How Understanding My ADHD Brain Transformed My Family & My Home

In this episode, we discuss neurodivergence, particularly ADHD & Autism, and how it affects daily life. The host shares experiences of learning to understand and organize a neurodivergent brain while emphasizing the importance of empathy, education, and community support. Through personal anecdotes, the host illustrates the challenges and triumphs of navigating life with ADHD, offering insights and strategies for embracing brain differences. With another perspective on 'Autism ruins families', the episode also covers the intersection of neurodivergence with parenting, societal stigma, and the value of diverse lived experiences. Listeners are encouraged to approach neurodivergence with curiosity and compassion, helping to foster understanding and reduce shame.

00:23 Understanding Neurodivergence

01:11 Executive Dysfunction and Perfectionism

02:25 Curiosity Over Shame

06:31 Parenting and Neurodivergence

14:39 Diversity and Neurodiversity

19:47 Conclusion and Community

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Transcript

Yeti Stereo Microphone & FaceTime HD Camera: 0:42

Hey, beautiful people. Welcome back to organizing an A DHD Brain. Happy Easter if you celebrated this past weekend and happy weekend. If you just celebrated a weekend, because all are important, as long as you're taking time for yourself Normally this week I would go in with an interview because I have a ton of them in the works that I could release to you, and I've got a couple more interviews coming up this week that I'm really excited about. But I really wanted to talk about being neurodivergent, having a DHD, and what that truly means because it's so much more than just understanding your brain and then being able to organize, and then life is a peach, I often joke around about going into the organizing business and wanting to create Pinterest perfect pantries and wanting to create spaces that looked perfect. I wanted to find the perfect bin that fit in the space so that you would be able to figure out what to put in places, and then life would just be so much easier. But once I started to understand my brain, by reading books, by listening to people, by interviewing people, by talking to people about shared experiences, I realized it was so much more than that. And so when we think about neurodivergency, it's a brain difference, our brains work differently than the neurotypical brain, and that's okay. Case in point, we have executive dysfunction. And so one thing that myself and a lot of my clients deal with is this perfectionist mindset is that we want everything to be perfect. Pinterest perfect pantries, right? We want things to look so beautiful. We want things to appear so beautiful, but oftentimes it's gonna take more than a day to get there. But we want instant gratification and we want everything all at once or nothing at all. Because when it comes to executive function, we have trouble breaking up these big projects and these big dreams of ours. Into smaller tasks, and oftentimes those tasks are mundane. They're the things that we don't want to do because we have an interest-based nervous system. We wanna go to the things that interest us the most, that bring us a dopamine kick right away. We're going to avoid the things like doing the dishes or let me quickly plan out what this could look like. We just wanna go with the flow and we wanna do things because they genuinely interest us. When that happens, we don't attack the big things. We simply just do the things that we have to do. It prevents us from being able to get to that end result, to what it looks like at the end. By doing so much research on Neurodivergency and A DHD, it's allowed me to understand my brain so much better so that I could help others understand that you're not broken. It's just about going about things differently. The more education we have about A DHD and autism, it allows us to see things from a different perspective instead of just saying, gosh, I really wish that I could finish that project or even just start it. And why am I so lazy? Why can't I do it? You can now look at it from the perspective of, oh, I'm not great with executive function. I wonder what it would be like to break down this project into small tasks. And you're not gonna be good at it right away because that's not the way that your brain operates, but the more you practice. You could, I'm not saying that your executive dysfunction goes away because it doesn't, you're not healed from A DHD, but you get to start approaching things from a different perspective, out of curiosity instead of from a place of shame and guilt.'cause I remember. I would invite people over, I would spend hours trying to clean things and throw things in places and hide things to pretend that this is what my house looked like on a regular basis. By the time my friends would leave or my family would leave, I would be so exhausted and things would go right back to the way they were because things didn't have a place. And I literally tried to just do it too fast. There's nothing wrong with me because I did that. It's just because I had no idea that my brain was different. I was trying to go about things from the way that I had learned them growing up. And that's another thing that we don't talk about very often is, is not only these neurodivergent brains that we're dealing with, but also the fact that likely our parents had neurodivergent brains too. But a lot of them didn't know how to communicate with us how to get things done in a way that made