00:00:02 Nancy
I think the main way that I support my clients with ADHD is possibly not much different from other conditions. And it’s really to attune with them and provide them with a sense of safety, a co-creation of safety where they can feel all that they have suppressed. So just allowing gradually in their own time, the emotion to be felt and expressed and held. And that does so much. That has been my journey as well. I’ve gone really, really deep doing my own work, as the more that that emotion has come up, the more I’ve been able to express it in regulation with my Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, the more regulated I’ve become as a person. And I’ve added meditation in now, and for some people with ADHD that sounds impossible. You know, I used to be one of those people, like I can’t meditate. No, I can’t do it. Like I didn’t even want to think about it, it felt college yucky. The thought of having to sit still or for clients of mine that feel that way, that gently, just if they are receptive and want ideas, we talk about what is it that does feel good? How can you regulate yourself? Not everyone wants to sit and meditate. When I could was when I realised I wanted to. I was taking cues from my body and not trying to do it all in one go, and only then did I start to feel ready for meditation and knowing that the work is probably lifelong and ongoing. There is no end point.

00:01:58 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast stories of transformation and healing through compassionate inquiry. 

Welcome, Nancy, to the Gifts of Trauma podcast. I’m so glad that you could join me today to talk about ADHD, its gifts, and how it can impact the lives of children and adults. And I’m hoping you can also share some stories that illustrate how we can support our own ADHD, and that of those we love.

00:02:36 Nancy
Thanks, Rosemary.

00:02:37 Rosemary
All right Nancy, I know you’re a Compassionate Inquiry practitioner and that you Co lead the Compassionate Inquiry ADHD focus group which I have attended, as I also experience ADHD. You’re a meditation teacher, a life and addiction coach, a wife and a mother. You’ve also learned how to support your own ADHD and addiction recovery. The most common online question is what is ADHD? Now, given the work that you do, this may be a question that you’re often asked. So I’m just wondering, would you like to address it?

00:03:16 Nancy
Yeah, I can have a go. I would say, you know, it’s a group of symptoms. It, my minds, and all the people in my family with ADHD are also highly sensitive. I think that will align with Gabor Mate’s teachings and other opinions and it is definitely exacerbated by the trauma of unmet childhood needs. And it can include hyperactivity, impulsivity, distractedness, zoning out. And it’s definitely not a deficit of attention, in my opinion. It is all of the attention and all of the things, all at the same time. Quite often, you know many of us will recognise that… We start doing one task and we start bouncing around to all the other tasks that are also being held in our minds.

00:04:24 Rosemary
Great description. I think of it when it occurs to me, especially when my thoughts get very busy. My thoughts go a little wild and it’s almost… the visual I think of is colliding thought bubbles. You know, if I was a cartoon character, I would not have one thought bubble per cell of comic. I would have a whole bunch of them fighting for my attention. So I guess it shows up a little bit differently for everybody, but there’s always a lot, a lot shows up at the same time. Might be a common denominator.

00:04:58 Nancy
Yeah, definitely. And it does, you know, it does crossover with anxiety, depression, dyslexia, OCD, these things can all be interlinked, and autism spectrum disorder. And so it’s wildly varying depending on the individual.

00:05:21 Rosemary
So what you’re saying really, if I recap with different words, is it, you know, it all falls into the neurodiversity spectrum, and it seems to get a lot of attention, ADHD. And so I’m wondering, I have two questions which I will separate. I will take those two thought bubbles and pull them apart. We used to have ADD and ADHD and now it’s all being combined and I had a conversation with someone just last week and they said “No, I definitely have ADD not ADHD because I’m not hyperactive.” I wonder how you would have responded to that comment from her.

00:05:59 Nancy
I would be curious about what it’s like inside her mind because my hyperactivity definitely was very internal. So I think it’s still there. I don’t sort of physically…  I have one of my sons, he’s very physically hyperactive and he goes out and walks, you know, walks around the block a few times a day even with his headphones on. But mine is all internal, but I still consider it hyperactivity.

00:06:30 Rosemary
That’s exactly what I said to her, because my mind can race sometimes and it’s not the most pleasant thought, especially when I’m trying to focus and I’ve got all these other thoughts passing through my mind. It would be almost like the literal equivalent if you know, pulling out your laptop at a train station and trying to focus while trains are coming in and out and people are passing by it, it makes it a little bit difficult or a lot difficult depending on what the distractions are. So that’s, yeah, that’s very well said. Thank you. 

