1 00:00:00,640 --> 00:00:04,320 Be honest, am I overreacting? I know you've asked someone 2 00:00:04,320 --> 00:00:06,560 that, and I know that in the moment you asked it, you 3 00:00:06,560 --> 00:00:09,480 genuinely didn't know which answer would be more painful. 4 00:00:09,680 --> 00:00:12,560 Because if they say yes, you're back to being too much, and if 5 00:00:12,560 --> 00:00:15,680 they say no, the thing that happened was actually as bad as 6 00:00:15,680 --> 00:00:17,680 it felt. And neither of those is 7 00:00:17,680 --> 00:00:21,160 straightforward to live with. I still ask it occasionally, and 8 00:00:21,160 --> 00:00:24,200 I want to be really honest about it because I think there's a 9 00:00:24,200 --> 00:00:27,040 version of this conversation that would have me presenting as 10 00:00:27,040 --> 00:00:30,240 someone who's completely cracked self knowledge and 11 00:00:30,240 --> 00:00:33,760 self-awareness and never needs a second opinion, and that would 12 00:00:33,760 --> 00:00:36,920 be nonsense. What's changed is that I'm very 13 00:00:37,080 --> 00:00:39,440 careful about who I ask. Not because I need them to tell 14 00:00:39,440 --> 00:00:41,600 me I'm right, but actually the opposite. 15 00:00:41,800 --> 00:00:45,320 Because I know my own patterns well enough now to know when I'm 16 00:00:45,320 --> 00:00:48,600 likely to be running hot and I need someone to pull me back, 17 00:00:48,760 --> 00:00:52,520 and when I'm actually reading something accurately and need 18 00:00:52,520 --> 00:00:54,960 someone to confirm I'm not imagining it. 19 00:00:55,640 --> 00:00:59,520 The distinction matters. And the person I ask matters 20 00:00:59,600 --> 00:01:02,160 enormously. Because anyone whose own 21 00:01:02,160 --> 00:01:05,280 subjectivity, conditioning or blind spots might colour their 22 00:01:05,280 --> 00:01:09,080 answer is useless to me for this particular job. 23 00:01:09,440 --> 00:01:12,360 They'll either talk me out of something real, or they'll hand 24 00:01:12,360 --> 00:01:16,000 me a false sense of justification for being, well, a 25 00:01:16,720 --> 00:01:19,520 bit of an ass. Before I got to that point, I 26 00:01:19,520 --> 00:01:22,440 was asking everyone, not selectively and just whoever was 27 00:01:22,440 --> 00:01:25,120 there, whoever seemed safe, and don't forget it. 28 00:01:25,360 --> 00:01:28,720 If things feel safe and you've got a bad model, then maybe 29 00:01:28,720 --> 00:01:31,400 they're not safe. But whoever I thought might tell 30 00:01:31,400 --> 00:01:36,200 me I was OK and what I was really doing was outsourcing the 31 00:01:36,200 --> 00:01:39,320 question of whether my own experience was real to people 32 00:01:39,320 --> 00:01:43,320 who didn't have access to my internal data and in some cases 33 00:01:43,480 --> 00:01:46,920 had a direct interest in the answer coming out a particular 34 00:01:46,920 --> 00:01:49,200 way. That's what this episode is 35 00:01:49,200 --> 00:01:51,760 about. Not just why you can't calibrate 36 00:01:51,760 --> 00:01:54,520 your own responses when you've grown up in a toxic environment, 37 00:01:54,920 --> 00:01:57,960 but what's actually happening neurologically when your 38 00:01:57,960 --> 00:02:01,800 responses don't come with a built in proportionality gauge 39 00:02:01,800 --> 00:02:04,960 in the 1st place? What it looks like to slowly, 40 00:02:05,240 --> 00:02:08,800 imperfectly build 1. I know you've been asking 41 00:02:08,800 --> 00:02:13,080 yourself, am I the problem? Let's find out with me, your 42 00:02:13,080 --> 00:02:24,400 host Helen Villas. The experience has a very 43 00:02:24,400 --> 00:02:27,200 particular texture. You're in a situation, 44 00:02:27,200 --> 00:02:30,120 something's been said or done, and instead of just responding, 45 00:02:30,440 --> 00:02:33,160 you freeze into this kind of assessment loop. 46 00:02:33,560 --> 00:02:36,360 Is this bad enough to react to? Am I reading this right? 47 00:02:36,360 --> 00:02:38,440 Would a reasonable person be upset by this? 48 00:02:38,880 --> 00:02:42,600 The problem is that you have almost no reliable data to 49 00:02:42,640 --> 00:02:46,040 answer those questions with, and you've had almost no reliable 50 00:02:46,040 --> 00:02:49,440 data your whole life. What makes it worse is the 51 00:02:49,440 --> 00:02:51,880 asymmetry of it. Other people just seem to know. 52 00:02:52,160 --> 00:02:55,480 They respond, they move on. They don't appear to spend 40 53 00:02:55,480 --> 00:02:59,640 minutes and the rest after a conversation running a debrief 54 00:02:59,640 --> 00:03:02,560 on whether their emotional response was within acceptable 55 00:03:02,560 --> 00:03:05,120 parameters. You've watched people get upset 56 00:03:05,120 --> 00:03:08,840 about things and just be upset straightforwardly without the 57 00:03:08,840 --> 00:03:12,040 meta layer, and you genuinely don't know if you're missing a 58 00:03:12,040 --> 00:03:15,280 skill they have or if you were simply trained out of trusting 59 00:03:15,280 --> 00:03:18,000 yourself at such an early age that the self trust 60 00:03:18,000 --> 00:03:20,480 infrastructure never developed properly. 61 00:03:21,200 --> 00:03:25,520 One Direction this goes wrong is under response, where something 62 00:03:25,520 --> 00:03:29,080 genuinely bad happens and you feel nothing, or you feel 63 00:03:29,080 --> 00:03:32,400 something so faint you dismiss it, and then three weeks later 64 00:03:32,400 --> 00:03:35,320 you're crying in the car about something apparently completely 65 00:03:35,320 --> 00:03:38,280 unrelated and you eventually work out if you're paying close 66 00:03:38,280 --> 00:03:41,080 enough attention that it wasn't unrelated at all. 67 00:03:41,360 --> 00:03:44,480 This happened to me years ago, just after my stepfather had 68 00:03:44,480 --> 00:03:47,680 died, where I was taking medicine back to a chemist and I 69 00:03:47,920 --> 00:03:51,880 bumped into a car and I got dreadfully upset. 