to get access to resources and supports, too. David names that teachers are absolutely amazing and are doing the impossible. We are working with antiquated education system; we have phones that can look up data but we still get graded on memory, v. The questions we ask; teachers get punished if students don’t fit the mold and don’t perform well, but the mold itself is out of date. What about noticing the complexity of the questions students ask, rather than what they know? Marcus wonders why did it take us so long to embrace technology? One of the things he was always told was, “Marcus, you’re not going to have a calculator

In a panel recorded live in front of an audience at the 2023 Eye to Eye National Friends and Allies conference, David and Isabelle sit down with Eye to Eye co-founders David Flink and Marcus Soutra, Eye to Eye student leader Kayla and an Eye to Eye student leader’s parent Claudia to discuss what it is like to be neurodivergent—or a parent to a neurodivergent kid—across different generations. Part two of a series. To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org In this part, we cover masking, loving/hating school, and what's next for the next generation. ——David Flink shares his story, where he had a family that backed him and had a lot of privileges (being a white male in this country), but he was “invited” to leave four schools. He did not have a community. He met with his first student while he was in college, despite their neurodivergence in common, was very different from him—single mom, Cape Verdean family—became the closest person to him. He met Marcus, and they connected about getting their meds at 3p together, and now, 25 years later, here they are. Marcus points out that people think he was always talking about his learning difference, but he wasn’t, he was going to school to become a teacher at King State college, and he was talking with David, and after he shared his experience in the classroom he was student teaching in and seeing the impact that made on the students, he said “no one is going to listen to us, we’re 22,” we both overcompensated, were so extra professional, always showing up to meeting in suits, having to convince people that they could do this. The first person he openly talked about his learning difference with was David. Isabelle jumps in with her story; daughter of Polish immigrants, rags to riches immigrant dream kind of idea, and she had no clue she was neurodivergent until her mid to late 30’s and she hadn’t felt the feeling of what it’s like to be in such a neurodivergent friendly space (with snacks, food, fidgets, people being so direct and honest!) until now, and is so grateful that Marcus and David co-created such a thing. She realizes her community is now other neurodivergent parents who are sitting in their own learning and parenting kids who may be neurodivergent and just working so hard and finding community that way. David wants to normalize what Isabelle is speaking to, which is that we tend to think neurodivergence or learning difference means struggling or hating school, and the truth is so many people realize they are neurodivergent when they lose the structure of school, when they get a new job, when they become parents. David Flink wonders, asking Kayla—we work for you—what are you seeing? What are you hopeful for? What is it like for you? She saw a lot of pull out classes, and her little brother is telling her his experience at school, and it’s a little bit better. She was not pulled out for different classes. In class supports would be helpful, but public school districts are severely underfunded—she hopes that he does not go through so much ridicule and bullying that she had to go through. He’s making genuine friendships; she didn’t have a chance to make those the same way because she was always taken out of classes and kids were too busy realizing her difference. What should we all know about Gen Z? Kayla is describing being in 5th grade, taking these standardized tests and it was on the computer, and she has to take it with the rest of the class. The upside: easier than writing on paper. The downside: everyone is done before her, and everyone is on her “c’mon Kayla, finish up the class” and it just wasn’t enough—if she had the proper accommodations, she wouldn’t have to deal with that bullying. Claudia thinks that this is going to continue to change and evolve. Her Zoomer (wait?! Is this the next generation name?!) Got early intervention and proper accommodations and is dunking in all his classes that are not easy classes. If you have parents that start with acceptance, then seek resources and accommodations for you when you’re really little, the sky is the limit. David names that generationally speaking, don’t sleep on accommodations, and effective early intervention is making a difference we weren’t even able to see before because it wasn’t a resource that was even available to earlier generations. Claudia names that each person’s unique potential and style of intelligence is different, but this sets someone up to live up to their unique greatest potential, whatever that is. Isabelle jumps in with the idea that it’s also a systemic thing, to recognize (as author Julie (see show notes) put it in a talk earlier at the conference) that Gen Z is the first generation of students to even have social emotional learning standards as a part of their curriculum, we’re now seeing the changes because it’s not just on parents to nail it, it’s the larger change that has to happen to a culture through awareness. Marcus names that this cultural change a

In a panel recorded live in front of an audience at the 2023 Eye to Eye National Friends and Allies conference, David and Isabelle sit down with Eye to Eye co-founders David Flink and Marcus Soutra, Eye to Eye student leader Kayla and an Eye to Eye student leader’s parent Claudia to discuss what it is like to be neurodivergent—or a parent to a neurodivergent kid—across different generations. Part one of a series. To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org. In this part we cover how we have moved from the margins to a neurodivergent culture of our own. ——David introduces this live panel and that we’re all here to talk about neurodiversity across generations. There is this potato that came up in Ireland, called lumpers—exploded the population, everyone grew these yummier, bigger potatoes. But a Spanish galleon brought mold that took out only the Lumpers—when we lose diversity, we had the Irish Potato Famine. Throughout the generations we’ve had different pressures to keep or lose different parts of ourselves. Beginning with a cheesy icebreaker, the panelists introduce themselves - David Flink (co-founder of Eye to Eye National), (he/him), Zennial (born between 1979-1981), and ice cream. Claudia (she/her), Gen X, French fries. Marcus Soutra, elder millennial (remembers dial up sounds and getting one song downloaded during dinner time), French fries. Kayla (she/her), Gen Z (no knowledge of dial up sound), French fries and ice cream together. David (Kessler, SSPOD co-host, he/him), Zennial, French fries. Isabelle (Richards, SSPOD co-host, she/her), elder Millenial and the original AIM Dizzabelle (with no numbers), specifically Five Guys cajun spice fries with strawberry shake. When did you or your loved one first identify as neurodivergent? Kayla shares that she was a premie baby, and already qualified for early intervention, then when she went through the public school system, she realized she learned differently then the rest of her peers, it took more time to get information, spell things differently, kids start to pick at you. Her family went back and forth with the school district to get her properly tested, and it was a battle, but finally, in the 7th grade, she was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyslcalculia, but her family always knew. How did you family react to your diagnosis? Kayla’s family were totally fine, it wasn’t completely shocking, her uncle and grandfather both had dyslexia, and her grandmother immediately knew because they were high school sweethearts, and she’d help him with his homework, so she saw the signs and immediately knew. Marcus was identified in 3rd grade, sort of the “classic” story, first with dyslexia and then with ADHD. Everybody reading looked like a magic trick that he just didn’t know how to do. His family reacted in a complicated way, they weren’t sure how he would react to the label, his mom has been identified with dyslexia since, and she was fearful of that label, because in her generation, she was labelled “dumb” and “stupid,’ because she didn’t have the luxury that Marcus had of having dyslexia and ADHD identified. When Marcus first heard the word dyslexia, it was from his 4th grade classmate, Karen, who was the one woke Karen (poor Karens everywhere, btw), when they were grouped together in a reading group together. Marcus thought it didn’t sound good, and that was when his mom first talked to him about it. We’re starting to see the differences in how boomer parents reacted to these diagnoses. Claudia noticed that something was different about her son when he was a baby, and went to Dr. Google and researched, and he ended up being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder at 18 months, and has since been diagnosed with dysgraphia and dyslexia. David points out the differences in being diagnosed much earlier, and Isabelle notes that you have access to something like Google to get more information if your peers or family doesn’t have access to it. Claudia names that her generation was also prone to Googling harmful things, so she stuck to peer-reviewed, science in her research. David Flink names how different those early years of time, were for him. He is a White man in America, mom is an educator, they had some means, and he was first identified as “stupid,” long before he was identified as dyslexic. That identity still stays with him. We want to give him a big hug. There are parts of our identity that develop in the absence of information. For David, his symbol recognition disorder (form of dyslexia) was caught in 4th grade, because of his spelling, but no one caught his ADHD until he was in college. There’s a part of him that, in the absence of information, always thinks he is in trouble. And this connects to how people respond to our diagnosis. David names he hit the family jackpot, and someone else’s reality is so different. You can chart your life based on who you hang out with—it’s not talked about enough. What happened to those groups when you go

David sits down with Eye to Eye's Alyssa Tundidor for the question and answer portion of their fireside chat. The audience members, who are young student leaders from across the country who are neurodivergent or have a learning difference, ask brilliant questions, like what is David most proud of, how do you answer someone who is pitying your neurodivergence, what do. you say when people insist "everyone has a little bit of ADHD!", and to how to share special interests with neurotypical folx. To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org-----Lee asks: David’s talked about making the world better for folks who have LDs or are ND, is there a specific moment he is proud of? David answers: there are so many, and he’s really lucky. He’ll do a rapid fire bunch of them, somebody trying a strawberry for the first time and realizing it was delicious, somebody reading a book, somebody realizing they didn’t have to sit still. Somebody realizing they were worth it and good enough. The time he was called Dr. 13 times even when he kept correcting them. The time he was able to evidence differences in someone’s education plan. The time he talked to parents to help them get their kids diagnosed appropriately, or get them to understand their kids differently. Every speaking event and having to talk to friends about where he just was. Somebody buttdialed him once, and he never listens to voicemail and the person didn’t know they were leaving a message and he hears the person saying that “David helped me understand ADHD differently.” They were talking with their friends like in a chat about what they had learned from me. That made David’s heart explode in a good way. Carly asks: people who are neurotypical use language that is harmful to the neurodivergent community, like calling them stupid, how would you address a discussion like that with someone when you understand their intentions aren’t negative—what’s the appropriate way to approach it? Let’s imagine David it’s someone relatively new in your world. With family members or loved one, it’s about creating parallels that shock them. With someone new, the most important thing is to not fight a belief but contradict it. How many times do you all talk about your neurodivergence in a good way: it doesn’t happen a lot, it’s conditioning. He got a piece of pizza, put in salad, called it a pizza taco, and everyone did it and David was like “yeah, that’s an ADHD thing.” Rebranding! And parallel examples for people to feel more of the intensity. For example, having a teacher saying “how can I get my student to feel more comfortable talking about their learning differences?” And the example: “great, how much do you weigh?” So depending on how well you know the person, throw things out there. Talking people about culture and oppression, and give people the out. People double down when you accuse them; so instead, “I know you didn’t mean to oppress a population, or be an ableist jerk, and call them stupid.” And it's really hard to see people not learn in a typical way, you give them the out. The more you combat the belief of another person, the more you entrench it. Have you ever seen people fight about how tall they are? What does it matter, and they’re getting more and more riled up. Another Carly asks: advice for seeking a therapist that supports them, especially going through transitions. Lots of language uses infantilizing examples and person first language, and therapists do this as well. One thing about therapy: you are their boss. You hire and pay them. Interview them. Ask them why they said that? We shouldn’t give therapists breaks and also don’t mistreat them. Meet with different therapists and find out who’s better. How good it feels actually talking to the person—do they listen to your expertise on neurodiversity. Do they do say “oh ADHD, that’s hard.” v. “Oh ADHD, that can be really marginalizing, how do you experience that?” One is vacant neglect, one is targeted. You are allowed to be very picky about the people you put into your life. Another participant asks: My brother is coming from DC to Northwestern and is complaining about the food-is the food at Northwestern really that bad? David names that he will have to deal with the friendliness of the midwest, and he needs to go into Evanston or go off campus to really give the food a try. The midwest nice thing can really unsettle people: why would you know that? The midwest thing is actually: Hi, how are you? They really want to know the answer. It’s a cultural thing. The food is fire, but not on campus. Check out Jeni’s ice cream, and check out Gigio’s. Another question: ADHD as a term is overused and because of that their is a fear of being dismissed—what about the pat on the head, the condescending v. The dismissing? Are those equally bad? David names that it’s probably person, what someone can’t tolerate; he can’t tolerate being infantilized, he’s not a baby, he has a beard and everything. It’s a frequ

David sits down with Eye to Eye's Alyssa Tundidor for a fireside chat. Covering everything from David’s origin story, to where Something Shiny came from, to co-creating spaces safe enough for folx who are neurodivergent. To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org.-----Alyssa Tundidor (Alyssa Tundidor is Eye to Eye's Senior Mentoring Program Coordinator--for more on Alyssa, see below!) facilitates a fireside chat for the participants of the Eye to Eye Organizing Institute (OI) at the University of Denver. David names this is the first time he is sharing his story and he is not holding a tennis ball and is actually sitting down as he tells it, and he’ll be squirming the whole time as he does it. His first memory is around his story, in 5th grade, he is the kid in school with the really messy hair, and he’d write pages and pages of stories-no one could read them, they were not spelled correctly. And David is quiet when he’s writing in the corner, but nobody cares what he writes. Fast forward to his first year of graduate school at Northwestern University, he feels like a fraud, like they shouldn’t have let him in, did they know he failed a class in high school? And he was in class learning about ADHD and classmate who ran the Eye to Eye Chapter at Reed College says “oh” — he braces himself to be ‘fixed’ or told things, and instead she says “there’s this think called project eye to eye starting where they take college students with learning skills and putting them together with students in high school. Wanna join?" His first encounter with the organization is talking to David Flint, and he asks what he has, and David shares he has symbol recognition disorder and ADHD, and David Flink goes: “Awesome!” And that’s the first time David heard someone react that way without the pity or the “good for you!” Skipping past a lot in high school, getting in trouble a lot, skipping school, all of that, he’s sitting in a room at the OI with 27 other peoples, cross-legged, throwing racket balls against the wall, he felt like he belonged for the first time in his life somewhere. He belonged before…as long as they didn’t know… whatever that “nerghhh” is. OI and Eye to Eye was the first place where he experienced he didn’t have to hide a part of himself. Alyssa had a very similar experience with the OI, she was 23, she was at Radford University, and there were 60 people. What is the story behind Something Shiny? David gives the real story, not the marketing story. He’s a person who thinks really big but doesn’t really think about the details, of course he wants to save the world, he just doesn’t know what to do next. And he was getting paid to do all these trainings on ADHD, and he realized that there’s a paywall around getting good information about ADHD. You have to have certain privilege to know someone, to have money, to get accurate information. And most people trying to put forward accurate information are selling something. And it’s hard to find somethings like this without a sales push. When we can increase the understanding of things, we can decrease suffering. Alyssa speaks about listening to the qualifier episode, and it made her feel really seen and really heard. We had real feels right there. There’s this idea you’re getting at, when we’ve experienced something in the world, we can make it better for someone that follows us. There’s a cultural piece of learning differently when we’re neurodivergent. If you are part of a neurodiverse community, it’s very very hard to grow up without neglect. The people who love you don’t know how to love you. We don’t know what we need, that never happened. You can’t neglect neglect, you have to attend to it. Asking a neurodiverse person “how do you learn?” The answers 30 years ago would be “it’s hard, and it’s good that it hurts” and we all kind of bought into that. And then, all of a sudden, it doesn’t have to hurt. It's okay to swivel in a chair and have every chair in your office be a swivel chair—it’s about speaking to the things that are very hard for us to own because we’re afraid we’re going to get rejected. When you talk about them, you feel like more of community, not less. Alyssa wants to emphasize the belonging aspect—what inspired David to make a safe space for people who are neurodivergent. Someone at work said to him: “Just so you know, it didn’t bother me at all, but your energy was really big—it didn’t bother me, but it could bother someone” — that person saw my energy, and wanted to work together. We have to take steps to work together and not mask. It’s like hiding the parts of us that don’t look like everyone else. “I read books, I sit still, over the weekend, I read books, I sat still.” There’s emotionality and there’s a task, but if the task is understanding what the book says, does it matter if I read it or listen to it? Creating safety is looking at comfort, looking at who you are, and not wearing masks. Immediately take that mask off. Alys

Ever shown up at a holiday meal and immediately realized with a sinking feeling- "Not again…I don't can’t eat anything here…" this episode's for you! From honoring the cook's efforts while not betraying your own needs, to recognizing the joys of chewing on pens and ice, join David and Isabelle as we embrace our sensory sensitivities and make our own neurodivergent-friendly and inclusive traditions. Check out our Holiday Survival Guide!——David and Isabelle stare down the fast moving train of holidays and expectations that is barreling toward us right now. As we approach Thanksgiving we have a bunch of "shoulds" coming at us--we should be like everyone else and even though we have sensory issues with cars, and sounds, and people, and all that stuff. Everything from sitting still from being held hostage on a plane or in the car, or being stuck in a service or sit at a table, or eating - the sound, the food, the overstimulation, while simultaneously coupled with frustration and your routine being destroyed, and all of this at the same time. This explains why Isabelle has a lurching sense of dread approaching this time of year. The holiday dread is real. David and Isabelle have covered other aspects of holidays, like speaking with family, and the glories and pains of holiday travel, and here they are focusing on food and sensory sensitivities. Isabelle remembers how growing up she was known as a picky eater but actually there were a lot of sensory sensitivities going on. She had memories of celebrating “wigilia” (Polish Christmas Eve celebration) and sitting at a much larger table, with much more eyes on her, and as someone who only ate pretty much chicken and white rice and potatoes, she was facing down a traditional non-meat meal of 12 mostly fish-based dishes (such as pickled herring). You fast before this evening meal, and then you commence the eating. She would be lightheaded and nauseous because she’d be so hungry and would fill up on dinner rolls with butter, everyone is judging and commenting, then she lives on the high of opening presents, and then they’d go to midnight mass at midnight, and then they’d light candles and means the oxygen is rapidly leaving the area in an enclosed place and so she’d either pass out and throw up. Everyone can look back in time and find the holiday memories of “we can’t believe we did that on purpose.” We don’t make time any other time of year to have these rituals, and see each other, and it's really about connections, yet we get caught up in following these rules that don’t always work. Isabelle thinks about how for years she carried the shame around this being her fault, she’s the picky eater that would end up passing out or throwing up, but then thinks about how easy it would’ve been to provide some kind of option for her. That there are traditions and ways of keeping the meaning behind the traditions, but also making even small accommodations that can make all the difference to us. How we can always make new traditions. There’s a really hard part with food: there are people that work really hard for hours in the kitchen and they want you to try and see what you like about it and not like about it—how can we try certain things that work for us, and how can we bring our own food—like here’s my tub of Mac and cheese, there has to be a middle path. The way to be a gracious guest and host, and how as neurodivergent folks we can prefer to host because it gives us structure, she can stay on her feet, it helps her mask less. What is this about ADHD and food sensitivities? There’s a lot around taste aversion, what happens when we associate a food item with a thought in our head—like “eww, this tastes like sand” and we don’t eat sand…or boogers. To make the eating experience a lot more about the flavors they’re experiencing rather than the thought in the brain. Is it salty? Sweet? Savory? Textures? David is a texture person, there is a fine line between “this is edible” and “this makes me gag”—like bananas, one day to the next changes. Isabelle and David firmly agree on bananas being this type of thing, and Isabelle does not do overripe bananas, you make it a cooking liquid and you put it in banana bread. David also likes drinkable yogurt and he doesn’t mind it because he’s drinking it. If he’s moving his mouth hole up and down there needs to be something there to fight my mouth.” And crunching is stimulating and stress reducing. Whether we’re chewing ice or almost-cutting-the-top-of-your-mouth bread crust. Is it the act of chewing that’s stress reducing, or something crunchy is stress reducing? Isabelle notices chewy things, like gum, gummy chews, and chip crunch, or a cold crunch, she does not like it—there are special ice cubes that collapse in your mouth that shrink in your mouth. Tiny ball ices at Sonic or certain places have that. David knows chewing gum is a stimulation, and David is hazarding guesses with the crunching thing (like it’s objectively dominating something i

The second part of an illuminating conversation with David Flink and Marcus Soutra, co-founders of Eye to Eye, friends and pioneers in education equity for neurodivergent folx. The group explores how a story of neurodivergent shame and trauma can shift to feeling like the story of surviving, how the pain stays with us but the reaction of a listener can layer over it, and how we can to begin to heal old wounds. Furthermore, what does it actually mean to be cool or to be a role model people want to look up to? To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org ——Flink names that in all these schools, there’s an adult who believes that giving young people room to tell their story can change the world. This was before research supporting depressive symptoms go down, self esteem goes up, that this work works. They are saying yes to a young person—and we are the adults now, and we can say yes to a young person. The day Flink met Marcus, his life changed. They were introduced by a professor. And then they had this whole momentum when they all met—and that’s how it started rolling. There are kids right now that are hearing this message on this podcast, through Eye to Eye chapters, and it’s unprecedented, and there are all these other hidden players that make this all possible. Kessler names that the value and the meaning of the story changes when you participate in these kinds of movements, though it doesn’t change the story itself. Kessler’s story started with a sense of being a fraud and was shame based—it wasn’t until he met Flink and Marcus and everyone at Eye to Eye that he started to see the impact of his story. It changed from a fraud story to a survivor story, there was worth in that all of a sudden. We’re grown ups, we made it—when Kessler turned 40, there was this thing that he felt like “he did it! I survived! I didn't know if I was going to do this!” And now he’s one of these old ND people, and he can remember when there weren’t CDs—there’s a part of who he is that’s entrenched in meaning that wasn’t there before. Eye to Eye creates those stories—taking high school and college students with neurodivergence and pairing them with jr high students to tell their stories through art. We have to mask—may the next generation not even know what we’re talking about when we say mask. After a generation of talking about what’s right with kids, there are schools where kids don’t have to wear masks, not like they used to. This daughter who started with Eye to Eye when she was 8, and now she wears her story with pride. How different is your life, when you don’t have to wait until your adulthood to change your narrative?- The environment in and of itself, is changing the story. Isabelle names that developmentally, that junior high age range is around the time our limbic system is storing the most vivid memories then, because they are the firsts and they help us start to make sense of our identities (see "reminiscence bump" info below!). Now imagine that the message you’re getting at that crucial developmental stage is there’s something right with you, that you’re okay, that you can be yourself, and just how contagious that is in a space, not just for kids with learning differences, but also neurotypical kids, everyone at that school. And that when you then retell your story, it doesn’t alter the original experience, but it creates a layer on top of it, and you keep adding those layers upon layers—which rewires the memory. That is actually trauma work, and can only happen in relationship, where you have someone listening. The brilliance of the Eye to Eye model is that it’s deeply relational, it includes these hidden networks and built upon near peer relationships. Kessler also points out that Flink and Marcus are actually cool. These are not people you’re feeling a sense of shame around, you’re seeing them and going “how cool are they?” Marcus agrees, they're the James Dean of dyslexia. There’s a way to normalizing it, and making it okay. Flink and Marcus held hands and took the leap—early on, thinking, he was thinking: “I am professionally neurodiverse, there’s no going back”—there was a fear in the beginning, how are people going to receive this? Finding other cool people who were willing to tell their stories and keep doing it, keep doing. Early on it did not feel as cool as it did now. Flink has a thesis on Kessler’s thesis—“it is always cool to own who you are.” That's what you see when you see Eye to Eye’s young people. Kessler met them at a time when they were really lucky where they had received kids responding to them, mirroring back to them—“your story matters!” If you visit any one of their sites, people with different races, cultures, backgrounds, who are proud of their brains. Proud of themselves. Everybody deserves the right to be proud of who they are, regardless of their background and intersectional identities including neurodiversity. Would Flink and Marcus self-describe themselves as cool