We’re going to run through a few facts before we get into some meaty stories. Something else I found in my research is that ADHD, it’s growing rapidly both in public awareness and rate of diagnosis. So as of mid 2024, adult ADHD ranks in the top ten mental health searches on Google. So that I think is quite significant. And as of a couple of years ago, 20/22, the hashtag ADHD had 11.4 billion views on TikTok. Now here’s where I’m hoping this conversation will come in. That source went on to cite that many people credit these platforms, such as TikTok and social media, with helping them realize, then they’ve had the diagnosis and subsequently are seeking treatment. But they also pointed out that misinformation is rampant on social media channels. But they said that same study showed that the content posted by healthcare providers and professionals was overwhelmingly more useful and accurate. So I’m hoping that we can fall into the useful and accurate category. And something else I found, um, British statistics, the number of adults receiving an NHS – National Health Service – prescription for ADHD increased sevenfold from 2013 to 2023, which is a 10 year period. And new figures from Public Health Scotland show that in 2023 almost as many adults as children were being treated for ADHD. So do you have any thoughts on it as it was thought for so long primarily as something that affected children, and now the adults are showing up. So how does that land for you? What do you make that mean?

00:08:57 Nancy
Yeah, that definitely resonates with me because I always knew that my brain worked differently and that’s all I understood growing up, and it was pushed away. And when my son chose to have a diagnosis at 14 because he wants to access college, and felt that it might be helpful, particularly for sitting exams and getting extra time and that kind of thing, his diagnosis came back and I thought, right, OK, that’s, that’s probably me as well. Briefly into my story, I stopped drinking alcohol when I was 40, and I thought that would be the answer to my chaotic mind. And it wasn’t, surprise, surprise. So a year later I thought, OK, let’s find out, let’s get a diagnosis. And it came back. And with a lot of the people I work with, mainly women, they’ve found the same thing. So they’ve stopped their drinking of alcohol, which was their self medication, really a lot like me. And the problems are still there, but more obvious because they’re not being masked anymore.

00:10:12 Rosemary
Yes.

00:10:14 Nancy
So either their children are getting diagnosed and then they’re realizing the similarities and getting diagnosed themselves, or giving up with an addiction is showing that there are still underlying symptoms.

00:10:32 Rosemary
I think if I’d been in your position, I would have been tempted to compare my own diagnosis with my sons and see if there were similarities there. Was that a temptation for you?

00:10:44 Nancy
It didn’t really occur to me. We were diagnosed quite differently as well. He went through a different channel to me, so it sounds… My husband kind of laughs at me and my eldest son because we are so similar with things like forgetfulness and messiness and I believe my husband also has ADHD but is also on the spectrum so he’s really about timings, plans, schedules, control. Our family balances each other out.

00:11:21 Rosemary
Yeah, And as you were saying that I was wondering, I’ve always been like, my mom was very controlling and I always like to be places on time, if not early. I’m rather obsessively tidy. When I was going through my house flipping phase, it wasn’t a problem at all for me to live in a show home because that’s normally how my house looks, because it makes me happy to put everything in its place. But I have a sneaking suspicion that might be some kind of coping strategy. And it was interesting you were speaking about alcohol because the thing that really exposed my ADHD to me, and I had not been formally diagnosed, was when I developed this brief love affair with coffee. And as someone with ADHD and I’m very sensitive to caffeine, so it was kind of fun to have a cup of coffee and turn into a squirrel. You know, if you can just picture a squirrel, especially if they’re being vigilant and they think there might be a predator around and their head goes this way and this way and they’re looking up and down and sideways. That’s how I felt on coffee. I don’t know, there was something about the caffeine that also made me feel a little bit like I had superpowers. And it wasn’t until I was in the presence of my daughter and she said, “Mom!” It was dysregulation her to watch me do my squirrel impersonation. And we were actually packing up a friend’s house and I was going here and there and putting things down and forgetting where I’d put them. I was a squirrel losing her nuts and I realized the impact that indulging my ADHD to that extent could have on someone else. And I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit? I’ve fairly recently been in the company of a few people who have ADHD and for the first time in my life I found it quite dysregulating for me to be around their ADHD. So I’m wondering, maybe you can share a story or two about what it’s like for you on the inside and what it’s like for you to be in the environment of someone else with ADHD, and you could pick either thread that appeals to you.

00:13:37 Nancy
So the one thing that can happen for me with clients with ADHD that that talk, the real talkers talk very quickly is that I can get caught up with them and their story and get pulled out of my groundedness. So for me, it is so important to have my own practice, staying grounded, knowing how to regulate myself in a session with the client. And also in the early days when I was going through the mentorship, is learning how to, to have the confidence to interrupt and ask somebody to slow down. And so that’s, that’s the one way it’s really noticeable for me and I can myself be very excitable. Not in my client sessions, but in day-to-day life, and when I’m with other people of a similar ilk. Yeah, the excitement and it’s fun, you know, it’s fun and lively and bubbly and energetic. But for me I have a short window of tolerance of being around that kind of energy and I come away feeling extremely depleted and have to just be on my own and regulate again. And so it can be fun and draining.