70 00:03:52,320 --> 00:03:54,680 But I wasn't upset about bumping into the car. 71 00:03:54,920 --> 00:03:58,320 I was upset about my stepfather dying but hadn't been able to 72 00:03:58,320 --> 00:04:01,400 feel and process and react to it in real time. 73 00:04:01,880 --> 00:04:06,160 It's really common. The other one is over response, 74 00:04:06,160 --> 00:04:09,480 where something comparatively minor happens and the feeling 75 00:04:09,480 --> 00:04:13,160 that comes with it is enormous out of all proportion to the 76 00:04:13,160 --> 00:04:15,040 situation. And you know it's out of 77 00:04:15,040 --> 00:04:18,120 proportion, you can see it, which doesn't make it smaller. 78 00:04:18,120 --> 00:04:21,959 It just adds shame on top, like whipped cream and a cherry. 79 00:04:22,640 --> 00:04:25,800 And if you grew up with a parent who was toxic, both of those 80 00:04:25,800 --> 00:04:28,760 patterns were used against you. The times you didn't react to 81 00:04:28,760 --> 00:04:31,800 became evidence that you were cold or didn't care, and the 82 00:04:31,800 --> 00:04:35,160 times you overreacted became evidence that you were unstable 83 00:04:35,160 --> 00:04:37,680 or dramatic. There was no response that was 84 00:04:37,680 --> 00:04:41,840 right, which meant you learned very efficiently that your 85 00:04:41,840 --> 00:04:44,680 responses weren't a reliable guide to anything. 86 00:04:44,960 --> 00:04:47,440 You learned to look outside yourself for information about 87 00:04:47,640 --> 00:04:50,320 whether what you were feeling was legitimate. 88 00:04:50,640 --> 00:04:54,960 I did this once with what are they called windscreen wipers. 89 00:04:55,160 --> 00:04:56,600 I used to drive along in the rain. 90 00:04:56,600 --> 00:04:59,120 I'm sure if you've heard me see Beacon before, you'll hear have 91 00:04:59,120 --> 00:05:02,520 heard me talk about this. That I would only know that I 92 00:05:02,520 --> 00:05:05,840 was all right to turn on my windscreen wipers because other 93 00:05:05,840 --> 00:05:09,480 people had their wipers on. Wasn't bad enough for me to not 94 00:05:09,480 --> 00:05:12,760 be able to see. I needed other people to know to 95 00:05:12,760 --> 00:05:15,720 be using their windscreen wipers for me to feel that it was 96 00:05:15,720 --> 00:05:18,920 legitimate to use mine. That's a slightly more external 97 00:05:18,920 --> 00:05:23,640 thing than emotional responses, but it's a similar thing too. 98 00:05:24,560 --> 00:05:28,320 That's the glitch, you know, not, not that you have big 99 00:05:28,320 --> 00:05:31,400 feelings or a flat effect, but that you have both without a 100 00:05:31,720 --> 00:05:36,240 reliable internal compass and with a very well trained habit 101 00:05:36,240 --> 00:05:39,560 of outsourcing the assessment of your own emotional responses to 102 00:05:39,560 --> 00:05:43,400 other people, many of whom have historically had an interest in 103 00:05:43,400 --> 00:05:47,120 telling you you're wrong. So what's actually happening? 104 00:05:47,440 --> 00:05:50,040 Because there are a few genuinely separate things going 105 00:05:50,040 --> 00:05:52,880 on and they're worth pulling apart because understanding 106 00:05:52,880 --> 00:05:56,120 which one is operating at any given moment is actually the 107 00:05:56,120 --> 00:05:59,040 beginning of being able to do something about it. 108 00:05:59,720 --> 00:06:03,040 Start with the ADHD piece and specifically what's called 109 00:06:03,120 --> 00:06:06,440 emotional dysregulation, which is one of the most under 110 00:06:06,440 --> 00:06:10,360 discussed aspects of ADHD and one of the most disabling in 111 00:06:10,360 --> 00:06:13,360 daily life. There's a researcher you will 112 00:06:13,360 --> 00:06:15,920 know that I think of him as the godfather and grandfather of 113 00:06:15,920 --> 00:06:20,720 ADHD, Russell Barkley, who has spent a considerable part of his 114 00:06:20,720 --> 00:06:24,520 career arguing that emotional dysregulation should be a core 115 00:06:24,520 --> 00:06:29,400 diagnostic feature of ADHD rather than a an associated 116 00:06:29,400 --> 00:06:31,720 feature. And the evidence he's drawing on 117 00:06:31,880 --> 00:06:35,280 is pretty compelling. What's happening neurologically 118 00:06:35,480 --> 00:06:38,320 is that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain 119 00:06:38,320 --> 00:06:41,880 responsible for inhibiting impulse and moderating response, 120 00:06:42,080 --> 00:06:45,800 is under active in ADHD brains. That's the bit that takes a 121 00:06:45,800 --> 00:06:49,520 feeling and runs it through a kind of proportionality check 122 00:06:49,680 --> 00:06:53,320 before it comes out in a neurotypical. 123 00:06:54,040 --> 00:06:55,320 Hate that word. I'm going to have to find 124 00:06:55,320 --> 00:06:58,960 something different brain. That moderation process is 125 00:06:58,960 --> 00:07:01,680 largely automatic in an ADHD brain. 126 00:07:01,680 --> 00:07:05,000 It's slower, it's less reliable, and under stress it can 127 00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:07,440 effectively stop working altogether. 