ADHD-What Does It Feel Like? With Kim Stewart

hi and welcome back to broken and brilliant I'm Carrie O'Toole with Carrie O'Toole ministries and I'm joined today by my friend Kim story welcome Kim thank you um you know interesting we normally I call somebody up and say hey are you interested in being on a podcast I've heard your story or whatever and you actually messaged me and said would you be willing to do a show about ADHD specifically for adults and we started talking about it a little bit and I said well how about you come on and share a little bit and we'll talk about it so that's sort of how this whole thing came about and so you're brave first of all I want to say just you thank you so much for being willing to come on and talk about this so why is ADHD important to you because it played it had a tremendous impact on my life and I didn't find out that I had it until two weeks before I turned 60 and by then you have endured many labels and incurred many failures in life mm-hmm and you never have an explanation you're constantly saying I'm sorry for one thing after another and it makes life really difficult I read something somewhere that will help you and other people to understand you know what it's like when you have a day when you get up and everything goes wrong and first you can't find your keys then you're running late you're on your way to a really important meeting now you're really scattered when you get there because you arrive late you're starting out apologizing and you're not anywhere near your best you know what that whew that's what having ADHD is like every single day of your life so let's define ADHD what does it stand for adult attention deficit disorder and the H is for hyperactivity as well and so some people just have a DD Coran some people have ADHD when that includes the hype the hyperactivity yes so which were you diagnosed with the ADHD okay now see you're sitting here like a regular not not old yes I am and it I cannot tell you the act of will it takes me one of the coping skills that I learned was oh I'd say when I was about fifty absolutely I got so tired of telling everybody I've always known something was wrong and that the way I perceive life is different from other people but with never having a reason never having an answer after a while you realize people are tired of hearing about it they're kind of tired of talking about it I happen to be a great mimic mmm-hmm so I focused on women whose characteristics I admired and I mimicked hmm so if they would sit calmly you would sit calmly yes right now like when we're talking what I want to be doing is my hands want to be all over the place I mean they're almost twitching they want to move so badly but I know it's really distracting for people when I do that mm-hmm so I'm kind of forcing myself to just sit here and do this now fortunately they've started me on some medication and the dosage isn't right yet but that is also happening helping me with it mm-hmm so tell us when you were diagnosed you said just a couple weeks before you were 60 this is just a few months ago a few weeks ago one month ago one months ago okay so this medication route is totally different for you it is and it's a real hard road one of the things one of the messages I really wanted to kind of get out there is it when you're an adult especially an aging adult they're finding more and more people like me and diagnosing them and part of the problem was that when we were growing up you were a behavioral problem they didn't know that much about it right and so a lot of people have gone through life not knowing that they have it and so the medication takes a while to take effect and you have to find the right one and unfortunately for me the ones that work the very best the I can't remember what they call them but it's Ritalin and is it a stimulant yes yeah the stimulant drugs made me really sick to my stomach and we tried three or four of them and so now what we're doing there's a drug that's a non stimulant but it also stimulates that part of the brain mm-hmm and it's called strattera mm-hmm and I'm taking that and a drug called in tune if for the hyperactivity okay and oddly enough it's a blood pressure medication and I don't have high blood pressure but what they found is that it helps to lower that impulsivity and a few homes everything down Wow so as a you were saying that being diagnosed as a chatter as an adult you went through all these years of thinking that you had behavioral problems and having labels what were some of the labels when I was in grade school I was constantly talking and it drove the teachers nuts they said I seem to be smart enough but they couldn't get me to stop - you when I reached junior high it got more difficult because I got into some of the classes that require some of those executive reasoning functions and I couldn't do it and suddenly my grades plummeted except in the classes where I was very stimulated because there's there is a process ik they call hyper focus mm-hmm where you you do just the opposite you focus on something and you don't to the exclusion right everything else and that's a misnomer because a lot of times you hear somebody has a DD attention deficit disorder it's not necessarily a deficit inattention it can actually be a hyper focus inattention to where you can't pay attention to anything else and that's exactly what happens so I would do great in things like English because I love to read I love to write mm-hmm but in mathematics and today I was failing mm-hmm so I got in trouble with my parents I've labeled myself stupid mm-hmm I was constantly late when our neighbor would drive us to school the father of some friends of mine drove us to school all the time well I was always late they're always waiting on me mm-hmm and it was like even if I got ready early I would get distracted