JOIN ME (AND OTHERS) FOR THE LIVING AND WORKING WITH NEURODIVERGENCE CONFERENCE ON 10th OCTOBER. I’ll be presenting Cattitude: A Polyvagal Informed Approach to Self and Self-Care for ADHD and Trauma and you can book here

EPISODE 76

Do you constantly forget your accomplishments while ruminating on what’s gone wrong? You might be experiencing "success amnesia" - the tendency for trauma survivors and ADHDers to completely forget positive achievements while remembering every mistake.

In this episode of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast, I (trauma therapist and ADHDer, Eve Menezes Cunningham) explain why success amnesia is so common in ADHD brains and share a simple daily practice to counter it.

Learn how to build authentic confidence by remembering what you've actually accomplished, even the small things. Using my Feel. Love. Heal framework, I share how to:

• Recognise and welcome your current feelings without judgment
• Connect with your inherent worth beyond achievements
• Use success tracking to support your efforts at collective care and empowerment

This isn't about fake positivity - it's about training your brain to remember the full picture of who you are and what you've done. Perfect for anyone struggling with low self-esteem, imposter syndrome, or feeling "not enough."

Timestamps, resources, and show notes available here

Feel Better Every Day!

Learn from the Self (for that highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant and miraculous part of yourself) and self-care practices the professionals depend on. With a mixture of solo and interview episodes I (your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham (author of 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing) share trauma-informed and VAST / ADHD-friendly self and Self* care ideas through the lens of the Feel. Love. Heal. framework to help you:

• Feel. Regulate your nervous system, work with your energy and do the things that help you create a life you don’t need to retreat from

• Love. Accept yourself completely with love, compassion and kindness – you don’t need to do a thing and

• Heal. Collective care to turn what hurts your heart into action to support your family, organisations, communities and the world at large

Thanks for watching. New episodes come out every Tuesday morning (Ireland time) and if you subscribe (via your favourite podcasting app or by joining the Sole to Soul Circle), you’ll be notified about each new episode. Sole to Soul Circle members get an exclusive deeper dive (these include bonus interviews, EFT Tap Alongs, yoga poses, breath practices, journal prompts and more) each week.

WANT TO WORK WITH ME?

• There’s the book – 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing – and all the book bonus videos

• All the free resources (for trauma, ADHD, menopause, solopreneurs, anxiety, sleep, confidence, resilience, finding purpose, meaning and joy and more) across my platforms and the library of self-care ideas and practices

• You can join the Sole to Soul Circle and get bonus interviews and content specially designed to help you dive deeper into each week’s theme

• If you want to support my work but don’t want to commit to a membership, even for a month, you can

• Find out more about my private practice for one to one work. If you’re based in Ireland or the UK, it’s worth completing the short form to book your free telephone consultation in the hope that we can find a mutually convenient time to work together (trauma-informed and ADHD-friendly therapies, Self care coaching, clinical supervision and supervisor’s supervision).

WANT TO CONNECT WITH ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA?

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And if you’d like to leave a ***** review and/or rate this and other episodes you’ve enjoyed, your feedback and support helps me help more people (of all genders) with trauma histories and/or ADHD take better care of their whole selves and create lives they don’t need to retreat from.

CHAPTERS

(0:00) Countering Success Amnesia

(0:39) Welcome to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast

(1:25) The Feel. Love. Heal. Framework

(3:04) Autumn Equinox and International Day of Peace

(3:27) What Is Success Amnesia?

(5:27) Why Acknowledging Your Achievements Matters

(6:23) Feel: Active Self-care and Processing Emotions

(10:28) Love: Accepting Yourself as Enough

(12:38) Heal: Collective Care and Post-traumatic Growth

(14:34) A Daily Practice to Overcome Success Amnesia

(16:18) Coming Up Next Week: Tend and Befriend

DISCLAIMER

The content I share is not a replacement for one to one trauma therapy (etc). While you can do an enormous amount to support yourself, please always seek appropriate medical advice. Thanks for watching. Please subscribe / follow and share with someone who you think will benefit from this episode.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

As in, I'm going to recommend a daily practice you can do to counter “success amnesia”. It's a wonderful way for building confidence in a really authentic way. It's not like, “Wow, I'm brilliant!” or anything like that.

It's just like, “Oh, wow! I did these things today that I had forgotten. And, yeah, that makes sense as to why I was working late or why I was tired or why...” Whatever it might be, it's helping you take a breath, pause before you move on to the next thing and how you need to just do, do, do, do.

Hi, you're listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. I'm your host and producer, Eve Menezes Cunningham. I'm a trauma therapist and survivor, a clinical supervisor and supervisor's supervisor. An author, columnist, self-care coach, where I integrate the psychosynthesis counselling, the yoga therapy, EFT, NLP, crystals and more, NLP. And I'm also an ADHD-er.