128 00:07:08,000 --> 00:07:11,920 What this means in practice is that when something happens, the 129 00:07:11,920 --> 00:07:15,360 emotional response arrives at full volume before the 130 00:07:15,360 --> 00:07:18,600 moderating process has had a chance to even wake up and have 131 00:07:18,800 --> 00:07:21,320 coffee, you know, and do anything about it. 132 00:07:21,800 --> 00:07:24,200 The feeling isn't too big because you're unstable or 133 00:07:24,200 --> 00:07:26,000 dramatic. It's too big because it's 134 00:07:26,000 --> 00:07:30,160 arriving faster than the system that would normally size it 135 00:07:30,360 --> 00:07:33,360 appropriately, and then because you've learned to be suspicious 136 00:07:33,360 --> 00:07:36,400 of your own responses, what you often do is suppress it, push it 137 00:07:36,400 --> 00:07:39,440 down, try to get the volume under control before anyone sees 138 00:07:39,440 --> 00:07:41,760 it. Which works for a while and then 139 00:07:41,760 --> 00:07:43,880 doesn't. Which is how you end up crying 140 00:07:43,880 --> 00:07:47,320 about something that seems from the outside, completely 141 00:07:47,480 --> 00:07:51,040 disproportionate. The term that gets used in ADHD 142 00:07:51,040 --> 00:07:54,520 communities for this is rejection sensitivity dysphoria, 143 00:07:54,520 --> 00:07:57,760 which is specifically the way this plays out around perceived 144 00:07:57,760 --> 00:08:01,840 rejection or criticism. You will know if you see me on 145 00:08:01,840 --> 00:08:03,600 socials. I find this very difficult 146 00:08:03,800 --> 00:08:07,160 because it is not a thing. The rejection sensitivity is, 147 00:08:07,480 --> 00:08:10,880 but dysphoria. No, that's not a disorder, 148 00:08:10,880 --> 00:08:13,840 that's learning. The sensitivity is a reasonable 149 00:08:13,840 --> 00:08:16,600 response to an unreasonable amount of negative feedback, and 150 00:08:16,600 --> 00:08:19,600 the fact that it now fires in context where the threat is 151 00:08:19,600 --> 00:08:23,320 smaller doesn't make it irrational, it makes it 152 00:08:23,320 --> 00:08:26,120 calibrated to the wrong environment. 153 00:08:26,720 --> 00:08:30,560 When it gets labeled dysphoria, it pathologizes a healthy if 154 00:08:30,600 --> 00:08:34,240 incredibly painful safety mechanism that protected you. 155 00:08:34,880 --> 00:08:38,600 And worse in my opinion, it implies unmanageable. 156 00:08:38,840 --> 00:08:41,720 And that just isn't true. When you start building 157 00:08:41,720 --> 00:08:44,960 identity, healing wounds, learning to trust yourself, the 158 00:08:44,960 --> 00:08:49,600 sting of rejection gets quieter. And whilst 1 sample doesn't 159 00:08:49,600 --> 00:08:52,440 equal proof and you know how scientific based I am and how 160 00:08:52,440 --> 00:08:55,680 evidence based I am. But I'm going to share it 161 00:08:55,680 --> 00:08:58,520 anyway. I'd have identified with the RSD 162 00:08:59,000 --> 00:09:01,960 label once too. I'm very glad to say not 163 00:09:01,960 --> 00:09:04,480 anymore. Now I genuinely welcome 164 00:09:04,480 --> 00:09:06,160 rejection. Treat it as learning. 165 00:09:06,440 --> 00:09:08,640 I don't take it personally or grow from it. 166 00:09:08,640 --> 00:09:12,880 Ideally more than one of those. When you say you have RSD, you 167 00:09:12,880 --> 00:09:16,560 say you have no power over it. You literally disempower 168 00:09:16,640 --> 00:09:20,520 yourself. But there really is a life that 169 00:09:20,520 --> 00:09:24,680 can be lived where rejection glances instead of blows. 170 00:09:25,320 --> 00:09:27,680 And while we're here, I want to say something about what 171 00:09:27,680 --> 00:09:30,080 emotional dysregulation actually means. 172 00:09:30,520 --> 00:09:33,040 Because the word dysregulation has a way of kind of making 173 00:09:33,040 --> 00:09:36,600 people think that it means unhinged or unstable, and that's 174 00:09:36,600 --> 00:09:39,160 not it. What it means in the context of 175 00:09:39,160 --> 00:09:42,520 ADHD is that the emotional range is wider, the bandwidth is 176 00:09:42,520 --> 00:09:45,080 bigger, the highs are higher, the lows are lower, and the 177 00:09:45,080 --> 00:09:48,680 speed of travel between them is faster than in people without 178 00:09:48,680 --> 00:09:51,320 ADHD. That's not crazy, it's not a 179 00:09:51,320 --> 00:09:54,360 character flaw. It's just a broader emotional 180 00:09:54,360 --> 00:09:57,760 register running on hardware that processes feeling before 181 00:09:57,760 --> 00:10:00,160 the moderating system has caught up. 182 00:10:00,880 --> 00:10:04,560 Which means that when something hits, it hits fully, and when 183 00:10:04,560 --> 00:10:08,560 something is joyful, it is genuinely joyful, and when 184 00:10:08,560 --> 00:10:11,840 something is painful, it's genuinely painful. 185 00:10:12,200 --> 00:10:16,120 And all of that is real. It's just arriving at a volume 186 00:10:16,120 --> 00:10:19,520 and a speed that the world around you wasn't expecting, 187 00:10:19,640 --> 00:10:23,240 including you perhaps, and didn't know how to accommodate. 188 00:10:24,080 --> 00:10:26,800 The autistic piece is different, and completing them produces 189 00:10:26,800 --> 00:10:29,720 advice that doesn't help either population. 190 00:10:30,200 --> 00:10:33,600 Autistic emotional processing involves alexithymia, which we 191 00:10:33,600 --> 00:10:37,280 talked about in Episode 1, the difficulty identifying and 192 00:10:37,280 --> 00:10:40,080 describing your own emotional States, and has a different 193 00:10:40,080 --> 00:10:43,800 processing timeline. Autistic people very often 194 00:10:43,960 --> 00:10:47,200 process emotional responses more slowly than people without 195 00:10:47,200 --> 00:10:49,920 autism. The feeling doesn't arrive 196 00:10:49,920 --> 00:10:53,440 immediately, it arrives later, sometimes significantly later, 197 00:10:53,440 --> 00:10:56,560 sometimes in a completely different context. 198 00:10:56,880 --> 00:11:00,120 And this is sometimes described as a delayed emotional response, 199 00:11:00,120 --> 00:11:02,960 and it creates a specific problem for calibration. 