Adhd Woman Quotes

Sometimes I’ve got too many thoughts at once. It’s like there’s a four-way intersection in my brain where everyone’s trying to go at the same time.

After a woman understands that she does have something called AD/HD and has had it for a long time, she begins to look back and see how deeply it has affected every area of her life. At this point she will often move into the next stage—anger. She often feels anger at lost opportunities, looking back at the paths that she didn’t take. She focuses on the point at which things started to go off course and begins to feel anger at a system that let her down as a child.

Writer Tara Mohr (2014) discusses ways in which women minimize their impact with the use of qualifiers in their communications. Similar to “I’m sorry,” one of these qualifiers is the word “just.” Mohr explains that using this modifier—as in “I just want to add…” or “I just think…”—diminishes a woman’s power. “Just” quickly disempowers what might otherwise be a stunning idea by connoting something more along the lines of “barely” or “I’m saying this with apology.

days of “talks” about his “problem”? People with ADHD are all too aware that others think they are “broken,” and the resulting low self-esteem and resentment sometimes color their ability to enter into a relationship in the first place. Take this professionally successful woman with ADHD:

I like that I have ten things on the go, all at once. I like that I'm always planning for the next thing. I like that I bring a high energy to my life, that I see it as a challenge. I like that my favourite thing to do on the flight home is to look at the airline route map to pick my next destination.

The only thing I really did except for drinking? Adderall, the amphetamine that’s given to kids for ADHD. Adderall made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed. It was the only thing that worked for me as an antidepressant, and I really felt like I needed one of those.

Research and clinical observation (not to mention people’s personal experiences) show that people with ADHD tend to have hypersensitivities in each of the five senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight (Bailey and Haupt 2010, 182). I have no doubt that the tale of the princess and the pea is the portrait of a young woman with ADHD! I’m constantly yanking my shirt tail and skirts down and my socks and leotards up because any bunched fabric drives me nuts. Many women with ADHD (including me) would like to burn their bras, and it’s not (necessarily) because we’re feminists: it’s because of tactile hypersensitivity

Women with AD/HD often feel that despite years of trying to keep their heads above water that they are sinking deeper and deeper and are feeling more trapped and helpless. Many women with undiagnosed AD/HD are unable to explain or have anyone else help them understand their experience. It may be incomprehensible for others to believe that a seemingly successful woman, or a woman who has never been hyperactive, may have AD/HD. Instead, she may be written off as having typical “female emotional problems” or serious psychological disturbances. The greater her outward signs of success, the more baffling it is to those around her. And if she has been visibly struggling, it just reconfirms other people’s opinions that she is indeed weak, incompetent, or helpless.

To this woman, a “comfortable” life is one that includes a predictable routine and quiet, intimate, shared time with her husband. I suspect that this is at least in part because routine makes taking care of three boys much easier. Her husband’s energy level is disruptive and foreign. Yet this is inherently part of him; the energy, humor, and wit that have gotten him out of tough spots in the past are the key to his professional success and are likely a reason why his wife was initially attracted to him (before she needed the routine to help make her and the children’s lives easier). Neither spousal style is wrong in this situation; her routine helps her succeed as a mother, and his energy helps him succeed at work. It is the intersection of their styles at this particular time in their lives that creates the problems.

Key to the success of many with ADHD is finding the “right life” in which to live. This means a job in which their particular talents for nonlinear thinking and quick emergency response are prized, and a spouse who can appreciate, or at least learn to live with, an often uneven distribution of work within the relationship. Without these things, many with ADHD feel that they don’t really fit into the world, or that the face that they put forward in order to fit in is false. The other critical factor for the success of an ADHD spouse in a relationship is for both partners to continue to respect differences and act on that respect. Here’s what one woman with ADHD says about living a life in which others assume that “different” is not worthy of respect: I think [my husband] uses the ADD as an excuse to be bossy and stuff sometimes but I find it very upsetting and hard on my self esteem to have my disorder and learning disabilities used that way. We do have very different perspectives but reality is perspective. Just because I see things differently from someone else doesn’t make one wrong or right…how I experience life is colored by my perception, it is what it is. I hate how people try to invalidate my thoughts feelings and perceptions because they are different from theirs. Like telling me [since] they feel…different[ly] from me [that their feelings] should make me magically change! It doesn’t work that way. Even if my ADD makes me see or remember something “not right” it’s still MY reality. It is like those movies where the hero has something crazy going on where they experience reality differently from everyone else.