00:15:12 Rosemary
I would agree. And that’s kind of a fairly recent realization. It’s when someone shows up pumping energy. If it’s not energy that you can jump on board with and enjoy the ride, it can be quite exhausting.

00:15:29 Nancy
Mhum. And I do also notice in groups, so I’m much better on one to one. If I’m in a group and there are loud, energetic people in the group, I withdraw and I hold back. And that’s something I’ve done all, all my life. As far as I can remember, groups have always been difficult for me, and even on Zoom when I first started the training with Compassionate Inquiry, I’ve really struggled showing up in a group. I mean, this is something we might go on to, but that’s something I’ve really overcome. I mean you as you mentioned, I’m co hosting the focus group and in other various environments in person. There’s probably still some work to do, especially socially.

00:16:19 Rosemary
It’s interesting that you say that because I have the opposite problem. If the conversation is too slow, it’s as if my mind gets bored and starts thinking about other things, and I have a very hard time not working with clients one-on-one, for whatever reason -I’m grateful for it. That can go at whatever pace, but if I’m in conversation with someone else or watching a video, watching a training and they speak slowly, I just do my best to stay present and kind of like in meditation, bring the puppy back, bring the puppy back. I try to practice that, but it’s very, very challenging.

00:17:01 Nancy
Yeah,I was at a small garden party recently, and there were two lovely ladies sitting next to me having a conversation. And I was with them, but I wasn’t talking, and I hadn’t realized that I’d completely zoned out. I don’t know what my face was doing, but one of them turned round to me and said, oh, Nancy, I’d really love to know what you’re thinking. And then the other girl said, yeah, me too. Well, I just was like, oh, Tina, how do I like, say that I’m zoned out. And that’s the first time I’d met them both as well. So I was quite embarrassed about that.

00:17:45 Rosemary
Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness. I can imagine. It’s interesting how opposite our responses can be. And I think that’s probably part of the complexity of this whole condition. So, I had an interesting story to share where I was actually collaborating with someone on a project and we were speaking a lot digitally. We weren’t face to face for much. And she was getting really angry with me. Like it was a very highly detailed project and she was getting angry with me. I told you this, you know, I and, and she, and it was all verbal and I don’t retain verbal, like I’m a visual learner. So if you send me an e-mail, it’ll be locked and loaded. But if I’m listening to something, if I’m not taking really good notes, I can forget it. So she thought I just didn’t care. I was being distracted. So one day we met in person and we went over a lot of details. And then we got on the phone later and she said she asked me a question about something that we discussed that morning. And it’s like, I know we talked about it, but I can’t remember what we decided. And it was a revelation for her. She said, I thought you just weren’t paying attention. But we sat across the table from each other and I watched you and you were paying attention. Why can’t you remember this detail? And it’s like, welcome to welcome to my world. I have all these little hacks, you know, I’ll record voice notes. I will highlight written things like, and I’m sure everybody who’s dealt with ADHD for a while has various hacks, when they need to remember things. But I was very glad she did that. I didn’t realize I’d been tested until she said that. But, you know, because I’m also highly sensitive, I could sense her annoyance and I kind of guessed it was because I wasn’t remembering everything. But I did not realize she thought I just wasn’t taking the project seriously. So it’s very interesting to help someone else discover what life is like on this side.

00:19:54 Nancy
Yeah, yeah, that resonates.

00:19:57 Rosemary
Yeah, so I guess it makes sense, given what we’ve just discussed, that the second most frequently searched term on Google is what causes ADHD. And if I may, I’m going to start this off by sharing a few of the many working theories I found in my research and then I’ll pass it over to you, Nancy. 

Now, these theories range from nutritional toxicity to a desire for instant gratification, a loss of societal structure, a neurodevelopmental disorder, low levels of dopamine, the interaction of several genes, abnormalities related to frontal subcortical function that directly impact a person’s executive function, and memory consolidation. On the other hand, Doctor Gabor Mate, author of Scattered Minds, whose therapeutic approach has been made teachable in the Compassionate Inquiry training process which Nancy and I have both been through. He has a specific and really confident perspective on ADHD that differs significantly from anything I just mentioned, and lands really solidly with me. So, just to summarize, rather than viewing ADHD as a genetic or medical disorder, Gabor proposes that ADHD is a developmental issue influenced by adaptive responses to childhood stress and trauma.

00:21:26 Rosemary
Now, after listening to that laundry list of theories, how do they land with you?