200 00:11:03,320 --> 00:11:06,840 If your emotional response to something doesn't arrive until 3 201 00:11:06,840 --> 00:11:10,880 hours after the event, or three days even, it's genuinely 202 00:11:10,880 --> 00:11:13,200 difficult to connect it back to the thing that caused it in the 203 00:11:13,200 --> 00:11:16,360 first place, which makes it very hard to assess whether or not 204 00:11:16,360 --> 00:11:19,360 it's proportionate. There's also a quality to 205 00:11:19,880 --> 00:11:23,560 autistic emotional experience that people describe as all or 206 00:11:23,560 --> 00:11:25,440 nothing. The feeling is either fully 207 00:11:25,440 --> 00:11:28,160 present or it isn't, without much of A middle register. 208 00:11:28,640 --> 00:11:32,120 This can read from the outside as flatness followed by 209 00:11:32,120 --> 00:11:34,240 seemingly unpredictable intensity. 210 00:11:34,560 --> 00:11:37,480 And this is a processing difference, not an emotional 211 00:11:37,480 --> 00:11:42,120 deficit and not instability. It's just that the internal 212 00:11:42,120 --> 00:11:44,600 landscape is a different topography. 213 00:11:45,320 --> 00:11:48,320 So you potentially have the ADHD fast arrival, high volume 214 00:11:48,320 --> 00:11:51,200 response and the autistic delayed all or nothing response. 215 00:11:51,480 --> 00:11:55,880 And you know, audio HD people, these can coexist in ways that 216 00:11:55,880 --> 00:11:59,600 are genuinely bewildering, where sometimes you get the ADHD spike 217 00:11:59,600 --> 00:12:02,760 and sometimes you get the autistic delay and sometimes you 218 00:12:02,760 --> 00:12:06,600 get both, which is its own special experience. 219 00:12:07,040 --> 00:12:11,440 Now here is where the toxic family background comes in and 220 00:12:11,440 --> 00:12:14,720 why this particular combination is so devastating. 221 00:12:15,080 --> 00:12:18,760 Gaslighting as a passing targets exactly this system. 222 00:12:19,000 --> 00:12:22,560 It works by introducing doubt into your perception of your own 223 00:12:22,560 --> 00:12:25,520 experience by consistently telling you that what you felt, 224 00:12:25,520 --> 00:12:29,680 saw, or heard wasn't real, or wasn't what you think it was, or 225 00:12:29,920 --> 00:12:33,320 was your fault, or was an overreaction. 226 00:12:33,960 --> 00:12:36,520 For people without ADHD or autism who have a secure 227 00:12:36,520 --> 00:12:40,080 attachment history and a well calibrated emotional response 228 00:12:40,080 --> 00:12:45,040 system, gaslighting is deeply destabilizing, but there are 229 00:12:45,040 --> 00:12:48,400 enough internal reference points to push back against it. 230 00:12:48,400 --> 00:12:51,440 It's hard, don't get me wrong, but there's something to push 231 00:12:51,440 --> 00:12:54,880 back from. For someone with ADHD who is 232 00:12:54,880 --> 00:12:57,280 already aware that their emotional responses arrive 233 00:12:57,280 --> 00:13:01,280 faster and louder than those of people without ADHD, being 234 00:13:01,280 --> 00:13:04,440 consistently told that those responses are too much, too 235 00:13:04,440 --> 00:13:07,360 dramatic, too intense, too sensitive lands very 236 00:13:07,360 --> 00:13:10,360 differently. Because it's confirming a fear 237 00:13:10,600 --> 00:13:14,720 you already had about yourself. You already know your responses 238 00:13:14,720 --> 00:13:17,760 feel bigger than other people's. You've already spent years 239 00:13:17,760 --> 00:13:20,640 wondering if that means something's wrong with you. 240 00:13:21,320 --> 00:13:25,080 And here is someone who is supposed to know you and care 241 00:13:25,080 --> 00:13:27,160 about you, love you, telling you that. 242 00:13:27,280 --> 00:13:30,560 Yes, actually, it does mean something's wrong with you, and 243 00:13:30,560 --> 00:13:33,760 moreover, that the specific thing that's wrong with you is 244 00:13:33,760 --> 00:13:37,400 that you can't be trusted to assess situations accurately. 245 00:13:38,000 --> 00:13:41,040 For an autistic person whose emotional responses may arrive 246 00:13:41,040 --> 00:13:44,800 late and completely or without clear labels, being told 247 00:13:44,800 --> 00:13:47,720 consistently that you're perceiving things wrong has a 248 00:13:47,720 --> 00:13:50,120 different but equally destructive effect. 249 00:13:50,520 --> 00:13:52,840 It teaches you to outsource perception. 250 00:13:53,480 --> 00:13:56,120 If you're already uncertain about your own internal 251 00:13:56,120 --> 00:13:59,320 experience, and the person you're supposed to trust is 252 00:13:59,320 --> 00:14:03,280 telling you that your read on external event external events 253 00:14:03,280 --> 00:14:05,640 is also wrong. What you're left with is a 254 00:14:05,640 --> 00:14:10,120 profound uncertainty about your own capacity to perceive 255 00:14:10,240 --> 00:14:14,600 accurately, not just. I'm not sure how I feel, which 256 00:14:14,600 --> 00:14:19,480 is already hard enough, but I'm not sure what actually happened. 257 00:14:20,480 --> 00:14:23,440 And this is where the two things interact in a way that goes 258 00:14:23,440 --> 00:14:26,720 beyond the sum of their parts. Because what a toxic parent who 259 00:14:26,720 --> 00:14:30,560 guest liked you is doing functionally is installing a 260 00:14:30,560 --> 00:14:33,760 second assessment there that runs between your experience and 261 00:14:33,760 --> 00:14:36,960 your response to it. Instead of experience leading to 262 00:14:36,960 --> 00:14:41,600 feeling leading to response, you get experience, then assessment 263 00:14:41,600 --> 00:14:44,400 of whether you're perceiving it correctly, then assessment of 264 00:14:44,400 --> 00:14:47,160 whether you're feeling is proportionate, then a decision 265 00:14:47,160 --> 00:14:48,840 about whether you're allowed to act on it. 266 00:14:49,080 --> 00:14:52,440 And by the time you run through all of that, you've either 267 00:14:52,440 --> 00:14:55,160 frozen or you've suppressed the feeling entirely. 