David and Isabelle are joined by David Flink and Marcus Soutra, co-founders of Eye to Eye, friends, and pioneers in education equity and empowering young neurodivergent folks to know and own their story and change the education system and world for the better. Go deep into how this youth-led movement started 25 years ago, the impacts Marcus and David have witnessed, and what it has always hinged upon: that our neurodivergent stories and culture matter and sharing them can change the lives of others for the better. To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org.——David wonders if, given that they have already attended the Organizing Institute of Eye to Eye—and should we talk about it as if it hasn’t already happened? Or as if they are about to go…? Marcus is up for whatever, David Flink points out that this is a really choose your own adventure intro. David Kessler has been involved with Eye to Eye for years and gives an introduction. David Flink and Marcus Soutra are very important people in Kessler’s (SSPOD co-host’s) story. Flink started Project Eye to Eye twenty years ago, he’s been nominated by CNN as person of the year, he’s created a network of community around neurodivergence spanning every state. Marcus is so much around the connections and relationships of this organization, being the boots on the ground, working with so many people in this industry, talking so much about neurodiversity and ADHD in general. What made you think about making the OI, what is it for? The event is the Young Leader’s Organizing Institute (OI), first one held in Jersey City in 2005, and held every year since, including virtually through the pandemic, and young people from around the country come together and build community through their learning difference, neurodivergence, learning how to be a leader and tell their story. It’s a youth-led movement, facilitates their work throughout the year. Some are already activists, and some are new to it. Isabelle names that this is incredible, people are coming and being real and vulnerable and its truly incredible. There are chapters from over 20 states, and two students from each chapter come together and learn real tangible skills to learn how to be leaders and lead a program. Every student coming represents another 10-20 students back home. This event has allowed us to give students the skills and puts their oxygen masks on first, rather than the masking of hiding who you are. How did Flink dream about making Eye to Eye in the first place? It was co-dreaming, it was celebrating 25 years since its inception, and he stepped on this campus 25 years ago. The original version was a pretty small dream. Nobody had told him with any authenticity that there was something about his learning experience was powerful and right. He hit the teacher and family lottery, he did have people cheering him on. He wanted kids to know they’re not alone. And it wasn’t until he met Marcus, they codreamed. They had different life experiences, what would it look like if we brought people from different backgrounds, different states. We need young people from all backgrounds finding their way to love each other through learning differently, and it’s helping educate educators so they can say yes to when young people say what they need. They are 1 in 5 of all students; we need to encourage cross communication between neurotypical and neurodivergent folks. Isabelle gives feedback on what the whole conference experience was like, where there were signs, and no fear sweat, chairs with wheels, fidgets everywhere, and then when someone talks, you actually want to listen. Flink names that there’s where they started, and it was all about people saying something we needed to hear. Flink gave Kessler (SSPOD co-host) a series of vague descriptions of people that were all wandering the airport, and he was going to find them all. David didn’t shame Flink, he was on it—tracking down the people, looking for people who looked lost or had Eye to Eye gear—it became this amazing quest. It was like a Collect ‘Em All Pokemon adventure, and it was screaming and excitement and it was so much fun. David names that for the next 25 years, our environment continues to be helpful, but we are an education equity organization, we are youth driven. We’re here to set up the next generation of young people to ask for what they need and change the school systems. There’s a need for them to say what they need to say. Kessler names that trauma bonding can happen in therapy, where people go into the gory details and it's not helpful. The idea of “sharing your story” can provoke eye rolls. One of the things you first need to know is your story—talk about your story, how you got there. David felt like a fraud, the last thing he wanted to do is to tell anyone how he got there, and then Marcus lead it off by sharing his story, and as he started hearing everyone’s stories, he realized how much he wasn’t alone, he was suddenly aware

Isabelle and David continue to reflect upon what it was like to experience the Eye to Eye Young Leader's Organizing Institute Conference—Isabelle describes how strange and surreal it felt to not be judged for things she’s used to having to manage and mask about; what it means to recognize that there is a part of you that goes unseen so much of the time and when you connect with it, the grief that comes. The power of recognizing you are among your particular tribe and the jarring feeling of realizing how rare it is. And also, ADHD podcaster dance offs. ——Isabelle describes how, partly due to flight delay and the tail end of a cold and such, it was only a day and a half worth of conference experience, and yet it felt very surreal—she kept asking, is this real? And on the second day, was walking around feeling like she was shaming herself for her own behavior (because normally, she would’ve registered people’s looks or reactions to her interrupting them so much, for example). And she also noticed that while she would normally push herself to engage even if she wanted to really shut down, here she felt safe taking time for herself and not engaging, and didn’t even feel the need to try to endear herself or manage relationships excessively to prevent fallout or misunderstandings. She felt very seen and understood. David names that no one in the world is used to not being judged. She wonders if this is a common experience for attendees? David describes that he hasn’t been in this alumni role before; when he was a participant, people would be up all night in the common rooms where they would be staying, someone would be crying, someone would be forming a significant partnership or breaking up with someone, and they would go to bed at 3a and wake up at 7a to do the whole thing over again. It was like being whisked down a torrent of a river without hitting any rocks along the way. To feel so fully accepted, in all your parts, not just the parts that are shiny but all the parts—the closest word to what it feels like is maybe a collective grief, and regret, and then also release. David names that people don’t see all your parts, but they see the parts you spend most of your time hiding. Having that part show up—it’s exhausting and refreshing and exhilarating to know how long that part has been hidden. As a therapist, when David diagnoses someone as neurodivergent later in life—there’s an initial, “oh my god, that makes so much sense!” And it’s followed by a “oh my god, if I had known earlier…?” You cannot grab this information without grabbing some of the grief. But it’s also so strange when you’re sitting in a room where the task is to acknowledge it. Isabelle gives the example of, going to a comicon and finding your people v. Going and finding a room full of people who are celebrating a show that was cancelled early (Firefly) and cosplaying as one specific character (Jayne) and it’s that specific and for four days straight. Or it’s like someone is playing the sports ball team and they’re wearing the opposing team’s jersey on someone, it’s like you know you’re on the same side because you’re both wearing the other team’s color. It’s the difference between finding your people under duress or outnumbered. It’s like Isabelle finding a bunch of tall women at the Denver airport and feeling oddly among her people but it’s jarring and delightful too. Isabelle wonders what David’s realization was like—he mentioned all these aspects of grieving his brother’s loss and the loss of being a part of this community in the same way, and here he came back and experienced it again. He is doing great, and he has the feeling of “put me in, coach!” He watched amazing people (like Sawyer, Chloe, for example) and seeing parts of him 10 years ago, looking up to people he thought were really great. It was this moment of feeling like everything was coming full circle and David felt an immense amount of gratitude that he could reconnect with people who were really important to him, and his partner could see what he was doing. They were participating in the ally training group and as neurotypical person, it meant so much to David to see them getting along with everyone because it wasn’t a judgment-filled place. It reminds him how important a lack of judgment means to everyone not just neurodivergent folx. He came back with a renewed sense of worth, mission, and purpose. We are trying to do this with the podcast, we are trying to destroy a stigma. And we are far from the only ones doing it, but the best podcast out there—Isabelle imagines they just challenged all these other amazing podcasters to a dance off and David names they would argue about the song choice and just end up having an amazing hangout. To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org -----Cover Art by: Sol VázquezTechnical Support by: Bobby Richards—————

Isabelle and David reflect upon what it was like to experience the Eye to Eye Young Leader's Organizing Institute Conference--in a nutshell, for David, figuring out 20 some odd years ago that his learning style was valuable, and then reclaiming hope after great loss, and for Isabelle, just this past year, feeling like she discovered her home planet in a conference room in Denver. Covering bits about medications, creating neurodivergent-friendly spaces, and masking, David and Isabelle go deep, and also discuss how there should be a "leave no trace" pact between a chair's fabric and your leg. ——Isabelle updates David that she’s been on stimulant meds (in extended release form), but would crash at the end of the day, and so her prescriber gave her an immediate release form she could use to help the end of day transitions (bedtime). They are going through schedule puberty as they transition to the kids being in school again but also not being in school yet and she just wants the discomfort to be over. She forgot to take her booster dose today, and it is so obvious to her, she is noticing just how much textures and sensations get to her. David names that it’s almost as if she didn’t have an accommodation to avoid distraction and wasn’t aware how many physical distractions would push through. She is so itchy and uncomfortable and so distracted by physical distractions. This comes up with the right variables. Just a few weeks ago, it was really humid, and David was like “I’m not wearing a shirt or pants” and it was just too much and he didn’t want to sit on certain fabrics, doesn’t want to sit on something that peels off, why can’t we just hold each and just leave each other as we found each other. Then there are other chairs that leave a butt print and so he gets up and wipes the seat off as he gets up. David and Isabelle went to the Eye to Eye Young Leader's Organizing Institute, where train their mentors and gear them up for the coming school year. They attended the portion of the institute designed for allies and former mentors of the program. Isabelle noticed that she found her way to where she needed to go on her first try, which has never happened at a conference before. It felt like reconnected with friends-in-waiting or long lost cousins. There were ample snacks and beverages. It just felt delightful and moving. David describes how this place has a different feeling to it because our nervous system operates differently. We didn’t have to get anxious to get where they needed to go. It’s this place where we see accommodations everywhere. We get to see both of it. There is no shame in this group of people to spin a fidget spinner, draw, or doodle, and people didn’t have to sit in nothingness. And the reason is mattered is that there so many things you normally have to think about, the anxiety level is so high, and halfway through the lecture, all Isabelle wants is a snack, and all she thinks about is the bar that she can’t get out of her bag, and then she is opening the notebook, the whole thing is hyper vigilance around how she is presenting. This was like instant unmasking, she didn't have to anxiously ask someone where to go. It’s incredible when the task isn’t being quiet, but the task is participation. You can eat crinkly snacks! David thinks about culture that we really have, that is a part of being neurodivergent. Any person who has to excuse why they’re running late, having an accommodation in school, not wanting to play scrabble—this is a cultural piece, when we see these things as a part of our culture, not our difference, and have them attended to, we feel safer. Oh my goodness, not having to fight for every moment to pay attention, gives us a lot more energy in a lot of ways. Isabelle names that where she has previously felt it were in places or spaces she would co-create. She has felt this before when visiting Poland, where her parents and family are from, and she’d have this sense of home. But this was the first time she had the feeling in a room of other people having the feeling. It’s like finding her home planet. Where has this been? I’m so happy it’s here! What is this feeling? This is the part of knowing you’re all of a sudden part of a group, you’re part of a group this world wasn’t built for, and you have to do it our way. And when you see hundreds of people not asking permission and not getting in trouble. People were attending to the task with incredible precision, and it’s an honor to watch these young people making the world we’re going to live in. David went the first time 20 years ago, and it’s the first time in his life someone made his learning style feel valuable. In his grad school program, one of his classmates was like “hey, you’re talking about ADHD, any interest in starting a program where they take college students with LDs and match them up with middle school students and seeing what happens?” And he gets ready for an interview with David Flink. He was interested in heari

David and Isabelle navigated the treacherous landscape of surviving and being the lucky ones; are we trash? Are we seahorses? From defeating the enemy that is loose glitter, to brain regions resembling animals, to why it hurts when we beat up on ourselves, tackling the pain and looking at ourselves with intention. ——Isabelle was told she’s a talker, but she’s also a listener. There’s this thing Isabelle borrows from mindfulness practices and therapy ideas: what you resist persists, what you go with flows, go for the ride. She had this moment the other day, at what point is it going to be bore her? She is easily bored, she is initially excited about and then she loses interest in it, she can be hyper fixated on the thing and then it passes, and then why is it that she’s never been bored in a session—it’s never happened: when will it not be exciting or curious? It’s not the same thing as it being easy or effortless, challenge does not mean something isn’t fun, and maybe it’s one of her favorite things to do. David names: it’s amazing to be put into an environment where it’s dangerous if you don’t pay attention to listening, attending to the patterns and themes in the group—it’s almost what I’ve done in my entire life. Find ways to honor ourselves. I want someone to be able to look at me and respectfully out himself more often, and we don’t see the models are dysfunction. “This kid having ADHD and being in jail” is part of the story. Until everything is shiny! Glitter! Except loose glitter which is Isabelle’s worst nightmare. She learned, the hard way, that loose glitter found it’s way into her world, the moment you try to clean it up, it’s “this glitter will be here always.” The glitter’s arch nemesis is tape—you’re welcome everybody. You still have to sit there for hours, but it makes the cleanup satisfying. David has had the thought of rooms with too much glitter and thought: burn this room. Isabelle names that this is different when there is epoxy style glitter in a floor or a tile, or in a shoe—she loves how there’s a lot of glittery shoes, but the glitter is contained in a plastic shell. And there’s something amazing about the shiny but it needs to stay shiny and not be embedded in anyone’s skin. Isabelle's friend pointed this out: David has a pleasant voice, and Isabelle, back in high school, was on speech team, and she competed in radio speaking, where you essentially you get to be in a room separate from everybody and record into a microphone. That got her over her fear of public speaking, only they used tapes and tape recorders. Who knew? These little things, not exactly fate v. Free will—isn’t it interesting the things that had to come into play were miraculous or exponentially improbable. David thinks his survival in life is pretty lucky. Like LeDerick said, we’re statistically survivors, how did we get there? David is sometimes looking at a river and it’s all pristine and there’s this piece of trash attached to a log not getting sucked down the river, and that's him, he’s a piece of trash, and he got saved. He was powerless being swept by the current—a lot of us were—whether we found partners, or friends, or jobs or something. The odds of David getting an advanced degree, being in a counseling practice, and having the same diagnosis. There was a moment in their office, it was Isabelle’s first or second month, and we were talking about structure and stuff, and it went brain-seahorse. And David went “maybe…maybe…” and everyone else just saw, it’s going to go somewhere else. To finish the thought: once seahorses have partnered, upon the first rays of sunlight entering the ocean, they will do a synchronized dance to each other. Speaking of seahorses: the hippocampus is the part of the brain is responsible for episodic memory, ability to time stamp when something has happened in our life, seal it with a declarative context—and to connect it to David's trash metaphor, how a seahorse gets around: it attaches to kelp or seaweed and it floats on the currents, and it mates for life, and takes care of it’s babies, and it does not make sense, and it exists nonetheless. Isabelle doesn’t think we’re trash on a river, we’re the seahorses. David names that 50% of people with ADHD don’t graduate on time. Isabelle names: a lot seahorses don’t survive, statistically there’s so many don’t make it. David names there’s a lot of compassion and meaning to what we see—Isabelle is doing a lot of shaming to the trash. David is not trying to say we’re mistakes, but he doesn’t think the system sees value in us, but we have to see value in ourselves. You see me, I see you, grab my hand, we’ll do things together, we are trying to survive. David is never going to judge survival. Isabelle quotes Carl Rogers, when the potato sprouts, it’s doesn’t matter if it’s in the earth or in the root cellar, it will reach out toward the little shaft of light, and he talks about it as an actualizing tendency, we’re always going toward the sunl

David and Isabelle grapple with flipping the focus from ADHD symptoms into strengths, as survivors in a neurotypically-geared world. From questioning why we don’t use our toes more often, to the Boxcar Children, to maybe "outgrowing ADHD" is more connected to growing up, having more power, and choosing your own adventure. ——Isabelle struggles with going in and out doors, getting on/off escalators, and also not injuring herself or others in revolving doors—it’s like the old Far Side comic, “Midvale School for the Gifted” where the kid is pushing on the pull door. David names that it’s an engineering flaw, you’re supposed to intuitively know which way to open a door, there should be no handle on a push door, for example, it’s not all our fault. Most of Isabelle’s family does not live in this country, and she has memories of different light switches, or doors, or the placement of things in bathrooms, or where the handles are on shower heads—the way you habituate yourself in your space is so engrained. Every time they clean the little island on casters in the kitchen is moved, and the next day is a series of humans hitting things a lot and going “what?!” Isabelle would walk while reading a lot, she couldn’t handle transitions and she needed something in her hand to do, and as David points out it increases the degree of difficulty. She was reading Boxcar children, and also—what were we reading? It was going to be the best to live in a boxcar? And half the book was “and then Violet made curtains" and she oddly wanted to make curtains. And because she was walking and reading and she learned to pick up things with their toes. She can hold a pen with her toes, and she can probably write something with toes—why do we forget our toes are just foot fingers? If anything looks like it wants to be helpful, it's a toe. It wants to do more than just stabilize you while moving. Isabelle remembers flying across the Atlantic and is by herself (as a kid, maybe 10 years old) and she was sitting next to an older teen, backpacking, he was really nice. They were talking, and she never forgot this and she was a very nervous flyer and it meant a lot to be distracted by this, and had a regular size middle finger, and his middle toe was the exact same length as his middle finger. The middle toe was proportionate to the other toes, the foot looked normal, and it was a large, basketball player sized foot, he must’ve been tall? He had regular sized fingers, but his toe was the same size. David doesn’t know where to put this in his brain: in the black box never to be revisited. I mean, literally there’s a foot out there that can drive a car if needed, and also what is this happening to a 10 year old (he felt like a chill camp counselor, not creepy at all), and then you think: could you cook with it? Could you be flipping eggs on the pan? You learn how to do things with your feet—is it just a social norm that we don’t do things with our toes? Did you know that when you’re born blind you can’t have hallucinations—you have zero chance of having schizophrenia, because hallucinations can be smells, feelings, lots of things. When you don’t have eyes, the whole part of your brain gets usurped, their senses are so much more sophisticated, they can’t have random errors. What about ADHD brains: we are so used to having lots of thoughts in our brain, and it lends us to be in situations where we cannot have dysfunction where other people do. How a blind person doesn’t have any form of hallucination. There are a lot of environments built for us that make our differences disappear. This is not a one-size fits all for everyone: when people get their environmental needs met with ADHD, there are not problems. To someone having auditory hallucinations, that part of the brain that is activated when they hear someone talking, it’s actually happening (same part of the brain is happening)—to that person it’s indistinguishable. The other parts of the brain grow into that region that’s missed—more parts of the brain deal with other senses, and your brain is use-dependent, and it just fills it in and becomes more sophisticated, and it's very easy finding the ghosts in the machine. It’s better at picking up “this is not matching the pattern of reality” and because they’re using all their senses. Isabelle references a radiolab episode where a man uses echolocation, and using clicks, and can ride bicycles and stuff, and they’re picking up on the space and materials and everything just from the sound. Whatever the brain does it gets better at. As someone with ADHD, we’re superpowered? David is saying we are, and referencing D&D. Make some stat categories super low and others super high —I don’t care about wisdom and coordination, but my reflexes are really high. David, for example, looking at what teachers references: also likes to talk, really distracted by helping people, wants people to feel better, also highly distracted, food motivated. We get caught up on ge