And I'm also Rainbow Magnificat's human. She was really shy for all the cat episodes, but here she is now.

Every Tuesday, I share new episodes of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. And in each episode, I go through whatever the theme is, using my Feel. Love. Heal. Framework. This makes it something that's accessible for yourself to work with. Whatever you're working with. The Feel element is to do with active self-care. That's that lowercase s, self-care.

The Love is the acceptance, the connection with Divine Love, loving yourself and recognising you are part of the divine. That connecting with your miraculous Self, that highest, truest, wisest, the uppercase S. That remembering you don't need to do a thing. You're already enough. You're not too much. You're worthy. You're lovable. You're part of the divine. You're all made of stardust. Connecting with that around whatever issue you're facing, it can help you.

I don't know if you can see little Rainy here. Connecting with that divinity within yourself and everyone can be really transformative and a peaceful way of going through life.

The Heal element is the collective care. The co-regulation. The, when you've had enough time to deal with things, to let yourself just be, to regulate all those things. It can be then that post-traumatic growth, that co-regulation. The looking into ways to turn what's hurting your heart into a way to improve things for yourself, your family, your communities, the world at large.

For today's episode, episode 76, we're celebrating the Autumn Equinox, a time of balance and harmony, on the 21st September. We're also celebrating the International Day of Peace.

That might sound quite strange because of everything that's going on in the world so I'm going to share a resourcing technique today around “success amnesia”.

Of all the things I've learned as an ADHDer, the term “success amnesia” explains my entire life. And like kind of having low self-esteem for so long and self-loathing for so long and all the rest of it. And then realising how that is so common with ADHD and trauma, with working memory issues. We can do good stuff and completely forget it. I forgot I wrote a book. I've forgotten I've edited journals. I've forgotten columns. I've forgotten huge pieces of work or other things that were tough in life. Success amnesia is the phrase that explains why it's so prevalent for ADHDers.

By working with your own success amnesia, and I'll share some ways in this episode, it can not only boost your own self-esteem and confidence, or at least start chipping away at some of that self-loathing and internalised ableism, but it can also empower you to feel better, able to speak up, to help others. To navigate so much of the insanity we're facing in the world and things that we thought everyone had agreed were bad things left in the past, suddenly rearing their heads again in order to stand up, in order to be able to resist, in order to help make the world a better place for yourself, your communities and others.

It's important that you are doing so from a place of safety, from a place of wellbeing. By acknowledging your accomplishments, I know we've talked about the Dragon's Tail, which is a gorgeous somatic coaching exercise I talk about in the book and I've talked about in another episode I'll link to in the show notes.

But success amnesia is a daily practice, as in I'm going to recommend a daily practice you can do to counter success amnesia. It's a wonderful way for building confidence in a really authentic way. It's not like, wow, I'm brilliant, anything like that. It's just like, oh, wow, I did these things today that I had forgotten. And yeah, that makes sense as to why I was working late or why I was tired or why, whatever it might be, it's helping you take a breath, pause before you move on to the next thing and how you need to just do, do, do, do, do. So I hope you enjoy it.

As always, we'll start with the Feel part of the Feel. Love. Heal. Framework. And I want to encourage you here to feel all the rage, all the fear, all the everything. Not act on it, but just recognise however it is you're feeling, getting it out of your body if you need to.

Thich Nhat Hanh has a beautiful meditation helping to recognise the temporary nature of so many emotions, even really strong emotions. When you feel yourself being hooked into clickbait headlines or news, if you can respond in a thoughtful, empowering, loving way, great.

But if you're just getting yourself stressed out and kind of feeling despair for humanity and the state of the world and all of that, it's not helping you.

You get to discern, you get to choose. But by recognising your rage, by feeling all your feelings, you're going to be in a better position to do all the work.

Sorry, little Rainey knocked the, oh bless her. She took the webcam with her little paw. Oh bless her. So think about, actually don't think, FEEL. Notice the most prominent feeling in your body right now.

The Feel part of the framework is about active self-care and feeling better. That kind of the things we can do to regulate. Identifying where you are, noticing what you're most conscious of. It might be a prominent body sensation. It might be a prominent emotion. But notice whatever it is you're feeling right now and say, “I feel…” whatever that is. It might be I feel despair. I feel rage. I feel hope. I feel love. I feel joy. I feel pride, whatever it might be.

Recognise, think about it when you're caught by a post online or something on TV or something someone says. And when we're trying to live, we're trying to be peaceful, loving beings ourselves in a world in which there's so much going on. That is so challenging and so polarising.

And it's trying to navigate doing what we can to help. But also staying sane and recognising where you are in any given moment, noticing the somatic sensations in your body, noticing the energy, noticing your charge, your life force, your prana, your chi. Just “I feel…” whatever it is.