00:21:33 Nancy
Well, as soon as I read Gabor’s book Scattered Minds, it landed so solidly. It was like, unquestionable. That felt like my truth. And he does also say that everyone with ADHD will have the group of genes for sensitivity, but not everybody who is highly sensitive will have ADHD, right? And looking through my family lineage, my family of origin, my dad was a highly sensitive musician and alcoholic. Really, he was absent in my life. But the times I remember watching him play, he used to play double bass jazz, I could see the emotion on his face. And he was a man that never expressed any emotion. You know, he would play with his eyes closed. And I just knew sometimes that I would see him with tears, big tears in the backs of his eyes. So there’s definitely the sensitivity genes in my family, and historically my dad  was a young child in World War 2 and was evacuated, lived away from his family, grew up in poverty. So there was trauma there, probably more than I’m aware of. And for my mum as well, I believe she possibly had ADHD. She was anxious, depressed, dysregulated, self medicated for some of my childhood, was erratic with her emotional availability, and very often she wasn’t emotionally available and certainly my emotions were not well tolerated unless I was happy and smiling. So what really resonated for me was that the early attunement that I would have needed was not there. It just wasn’t there. And my mum did her absolute best and I know how much she loved me and I know how hard she worked and how much she tried to meet my needs, but she just wasn’t able to. And yeah, I can feel the emotion. I mean, I’ve done so you know, I’ve done lots of work on this, but it’s still…

00:24:06 Rosemary
Let’s pause for a moment. That’s it. Just let that emotion arise I can see on your face, yeah.

00:24:14 Nancy
Yeah.

00:24:23 Rosemary
Yeah. And it’s hard. Even though I was adopted as an infant and  I don’t have biological history, how you’ve described your mum could easily describe my mom as well. Both my parents being British, emotions really were not welcome. And whenever I voiced an emotion, it’s like, oh, you don’t have to say it. Don’t let that thing out. Just yeah, just be cool. Just keep it inside like we are. Stiff upper lip.

00:24:52 Nancy
Yeah, I remember often being told don’t be so ridiculous, stop making a fuss. And for a child who’s highly sensitive, the shame that arose from those kinds of comments. And so I just pushed it all away, kept it all inside, pushed it all down and smiled and learned to look calm and relaxed and happy. And it’s no surprise that alcohol became a way, just to dampen it all down.

00:25:34 Rosemary
Yeah, definitely.

00:25:37 Nancy
And I and I can share all that about my mum and there’s absolutely no blame. I have nothing but love and compassion, despite sometimes her harshness and her disapproval and the ways that she showed up. But there’s nothing but love because I know it’s nothing she did intentionally. And that’s what sometimes people struggle with, clients struggle with, when we start going into the early childhood stuff, they don’t want to feel like they’re criticizing their parents.

00:26:17 Rosemary
Fair enough. Yes, absolutely. We’re very resistant to that, which is also something that goes back to childhood. We want to believe that we had a happy childhood and that everything was as it should have been. And sometimes it wasn’t. 

00:26:35 Nancy
Yeah. Yeah. And I, I sort of now I can see how because of my early childhood, I wasn’t able to be present for my two eldest children in the way that they needed me. And I’ve come to terms with that. There was a lot of guilt at first, but I absolutely know I did the best I could. But I was stressed, dysregulated, lacked support, community, family support. My sister, her children were older but she was still busy with her family, had a little bit of help from my mum, but that was a struggle because she parented the old fashioned way,, you know, put him in the pram in the garden to cry. He’ll soon get over it, which I was like, not having any of. Yeah. So I kind of was alone a lot of the time with two children that were 21 months apart, and I know that I wasn’t all that they needed. So it all rings true the way that Gabor describes the roots of ADHD in Scattered Minds.

00:27:49 Rosemary
I agree. It landed the same way for me and I’m going to share a quote from one of Gabor’s lecture videos that I’ve also referenced in the show notes because I think this captures it beautifully in less words than the whole book. He says, “If we recognize that most of the problems that people are troubled with are actually problems of development, and it’s those developmental conditions that we need to look at, will be asking ourselves what are the conditions in the society that lead so many people to have a failure of, or slowing down of, the impulse regulation, circuitry and capacity?” That’s the first point. So it’s a developmental problem rather than a medical problem per se. Number two, “if you look at the term ADHD, why do we have this capacity to tune out protection from overwhelming stress as his conclusion?” And he goes on to say, “If I were to stress you right now by becoming abusive or threatening, what options would you have? And he’s speaking to an audience. The options are standing up and telling me to shut up. You also have the option of leaving. So you have the options of fight or flight, and if you couldn’t do either, you would also have the option, given that there are many dozens of people here in the room with you, you have the option of asking for help. But what if I were to stress one of you and you didn’t have the option to ask for help or escape, or to fight back? Then what would she do? You wouldn’t do anything and so freezing is your option. Tuning out is another. Just going absent minded, dissociating so you wouldn’t have to feel the pain of the stress. Can you see I might have lots of reasons to tune out as a one year old, as a two month old or three-year old. So maybe ADHD begins as a coping mechanism.” 

