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While working with ADHD clients, sooner or later, I hit the same roadblock, which is the most challenging obstacle to work with.

Clients feel despair when talking about it. They crumble under the pressure of expectations paired with genuine inability. They would like to avoid working with the issue at any cost; however, they can achieve changes in their lives only once they improve it.

It is challenging because working on this deficit activates deep discomfort and resistance rooted in feelings of shame – clients are convinced they are not good enough since they cannot function like everyone else.

Many clients get easily discouraged since improving the issue requires enormous stamina, organisation, and faith.

What am I talking about?

Executive function.

We can describe the executive function by mentioning at least seven parts.

I will list them and give you some examples of observable deficit indicators.

1. Working memory.

If something is not written down, it will be forgotten. You forget to write things down.

You don’t remember to respond to the email or text you received a minute ago. You don’t remember to make a note of the meeting you just agreed to. You don’t know what you just read. You cannot follow cooking recipes since you do not remember what you just did. You lose things since you do not remember where you put them. You cannot remember what you want to say when someone talks too long. You might forget to pack important documents and objects. You forget the last steps of the tasks, like putting laundry up, putting the cake into the oven and pressing the send button.

2. Self-inhibition.

You often think you deserve to feel better or do something fun before doing something difficult. You cannot stop yourself from going on Instagram, playing games, drinking the third cup of coffee, eating another cookie, or smoking another cigarette. It is tough to stop when something feels good – no matter how ineffective the results might be. For example, you can spend hours in the gym since you get into flow. Even when something hurts, it is hard to stop; for example, you know you are tired and need to go to bed, but you watch another episode of your favourite show.

3.  Resistance to distractions.

Everything might steal your attention. Advertisement in the corner of the computer thought in your head, sensation in your body, a sound, reflection in the mirror, speck of dust on the desk.

4. Attention shifting.

You are unable to start the task. You do not know where to start and what should go next. You hate when people interrupt you since you will never be able to go back to the place you were working on. You will never be able to return to the feeling you had while working on the interrupted task. When you work on something, you cannot stop and continue later. You have many projects started, but you cannot finish them. When you shift your attention, returning to the task feels like a drag; it is dull and oppressive.

5. Organising

You do not understand your or other people’s limits, so for example, you might organise very long excursions that are not pleasurable. You might forget to organise food or water. You do not know how long things might take. You might omit some steps of the activity, like booking a cab, picking up tickets, or checking the train times.

6. Planning.

Planning seems impossible because there are so many things that you are overdue.

If you plan the day and fail to do one activity, it is impossible to do the next one on the list. Sometimes, activities take more or less time than you plan for; therefore, the plan does not work.

Often, you do not want to do things you planned to do. Planned things are boring because they do not happen spontaneously. The plan things seem like something you are forced to do – even though you planned them. Often, you forget to look into your planner or plan in the first place.

There is no one minute a day that we do not experience them. Our bodies register them all the time. Why, then, do we know so little about them and are usually puzzled about how to regulate them?

Emotional regulation is not an easy topic, but it is very needed when there is little time for relaxation and staying in one’s comfort zone.

We are constantly told to be productive and fast, react immediately, and stay calm. In practice, that means we are bottling or suppressing our feelings.

But what is this scary dragon we call feeling? The feeling is an emotional state or reaction.

Why do we have feelings? Feelings are a natural mechanism our body possesses that lets us know whether something is right or not. They are like a warning/feedback system given by nature to keep us alive and healthy.

The difficulty with understanding feelings creates myths:

1. Feelings come for no good reason.

Feelings come from reactions to the outside environment or inside reality. For example, if I suddenly feel anxious, it is because something in my environment proves dangerous or there are needs in my body I am not satisfied with.

2. Feelings are so powerful that they can hurt or kill us.

We all heard about people with broken hearts who die of heart attacks. In reality, it is not possible to be hurt by your feelings. As uncomfortable as they are, they cannot inflict more pain or stress than we impose on ourselves.

3. You cannot control your feelings. We cannot prevent the appearance of our feelings, but we can control how we act under their influence.

4. We cannot express feelings in words; some are very difficult to express, but we can use analogies and metaphors to work with them.

