The Moment My Case Was Finally Opened

The Mental Health Crisis That Changed Everything — The emotional collapse that ultimately led to a three-day inpatient stay and the decision to seek help. 

How Lifelong Coping Patterns Affected My Relationships — How low self-worth, freezing under emotional pressure, and difficulty communicating followed from childhood into marriage and adulthood. 

The Nurse Who Helped Me Start Asking Different Questions — Meeting Lilly and experiencing what happened when someone finally gave me the time, space, and questions needed to examine what was happening internally. 

Discovering ADHD Behind My Communication Struggles — Realizing that what looked like not listening, avoidance, or shutting down could actually be difficulty processing communication in real time. 

The Diagnosis That Opened the Case — Receiving an ADHD diagnosis and realizing it wasn't the end of the investigation—it was the first real clue toward understanding decades of unexplained struggles

3 Key Takeaways

1. A behavior and the reason behind that behavior are not necessarily the same thing.
What appeared externally as not listening, not caring, or avoiding communication felt internally like desperately trying to process and hold onto information. Understanding the mechanism doesn't erase responsibility—but it gives you somewhere productive to look. 

2. Sometimes the breakthrough begins when someone gives you enough room to investigate.
Lilly didn't diagnose ADHD. She listened, asked questions, provided resources, and created enough space for the clues to start becoming visible. 

3. A diagnosis can be an explanation without becoming the final answer.
The ADHD diagnosis changed the meaning of decades of struggles, but it didn't explain everything Chris was experiencing. Instead of closing the case, the diagnosis became the first real clue. 

“I thought getting diagnosed was the end of the investigation. I had no idea… it was only the first real clue.”

-Chris Steindorf

Chris Steindorf

chris@adhdcasefiles.com

Connect with Chris on your favorite social media platform

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chris.steindorf.2025

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-steindorf-89a5363a6/

For more information, go check out the ADHD Case Files website

https://adhdcasefiles.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

At 46 years old, Chris Dylindor finally received the answer that explained a lifetime of questions. For most people, the dying houses would have brought closure. For Chris, it was an even bigger question. What if he did what's in the whole story? He refused to let the diagnosis become the end of the investigation. Instead of he followed the evidence. He studied the science. He studied the patterns. He tells assumptions. He has some ideas. And with everything he uncovered, one thing became increasingly clear. There was more of a story than anyone had ever told him. When he discovered transformed focus and himself, the way he understood himself. And the way he now helps others understand themselves. Today people know him as the ADHD detective. Because every symptom tells a story. Every pattern leaves a clue. And every clue deserves to be investigated. This is ADHD Case Files, and the investigation begins now.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