268 00:14:55,320 --> 00:14:57,640 We haven't suppressed it, and now it's bigger than it was. 269 00:14:57,880 --> 00:15:01,280 And all of this is happening fast because your ADHD 270 00:15:01,280 --> 00:15:04,400 prefrontal cortex is trying to moderate a feeling that arrived 271 00:15:04,400 --> 00:15:07,480 faster than it could manage, while also running this anxiety 272 00:15:07,480 --> 00:15:10,320 spiral about whether the feeling is legitimate. 273 00:15:10,960 --> 00:15:13,920 That's what's happening. It's not a character flaw or a 274 00:15:13,920 --> 00:15:16,360 perception problem. It's a specific set of 275 00:15:16,360 --> 00:15:19,880 mechanisms producing a specific result, and it got installed 276 00:15:19,960 --> 00:15:23,720 early enough that it feels like just how you are. 277 00:15:24,600 --> 00:15:27,440 The difference between a response that's disproportionate 278 00:15:27,680 --> 00:15:31,760 and a response that doesn't look proportionate from once where 279 00:15:31,760 --> 00:15:36,040 someone else's standing matters and the two are not the same 280 00:15:36,040 --> 00:15:38,200 thing. A feeling that arrives fast and 281 00:15:38,200 --> 00:15:41,840 big is not automatically wrong. A feeling that arrives late and 282 00:15:41,840 --> 00:15:45,120 seems unconnected is not automatically wrong. 283 00:15:45,560 --> 00:15:47,960 Your ex or your parent or your sibling or your friend or 284 00:15:47,960 --> 00:15:51,320 whoever is telling you that you're overreacting is not 285 00:15:51,600 --> 00:15:54,240 evidence that you're overreacting. 286 00:15:54,360 --> 00:15:56,360 It's evidence that someone said that to you. 287 00:15:56,760 --> 00:16:00,000 Whether they were right is a separate question, and one 288 00:16:00,080 --> 00:16:03,400 requires you to have access to your own internal data. 289 00:16:03,640 --> 00:16:07,120 Which is exactly what this pattern disrupts. 290 00:16:08,360 --> 00:16:11,640 There's a concept in psychology called emotional invalidation, 291 00:16:11,640 --> 00:16:15,440 simply the experience of having your emotional response rejected 292 00:16:15,440 --> 00:16:17,400 or dismissed by someone important to you. 293 00:16:17,880 --> 00:16:20,720 And the research on it is pretty clear that consistent emotional 294 00:16:20,720 --> 00:16:23,920 invalidation in childhood produces exactly the kind of 295 00:16:23,920 --> 00:16:25,840 calibration problems we're talking about. 296 00:16:26,280 --> 00:16:29,400 Difficulty trusting your own responses, hyper vigilance to 297 00:16:29,440 --> 00:16:33,400 other emotional cues, a difficulty identifying what you 298 00:16:33,400 --> 00:16:37,200 feel, and a baseline assumption that your emotional experience 299 00:16:37,200 --> 00:16:40,520 is suspect until confirmed externally. 300 00:16:41,440 --> 00:16:44,080 This is what the literature says happens to people who've had 301 00:16:44,080 --> 00:16:47,240 this experience, and it maps precisely on to what you're 302 00:16:47,240 --> 00:16:49,840 describing when you say you can't tell if you're 303 00:16:49,840 --> 00:16:53,560 overreacting. The cruelty of it is that the 304 00:16:53,560 --> 00:16:58,000 people who do this are often very good at pointing to your 305 00:16:58,040 --> 00:17:01,120 ADHD or autism as evidence for the case. 306 00:17:01,160 --> 00:17:04,119 You always do this, you know you're sensitive. 307 00:17:04,240 --> 00:17:08,119 Or this is exactly what I mean, referencing some previous 308 00:17:08,119 --> 00:17:11,800 incident where your response was demonstrably too big for the 309 00:17:11,800 --> 00:17:16,319 situation in their opinion. Well they're not entirely wrong 310 00:17:16,599 --> 00:17:19,520 that the responses sometimes don't match the situation. 311 00:17:19,920 --> 00:17:22,119 What they're doing is using a real thing. 312 00:17:22,280 --> 00:17:25,920 You're genuinely non standard emotional processing as a weapon 313 00:17:25,920 --> 00:17:29,040 to prevent you from trusting yourself at all. 314 00:17:29,720 --> 00:17:32,240 If you want to go much deeper on the neuroscience of emotional 315 00:17:32,240 --> 00:17:36,160 dysregulation and specifically why the standard advice around 316 00:17:36,160 --> 00:17:38,720 regulation often doesn't work for ADHD and autistic nervous 317 00:17:38,720 --> 00:17:42,800 systems, I've done a companion episode on Is this a Thing My 318 00:17:42,800 --> 00:17:45,200 paid for episodes. You also get included in hub 319 00:17:45,200 --> 00:17:47,960 memberships. It gets into the actual evidence 320 00:17:48,040 --> 00:17:51,440 on what does and doesn't work for nervous systems like ours. 321 00:17:51,680 --> 00:17:54,200 If you're a a hub member, it's there now, and if you're not, 322 00:17:54,440 --> 00:17:56,200 I'll put the link in the show notes. 323 00:17:58,960 --> 00:18:01,920 If this episode landed for you and you want a safe, supportive 324 00:18:01,920 --> 00:18:05,160 space with people who just get it, join the hub at 325 00:18:05,160 --> 00:18:09,760 liberationacademy.co.uk where you'll get early access to Am I 326 00:18:09,760 --> 00:18:13,920 The Problem and Is This a Thing, along with courses, live calls, 327 00:18:13,920 --> 00:18:17,320 and a community of people who have at minimum read all the 328 00:18:17,320 --> 00:18:20,600 same books you have and are also still figuring it out. 329 00:18:20,960 --> 00:18:24,480 If you've been considering it, the link is in the show notes. 