sense and that's because their parents before them. Didn't treat them like they had a say at all. They just told them what to do and how to act, and they either obliged or they didn't. And so it's so interesting to be in this generation that we're in today because we are learning how to use our voice in a different way. We are learning how to parent our kids differently and the more information that comes out about A DHD and autism or any sort of neurodivergency, it allows us to understand ourselves from a perspective where we can approach the world in different ways, and we don't have to just do it because someone told us that this is how you do it, and you either succeed or fail, and then that's it. You get to try it from the perspective of what would make sense for you and how it would work for you. This curiosity allows us to approach a project from this space of understanding that it's okay to not be good at something immediately, but also understanding what could work for your brain and what might not work for your brain. That's what I love so much about so many neurodivergent creators out there talking about this subject because. For example, organizing. This is on my brain all the time and my brain if I let it run with a subject, it allows it to build these new neuro pathways where I can find answers for so many different things. I have been thinking about organizing now for. Over a year and a half since I started my business, I have been approaching it from the perspective of how do we do it so that it sticks, so that it's not something that we have to keep coming back to time and time again. That's gonna make it harder for us to live. I. But what Neurodivergent creators do is also make it a reality that it's okay. That just because you know how to do something or know how your brain works, doesn't mean that it's gonna be easy, and it's okay to still struggle gaining an understanding of what's gonna work for you and how to even take action. But that curiosity is gonna replace the shame and the guilt that so many of us have felt our entire lives. And it's replaced with openness. It's about what now, what now can I do to understand my life a little bit better? And from a place of understanding instead of from a place of shame and guilt. I wanted to do this episode today because I have talked about my daughter possibly having autism on this channel quite a few times and I'm open about it. There's information going around right now about how autism ruins families. What an interesting way to put an entire group of people in one category. This is important to talk about when it comes to organizing or anything because autism only ruins families. If it's your perspective that that is the truth, if you've decided to own that as your belief, then you will look for all of the evidence presented to you that sustains that belief. And so if you see a mom struggling with an autistic nonverbal. Son or daughter, but you don't necessarily know their lived experience, you're gonna say, wow, that's awful. It's probably ruined their family because you see how hard it could be to live with a son or daughter who's nonverbal and could need a lot more help aside from that, but autism doesn't ruin families. It's a misunderstanding of a neurodivergency that ruins families. It's the lack of support that ruins families. It is stigma that creates stress and harm that ruins families. And this comes with a DHD too. I was just in a community decluttering last week, and there was a young man who was talking about whether or not he discloses that he has a DHD as he's. Going to apply for new jobs, and that's ultimately up to you. You get to decide what you disclose to a new employer or whatever, but they're going to have their own perception on it based on what they were told. And if they believe something negatively about what neuro divergent means, then no matter who you are, how you show up, they're going to look for the evidence that sustains their beliefs until one day you prove them wrong because you're absolutely incredible. But my advice for that person was, you know, Hey, I come from the corporate world. I've seen it done. I've seen people announce their A DHD, and I've also talked to a lot of professionals where they start to talk about, instead of announcing that you have a DHD, what if you talked about what your accommodations and needs are as a human being. What if you went into the workplace and simply said, Hey, I need noise canceling headphones and that's going to help me work best. Is that something that you can accommodate for me? And in some cases in the corporate world, you'll have to go through a channel to be able to be provided that additional assistance. But that's something that you don't necessarily have to disclose to your direct leader. But that's why the education of this is so incredibly important. It's so important that we're talking about this because it creates empathy and compassion. It creates a space where we get to talk about the things and the struggles that we're going through to start to come up with some solutions for it. Now, it doesn't mean that you always need a solution for every struggle you're having. Sometimes you just need to struggle and just to work through it, and that's okay. Right? Sometimes even myself, as I'm continuing to organize my home and declutter and let go, I do still struggle. There are some days where I even look at myself and I'm like. Who am I to go and talk about organizing because I'm still struggling, right? But that's the lived human experience. We're not made to not