and start doing something else and I'd still be late right so you could have all of your books in your bag your lunches made your clothes are all on you've got everything that you need and then there's something over there and you get off over there and the car has come and now you still have to grab all your stuff and you're still late mm-hmm that's exactly what would happen so by then my parents were really frustrated and I remember to this day my mom looking at me and saying you know I don't know how to do this can't you find somebody aren't there counselors or something at school that can help you with us and the message that I kind of took from that is that I don't have the time for this are you and in my mind is silly as this may sound I didn't know how to go about doing what she was suggesting mm-hmm I had no idea who to talk to mm-hmm so I didn't and I continued to get D's on all those subjects if it was mathematics or science I could not process it mm-hmm I struggled with things like geography but I could get some of that mm-hmm if it interested me enough mm-hmm by the time I reached high school the anxiety part it the anxiety started actually in grade school and what's the anxiety over it can be over anything the way that kicks in for me is um for example when I was a little girl my mother died when I was three so this the woman that I call mother is actually my stepmother well my parents would fight about me quite a bit and I would curl up in a ball on the floor of my bedroom and just cry or shake because I felt responsible mm-hmm and then I'd get focused on that and I couldn't get off of it mm-hmm that feeling of responsibility and I was at the center of everything and what I did determined what all these adults were doing right so everything revolved around you and yet nobody knew how to deal with you and you didn't know how to deal with you know and so then you felt responsible for all of that and you're just a little girl right and so by the time I reached high school throw in hormones and dating and all of that into the mix and it was it was terrible my anxiety over the social interactions reached an all-time high I couldn't I couldn't talk to people or go out on a date without drinking to calm myself down mm-hmm and I couldn't understand how other people seem to be managing these things and I couldn't but at the same time my parents were very busy socially so they were not very involved in my life at all so I kind of grew up on my own putting pieces together and a lot of those pieces that I put together were erroneous conclusions about life in general so all I knew and my dad he was a genius so to have a child that wasn't functioning well and it really had nothing to do with your IQ no or your potential it had to do with this ADHD and how your brain was was taking in and processing information that's right because my IQ is actually quite high so but he used to get so frustrated I remember as a kid I was trying to learn how to play the piano but I couldn't keep time mm-hmm and he would slam his palm down on the piano counting me out loud and so I I would just quit so what I learned essentially growing up up through high school was you can't do it it's not worth the effort why even bother yes in the mean time I was getting in more trouble my folks and I were arguing and part of it had to do they drank all the time part of it was their drinking part of it was ADHD and me mm-hmm so I wanted to get away from home desperately mm-hmm I married the first guy I ever dated he was a cadet at the Air Force Academy and it was my ticket out of the house mm-hmm and I married him impulsively mm-hmm and on our wedding night he threw me over the back of a car in Las Vegas and was gonna hit me Wow it was a real wake-up call to life I told him if he did that I'd leave him he didn't hit me but we had a very rocky very cruel two years of marriage well it sounds like you really had not learned the social skills and how to tell who's a safe or a person filled with character good character versus who's not I I didn't have any basis for making those decisions and so all I knew was I wanted out of the house he asked me I and I didn't know this was any different from what other people were doing mm-hmm you just thought this is how life is yes and it's just really difficult yes mm-hmm so I eventually did leave him because the abuse continued and but that landed me back in my parents house again with all the disapproval and all they are doing so I had a part-time job at the time and this really nice guy used to come in to where I worked and he was nice and I thought this must be love so we moved in together and we eventually got married mm-hmm well he was into using drugs I really didn't like it at all I wasn't as much as I drank I didn't like using drugs right and I eventually left him because of it so by then I'm married and divorced twice before I'm 21 years old Wow I go into counseling which was a smart move I kind of could put things together enough to know that I needed help but the problem was because of some of the things that went on growing up the death of my mother I was molested in grade school so there were enough things that arguing with my parents the drinking environment and right no one ever thought to look at just me and how I was dealing with life or more how your her II was assessed all of that kind of stuff they're looking at it more as this is your product of the circumstances that have been happening around you so trying to deal with the grief and and the craziness the chaos and all of that type of stuff but not really looking at the chemistry of you that's right Wow which was probably partially helpful it was at least I learned some coping skills mhm it was ten years before I got married again during that time I worked but the interesting thing was is work was really difficult