That made a lot of sense to me because I was shamed often. And back to what you said about your mom taking care of your children. My parents, my daughter was their first grandchild, and I was happy for her to visit them until I noticed they were using the shaming techniques on her that they’d used on me. And that was not OK. I caught it early. She was just being confused. She wasn’t, you know, going into shame or anything. And of course, why wouldn’t they? They were just doing the best they could with her as they did with me. So I’m going to add one other little quote that I think really supports this. well, what I just shared to support the developmental nature of ADHD. Gabor invites us to imagine being a gardener. And he says “If your plants are not developing the way you expect them to, the first thing you would look at are the conditions. Too much or too little sunlight, too much or not enough irrigation or rain. How about the quality of the soil? You look at the conditions of development and if you want those plants to develop properly, you would fix those conditions. You wouldn’t try to treat the plants for some kind of disease. Most of the time you’d be looking at the conditions for development.” And again, that just made so much sense to me.

00:31:11 Nancy
Absolutely, and what sometimes frustrates me when I try and listen to other podcasts and other people talking about ADHD. I heard someone say recently, she’s a popular tick tocker who has ADHD, but there wasn’t any trauma in my life… without the understanding that it’s so early that there might not be a memory. The brain is developing from in utero up until age 3, and that’s when it’s being wired and that’s when the dopamine receptors and all of those technical things that I don’t quite know about – serotonin levels and dopamine levels in relation to our environment.

00:32:00 Rosemary
And it could be our family, our family pattern, our family role. We don’t see those things. We don’t necessarily question them. And in order to maintain our attachment, we shift our perception to make whatever happened to us OK, whether it was getting spanked or worse. It’s just that’s just how it was in our family and we’re all happy.

00:32:25 Nancy
Absolutely, yeah. So that for me is the missing piece in the mainstream view of ADHD, is that people are still not understanding unless they’ve watched Gabor and followed his work.

00:32:42 Rosemary
Well, I’d like to add a little bit of ADHD history to sort of, I think this explains the confusion really well because it’s been over 200 years now that ADHD has been described and redescribed, which I think plays into why there’s so many different disparate theories about what causes it and opinions on it. I was surprised to learn that Sir Alexander Creighton wrote one of the earliest documented clinical descriptions of a disorder in his 1798 book, On Attention and its Diseases. So what he described there looks very much like what we see as ADHD today. And then in the early 1900s, British physician Sir George Frederick still described a number of children with a deficit of moral control, which identified a number of features that we typically see in ADHD today. And when it first appeared in 1968 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, called the DSM, the focus was on overactivity and distractibility. Now, subsequent DSM editions shifted the defining feature to attention deficit. In 1980, the DSM limited the number of symptoms of attention deficit disorder or ADD, and then in 1987 the DSM combined inattention and hyperactivity into one diagnosis. The next DSM divided the diagnosis into 3 subtypes. 2013’s DSM reversed that trend and broadened the definition of ADHD significantly, allowing for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and ADHD to coexist, which contributed somewhat to the rise in ADHD prevalence as it added this huge group of children who were previously excluded. So these changing criteria, they make clinical diagnosis really difficult. And in the absence of biomarkers, it’s diagnosed by signs and symptoms. You said yourself your diagnosis approach and your son’s were completely different. So it leaves a lot to clinical interpretation and can lead to over and under diagnosis. So I think all that confusion from the regulatory body that diagnoses mental conditions this is just part of the whole chaotic picture of ADHD. So I’m wondering, we’ve talked about the rise in ADHD and awareness and diagnosis. What’s your perspective on the growth of ADHD?

00:35:33 Nancy
When I think about my own experience and how we parent these days, so often in isolation, so often stressed, I was fortunate that I wasn’t also trying to work. But there are parents who are having to go out to work and put babies into nursery full time. And I cannot imagine what that is doing to generations of highly sensitive children. How stressful. And this isn’t to blame parents at all, because often there is no choice, there is no good choice. So for me, that must play, to my mind, I mean, my experience just in having to manage two young children, also with ADHD myself, not having the tools to regulate myself, zoning out when they needed me, and families being dispersed to not having aunts and uncles and grandparents, not having a village, I think that contributes. And you’ve mentioned some of the other things. Obviously, there is a lot more awareness now. So people are recognizing what may before have been passed off as something else or ignored. But it goes back to the toxic culture, I believe that Gabor talks about in his most recent book.

00:37:17 Rosemary
Yeah, absolutely. And in last week’s interview, Sat Dharam spoke about it too, about the capitalistic culture where so much gets sacrificed in order to make a living. And in a couple of weeks, I’ll be speaking to Dr Gordon Neufeld. And we know, we know for a fact he and Gabor worked together on the book Hold on to Your Kids and the whole, you know, shift in attachment orientation from parents to peers. That’s another very disturbing cultural trend that we’re seeing now. Just as you mentioned, people having to take their kids to full time daycare and go off to work, That’s all supporting these cultural shifts. And we humans are not doing well as a result.