Rejection-sensitive Dysphoria can be triggered by the rejection of approval, love, respect, teasing, criticism (even if constructive), and ruminating self-criticism or negative self-talk prompted by possible or real failure. This dysphoria will quickly flip a woman’s mood and match the perspective of failure. Because of the instant emotional switch when triggered, RSD can be mistaken for a full major mood disorder, including suicidal thoughts, especially with continued internalization.

We also know that ADHD can crop up for the first time in adulthood. This often happens when the demands of life exceed the person’s ability to deal with them. Classic examples are when a woman has her first baby or when a student starts medical school.

These symptoms exemplify how impairing ADHD can be to a woman because they encompass just about all the facets of her life. Though “executive functioning” and “self-regulation” sound like terminology straight out of a college textbook, suffice it to say that these seemingly “absentminded” behaviors are, in fact, brain based, and there is a perfectly rational explanation for why you “do the things you do.

We also know that ADHD can crop up for the first time in adulthood. This often happens when the demands of life exceed the person’s ability to deal with them. Classic examples are when a woman has her first baby or when a student starts medical school. In both instances the organizational demands of daily life skyrocket and the person shows the symptoms of ADHD that he or she had been able to compensate for in the past. It is then that ADHD can and should be diagnosed. Indeed, adult-onset ADHD is a recognized condition in the big book of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5).

it’s not wrong to prioritize your functioning and find other ways you can contribute to environmentalism. Climate change is real. Environmentalism is important. But we are not going to fix the earth by shaming people with mental health and neurodiverse needs out of adaptive routines they need to function. Take that energy to Congress. Those who feel anger at someone with clinical depression or ADHD for not engaging in eco-optimal behaviors are seriously deluded. One of the major tenets of health professions is harm reduction. No one is made functional overnight, and some people may always have barriers. The goal then is to take steps that reduce harm, first to self, then to those individuals around us, then to our community. You cannot jump right to community harm reduction before first addressing individual harm reduction. Therefore, if a newly widowed woman struggles to eat, she is released from the obligation of having an eco-perfect diet not because eating ethically is unimportant, but because when the real-world choices for someone are eating dairy or eating nothing, it is always the ethical choice to eat. It is always the ethical choice to encourage that person to eat whatever they can manage. Harm reduction is always ethical.

When I look at the world today, from the physician's point of view, from the health point of view, what do we see? We see a society, not just in North America, but as globalization extends its reach around the world, we see increasing levels of certain illnesses, certain mental illnesses like ADHD, which didn't use to exist in certain countries and now, all of a sudden, they have a problem with it. Auto-immune diseases like inflammatory bowel disease that didn't use to exist in certain societies, now exist in these societies. If you look at North America, if you look at multiple sclerosis in the 1930s or 40s, the gender ratio was about 1 woman to every man. Now that ratio is about 3 and a half women for every man. If you look at something like asthma which is rising amongst kids... a study in the United States last year showed that the more episodes of racism a black American woman experiences, the greater the risk for asthma. We've known for a long time that the more stress the parents have, the greater the risk of the child having asthma. In North America millions of kids are on medication now, for depression, anxiety, ADHD, and more and more kids are being medicated all the time. If you look at something like autism spectrum disorder, it is now being diagnosed 40 times as often as it was 30 or 40 years ago. Anxiety is the fastest growing diagnose in North America amongst young people. The usual medical explanations for any of these phenomena just doesn't hold. Because medicine, for the most part, sees all of these problems as simply biological issues. Multiple sclerosis being a disease of the nervous system. Inflammatory bowel disease being a malaise of the gut. ADHD, depression, anxiety, addiction.. these are problems of the brain. And, for the most part, we like to rely on genetic explanations, that it is genes that are causing these things, or, if it is not genes, we don't know what is causing it. Of course, if you just look at that one little fact that I told you about the ratio of women and men in multiple sclerosis.. you know right away it can't be genetic. Because genes don't change in a population over 7 years and if they did, why would they change more for one gender than the other? Nor it can be the climate nor the diet because that also hasn't changed more for one gender than the other. Something else is going on. For ADHD and the fact that many more kids are being diagnosed.. that can't be genetic, cause genes don't change in a population over 10 years or 5 years or 15 years.