I was a secretary at the time and it was back remember carbons I don't know you made a mistake it was a really bad yeah because there were no copy machines and so what you had to do was put a carbon paper in between the two papers and you would write on one and the carbon would then copy it on to another if you made a mistake you have to throw the whole thing away get a new carpet well you could reuse the carbons you could reuse them for a while and that was before typewriters even had correction keys on them so I spent all this time throwing stuff away afraid somebody would notice how much paper I was wasting sometimes I'd make copies and I do something wrong and somebody thinking about computers now and for all the people who have a DD or ADHD what a blessing a computer is it is in more ways than just that yeah it can become their their brain and help them to function Wow well let's talk about that a little bit so I mean you've gotten us up through you know the first half of your life and then here you are at age 60 recognizing now first of all how did they diagnose you what what brought that on I had stumbled into an article about two years ago that made me think I might have ADHD mm-hmm and I talked to my primary care physician at the time and she told me that she thought I have chronic pain I have chronic I have nerve damage in my back and so she thought it might be due to the medications I'm on for my back and it was a valid statement and I really took it to heart and at that time she tried putting me on strattera she didn't use anything with it and I'm guessing that the dose wasn't high enough so I was on it for a while and I didn't notice improvement but I eventually went off it I can't tell you why I think it was because I thought well she doesn't seem to be really concerned about this and this isn't to blame her because I think she thought that if I really wanted to pursue it I would mm-hmm so another two years go by and we have a life planner come over to talk to us about retirement and how to invest in all of that he sat there and he talked for an hour and a half and is showing us all these numbers and of course I can't focus on anything that he's saying and I'm getting more overwhelmed and more overwhelmed and then the bot comes into my head oh my gosh if something happens to my husband I have to understand and do all of this and I he left and I almost had an anxiety attack which I hadn't had for almost 30 years now and I thought what is going on what a strange reaction and I stumbled stumbled I believe in God so I was sure that God orchestrated this because I came across another article on ADHD mm-hmm and I thought I have got to go and have somebody that really knows right diagnosed or something yeah and work with me mm-hmm so I found a psychiatrist in town that does that and I went in and saw her and we talked about my life and she was so sweet she smiled at me and she says Kim there have actually got tests nail which I found very interesting they can test and tell you let me explain something first the way ADHD works people have a certain attention span mm-hmm let's say it's 2 minutes and then well let's say for a normal person it's like 10 minutes 20 minutes maybe even 30 probably closer to the truth with ADHD you have say like 2 minutes and then you're out and then you're back in for 2 minutes so you get bits and pieces of everything that's going on but you don't get the whole picture ever mm-hmm so she was telling me that they actually have tests now they can measure your attention span when you're coming in and going back out ok and she said you could spend a lot of money and they could do this they can do an MRI and show you the difference in your brain so that you see that this is actually a bio logical illness mm-hmm and she said but I can tell you from everything that you're telling me that you are a classic example hmm and then she said but for your own knowledge she said let me give you this and there was a written questionnaire that she has her ADH adult's spill out and it's filled out on both sides and I answered yes to almost every single question Wow and so what what was that like emotionally do you know I was just stunned and she talked to me a little bit about it and she could tell I'd hit the overwhelmed level and as she talked because it was a lot of information and talking about the medications and everything so we got done and she recommended a book called driven to distraction mm-hmm and I went straight to Barnes and Noble and picked it up and I went home and I started reading it and I cried the whole time I read the book because there was story in excuse me after story of people just like me mm-hmm and I said this is my life and I felt pardon me I felt a certain amount of grief mm-hmm and I thought what would my life have been what could my life have been mm-hmm had someone known sooner mm-hmm but that feeling of grief was greatly offset by a enormous sense of relief yeah I was wondering to have to finally have it make sense mmm and to know that you're not just crazy or it's not just in your imagination but there truly is something here it's in your brain it's how your brain functions other people have this you're not alone somebody understands it and knows what to do about it yes that must just feel like you have a whole new lease on life and I felt redeemed for all the people that had said you're just not listening you're not paying attention because I I forget I lose things for people that meet me over and over again and I still can't remember their name because that's one of the classic things I do the minute I meet somebody I forget their name immediately and I do that too and I have people have trouble with names and so this is it's like on steroids all right and I was all spaced out or when I'm working on my novel and I'm deeply engrossed hours