And then, “I welcome…” whatever it is. It's going to help you recognise, “Is now the right moment to continue with this conversation for that International Day of Peace?” If someone is saying something quite provocative, there might be times where you're like, “Yep, I can ground, I can centre myself and I can speak up in a loving, respectful way that might actually help.” Like not just further polarise people or “Nope, I'm just getting angry here. It's going to make it worse. I'm going to do something else instead.”

Identifying how you're feeling is a very powerful thing. And I think you will also enjoy how quickly all feelings go. It makes us less likely, any kind of mindfulness practice, to hold on to joy, hold on to the good things because we recognise that everything is temporary.

Let me know how you get on with that. I do love hearing from you. Moving on to the Love part of the framework, it's that uppercase Self-care. That you don't have to do a thing. You are a wonderful part of the Divine. You deserve love. You deserve acceptance. That reminder alone can transform whatever issue you're working with.

When we stop resisting, when we stop trying, when we stop arguing with reality, that love, that acceptance, that support, it's just really transformative. And that doesn't mean that it's easy. It's a practice. Notice how it feels. If you want to be a force for love in the world, if you want to help make the world a better place.

I love the idea of helping making the world a better place where everyone, wherever we're born or live, is safe, welcome and loved and able to thrive. And love can, in this case for me, mean loving that kind of grandiose idea like, who am I to think that I can help make a difference? But I believe everyone can help make a difference.

It's not about taking it all on yourself, but thinking what is important to you and how can you make what you're doing as loving, as peaceful, as harmonious for your nervous system, for your body, for your life, for your loved ones as possible.

It might mean sending love to the parts of yourself that may be tempted to hate other people for what they're saying and doing and posting and all of that. It's like Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

It's really hard when things are so charged and the more you can remember that you're not just a human, you're not just a body. You are a soul as well. And you have that beyond the person energy and remembering that connection.

Which then moves us to the Heal element, that collective care, that encouragement to speak up, to connect with others, to co-regulate, to heal in community. There is so much to be so outraged about. Community is what will help you feel better, to heal and also to care for others as well as them helping care for you.

We're living in a world in which so many of the most powerful people on the planet are using that power against people. It's too easy to forget that you have so much power within yourself. You can connect with that ventral vagal energy as much as you can. You can feel empowered by the idea of post-traumatic growth to just, I mean, again, with the success amnesia log, by noticing at the end of every night what you've done.

It might be who you spoke up for. It might be things you did at work. It might be having had a loving discussion with your partner instead of, ah, it might be taking a breath and hugging your toddler instead of feeling impatient or whatever it might be.

Success amnesia is very worth overcoming because it will help you rise to the challenge of 2025 and all that we are dealing with personally, professionally, globally, in our communities.

When you remember all the things you have already accomplished, all the things you've already done and you build on that, it's from a much more grounded and centred energy and it makes it much more sustainable. There's not a huge gulf between what you're trying to do and feeling too tiny to make a difference.

I hope that gives you some ideas. Do email [email protected] if you want to let me know how you're getting on or comment wherever you're listening to or watching this.

I read them all and I do love to hear from you.

In the Sole to Soul Circle tomorrow, there'll be an EFT tap along to help you really integrate some of this and feel empowered to take even five minutes a day to do this simple, simple, simple and enormously effective practice to help you change the way that you feel about yourself and any challenges that you're up against.

Just making a list. It might be that you make a list with pen and paper or in your diary or on your phone, or you might just even say it to your reflection as you're brushing your teeth. I did. “I'm proud of myself for…” whatever it might be.

A tiny, tiny, tiny tweak to your life and it will help you make bigger steps in terms of what you're doing for yourself, for your communities and for the world at large.

Thank you for listening. I love sharing these. Next week, we're going to be talking about the Tend and Befriend response and people pleasing. I've just been interviewed about “extreme people pleasing” for a UK national paper so I think by the time that publishes, I'll be able to link to the show notes for the episode.

But I got so excited talking to the journalist, I thought this needs a podcast episode of its own. If you would like to subscribe, please do so. You can access full transcripts, show notes, links and all the rest of it through the show notes wherever you're listening or watching on YouTube. And you can also get it through selfcarecoaching.net and the feelbettereverydaypodcast.com.

You can find out more about joining the Circle and the book and you can potentially book a free telephone consultation if we have a mutually convenient time and you're interested in any of my Self care coaching or trauma informed therapies or supervision.

And I hope that you will keep a list. If you really want to ground this, it's really helpful not just to list what you're proud of yourself for having accomplished every day. And when I say accomplished, that sounds quite grandiose again. It's not like big things. It could be the tiniest thing, but it's building again. We retrain the nervous system with these micro moments and just taking a moment to acknowledge the things that you've done. It's powerful. Reading them back also really powerful.

It might be that you just write one thing you're proud of yourself for, but make sure you read it back every night. So you're building this long list and it will change the way you feel...