Isabelle and David reflect on going on 3 years of working on this podcast (note: this is now are 4th year working on it! WHAT?! WE LOVE YOU!) and how much the common way of interacting with inanimate objects is “did I break it?” And when we don’t, the realization of: “it’s more better!” Thinking about all the shiny neurodivergent folks gleaming around the planet, the power of your suggestions and ideas for shaping this podcast, and things we’ve learned as adults that changed the game (see: logos, gas station hacks, successfully getting everything for a recipe at the grocery store).——David and Isabelle reflect on this being their 3rd anniversary of recording the podcast. David describes how he used to walk to Isabelle and Bobby’s place past a McDonald’s every time to record, mulling over what they would talk about or what they could do. But this McDonald’s had a lit awning but was also closed a bunch of the time, and was filled with the most awkward sidewalk and road configuration so you need to do a lot of things to find out they are closed. David would like to barter, somehow. On Isabelle’s end she remembers getting the table ready after putting their kid down for bed, and getting excited to have a guest over. Almost everything is improved by snacking, but also less ice, is better. The two ponder about what to talk about, or going meta with the podcast. David wants to go there because it has been so cool to see what happened since we started this. We started wanting to remove the paywall from good information about ADHD, reduce suffering. The letters and emails we’ve gotten, the reviews we’ve seen posted, David is constantly in awe and reminded that sometimes people hear something we’ve talked about and it makes them feel less alone or more seen. It’s so cool that it’s happening so much. And he’s sitting with ADHD in that he doesn’t respond. “This person is amazing, their heart is true, and man, I need to sit down and write an honest letter that matches the energy.” Isabelle is trying so hard to respond. David cries and wants to respond, and here is his verbal accommodation to responding. It’s really incredible and rewarding in ways he wouldn’t have thought. For Isabelle, it relates a delayed gratification time, having a roughly regular way of interacting with David is so rewarding. For a long time in person, this was the lifeline to getting to see each other and it is delightful and brought me so much, and then she turns to Bobby and goes “have you listened to the podcast?” Because they actually use this in their every day life. Let’s figure that out. In terms of the immediacy of what this means, every time she goes to listen and edits old episodes, it’s delightful, and then she gets something from it. And then she sits and edits and gets better and faster and it’s not her chosen profession, so she’s picked up a lot as she’s gone. And then she feels the growing load of never putting this out and it’s fine as long as there’s an episode up. And then we get a review, or a letter, or an email, and it’s like holy flying pieces of flaming something. And then it's a conversation. You’re listening on the other end of this. And she listens to the other end of this, she’s just listener, too. It makes her think of the first “X-Men” movie and Professor X in his machine, Cerebro, and seeing all of the shiny people all around the world. And David names, we can struggle with premeditation, and not rehearsing, or scripting anything, but these are very real conversations that can feel scary and vulnerable because they’re not here. There are certain topics and suggestions that lots of people have written in and we’ve been so excited to cover them and maybe do it. It’s really helpful if people tell us “give us more information on x” and that gives us structure, or like help me with littles, and how do we sit here and deal with partners, how do you reclaim a life when you learn you’re neurodivergent into your later adulthood? What might be really great, and maybe do a conversation around them, there are no capital A answers, but there are lots of answers to these things. We should rope in more people so we have more ways of talking about it, both from parents and non-parents, and more of a Q&A roundtable - and maybe we make it an event, a virtual, zoom type things. David gets balloons no matter what. On Isabelle’s scale of decorations, the top one is little paper accordions made of tissue paper, loves the opening of party decorations and then she closes them and they are flat. David has kept some of those up because why would you take them down. It’s like a 3D animation, now it’s flat and now it’s slowly getting not flat. Am I going to break it? It’s more better! This sums up half of Isabelle’s interactions with inanimate objects. Giant learning moments of things you didn’t know until way late and it changed the game: David was in his late 20s when he learned how to spell kitchen, and he got it and it was funny, but he d

While we reunite (in person!) and prep some amazing new episodes, here's one of our top ever: ever wonder if it’d be easier to be partnered with someone who also has ADHD (or, someone who is neurotypical)? How can you coexist no matter what the combo platter of neurodivergence? Robin, David’s neurotypical partner, and Bobby, Isabelle’s neurodivergent partner, join a relationship round table filled with practical tips on how neurotypical and neurodivergent partners can better support, communicate, and respond in key moments with one another. For our younger ears: there is a swear in the last minute of the episode. Be warned. ---ADHD is often scapegoated within relationships. David & Isabelle are joined by David’s partner, Robin, who is neurotypical, and Isabelle’s husband, Bobby, who also has ADHD. David describes his friendship with Noah, who also has ADHD, and how the two of them have different and complementary needs and accommodation styles (for example, Noah likes structure and being on time, David is more accommodated by not wanting to let Noah down). How relationships could look when people are aware of what they are good at, not so good at, and that they need to work differently. This is similar to how when Bobby and Isabelle were first diagnosed, they had very different ways of experiencing ADHD and their sample size (“but wait, Isabelle’s more organized, she can’t have ADHD!”) impacted their understanding of it. David and Robin describe how Robin gives David a part of a shelf—a place where he could freely be messy and do his thing. Like spots that she, as his neurotypical partner, does not try to manage. The group goes on a tangent about cockroaches running up legs and spiders in your mouth while you sleep (see below). David also observes that Robin does not ask him to do a lot of things so when she does ask him, it feels novel and he received instant gratification for doing the task, so he’s more likely to do it (and eager to please the person he loves). This also connects to how Robin asks him to sweep or clean up crumbs (more thoroughly). Isabelle notes Robin’s warmth—and recognizes that Isabelle and Bobby both aren’t as warm to each other around this feedback. Robin points out that Isabelle (having ADHD) may not see the feedback as it goes, and instead notices the feedback when she’s already overwhelmed. Isabelle and Bobby note what they call a Great America moment (see below) and notes how she was able to observe Bobby circling around distracted, like a shark, and that she was able to see he needed a different environment to complete his tasks and was able to choose to go to Great America anyway (for herself): in short, she didn’t have to jump into the shark circling herself. David points out that children (which he does not have) are like the loveliest hedonist parrots (which Isabelle and Bobby add: are also the best thing ever). David also talks about mirror neurons and how people with ADHD can have much more active empathic responses, where they can really sync up to the moods/emotions of the people around them. As Bobby is circling like a shark, Isabelle’s mirror neurons are activated and she is syncing up, but Isabelle does not need the same level of intensity. How to know when you don’t need that level of intensity, knowing when you can’t think your way out of that circle (AKA Great American moment). Also important and hard to notice when you’ve self-stimulated yourself into some intense emotion but then your next task doesn’t need it. Hard to see yourself clearly in these escalated moments and how a partner can see you more clearly sometimes and help reflect back boundaries or what you need. And so when Isabelle syncs up to Bobby, she’s trying to soothe them both, instead of paying attention to taking a break and NOT syncing up, which will help them both. Bobby notes that podcast recording sessions helps everyone. Robin also names times when she and David need to ask for what they need to sync up (or not sync up). David will call and give her a heads up telling her he’s ‘coming in hot’ from his commute/work time, when she’s on the couch horizontal watching the Office or Park and Rec—how they try to meet them halfway. How both David and Isabelle forget their age all the time. For more show notes, go to somethingshinypodcast.comWhy is the cockroach named Rick? For no reason, except David and Robin like alliteration. Isabelle mentions a sacred pact between humans and bugs? Well, it’s an ancient truce predicated on the idea that if a bug is around, that’s fine, we’re on their turf, really, but if a bug is on your body without you electing to have said bug on your body, or the bug is on your bed or perhaps in the bath/shower with you, you will use whatever means necessary to remove said bug from said body/bath/shower/bed. What is the Great America moment? Let’s say a group of people all want to go to an amazing thrill-ride packed amusement park (like Great America, a Six Flags park in sc

Isabelle and David explore more strengths of neurodivergence, such as adaptability and responding in crisis/pressure situations (like a Ferrari on a racetrack, versus the parking lot of practice), and explore the question: why do we use so many qualifiers? Saying things like “I know I’m talking too fast,” to “nerd alert!” to “I know you hate me and want to kill me, but…” thinking about how we try to make ourselves appear aware, or harmless, or signal our vulnerability or fear of being put into a box, and how curiosity can work in our favor to make this a conscious choice rather than an automatic habit. ——David shares the stat that is most closely tied to income (not your test scores or math scores or writing ability)…but your vocabulary, the words you understand. It’s connected to travel, how well you can shift between different environments and understand things. We’re so used to thinking about things in different ways we may not even realize how adept we are at traveling between worlds. Isabelle recognizes how the oral tradition, storytelling, there’s some things she doesn’t take away from the written word that she takes away from hearing about it. How wonderful is it that she found her way into a profession where her role is a listener. She may not regurgitate all the info or nail that standardized test but If you look at her facility to adapt to novel or unusual or crisis circumstances, she wouldn’t trade all her masking for that ability, because she can chameleon her way through a lot of situations. She was recently on a panel and hadn’t been in front of so many humans in a long time. And she noticed that she doesn’t necessarily have the same stress response others have. When they were practicing for the panel, she didn’t do as well and the other amazing panelists seemed at home. When it came time to do it, she got in the zone, and their nerves were visible and it changed their performance. They went from being so organized and put together and getting nervous, whereas she noticed she was more at home and at ease under pressure. All these intangible but real things that we don’t give ourselves credit for. David names that her brain has always been a Ferrari, and when they’re doing the pre-planning, that’s like driving around a parking lot. It would be clunky. The panel itself was the racetrack and she could let herself go. This brings David to something he noticed lately when talking with his lovely colleague; he said “I know you’re going to kill me and hate me, but…I like football.” And his colleague pointed out that he says that sometimes. And his brain opened up the neurodivergent qualifier canyon—“but, I dunno, is it? I do” All the “am I taking up too much space? Talking too fast? Moving too much?” It’s something David has worked on so much. When we’re qualifying, we’re taking ammo out of someone else’s arsenal. We say the thing we’re scared someone is going to say to us, then when someone says something terrible to us, we’re not upset. David notices he does this with things he really, really likes but that he has a conflict around. He’s owning that he’s a really, really big football fan. And he’s the only football fan in his family, this wasn’t handed down, this was something he stumbled on that he loves. He’s also spent the last 30 years studying brains, trauma, and behavior, so it’s complicated, but he still loves football. He says “don’t kill me, I love football” as a way of saying “don’t worry, I know football is bad, it’s a guilty pleasure.” But in all moments when qualifiers come out, we disrupt other people’s agency. The questions need to be okay. The conflicts need to be okay. We’re allowed to be guarded, we’re allowed to be vulnerable, but it’s not always easy liking little shiny things, because you might like a shiny thing that someone else doesn’t like. The qualifiers are the ways we use language to soften blows for ourselves, to stop our rocket from fully going wild across the field, they’re like really sophisticated bumper guards. It’s a part of having self esteem hits from ADHD, but it’s not all bad. This makes Isabelle think of how many qualifiers she uses in a moment let alone a day. It also makes her think of how she first came across qualifiers in a book on negotiation that calls them accusational audits, where you disarm someone’s argument by naming the thing you think they’ll use against you (e.g. ‘I know I’m young and experienced, but…”) She also thinks she uses phrases like “nerd alert” and “get ready, I’m about to geek out on you…” because there’s a lot about herself she was the last to find out about. She feels like she’s the last to know and she misses a lot. That’s also a strength/vulnerability of neurodivergence, the sense of our own self-appraisal being off, and/or really knowing our own limits. It’s like a way to broadcast to the world, “hey, don’t worry, I may be ten steps behind, but there’s a thin line of awareness here, there is a fin on this rocket, it’s way back

Isabelle and David explore a bit about dyslexia, dyscalculia, and all the ways we walk around accommodating ourselves without knowing it. From making ADHD pasta, to thinking about ourselves in behavioral terms and moving from being driven by feelings to being able to make choices, the question really is, when do you want to learn how to swim? When you're in a pool, or when you're thrown into the ocean? -----Isabelle describes hanging out with a dear friend (who she hopes will be a guest on the podcast soon) who late in life was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum and also with a mild form of dyscalculia and dyslexia; her handwriting is all over the place, and she may have a mild form (not officially diagnosed), but realizing that she may be accommodating a lot more than she realized, and now she thinks that she may have a moderate form of dyscalculia, and her numbers and analog time switch on her. David wants to give her a hug; neurodiversity is our brains working differently, and we can get hung up on the pathology of it, but all things like slow processing, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and all of it—it changes how we think about attention cycles and how to attend and how to use accommodations. Some kids have ADHD symptoms, then they get glasses and suddenly they lose the ADHD symptoms. But they were blurting things out because they weren’t seeing prompts and once they could see them, they could move through it better. So many of us just move forward going “it’s just me” because we don’t want to talk about the broken or damaged parts of us and we think it’s just going to be hard. This is where it gets complicated, the part of this that David gets stuck with—neurodivergence, dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, autism—that’s your brain all the time. That’s not your brain breaking. For David, ADHD is part of his brain all the time, but it makes things awesome. We don’t say “that’s ADHD pasta, you like that pasta, huh?” Because he’s experimenting with cooking. We could say, that’s creative, or we could say that’s impulsive. For people who have to learn differently, we’re creative, out of the box thinking, problem solving is through the roof. They’re not symptoms, they’re behaviors. We gotta normalize people and experiences, often times it’s used as an excuse. “I can’t, because my ADHD, or it’s out of control all the time.” Isabelle also has ADHD pasta, which is the spices she gathers that’s different every week and it’s so interesting, even the way she frames it. Friend was telling her about how to take the reading comprehension test; she would read the passage, then read the question, then re-read the passage to answer every question. And friend pointed out that some people are able to read the passage and keep that in their working memory as they then answer the questions. It’s a fleeting moment of talking with her, that makes it feel like someone gets what it’s like to do it the way you do it, and what it might be like to be neurotypical. A near peer mentor, especially someone who is doing well. We’re caught in that damaged place where we think it’s just our fault and we’re bad at the thing everyone else can do. The way that David has always thought about it, is that it could be working memory, or it could be that when you read the questions, you get structure about where to put everything else. We have incredible visual and spatial memory, David gets caught in how we organize stuff, and there’s this incredible guy Barkeley, who does a lot of great work, and he talks about it in a medical model where he talks about it with a symptoms and problems. David talks really fast—it’s either a symptom of ADHD or a behavior with ADHD. One is about sickness and one is just a thing. Isabelle is reminded of Sam Kean’s “Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” and his glorious tangents and neurodivergent-friendly, fact-filled writing style, and she takes away that we commonly think our prefrontal cortex makes a decision and then our motor neurons follow it. Like if she wants to reach for the coffee cup, she decides to reach for the coffee cup, and then does the movement to reach for it. But your body actually reaches for the coffee cup before you consciously decide you are reaching for the coffee cup. Our brain and explanation for what we do is always lagging to the motions and things we’re doing. David’s turn to the do the Isabelle moment: whoa. The behavior comes first, our thoughts about it come second. Same with emotions, they come first, the thoughts come second. David’s first training was behavioral psychology, he thinks we’re stimulus and response creatures, but we really like to imagine we make a lot of conscious choices, when we don't. Nine times out of ten we think we make decisions, but we are on autopilot and don’t look at the menu at the fast food restaurant, we know what we’re getting already. We have to practice the habits we want to institute in our lives when it doesn’t matter. We need to initiate the routines, habit

David and Isabelle name that a big part of any behavior change is a change in how you identify; to go from “I’m a damaged person full of failure” to “I’m a person who’s needs have not been met by the world and I’m doing my best and what can I do?” Furthermore, it is vulnerable and anxiety-producing to be neurodivergent and to live with failure on the regular. How to take the wins while honoring the hurt and healing the hits to our sense of self.-----We don’t exactly always know when to ask for help; Isabelle asked for help and asked for an icepack after injuring herself, which was a big deal. Isabelle names that some people are lone wolves when sick (arr! Stay away) whereas some people are teddy bears that want cuddles and care. Isabelle is more of a lone wolf. One of the last parts of habit formation is changing how you identify. Like quitting smoking: if you live thinking you're a smoker, then every time you don’t smoke, you’re constantly denying yourself, rather than thinking of yourself as a former smoker (and look at me go!)—enforcing a positive thing about yourself rather than resisting a temptation over and over again. With ADHD, thinking about how she is hacking her brain and doing is easier than taking. David is taking it in like a raccoon on light speed, “big eyes, lotsa lights!” This piece around identity is big. This is around self-esteem—“I’m a damaged person full of failure” v. “I’m a person who has never been seen correctly, and my needs have not been met by the world and what can I do?”—instead of trying to fix what’s broken, trying to get curious. Everyone of us is in this battle, too: changing your perception of what it’s like to be neurodivergent in this world. We have to shift our identity—for example, I’m not ever going to pair another sock in my life, or I’m going to make a game of pairing socks. Either way you go, you can be that person. No one has time for laces, or multiple trips for groceries. Now for a tangent, going back to the raccoon traveling light speed But what about if you’re going light speed, do you not hear the screaming and the farting until you stop? And the sonic boom is the displaced air from moving so fast? If you’re in space, does sound move the same way? Big questions. Isabelle describes Brian Cox and how her and Bobby went to go see a lecture by him for their anniversary, it’s a moment where they understand it, and then you see him drawing multiverses and you sorta get it and then you totally don’t. We were talking about awesome people, and podcasts, and one of the things David is thinking about lately is anxiety. We’re supposed to feel it, it’s a part of life. But anxiety stops us from getting answers. Fear is what happens once we see the answer and face it. Resiliency is what happens when you face your fears. These things are all difficult things: changing your identity is hard. It’s not about running from your anxiety, it’s about finding a safe group of people to experience it with. You don’t have to do it alone. It’s doing things together that makes doing the podcast really special. This is scary stuff that we’re doing on the podcast. At any point in time, we can make mistakes and make them last forever, there’s anxiety in that, but David doesn’t feel it with Isabelle—they are accommodations for that with each other. It’s not that we don’t do it alone, we do it together. And Isabelle names this recurring joke about “why are there no Bigfoot bones, because other Bigfoot eat them!” Fear is intended to mobilize, it’s intended to help you focus and do the thing. Isabelle thinks of anxiety, related to trauma, survival and conditioned experiences around things she learned are not safe, but may be safe (but may perceive as unsafe). It’s impossible to feel fear if you’re also curious, like even if in the midst of fear or anxiety, you can cultivate a little curiosity, it gives you a little room to work with. When someone is with you, it’s that you co-regulate with someone, they validate and affirm that you’re safe and okay, and are able to say, you’re getting these little blips that can burst through that conditioning that can signal to you “you’re safe enough” someone is here to tell you “you got this, you’re good!” But it’s not just about taking what you perceive v. What is real—it’s not just that it’s real that the world is neurodivergent friendly, but it’s also true that when you don’t have people you can connect with and get that reinforcement from (those near peer mentors!) You are accurately actually vulnerable (like Isabelle feels vulnerable when she interrupts people or tangents), she spends so much energy masking. It takes a lot of courage to own you’re anxiety or fear or your resiliency, or to have a concept of “that’s what’s happening to me.” Don’t know if we give ourselves enough credit. Because she can’t not pay attention to things, she can’t not pay attention to her feelings either. On the one side, she’s sensitive, emotional, etc. she’s also hyperaware

David and Isabelle explore the myriad injuries and ponder the links between clumsiness and ADHD--is it because we're clumsy (which there are some fascinating links) or do we try and do too much? And speaking of doing things we don't want to do, but we care about doing, how does chunking help? All this, plus how we try to win by getting all the groceries in the house in one trip. -----Isabelle recounts a series of minor injuries, a bum knee, menstruating, and funny bone elbow stuff, and as she was sitting down she hit bone on bone throughout the day and sit down and had no self-regulation and was crying and then taking a ice pack that she is rotating to every injury. Is this clumsiness/injury-prone-ness ADHD? Or is this just her life? David names that there is a real thing about ADHD and clumsiness, and also some times you just have a bad night. Way more common to injure yourself with ADHD. Both clumsy and not clumsy exist in ADHD; there is some data around balance and your cerebellum and ADHD. David taking in all his groceries in one trip is maybe the dumbest thing in the world. He has a bag of cat litter on his head, bags up and down his arm and they’re both in front of him and then facing the obstacle of the door, he is trying to get the key in the door, but then the door explodes open, and he lands on cat litter—and that’s just taking in the groceries. You have to elbow pinch, and using your whole body to align the key with the keyhole, it's a whole thing. But this whole thing is not clumsy—he’s doing way too much in a moment. But is it really clumsiness, or going for the win, or the lack of response cost—it would’ve been shorter to take two trips, but it was about winning and he had to do it in one. Isabelle witnesses this in her kids—neurotypical, neurodivergent, all kids—the way you do the task is the way you decided it needed to be done to get the win, rather than what would actually be simplest. And sometimes you step in, and sometimes you just let it fly. While she was just in the doctor’s office where she was getting her knee checked out, and she brings her foot up to tie her shoe, the time it takes it takes for you to do this, just take two trips—and that’s what her kid does, too, and of course, because she does it, too. Six years ago, David said, fuck laces. No more laces, too much time, can’t do velcro professionally, but professional shoes you can’t just step in because you'll ruin the heels, so now he's doing this sequence of kicking up his heel to try to jack the shoe in while standing without ruining the heel...and now he is resisting the urge to jump up and show that he does this. Makes David think of chunking, taking two unlike or like items and smashing them together. So every time David takes out the garbage, he cleans the litter box—pairing two things together, he won’t forget to take out the garbage. When you can put multiple things together, it makes you feel more effective with your time, why not take care of future you a little bit and make a transition more effective? Isabelle tries to take an object from one room to another, like anything that you need to rehouse to that room you take with. David names we all do this in our morning routine and going to bed routine — we have "hitting alarm, stretching, brushing teeth, getting dressed, get coffee" and it becomes “wake up routine;” we have "take shower, brush teeth, put on pj's, read a book" and becomes "going to bed routine," all those steps into one chunk. Isabelle tried this with a client during packing, and actually physically chunking to make a bunch of things just one category of thing, so you don’t have to remember all of it, you just have to remember the category (like here is your bag of toiletries). David would chunk together his sequence of actions upon arriving home after travel—initially it was hard, but now it’s a reflex—he immediately takes all his clothes and puts it in the laundry, and puts his suitcase away (all right away). Isabelle thinks of the game “my name is Joe and I like to Jump” (she was Isabelle who ice skates and she hates ice skating for the record)—it’s like a memorization technique. You’re trying to outsource the working memory, so you’re building a habit so you don’t have to think about it so much any more. Takes six weeks of consistency to build a neurological habit. It’s a long long time, but not a long time. But once you’ve built the connection, any time you justify not doing the thing, everything is broken. When you’ve been on vacation, and then you return, and then everything’s awful for two weeks. Working memory is hard for all of us, but anytime you can outsource it you can. Isabelle hates changing the sheets on beds, especially her kids’ low loft bed. The feeling of a clean sheet, maybe top five sensations, after you’ve freshly showered or bathed, and you have clean sheets—and she takes the thing where she cleans already every week, she adds in changing the sheets. Is it also giving a bigger