and hours can go by and I won't even be aware of it so I've learned to set a timer so that because we're a writer which we really didn't talk about ruts that's where we met is in a writing group right and you know Kim I've known you for a couple of years now I had no idea in fact when you think of typical ADHD I'm thinking of little boys in classrooms who cannot sit at the desk and so they're bouncing around off the walls and can't wait till recess that's kind of the typical what you think of for ADHD you don't think of 60 year old women sitting very quietly and patiently in a writers group because you look and acted just like everyone else in the group so I had no idea that there were all these internal struggles going on just so that you could be a part of the group right I had no idea what it would take for you to do that it took enormous courage for me to even go the first time I was just so nervous but I love writing so it was offset by that it was worth it was worth the social struggle right and once I get to know people it's so much easier but to put myself out there is really difficult so now that you know that you have this you've done some research you're on you're working it at least figuring out the medication so that it can give you the greatest benefit possible what are some of the things that you could offer to others may be struggling with ADHD what are some coping mechanisms that you found things that have made your life a little bit easier shortcuts or things that you do so that you can function better okay they say and I found it to be true for me that diagnosis is one of the best treatments there is just knowing that you have it right and I can give you an example I used to and I'm not proud of this get behind the wheel of the car and I'd be reaching for drinks and adjusting my iPhone sometimes at 75 miles an hour figuring out what I wanted to do and I mean I think about it now and I just shudder at some of the things that I would do behind the wheel of a car and now I get into the car and it's like I say to myself Kim you have ADHD you can't do that don't touch anything coming out here a song came on I hook everything up before I leave and the song came on that I didn't like in my right hand kept wanting to just go and change it and it's like no you can't do that anymore mm-hmm and it I mean it helps just knowing that the other thing that has helped me is they have wonderful timers out now some of them designed for people with ADHD but I'll set a timer well I have a calendar for each day and I plot out sections of time that I'm going to do different things and then I worked at keeping that and sometimes it's real work and I try not to cram too much into it so I can be successful like getting this stuff done I make a real effort if I start something and I start to walk away of saying no I need to finish what I started mm-hmm instead of having 15 tasks that are in progress right well I've chaotic I've been saying that the calendar could help because it can not force you you can't be forced to do anything but it can gently remind you this is how much time it's going to take to get done the things that you don't really want to do but you need to get them done and then it'll also help you with the things that you could get hyper focused on and you could spend the whole day and forget to eat and not do anything else so it's like okay cut this one off now spend a little time on this then maybe you can go back to this one that you love so much that's right and the other thing that timer helps with is people with ADHD have no sense of time and no sense of how long a task takes in fact my husband used to laugh at me because I would always be late and it would frustrate him understandably because I had no conception of how long it took me to get dressed and get ready to go and how much time it took to get somewhere mm-hmm and one of the things you can do with the timer is figure out how long different tasks take how long how long does it take me to do this so that you have really mccaskin of patience okay hmm for instance I learned that on the day that I'm going to the grocery store don't try to work on the novel because the two are both time-consuming and and it leaves me feeling really rushed and I'll end up literally rushing around trying to get everything done and but I've also learned to block out times and just go okay focus on the novel it's all right mm-hmm just let every go for them yeah I know ahead of time that when it comes to doing the paperwork associated with writing the proposals and things like that I'll probably have to have somebody coach me because that's not going to be interesting to me you know the writing of the story is interesting but the work that it takes to get it published or to get it to an agent or all of those types of things if that's not up your alley you so you could get this whole amount done and then do nothing with it I'm guessing because I don't like doing routine things over and over and over again so I see having to put together the letters and mail out the packets as being a real dreary part of the process and so I know I'm gonna have to commit to someone mm-hmm this is what I'm gonna do and then keep following through because that's how you get published as you have to keep doing that process right right that's true of many jobs well yeah just in general but for someone with ADHD and you don't realize if you don't know that that's your struggle I'm just sensing you you mentioned before that you you could have a tendency to really feel like a failure in life and I'm imagining that for anybody else who might be listening whether it's a teenager or somebody in their 30s or somebody in their 60s just recognizing they're hearing this and going oh my gosh this is me I didn't have any idea but yet my life has been so darn challenging all the