There I was, sitting in a small room, on a small hospital bed, staring at the white wall. The doors were locked from the outside, ensuring I wouldn't wander off. For the next few hours I was finally, after over a week of barely any sleep, able to get a decent nap. Then the doors opened, the lights came on, and the concerned questions began. Why did I call to have myself admitted? They asked. All I could do was sit there and wonder how I let this internal fear of mine get the best of me and cause me to seek professional help. I told them that I had no idea what was going on, but that this feeling inside my chest is so intense and won't go away. And that I think I might be losing my mind. They were gonna suggest I start some therapy and wanted to discharge me. But I told them the reason I was there was a few short hours before I was gonna hitch a ride with the next train without a ticket. That got me admitted into the inpatient care center at the local hospital. The ten days leading up to that moment started with an ever-escalating inability to communicate my feelings with everyone, especially my wife. I need to give some context here. Being raised in what I can now see an entire family, mother, father, siblings, all who were probably ADHD and didn't know it. To date I'm the only one who has officially gotten a diagnosis. I may at some point in this podcast take you into my upbringing in more detail, only if it's appropriate and serves useful to help you understand aspects of yourself better. This is not about me airing my dirty laundry just for the sake of a podcast. However, it wasn't your typical upbringing. I had to form coping strategies to psychologically survive my youth. These learned coping strategies followed me into my marriage. I'd asked my wife on so many countless occasions throughout our marriage what she saw in me. Over time, as you can imagine, this eroded our ability to connect on a deep level. You know, the level where the worst things that could ever be said to or about you is matched with the same amount of passion and understanding, which creates an ability to work through the challenging moments because you know the wonderful things about who you are is just intact. Yeah, we didn't have that. My lack of self-worth wouldn't allow her in that far. So over the years, when difficult moments would arise, I'd shut down, and she was usually strong enough to figure the moment out by herself, and life would regulate again, go back into autopilot and coast until the next inevitable bout happened. Over time, her desire to just figure it out became burdensome, and she then needed me to step up. I had no skills, self-worth, really any desire, because every time I would try, the words were never there. I would freeze and she would explode. Now I'm gonna take a moment here and let you know that after a ton of therapy and learning about my personal neurodivergence, my wife and I have since found ways to communicate and are learning to be there for each other in ways we've never known how to before. And we're both pretty sure she has ADHD as well, although she's never been evaluated. However, those cycles of my freezing and her frustrated outbursts created intense emotional meltdowns coupled with myself and my tendency to withdraw and freeze learned responses to intense emotion that night I wasn't able to be there for her emotionally. And as if in one quick fury, I found myself on my best friend's couch where I stayed for the next two weeks. My world, as I understood, shattered. How does someone who loved his family end up here? And why couldn't I communicate my feelings? I never really understood that you aren't who you hope to be one day. You are the person that all of your beliefs, both limiting and powering, have created the image of who you see yourself to be. In previous failed attempts at therapy, I would try to describe that internal feeling that would make me feel crazy. The only way I could was to say in my mind's eye it was like a ball of black and dark grey resin-like matter swirling around within a thin membrane. It was so taut that it felt like it was one bad outburst away from being punctured and permeating me with its truth. I was deathly afraid of it. I thought it was the version of myself that I believed I was keeping in that container. You know, the verdict I received. The explosion that put me on my friend's couch also was the springboard to both my children who were of age to move away from home. So in an instant, we were also empty nesters. While staying on my friend's couch, my son was getting ready to move three states away. I wanted to say goodbye to him. My wife and I spoke cordially and agreed that I would bring some food to the home while she would be somewhere else, and I'd be able to say goodbye to him. The agreement was that I would wait for a text, and that was my cue to come over. Well she decided to text and just ask what I was doing. I, thinking this was the text, that it was okay to come over, felt relieved that she was gonna let this happen. So I relaxed a bit and replied that I was watching a movie with my friend, waiting for the text to come home so I could say goodbye to my son. I then asked what she was doing. She said telling you not to come home. She said, any man that wanted to see his son would not just relax and watch a movie. So I wasn't able to say goodbye to my son. This put me over the edge, and I began pacing all night. The worst things were going through my mind, with no hope, no real idea what the future held, and that internal fear that I was fundamentally broken. Like any purpose that humans live by, somehow, I had to make that list. Early that next morning, after a night of no sleep and adrenaline fueling the feeling that I had failed my family, I headed to the nearby train tracks, out of my mind and not really in control of where my feet were taking me. At the overpass, watching as the first train went underneath me, I had a little bit of time to wait for the next one, so at 4 30 in the morning I called my father and told him where I was standing. He asked me to talk with him and not hang up. For the next hour and a half, I cried one of the deepest, most painful cries of my life. That hour and a half walked all the immediate aggression and heightened desire to go through with anything in that moment back from the edge. I knew this was only momentarily, because I still had to face my wife. Desperate and afraid, I called the suicide hotline and spoke with someone for about fifteen minutes. They told me to hang up the phone and go immediately to the local hospital and get some real help. While in my three day stay in Inpatient, a wonderful nurse by the name of Lily came into my room with a sandwich for me and wanted to get to know who her new patient was. I remember telling her that I'd always been an effective chameleon, and that it had always served me well. That is until I wound up an impatient. What did that mean? Was that really what I always feared? Was I somehow so dumb I could also be going crazy? If you've ever heard the saying, the Lord works in mysterious ways, well this was one of 'em. There