Do you ever feel like, even if you’ve been formally diagnosed with autism and ADHD, that you’re somehow making it out to be worse than it actually is?
That you somehow, even though you waited for years and answered all the questions truthfully and all the forms and everything, that somehow you don’t deserve your diagnosis?
You don’t deserve potential support?
Episode 119 of Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD is a solo episode where I share some personal reflections (including my lived and professional experience) around caring for ourselves, our Selves and each other when the world seems inexplicably hostile to the idea of people denied a lifetime of support suddenly having potential access to that support.
Let me know what you think and what helps you own your diagnoses (even self-diagnoses).
le grá (with love),
Ev3
CHAPTERS
0:00 – Do I really deserve my autism and ADHD diagnosis?
2:50 – A new way to access support through Adventures
5:42 – Why increased diagnosis isn’t the same as overdiagnosis
10:02 – Replacing self-doubt with self-compassion
13:02 – The FEEL. LOVE. HEAL. framework
14:41 – What rescue cats can teach us about accepting ourselves
17:25 – Finding the support your nervous system needs
19:08 – One small step you can take today
20:07 – Final grounding practice and reflection
LINKS
Kaelynn Partlow https://linktr.ee/kaelynn_vp
If you enjoyed this, check out:
Episode 44: Some of my own mental health journey
Episode 69: Will ADHD Meds Work for Me?
Episode 106: Su-Purr! Polyvagal Purrs evolution
Choose your own adventures: New adventures in the works including Inner Child Play, Stop Self Loathing, Move Past People Pleasing and Purpose, Meaning and Joy https://solestosoul.ie/adventures/
Book your free telephone consultation and access 100s of body-mind practices at https://solestosoul.ie/free-downloads
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Do you ever feel like, even if you’ve been formally diagnosed with autism and ADHD, that you’re somehow making it out to be worse than it actually is? That you somehow, even though you waited for years and answered all the questions truthfully and all the forms and everything, that somehow you don’t deserve your diagnosis? You don’t deserve potential support?
Welcome to episode 119 of Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD. Each Tuesday, you’ll get new episodes helping you learn to love and care for all your parts, including your trauma and ADHD, from AuDHD, from the soles of your feet to your soul. You can access older episodes at solestosoul.ie/podcast, so that’s soles as in soles of your feet, s-o-l-e-s-t-o and then s-o-u-l.ie forward slash podcast.
And if you subscribe, you’ll get them every Tuesday morning, Irish time, and you can access them through your favourite platforms or you can also access lots of other resources through the website.
But for now, just thinking about how you feel when you see another headline about over-diagnosis or controversy about people getting treatment that they haven’t had access to their entire lives, decades and decades and decades in many cases.
For me, it was my late 40s and I’m 50 now and it is painful hearing client stories, my own experience and others in various networks and just thinking how rather than making up for lost time in terms of, Wow, can you imagine if society were better set up to support all differently wired brains and all different needs? instead it’s very dismissive in many cases.
So no one obviously is broken beyond repair. If the systems we lived in were friendlier and if there were less ableism and less internalised ableism to help us better advocate for ourselves and others, things would have been very different. So taking a very quick break and be back with the episode soon.
Would you like to work with me without actually working with me one-to-one, whether that’s to do with your location or your budget. I’ve created the Adventurers online programmes so that you can focus in on specific issues you want to improve and benefit from my really holistic approach using everything from yoga and breathwork and meditation to coaching and psychosynthesis and NLP and EFT tapping, crystals and psychoeducation, looking at some of the neuroscience around some of the issues and I have been putting together online programmes to help you with everything from trauma and AuDHD to going for glimmers to stopping pulling your hair out if you have trichotillomania to getting more organised, sleeping better and dealing with anxiety. There are so many options and for 33 euros a year you get access to all of it.
What happens is you sign up, you email me what your wish list is and I will then send you three suggestions for getting started and I will use your answers to support my own AuDHD brain in finishing the online programme that is best for you. It might be something you’ve already identified or it might be something that I recognise from your answers and as more and more are completed you’ll have access to all of those as well and I’m really excited about these offerings and these ways of working in really focused kind of laser-focused ways. They’re mainly seven-day programmes but I don’t like telling people how to do anything and their persistent drive for autonomy otherwise known as pathological demand avoidance, you know what’s right for you.
It may be that you want to experiment with all of the tools, it may be that only certain tools resonate for you, again you know yourself best. Let me know what you are most keen to begin with and if you have any questions and you can find out more at solestosoul.ie/adventures so I’m looking forward to hearing from you there or if you just go to the website there’ll be links and there’ll be links in the show notes as well. Thank you for listening to my first ever podcast ad and welcome back to the episode.