struggle. We're made to struggle through and then share the experiences of how we've come out on the other side. And so I'm here to tell you that I have failed a ton of times, but I've failed enough to say that my mistakes have taught me who I am and how I can show up today so that I can teach you and I can help you understand your own lived experience to find the solutions that make sense for you. So coming back to my 6-year-old, I've suspected that she's on the spectrum. She doesn't like cracks in her clothes. She's very specific about her clothes, we buy her leggings. But if the leggings don't fit a specific way and even the seam goes a specific way, then they will not work. We have to donate them. She will not touch them again. And then if her pants flare out, or if they're tight on her ankle, she has to have specific shoes. She's very specific about the type of socks that she wears. She is very specific about what her wants and needs are, and she knows when something feels good and she knows when something does not feel good. In the autism community and A DHD in general, we talk a lot about tantrums. That's something that's happened a lot. I suspect she's on a spectrum, but in order for us to get a diagnosis, it's$2,000. So if she is autistic, then I'm really proud of her resilience and uniqueness. And also over the last month and a half, she's probably watched the sound of music, I think 25 times. I'm not over exaggerating. She can recite every single song. That girl probably knows that movie better than I do, and it is my favorite movie. Growing up, I used to watch it with my mom. Those things indicate to me that she is on a spectrum of sorts, and so if she isn't, say she isn't on the autism spectrum whatsoever. Learning about autism through neurodivergent parenting groups have helped me feel seen in a way that I've never felt seen as a parent before. It helped me understand that these lived experiences that I have with my own daughters. Are not unique to me. They've helped me understand that there's different ways of going about it than simply just putting a child in time out or telling them that they need to suppress their feelings when they're having a temper tantrum when they don't know what to do with them. but by understanding some of these unique needs of my daughters, I've been able to show up as a parent in a completely different way. Then I ever knew, We are doing this incredible service to our kids by learning a little bit more about it now, and this directly relates to organizing because we were never taught. If you are in a space right now where your clutter is all over the place and you don't know where to put things, it's because you were never taught. It's not because your brain is broken, it's because you were never taught how, in a way that makes sense for your brain. And so when it comes to handling my kids and their neurodivergence, I think it's fascinating because I first started to learn more about my kids and how to parent a little bit differently through Mindful as a mother. I found them on TikTok. They've been on the podcast, and I'm also in their membership group because. I learned so much about how to parent in a different way, and it allows me to come up with different ways to parent them too. So again, as far as the diagnosis goes, I'm not putting a label on my kids except that I am. And what it's done for me is it's allowed me to show up as a completely different human being because I've learned so much more about what their needs are and honestly about what my own darn needs are. The nervous system and how we react to certain things, especially clutter and our own organizing methods is another thing I'll talk about in an episode soon. It's definitely something that I wanna highlight and I wanna give you some of the tools that I like to use with my own clients and some of the things that I'm developing, but. Understanding your own emotional states and your own habits when it comes to the things that you do is gonna be one of the keys to changing your life and understanding your life in a new way, and being neurodivergent in a neurotypical designed world can feel challenging, but understanding our nervous system creates pathway to harmony, and instead of being in that constant struggle, you become aware because while your brain naturally wants you to do certain things, and there are certain things that you are naturally going to do because your brain is different, we've also learned so much about why our brain does the things that we do, that we get to understand it in a completely different way. Which is why there's a DHD coaches out there and people trying to help you understand things from a perspective where you can take control of your life. When we think about diversity in this world, we often think about people who are black and white, right? Different races. But when I think about diversity and how I've grown up learning about diversity, not only in school but in the corporate world, and then in the world that I'm living in, people are listening to this podcast all over the world. You and I have completely different lived experiences, whether you're living in Texas, Massachusetts, Canada, France, South Africa, we all have differences of thought and of upbringing. That's diversity. We also have difference of skin color diversity, right? But because we have differences of skin color, it means that we were brought up and we have different lived experiences from the way that we were brought up differently. But it's also diversity of culture and the way that we learned how to perceive