5. People should have different feelings. If feelings are like the warning-feedback system, having different feelings from the ones we have would mean we override essential information that could improve our well-being.

How many primary feelings do we have?

Fear, joy, anger, shame, and sadness.

From my professional experience, all the big and complicated feelings could be reduced to those five.

To work on emotional regulation, we need to meet and understand feelings. We need to go back to basics.

We need to answer some questions: What are my feelings’ characteristics? What is their function? Where are the feelings in my body? How do I deal with them?

Many clients need clarification on these questions since no one teaches us about those topics.

Let’s look into fear for a moment.

What is the function of fear? Fear lets us know that our needs are not being satisfied or cannot be satisfied in the future. We feel fear when something threatens our physical health, self–esteem, or well–being in the present and future.

Example: I have a public speaking event, and I feel fear. My need for admiration and safety might not be met when I flop the talk, and my boss will be unhappy with me, resulting in a lack of promotion, less money, and so on.

Where is fear in my body? Clients usually describe fear as a heavy, hot feeling in the chest and stomach. The feeling might be tight and suffocating. Fear can travel to the shoulders, neck, and back.

What does happen in my body when I am scared? Because the body prepares for fight or flight, the heart beats faster to pump blood away from internal organs to muscles. For the same reason, we breathe faster. We can feel hot or freezing. Our muscles become tense in preparation for danger. The part of the brain responsible for rational and analytical thinking switches off. We cannot think or work. Since blood is directed from our internal organs, we might feel nauseous, and our digestion is affected. We can experience diarrhoea or constipation.

How do I deal with fear? Fear is a hot feeling the sympathetic nervous system activates to prepare us for fight, flight, or freeze. To work with fear, we need to slow our bodies down. Activities that relax the body and slow the heartbeat would be the most helpful: meditation, yoga, stretching, reading a book, essential oils, white noise, hot baths, etc.

Your turn!

Think about joy, anger, shame, and sadness.

What is the function of …?

Where is … in my body?

What does happen in my body when I am …?

How do we deal with ….?

Would you buy a service that does not specify a time limit, does not guarantee success, and promises pain and unpredictable results?

The more clients I see, the more pressure I feel to fix any ailment quickly and painlessly. Often, I hear from positively-willed clients that they come to therapy to work hard on their past trauma, put it behind them, and start living to their full potential.

It would be great if they did not want to do it in six sessions and with the help of worksheets. It would be great if they did not want to know what would happen and how the process would evolve. Also, there are often suggestions that I should know how to do it without raising pain and discomfort.

We are infected by the narrative of late capitalism, which trained us to look out for a product’s advantages and disadvantages. We see therapy as an invention that should guarantee the change we seek in the interval of time suitable for us without any adverse, disturbing, or evading everyday life side effects.

I do not have anything against short-term therapy or worksheets. I do practice both. Unfortunately, I have to tell my clients that working on trauma will not be fast, predictable or manageable.

Also, there is “something” we must create together, which is paramount for success.

The distillation apparatus used by alchemists may be the best metaphor for imagining that “something.” Therapy, like a chemical reaction, happens inside an apparatus between elements that start interacting with each other. Without apparatus and time, alchemists cannot produce gold.

The “something” is the therapeutic relationship. Some psychotherapists explain it as trust, others as congruence.

I would risk hypotheses that it is liking.

The clients who benefit most from therapy enjoy themselves in the room during the sessions with me. They begin to trust themselves since they once trusted me. They talk the truth to themselves since they heard the uncomfortable truth told with love by me. First, they develop a relationship with me and then connect with themselves.

It is such a cliché—but hard to achieve.

No worksheet, app, or self-help book will give you that.

You cannot produce gold without burning, evaporating, examining collected data, repeatedly trying experiments, and failing.

We have reached the crucible of the difficulty: advertising will never explicitly tell you this. You will read it in small print: “We promise pain and want you to sacrifice time. We want you to feel uncomfortable burning, losing shape, being incredibly heavy with emotions and allowing new qualities to come.”

Surely, no one wants to buy that.

“Don’t tell me it’s not worth trying for

You can’t tell me it’s not worth dying for

You know it’s true (you know it’s true)

Everything I do, I do it for you

Yeah, yeah”

We all probably remember Brayan Adam’s theme song from the movie Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, with a fantastic Kevin Costner performance. This entry will not be about the movie – but please watch it if you did not – it is much fun.