330 00:18:28,080 --> 00:18:32,960 This one is genuinely hard to rewire because the pattern is so 331 00:18:32,960 --> 00:18:36,240 deeply embedded and because it's sort of involves learning to 332 00:18:36,240 --> 00:18:39,400 trust something, your own perception that has been 333 00:18:39,400 --> 00:18:43,480 systematically undermined. That takes time, and I'm not 334 00:18:43,480 --> 00:18:45,920 gonna tell you there's a quick fix because there just isn't. 335 00:18:46,160 --> 00:18:48,280 And you've been told enough things that have turned out not 336 00:18:48,280 --> 00:18:51,240 to be true. What I can tell you is where to 337 00:18:51,240 --> 00:18:55,040 start, and the starting place is not with big moments, not the 338 00:18:55,040 --> 00:18:57,640 moment when you're in the middle of a conflict and you genuinely 339 00:18:57,640 --> 00:19:00,960 cannot tell whether you're right or you're catastrophizing. 340 00:19:01,560 --> 00:19:04,440 The big moments are the wrong place to build the skill because 341 00:19:04,440 --> 00:19:07,240 your nervous system is already dysregulated. 342 00:19:07,560 --> 00:19:09,960 ADHD. Prefrontal inhibition is 343 00:19:09,960 --> 00:19:13,280 compromised, and if there's another person involved who is 344 00:19:13,400 --> 00:19:16,320 actively contesting your perception, you have too many 345 00:19:16,320 --> 00:19:19,920 variables, you'll lose the thread every time. 346 00:19:20,680 --> 00:19:23,640 The place to start is in low stakes situations where nothing 347 00:19:23,640 --> 00:19:27,320 much is at play and the practice is really actually deceptively 348 00:19:27,320 --> 00:19:31,000 very simple, which is that instead of asking, is this 349 00:19:31,000 --> 00:19:34,440 response proportionate, you notice the physical signal 350 00:19:34,640 --> 00:19:38,600 before you assess it, you before you run it through the tribunal 351 00:19:38,720 --> 00:19:40,800 of people who have their own agendas. 352 00:19:41,480 --> 00:19:44,680 You just register that there is a physical change happening 353 00:19:44,680 --> 00:19:48,240 somewhere in your body. Your jaw has tightened, or 354 00:19:48,480 --> 00:19:51,240 there's something in your chest, or you've gone slightly cold or 355 00:19:51,240 --> 00:19:55,080 your attention has narrowed. I can sometimes get it like a 356 00:19:55,840 --> 00:19:59,080 floaty feeling, almost like I'm disconnected from my body. 357 00:19:59,080 --> 00:20:04,240 Not like disassociation, just. A jarring of myself, like I'm 358 00:20:04,240 --> 00:20:06,760 not quite all in the right order. 359 00:20:07,440 --> 00:20:09,720 You don't have to name it as an emotion, you don't have to 360 00:20:09,720 --> 00:20:12,360 categorize it. You just have to notice that 361 00:20:12,360 --> 00:20:14,280 your body has registered something. 362 00:20:14,560 --> 00:20:17,280 If you have alexithymia, this is the weigh in not through 363 00:20:17,280 --> 00:20:20,120 labeling the feeling, but through noticing the sensation. 364 00:20:20,680 --> 00:20:24,160 This is grounded in interception research, and what the research 365 00:20:24,160 --> 00:20:27,840 suggests is that you can improve your ability to read your own 366 00:20:27,840 --> 00:20:31,480 emotional states by improving your connection to the physical 367 00:20:31,480 --> 00:20:36,160 signals that precede them, and that this is learnable, not 368 00:20:36,160 --> 00:20:39,400 fixed, even if your baseline intraceptive awareness is lower 369 00:20:39,400 --> 00:20:43,680 than average, which for a lot of people with ADHD or autism it 370 00:20:43,680 --> 00:20:46,600 is, and this doesn't require visualization. 371 00:20:46,600 --> 00:20:49,920 If you can't generate mental images, this practice still 372 00:20:49,920 --> 00:20:52,480 works because it's entirely body based. 373 00:20:52,840 --> 00:20:55,600 You're attending to what's physically there. 374 00:20:56,400 --> 00:20:59,720 Once you've got that even loosely in place, the next piece 375 00:20:59,720 --> 00:21:03,080 is building what I'd call a kind of personal baseline. 376 00:21:03,400 --> 00:21:06,600 Not from a feelings wheel or a worksheet, but from your own 377 00:21:06,600 --> 00:21:09,080 data about how your responses tend to run. 378 00:21:09,480 --> 00:21:13,040 If you have ADHD emotional dysregulation, you know that 379 00:21:13,040 --> 00:21:14,920 your responses arrive fast and big. 380 00:21:15,280 --> 00:21:17,600 That's not a flaw in the data, it's a feature of your 381 00:21:17,600 --> 00:21:21,000 particular data set, which means when a big response arrives, 382 00:21:21,240 --> 00:21:25,600 you're not necessarily reacting. You're running on fast arrival 383 00:21:25,600 --> 00:21:28,920 hardware. You're like Concorde compared to 384 00:21:29,040 --> 00:21:33,800 a little twin engine plane. If you have autistic mind you, 385 00:21:33,800 --> 00:21:35,840 is the analogy of Concorde bad? See there? 386 00:21:35,880 --> 00:21:39,560 There you go, there's a spiral. Nevermind if you have autistic 387 00:21:39,560 --> 00:21:42,360 delayed processing, you know that sometimes the feeling will 388 00:21:42,360 --> 00:21:45,720 come later, and the fact that it's come later doesn't make it 389 00:21:45,720 --> 00:21:49,200 wrong or disproportionate. Both of those things are just 390 00:21:49,200 --> 00:21:50,920 your system doing what your system does. 391 00:21:51,400 --> 00:21:55,080 This connects to something that took me an embarrassingly long 392 00:21:55,080 --> 00:21:57,960 time to work out. For all my training, therapy, 393 00:21:57,960 --> 00:22:01,600 and knowledge on this mechanism, it can still catch me out 394 00:22:01,600 --> 00:22:05,320 sometimes, especially if I'm tired, feeling vulnerable, or my 395 00:22:05,320 --> 00:22:08,520 cognitive load is high. So quite a lot of the time to be 396 00:22:08,520 --> 00:22:10,720 honest. But the thing I eventually 397 00:22:10,720 --> 