certain things. It's diversity of beliefs and the way that we grew up learning about these beliefs, and now we're looking for the evidence to sustain these beliefs. And then it's diversity of the way that our brain works. And neurodiversity comes in many different forms. It's a DHD, it's autism, it's dyslexia, and beyond. The way that our brains work is fascinating. And when my therapist finally said that my brain doesn't work like everyone else's, I was in shock and awe. I just thought that everyone could do it so much better than I could. But it was when I started to understand my brain that I was able to take it so much further because I understood I wasn't broken, I was different. And I had to learn about how to do things a little bit differently and what a blessing that was. So because we're different and because we are having these conversations, because we're learning about one another, we get to show up so much better in this world. There's value in our lived experiences. And sharing these experiences fosters empathy. I. It reduces stigma and judgment, and we get to build compassion by sharing these diverse experiences, and each and every one of us is diverse and unique in our own ways. This all comes back to the day I finally understood that buying the perfect bin was never going to solve my organizing needs, that creating a Pinterest perfect pantry or having my fridge perfectly organized was not going to solve all of my problems. It wasn't going to be the answer to what my A DHD brain needed. But that's why I continued to become an organizer, and that's why I created this podcast, and that's why I'm on a mission to help you understand that just because you're different doesn't mean you're not broken. It just means that we all need a little bit more education and think about the incredible things that we're gonna continue to learn is just because I know a lot now and I'm sharing it with you, and just because you know a lot now and you're sharing it with others, doesn't mean that we're not gonna grow and we're gonna learn. Over this next year, we are going to learn so much together, and it's gonna take us from this level to this level because that's the way that information is being delivered to us in this world. It is so rapid, so fast paced. So if we know something one day, we're gonna know something totally different the next day. Something I'm really proud of over the last year and a half is I've been able to embrace myself in a way that I've never embraced myself before. Some know it as masking, right? We act a certain way in front of a group of people because we know it's gonna make them happy. But what about us? I know using my voice makes me incredibly happy, and I'm so proud to come to you and share with you what I feel on a regular basis and how things can change in your life if you start to believe in yourself a little bit more and understand that you're not coming from a place of laziness and ditching the shame. I am always striving to, to learn about my A DHD brain more because it allows others to do the same. And I'm gonna be honest, I've thought about getting an autism diagnosis. I've thought about looking into that, but it's so expensive. As I've learned to understand myself, I've learned to understand my brain so much more, and if I can do it, so can you not because it's easy. Because knowing yourself deeply makes change possible. It allows you to say, okay, instead of making other people happy, what is it that I want? What is it that would make my life easier? If you're navigating your own neurodivergency and you don't necessarily know how to communicate it with others, send them this podcast. Maybe it could help them open their eyes a little bit more, but I would encourage you to then also approach your loved ones neurodivergency with openness, curiosity, and compassion, because there's so much that we can learn from our kids and from other people in our families who are open to learning more as well. If this resonated with you at all, It would mean the world to me if you wanted to reach out and share your own story or if you had any questions about live to share this episode today. On that note, I hope you have an incredible week. I am working right now on transitioning my membership, which is the organizing and a DHD brain membership over to a platform called Circle. It looks to be so much more A DHD friendly based on the research I've done, and my good friend Russ from the A DHD, big Brother hosts his platform there, and I really, really like it. May 1st will be your chance to join the membership again, get some group coaching, meet other people who are also trying to get decluttered and understand their darn brains in a way that works for them, but also have time to body double and have time to get to a decluttering session with a group of people who are also making the decision to get decluttered and we'll do it together. There's so much power in community when it comes to being neurodiverse because you get to understand that you're not alone in this. And when I first started to understand that it made a world of a difference If you are interested in coaching, I have some really cool new opportunities coming up on May 1st as well. Right now my program is 90 days, but I also know that doesn't work for everyone in their budget, and so I've created some smaller programs to be able to work with me. So that way if you can't commit to the 90 days, I'm here for you and I've got some support that could fit you exactly where you are. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you next week.