I’m very fortunate, because I have a great job — part of what I do is listen to people and understand different perspectives, ways of thinking, points of view, and processes. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to interview subject matter experts, take the best of what they’ve done, and put it together. One thing I’ve begun to do is look at emotions as a reflective response, just like when the doctor hits your knee with a hammer. Your leg will swing out unless you try to inhibit it. Often, when those with ADHD have an emotion, they will have a reflective response to skip over thinking.
Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. John Eastwood on thinking. It was fascinating to me because although we work in different fields, we came together in the understanding that thinking is difficult for those with ADHD, and often they just want to escape it. Whenever things get difficult or hard, they jump to conclusions, escape, go to emotions, and they try to get out of it.
What I’ve learned from Dr. Russell Barkley over the years is that the challenge isn’t trying harder, but to make thinking easier. The difference between thinking hard and thinking easy (often externalizing thinking) is to do it outside of your head. This means talking out loud or drawing pictures so you don’t have to rely on your mind to make mental images.
I’ve had a couple images that I’ve been experimenting with to communicate the challenges of thinking and emotions, whether you’re jumping to conclusions or bypassing thinking. The concept is that when you feel something, you’re no longer thinking analytically about the process; you’re globalizing.
The purpose of this blog is to help bring an awareness to this. If you’re actually going to move forward, you have to confront your beliefs, thoughts, and thinking and take a look at situational differences to really begin to understand what’s going on. If you always catastrophize through your emotions, you will go to a place of fear, shame, or blame that will leave you paralyzed.
For many I coach, the idea is to make this idea tangible and help prove to them that their feelings are often misguided based on the facts that are present at that point in time. Emotional self-regulation is clearly one of the most difficult things for those with ADHD. However, if you can pause to think, look at the data, and remove the emotions, this is actually how you move forward.
How you do this is a complex process and not something you can snap your fingers to do, but it’s something that coaching can help those with ADHD moving forward. My hope is that this gives you some insights to understand more clearly the dynamics of what’s going on.