00:22:14,360 landed on is that proportionality isn't actually 398 00:22:14,520 --> 00:22:18,600 the right question. The question isn't, is this 399 00:22:18,600 --> 00:22:21,760 response the right size? The question is, is this 400 00:22:21,760 --> 00:22:24,280 response telling me something real? 401 00:22:24,800 --> 00:22:28,200 A response can be large and still be telling you something 402 00:22:28,200 --> 00:22:29,920 real. The response can be 403 00:22:29,920 --> 00:22:34,000 disproportionate to the immediate situation and still be 404 00:22:34,040 --> 00:22:38,160 accurately flagging a pattern. Your ADHD emotional system is 405 00:22:38,160 --> 00:22:41,240 fast and loud, but it's not wrong just because it's loud. 406 00:22:41,680 --> 00:22:44,040 You don't have to win the argument about whether your 407 00:22:44,040 --> 00:22:47,200 response was proportionate or convince the person who's 408 00:22:47,200 --> 00:22:49,240 telling you that you're overreacting. 409 00:22:49,360 --> 00:22:54,400 What you're trying to do is build a read on yourself that 410 00:22:54,400 --> 00:22:58,120 doesn't require someone else to confirm it before you'll accept 411 00:22:58,120 --> 00:23:02,280 it, so that even when you can't be certain whether you're right, 412 00:23:02,480 --> 00:23:05,760 you're not automatically defaulting to the assumption 413 00:23:05,920 --> 00:23:09,240 that you're wrong. The default blame position I 414 00:23:09,240 --> 00:23:11,600 call that. And I do want to say something 415 00:23:11,600 --> 00:23:14,680 about reality checking with other people because I don't 416 00:23:14,680 --> 00:23:17,040 want to leave you with the impression that asking someone 417 00:23:17,040 --> 00:23:20,400 else's opinion is automatically self abandonment. 418 00:23:20,400 --> 00:23:23,760 It obviously isn't. There's a meaningful difference 419 00:23:24,080 --> 00:23:27,120 between outsourcing yourself trust to whoever's available 420 00:23:27,120 --> 00:23:30,600 because you have no internal reference point at all, which is 421 00:23:30,600 --> 00:23:33,600 where a lot of us started, and choosing to check in with a 422 00:23:33,600 --> 00:23:37,600 specific person you trust precisely because you do have a 423 00:23:37,600 --> 00:23:41,040 working sense of your own patterns and you know when you 424 00:23:41,040 --> 00:23:44,080 are likely to be off. I still do the latter. 425 00:23:44,080 --> 00:23:48,080 As I said, when my response feels big and I'm tired and my 426 00:23:48,080 --> 00:23:51,600 cognitive load is high, I will go to one of a very small number 427 00:23:51,600 --> 00:23:55,920 of people, two or three maximum, to be straight with me. 428 00:23:56,400 --> 00:23:59,240 Not because I can't trust myself at all, but because I know 429 00:23:59,240 --> 00:24:01,880 enough about my own system to know when it might be running 430 00:24:01,880 --> 00:24:04,040 hotter than the situation warrants. 431 00:24:04,400 --> 00:24:08,120 You know, I could be projecting, I could be reading something 432 00:24:08,120 --> 00:24:12,320 into what's happening that isn't there because of my history, and 433 00:24:12,320 --> 00:24:14,880 I know that about myself. So I check it out. 434 00:24:15,120 --> 00:24:18,800 And having someone I trust confirm or challenge that is 435 00:24:18,800 --> 00:24:22,960 useful, not weak. The differences in who you're 436 00:24:22,960 --> 00:24:25,640 asking and why. If you're asking because you 437 00:24:25,640 --> 00:24:29,160 genuinely cannot tolerate your own uncertainty, and you need 438 00:24:29,160 --> 00:24:32,800 external confirm confirmation before you'll allow yourself to 439 00:24:32,800 --> 00:24:35,080 feel anything, that's the old passion. 440 00:24:35,520 --> 00:24:38,200 If you're asking because you have a working hypothesis about 441 00:24:38,200 --> 00:24:41,080 your own response, and you want an honest second opinion from 442 00:24:41,080 --> 00:24:45,440 someone whose judgement you actually trust, that's just good 443 00:24:45,600 --> 00:24:49,360 epistemics. The goal isn't to never need 444 00:24:49,360 --> 00:24:53,280 anyone, it's to build enough of an internal baseline that you 445 00:24:53,280 --> 00:24:56,600 can tell the difference between those two things. 446 00:24:57,280 --> 00:25:00,000 For people with ADHD specifically because working 447 00:25:00,000 --> 00:25:03,840 memory and the passage of time both work against you, is worth 448 00:25:03,840 --> 00:25:06,760 keeping some kind of record. Not a detailed journal. 449 00:25:06,760 --> 00:25:10,440 If that's not something you'll sustain guilty, but a note. 450 00:25:11,120 --> 00:25:14,760 You know, like even a voice memo in the moment or shortly after 451 00:25:14,960 --> 00:25:18,320 that captures what happened and what you noticed in your body, 452 00:25:18,640 --> 00:25:21,600 Not your assessment of whether it was right, just what was 453 00:25:21,600 --> 00:25:24,400 there over time. That data is genuinely useful 454 00:25:24,400 --> 00:25:27,600 because it lets you see patterns in your own responses that you 455 00:25:27,600 --> 00:25:30,440 can't hold in working memory long enough to identify in real 456 00:25:30,440 --> 00:25:32,760 time. For artistics processing 457 00:25:32,760 --> 00:25:36,200 specifically where the emotional response may come later, the 458 00:25:36,200 --> 00:25:38,400 useful practice is to not force it. 459 00:25:38,760 --> 00:25:41,960 If the feeling isn't there yet, it isn't there yet, and trying 460 00:25:41,960 --> 00:25:45,000 to manufacture a response so that you can assess it in the 461 00:25:45,000 --> 00:25:48,640 moment is just adding another layer of performance on top of 462 00:25:48,640 --> 00:25:51,880 an already complicated system. Give it time. 463 00:25:52,160 --> 00:25:55,440 The response will come when it comes, and when it does it's 464 00:25:55,440 --> 00:26:00,360 still valid data even if it arrives 3 days after the event. 