Melissa: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Reframing Neurodiversity podcast. I am so excited to be here with Brooke Schnittman. Brooke is the founder of Coaching with Brooke, an executive function coaching company for students and adults.
Brooke has dedicated her life to helping thousands of people with ADHD shift away from chaos, frustration, and shame, and move towards tools that help them focus and thrive. I am so happy to have you here with me today, Brooke. Welcome.
Brooke: Thank you for having me, Melissa. It's a pleasure.
Managing ADHD as a Parent
Melissa: I'm a mom with ADHD who is raising children with ADHD, and so I'm really curious to talk to you today about that perspective. Because for me, as a mom navigating my own challenges that come with that neurowiring and then being in a position to be a leader for my kids who have similar challenges, it can be really tough.
So I'm just curious, what is your approach in helping parents navigate this train when they're in it themselves?
Brooke: Yeah. I empathize with you because I'm also in the same situation. I am a mom with ADHD, two step-sons with ADHD, and my husband also has ADHD, and we have a toddler displaying those ADHD symptoms.
It can be difficult because you might be frustrated with your own unmanaged ADHD and have less patience and tolerance for your children who are also needing help with their executive dysfunction.
So manage yourself first, always, so you have the space for your children, whether you're ADHD or not. If your brain is chaotic and you're in a constant state of chaos, it's going to come off for your children that way.
And they are going to receive the less calm version of you, which might spike some of their rejection, resistance and opposition. So it's really important just to be in a place of calm before you're managing the household.
Executive Function and Emotional Regulation Challenges
Melissa: So we know that with ADHD, executive function and emotional regulation challenges pop up. Do you feel like there is an intersection where the challenges with emotional regulation impact our executive function?
Brooke: A hundred percent. If you are not regulated, your executive function shuts down. So if you have trauma from the past, if you're in a constant state of fight or flight, or you are defensive, or you have rejection sensitivity, your executive functions are not managed properly, and it's not going to be regulated.
If you're not:
Sleeping well
Eating well
If you are not having healthy hygiene habits for your brain and your body
your emotional regulation is going to be more negative. And again, your executive functions are not going to work properly. Your emotions are very involved in your executive function.
So Dr. Thomas Brown has the model of executive functions in the ADHD brain. And he talks about six different clusters that work simultaneously together. And one of those are emotions.
So if we can't regulate our emotions, you can try to be the most productive person in the world. However, you're going to burn out, you're going to shut down, and you are not going to be your optimal peak performance.
Melissa: Oh for sure. So how do we tease apart if we know that the challenges with emotional regulation and often being more highly sensitive as people with ADHD. How do we sort of like pull those things apart and know that we're treating the right thing or providing tools for ourselves and our kids for what's really causing whatever's going on?
Brooke: Yeah, I think that mindfulness and meditation is so important. And awareness. So if you're in a constant state of chaos, it's hard to know what calm is.
Working with someone who can possibly mirror what you're feeling and help you to set boundaries for yourself. And mindfulness I know is being taught more as well nowadays.
So really starting with that and making sure that if you:
Go to therapy
Exercise
See a coach
See a consultant
If you have a friend or a loved one who can help you understand and work through the ADHD chaos
so you can prioritize your social, emotional, and mental well being so then you can work on being your best self- I think that's important.
Melissa: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's just foundational, it seems. Because it's like if we don't have that, those tools and those go-tos to support ourselves to regulate, then #1 it’s impossible to support our kids, and #2 then it seems like the executive function stuff and the tools that maybe come in there are secondary to being able to calm our bodies and get in a space where we're thinking clearly and can even apply any of those tools.
Brooke: I 100% agree. Yes. And I think that if everyone as a whole had more emotional regulation tools as a society, we could even be better ADHD or not.
Experiencing High Sensitivity with ADHD
Melissa: Yeah, no I completely agree. There's definitely talk out there about how high sensitivity is a component of ADHD and I'm just curious if you see that in your work or if you have feelings around high sensitivity as a characteristic of ADHD? Or even, I know Gabor Mate talks a bit about it being actually an essential piece in what develops this neurowiring, I was curious your thoughts.
Brooke: High sensitivity, I definitely think that that can come with ADHD. We are very often in a freeze, fight, flight, fawn, or fib state. And we get defensive because of many different things. But also the fact that we've received so many negative messages by the age of 10, I think it's 20,000 more negative messages than a neurotypical.
Our self-esteem is usually less than based on what we experienced growing up. So yes, that is going to make you more sensitive. And we usually have very strong intuition and we're usually hyper-aware of what's going on around us with our ADHD and our sensitivity. We hear things and sometimes think that it's about us when it might not be about us.
And that leads into our rejection sensitivity, sometimes called rejection sensitive dysphoria. People might say something to you, and you might perceive it as you did something wrong, or nothing might be said, but you might perceive that as you did something wrong.
And you can seriously get stuck in a state for a very long time, and it could be hard to get out of that freeze state when your body shuts down. So yes, people with ADHD are highly-sensitive from what I've seen, most people with ADHD.
And I had Gabor Mate on my podcast and he does talk about that. He talks about trauma as well. And the science shows that ADHD is genetic, and it's not necessarily based on a stress gene that's passed down from your mom or your parents.
Melissa: Yeah. I guess I just wonder if we're highly sensitive by nature, then all the messaging that's thrown at us in youth we might internalize more deeply or it might be experienced as greater trauma, which then contributes to this rejection sensitivity. I'm always just trying to tease the two apart a bit, is it nature or nurture?
Brooke: It's hard to know. Everyone that I have worked with, myself included, have had these negative circumstances happen to them. Doesn't mean that it can't happen to you if you don't have ADHD and makes you highly sensitive to it, so it's hard to know if it's the nature or nurture.
Creating a safe space and meeting your own needs
Melissa: So as more highly-sensitive people who are often receiving more negative messages than the average person, how do you suggest we get out of these states of overwhelm, of fight or flight, to move to more productive action in our lives?