My favourite analogy around over-diagnosis is the night sky and how no one looks at the stars through a telescope and is suddenly like oh where did these all appear from, they can’t be real. Instead it’s recognising that as technology has advanced just like diagnostic criteria has advanced and expanded, astronomers can see more of the night sky and psychiatrists and psychologists have more to go on. It’s only since 2013 that autism and ADHD have been acknowledged to exist within the same brain, within the same human.
So for all that time before that people thought if you had one you couldn’t have the other whereas now just 13 years later most people recognise the exceedingly high correlation between the two.
It’s not that our experiences and our struggles, feeling like we’re constantly battling ourselves with some of the symptoms being in direct opposition to the others, masking them out as well leading to later diagnosis. It’s not like our lives suddenly changed, it’s that we have a greater understanding and that should be celebrated, that should be used to help create systems and lives and workplaces and relationship styles and all the things that humans need and to make them more accessible.
If you’re struggling to believe that you’re worthy of support, compassion, all of it, if you’re struggling to believe you deserve a diagnosis and to put yourself through all of that, it took me years to get the diagnosis and like it was expensive and to believe the diagnosis and I know that I’m lucky that I was able to afford it.
I know many many people it’s just not an option but self-diagnosis, giving yourself that compassion, giving yourself that understanding, the empathy, the amped up self-compassion and this is from someone whose work has been all about self-care and self-compassion for over two decades. Having the diagnosis, it still helps me on a daily basis.
I still haven’t seen my occupational therapist around some of the sensory issues, something I’m really looking forward to getting sorted quite soon. But it’s incredible, so many people have such amazing results on the ADHD medication. I had amazing results in terms of my brain but I’m not able to take it very often due to my nervous system and other side effects.
But just even remembering when I go back to the house several times before actually leaving, Oh when I was medicated I didn’t have to do this. Recognising it’s just executive functioning issues, it’s just working memory issues, it’s just whatever the symptoms are, whatever the traits are and having that compassion, having that other people don’t have these struggles, other people.
I was watching Everwood the other day, I saw it when it came out and now it’s on Netflix and we’re watching it again and there was this little scene where the father, a like kind of world-renowned neurosurgeon, was saying to the kid something about how he remembered something he read back in college and the kid was like, you remember everything you read? And the dad very dismissively said, don’t you?
There was no follow-up, I’d love a whole episode on that. And I think when we understand more about our executive functioning issues, our working memory, our sensory differences, all these things, it makes so much sense of so many things and I hope you’ll find the older episodes helpful and lots of my interviews with other people working with neurodivergence.
But it starts with compassion, it starts with knowing you deserve to feel better. So moving to the FEEL. part of the FEEL. LOVE. HEAL. framework I developed, let it all out.
Journal, address your internalised ableism from living in an ableist society that has told you your whole life you’re being too sensitive, too needy, too big emotions, too dramatic, too forgetful, too careless, too thoughtful, thoughtless, too lazy.
All the things, let it all out. Let go of any guilt around it. I know that even now, even recording this, there’s a part of me thinking, OK, I didn’t used to know what masking was, but I was and still am very high masking and being able to mask is in itself a privilege.
But my understanding more about my uniquely wired brain means I can be a better advocate for people who don’t have the privilege of masking, but who also aren’t as exhausted by masking.
But we who can mask, we who are late diagnosed because it wasn’t as extreme, as severe, although we did have many other challenges which are directly related, it means as Kaelynn Partlow, Life on the Bridge, the autism advocate and author and she’s a therapist at the same place where she had school. Her book is absolutely gorgeous, her content is absolutely gorgeous, but one thing that really stood with me, stuck with me from the book was about being able to advocate for others, being able to use our experience to help people with higher support needs be heard and help hopefully change the systems, not just even with neurodivergence, but with all otherness, with all differences, with all different needs.
People talk often about wheelchair access ramps, how they were initially put in for like the bits on the curb for wheelchair users, but people pushing pushchairs benefit, all sorts of like these extra accommodations, they don’t make life worse for anyone. We all deserve ease, so with the FEEL. bit, let it all out.
Remember also that because we take things so literally, even when we tick almost all the boxes, we can get hung up on the oh no, but that specific thing I don’t have.
We’re wired to focus on that, just as we move into the LOVE. part, that love, that acceptance, that support. So the FEEL. part of the framework, it’s about the self-care, when you have the bandwidth, when you can do the things that are going to help you feel better.
It might be exercise, it might be cooking something nourishing, having a shower, it might be brushing your teeth, it might be going for a walk, it might be picking up the phone to connect with a loved one, whatever it might be, asking for a hug, whatever.
We need a certain level of bandwidth to be able to do those basic self-care things. As we move into the LOVE. part, it’s more about that love archetype, that things that we do that help us connect to the Self, that uppercase Self, that highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most brilliant, joyful, miraculous part of yourself, the part of you that knows you’re part of nature, part of the divine, the part of you that knows you deserve all the love, support and acceptance available, and that’s able to give it to yourself as well as to others.