In honor of summer travel plans and it's own type of holiday magic, we revisit this classic (Episode 038): How do you survive traveling with ADHD? What about traveling with children, particularly small children? And what happens when you find yourself rushing, leaving things until the last minute, and forgetting your charger once again? David and Isabelle swap stories and share specific tips to traveling and also discuss WHY ARE THERE SOCK NUBBINS AND TAGS. Seriously.------There can be so much pressure to have a Hallmark, picture-postcard perfect holiday and it’s so important to revise those expectations and think about what you actually want to do, for example, maybe it’s “we go to the this house, tolerate everyone for 45 minutes, you grab the turkey, I grab the mashed potatoes, and we leave.” And what about the uncomfortable holiday clothes? Isabelle laughs and mentions a brilliant SNL fake ad for Macy’s that’s all about children’s clothing and how uncomfortable it is. David describes this might be where task meets emotionality (for definition, see below)—is the task of the holidays spending time with family? David remembers the holidays being hard, everyone fighting on the way there and then fine when they got home, and wearing uncomfortable clothes, and just wanting to leave and it being awful. Isabelle remembers coming home so late and it was freezing and trying to sleep in the back seat, freezing. David had the experience going to his partner’s holiday celebrations and—they don’t have ADHD—everyone got along, hung out, sang songs, played piano—and this is real? Friendsgiving is a thing, and you can make choices, what you do for holidays is a choice: like winter is a choice. Anytime you feel trapped or caught in something, changing the language to “I’m choosing to do blank because blank…” with what needs your meeting with it, changes it from you “have to go see Meemaw” You can take the shoulds, musts, and have-to and change it to choices. And maybe Meemaw doesn’t care what you wear, she just wants to see you. WHY ARE THERE TAGS IN CLOTHING? And NUBBINS ON SOCKS? We have evolved so many incredible things, we have AI, we have genome sequencing, and we have sock nubbins, and who invented pantyhose and shapewear. David likes shape wear because the underarmour stuff he wears is nice and tight. Isabelle describes that it’s more designed to smush you in and sometimes it’s great—this is maybe Isabelle’s trauma after being a 6 ft woman at 14 year old, so she was fitting into shape wear and pantyhose as a kid and hated it so much and it was so uncomfortable. David always got all these hand-me-down socks that were in a constant state of yawn—now David gets the really tight socks that stay up all day, “look at you sock, staying up all day!” And transitioning back to travel—and sometimes travel is really hard because we’re pushing ourselves harder than we should. Having the toolbox is just as important on the airplane or airport, or knowing how long you’re waiting with a toolbox. Whoever’s doing the traveling, your self care is the most important: you can’t control your kids being miserable, they will be, you have to put your oxygen mask, go at your pace, go at your tolerance. Kids will fall apart. You need to be there for them when they do. So what do you need to be there for them? Maybe it’s a treat, maybe it’s slowing down—take care of you. Pack the day before. And always include an extra day back at home before transitioning back. You can change the day back—the end is always going to be the end of the vacation, but you being able to have a different re-entry ritual into your day to day can be game changing. Isabelle shares some tips from her own front line experiences, such as when driving from Indianapolis from Nashville as part of moving, when she forgot the iPad…and everything else, and her kid was stuck in the way back for hours bored out of their mind. Needless to say, iPads are last steps, so it’s a plan B, but it forces them to have lots of plan A—and on this trip, she forgot all the plan B’s and A’s. And everyone is going to have a meltdown—Isabelle, as mom, will also have a breakdown. It doesn’t matter how prepared you are, travel will break you at some point. Travel with kids is courting brilliant memories of chaos, so she anticipates and plans on her having a breakdown. So she tells herself that “I’m a good mom who’s reached her limit.” You’re trained from babyhood to meet their needs all the time, but it’s a set up, the game is rigged, and part of the rigging is us thinking we’re never going to lose it ourselves. Maybe it’s the rule, not the exception. What about outsourcing, like checking your bags curbside, strapping your kid into the carseat on the plane (because they’re used to it and airplane seatbelts do nothing). Be kind to yourself. There’s also this idea that a vacation and a trip with kids are two separate things. The labor does not change, but increases, but the expectation for fun and f

We replay one of our favorites (Episode 022): Are folx with ADHD made to be night owls? Or early birds? Or does your early bird/night owl setting, which feels so engrained in your personality, actually have more to do with giving yourself distraction-less time? David and Isabelle explore myths, misperceptions, and truth bombs about the nature of sleep and ADHD, including tips on setting up your morning or evening (or all day) routines, dropping the shame, and embracing what you may be doing right in staying up late (or waking up early). ---- Isabelle is super tired and is tired of her own choosing. She has been waking up earlier than usual in an attempt for her and Bobby to each get some alone time in the morning to get situated and start their routines and transitions differently. She does yoga, exercises, meditates, and can see that it gives her more energy. She wonders if folx with ADHD are actually night owls by nature, having spent years waking really early, then sleeping in—but is it ADHD? Delayed sleep phase is one idea, but David mentions that folx with ADHD seek out a distraction-free environment, and where you get that time (whether in the morning or in the night time) is the kind of person you become (early bird or night owl). So you adapt to achieve the distraction less time in the morning or at night. We carry so much of a load for all the things we’re not doing (I still need to call this person, I still need to do all these chores, etc). the escape of things being too late or too early to do also gives us distraction-less time. Being up early or staying up late gets really simple, it takes away choices. What happens when you are hyper vigilant all the time that you’ve made a mistake and someone is going to call you on making a mistake before you realize you’ve made a mistake? Or that you’ll later be embarrassed for doing something impulsively? This connects to how often is anxiety used by us to drive things, the anxiety of being an imposter, being seen as incompetent—there are lots of these themes for people. Certain environments shut off the anxiety or the drives. How much shame we have determines the intensity of the anxiety, hyperfocus, hyper vigilance. One of the reasons we are doing this podcast is to reduce that shame: there’s no shame in your night game! If you are still getting up and doing the things you need to do in the morning, go for it. If you like to wake up super early and run for hours—we can self-authorize to do the things we like and need. And shoutout to new parents, from David, that in between all of the unsolicited parenting advice, you need to believe in yourself and your needs, and not have shame for your needs. There can be so much anxiety for the ongoing assault of judgment about how you should be doing it; or how you should be spending your evenings. Or how you should be spending our mornings. Or how neurotypical you should look, how you should ‘do’ ADHD. There is no right way. If the task gets done, drop the how. Isabelle points out that early birds are often praised while night owls get the shame. David names that it’s more about finding mastery over your behavior. The answer is yes, there is no better, the real question is: are you getting up for the things you need to get up for? It’s the metacognition (see definition below), that gives you awareness that you have some mastery over your behavior (eg. Like waking up early easing your morning transitions. Isabelle is so tired she realizes her tangents are in slow motion and David names that he sees her turning on her blinker to make her tangent. Isabelle remembers reading a book about sleep that mentioned a method used by the military to fall asleep in two minutes (see article below), that includes relaxing your jaw. David names that sleep training often relies upon fatigue, and fatiguing your body. Weighted blankets can help (but with a word of caution, they are quite heavy, so if you try to throw it across your bed like a regular blanket, you will throw your shoulder out). It’s tough to plan what time to go to bed without factoring in what time you want to wake up, nor that you need to wake up earlier the day before so that you’re actually tired and fatigued when you try to go to bed early. Isabelle experiences this every time she tried to go to bed early before a trip. David is trying to actively do this now by waking up earlier the day before and drinking lots of chamomile tea. David names: we often do the right things but we don’t know why. When you’re staying up later, you’re getting the alone time that you need, but you’re not allowed to have it. Or if you’re listening to music all the time it’s helping you tune the distractions or scary noises out. Sleep hygiene is a place where we should all over ourselves (stop ‘shoulding’ on yourself). Sleep hygiene is creating routines: does it help? Does it help you get sleep? It’s also effective to chunk time together, going to sleep could connect to when you wake up,

David and Isabelle are joined by two fellow therapists who have ADHD, Caily & Sarah. They talk about how much shame we carry around our bodies and how that impacts so much of our wellness, the way women's pain and experiences are minimized and questioned, the need to stop protecting men from discomfort, and what advice they would give their younger neurodivergent selves. (Part IV of a series)-----Full Show Notes:Sarah names we do not talk about bodies—as women, we are sexualized, but we don’t talk about our bodies, we carry so much shame around our bodies. How much about her body she didn’t know until pregnancy. This is a systemic issue, that we are not informing about things we need to know. For example, one of her friends was embarrassed to share a story about poop. But we all poop! Everybody poops, that’s a good sign when we poop. But there’s so much shame around everything related to bodies, it’s not surprising that then we don’t talk about ‘hey my period seems off,’ and ‘this one day I feel so low’ because no one’s talking about bodies. Or it falls under this ‘mystery’ of PMS or menopause or postpartum—there’s a ton of needless suffering, including the way endometriosis is treated, and the way our pain is minimized. When Isabelle was birthing both of her children, she was not on painkillers, and these doctors—who were women—did not believe she was having contractions, and she was saying ‘I’m about to push” — it’s an unmistakable feeling. To demystify it, it’s the biggest poop of your life and you can’t stop it from happening. It’s ostensibly a very different poop and location (because it’s a baby), but it's that sensation nonetheless. David makes a great joke that it is a “holy shit.” Isabelle was conscious and there and happened to be in pain, and nobody believed her pain or experience. The resident replied, “I just checked you, no you don’t have to push, there's no way." The moment when Isabelle started getting angry and not overriding whatever anyone told her with what she knew in her bones—the “I will never betray my own knowing” kind of feeling is the moment that she felt her womanhood. The resident checks for dilation again when Isabelle insists, and goes ashen and states “I see a head" and suddenly everyone is mobilized for a very imminent delivery. This is just one example of how women's experiences are minimized, and doubted, and the internalized misogyny and minimization we carry within ourselves. It relates to minimizing and dismissing ADHD as well; Isabelle notices a pattern where the men who come into her office state they have ADHD or suspect they do; the women typically go around and doubt themselves so much—which comes from a lifetime of being doubted. David acknowledges that this is so big, there’s no way to have this whole conversation in one go—so it’s a lot of little conversations that are so important to have. David states that we cannot take care of men in having these conversations: if a man can’t handle having a conversation about a period, that’s a threshold measure—if you can’t pass a driving test, you don’t get a license. If someone cannot understand hearing about a menstrual cycle, which are things that happen with frequency to people we care about, we (as dudes) project that we are fragile, and that we put that out into the world. That’s all of our learning in a pretty toxic system. He describes how with his colleagues and friends, isabelle, Sarah, and Caily, they often talk about trauma all the time, we share the most intense stories, but we keep this real lived experience of something like a period in a gendered silo? It creates a lot of opportunity to marginalize people. David has bought tampons before and is now the dumb dude talking and recognizes this is so complicated—Isabelle points out that the tampons cost x amount of money, and that the costs of being a woman in the world, the so-called ‘pink tax’ is real. And what’s marketed to women and upcharged? And David hates that as a man he gets blue and only blue as his color choices. In some grocery stores, Caily shares that tampons are listed under “luxury items.” The amount of years it took for people to realize that scents and chlorine found in tampons could be harmful to our bodies—the layers of the anger you could sit with this, is real. David gives the time machine question, to their 9-12 year old self, to do it in a short amount of time, with lasers and chaotic lightning. Sarah had heinous periods, and was the latest to get it in among her peers, and she wants to say to herself “you’re going to get a period.” And also “be prepared, you’re going to have a very heavy period and you’re going to need lots of supplies, and it’s okay to carry a pad to the bathroom and for people to know, because bodies are normal.” Isabelle: “people exist because of periods! We all exist because of periods!” Sarah would also go back to pre-having a child moment, and “FYI, your estrogen levels are going to go up and down and you hav

David and Isabelle are joined by two fellow therapists who have ADHD, Caily & Sarah. They talk about how we don’t talk about hormonal changes and their impacts on ADHD enough: in short, your hormones change your ADHD symptoms during your menstrual cycles, pregnancies, post-partum, and into menopause. They cover PMDD, postpartum depression and anxiety, and a whole host of ways neurodivergent—and all—women’s experiences are systemically invalidated, and what we can do. (Part III of a series)------How do we start a conversation, say about how PMDD is a real thing for women with ADHD—there’s a vacuum in conversations and normalizing this. How do we start that kind of conversation? It blows Caily’s mind how little we talk about hormones related to ADHD. Estrogen and dopamine are interrelated; when estrogen is highest, women will report thinking clearer, less hyperactivity, etc. and in the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle, when estrogen dramatically drops and progesterone rises, estrogen is important in up regulating dopamine levels, and so when it drops, it exacerbates your ADHD symptoms. Also, progesterone rising can inhibit medication effectiveness. Doctors don’t talk about dose titration, and so little research on it, but it would make sense, if you look at the hormonal changes across your menstrual cycle, you would titrate your medication and take more before and during your period. The connection between dopamine and serotonin and estrogen and progesterone also makes it much more likely for women with ADHD to have PMDD. It’s incredibly invalidating to have this not be discussed. What is PMDD? We all have PMS (premenstrual syndrome) to a certain degree, but it’s exaggerated in PMDD, PMS symptoms that become clinically significant for a short period of time. Caily noticed and pinpointed the day, per month, where she feels like she’s going to lose her mind, she feels really depressed, off, irritable—her best friend could pinpoint that day. The most validating thing was getting a period tracker and being able to anticipate that day. Nobody ever explained to Isabelle that upon becoming a mother, she learned a lot about her periods in 6th grade for a half hour. So there’s much more to learn. You go through a big hormone change with pregnancy, and the idea of “pregnancy brain” or postpartum “mommy brain” is real. Your progesterone levels shoot up during pregnancy and your estrogen levels (which go up to, but it's a combo platter cocktail) and also you are discouraged from taking stimulant medications (please talk to your doctor) but it means you have less accommodations that usual. Then, you throw in that postpartum when your periods return, they are really changed up, and pregnancy throws your body into a 2.0 or 3.0 version of itself, where you suddenly develop eczema, or your thyroid levels are different, and voila, your periods are different, too. And then covering the postpartum period, with the baby blues, postpartum depression or anxiety—your postpartum time is also marked by a dramatic estrogen drop, so your ADHD symptoms also can be exacerbated. We are also much more likely to have postpartum depression because of the drop of estrogen. Also, your hormones fluctuate prior to your period returning, you will maybe not even notice it’s PMDD. Please seek your own medical guidance, and talk to your people and know that some of this information is harder to come by. Another thing to name is that a number of women don’t get diagnosed with ADHD until they reach menopause because it’s another time of estrogen drops and hormone fluctuations—if you already have a dopamine imbalance, it’s super exacerbated. In particular the brain fog, tiredness, and inattentiveness. And then there’s invalidation, “I can’t have ADHD, I’m just getting older!” If you’re a menopausal women just getting diagnosed, we see you! There’s so much support out there for you. Sarah is so enraged—as someone who has two children already, it explains so much, but why is this information more accessible? She didn’t know any of this. The SYSTEM!! You feel so much shame, thinking there’s something wrong with you versus it’s something that can be explained. Caily names that ADHD wasn’t added to the DSM until 1960 and it’s unbelievable looking at the research how little women are represented, and it’s so important to understand how intensely hormones impact medication. Isabelle names that it is a known factor that hormones impact medication effectiveness, which is why so many studies on medications were originally normed on and studied on men. Thinking about how people listen to their patients and clients—and the way the word “hormonal” is used to dismiss, discount, and pathologize women. It’s a biological part, it’s neutral, it’s part of a cycle. And furthermore, you can appear to have depression, anxiety, or be a new mom who’s stressed and tired but it can be a symptom of serious conditions like PCOS, thyroid conditions, autoimmune conditions t

David and Isabelle are joined by two fellow therapists who have ADHD, Caily & Sarah. They talk about how ADHD and anxiety can go hand in hand in women with ADHD, how anxiety and discouraged anger relate, how gender norms for women set up neurodivergent women to mask, and the value of just TAKING AWAY THE CHAIR. All this in twenty-some minutes? Believe it. (Part II of a series)-----David and Isabelle continue their conversation with colleagues Caily and Sarah, two therapists who identify as women who also have ADHD. David names that there are some sexist structures that women are supposed to be ‘daydreamers’ and ‘forgetful’ and when someone fits those norms (misogyny) and they are also fitting inattentive ADHD norms that impacts their ability to build self-esteem, an identity, why am I different? Why am I deficient? Etc. Caily names that so many women with inattentive ADHD go undiagnosed or get misdiagnosed with anxiety, because there are many overlapping characteristics. And women are socialized and feel the pressure to perform tasks that require high levels of organization, executive functioning, and task switching, all of which are super hard to do when you have ADHD. This is true of women and mothers, and it can feel like it’s okay to be messy or disorganized when you’re a man, and it’s okay to get help from someone, but if you’re a girl, the message we get is you can’t be messy, because then we’re told “you’re lazy.” There’s a layer of rage Isabelle is noticing rising up, and also she wants to go 100 places with this and picks one. With the anxiety piece, there’s a way where you walk around with this high bar for moms that is not as high for dads (see Jimmy Kimmel’s asking dads info about their kids). Imagine you are walking around with a higher bar, and Isabelle, for example, is not great at any of these things, people judge you as not only a person who is struggling with some things, but you’re seen as not a good mom, because your role as mom is to run the constant ticker tape of all the things, not just keeping your kids alive. But also single women carry more of this burden and pressure than single men, too—how would this not promote anxiety? And then Isabelle doubles down on the soapbox of how an emotional component that is often missing in women she works with is a healthy sense of anger. One of the reasons Isabelle looks up to Sarah is that she has a fight in her, because we’re so socially conditioned to be peacemakers, to be nurturing, to carry the emotional load and not ruffle the waters. And it all combines to SUCK. Sarah seconds this, how could you not be anxious if in the message you do something and you’re told you’re bad—how does that not create anxiety and an urge to hide these things because you feel like you’re doing something wrong? In her case, Sarah was not very anxious, because her anger got to come out at the injustice of the system itself—internalized anger can translate to anxiety. But if you express your anger, if you get to externalize it and depersonalize it, you also get to know that you’re not the problem. She wants Isabelle and Caily to know that it’s not you, you were set up for failure. Everyone with ADHD is set up for failure. Sarah recounts a moment when her and Caily were both on a zoom call and they both stood up to recross their legs to sit back down because neither likes to sit with her feet on the ground, and this was a moment of connection and shared understanding that can be so rare. Sarah has been shamed her whole life for not keeping her feet on the ground, hearing phrases like “Can’t you just sit with your feet on the ground”—and even the ways we talk about “getting grounded” is the opposite of how she gets grounded. She sees this with her daughter, who also has ADHD, who has a hard time focusing while sitting at dinner, so Sarah takes away the chair—take away the chair, take a bite, twirl in a circle, do whatever you need to do to attend to the thing I am asking you to attend to. That would have been so lovely growing up. And she heard her own parents’ voice saying “can’t you just sit down and eat your food?” Sarah realizes that her daughter cannot, so let's actually take away the chair, because the system is what’s setting you up for failure. David names that when you’re authorized to fight, things are different. Get it done, not about how—there’s a lot more HOWs applied to women, rather than men. Having anxiety is different from having healthy fear responses to threats, and the threats are everywhere, and is how the world tends to articulate experiences. David starts to explain that there’s this relationship researcher guy John Gottman, of the Gottman Institute—which Isabelle points out is actually founded and run by the Gottmans, (it’s not just John, it’s Julie and John Gottman)—which David checks himself and names he is regurgitating another societal narrative that leaves women out. (Isabelle also names that Erik Erikson’s wife (Joan). David reference