wasn't any available rooms in town, so they were gonna transport me to another ward three hours away. At the last minute, one opened up, and it was a room in the most challenging mental health wing in the hospital. This was Lily's wing. She spent probably twelve to fourteen hours over the next three days just talking with me. She said it was unusually quiet on the floor those three days. Generally she would have had time to meet with me, take my vitals, give me my meds, then I'd get off to see the next patient. But somehow no one was asking for additional help those three days. Lily said she stopped in because it seemed like I was open to learn. I had heard the word anxiety before, but never associated myself with any of the irrational symptoms. However, the more we talked, the more she said I was riddled with anxiety and that I was off the charts. Those three days were so liberating to be able to just talk to someone who knew what questions to ask. She gave me multiple resources to read while I was just sitting in that room. The first night she came into my room to do a routine check. I was sitting up in my bed with the light on. I had all four of the books that she gave me opened up to different pages. I'd never heard anything like what I was reading before. I was learning about anxiety, depression, chronic stress, and many other explanations to many of the feelings I was experiencing. I was taking notes from one book, cross-referencing it to other books to find the commonalities in all of the symptoms. Wow, she said, You're serious about figuring this out. On my third day there, I spoke with a psychologist on staff and told him that I didn't want to leave the ward without a plan in place to get real help. Whatever that meant. They set me up with a local therapist who I would then see for the next three months, trying to figure out what was bothering me. After many attempts to understand, he finally asked me to just talk. I began explaining that when in a conversation with someone, say my wife, she would just start the talk. She would start the talk with a simple question. Every time she would pause where a break in a conversation would be appropriate, my brain would consider that a completed sentence. By the time I thought it was my turn to talk, she'd continue. By then, I'd forgotten what the first question was, and I tried to understand what she was now talking about. One conversation in normal talk would feel like ten to fifteen short conversations to me. By the time I needed to contribute, I would just freeze. Because at that point I had no idea what we were even talking about. My therapist said, You know what that sounds like? That sounds like ADHD. ADHD. I knew the word, but I didn't understand it. I thought ADHD meant a child who couldn't sit still, someone who was disruptive, someone who couldn't pay attention because they weren't trying hard enough. I didn't understand how it could explain what was happening in my conversations. I didn't understand how it could explain why my thoughts disappeared before I could say them. Why pressure made my mind go blank. Why I could walk into a conversation knowing exactly what I wanted to communicate, and somehow walk out, having said something completely different, or nothing at all. For the first time, someone was suggesting that maybe I wasn't refusing to communicate. Maybe I was struggling to process the communication while it was happening. Those are two very different things. From the outside, it looked like I wasn't listening, like I didn't care. Like I was avoiding responsibility. But inside my mind, I was scrambling to hold on to the first sentence while trying to understand the fifth one. And when the emotional pressure became too great, everything disappeared. I would freeze, withdraw, or respond from a place of fear before I even understood what I was responding to. That did not erase the damage I caused, it did not remove my responsibility, but for the first time it gave us somewhere to look. I began reading, listening, looking back through my life, and the clues were everywhere. School, reading, work, my marriage, the way I handled criticism, the way I became overwhelmed, the way I could focus intensely on something that interested me, but could not force my mind to stay with something that didn't. The way I had spent my entire life building systems to hide the things that seemed to come so naturally for everyone else. For nearly five decades, I had interpreted those struggles as evidence that I was dumb. Now for the first time, I had another possibility. Maybe the verdict had been wrong. Looking back, Lily did not diagnose me. She did something I may have needed more in that moment. She gave me time. She listened without trying to rush me toward an answer. She asked questions without making me feel like the problem. And those twelve to fourteen hours of conversation over three days, she helped me realize that the things happening inside me could be examined. They could be named. They could be understood. For the first time in my life, someone gave me enough room to talk until the clues began appearing. Receiving an explanation did not magically repair everything. It didn't undo the things that I'd said. It did not erase what my wife had experienced. It did not instantly teach me how to communicate. And it certainly did not answer every question. But it changed the question I was asking. I was no longer asking what's wrong with me. I began asking what's been happening inside me all this time. For most of my life, I believed the evidence proved that I was dumb, that I was emotionally broken, that I lacked something other people naturally possessed. But inside that hospital and in the conversations that followed, the case began to open. I scheduled an appointment with the psychologist at the hospital. Our first session was over the phone. I was informed that this could be a lengthy process. She began with a few questions on the ASRS scale. Apparently the way I answered them, she said, Yeah, there's no real reason for us to go any further. You definitely have ADHD. The diagnosis was ADHD. And in many ways, that diagnosis saved my life. It gave language to struggles. I'd never been able to explain. It showed me that many of the things I had hated most about myself were not character defects. But I would eventually discover something else. ADHD explained a great deal about how my mind worked. It did not explain everything I was experiencing the exhaustion, the brain fog, the aches and pains, the feeling that even after receiving the right diagnosis, something was still missing. I thought getting a diagnosed was the end of the investigation. I had no idea it was only the first real clue. This is ADHD Case Files, and this was the moment my case was finally opened.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Thank you for tuning in for today's episode. If anything you heard caused you to stop and question some of the limiting beliefs that may have been holding you back, please like and share this podcast with someone you think could have been a fit. If anything said in this episode, if anything lives,