Every time I hear this song, I return to one conversation I had with my dad when I was a small girl. There were some troubles with my grades or house chores, and my dad decided to give me a talk.

He said: “You do not understand, Edyta. Everything you do is for you, including your grades, how clean your room is, and how much you read. Maybe you think it is for me or your mother – but it is not. We care, but it is not like we will benefit from your actions. The only person who will benefit from it is you”.

This stopped me in my tracks because it was the undeniable truth, and because I loved my dad so much, I took everything he said as gospel.

I thought, how is that possible? Well, if I have good grades, it would be easier for me to get into a good school; if I cleaned my room, it would be easier to find the stuff I need for school, and so on.

Since then, whenever I do not want to do something or feel that things are meaningless, I return to my dad’s talk.

Let’s say your job is bringing you down. It is tedious, all the procedures are backward, colleagues are weird, and you hate your workspace. You might be stuck in the narrative that someone is taking your time from you and you are doing things for someone else.

How different would it be if you thought they were paying you for things you do for yourself? They pay you for gaining experience, improving your communication skills, researching the procedures that need to be improved, and practising your patience, resilience, and faith.

I know what I am saying; I have practised it for years in various workplaces where organisation, management and tasks could have been better. Nevertheless, I learned something from each of them.

When we think about sacrifice, we may think we can do genuinely altruistic deeds, but there is no such thing in practical terms. Even when we sacrifice, we do it to prevent experiencing the alternative reality in which a person we love will suffer.

Everything you do, you do for yourself. It’s natural law – no point in feeling guilty about it.

Exercise. If you wish to explore it more, please answer these questions:

1.      What is the one activity you hate doing right now that you consider as something you do only for others?

2.      What are the things you feel dread about?

3.      Find five beneficial results for you when doing this activity.

Example:

Booking my husband’s medical appointments will improve my husband’s health, allow him to live longer, allow us to travel when we are old, allow him to do more things around the house, and make me happier.

The smallest possible quantity or the least fulfilling, but still adequate, condition that is required, acceptable, or suitable for some purpose.

The bare minimum. We are told that the bare minimum is something negative.

“Your son is not doing well at school. To be honest, he is giving only a bare minimum to not get into trouble – but this is not enough to be successful with his exams”.

“You are giving me a bare minimum in this relationship, which is unacceptable”.

But what if the bare minimum is the way to protect your sanity?

What is the bare minimum you need to do in a day?

Why am I asking? Is it not important? Because, of course, you will not dream of only doing the bare minimum. You are professional, and you will give 110% each day. You are a loving spouse and parent, and you will not want to perform only on the bare minimum – since it is not good enough.

Is it not?

What would happen if you were doing the bare minimum for seven days?

What is the bare minimum, then? The smallest possible quantity or the least fulfilling, but still adequate, condition that is required, acceptable, or suitable for some purpose.

Of course, it depends on the purpose. What is the minimum amount of walking you should do a day? NHS says 10 minutes of brisk walking. In general, 150 minutes a week of exercise is a bare minimum. So, 2.5 hours a week.

What is the bare minimum of work you need to do each day?

Does it feel uncomfortable If I ask such a question? But why? Are you afraid of the consequences of not being a 110% person? Not being promoted? Being let go? Not standing out?

But the bare minimum would seem adequate, acceptable, and suitable.

Why are we persuaded we need to give more and work harder?

Why are we convinced that the bare minimum is enough for what we like to do, even though doing the bare minimum will not bring any monetary benefits?

Instead, we do 110%, burn out, and feel horrible – being stuck in the cycle of anxiety and shame – just doing the best we can to reach our full potential.

When I was running emotional regulation workshops, I discovered that most children who had problems with emotional regulation could not name their feelings. Some of them could not locate the sensations in their bodies. They would say, “I feel it in my head”.

You cannot feel things in your head.

Some would say, “I feel like walking away from here” or “I feel like not talking to you”.

But what did that mean? How does it feel to want to walk out? Well, it could be being afraid or bored, equally agitated or excited about something happening after the session.

I was confused. I did not understand where the child was because I did not know how they felt.