David and Isabelle are joined by two fellow therapists who have ADHD, Caily & Sarah. They talk about how they came to feel something was wrong with them, or the system around them, how girls are often socialized to mask impulsiveness or hyperactivity, and how stereotypes around ADHD impact all gender expressions. (Part I of a series)-----After a technical difficulty, David and Isabelle reintroduce Caily and Sarah, two therapists who identify as women who also have ADHD. Caily had shared how when she was little, she wanted to be the teacher’s pet, and remembers a math manipulative (say that five times fast)—these little teddy bear toys, that were colorful—and the moment when a strict teacher said you have to have a calm body, sit still, and not touch the teddy bears until she said so. She was speaking slowly and using the manipulative to do a subtraction problem, and Caily was staring at the teddy bears, and what she wanted to do with play with them, their life stories, and she ended up saying “Caily, write your name on the board” and that meant she had to sit out for recess, and remembers thinking “I’m so bad, I’m so awful” but also “I didn’t mean to, I was focusing so hard on not touching them.” David points out that she got in trouble for playing with a toy as a first grader. Caily names that it was something new and novel, which makes it so much harder not to do—and refers to Sarah, who just talked about how she knew the system was off. Sarah's story was one where she was ditching class, acting out, getting into trouble, and struggling in school. Sarah remembers being in first grade and was sent to the principal’s office after discovering where the ‘leprechaun left candy’ around St. Patrick’s Day—when it wasn’t her turn, but she knew it was dumb to get into trouble for something that she was supposed to find. It wouldn’t occur to Sarah to not touch the teddy bears, she would have immediately touched it, rather than sitting on her hands or resisting the impulse the way David and Isabelle would have wanted to. The set up is wrong: you don’t want 7 year olds to touch teddy bears? Don’t bring them out until they can touch them. She was so impulsive and did things that she wasn’t supposed to do, she broke rules because she thought the rules were dumb. Growing up, the dress code was that all the girls had to wear skirts or dresses, and so she wore pants, and got sent to detention every day for wearing pants. One day the principal even drove her home to change. This was not the 1950’s, this was the 1990’s. Her dad thought it was ridiculous and called WOW, a women’s rights organization—who contacted the school and indeed, the dress code was changed overnight. It was pivotal for Sarah to know she can change the system, and this continues to this day. Her dad was a political activist who encouraged this, but her mom was compliant and trying to fit into her suburban world as a divorced mom. David names that hyperactive (or impulsive type) ADHD, and true hyperactive type is rare, rather than a combination like David or Isabelle. So often people aren’t seen as having ADHD, but rather are seen as obstinate, oppositional, etc. and then there’s an expectancy effect, teachers see you that way and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and often times you need to start over. In 8th grade, Sarah was labeled as oppositional, no one in her elementary school was talking about ADHD, and in high school, she only saw boys with the diagnosis, and didn’t know that girls could be diagnosed with this. Her paths to high school were catholic all girls’ school, or military school, but her dad encouraged her to write a letter of recommendation for herself to get into a selective enrollment school. The principal had never read something similar and gave her a trial year and gave her an extra class and a chance to prove she can read; previously she had tested at reading at an 8th grade level, after a year of hyper focus proving she could, she was reading at a 13th grade level (college level). No one previously thought she had capacity before, and it made a world of difference. David names it’s a hard thing to recognize how healing or destructive labels can be. So many people with hyperactive ADHD are labeled as bad, or need to be broken in (like a horse? Getting the wild out of the horse?) Punish it enough, be strict enough to not be wild anymore. This is similar to Sarah being pushed to a military option—it takes a special thing to teach a kid to lean into their strengths, and we don’t teach them how to fight. And meanwhile Sarah was taught how to fight, and they were not ready for you. Isabelle resonates with Caily’s compliance growing up, and was scared of getting in trouble, and spaced out and daydreamed a lot, and talked a lot, and would get a lot of feedback about her distracting the other students. Also, this was Catholic school and she had to wear jumpers and skirts and walk through Chicago snowy winters in knee socks, or wear

David and Isabelle continue their conversation with poet, speaker, and activist for people with disabilities, LeDerick Horne—and get to hear him recite some of his incredible spoken word poems. They talk about how songs taught them to spell, the power of oral traditions, and an incredible school in Kenya that expanding education and access for those with disabilities. Seriously, his poetry will give you life. (Part IV of IV)------LeDerick continues sharing some of his poetry, describing his father’s record collection and his mother’s love of music—he recites his poem, “Alice Street Soundtrack,” Alice Street being the street where he grew up. The website understood.org (see below) shot an interview with them and how in one of his last lines, he spells out the word “FRESH,” which is one of the first words he learned how to spell, and it’s also how David learned how to spell it first time. LeDerick and David share how they learned to spell Common from his songs, too. David feels so seen, having symbol recognition disorder, he has a 4th or 5th grade spelling level and learning how to spell words was always hard, the power of songs to be able to help us learn to spell (like Gwen Stefani with “Bananas” and Fergie with “Glamorous”). LeDerick describes how the written word (thanks, Gutenberg!) Has become such a big force in the world, which he respects, but he has a deep love of the spoken word and the necessity of the spoken word, with rhyme, with rhythm. He describes the Griots (for more info, see below) being the first MC’s in Africa. LeDerick shares one more poem he wrote in 2020, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the ADA and also the national uprisings related to social justice and policing—and he wanted to write something about the beauty of those with disabilities. He recites “Until Every Barrier Falls.” David hearing LeDerick talking about the things he does in his poetry changed his understanding of LeDerick. Isabelle sees all the images as LeDerick is speaking, as does David. LeDerick describes the African word, “nomo,” which refers to the magic of the spoken word. We need to speak it into being, and like his Aunt Kay said, as long as we say someone’s name, a person who has passed, they live. He comes from strong oral traditions, his dad was a cross-country coach, and his grandfather was President of his chapter of the NAACP, and LeDerick aspires to continue those traditions, and continue their work. If he’s doing his job well, you can see it, poetry doesn’t say, it shows. Isabelle and David are so honored that LeDerick has been Something Shiny’s first guest (upon David’s insistence, and LeDerick’s generous sharing of time and energy), and we are here to promote whatever LeDerick wants to promote. He mentions the Rare Gem Talent School in Kenya that supports students with disabilities, and right now they’re renting an old hotel and providing education for about 120, and were able to raise funds to get through the pandemic. Now they’re trying to raise money for the land they’re on and to eventually create a complex that will support 500 students with dyslexia, ADHD, etc. and have a huge waitlist. Nancy was just at the International Dyslexia Conference—you can’t do it on your own (for more information and how to support this amazing school, see below!)Songs we mention that help us spell words“Fresh” - Fresh 3 M.C.’s “Fresh” “Common” - De La Soul’s “The Bizness” Bananas - “Hollaback Girl” by Gwen Stefani Glamorous - “Glamorous” by Fergi More info on the amazing school in Kenya:Rare Gem Talent SchoolVideo from understood.org featuring LeDerickVideo for “Until Every Barrier Falls” (WATCH THIS RIGHT NOW) More on LeDerick Horne(here's a brief bio)(here's his amazing link tree)LeDerick and Dr. Margo Izzo’s book, Empowering Students with Hidden Disabilities: A Path to Pride and Success Black and Dyslexic Podcast (hosted by Winifred Winston and LeDerick Horne)Celebrating Black History and People with Disabilities - Youtube series A glimpse of LeDerick's live events - from the Nevada Student Leadership Transition Summit (NSLTS)The vision boards LeDerick talks about appear in this video at 18:45 - December 14, 2021, Humboldt County School District School Board Meeting - The Lowry High School NSLTS Team presents on their efforts, including self-directed IEPsNew Jersey Coalition for Inclusive EducationAll in for Inclusive Education DAVID'S DEFINITIONSDisproportionality: the racial or ethnic differences that exist in how students with learning differences are identified, placed, and disciplined—for example, how black and brown students with ADHD might be labeled as having Oppositional Defiant Disorder or “behavioral issues” while white students are identified as having ADHD and thus treated very differently.Griot: a West African ethnic group dating back to the 14th century that act as storytellers, mediators, royal advisors, and bards, the keepers of oral histories and stories for families and tribes. For more, check

David and Isabelle continue their conversation with poet, speaker, and activist for people with disabilities, LeDerick Horne—from how the LD/ADHD community often generates it’s knowledge base from peers and social media, to losing resources by ignoring people, to recognizing that the suffering is real and the urge to help someone not suffer as you did has a big fancy psychology term for it (transmuting internalization, PHEW). Go further into the depth of how you’re not alone and also hear one of LeDerick’s incredible poems - Dare to Dream. (Part III of a series)----LeDerick talks about a multimedia approached to activism, making a Youtube series on Celebrating Black History & People with Disabilities, and starting up a TikTok account (see links below)—and the importance of recognizing that for most people with disabilities, the information is transmitted peer to peer, rather than parent to child. At most of his events, he notices that parents are sitting on the sidelines, and the kids are interacting about the best apps to use for accommodations—we’re not going to read the book, access the study, but we can listen to a podcast. David jumps in about a shared oral history and the access to that oral history is geography—and now podcasts can overcome that. Given the history of segregation, and New Jersey being the 6th most segregated state in the nation, and living in a blue color, primarily black and Latinx community—you need to be able to cross over to other parts of town and communities to access information. Segregation cuts us off from resources, from information, and the power of having these conversations for everyone to be able to find out in the world. The power of sports or other activities to bring people together—he was able to meet folks that were not in special ed because he ran track and cross country. If he had just stayed in those classrooms, he wouldn’t have had access to them professionally. LeDerick was invited to Harvard, the UN, the White House—connecting to others with a shared passion and from all walks of life. LD/ADHD crosses all lines, and it’s important to recognize, and there is privilege that comes in there and makes the experience of being LD/ADHD so different. David names—when we’re talking about people in this world, whether the color of their skin, their neurodivergence, their gender—there isn’t one way to receive a message in this world. And there’s no way for a message to become universal, and it stretches, and we need to have these conversations more often, not just the right way. It’s important to honor choice and agency—and with LD and ADHD, we’re looking at exceptional people that are being missed. There are people who could be potentially curing major diseases, changing the world, we’re losing resources by ignoring people. LeDerick went to school with some folks who he looked up to intellectually, artistically, and who were in the same classrooms as him—and whether it was resources at home, luck—the story ended very differently. The three of us—LeDerick, David, and Isabelle—we’re the survivors, we’re the ones who made. As he takes his last breath, LeDerick wants to know he’s made the world a better place, so no one has to go through the same sort of suffering. David drops the transmuting internalization—it’s the quantum leap of psychology, you don’t want others to suffer as you do and you go back and try to the right the wrong that was done to you, for someone else. David doesn’t want people to suffer, but he wants people to suffer (not as a jerk)—but he is what he is because of what he suffered. But what are the right ways to suffer? There’s a lot of needless suffering. There’s a lot of bad returns on investment, so being able to right these wrongs, and wanting to correct something that’s wrong in the world, they can feel it, because they can tell that you’re not correcting them. This makes Isabelle thing of trauma mastery, and how we can be unconsciously drawn to scenarios and relationships that reenact the trauma we suffered because we want to rewrite the script this time. And also the difference between pain and suffering, and there’s some disease (leprosy or Hansen's disease) that numbs your ability to tell you’ve had an injury, so you keep going and keep going and this leads to infections and loss of fingers, etc. (See below)—the idea of pain as a messenger, as something that indicates you need to notice something so you can change it, versus suffering as feeling isolated and stuck in that pain and aloneness. Trauma work as requiring community, and connection and vulnerability, and how trauma can’t be healed in isolation. David loses his thought around how this connects to inclusion, and the three pause for an insert, and then he thinks of what he wanted to say! He pulls up the example of PTSD rates and how countries that are facing war, like Israel, might be assumed to have the highest rates of PTSD—and yet Israel has the lowest rate, which relates to how whe

David and Isabelle continue their conversation with David’s dear and incredible friend, LeDerick Horne—a poet, speaker, and activist for people with disabilities. From vision boarding your IEP, to the importance of near-peer mentors and role models who have walked a little further down the LD/ADHD road, to accommodations and frustrations in LeDerick’s multiple roles (as businessperson, activist, poet, writer, tree farmer, etc.). Go deeper into recognizing an inclusive view of success, and what success can look like for each of us individually. (Part II in a series)----David describes how in education, it might be helpful to facilitate extra resources and have other eyes on schools and supporting the staff and professional development, just as therapists need supervision, eyes on their work. LeDerick points out that nobody builds a building or a car or anything by themselves, most problems get solved in teams professionally, so when it comes to building up and supporting a child, it takes a village, too. When we say we want to educate all students, it takes a team effort to actually create the diversity needed to honor the students. Inclusion is a richer experience for most educators, too—the first two or three years for teachers is burnout city for teachers, and it’s important to come to their support and help create this environment. LeDerick got his start being a motivational, assembly-style speaker in college, when he was part of a group of a support program for tutoring and accommodations to have community to celebrate surviving another week of college together. Someone suggested going back to their high schools—and it was great PR for the program he was a part of, but it also had a lasting impact on him and these young people. When we think about this work from a civil rights, from an activitist point of view—young people should be the ones leading the work and informing and forming the voices of it. Training people to be better self-advocates, to run their own IEP meetings, to understand their rights under the law, to use their voice as an agent of change. Its important to give a voice to those who are overlooked, or being used—how important it is to make sure you’re listening, not just directing. David names how LeDerick’s experience is shattering expectations; we’re taught to mask, to hide our LD’s, to not talk about how hard the road is, to not talk about what to avoid, everything is good enough or not good enough — but we needs what’s an inclusive view of success? What can success look like, because it’s not going to look the same all the time. What’s a model people can go to? Isabelle references Lawrence of Arabia—the potential of youth (see full quote below). There’s something so important about people seeing someone who has actually walked the path be able to talk about the things we’re not supposed to talk about. LeDerick wrote a book with his colleague, Dr. Margo Izzo (who also has ADHD -- see link below), and the use of narratives as well best practices for kids transitioning from high school into their next steps. The importance of near-peer mentors—the people who have recently been where you’ve been, the need for that. LeDerick talks about how the State of Nevada hired young adult facilitators going back into their high schools, and they make a vision-board/dream-board that speak directly to the IEP sections, and they teach cohorts of students how to capture the IEP sections in this board and present it in a visual way. Once the pandemic hit, the vision boards became PowerPoints and using social media images to help tell the story. One school created a club for people who are feeling marginalized, some students want to do teacher education, or getting on the loudspeaker at school and sharing a new disability diagnosis, to raise awareness. There’s a video LeDerick mentions showcasing this: HERE IT IS (VIDEO OF VISION BOARD/STATE OF NEVADA). What if we could make dream boards for work? How could we break some of the neurotypical molds we’re caught in, sometimes without even realizing it. What it might mean to not have to constantly translate yourself to be understood by this neurotypical world. Being seen by somebody like you is so key. David appears to be paying attention but he is totally not—and the moment somebody gets that, they understand each other on a new level. He quotes Ruth Bader Ginsberg (see quote below) and describes how it may not be their fault, but the world carries a neurotypical gaze and it dictates what transitions should look like, what IEPs should look like. We want kids in schools who are on IEPs to advocate and know what’s on their IEP—because when they know what’s on their IEP and how it works, they do better in school and more importantly, feel less shame around that. When IEP’s were rolled out, parents were not given this instruction—kids were told to not come to the meeting, seen as something to be embarrassed by. It can mean a lot of have differences seen and va

David starts by introducing his incredible friend—poet, speaker, and advocate for all people with disabilities, LeDerick Horne. He uses LeDerick’s own advice about introducing people: think of the last time you saw them and then why they’re here now. David last remembers walking with LeDerick on a cold Chicago day after eating delicious Ethiopian food and talking up a storm almost a year before this recording, and the reason for LeDerick being on Something Shiny goes deeper. When David was first learning about how to be an advocate and unmask his own LD/ADHD (side note: David does not like frosting on cakes, he just doesn’t), LeDerick was one of David's first mentors in this field, but he’s also a poet, a playwright, a businessperson, a consultant, a fellow D&D enthusiast, advocate for the voiceless, tree farmer, and the list could go on—David wants to be like LeDerick when he grows up. LeDerick feels likewise with David, a good friend and remarkable human being—and it’s been great for them to go on this journey together. Isabelle is so giddy to hear more and to witness such love and friendship. LeDerick was a founding board chair for a mentoring organization, Project Eye to Eye (see link below for more), where he and David first met, but the two became closer when they were working for the State of Nevada, where an event for young people with disabilities, primarily LD/ADHD coming from all over the state of Nevada, talking about transition with the state's leaders shifted into building a community, and David makes that happen. David was the first one to talk and break the ice, and these were teams of young people throughout the state (as both the most rural and urban state in America)—where some were the only ones with an LD/ADHD in the county, others coming from Vegas and huge school districts—and David was sent in to break the ice and pull them all together, and he would make that connection, and the resources that were able to share for the young people. It was this ability to look around the room and realize you were not alone, and as leaders, LeDerick and David had to embody the modeling. David also realized that the power of being who we were, and not coaching people to be perfect, because being perfect misses the point. David wonders, what would LeDerick want to tell a younger version of himself—he was just in a room with an 18 yo kid who was about to go transition post high school, and he wanted him to hear: “if nothing else happens, you need to hear that you are okay just as you are now. You are not broken. Nothing about you needs to be fixed. That you are beautiful: your mind, your body, the way you show up in this world, you are beautiful right now.” He tries to chip away the edges of shame, embarrassment that then let someone be who they really are, like a sculptor. David wonders how you can say that and convey this without it feeling like patting someone on the head—are you, LeDerick, aware how you embody this in such a powerful way? LeDericks shares still feeling nervous, and how many different settings he’s been in, whether it’s a setting where he felt like people could attack him for what he was saying in a presentation to school, v. Speaking to a bunch of academics, to speaking to one kid in a room—he’s passionate about inclusion, having come from a segregated experience himself. But he’s able to carry himself in this way through collaboration, a network of support, and also knowing that our representation and our narrative matters. It’s one thing for a parent, teacher, or counselor to say you’re going to be okay, but the it comes from someone who has lived it, it’s different and hits very differently, covering the ups and downs. “It’s not just the message, it’s also the messenger.” And he uses poetry and it’s cuts through the BS, it gets to the heart of the message. David makes a reference to one of his favorite book series, the Gunslinger (see below), and there’s a line in it where Roland says “I can tell you’re a good person, I’ve seen you fight naked” — there’s a vulnerability and a naked fighting that happens. David is in an organizing council with fellow folks with LD/ADHD, at Eye to Eye, and he’s having this incredible community experience, and then LeDerick puts on a full play, and did spoken word poetry, and sat and talked with people for hours, and the whole time he was doing it he was effortless. David has never met somebody with an LD that moved like water, was so carefree, so confident—it was embodied in you, and you fight for anyone that is marginalized in a system and the importance of inclusion. Teachers are working an impossible task, and are crunched in the middle of the system and kids and parents, and it’s very simple for people to say “advocate for the use of accommodations” but what does it actually mean for there to be an inclusive classroom. LeDerick has just come from a municipality conference and the mayor of Hillside named how educators are really nation buil

Here's a REPLAY of good ol' episode 11 to help ease your transition into 2023-with new episodes coming soon! -- Why do some of us minimize and reduce the number of choices while others seek excitement and novelty? Why do some of us need everything listed out while others need to just try something blindly? The secret? Different types of ADHD and different ways our ADHD shows up in different environments! David and Isabelle are joined by Bobby and Noah, who also have ADHD, and talk about things like trying to leave the house, deciding what to eat, and why their accommodations all look so different.-----Transitions and choices are hard. Isabelle and David are joined by Isabelle’s husband, Bobby, and David’s friend and fellow clinician, Noah, both of whom also have ADHD to talk about different types of ADHD. We don’t remember all the stuff we have to do to leave the house. Isabelle describes a detailed whiteboard and just how long it took to get into the habit of not forgetting things like lip balm. David puts everything into his bag at night. Isabelle has to do a one-touch rule. Noah’s and Bobby’s work bag are empty. Bobby’s really into minimizing things, which David points out is a wonderful intervention, especially for inattentive type— decision fatigue. Noah does this for going out, always ordering a blackened chicken sandwich. How exhausting it is to make decisions all the time. Noah’s experience in a blind restaurant. Bobby’s picky eating is connected to something ADHD-related—hypersensitivity around texture. David’s experience of this is big after decades of vegetarianism, experiencing the texture of meat for the first time (bacon and hot dogs are great. Other meat for him? Not so much). Isabelle references the Paradox of Choice book (TLDR) and describes the phenomena of randomly remembering facts she’s read, but struggling to remember what she read on command. Recognizing that when there is an overabundance of choice, we think we made the wrong one (or are left more disatisfied) because we always think we could’ve picked better. This relates to Isabelle’s reaction to Tinder as something that makes her nauseous thinking about it: too many choices. Same with old school diner menus. Or Cheesecake Factory menus. David agrees. Isabelle describes novelty seeking with food, whereas Bobby wants the same thing. David went to Superdawg and got everything on the menu he wanted because he couldn’t make a decision. Noah would go there, deliberate what to get for 20 minutes, and leave with nothing. Why do we all sound so different and yet similar? We’re talking about the distinctions between inattentive and impulsive ADHD types. What about combined type? Depends on the mastery of the environment: the more mastery, the more impulsive we can be, the less mastery, the more inattentive.What is Superdawg? If you’re in and around Chicago, you’re welcome to check it out. If you’re not, it’s still a fun place to look into. From the bottom of our pure beefy hearts. Paradox of Choice - book by Barry Schwartz (TLDR for Isabelle but an interesting summary appears on wikipedia). DEFINITIONSADHD types explained through how we order at a restaurant:inattentive type: struggles to figure out what to order, stares at menu (accommodations: always orders the same thing or same type of thing, asking the server for their choice/having the chef or someone else choose for you)impulsive type: orders three different entrees (to try them all), or the novel/strange seeming thing on the menu (accommodations: finding new places to eat or food bars where you can throw on whatever you want in that moment)combination type: see above and experience BOTH, often depending on your level of mastery/comfort (more mastery in the environment, the more your impulsivity shows up). Decision fatigue: the more decisions we make, the more our quality of decisions (or ability to do so well) deteriorates. Too many decisions can lead to an overwhelming feeling, burnout and poor decisions. Avoiding the complexity of decisions, can be an adaptive tool for individuals to preserve brain power for more important decisions, especially when the inattentive-type ADHD experience is loud. Here's an article on how to notice when it's happening to you.Hypersensitivity around texture: some textures are going to make people feel more yucky inside than you would think they could. Often times it can be really helpful to honor these sensitivities, and not try to push through them unless there's serious impact on food and nutrition.Here's a quick article on how to cope with hypersensitivities to sound, texture, taste, smell, etc. -----Cover Art by: Sol VázquezTechnical Support by: Bobby Richards