465 00:26:03,680 --> 00:26:06,360 One of the things that comes up a lot in the work I do around 466 00:26:06,360 --> 00:26:09,840 emotional dysregulation is how badly it translates into 467 00:26:09,840 --> 00:26:12,440 professional environments. Not because the responses are 468 00:26:12,440 --> 00:26:15,680 wrong, but because workplaces are generally not built with 469 00:26:15,680 --> 00:26:18,600 fast arriving emotional responses or delayed processing 470 00:26:18,760 --> 00:26:21,320 in mind. And the result is that a lot of 471 00:26:21,320 --> 00:26:25,400 very capable people look on paper like they're not coping 472 00:26:25,760 --> 00:26:29,080 when what's actually happening is a mismatch between how their 473 00:26:29,080 --> 00:26:32,280 brain works and what the environment is asking of it. 474 00:26:32,880 --> 00:26:35,840 A Perio profiles is what I've built to do something about 475 00:26:35,840 --> 00:26:38,080 that. It's a cognitive and personality 476 00:26:38,080 --> 00:26:42,000 profiling service that maps out how you actually function, your 477 00:26:42,000 --> 00:26:45,400 executive function patterns, your processing style, how you 478 00:26:45,400 --> 00:26:47,440 perform under different kinds of pressure. 479 00:26:47,680 --> 00:26:50,200 And it comes with practical recommendations that are 480 00:26:50,200 --> 00:26:53,560 specific to you. Not a diagnosis, not a 481 00:26:53,560 --> 00:26:57,680 personality quiz, Something considerably more useful than 482 00:26:57,680 --> 00:26:59,600 either. It's for individuals who want to 483 00:26:59,600 --> 00:27:02,720 understand themselves better in professional contexts, and 484 00:27:02,880 --> 00:27:06,640 managers and HR teams who want to actually support their people 485 00:27:06,880 --> 00:27:09,720 rather than just accommodate them on paper. 486 00:27:10,120 --> 00:27:13,560 If that's relevant to you or your organization, the details 487 00:27:13,600 --> 00:27:21,600 are in the show notes. Right, here's the uncomfortable 488 00:27:21,600 --> 00:27:24,200 bit. At some point, knowing all of 489 00:27:24,200 --> 00:27:27,920 this has to become something other than a very sophisticated 490 00:27:27,920 --> 00:27:30,120 explanation for why you can never trust yourself. 491 00:27:30,560 --> 00:27:33,160 Because that's the trap of this particular pattern set. 492 00:27:33,640 --> 00:27:36,640 It's a trap I've fallen into myself, and I suspect you 493 00:27:36,640 --> 00:27:39,360 recognise it. You learn enough about your own 494 00:27:39,360 --> 00:27:42,680 neurodivergence and your own history to build a very thorough 495 00:27:42,680 --> 00:27:45,600 and very accurate account of why your calibration is broken. 496 00:27:46,120 --> 00:27:49,640 And then you use that account as a reason to perpetually defer 497 00:27:49,640 --> 00:27:53,440 the question of whether your responses are real, The 498 00:27:53,440 --> 00:27:56,120 explanation is true, the mechanisms are real, and the 499 00:27:56,120 --> 00:27:58,720 history is real. And none of that changes the 500 00:27:58,720 --> 00:28:02,720 fact that at some point you have to start making calls based on 501 00:28:02,720 --> 00:28:06,600 your own data, even imperfect data, even fast arriving or 502 00:28:06,600 --> 00:28:10,400 delayed or unlabeled data. You have to start treating your 503 00:28:10,520 --> 00:28:14,480 own perception as a working hypothesis rather than a 504 00:28:14,480 --> 00:28:17,960 defendant who needs to prove innocence before being allowed 505 00:28:17,960 --> 00:28:21,120 to have opinions. Because the alternative, the 506 00:28:21,120 --> 00:28:24,440 indefinite suspension of self trust pending sufficient 507 00:28:24,440 --> 00:28:27,840 evidence, it's just a more internally generated version of 508 00:28:27,840 --> 00:28:32,120 the same gaslighting pattern. You're doing the work your toxic 509 00:28:32,120 --> 00:28:35,000 parent used to do. And I say that not to make you 510 00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:39,000 feel guilty about it, because it makes complete sense that you'd 511 00:28:39,000 --> 00:28:40,840 internalize it. It's what brains do with 512 00:28:40,840 --> 00:28:42,360 patterns that got installed early. 513 00:28:43,040 --> 00:28:45,400 But because you need to hear that the thing you're doing when 514 00:28:45,400 --> 00:28:47,760 you run the tribunal is not neutrality. 515 00:28:48,120 --> 00:28:51,640 It's not intellectual rigor. It's self abandonment, and 516 00:28:51,640 --> 00:28:54,800 you've had enough of that from other people without adding 517 00:28:54,800 --> 00:28:59,560 yourself to the list. So that's episode 2 Next week 518 00:28:59,560 --> 00:29:01,240 we're talking about the apology reflex. 519 00:29:01,240 --> 00:29:04,840 The reason just stop apologizing is genuinely useless advice. 520 00:29:05,160 --> 00:29:08,680 And what's actually happening when you apologize for taking up 521 00:29:08,680 --> 00:29:12,600 space before that episode drops? I'd love to know what's the 522 00:29:12,600 --> 00:29:16,080 thing you apologize for most that you know somewhere. 523 00:29:16,360 --> 00:29:20,240 You don't actually need to apologize for my lump posts. 524 00:29:21,280 --> 00:29:24,240 You can tell me on Instagram or through the form in the show 525 00:29:24,240 --> 00:29:26,000 notes and I'll be reading everything. 526 00:29:26,000 --> 00:29:28,600 Even if I can't respond to all of it. 527 00:29:28,680 --> 00:29:32,640 Thank you as ever for listening. And again, as ever, all that 528 00:29:32,640 --> 00:29:35,080 remains to be said is take care. Bye.