00:38:06 Nancy
Yeah, totally agree. Yeah.

00:38:09 Rosemary
We’ve danced around this a little bit, the ADHD focus group that you Co lead. I wonder if you can talk about that a little bit, perhaps share the sorts of questions and stories people bring to that group, Of course, protecting their privacy. But are there typical questions? Is there such a thing, or are they all as diverse as the nature of this condition?

00:38:32 Nancy
It is very diverse and what we’ve seen, it’s been about a year and a half now since we’ve held that focus group. Is that the benefit to that group is being with other people that get it ,and get you, and understand. People that can share things that they haven’t shared before and have someone say, yeah, me too. So it’s all kinds of things. And of course, my mind has gone a little bit blank now as to recent questions and topics. But the common theme is people just feeling held and supported by other people that really get it. And it’s the non judgment and the acceptance if there’s ever a bit of a rift or a misunderstanding. Just yesterday, a few of us got together on Zoom where we could see each other’s faces, to just say… each person said their piece and we were like, yeah, it’s all good, we get it. We get triggered, so triggers I think might be the topic for this upcoming session and how we deal with those.

00:39:59 Rosemary
It makes sense because I think just our conversation together has demonstrated how differently this condition can show up, In different people. So I noticed on your Compassionate Inquiry Practitioner profile, which I’ve included in the show notes, that you specialize in working with people experiencing addiction and ADHD. What can you share with us about the work that you do that might be helpful for listeners who perhaps wonder if they, or their partners, their children or colleagues, are experiencing ADHD behaviors?

00:40:35 Nancy
I think the main way that I support my clients with ADHD is possibly not much different from other conditions. And it’s really to attune with them and provide them with a sense of safety, a co creation of safety where they can feel all that they have suppressed. So just allowing, gradually, in their own time, the emotion to be felt and expressed and held. And that does so much. It really does. And that has been my journey as well. I’ve gone really, really deep doing my own work as the more that those emotions have come up, the more I’ve been able to express it in regulation with my Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, the more regulated I’ve become as a person. And I’ve added meditation in, now, only for a year. And for some people with ADHD, that sounds impossible. You know, I used to be one of those people, like I can’t meditate, No, can’t do it. Like I didn’t even want to think about it. It felt yucky, the thought of having to sit still. For clients of mine that feel that way, gently just if they are receptive and want ideas. We talk about walking. Dancing, or what is it that does feel good? How can you regulate yourself? Not everyone wants to sit and meditate. When I could was when I realised I wanted to. I started to feel like I really, I really want to do that now. But that came after… So when I first stopped drinking alcohol, I went, kind of, not crazy at the gym, but I went to the gym and had a personal trainer for a whole year. It was about physical exercise and I did a lot of walking in nature. And then after that something happened. I was taking cues from my body and I suddenly went into “this doesn’t feel nourishing, I need to feel nourished.” And I started doing yoga and I was doing yoga probably for a couple of years, three times a week. And only then did I start to feel ready for meditation because at the end of the yoga class, we would do a little bit and I would notice, sitting or lying down, the tears would just start rolling when I got into that still place. And this was kind of in conjunction with a lot of grief that was coming up at the time and doing my own work with my practitioner. So yeah, having a safe place to explore and express suppressed emotions and some kind of regulating practice for the nervous system and fun finding ways to, alongside this journey that can go very deep, is to keep bobbing up. You know, I have had this a metaphor of deep diving and then popping back up for air and getting some sunshine on your face and then diving back down again and then coming back up and not trying to do it all in one go. And knowing that the work is probably lifelong and ongoing. There is no end point.

00:44:19 Rosemary
Well, I think it’s amazing that you have got to the depth you have with meditation. And I love what you just said about diving deep. As a little kid, I used to love going into a swimming pool, diving to the bottom, hanging there for a bit, and then in the deep end pushing my feet as hard as I could against the concrete and like popping up and then going down again. And in a way, if you think of yoga practice and meditation, that could be considered, you know, part of that practice. But it was just, I loved the silence down there. And then I loved the rush and the burst out into sunlight as well. So thank you for bringing that back. I haven’t thought about that for a very long time.

00:44:59 Nancy

Yeah, so, so for me like finding ways to play, rest of see nutrition and hydration and regulation. So whatever that is for the individual and it would be different for everyone. Dancing is a big one for me, whether that’s in my kitchen or going to an ecstatic dance. I can’t do late night dancing anymore. So clubs are out the window, but I used to enjoy that.

00:45:24 Rosemary
Beautiful. Now, Nancy, we’re sort of coming towards the end of our time together. I’m curious about how you found Compassionate Inquiry. You said you read the book Scattered Minds, so if you could share how you found Compassionate Inquiry, and what sort of a difference it’s made in your life?