(originally episode 08! rerun for your holiday break enjoyment!) How do we separate a task from our emotions about it? Especially when it comes to our own battles with procrastination? Isabelle is struggling with this and Bobby, her husband, is curious to hear more. David breaks it down like this: let’s say the task is running 5 miles in 60 minutes, which sounds very hard to Bobby. Does it matter what you’re wearing? What time of day you go? If it’s raining or not? There’s lots of things we can get caught up in the ‘emotionality’: I don’t have the right clothes, I don’t like the weather, etc. The emotionality is the stuff that we get caught up in that doesn’t matter. Our view of how it needs to be done that gets in the way. Can you walk while watching a video, for example. Isabelle tries to break a sweat once a day. But it only counts if she goes to the exercise class she signed up for. Bobby asks: why does a brain with ADHD is likely to procrastinate in the first place and then why do we discount doing it differently? ADHD individual needs a specific amount of stimulation to do a task; not enough or too much, they need to self-medicate. The emotions we use to self-medicate include anger, anxiety or excitement, etc. Medication can give you the stimulation without the anger, anxiety, or excitement. We procrastinate because it boosts the stakes, gives us a threat, so every moment of working on the task is alleviating the stress so there’s no delay in gratification, we’re instantly rewarded (yay dopamine!) for working on it. If you had worked on it two weeks earlier, you wouldn’t feel any different because there was no stress/threat you were relieving, you wouldn’t get that feeling of reward. So let’s teach people how to procrastinate better, rather than trying to undo it. What if you knew you weren’t going to work on the report until Saturday—what could you prep for Saturday, instead of beating yourself up for not working on it until then, if that’s the sweet spot of stress/crunch time for you? Your brain needs to experience that threat to feel that relief. A person with ADHD can be an angry, anxious, etc. — I’m going to be a monster when I’m focusing on this, so what can we do to ask for what we need? Is it easier to find a quiet place to be a monster or not become a monster (let’s say you get angry when you work yourself up to focus on something)? Bobby and Isabelle share that they would set each other off and both need accommodations in their relationships, but realizing that the meta-awareness of knowing it connects to ADHD and what they need has helped them navigate situations and help get out of each other’s way rather than asking that person to magically change. David points out that we’re normalizing that folx with ADHD can all become monsters in this sense and that not all monsters are bad—you could be angry/anxious to the max and find ways to create room for that that minimize the hurt and ill effects on those around you. There’s lots of relational trauma for people with ADHD and other forms of learning differences. You see everyone sit down and do something one way and you do it differently, your brain tells you it’s because you’re stupid/not following the rules/not doing it right, etc. Right around between ages 7-11, kids' peers normalize their world rather than their parents. For example, how are relaxation and self care portrayed? As wine and spa time—what if you don’t like wine and baths/spas (for example, like Isabelle). David makes the point that everyone else is doing it right, we’re just not taking in the input right. Maybe no more boring baths. Something needs to move. What we can do with the optical illusion of snow falling or a shower rain falling. The ADHD brain is meant and designed to procrastinate, but people with ADHD are made to believe their thoughts are naturally wrong. Healing comes from acknowledging this.Does cranberry juice prevent UTI’s? Yes (and no).Side note, one thing Isabelle learned on this internet rabbit hole about cranberry juice and UTI’s was this: “Cranberry is a term derived from the contraction of “crane berry.” This name is derived from the nickname of the bilberry flower, which, when it withers, is similar in appearance to the head and neck of the sand crane, a bird that often feeds on the berries of this plant.” Who knew? For the full fascinating scientific article about cranberries and UTIs, click here.DAVID’S DEFINITIONSTask: what you’re trying to do - the ‘work’ of a group or a person.for example: I am finishing my project this weekend.Emotionality: what you do to prepare to do a task - beliefs/fears/assumptions about what you’re doingfor example: I’m doing it wrong/right, I always procrastinate, big fear you’ll never get it done, dream that someone will come and save you from having to do it, etc.PROCRASTINATION: this is the behavior that occurs in between the assignment of a task, and working on the task. This is waiting to the last minute, or what we do

How do you survive traveling with ADHD? What about traveling with children, particularly small children? And what happens when you find yourself rushing, leaving things until the last minute, and forgetting your charger once again? David and Isabelle swap stories and share specific tips to traveling and also discuss WHY ARE THERE SOCK NUBBINS AND TAGS. Seriously. -----There can be so much pressure to have a Hallmark, picture-postcard perfect holiday and it’s so important to revise those expectations and think about what you actually want to do, for example, maybe it’s “we go to the this house, tolerate everyone for 45 minutes, you grab the turkey, I grab the mashed potatoes, and we leave.” And what about the uncomfortable holiday clothes? Isabelle laughs and mentions a brilliant SNL fake ad for Macy’s that’s all about children’s clothing and how uncomfortable it is. David describes this might be where task meets emotionality (for definition, see below)—is the task of the holidays spending time with family? David remembers the holidays being hard, everyone fighting on the way there and then fine when they got home, and wearing uncomfortable clothes, and just wanting to leave and it being awful. Isabelle remembers coming home so late and it was freezing and trying to sleep in the back seat, freezing. David had the experience going to his partner’s holiday celebrations and—they don’t have ADHD—everyone got along, hung out, sang songs, played piano—and this is real? Friendsgiving is a thing, and you can make choices, what you do for holidays is a choice: like winter is a choice. Anytime you feel trapped or caught in something, changing the language to “I’m choosing to do blank because blank…” with what needs your meeting with it, changes it from you “have to go see Meemaw” You can take the shoulds, musts, and have-to and change it to choices. And maybe Meemaw doesn’t care what you wear, she just wants to see you. WHY ARE THERE TAGS IN CLOTHING? And NUBBINS ON SOCKS? We have evolved so many incredible things, we have AI, we have genome sequencing, and we have sock nubbins, and who invented pantyhose and shapewear. David likes shape wear because the underarmour stuff he wears is nice and tight. Isabelle describes that it’s more designed to smush you in and sometimes it’s great—this is maybe Isabelle’s trauma after being a 6 ft woman at 14 year old, so she was fitting into shape wear and pantyhose as a kid and hated it so much and it was so uncomfortable. David always got all these hand-me-down socks that were in a constant state of yawn—now David gets the really tight socks that stay up all day, “look at you sock, staying up all day!” And transitioning back to travel—and sometimes travel is really hard because we’re pushing ourselves harder than we should. Having the toolbox is just as important on the airplane or airport, or knowing how long you’re waiting with a toolbox. Whoever’s doing the traveling, your self care is the most important: you can’t control your kids being miserable, they will be, you have to put your oxygen mask, go at your pace, go at your tolerance. Kids will fall apart. You need to be there for them when they do. So what do you need to be there for them? Maybe it’s a treat, maybe it’s slowing down—take care of you. Pack the day before. And always include an extra day back at home before transitioning back. You can change the day back—the end is always going to be the end of the vacation, but you being able to have a different re-entry ritual into your day to day can be game changing. Isabelle shares some tips from her own front line experiences, such as when driving from Indianapolis from Nashville as part of moving, when she forgot the iPad…and everything else, and her kid was stuck in the way back for hours bored out of their mind. Needless to say, iPads are last steps, so it’s a plan B, but it forces them to have lots of plan A—and on this trip, she forgot all the plan B’s and A’s. And everyone is going to have a meltdown—Isabelle, as mom, will also have a breakdown. It doesn’t matter how prepared you are, travel will break you at some point. Travel with kids is courting brilliant memories of chaos, so she anticipates and plans on her having a breakdown. So she tells herself that “I’m a good mom who’s reached her limit.” You’re trained from babyhood to meet their needs all the time, but it’s a set up, the game is rigged, and part of the rigging is us thinking we’re never going to lose it ourselves. Maybe it’s the rule, not the exception. What about outsourcing, like checking your bags curbside, strapping your kid into the carseat on the plane (because they’re used to it and airplane seatbelts do nothing). Be kind to yourself. There’s also this idea that a vacation and a trip with kids are two separate things. The labor does not change, but increases, but the expectation for fun and frivolity is also increased, but maybe change the expectations inside. Also okay if it’s extra hard because

How do you survive family dinners? Sitting at a table until everyone is done? Overstimulation? Sticky conversations and setting boundaries? David and Isabelle talk concrete tips for getting through the holidays, and even enjoying them—and the truth behind ear worm songs’ lyrics that may pop your Thanksgiving Day Parade Spiderman balloons. ----David and Isabelle name that any time you’re meeting with family, traveling, disrupting routine, and then you throw in kids—how do we do this? Let’s start with dinner, and then work our way back to how you get there. Whenever you’re going out to eat with family…family is a tricky word. Family describes ritual—people who get together at different times, don’t have to be related. Whoever is in your network, where you go. Kids really need help knowing the story behind people, understanding the story behind Uncle Jack and Aunt Sue—it can help create connecting moments by throwing in novelty. Kids can be really honest and if it’s boring, they may ask: “Why are you boring?” Also, we love Aunt Sue. Partners might use this, too, not just kids. Let alone how family stuff can be so loaded, you may not want to share the same room with some people, there can be anxiety, and anticipatory dread. Part when you’re going to go visit v. hosting—how do we cope with the different layers of anxiety. With a heavier family situation—bring the toolbox, especially with kids. Before you leave, have a backpack, help your child pick toys (even if they’re 14), headphones, and talk about where you can use your phone or play games. What about the interesting power struggle of having kids sit at the table until everyone is finished eating—let’s think about that differently, because sitting for that long is so hard for kids, and adults, with ADHD—and why is hosting so FUN, because you’re always translating your restlessness into effective hosting. Most people with ADHD fall into really good host and amazing networker, and we can also know how to help people feel connected and welcome because we know how hard it can be to be isolated. Take breaks with your child. Be honest about how long it’s going to be (like 3.5 hours, not "just 15 more minutes"), and be realistic about what battles you’re going to pick with your child. Sometimes when we think about social norms we’re trying to show and build the frustration tolerance in our children—we place such a load and raise the stakes so much for the holidays, and we forget that that is a set up with kids. The more you raise the expectations and raise the stakes, the more it’s asking for disaster. For the parents who feel that pressure, judgment, and family rules—really hard to have an unreasonable expectations and have them passed on. Can be helped to know that expectations are resentments waiting to happen—and let the table know the expectation we’re actually dealing with (eg. We’re trying to help kid finish food, as opposed to sit quietly for an hour). Have a wonderful moment with your family, knowing that the most unconventional moments are the memory makers. Also can be really overstimulating, and have a plan for what to do then ahead of time, and how to manage that. How do we recognize we are overstimulated? Isabelle went to Costco and only realized 3 hours later how she was overstimulated. We’re all going to feel things differently, but certain things will always be overstimulating: loud noise (increases heart rate) and triggers your fear response. Think about that moment you left a loud concert or house party and that moment when you walk into the cold night air and then you take a breath—knowing that we’re overstimulated is really hard to notice (want to work on with a therapist or close friend)—we can tolerate the heat getting turned up really high and we don’t notice it until it’s at a certain point. David knows he’s overstimulated when he’s worried about breaking things or bumping into people. When Isabelle starts to feel she’s obstacle coursing it, that’s when she’s overstimulated. Sometimes being overstimulated is really good, or really bad—it’s not necessarily one thing or another: it's what’s appropriate for the moment. David will sometimes look at his partner where she’s like “we don’t have time for that.” Getting signs and knowing these things, like with your kid—“I noticed that you were walking around with your hands balled up”—“can I check in on you at Meemaw’s house when you’re hands are clenched, maybe we can go on a walk with me?” Walks are important intervention: changes environment, smells open up, visual stimulation, movement. Or have a place in Dodge—a weighted blanket in the basement, watch a couple of TikTok’s. Isabelle describes the giant mega Christmas party they’d attend that included all these pockets of peace and respite—like smoke breaks (side note: folx with ADHD being drawn to the stimulant with nicotine, but also the habit of taking breaks with a few different people). How valuable it might be not only notice your kid’s cu

Why are some of us anxious and some of us excited (or a combo platter of both)? And is it possible to turn anxiety, or anger, or shame spirals, into something else? David and Isabelle swap stories, talk transgenerational trauma, and get curious about how we are socialized to mask and behave...and that perhaps the solution for being overly apologetic lies in the midwestern gem: "ope.”----- Isabelle starts by expanding on the idea of how you think about things, how that inner landscape can connect into tapping into norepinephrine—if you’re practicing going “I see you anxiety, I see what you’re trying to do, and I’m so grateful I have you because it helps me…” what it means to not shame or blame yourself for having an instinct to worry versus what you do know to be true. Short of someone giving you direct feedback, you don’t have data either way, so saying hi to your anxiety or feeling, and taking a few breaths to be grateful. Then when you do have a tough moment, like a hard meeting at work, you won’t beat yourself up about it as much. David even says: you can skip the shame spiral. Norepinephrine is so much about the inertia and movement of something. People with kids who have ADHD either have a very very clean room, or very very messy room. For those with a messy room, they’re like “where to start? Do I burn it and start over again?” Then you give them one specific thing to do, they earn dopamine from that one thing. So you build momentum by building a feedback loop between dopamine and norepinephrine, because you judge yourself on a very reasonable scale. If you make a broad request, it’s like “whaaa?” If you say “pick up your legos” or “Hunt for all the legos you can, you have 7 minutes, you earn 3 snarf points? What’s a snarf point? I’ll tell you in 7 minutes”—you now have specificity, and time pressure, and reward. Isabelle describes that she lives in the anxious side of the spectrum, and David lives in the excitement of it. If anxiety and excitement are the same physiological symptoms, how can you replace the two things? Isabelle wonders at her anxiety, which she is not bummed about, but knows that it’s a part of her, and also knows that it has served her and her people across the generations—like she feels less anxious when she has a very stocked pantry or fridge. How can that be turned into excitement? We’re talking about the interplay of epigenetics, and the interplay of how you lean into the anxiety. If you’re in the United States, you’d be hard pressed to not have a transgenerational history of trauma, and as men and women (and non-binary folx), we are treated differently and are rewarded for going to anger or anxiety. Men are traditionally reinforced for getting angry in the U.S.—it’s reinforcing for them, and it’s not great, and in the same way anxiety may be reinforced for women. Not that it’s so cut and dry and binary-based. David elaborates that his impulsivity has been viewed as confidence, whereas for women, it can be viewed as overemotionality, and can be shamed, or put in corners. David had to work really hard to find excitement, he was way more in that angry place, fighting any system, any person he could. When you get angry, you feel yucky afterwards for like two hours, and he met really good friends, had an amazing brother, and had good supports, and a lot of people don’t have that. And he had a choice in that moment whether to get anxious or excited. Isabelle is so grateful David shared that about himself and felt so seen, really resonating with the idea that whereas David’s impulsivity was viewed as confidence, hers was read as overreacting, or overdramatic. She describes how she makes big gestures and shrieks and has big reactions to things and how often she has to blunt them or try to mask them in her daily life. She also recognizes the layers of privilege she carries as a white, cisgendered woman, that she has gotten a lot of reinforcement for her anxiety. Her asking, let’s say, her kid’s teacher a detail-oriented question seems almost assumed, that she would be the one who needs to be vigilant about the details of things, whereas her husband, Bobby, is seen as winning the day if he gets the kids to school, even though he is more effective at this. How we’re socially viewed impacts how we think about it—perhaps Bobby running late is viewed as he was busy doing important things, whereas Isabelle names she has been conditioned to be extra apologetic and nervous and take it on as some awful thing that she’s running late. David goes into Tavistock group dynamics stuff (see show notes below)—based around the work of Wilfred Bion—where people learn how they are in a group. David was in a group and someone came in late and were overly explaining it, the group ended up attacking her about all her apologies—David named there is an art to being late, and it is this: acknowledging the inconvenience, being very small, and apologizing at the end. Don’t talk too much or give too many specifics,

The first thing David wants to talk about how amazing Dolly Parton is, how he’s heard more amazing things that she’s done in the last six months and it blows his mind.. Isabelle references the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, about how Jad Abumrad’s (of Radiolab’s) dad befriended Dolly Parton, and just how beloved she is and why that might be. David names Imagination Library, which gives free books to kids 5 and under every month to encourage literacy, because her own dad never had a chance to learn how to learn how to read. Isabelle really wants to go to Dollywood, and David’s partner Robin went, and it was amazing and is like Orlando in the Smokies. The other thing David wants to talk about is norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in ADHD and it’s almost a crime we haven’t mentioned it before, focusing so much on dopamine. Dopamine is still really important, but both are. Imagine that neurotransmitters are like a light switch, they are on or off (whereas hormones are like a thermostat, you change the temperature and then it slowly brings the body back up to it). Dopamine is the reward or satisfaction feeling, it’s sex drugs and rock n’ roll, it’s raising the stakes and feeling the risk and then doing the thing anyway. For example, as you procrastinate and then do the task, you feel dopamine as you inch closer to getting your task done, because it’s giving you the feeling of achievement, but as soon as you’re done, the dopamine is gone. As folx with ADHD, we are dopamine deficient, so we’re kind of starving for it, it’s a little bump we’re getting as opposed to a full high of dopamine. David uses the example of researching a knife, and he went down this massive research wormhole, and he buys the knife, and the moment it came, it was like “Yay, it’s here.” (Crickets chirping). The shine and newness goes away, and he still likes the life, the handoff in that moment is from dopamine being the lead thing, and then norepinephrine comes in. So if we’re hunter-gatherers, the dopamine comes in when you’re hunting, as Isabelle points out, it’d be evolutionarily beneficial to have the process be rewarding, and the moment you hunt and then you feel productive, that’s norepinephrine kicking in, that feeling of being productive. It connects to motivation, and the thoughts that you have, how you think about things, and Nora, as David calls norepinephrine, is amazing, she is involved with the self-talk in your head, and when there’s too much, there is negative self-talk cycles we can get into. Motivation isn’t always pleasant, because we can shame ourselves or beat ourselves up. Isabelle names that she thought the I did it feeling is dopamine. It can be hard to get things started or finish them, using the gatherer metaphor, it can be rough getting out to find the berry bush, but then you get the dopamine once you found the bush and are picking the berries, and then again the let down once you’ve found them all—Isabelle wonders if it’s a pleasant feeling, having this norepinephrine trade off? David names it can easily be manipulated by how you think about things. If you feel like you did nothing but brush your teeth today, then that’s how you feel. But if you brushed your teeth after just breaking a leg and having food poisoning, you’d feel differently about it, you’d feel so grateful you did the thing—you get the burst from feeling validated. Isabelle keeps clarifying dopamine is the thrill of the hunt or the chase or the online shopping cart building, or researching cutting boards (which synchronicitously with David’s knife-researching example, Isabelle is now doing), ends once you order it, is norepinephrine the moment when you’ve ordered the thing. The dopamine goes down once you’ve finished the task, it goes away because it makes you want the next thing (it pushes you to seek that reward again), like David ordering all the video games, and only playing with two of the games. Isabelle is still confused: is it the feeling that comes after the thing happens that forces us to pause and reflect on what just happened. It’s more complicated than this, so David is being purposefully vague, but it’s connected to our perception of productivity, worth, and work. If dopamine is what helped you get through the day, norepinephrine is how do you feel about the day you just did, it’s around wins and accomplishments. If dopamine is the lights, norepinephrine is evaluating the light show. David thinks about it in his life, there are some days where he mowed the lawn, went to hardware store, saw a friend, did laundry, “what a productive day!” And then he feels the WOOO that’s norepinephrine. Dopamine is really connected with being distracted by auditory outside things, whereas too much norepinephrine, you are distracted by internal judgments. If you’re ruminating a lot, or evaluating what you just said to the friend, replaying your day a lot, that’s norepinephrine, and if you have too much it can get you caught in tha

David describes how when we hyper focus and launch ourselves into something, it can be hard to finish, because the hardest part is behind us. He heard then governor Gavin Newsom speak and he describe how there comes a point in running where you just have to keep kicking, you keep kicking your feet forward. For neurodivergent folx to recognize that we have to sit through the hard thing and just do it—it becomes important to honor just how painful and difficult that is. Self-soothing and grounding are helpful, but watching a show isn’t going to help you clean your room, watching the show would be a really good reward from cleaning your room. You need to offers when you’ve done something terrible, you need to be able to put your feet up and relax, but after you ran the race, not before you race at all. What does your system need to be effective? Are you angry or anxious for a reason, do you need to be stimulated? That’s what you need to be stimulated. Knowing that requires metacognition, knowing what you need for each moment. Isabelle describes her own difficulties delaying gratification, with black and white thinking and sequencing, and then the need to seek comfort, and wonders about the stats of folx with ADHD having more substance misuse, higher rates of divorce, accidents, etc. but as David points out, we do do more flips. But what is the warning or worst case scenario if you don’t clean your room, but what if the consequences are worse? David jumps into the substance abuse or misuse idea and wonders: if you have a marginalized, underserved, neurodivergent population and is neglected by a system--and they're using substances--and you think there's something wrong with them? For people with ADHD, a lot of people can fall into cannibis, or alcohol, or cocaine. For example, when you pour a depressant like alcohol into your system, your body tries to compensate by boosting your stimulation, because your body is seeking homeostasis. So if you don’t drink after drinking after drinking, your brain is released stimulants. Cocaine and cannibis are stimulants—and cannibis, as a dissociative stimulant—so folx with ADHD tend towards substances that are giving them the stimulation they are needing. When you look at people who struggle with delaying gratification, increased pain, more social rejection—wow, drinking can help them numb the pain and then they are doing stimulants when they would be prescribed stimulants to help with their medication condition. David sees this as a humanistic push toward health by people who have been given bad information. Our population is highly at risk because we’re in a lot of pain. David wants to highlight the pain we live in. “Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments” and changing it for neurodivergent folx: “expectations are premeditated resentments.” All of our expectations, because of our black and white thinking, are that things are going to take away the pain, make us feel better, not hurt anymore, not be anxious anymore…when people make a decision that’s like “I’m going to bomb this test so I never have to think about it again” we get you, we understand that’s pain, you are in a lot of pain. There’s self-soothing to feel better to take a test, or bungee jump off a cliff, but when you’re in so much pain you look for ways to self-soothe your way through your entire life, we need to look at your expectations and get you the help you need. You are not broken, you are being serviced by the wrong technicians of the world, you are being given leaded gas, you have square tires, we need to get them off—it’s not your fault. It’s not David's fault that he misread that podcast that he screened, and he needed to be able to challenge it and face it, and lean on his support system. A lot of us have more courage than people understand, because we have a lot of anxiety and fear—if you’re not scared, it can’t be courage. Isabelle is so grateful for David naming this, and while neither one of them is a substance abuse expert, it is an important reminder to all of us. Isabelle thinks of the quote that sometimes when you think you’re the “crazy” one, it’s actually a very sane response to a “crazy” world. What is the appropriate response to what you are facing, and nobody told you this was in the water, and you’ve been drinking it your whole life, and the protestant U.S. work ethic of: “good things happen to you because you prove your worth, you earn it all” logic and it so does not match up with anyone’s experience, the “just world” hypothesis does not match up. Because it flips on you, if you did all the good things you missed the suffering, but if you suffer, it’s something you must work on it and solve it and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. How much work is loaded on neurodivergent folx. We are not given the accurate operating instructions and we encounter more intensity of pain than people understand. There’s a lot of neglect in the world, we neglect things and pretend they’