time I think it would be I think you've hit it right on the head that there's gonna be some relief in knowing what it is and knowing that there's something that can be done about it but there also could be some real grief over that because nobody wants to have something wrong with them nobody wants to have something wrong with their brain or to be challenged in these different ways and you may have been thinking your whole life I'll get over this I'll be able to master this I'll be able to and all of a sudden you realize this is not something I can just keep working at and it'll somehow get better I mean there are there definitely tricks but you can learn and there are things skills that you can learn and tools that you can have like the timers and the calendars and all these different things but it really truly is something that needs to be dealt with what what would you say to somebody who's just finding out or just recognizing through your story that this might be them too if there's somebody out there that thinks that this could apply to them I think it's really important to get diagnosed regardless of your age some people say with older adults well they've been living this way all their lives they're not going to change now and I think that's such an unfair thing to say because nobody wants to be a failure and no one wants to make life difficult for the people they're married to or for their families or for themselves plus you look at all the end-of-life decisions people have to make you have to be able to communicate your needs to doctors and medical staff to financial planners and you can't do that my the psychiatrist that I'm seeing told me she said Kim this isn't about trying harder mm-hmm this is a physical condition mm-hmm you can't work your way through it right so it's really important to find treatment I think about when I went in I developed I have a nerve damage I had a pinched nerve and it was a real unusual situation and they didn't find it for over I think it was close to two years Wow by then the pain was totally out of control I get it and at the time I could hardly communicate my husband was doing the talking for me and I look back on that and I think well no wonder because pain acute pain is overwhelming anyway most people can't think with acute pain add to it a scattered mind to begin with mm-hmm you cannot tell people what you need mm-hmm so it's really important to get treated as far as I'm concerned no matter what age you're at well I just want to thank you so much for being willing to do this because first of all like I said I didn't know that this was a struggle that you had you're kind of coming out here sharing all of this with people and to not know it until you're 60 I just can't even imagine the amount of pain that that must have caused through your life and yet you're still a young woman there's you've got plenty of life to go you're working on a novel here and trying to get it published and I just think about the opportunities that maybe you've opened up for yourself that you wouldn't have if you just stayed in the dark about this and didn't face it and come to the reality and start to figure out what you need to do to change things so for a lot of people I think the idea of well you've lived this long with it what's the big deal why don't you just keep on living and for you to challenge that and say that but there's so much more there's so much more to life why would you want to live in a way that's detrimental and and hurtful and makes you feel like a failure when you have a choice right and you can finally do something about it so it to me it's exciting yeah a lot of people look at turning 60 and getting older as it's downhill from here and for me it's like it's the whole world of possibilities it's opened up all these things that maybe you never thought you could do before and now there's a potential that you could do them that's right excited to try yeah yeah well here you are in a podcast is there so the book that you mentioned I've read it I have it and I can't think of it all of a sudden what's it called driven to distraction driven to distraction and is there any other resources that you can think of there is and I brought it I don't remember the name let me look real quick because it was another one that was recommended it's called the ad D friendly ways to organize your life and it's fantastic it looks like this and it just has all types of easy ways to structure time to deal with everyday tasks in a way that for me it was like now why didn't I think of that and it's usually simple stuff but it's things that just don't come to me easily right right and so other people who have dealt with this get them all together put all these ideas together get them all in one place you don't have to reinvent it yourself it's all about there go buy the book and make your life easier that's right I I don't want to reinvent the wheel I figure I don't have time to reinvent the wheel I just want to use it right that's right well Kim thank you so much for joining us I just think this is gonna make a difference for a lot of people and I'd love to hear from you if you're discovering this maybe your child if you're discovering this could be you and it's made a difference in your life let us know write a comment get ahold of Kim Ryan and let us know that it's made a difference for you because we love them to know that absolutely so thank you so much for joining us you're welcome and we will see you next year next time back here on broken and brilliant you

Channel: Carrie O'Toole Ministries

Views: 6,244

Rating: 4.9595962 out of 5

Keywords: ADHD, ADD, Adult ADHD, stimulation, hyper-focus, trauma, alcohol, intelligence, coping skills, grief, failure, challenges

Id: Sq5b2Tmiw7M

Length: 38min 29sec (2309 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 20 2014