00:45:44 Nancy

Wow, what a question! I found Compassionate Inquiry when I was doing an addictive behaviours coaching course and someone shared one of Gabor’s videos and it resonated so deeply that it became my, you know, new special interest, and I watched every YouTube clip I could find. Listened to podcasts, found his book on addiction in the realm of hungry ghosts, then scattered minds. Then when the body says no which I bought all, of but listened to all audible, because I can’t just do one or the other. I can’t read a physical book and if I only have it on Audible, then I miss bits and I want to underline and fold corners down. And then I just thought I need, I need more. I need to learn. Is he doing a course, is he doing a training? And I got so excited when I discovered that there was this training, compassion inquiry. And when I found it, my dad had passed away quite suddenly. It was in the November and I was in the February 22 cohort. So I decided to do the training before my dad passed away, which happened in like a two week span from realising he was ill to his passing and he lived in another country and it was during COVID. So all of a sudden I was just filled with grief and I said to my husband, I don’t think I can do it. I think I need to pull out and he just said no, you need to do it. You really, you should do it. I’m here. I’ll support you, huh? Yeah, and the emotion is coming again. Just remembering how difficult it was to have all of that grief and have to explore it every week in the dyads and triads or or just have to show up. But it was life changing, absolutely life changing, and straight away I switched from the therapist.. I’d only started doing personal therapy in the August before, but as soon as I started the training, I switched to a Compassionate Inquiry Practitioner, who I still work with, and it has completely changed, right? It’s been transformative. It’s changed. My relationship with all of my children, it’s potentially saved by marriage. And, despite the rocky start that my children had with me, you know, I’ve been working on my relationship with them since they were kind of 6: and 8 and trying to do better. And this has just really deepened my connection with them as well, and knowing how to show up for them and come alongside them and love and accept them exactly as they are and trust in their capacity to heal. Because they have ADHD. One of them’s highly anxious, one of them is very highly sensitive and I just trust now that they can do the work if they need to. And they have already, at times, asked me for support and asked me to recommend a therapist. And my eldest two sons are 18 and 20, so they’re dipped in and back out. So the main thing for me, it’s giving me trust in myself and in others capacity to heal.

00:49:39 Rosemary
Thank you so much. I wish our listeners could see your face and just see all of the emotion that was moving through your body as you shared that. Thank you. You have linked to ADHD and sensitivity. Is there a connection between ADHD and addiction? You kind of alluded to it with, you know, the alcohol would calm you down and help you regulate, but is that it, or is there more?

00:50:07 Nancy
I think people will find ways to self medicate, whether it’s with caffeine or alcohol or running. We find ways and it’s very common in my experience. The majority of my clients are in recovery from alcohol misuse or alcohol addiction. I mean I don’t use the term alcoholic. I didn’t come through like the AA route of recovery, Yeah, but substance use disorder, and I see it. I’ve seen patterns  in my family members. It might be food and it might be nicotine. Vaping is quite a common thing with teenagers these days that have ADHD. And so it’s just that they’re trying to find that balance with cannabis as well. And for some people it does it really work. For me, alcohol really worked until it didn’t, until it was causing me more problems. It worked up until a point and thankfully and I think being being a mum and having a caring role, I just was always trying to manage it. I was always trying so hard to moderate and it just got to the point where it was consuming me. And one day I thought I’d just just want to know what it feels like to be sober, to be an adult that doesn’t drink alcohol. I want that. I really wanted it. It came. It was an internal, again, like a gut thing. So I said I’m never going to drink again. I had to because my husband and I were partners in crime. We met working in a pub together, 20 something, and we often encouraged each other. So I knew that if I was going to do it, I had to do it for me and I had to tell him explicitly. Never again because it would just wheedle its way back in and it would be one drink at the weekends and it you know, you’re tolerance builds and it creeps up and it creeps up and it creeps up. And that’s a very familiar story with the people that I work with, people that I know. I have met people with ADHD that don’t have substance use issues, but they might be workaholics.

00:52:52 Rosemary
Behavioral addictions, yes. Yeah, Yeah, fair enough. Thank you. Now this is the gifts of Trauma, which is a title that surprises many people because they don’t think of gifts and trauma. So I was curious to ask you, what gifts have you realized through ADHD?

00:53:14 Nancy
My sensitivity, absolutely. I used to be embarrassed of my sensitivity, I even, saying it, the energy starts welling up again into my chest. But  I appreciate it now and it means that I can really attune to people that I work with. And because I can feel what they’re feeling, you know, it really guides me. And I notice, you know, when I’m having an emotion, I can see you feeling it in the same way. And I felt extreme pain and extreme grief a couple of years ago. And I can remember saying to my practitioner, like, when will this ever end? I feel like the well of sadness is so deep. It’s never going to stop him. But I, I went into it, I kept going and I kept going and I one day just saw, like equal parts joy and pain. I had this, this image of a heart on its side and the bottom half was black and the top half was red. And that for me is, is that the contrast of being able to feel pain so deeply I can feel joy and happiness, and laugh in equal measure?