Isabelle and David check in and Isabelle describes trying Pickleball, and the way that physical activity is wonderful but you don’t know you’re tired until it’s too late. David and Isabelle then try something new, in that they are revisiting their previous episode and what it brought up in each of them. David listened to the preview of the previous episode (Ep032: When is hyperfocus your friend?) and he felt like he talked too much and interrupted and did a poor job and felt like maybe they shouldn’t release the previous episode. Isabelle names that David often reframes and revisits things that bring Isabelle shame. She did not read the same into the last episode, and didn’t even notice this behavior, however it was useful to her to hear David struggling with some self-doubt or shame. She also wonders if interrupting or talking over each other is not just something that happens when neurodivergent folx get excited. David agrees, and was ready to revisit the episode and his shame response in order to connect to the mission of the podcast, to be inclusive, to not be perfect, to show the process and leave in mistakes. He left his first listen thinking he had missed things, and he was wrong, and rude to Isabelle. And so he listened to it again and…he heard a different episode today. He kept listening for the awful things he remembered and realized he hates that all the stuff he talks about not having accurate self-assessment are true for him, too. When he heard it first, he was tired, environmental variables were stacked against him having a good read of this, and he had a negative slant of it. A base level is if someone he trusts says “it’s okay,” then it’s okay. So he trusted Isabelle when she said no. David remembers what he was trying to say about intermittent fasting, which is that it gave him structure about what he wanted to eat that he didn’t have before and it made decision making around eating easier. But he also noticed that he was being more black and white in a moment that requires more grey, around Isabelle’s discussion of self-soothing. Isabelle sees the meta-layers in what David is naming, because she relates deeply to the sense that you feel you have done something wrong or it’s a misstep or you could’ve done better and then when someone gives you feedback it’s okay, do you trust it or not (and she does not trust it, it would be hard to convince herself it’s okay). Her inner critic/self-judgment/self-criticism is loud, and she remembers that David named that folx who are neurodivergent can struggle with inaccurate self assessment, often leaning toward the negative side. With the setup of so many knocks to your self-esteem and devaluing your self it’s hard to disagree with that even when you have evidence to the contrary—though isn’t this something that all people are impacted by, neurodivergent and neurotypical alike, that their mindset and mental state will impact how they perceive they did? The difference is that for folx who are neurodivergent, for anyone who learns or thinks differently, we don’t have models. We don’t have a litmus test to hold our behavior to, that signals to us what's appropriate. One of the things that happens is forgetting to eat and that impairs our executive functioning or judgment. No one is immune to that, including David. Having a support system and friends around you is really important. We can keep fighting back, but David has burned enough villages in the past and if a friend says something that makes me turn off an entire line of criticism and judgment, he listens to it now. Going back to the last episode, David elaborates on the question: when is a self-soothing the task and when is it a distraction? For example, if being grounded and soothed and calm helps you perform on a task, then it’s helpful; but what if the task is cleaning your room, and can you go from self-soothing to self-soothing behavior without ever ending up cleaning your room? How do we make the distinction that a task is supposed to be uncomfortable and we have to do the uncomfortable thing? Isabelle wonders about the fact that to her, self-soothing behavior can be mindless or it can be something you’re aware of, and to engage in something soothing, you first need an awareness that you are soothing yourself, perhaps. Also what if you’re so focused on the results, like for example, a clean room, that you lost the part where you recognized what your needs were that day, what you were up to doing—an awareness of yourself. But what about when you’re people pleasing and you’re being vigilant about all the tasks and all the needs of those around you, how do you recognize if you need some soothing or grounding in general as you go about doing any tasks? And what about if you have this on mode where you are so productive and go go go but you don’t necessarily stop to be present or aware of what’s happening inside you. David sees self-soothing as something you do to attend to yourself to make your body

What about a task that doesn’t have a sense of doing it well? You do it or you don’t do it, like earning money, or getting that job, or buying a house? The only thing that’s reinforced are tasks toward goal completion. What could I do today that would move me toward that goal? The only question: is it moving toward my goal? If so, it’s effective (or if not, not effective), rather than good or bad. For example, David venting about his paper to his friend helped him be on task, rather than not being on task and going out to eat at Burger King—it’s still about the paper (it’s still on task). How effective is it toward the task? More effective than going to Burger King and not talking or thinking about the paper at all. Long term goals are specifically hard for folx with ADHD because of the delay of gratification. The more you wait, the more you feel like you’re failing. Neurotypical folx will read that waiting as normal or to be expected. Bobby names things like saving for retirement, saving for a house, paying off debt—the progress is so slow it feels so boring. David relies on his awesome neurotypical partner to save for a house by taking what they would pay for a mortgage every month and saving whatever that was on top of their rent (so if their Lego House rent was $10, and they wanted a $30 mortgage, they saved the extra $20 every month). Isabelle wonders if neurotypical shame spirals go as deep as neurodivergent ones—for example, David’s goes to homelessness, and she notices that neurotypical folx notice how close they got the finish (like getting the brick at the bottom of the pool during swimming lessons), and factor that in, whereas for her it’s the outcome that matters and she goes straight to everyone she loves is going to abandon her and ditch her. David names that he has a few shame spirals—for work, it’s homelessness, for relationships—it’s abandonment. This leads to black and white thinking, which is more than just worth mentioning, it’s the difference between “not getting a snack” to “failure begets failure begets FAILURE…” And this extreme is dismissed so often, people don’t get it. As a therapist you’d never say “it’s not a big deal,” you’re invalidating those feelings. What we ADHD folx feel, our level of intensity, is REAL—instead of “it shouldn’t hurt that much,” it’s “that’s extremely frustrating.” Bobby is slurping all this data up, and taking the feels, and feeling them…and that’s what you do. You acknowledge how intensely you’re feeling them. Bobby sits in the role of “Novice EveryDay-er…Every Day Dude” (which is what it says on his nameplate). And not just acknowledging your feels, but acknowledging the intensity of how strongly you feel them. Feel the feeling, know it’s more intense, or it might not be felt by other people. And do what you need to do to regulate—-as opposed to let it go. It’s like telling someone with ADHD not to look at the ceiling (we all looked at the ceiling). Telling someone to fight something is not effective, it can go on forever in a power struggle. Isabelle describes that she prefers the phrase self-soothe to self-regulate, because it can be a pressure to return to masking and appearing as though you are neurotypical or ‘regular.’ David is wondering if self-soothing is the task, actually—you might not be able to soothe or make the injury out of the way, and instead get grounded again. It’s not about getting out of your ADHD mindstate, it’s about lowering your hyper focus and lowering the pressure to act. David does this intermittent fast now and just got distracted about the food he wants to eat (schwarma)—he’s not pretending he’s going back to the point and instead is focusing on food and saying “Schwarma.” The group decides they will say “Schwarma” any time this happens, if they can remember, which Bobby reassures them he will. Isabelle then describes that she thinks Bobby circumvents working memory problems by using some of the rules of comedy, like callbacks, and then…she also loses the plot and goes back to telling her story. Isabelle describes fixations on movies or things across many genres and seems to do with what the movie makes her feel. She is reminded of one of her roommates in college who was a lovely person, but would fixate on one or two somewhat depressing emo songs and for Isabelle, she didn’t like the emotional state it would generate. So she recognizes that she goes through fasts almost, of media that stirs up feelings because she gets so sucked in, so she avoids fiction and movies and music for a while. Then, it’s like a switch flips, and she gets sucked in and rewatches things over and over again. Like the Netflix film “Tall Girl.” Because she is tall. And it hooked her (despite not being the best movie maybe, but she liked it). And she found time, when she has no time, to watch it four times in the span of a week. What is this? David’s like: it’s the definition of hyperfocus. It’s that you fall into it intensely. It’s that you do the sa

David takes us back to second grade and playing following the leader, where you do the same maneuver on the jungle gym that the ‘leader’ did. He always felt his leadership was undervalued. It was finally his shot to be the leader and he wasn’t going to waste it—he is up way high in the air and looks down and says “Follow the leader!” And he lands with both feet about 15 ft down onto the wooden beam he was aiming for. Everyone looks at me and goes “You win! We quit!” That’s a perfect example of response cost: as a child, I didn’t think that if I nail this, no one wants to play anymore, and if I fail I might end up as a quadriplegic or dead. No thought of those consequences and what they would look like two hours later. Thank goodness no one went after him, he never thought that the other kids not getting it would be bad. The impulsivity in that jump and the response cost that was forgotten. The take away is it’s not worth it to win that game by beating everyone--it's also not really a lesson learned. Bobby shares his story from the week, and is in a show and is an understudy, where he has to do all the prep on his own and doesn’t get to do the reps with the other actors. Hard to do with ADHD. Also hard to do when he already had a bunch of work on his plate and took on the extra load and found himself procrastinating on memorizing the lines. David wonders, did the task get done, though? Did Bobby memorize all his lines in a day? He didn’t, but he did do a big bulk of it and did one scene per day and it’s been a challenge but he’s been more successful doing that way. He’s listening to the scenes on loop and does it in the background while he’s doing other things. We have all been there, where there’s a reality where we don’t get to make the structure until we’re in the crisis—now I have a plan, why didn’t I make this plan before? It’s because you weren’t in your sweet spot of stimulation. And he’ll (and we’ll) do it this way again. David points out that Bobby is learning his authentic way of working and not judging it. What would have happened if all the internal freak-out judgements and questions—if someone else had asked you those? Bobby admits he would have crumbled under that pressure, it would have deeply affected his productivity. Isabelle thinks she knows where David is going with that question, and recalls podcasts she’s been listening to on anxiety that were echoing the notion that what you resist, persists—and it's the same with this. Acknowledge the anxiety and roll with it. What she’s learning is that if you think you need to beat yourself up to get something done, you can remove that part, and still get it done last minute. David learned this very late in life. He was talking to his partner, Robin, and was stating that they were going to clean bit by bit in preparation for the people coming to visit them. And she looked at him and said: “you’re not going to do it bit by bit, you’re going to wait until the last minute, and freak out, and while I’m at work, you’ll get it done.” And he was like “yeah, you’re right. Is that okay?” And she’s like “yup.” If I can talk about it without shame, a lot can change. And if you’re trying to beat yourself up so someone else can’t, you get totally distracted from the task. It becomes a perpetual motion machine of shame, and it takes so much energy. Isabelle describes how her motor (or brain) keeps running and sometimes gets locked into a space where there’s no brakes and so sometimes, the setting is on shame. She is a champion shame spiraler. David describes how we lock in on the activating state we have the most tolerance for. David has a lot of excitement in his life, like a golden retriever, he authentically labels things closer to excitement rather than anxiety. Where does shame or anxiety displace stimulation from the task? For some people, you need the shame—it’s something someone else makes you feel (like peeing your pants in public is shame, peeing your pants in private, guilt). Shame is incredibly stimulating: "If I don’t get this done, I will be socially rejected and annihilated." This gets your heart pumping, adrenaline going. We’re all adrenaline junkies. How do you turn the shame into a tool? (Pause for siren and airplane noise and acknowledgment of us recording in a landing strip right now) Isabelle pictures the scene from Star Wars (errr, Empire Strikes Back, thankyouverymuch), where Luke goes into the cave. If you can acknowledge the fear that’s happening, you can face it. David uses the example of doing a talk in a big crowd and his shame spiral goes to a very black and white extreme where if he messes up his talk he’s going to end up homeless. So the first time he gave this talk he took weeks. And then he got better at it and wasn’t starting on it so far ahead. So what if he could just plan on doing it on the 6 hour flight? The Shame Force is ready to go—but ready to go at an appointed time, not for weeks in advance. No one way I’m not going to

Isabelle & David welcome Isabelle’s husband, Bobby, and their friends, Christina, AJ, and Gabe, to continue to listen and learn from David’s tried and tested presentation on ADHD, which he normally gives to fellow clinicians (for the 1st-9th parts of this talk, please see episode 4, All About ADHD Part I; episode 6, All About ADHD Part II; episode 9, All About ADHD Part III; episode 12, All About ADHD Part IV; episode 15, All About ADHD Part V; episode 18, All About ADHD Part VI; episode 21, All About ADHD PART VII; episode 24, All About ADHD Part VIII; episode 27, All About ADHD Part IX). David launches right into why we get into fights when we leave and we procrastinate, imagine a scalloping bar graph that shoots right near the end, and then right back down. David uses the example of how when assigned a paper, he realizes he has three weeks to work on it, so he plays video games, he does other things, and then his anxiety grows as he gets closer to the deadline, and then it shoots up very rapidly, and he goes into “oh my God, I’m going to be homeless, I’m going to fail, no one’s going to love me, I’m stuck in a van by the river.” Worst case scenarios to the extreme. Now, everything he does related to the paper brings him terror and so everything he does toward the paper gives him the immediate gratification of relieving some of the terror. Any action toward task completion is naturally reinforcing at this point. And the flow feels better and better because it’s getting you further and further away from the dragon. And then you turn the paper in, misspellings be damned, and you sleep the rest of the weekend. The anxiety level plummets down. The same graph can be used toward anger and task completion, too. We are using anxiety or anger as self-medication. David is not quick to throw medication at people but he does say that the second that anxiety and anger around the procrastination get in the way of your life and your relationships—can you see how a stimulant medication might help? A stimulant medication raises your ambient level of stimulation without you having to be anxious, angry or aroused. You need that stimulation to be able to work (like the allele cells and environment). Medication gives you a sense of urgency without a crisis. If you give ADHD medication to a neurotypical person, they will not perform better on the task but they will believe they did. They will write a five page paper and then they’ll turn it in and get an A (they would’ve gotten anyway). A person with ADHD will do significantly better on the task, believe they cheated because they used meds (and because of the knocks to their self esteem) but they also have a better evaluation of their work. The side effect is to give you a better ability to appraise their work more accurately, and it reinforces doing more work because it reinforces a sense of mastery. When someone doesn’t need ADHD medication, the medication will make transitions harder, it will make them more angry, more anxious over times and more rigid. With ADHD population, it helps with distress tolerance, transitions, and flexibility. We procrastinate when we need more medication. We procrastinate on packing for a trip, making lunches, making a list—the more boring a task, the more stimulation we need to do it. Gabe asks: where’s the balance of that? What if you accommodate yourself and never touch socks again? But you have to be an adult and do things you don’t want to sometimes. And David responds: Why not? Why not have only the same sock and not pair them at all? Or outsource that particular task. But, Gabe counters, what if he wants to learn the skill of folding laundry? How does he gain that skill? Medication is one option, but David asks more basically: how do you up your level of stimulation? Another way is to make it about time. Set a timer, don’t cheat, how many socks can you pair? Gamify it somehow, you can experience winning/losing. AJ names that this is something he did but didn’t have a name for. The reason he started folding his laundry is because his partner appreciated it, so it’s a win because it’s his partner’s love language. And once you’ve started you can always listen to one more song because there’s structure and progress. What if you say “ugh, I gotta clean my room” — what’s wrong with that statement is it’s too broad. You have to make it a smaller objective, like clearing everything off the counter. So with kids, day one, we’re going to clear the counter. Then we’re going to sift out the clothes. Now find all the cassette tapes, etc. Isabelle gets super excited about the KonMari (Marie Kondo’s organization method, see links below) because it’s literally this: taking everything of a category and putting it into piles, then deciding if each thing sparks joy. It’s simple, it’s structured, and it uses piles. David wants to make it clear that when the kid actually sweeps everything off the counter, and sees the big mess on the floor, they actually

David asks: what about brushing your teeth and things that don’t have immediate gratification, necessarily, but you have to do them over and over again? How do you motivate yourself to do them? It’s preventative-you don’t see what you save, you don’t know what Past You did for Future You when you’ve brushed your teeth. David’s answer is to outsource a lot of decisions that he doesn’t want to make to ritual, and the world of pain is part of everything we have to do. He just does it because it’s the routine (like getting up) even though it is so hard, so very hard, to do the things we don’t want to do. The fact that we can feel this much pain helps us want to prevent other’s pain, makes us think creatively. David might be willing to bet that a lot of technology and innovation that makes things more efficient and helps us skip the boring tedious parts is perhaps invented by folx with ADHD. For folx with ADHD, you are tested in fire all the time, and it does things—there is negative stuff (sucks experiencing rejection, sucks making mistakes, sucks not being perfect, sucks being found out)—but our ability to think outside the box because we’ve had to struggle our whole life is something he doesn’t want to surrender. Isabelle names that it feels that David saying that expressed compassion to the part of her that didn’t get that before. She thinks about how in trauma work there’s this mythology around the trauma making you stronger, but also—you could’ve been great without the trauma, thank you. Isabelle didn’t really give herself credit for the strengths, and often assigns the strengths and things that she has achieved to good fortune or luck, while taking full ownership of the blame, shame, and mistake-making parts. It has taken her a long time to not just jump straight to “I got so lucky!” And recognize that maybe she had something to do it with—and wonders if she’s the only one? David names that this is so relatable—it is so hard to acknowledge that our strengths are coming from the same place our vulnerabilities are. It’s so easy to say we got lucky or it was chance, because we don’t get to refine the skills to know we did more than get away with something. We don’t fit in the Normal Rockwell image of how things appear and so we don’t think about doing things the same way others do, either. David names how a part of him would be ashamed about getting ready for a school presentation in ten minutes—instead of practicing every night for twenty minutes, like he thought he should. Never mind that he still got an A, was able to speak with great energy, that the fact his tone of voice was a little more engaging—all of those things are ADHD. David is just thinking he got away with it, because he’s not counting all the times he thought about doing the thing and then didn’t, because they were ‘dumb anxious thoughts,’ never mind that he got it done and got a good grade, he was still a fraud because he was different. Now he can look at it in a balanced way, it’s all ingredients to who we are. In the real world, you’re not in trouble if you get it done too fast. Isabelle convinced herself people would think she cheated if she was honest about how she did something. We encounter so much pain, we don’t need any help seeing the fault of our actions, David is really good at that—but we all need someone to remind us of what we’re really good at. Folx with ADHD are used to calling out ADHD behavior when something is not going right; getting use to calling out ADHD behavior when things that are happening that are excellent, and would not be happening if not for a person’s ADHD. There’s so much pain, let’s honor the great things. Isabelle thinks about how she was at the park with her kid on a playdate and had a snack bag and thermos with tea. She proceeded to leave this tea everywhere and put the tea everywhere, on slides, wherever, forgetting she had it, circling back, and meanwhile, her kid is playing and pushing their amazing boundaries. She always thinks someone has come in and moved something, like the realization in the film A Beautiful Mind that someone’s hallucinations are so real to them they feel like reality. David calls Isabelle on calling this a delusion: somebody did move it. It was you. And you don’t remember it because you didn’t make a memory because you were busy doing ten other things. The whole thing is accurate. Isabelle laughs so hard and thinks she might need to get that tattooed on her: “Somebody did move it, and it was you,” Memento-style (see below). Isabelle notices that over time she is much more open and discloses more quickly that she has ADHD, in an attempt to normalize it and make it a safe conversation for the other person, too. And she notices that in the past she would maybe make it more of an apology or an explanation—don’t mind me not keeping track of the tea mug, my working memory is shot—but she realizes this added dimension, that while she is beating herself up inside for losing the tea mug