Ask yourself what would that even look like? How does it feel to even imagine giving all your parts, including the forgetful, sensitive, needy, dramatic, all of those parts, all the love, all the acceptance, all the care, to think about you deserve it just like everyone deserves it.
To give a cat-related example, moving to the Polyvagal Purrs element, the newest feral, Lizzie Giraffe, she attacked Rainbow, my beloved, my heart, and it was awful. And I’m still feeding her, I’m still trying to get her to the vets to be trapped, neutered and released. I’m obviously doing what I can to protect Rainbow, but I was here earlier and Lizzie Giraffe was leaping up on the patio door and Rainbow was kind of hissing and growling and all the rest of it.
And I was kind of thinking, oh, if only Lizzie Giraffe would go away and find someone else to feed her and trap, neuter and release her and all the rest of it and basically repressing that, like, I don’t want to deal with that, I don’t want to.
And then she looked at me. And she needs treatment, she needs to get to the vet, I need to be able to get her there and I need to feed her, I need to love her, I need to cherish her, I need to make sure that she doesn’t hurt Rainbow or Meadbh or any of the others. But she is as deserving of love, she just needs care, she needs welcoming, she needs safety, and then she’ll be able to thrive like all the others.
And it’s the same with all our parts. The more we pay attention to what is behind the acting out, what is behind the anxious symptoms, whatever it might be and meeting that need, recognising with care and compassion, rather than I just don’t want to feel it, I’m not going to and then of course we project it out and we create wars and all sorts.
If it helps you, think of the Polyvagal Purrs approach and imagine those parts of yourself as beloved rescue cats that are so worthy of love, so worthy of curiosity and compassion and care, because you are, you totally deserve.
And you might find some of the yoga nidras helpful as well, in most of them I work with that limitless part of yourself as well, encouraging you to connect with that part of you that’s so much more than your AuDHD, your trauma, anything else you’ve survived, anything else you’re facing now, worried about in the future and I encourage you to imagine yourself as a drop in the ocean or a star in the galaxy.
And there’s much more to it than that, but it might be just as a quick takeaway from this episode, just imagine yourself as a star in the galaxy, complete and unique, all on your own and part of something far greater, far bigger. And we are all made of stardust, like it’s incredible when we think about it.
So moving to the HEAL. part of the framework and thinking of ways in which you can access all the supports available, some of the supports available. I say this, I have a mental note again to ring the occupational therapist, make that appointment to see a coach, a therapist who can help you. You might find some of my resources helpful at solestosoul.ie, online care, in-person care, friends, making more time for loved ones, making more time for your glimmers.
You might find the adventure interesting and helpful in the solestosoul.ie/adventures online programmes, the glimmers one is there now. How can you put in place the things that will help you discern what your extra sensitive nervous system needs, the things that will help guide you. It can feel punitive, it can feel problematic, it can feel angsty and agonising living with an extra sensitive nervous system through trauma and AuDHD, but it is a gift.
It means that where other people are able to endure much more, we get to notice much faster because of our sensory differences and when we act on that, when we remind ourselves that we deserve to feel better, we deserve to thrive like everybody else, we can put these accommodations in place as much as possible and make plans if we can’t immediately in other areas. So we co-regulate, we heal through connection, we heal in community and community is more important now than ever. So think about what you’re going to do differently as a result of listening to this episode and before you go, just take a moment to ground, press into the soles of the feet, press into whatever you’re sitting on, whatever you’re lying on, whatever you’re connected with and if it’s safe to do so, like if you’re not driving, just connect with your whole self from the soles of your feet all the way up to the crown of your head, that connection with the soul.
Be open to any sensations, any emotions, anything that feels most prominent right now, let it help you identify what would be most supportive for you right now and do it, look after yourself.
So this episode, like all of them, has been produced by me, your host Eve Menezes Cunningham and I look forward to sharing more next week. Thank you so much for listening and if you haven’t already and you would like to, please like, subscribe, share, leave a five-star review, get in touch in the comments or email eve at solestosoul.ie, let me know how you’re getting on and before you go, please take a moment to ground the episode by just pausing and scanning your parts, all your parts from the soles of your feet to your soul, so you may want to keep your eyes open, you may want to close them but planting your feet firmly on the ground, lengthening through the spine if that feels comfortable for you, letting yourself feel held by the chair or whatever it is you’re sitting or lying or standing on and taking just a moment to scan your whole self, your whole body, your whole energy field and ask yourself what you’re going to do for yourself right now, it might be as a result of listening to the episode, it might be something else, it might be a nap, it might be something to eat, it might be some kind of movement but let yourself ground, let yourself get into the habit of connecting with your inner wisdom and notice what you need and give yourself what you need.
Thanks for listening to this episode, if you haven’t already and would like to, please like, subscribe, comment, engage across the platforms wherever you may be accessing this and you can also email me eve at solestosoul.ie. Thank you for listening, I look forward to sharing more next week.