00:54:40 Rosemary
Mmm, that’s a beautiful visual, thank you.

00:54:43 Nancy
Yeah.

00:54:45 Rosemary
And I love the story of how you followed your internal cues, like you just talked about following your gut, the journey from the gym to yoga practice to meditation, and I think our inner wiring. I know when I was in a actually life and death situation, my gut just brought forth dissociation and I was able to survive because of that. Yeah. Deconstructing that afterwards took a little bit of work, but it was absolutely the most brilliant strategy. And I didn’t even have to think about it. It just showed up. We really can trust our bodies to support us in ways that are helpful. And I love how likewise you take care of your body. You, you listen to the cues and you follow them. I don’t think our bodies ask any more than that from us. Now, I’ve asked you a lot of questions. I’m going to  invite you to add in anything on this topic that I haven’t asked you that you think our listeners would benefit from hearing.

00:55:51 Nancy

The one thing that I haven’t touched on, I mentioned that I’ve got two older sons that I didn’t feel I showed up for in the way that they needed me to. I have a younger song and when I had him I was 40. And as any mother of multiple children knows, you learn from everyone and they’ve been my greatest teachers. And with my youngest son, I moved away from my parents where I grew up in London where my mum was living, and decided that I’m going to do this my way and be the mum that I know I, I am at my core. And he shared our beds, I carried him everywhere. I met those needs of his and he’s highly sensitive, but he doesn’t have behavioural things of ADHD. He’s very empathic, sensitive, gentle, kind. My other two are all of those things as well. But I, I just, for me, it was when I found Gabor’’s work, I was just like, oh God, like, I can see how I showed up differently and the impact it’s had on my own children. And I just felt that was an important thing to share.

00:57:26 Rosemary
Thank you. That’s beautiful. Last question.

00:57:33 Nancy
Hmm.

00:57:35 Rosemary
What pearl of wisdom would you like to roll out for our listeners regarding ADHD? Maybe something that put you on a different path, or something that you’ve learned since?

00:57:50 Nancy
Yeah, One thing I found really helpful with my parenting was, love the child that you have, not the one that you hope them to be. You know, come along by their side and Just keep loving them. Gaborl talks about it. Keep biting your tongue when you have a child with ADHD. Just keep loving them exactly as they are and you know, keep building that bridge and there is always hope if your relationship is rough with your children, as long as you are in relationship with them, your relationship can grow and trust can build, then it can flourish. And I have two adult children now who just spent two weeks on holiday with us and love being around us. And for me, that’s such a gift and an honour that my kids still want to be around me.

00:58:59 Rosemary
Yeah. Thank you so much. I can see the emotion as you bring that up, and that’s a big deal. That’s a big deal that your adult kids or adultish kids, still want to spend time with mum and dad.

00:59:15 Nancy
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:59:17 Rosemary
Ohhh thank you so much Nancy for being with us today.

00:59:21 Nancy
Yeah, it’s so lovely to chat and a real honour to be to be present and representing all us ADHD is and just want to Yeah. Also shout out to my cohosts on the focus group, Monica and Vera, because we’re A-Team and and welcome anyone else in their compassionate inquiry community that might want to be part of that.

00:59:46 Rosemary
Excellent. I will put a link to the focus group in the show notes. I think a lot of people will be leaving this podcast feeling hopeful, curious. And perhaps get busy tracking down the patterns that they see and exploring with their… There are lots of resources in the show notes. Please check them out. There’s books and video lectures, all kinds of things. So they’re there for you. And yes, enjoy the journey. Thank you, Nancy.

01:00:20 Nancy
Thanks, Rosemary.

01:00:25 Rosemary
If you’ve been listening to our podcast and are curious about the transformative power of Compassionate Inquiry, you are invited to join us on Saturday, February 22nd for a six hour online experiential introduction to the Compassionate Inquiry approach and community. Whether you’re a healthcare professional, therapist, coach, or simply someone seeking trauma informed personal healing or professional growth, the CI Experience event invites you to witness live demonstrations, learn practical techniques, participate in reflective conversations, and connect with a supportive community of like minded individuals, all in a single immersive day. This event will be recorded and as a participant, you’ll have lifetime access to the event recording and so much more. The CI Experience takes place on February 22nd. To learn more and register, just follow the link in the show notes. 

The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen on Apple, Spotify, all podcast platforms, rate, review and share it with your clients, colleagues and family. Subscribe and you won’t miss an episode. 

Please note this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for personal therapy or a DIY formula for self therapy.