David begins by naming that dealing with a lot of a frustration is part and parcel of ADHD—and yet, we don’t want to make everything easy, some things are supposed to be hard. Essentially, there is a certain amount of frustration and discomfort that someone with ADHD has to be ready to experience. Isabelle is hit with that and explains that frustration tolerance is how much discomfort we can handle—when we’re waiting, someone’s running late, we’ve lost an item, pick a thing—and as much as it might be nice to hit the easy button and want this all to be squeegee’d away (so satisfying), it cannot be. It’s more like an old rag that barely gets the soap off. David names that Noah and him have long conversations about it, and his friend focuses on what you can do to experience discomfort, tolerate it, and build accommodations about it. He’s the kind of person who sees a big scary book and decides to read it, and David oppositionally wonders why you would put yourself through that? He sat down and taught himself how to read—David wonders at what it takes to sit down, take time, stare at a book, and flip pages, and reread a page or paragraph over and over again. For David, a lot of those hurdles felt unfair and unjustifiably frustrating, so watching Noah tackle a task simply for the mastery of it was a new idea. In very general terms, the grey matter around our brain gives us a little more impulse control. The more time you spend practicing something, the act of practice—a puzzle, a book, sitting and breathing, going for a daily walk, etc.—the act of continuing to do it even if you don’t want to builds grey matter, it builds your frustration tolerance for the thing you’re trying to do. Isabelle clarifies that this is a task that you can’t require your hyper focus to do, because you’re not as interested in the thing. David describes how he was struggling with fifteen minute car rides, and then got stuck with the first to be picked up, last to be dropped off slot on the bus route for school—hour long experiences. Suddenly, after having practice taking the bus, which sucked, it happened that he gained a greater tolerance from that. Isabelle asks if the the strife and frustration got him something, that wasn’t needless suffering: short term gain v. long term gain? David names that it is important to honor that it is more painful for us to do things we don’t want to do than people understand. You want to ball up your hands and stomp your feet, the amount of restraint it took to not swear more than once in traffic—there are so many places where we don’t fit. We encounter the pain of not doing the things the first time, then the double pain of judgment—is it me, or them? What’s the best way, and how do I know? Folx with ADHD tolerance for distress is much higher for a lot of things than others understand, but not for all things (like people walking slowly, waiting in a long line with a delay, being stuck in traffic). The example of people walking slowly made Isabelle cringing at the very thought of the moment: it is actual, physiological pain. It makes Isabelle think about childbirth and the practice she underwent called mindful birthing, which meant she slowly tried to acclimate herself to discomfort and pain (such as from holding an ice cube) and then to practice different approaches to noticing it mindfully and riding it out. She describes how she noticed in the labor process, which took many days, that there was this internal, full-body sensation (beyond the contraction) in response to the discomfort she was in, not dissimilar to the response she feels when she’s stuck behind people walking slowly, and she noticed that her endurance surprised her, not being naturally athletic or very physically gifted in that way. She describes telling herself “it’s only one minute” or “it’s only ten more minutes,” like a button to counter the impatience she feels (similar to the “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”). David is stunned and wants to relate to what Isabelle is saying because though he cannot fathom childbirth, he resonates with something for him. He goes back to his psychology class sophomore year and names that it’s a duration measure: something that has a beginning and an end. Everything that is crappy has a beginning, and an end. He had the kind of learning that things stink, so you avoid them, but it gets in the way as he gets older. All of a sudden, something clicked, that he learned if you get something over with, it’s over with. When we’re talking about how much pain people with ADHD experience and how much we need to experience those things, we need to remember that the time you’re doing the thing you really hate, it’s going to be over with. Maybe you’re only going to have to do it once, or twice, or six times. “I can’t do that thing, I have no more room for pain.” Which David understands, and if you have any in the tank, “let’s do this thing so you don’t have to do it again.” Isabelle describes that often feels like ther

Isabelle & David welcome Isabelle’s husband, Bobby, and their friends, Christina, AJ, and Gabe, to continue to listen and learn from David’s tried and tested presentation on ADHD, which he normally gives to fellow clinicians (for the 1st-8th parts of this talk, please see episode 4, All About ADHD Part I; episode 6, All About ADHD Part II; episode 9, All About ADHD Part III; episode 12, All About ADHD Part IV; episode 15, All About ADHD Part V; episode 18, All About ADHD Part VI; episode 21, All About ADHD PART VII; episode 24, All About ADHD Part VIII). David describes how with ADHD, the context matters. As part of a respite care program, he once took out this amazing kid out who loved to scream--not angrily, he just enjoyed the sensations of screaming. The behavior would get to his parents and they felt they couldn’t take him out to eat, etc. because the screaming would bother people. David took him to a football game. Is there ever a point in a football game where it’s not okay to scream? The same behavior is contextually appropriate. Gabe thinks about violence or hunting, which he is wondering about connecting to ADHD and appropriate/inappropriate behaviors—David does not see a connection between violence and ADHD. Instead he talks about danger and stimulation. He picks up an agate coaster (rock) and says if someone with ADHD was handed this, they might start tossing it around. But tell that person that this is a one of a kind, very valuable thing, and they’re not going to toss it, the added risk has raised the stimulation so you don’t have to toss it anymore to be stimulated. It’s about safely increasing the danger or risk of something, pushing the limits. Another example is the water cooler. David describes working with kids where they press the button to fill up their cups with water to the very top, to see how high they can make it, and then have the added risk of trying to carry the cup without spilling it. In those moments, they are actually attending so well to the water, really focused on it. Bobby wonders if his “That’s So Raven” (see below) moments, where he has flashes of what might come to pass, like the danger in taking one route or another. Isabelle hypothesizes that it's a way to introduce danger to a scenario that doesn’t hold any. David describes that it’s a way to safely visualize danger so you can organize your thinking, but not actually have to experience it. Everyone has a different level of tolerance to danger, and it’s not about “hugging the danger,” it’s more about introducing structure. Like at a garden party, telling a kid to make sure this guest has enough water and whatever you do, don’t step on this other person’s shoes, and suddenly, it’s not a dead person command (something a dead person can do, AKA, not what you give someone with ADHD), it’s actually structure. Isabelle wonders at how this seems to help with their toddler (setting up some ground rules to think about ahead of time before visiting a place) and at how she might do that for herself, setting up rules for a meeting, let’s say, where she knows she’s going to doubt what she said so she’s going to say something silly and get it over with first thing. Bobby likens it to an accusational audit, which is a negotiation strategy, where you make all the accusations you’re scared of hearing up front, you get them out of the way. Bobby gives an example of asking for a raise and starting off by saying “I know I might seem ungrateful or like I don’t understand how tight the budget is…” This connects to David’s DARE technique for asking for accommodations. D=Describe the dilemma. “I really want to ask for a raise because I think I deserve one but I don’t know how to do it.” A=Ask for accommodation. “I would really like a raise.” R=Reinforcement, no matter what they say. “Thank you for saying no, I appreciate your honesty and being up front with me.” E=Empathize, or remember that the other person is a human and negotiate closer to what your want is. “I hear you, when’s a good time to come back to this conversation?” AJ seconds that this is a technique similar to what is taught in his sales-based organization, and David describes that he stole it from DBT (dialectical behavior therapy, see below) and it’s acronym DEARMAN, because it simplifies it for someone with ADHD (too many things to remember). Gabe asks about the romantic nature of danger, how he pushes limits, like when he was younger, see how far he could ski down a black diamond ski run without turning, which led to him being injured. David wonders about this: is there any way that him telling Gabe no wouldn’t stopped Gabe from doing this? (no). Would Gabe have just gone back another day to do it? (yes). The potential consequences on that day might’ve been worse? (yes). David says there is no way Gabe would’ve learned those limits without trying it himself. So how to set that up to do it as safely as possible, without trying to prevent what the person is going to do

Isabelle & David welcome guests to a live Q & A (previously recorded) and start by addressing the question: What is it about folx with ADHD and overexplaining? Isabelle really relates to this as she overexplains the question. David describes the intersection between mastery and guilt. When you have a lot of mastery around the topic makes it hard to structure a response. You have so much to say, and as you start talking, you realize the holes in what you’re saying, so you go back and try to respond more and try to fill in more and more, and because you have a lot of mastery you have a lot of information. There is also a sense of guilt: when people are trying to be understood, or are feeling misunderstood, people can overexplain when they’re trying to explain themselves. This is literally what structure looks like: over explanation is a structural issue, thinking about the beginning, middle, and end of what you’re going to say. With ADHD we often had a good beginning, a solid middle, and then…it’s just supposed to end. Why are people still looking at me? But I’m still talking…(awkward silence). Isabelle names there’s a look on people’s faces when she’s talking too much and often makes a joke about talking to much to end it; David notices when people start checking their watches or phone, or starts looking around the room, he just assumes that people are done. YAY for the podcast format that helps them both talk longer than might usually be socially welcomed. Isabelle describes how many a part of overexplaining is wanted to clue someone in to what’s going on in her head when she unmasks, like it’s the closest thing to seeing her thought process and the tangents and longwinded way she sometimes gets to things. She also finds herself wanting to fill in silence with jokes and facts and anecdotes and is often the one to try to break the ice. David names that this could be something else: namely, how comfortable are we with nothing? David has a low tolerance for someone asking a question, let’s say in class, that no one’s answering. It could also be called mansplaining, in the form of David just taking up air time, but he’s noticed it often helps start off conversation. Isabelle agrees that her awkwardness often brings people together. Noah chimes in to name it as being natural pickle jar looseners. Noah names gaslighting, and if someone has been gaslit (by others or themselves) their whole life, they may walk around feeling like they need to prove that they’re not “crazy” —Noah describes that he often asks himself “is this weird? Should I say this? Are people going to think…” before he says something. Everyone on the call starts nodding vehemently. David names that folx with ADHD often are very connected to someone else’s inner state, they have lots of mirror neurons (neurons that fire when you’re witnessing or anticipating someone else doing a thing AS IF you are doing the thing yourself, which some folx think can be linked to empathy—see fuller definition and resources below). Isabelle and David open it up to even more questions. Noah starts with the challenge of working with clients who keep developing structure to get something done and it works for a week, but then they have to keep recreating or honing the structure week after week and it’s not working. David responds that there’s often an overcorrection when people are putting in structure, for example, they plan out every minute but it’s not sustainable. Also there’s novelty: novel plans can be attended to and are often stimulating, but once something is not novel, it can’t be attended to the same way. Even if you don’t really like the thing you’re doing, it may still give you a dopamine hit. Noah gives an example of the Pomodoro method, which uses timers. David names that not all interventions work well for different tasks and people. Think of the brain of someone with ADHD as a jet engine—it’s not disabled, but it might find it hard to go in the slow lane or try swimming. So now introduce an intervention that means you take a break quickly after starting (and started a jet engine can take a while)—is the person having trouble taking breaks or having trouble starting? Start a seven minute timer and have to start before it goes off. If it’s a taking a break intervention, maybe take a break when you next go to the bathroom. Breaks and ADHD is hard, people will believe they need to take more breaks, and that’s not true—people often need less breaks, to stay in rhythm longer, and take breaks when it’s effective. For example, instead of a break after school, knowing your medicine is not going to work as well later, going to punch a wall (or do some movement) and then resume homework. It’s like the intervention of needing extra time on a test, when we often need less time. Isabelle wonders what are questions you can ask to figure out what interventions you need? Figuring out what the task is, whether they accomplish the task, and whether it hurt (what a

Isabelle & David welcome guests to a live Q & A (previously recorded) and describe the origins of the podcast, when the two were working together. David had given a presentation and had been gifted a microphone to record his presentation and turn it into an audio book. Isabelle had been welcomed by David to the tribe of folx with ADHD as she slowly realized her own ADHD diagnosis, and was hopeful she had it because it could remove so much shame, blame, guilt, and doubt and increase her understanding of herself. She was brimming with questions for David. They wanted to make a podcast to remove the barriers to this information, which you may normally pay a therapist for—not everyone can pay for a therapist, let alone reach one or feel comfortable going to one. David recalls his brother, who’s mission was to increase understanding to reduce suffering, which is a great way to sum up what the podcast is all about: to increase understanding about ADHD to reduce even one person’s suffering. Without further ado, the two begin to answer questions asked by Q & A participants, the first being, why, when asked [a broad question like: what do you want to know about ADHD?] Their mind goes blank and they can’t think of anything? David names that it reminds him of straddling two countertops like Jean Claude Van Damme (see clip below) and could come from two angles. If someone has ADHD and they’re reading a structureless question, it’s so broad, too little to think about—structuring the question would be very helpful and sparking specific ideas. If the asker is someone without ADHD, they might not know how many parts of the world ADHD touches, how people learn differently, how people hum at different energies, what natural homeostasis looks like for different people. You might not think ADHD has something to do with someone’s sexual appetite, why textures feel strange, why someone seems selfish, why someone doesn’t take care of themselves, why someone is ruggedly independent and ask people for help (fill in the blank), etc. Isabelle notes how she’s noticing that a particular shade of pink on her screen always makes her feel nauseous when she sees it. How to narrow down a broad question, or deal with ordering food—think about categories. As an adult you can (sort of) get whatever you want, and that is a huge question. On a side note, why do buffets exist, Isabelle wonders, while David likes a buffet. What kind of food do you want, hot or cold? Hand food or silverware food? Spicy food, etc.? So one way to rephrase the question is to sprinkle in a category or detail. How important is it to see someone (as a prescriber or therapist) who has a lot of experience with ADHD? Maybe not so important. David names that he would consider what somebody’s biases around ADHD are and ask that question: what do you think of that diagnosis, do you often see people with this diagnosis, etc. We often forget that we have hired them, that psychiatrists and other prescribers work for us, we hired them, we can decide that we don’t work with it. Someone who is willing to try together to find something that works for you and be willing to experiment with you, v. When someone is naming the connection between stimulant medication and drug abuse, the question is not, is it the right thing to do, it’s: does it work? Examples include people who have been off of meds but now drink 13 cups of coffee? David makes it clear that psychiatrists work with psychiatric issues—ADHD is a medical issue. A general practitioner or doctor can prescribe you medication; you don’t have to go to a psychiatrist unless there’s a psychiatric issue. In the ADHD world you’re often working in one of two ways: do you need gas, or do you need brakes? Do you need something to speed you up or slow you down? When people look at it as a psychiatric issue, they try antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds, but when people are medicated to reduce anxiety they act out to increase stimulation. David also names neuropsych evaluations have a hard time differentiating between anxiety and ADHD—sometimes it’s less important to know what it is, than to see what works (more sleep, which meds, which interventions?) Next question: What about people who’s partner has ADHD and gets irritated by their behaviors that may connect to ADHD? David names how important psychoeducation to understand what’s going on. Is it the person’s ADHD or their middle finger? Is it their inattentive type behaviors or do they really want to hurt you? David names the study (cited below) that shows that when someone feels like someone is intentionally shocking them, it hurts more, and when it’s not intentional, we feel the pain less. “He did it again, didn’t mean to,” and when you were in a fight and realizing what someone is not intentionally doing to you. Knowing where you can expect things to change and where you need to expect acceptance are important things. It’s not that you’re helpless and someone with ADHD is

Isabelle & David welcome Isabelle’s husband, Bobby, and their friends, Christina, AJ, and Gabe, to continue to listen and learn from David’s tried and tested presentation on ADHD, which he normally gives to fellow clinicians (for the 1st-6th parts of this talk, please see episode 4, All About ADHD Part I; episode 6, All About ADHD Part II; episode 9, All About ADHD Part III; episode 12, All About ADHD Part IV; episode 15, All About ADHD Part V; episode 18, All About ADHD Part VI; episode 21, All About ADHD PART VII). Bobby starts by naming that a lot of self-help and business books focus on you giving one specific thing your all and focusing on that, continuing David’s idea that folx with ADHD are like relief pitchers, so don’t try to make them all around baseball players (play to your strengths rather than trying to change your vulnerabilities). David names that it can be distracting trying to be perfect. Bobby also names that being a freelancer means you are wearing so many hats and getting caught up in so much minutia. But it also is scary to say you’re going to say no to 98% of what you would normally do and only focus on the 2% that’s your focus—also, what about the fact that Bobby (and many of us) want to wear many hats and do so many different things? Isabelle relates to this in how she checks out a number of ebooks from the library and reads them all, but in patches and based on what her mood is. David names that what they’re both talking about is the structure. You are focusing on one thing, but you’re using a structure to determine what that one thing is, and how it’s more of a pattern and a rhythm than you might realize. Bobby names that he thinks it’s true because of Isabelle’s 5 year journal, that reveals they are way more into repeating patterns throughout the year than you would think. Focusing on the things you’re really good at allows you to notice what else you should pick up and add to your repetoire. People with ADHD often overcommit because they want to make people happy. So saying you can focus on what you’re good at doesn’t mean you have to do it one way, it’s more that finding what you want to do helps you feel less overwhelmed. Find what you’re good at and invest energy into it. David is good at talking and listening so that’s what he does for a living. It’s about accepting your vulnerabilities and knowing who you are, it’s about embracing, not curing. ADHD requires a variability of stimulation. In the absence of stimulation, we can’t do tasks. Example: one explorer goes ‘there’s a cliff!” While the person with ADHD goes “there’s a cliff!” and almost runs up to the very edge and sees an orchard that was hiding there. The need for stimulation is why you might get closer to the edge of the cliff, it might mean why you wait until the last minute to do something. This connects to procrastination and self-stimulation. (For MORE on procrastination, check out episode 08: Are We Designed to Procrastinate?) Which emotions help your heart beat faster, that help you self-stimulate? The ones you’ve practiced the most, usually, including: anxious, angry, or excitement (or arousal). Bobby and Isabelle both relate to the anxious/angry during transitions part. You can always expect those things around a transition. It can make you feel like less of a monster, if you can expect it. Instead of saying “why are you always so mean to me when we leave?” You say “oh my gosh, we need to leave, I’ll meet you there.” David mentions that it’s a DRO technique, which means a Differential Reinforcement of the Other (DRO), a type of behavioral technique that makes the behavior you’re trying to avoid not an option. Bobby uses accommodations to make sure he’s on schedule, so he gets anxious and needs to be on schedule and tries to be early. Isabelle, on the other hand, has her own rhythm and path and gets overwhelmed when she hears too many voices coming at her, and then gets really mad at herself. David names that it may be less about being mad at getting micromanaged and more about getting distracted. Isabelle agrees, that it feels like six competing voices sometimes, and it’s very overwhelming, she gets that way about music and sounds in general. David talks over Isabelle to demonstrate what it’s like when she’s trying to go through her list and giving her instructions, and she gets so mad at him (and it’s okay, it’s part of the example) and he points out her way of creating a sound screen is to hate somebody. So with structure and independence, you don’t need to get angry because you don’t need to self-stim (see below) to stay focused. In essence, there's no way she can take on another competing stimulus (like someone telling her what to do as she has her own thoughts about what to do) without self-stimulating unless she is on a medication. AJ posits that maybe this means don’t give competing instructions to someone with ADHD to limit this phenomena; David revises this as the person with ADHD saying “One, I

David mentions that he is sitting on the floor, because he still hasn’t gotten a desk. Isabelle supports the floor sitting and prefers it herself for her sessions, or standing. The two agree on swivel chairs and some of the squeaky and smooth qualities of swinging or rocking, and Isabelle mentions that 5 S’s, or the hacks that are supposed to help lull an infant to sleep (5 S’s) —what is it about water that Isabelle finds so soothing on a sensory level? Isabelle’s theory is that it provides a deep consistent pressure, and a lot of sensation and stimulation, the almost-weightless feeling— a set of physical sensations. David validates this: cold water is a neurological stimulant, and the sense of buoyancy may not be comforting for everyone, but soothing for you. David mentions Wim Hof and his method that uses very cold water/showers and breathing methods to give a bit of a reset. David points out that water may also be helpful because it provides bilateral stimulation and an element of risk taking (you have to keep swimming or moving or you’ll drown), and Isabelle confirms that for her that pressure and buoyancy and the sensation of being pulled down (like Twilight Zone Tower of Terror). Bilateral stimulation is when you stimulate first one side of the brain, then the other. It has been known to help with trauma processing (for example, what’s used in a method called EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and added stimulation can be comforting alongside cognitive processing. Owning the idea that it might be comforting for you, not for everyone. There is a spectrum, for example, some people love a weighted blanket, some people cannot tolerate it. Make sure it’s a weighted blanket that is right for your age and weight range (because there are limits)—David almost threw his arm out throwing a weighted blanket. David tried it for three nights and then got too hot. Isabelle and Bobby’s blanket doubles up when one of them tosses their large blanket onto the other during the night. Isabelle talks about all the sensory rooms she wishes existed, and how awesome certain sensory toys are, and they agree about ball pits and how it feels. She mentions the City Museum of St. Louis (see below) which is filled with incredible sensory experiences—Isabelle had an experience where (as a six foot tall person) in a ball pit, she thought there might not be a bottom. David helped prompt Isabelle to remember what she was talking about by repeating back what her tangents were. Isabelle names that she has not idea where she learned something but can also picture it—David names that there are anchor memories. Isabelle notes that conversations with neurotypical friends—she slows down, tries to stay on topic, tries not to interrupt, which she notices she does not do with her neurodivergent friends. David never understood what masking was until he met David Flink and became involved with Project Eye to Eye. David learned through the trainings and collaborations with that organization that masking (pretending to be neurotypical) was chipping away at his authenticity. His usual rate of talking is 1.5x—and it takes energy to slow down, both Isabelle and David agree it’s exhausting to slow down. David describes how when everyone was talking, this awesome guy named Grady was throwing a ball against the wall, and then he shared this racquetball experience with each other. No one in that room dared to challenge someone to say they weren’t paying attention, regardless of what they were doing—it was such an empowering and incredible space. Isabelle remarks on how amazing this sounds and names that throughout this whole conversation, she has been fidgeting with a My Little Pony plastic tail—and how it would feel to hold up that fidget toy with pride. The importance of explaining to people why we need our sensory toys and fidgets and just how much it matters to unmask and set new models for people.5 S’s (for soothing babies, developed by Dr. Harvey Karp who wrote the book The Happiest Baby on the Block) but as David and Isabelle name, these can be great sensory ideas for folx in any age or stage)-swaddle (think of a weighted vest/tight shirt/weighted blanket/body sack/body sock)-holding baby on their side or stomach (lying down in that position)-shush (imitating white noise) (noise machine or ambient music)-swing (or rock)-suck (pacifier or thumb)Twilight Zone Tower of TerrorCity Museum in St. LouisProject Eye to Eye Wim Hof: Also known as the Ice Man, developed a breathing method to endure cold temperatures and holding his breath a long time. It’s a breathing method that can help you stimulate yourself and ground yourself using a cold shower, for example. DAVID’S DEFINITIONSBilateral stimulation: Any rhythmic stimulation of first one side of the brain/body (eg. left), then the other side (eg. The right). Essentially it’s going back and forth, back and forth, almost like a metronome, but with a tone, a tap, a light, or a movement.