Then, I discovered one fundamental truth: you cannot tell how you feel because you do not connect with your body.

Why?

You cannot tell how you feel because you do not have vocabulary.

We all know an old joke describing how you can say many things with one swear word articulated differently.

So we could be surprised, angry, amazed and use the same words to describe how we feel.

But do we know how we feel? Naming is significant in understanding why we feel the way we feel. You would be unable to tell why you are angry without knowing you are angry.

You cannot tell how you feel because it does not help with anything.

Well, it might be standing in the way of success. “Suck it up”, “no pain – no gain”, “push yourself”. The message is clear: do not feel – and push through it. Often, the measure of success is how much we can deprive our bodies of sleep, food or human contact.

In pursuit of eternal happiness, we learn not to feel.

You cannot tell how you feel because there was something that scared you so much that going back to your body is unambiguous with accepting death.

We sometimes say that we were so scared or shocked that we stepped outside our body and looked at the situation from above. It is difficult to return to the body that knows the pending feeling of annihilation.

Some clients write a lot: morning pages, books, screenplays, complaints, memories.

Some others do not, but they would like to start because every corner of social media advertises the benefits of journaling for personal development.

Is writing so enlightening and necessary? Ancient philosophers seemed happy walking and talking simultaneously, but then they started writing.

Nevertheless, if we do not have words to name our feelings, they do not exist.

We can only have bodily sensations if we cannot find words for feelings.

The feeling might be in the pit of your stomach; it could be thick and cold and look like a slug. Only when you put a name to it (shame),  you gain agency over it.

You are gaining control.

So yes, let’s write. If you have no experience with personal writing, the quickest way to start is to write a list.

For example, the list of the things I thought I would never do but I did:

• I went on holiday on my own.
• I had a baby.
• I jumped from an aeroplane.
• I had my appendix removed.
• I told my mother I loved her.

Convinced? Some more

1. All the funerals you have been to
2. All the pets that you had/have.
3. Books you will never read with the reasons for not wanting to read them
4. Symptoms you are experiencing recently.
5. Write a list of all your thoughts when you wake up at 3 am.
6. The reasons why you hate/like/are not interested in your neighbours.

Avocados exist on a spectrum.

Avocados are unapologetically hard on one end of the spectrum; we call them not ripe enough. Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, avocados become suitable to eat, later changing into a mushy, rotten, sad existence.

Various people like avocados in different stages of development. Some like them a little bit hard, and others like them mushy better.

Personally, I like the mushy option.

In general, we can say with 100 per cent certainty that some avocados are just not good enough.

We can wait until they are ready or just throw them away.

Either way, we do not engage with them much and allow them to lay silently in the basket until they are to our liking.

People are not like avocados.

They are not on the spectrum of being not good enough or just right. This is a ridiculous claim, but we tend to believe it.

But why?

1. Our parents told us that if we were not going to be good enough, we would fail. We do not really know what that failing would look like, but it is possibly the most horrible experience since everyone is terrified of it.
2. We “know” that if we are not good enough, we will miss something big in life, like falling in love. Not being enough is the sole reason someone is not lucky in the romantic department.
3. Finally, we think that if we are not good enough, we will regret not achieving something spectacular in life.

Anxiety and regrets. A lot of responsibility for something that does not exist.

You are not an avocado.

Your worth cannot be measured.

You do not have a “best before” date.

Someone recently reminded me of the Johari Window concept, created by psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) in 1955. The idea has become a heuristic exercise used by the corporate sector to improve individuals’ effectiveness and allow them to fit better into a working environment. Any exercise or concept disconnected from its theoretical basis might become abusive and toxic. I heard horror stories about that exercise being used to micromanage individuals.

But…

We can also use Johari Window in therapy, which has more blessed effects. However, my point is not to advertise what exercises I might use in the therapy room.

The Johari Window illustrate how complicated a person is. The person in the counselling armchair is not just the characteristics visible to people outside. The person is not identified by their job, social role, or age. What is more, the Johari Window assumes that there is an unknown part of a person. Unconscious, but ever present and working underneath.

This part you can discover in therapy.

That is why therapy provokes anxiety and fits of uncontrollable childish behaviour. It is scary and overwhelming to think we have not met ourselves completely. Yet.