Translating ADHD

Shelly and Cam continue to explore the lived experience theme for the new season with a deep dive into personal narratives. Our personal narrative is the narrative we tell ourselves to explain a situation or rationalize a behavior - ours or someone else’s. ADHD can make it really hard to distinguish our inner dialogue from our experiences in the world. The brain works hard to ‘tell a story’ to make sense of our experiences. Sometimes it gets it right, but often it omits or adds pieces to make the information more palatable, to fit a certain story.

Shelly and Cam share numerous client examples of how one’s own lived experience or context informs their narrative. They go on to share how coaching and therapy can help with seeing these statements for what they are - a perspective - and if this thinking is serving the client and who they are and what they are trying to achieve.

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Cam and Shelly kick off the third season of the Translating ADHD podcast entertaining an often-asked question in ADHD circles - Is ADHD a Superpower?

It turns out that one’s own experience or context informs how people will answer this question. Many are emphatic one way or the other - that it is totally a superpower! or that it is not at all a superpower! Shelly and Cam, in usual form, explore the nuanced middle ground and discuss superpowers in the form of strengths and how ADHD can get in the way of distinguishing, owning and stepping into one’s strengths. Shelly and Cam point to research that proves that one’s context such as race, gender and marital and economic status influence one’s outlook on their ADHD (links below). The hosts share a number of client examples and examples from their own lives to look at framing one’s ADHD experience by exploring concepts like personal preferences and identities. Most significant, the hosts introduce the theme for the start of Season 3 - Your own context matters.

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Flourishing Despite ADHD Article

• Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode

This episode is a rebroadcast. Cam and Shelly have handpicked episodes from the archive to air while they are on their annual summer break. New episodes resume September 19th!

One of the best things about doing this show is that, as your hosts, we are also learning. We are constantly examining our models, concepts, and language as we deliver episodes to you. 

This week, we examine the language we've been using for modes of operation as ADHD people. Taking our previous "Planner and/or Doer" language, we introduce and discuss a new model that we feel better describes a range of ADHD experiences: "Big Brain and/or Fast Brain"

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• Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode

This episode is a rebroadcast. Cam and Shelly have handpicked episodes from the archive to air while they are on their annual summer break. New episodes resume September 19th!

This week we return to our exploration of big signal emotions as we dig into shame. Shame is no stranger for those of us living with ADHD. Shame is often the root of many downstream emotional responses, like imposter syndrome and rejection sensitivity. As one walks through the world with an invisible disability like ADHD, one can see how shame can manifest. Cam and Shelly discuss how years of dismissal and rejection, deliberate and not, and years of struggling to explain or account for the unexplainable, plant the seeds of shame. Cam and Shelly share how factors like isolation, fear and trauma will contribute to the development of shame and how ADHD and emotional dysregulation heighten a shame response.

The First Barrier of ADHD is the barrier to new awareness. Emotions like shame, and blame in a previous episode, can cloud our judgment, disrupt our own agency and take us offline down some negative emotional rabbit hole (or one of our Valley experiences). When we explore emotions in a safe and curious way, locate a supportive community and bring new language to our emotional experiences we can start to dissolve the effects of emotions like shame.

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• Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode

This episode is a rebroadcast. Cam and Shelly have handpicked episodes from the archive to air while they are on their annual summer break. New episodes resume September 19th!

Shelly and Cam bring forth a topic that is synonymous with coaching and the ADHD lived experience but rarely, if ever, discussed overtly in ADHD circles. Context drives so much of the coaching conversation from discovering big agendas to exploring limiting perspectives, yet we often don’t recognize when context is at work influencing our thoughts and behaviors.

Shelly and Cam define context and how it is of particular interest to those of us with ADHD. Part of the neurodiverse experience is in part because many of us are ‘wired for context’ - that we process by our relative relation to our world in a particular moment. The neurotypical population is wired more for outcome, sequence or process - wired more for time. Our preference for context has us lead with curious ‘Why’ questions rather than conventional ‘What’ and ‘When’ goal-oriented questions. They share numerous examples of how context comes into play in coaching relationships and how context can be a powerful ally or a formidable obstacle.

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• Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode

This episode is a rebroadcast. Cam and Shelly have handpicked episodes from the archive to air while they are on their annual summer break. New episodes resume September 19th!

Shelly and Cam do what they do best, taking listeners on a journey through an ADHD-lived experience. Today they integrate all three barriers of ADHD as Shelly shares her own discovery and learning process. She digs into a recent dilemma around a breakdown with getting house chores done. Listen as Shelly and Cam explore Shelly’s journey as she bumps into and then develops workarounds for all three barriers, to new learning that she converts into new action resulting in systems and practices that reflect her current reality - the captain of her own abode.

The Three Barriers are as follows:

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• Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode

This episode is a rebroadcast. Cam and Shelly have handpicked episodes from the archive to air while they are on their annual summer break. New episodes resume September 19th!

Surprisingly, this is the first episode dedicated to the topic of self-care. Shelly and Cam discuss self-care in the context of the coaching process. They discuss why they start with self-care in every coaching engagement. Clients often come to coaching looking for a quick win but they're often seeking that win from an urgent state of mind or in an ARC perspective.

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• Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode

This episode is a rebroadcast. Cam and Shelly have handpicked episodes from the archive to air while they are on their annual summer break. New episodes resume September 19th!

As ADHD people, we pay most attention to the things that generate the biggest signals. This week on the Translating ADHD podcast, we dive deeper into this signal-based attention system.

We discuss our tendency as ADHD adults to rely on the Adrenaline Response Cycle (ARC) and hyperfocus as primary tools for getting to action. The challenge here is that these tools are only effective for the biggest signals, those generated by emotion or urgency. This leaves us ignoring the more nuanced signals, the ones that often speak to what really matters to us.

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• For episode transcripts visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode.

This episode is a rebroadcast. Cam and Shelly have handpicked episodes from the archive to air while they are on their annual summer break. New episodes resume September 19th!

Hosts Shelly and Cam continue to explore the concept of resilience and focus on resilience practices. Episode 60 laid out the ‘valley’ experience - getting stuck and not finding a way out. In today’s episode we explore practices to manage those valley moments. We share more examples of challenges when we are ‘deep in the emotion of an event’ like ‘blame sponge’ and our old friend from Episode 4, Adrenaline Response Cycle.

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• Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode

As season two comes to an end, Cam and Shelly reflect on their learning over the last year in hosting the podcast together. Cam appreciates the focus on practice in the episodes and reflects how he is using this approach to develop a lighter touch on moving his own initiatives forward. Shelly shares how she let go of pursuing or achieving “at the speed of capitalism” and regaining an important perspective on what matters most for her - to have more balance in her life. 

Both hosts share about what they are looking forward to in the next season starting September 19th - more in-depth exploration of lived experiences, especially the interplay of ADHD and other conditions like anxiety and depression. Cam is also considering tinkering with the Mt Rainier Model. Cam has picked seven archived episodes for the break. Shelly and Cam invite listeners to listen and catch up or to also take a break and rejoin them in September.

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• Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode