Build Your ADHD Emotional Resilience: Help for Adults Who Feel Deeply (with Tamara Rosier, Ph.D.)

annie rogers and on behalf of the attitude team i'd like to thank you for joining us for today's adhd experts presentation titled build your adhd emotional resilience strategies for adults who feel things deeply for many adults with adhd emotional dysregulation is one of the most impairing aspects of the adhd experience intense feelings mood shifts irritability outsized anger rejection sensitive dysphoria these all cause problems with daily functioning with friends and family with colleagues at work and beyond here we will focus on learning strategies to minimize the damage that runaway emotions can cause to others and to ourselves in this webinar we will learn how to monitor emotions and express them in healthy ways we'll also look at how to improve emotional resilience and bounce back from those outbursts leading today's presentation is dr tamra rozier dr rozier is the founder of the adhd center of west michigan where she and her staff work with individuals with adhd and their families to learn strategies and develop new skills to live effectively with adhd dr rozier is also the president of the adhd coaches organization aco her book your brains not broken discusses strategies for managing the emotional aspects of adhd before i hand over the microphone to dr rozier i have just a few housekeeping items those of you tuned into the live webinar may download the slides now by clicking on the event resources section of your webinar screen and if you are interested in the certificate of attendance option look for instructions in the email you will receive about an hour after the live broadcast if you are listening in replay or podcast mode visit attitudemag.com and search podcast 388 to access the slides the webinar replay and the certificate of attendance option if you support the work we're doing here at attitude to strengthen the adhd community we encourage you to visit attitudemag.com subscribe to sign up for attitude magazine for your family or to share with a teacher or loved one who could benefit from greater adhd understanding finally the sponsor of this week's webinar is inflow inflow is the number one app to help you manage your adhd developed by leading clinicians inflow is a science-based self-help program based on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy you can click right in the slide to download inflow now on the app store or google play store attitude thanks our sponsors for supporting our webinars sponsorship has no influence on speaker selection or webinar content so without further ado i am so pleased to welcome dr rozier thank you so much for joining us today and for leading this discussion on big emotions thanks annie uh thanks for having us today and us i mean the royal we i guess i meant me uh hey welcome everyone uh thanks for being here today odds are you're here because you've realized that we spend a lot of time talking about really how to plan how to organize how to structure ourselves but really many of us are struggling with big emotions and our big emotions can cause big problems and so i really today just want to set aside all the executive function stuff and really talk about how do we hone in on emotional health so many of you are here today and you already know that the adhd brain feels like it's set up for overreactions and i you know i can't hear any of you can't see any of you but i could almost hear many of you go that's right that's true and that's because our brain gets confused between what's a big deal and what's a small deal and we know this through research that the adhd brain has big feelings and emotions that's not what today's talk is about but if you check out tom brown's work russ ramsey um russell barkley all those guys are talking about how the brain is kind of set up for overreactions but today we are going to be talking about building emotional resilience and this i believe is a key part to having an emotionally healthy life now i have adhd i'm an adhd coach i run the adhd center so i'm surrounded by adhd all the time and i can only do this work when my own emotional balance is appropriate and so i want to encourage all of you that you gain resilience by practicing resilience and research clearly supports the more we use this this is like a muscle we can do it and so let me start by explaining what resilience is it's your ability to respond to stressful or unexpected situations in an emotionally healthy way uh and i'll take that apart in a second but uh something lovely happened this morning i was working with a client and she well when i say lovely this wasn't great news for her she was having a difficult time at work and during our call today she said well i was put on an improvement plan and i want you to remember that this is a very she's young but she's smart she's a go-getter she's driven perfectionistic and she's put on an improvement plan and that was soul-crushing for her but the reason i say this was a lovely thing is she's been practicing her resilience for a very long time and so we talked about how she felt the big waves of emotions come over her but she knew what to do when she felt them and that's an example of resilience and that's why actually even though this was kind of a bad thing that happened earlier in the week we celebrate it we actually celebrated her resilience oh and by the way she hates her job and really has been wanting a way out of it anyway so we celebrated her resilience we celebrated um that she felt the big emotions and she made sense of the big emotions and was able to carry on so today we're going to be talking about these things emotional healthy emotional beliefs identify a pattern of your emotional uh outburst uh managing strong emotion recovery repair and then living a daily balance i can't do justice to any of these topics in 45 minutes but what my hope today is i can start to create thoughts in you that you will want to further explore and hopefully you're going to be curious enough to go hey i really wonder what she means about this so that's my goal for today now i told you my goal for today i'd like for you if you are listening with a pen and paper in front of you i would love for you to jot down you know what's one thing that i'm hoping to get out of today if you're driving you know don't do that but i would love i'm going to pause just a second and for you just to kind of set an intention like why am i even at this session today okay because silence is awkward especially in recordings i'm going to keep moving but but as you're listening i want you to keep thinking what is it that i'm hoping to get out of today so we're going to start with healthy beliefs and here's what i mean uh emotionally resilient people they don't project their feelings they don't blame others for their emotions and they don't shame themselves now i i was talking with a client a couple months ago about these basic things and she really she just looked at me and said what are my options because that's all that she knew what to do with emotions and if you're viewing the slide you see that i have a big wave because emotions come in big waves so here's what emotionally resilient people do they have healthy emotional beliefs and they're self-aware they take responsibility for their emotions they take responsibility for their actions caused by their big emotions they empower themselves to learn and to grow and they practice practice practice by the way practice uh doesn't make perfect practice makes permanent and so we really want to be very careful what we believe about emotions so here's a few basic beliefs about emotions emotions aren't good or bad they just inform us yeah i would i often ask my clients to imagine someone tapping on their shoulder saying excuse me excuse me um this is anxiety and i'd like to tell you that we're nervous about this um anger doesn't do any tapping anchor anger just kind of whips us out of the way and says excuse me i need to take over but emotions even that emotion is trying to tell us something and so i really teach my clients to be curious about their emotions emotions inform us and sometimes the information's useful and sometimes it's not emotions can feel too big we can feel swept away by our big emotions but i want you to know you can handle them one of the biggest emotions i've had to work with as a coach is with a client who lost a child and that is i i have to just be honest that is the worst fear i have um and i can't even imagine the level of sadness and despair that she feels and she said to me tamara this this is too much for me i can't bear this emotion and that that was the only time that this challenged my belief i i kept saying but i know you can handle the emotion i know you can handle it and so we talked about letting things wash over her as as she grieved her grief is not done it's not going to be done uh this happened several years ago and it's it's still with her but we teach her to release it and so that's the biggest scariest emotion i can think about so later today when you're irritated because you can't find your phone for the third time and you feel that big emotion swelling i know that you can handle that one i know you can do that so uh the next belief is emotions will pass you don't need to act on them i'm just going to say that again because i feel like my own adhd brain needs to hear that emotions will pass and i don't need to act on them uh the emotional brain is geared and i won't go into the uh neurology of it but we have an action oriented system when it comes to emotions i feel this therefore i will do this and you know when we when we actually believe like i have this emotion i don't need to act on it all of a sudden we're allowed to feel it but i don't need to do something about it all right so now moving on now we're going to go to identify the pattern and when you identify the pattern you're just kind of thinking about well do i tend to do this or this so today i'm just going to give you two choices but i'm positive there's more choices out there but for today we're going to keep it simple so are you the hurler which means uh you take big emotions and you just hurl them out of anyone or anything around um also known as the fire breather uh you don't you don't really need to admit this to anyone else but if you know this is you i want you to know that you probably hurt people with your emotions you probably are doing damage that you don't understand to relationships so we really want to slow down and think about that now some of you guys aren't hurlers all the time some of you are hiders aka shay meters so you take all these big emotions and you shove them down inward and all that anger that you feel oh no you're not fire breathing it you're just putting it all down inside and many times these people will have stomach and digestive issues because they're taking all the emotional energy and instead of spewing it they just cram it all down uh by the way the hurlers they report to me that they're like yeah you know i lost my stuffings about this but you know it felt good and now i'm over it and they feel good after they project all their emotions out the shame eaters or the hiders are the ones that just keep on torturing themselves so as we're moving through this i want you to notice the patterns when are you a fire breather or a hurler what are you a hider some people uh will tell me that they're a hider hider hider i'll just keep shoving those emotions way down and then something happens and then all of a sudden i'm a hurler uh that's that's a very common pattern i see um i growing up um i was taught that no one could handle my big emotions and so i became a hider i be i went to the point of going well i just shouldn't have emotions um big emotions aren't okay and so i just won't have them so whatever your emotional story here is we've got to figure out the pattern so what is your big emotional tell and we need to learn to listen for that cue so here's what i mean by a big emotional tell uh by the way uh this is just free quick advice adhd people should never play poker why because we carry everything on our face just free side advice uh but uh and the tells in poker get us kind of give us away and so we think uh oh one of my daughters thinks she has such a great poker face it's all right there on her face she can tell everything so an emotional tell is kind of like a poker tell except to yourself so it's something that you telegraph how you're feeling or what you're thinking and so some people feel it in their bodies one of my clients says he feels like a burning uh kind of in his esophagus another person says she feels like a shiver of a big emotion uh and many of my clients will have like different bodily feelings for different big emotions i all right i'm just gonna share with you because i've already shared a lot today but i'm gonna tell you my big emotional tells uh when i'm angry it is like i hear oh heck no and when i hear that in my head i have to think okay tamara stand down you're ready to fight don't do this calm down um and i've taught myself if i do that then then that's my emotional tell stand down tamara don't listen listen to that emotion don't go after the fight mode now some of you are saying oh hold up you just said you were a hider yeah for the most part right but then every once in a while something will still click and i could go into a hurling mode and so that's why we really need to understand what are our big emotional tells so uh when a big emotion is cropping up in you what is it that you start to feel and i'm hoping that you're playing along at home right now and you're actually answering these questions out loud maybe no one's around and you can talk out out loud but it i even if you're in a crowded subway well anyway subways aren't crowded anymore no matter where you are i hope you're playing along and answering these questions for yourself so that you can figure out how do i know when i'm ready to have a big emotion or that one is starting to create a wave inside me all right managing strong emotions so a lot about what emotional resilience is is what do we do when we get these huge strong emotions how do we manage this i told you that you know i became a hider because i was afraid that if i let out those strong emotions no one will like me no one will love me i'll be rejected i think many of you out there might have come to those same false beliefs so how do we respect the big emotions and manage them without and letting them out without hurting anyone so emotions are really a form of energy there's a harvard um study that came out two years ago that really started to talk about emotions as a form of energy if it's a form of energy it means it's like a wave waves are energy right uh look for the healthy way to let that energy out and when we think of emotions as a form of energy so it originates in our brain washes through our body and that's when we have to figure out how do i let this energy go one of my clients uh she's in her 50s she went to the doctor because her hands were hurting so badly and pretty much the hand specialists explained to her i think you're clenching your fist at night and she saw the hand specialist saw me in the same day and she's like this this can't be true i'm not clutching i said well let's just try it out and so um she taped her knuckles so that she couldn't clench in the middle of the night and sure enough her hands felt better well that's great but that's still not releasing what she was doing in the middle of the night is taking all that anger and frustration she felt about herself and others her work whatever and just clenching it into her fist by the way she was a hider and so just taping her knuckles so that she couldn't uh clench her fist wasn't enough she had to find a way to actually let the energy out so i'm grateful that she learned that from her hand doctor so that she could come in and we could talk about ways uh that she could build her emotional resilience and actually let the wave pass the other thing i'd like for you to really think about is we have to make a plan to release the emotion before it happens because we have to think and be able to predict enough that when i hear the oh heck no i'm like oh tamara tamara that's your big emotion anger and then i have to figure out what are my options so i'm going to suggest that we find our catharsis catharsis is an old word um i you know i i started my career out as an english teacher and so english teachers like to talk about catharsis uh but it goes back to the greeks and the greeks used to go to theater for an emotional catharsis and catharsis means letting something out and so they would go to a play and they'd watch this ancient play about murder intrigue and you know they got really nasty these old plays and people would be so engulfed with the emotion that they'd cry they'd be angry and it would let out their emotions and this is this is a an emotional management technique so sometimes um i know some of you already find your own little catharsis and i'd like to pause here and think you know what what ways that you uh do you use to already let out your emotions and just note those a quick second i'm going to give you a couple but i'm sorry you already have a healthy way to let out your emotions all right so here are a couple ways breathe uh you know breathing sounds so cliche people are like just breathe but when you actually take time and i i suggest my students my students my clients sit up and they push their shoulders back and they take a deep breath what that breath is doing for you is it's sending a signal to your brain that you can't possibly be in danger because if you were in danger you wouldn't have time to breathe like that and then release muscles with the next breath so there's a lot of breathing techniques uh i personally like the box breathing technique inhale for five hold for five exhale for five hold that for five and you just keep doing the box there are so many other breathing techniques and you guys have access to google so if you hear a catharsis today that you don't know about uh just jump on down that rabbit hole and and do some research uh the next catharsis is and this is just a catharsis for just this low level anxiety that you feel or a frustration it's usually i use this one or suggest people use this when people are frustrated at their computers so again we sit up straight and so sitting up straight means popping your tailbone out don't sit in a curve and you sit up straight and start to relax the shoulders again you're sending a signal to the brain hey folks we're really okay here it's just an email so vomit words safely some of us are verbal processors some of us if we can just spout out words and that's that's just gonna be enough for us the the key here is we have to do it safely so uh i have three dogs i love them don't have grandkids yet so i instead of being all bitter about that i'm going to you know treat my dogs as grandchildren right now so there's times i'll want to talk to you know i'll just want to vomit words and so i say to one of my dogs okay gracie here's why i'm so mad and she looks and she tilts her head and she really tries to follow because she's a very smart dog and she knows enough words but then watching her tilt her head i'm like oh you know this isn't probably as bad as i thought um i used the vomit words technique with many of my clients uh one female with whom i was coaching uh she she worked it so that she could call a friend and say permission to vomit and the friend would go granted and then she would just go can you believe us and she would just rant and the deal was the friend would not interrupt the friend wouldn't do anything the friend would just listen and then the front then my client would say vomit over and then the friend would say what do you need from from me about that and it's interesting my client came back she said you know what's weird once i get it all out it's out and usually she doesn't need to say much else to me and so she thanks her friend and hangs up and that's a wonderfully safe friendship for her to do but notice the agreement was made ahead of time right uh both of those people they met at a camp and so uh i guess they're kind of relying on permission to vomit granted was like their kind of secret language from like from their camp experience so they built on the relationship to allow this person to let the emotions out uh make noises gosh that sounds weird doesn't it uh making noise is a way to release emotions and if you think about it we already do it naturally something happens we groan or we grumble so i'm asking you to do it on purpose uh i had a client who had a hard time acknowledging her emotions so vomiting words wasn't going to work for her breathing wasn't enough for her and so i just encouraged her to lie on her bed when she was very frustrated or whatever big emotion came up just lie in the bed and just make whatever noise she wanted and she texted me she's like i'm so glad i was at home because she just started out with this little kind of feeling and then she's it just kind of grew into like this loud she said she called it an animal sound um and so now her catharsis is to make this animal sound um and it she says it's like part growl part yell and it would scare anyone that she knew but she's letting it out in a healthy way all my clients who are using these weird kind of techniques they're actually gaining uh emotional balance as they let the emotions out uh cry or yell you know oldies only but good one uh yelling remember uh the whole thing is we're not trying to hurt anyone or anything so if you go hiking and want to yell yelling to a pillow uh yelling at someone clearly has to be out of bounds uh move your body i used this technique uh when i was working my dissertation uh it was really a hard part of my life i was working full-time i had a newborn and i would get so overwhelmed and confused and all the big emotions just started swelling and all the doubts imposter syndrome everything that was just kind of haunting me and so about nine o'clock each night i live in the north so in the summer nine o'clock is still light uh in the summer i would go for a run and i would run up this big hill and the hill goes up for about three quarters of a mile and i would be crying and i'd be arguing with a hill you're not going to beat me today not today hill not today and so moving my body was a way um to kind of start to release the emotion i wasn't trying to make sense of the emotion i was only just releasing and in catharsis by the way this isn't deep meditative stuff this is just releasing the energy another technique i love is tapping techniques for those of you who don't know about tapping check out eft you can type in tapping techniques uh but that is really something to research um for yourself uh tapping uh the research on this says hey it works we don't know why it works exactly but it does work uh so many of my clients have had incredible success uh releasing especially the the quieter emotions like sorrow uh fear failure you know all those kinds of quiet ones that just kind of creep up it go hey you're not good enough that that would be a good catharsis uh for relieving those emotions and the last one is self-having uh if you haven't found self-havening uh it's actually a wonderful thing to do it's usually uh called for as a catharsis when your emotions are so big that you're actually so distracted by them that your head and your body start to argue and the goal there is to bring back your head and your body so so look into safe haven self-having a techniques they're very very simple and they're incredibly uh good to kind of get your whole body back together this is where i would love to pause and say any questions so far uh but it is a good uh point to rest here and say if you've heard of any techniques that you're like wow i really want to learn more jot that down because something i know about the adhd brain we're curious and we're really curious and google can be a friend or an enemy depending on what time of day but we can um really get into things and learn about things all right uh recovery and repair so one of the biggest problems my clients have is in the area of recovery and repair i was just working with someone uh who she has a quick mouth quick-witted but that doesn't really work for her because at work she says very passive aggressive in snide comments and what happens is she has these big emotions sitting her cubicle and instead of being aware of them and letting them out in a healthy way they come out in sarcastic snivers uh remarks uh what she doesn't realize is that she has got to take responsibility and she has to seek repair when that happens now to be clear about sarcasm uh i'm very sarcastic i it only takes you spending just a few minutes with me to realize oh wow she's super sarcastic but sarcasm should never be directed at anyone when it's directed at someone that's when it becomes very hurtful or as uh my one of my kids teachers used to call it uh satan scissors we don't want it when it's directed towards people it becomes satan's scissors so what we need to do is we need to think about repair so once a comet comes out that isn't nice or when you flip your lid or lose your stuffings whatever the big emotions happen and you let it out and you're like oops that wasn't a healthy catharsis um you need to go through and think who or what did my big emotions affect and what needs to happen to repair now um i need you to avoid the temptation just to move on i work with this and families i do a lot of family coaching and all the time families are like oh can we just move on from that maybe that just didn't matter that much and we're missing an opportunity to repair and to strengthen relationships and so i always talk about two questions who or what do my bigger mesh motions affect what needs to happen to repair uh especially hurlers by the way uh hurlers you guys are really bad at repair because you're like i don't know what their problem is i feel better uh meanwhile you just left someone else in a puddle on the floor because you yelled at them for an hour so so who or what needs to be repaired uh for you you folks who are hiders guess what guess who needs the repair after you lose your stuffings you did the damage to yourself and so in that case you have to figure out how to repair this you really cannot keep going on just shaming yourself and just creating this or you know feeding the self-loathing voice it's not okay and so after you uh let's go back to that earlier client uh this morning who she was uh so um upset because she was placed on an improvement plan uh she had a big emotion she started to take it inside search and really like well this is what you do you're stupid you're wrong i hate you her repair had to be about are those beliefs true about myself am i feeding a shame monster that i just shouldn't be feeding anymore what do i need to do to repair this in myself and and really because of her understanding how to repair that's why she could rebound and it's why she could be so resilient when she was put on that improvement plan okay lastly we want to talk about daily balance okay uh when i talk about doing anything daily i want to remind you i have adhd everything daily like daily exercise every day i try to exercise i'm like whoa this is a new experience every day how do i do this so i understand that when i say daily many of you are like oh i don't know if i can do this daily but i am saying this is as important as good diet or exercise now having said that we can find ways for you to do the daily balance but this takes an awareness step and a commitment to say i am going to do the daily balance so uh there's a lot of a lot of things you can do uh you can take frequent assessment assessments of your emotional state when people are first learning this uh i suggest they set an alarm at 8 a.m or whenever you want to start your day uh and you just kind of rate your emotions um and by the way i'm not into the naming the emotions here i'm talking about naming the intensity of the emotions and then i ask them to return to that around their lunch time which reminds them to eat anyway then they return and they're again looking at the intensity of their emotions for the day and just noting anything that might come up and then as they close up the day to kind of look again like how how emotionally how am i feeling uh i actually still use this technique uh on days that i don't get enough sleep you know every once in a while just for one thing or another for one reason or another i just don't have a good night's sleep i try hard but it just doesn't happen i know on those days i have to be very careful because i'm at risk for high intensity emotions and so i kind of put myself on an alert and i set three alarms that day and they're to check in with myself because i find if i don't i will be sitting in a meeting of people i really like and love but i'll be sitting in the meeting going i hate you i hate you i hate you oops i'm not emotionally managed right now and notice i just will project it out to it's their fault therefore their fault but when i take the emotional assessment in the morning i'm like hey tamara you need to be careful today because you have high emotions so how about we just not trust every emotion that's coming in right now you're tired same goes for hungry right hungry emotions really can't be trusted so the next thing i want you to think about as we find our daily balance is find your system to rank emotional intensity so i in my book i use the number system one for low intensity high for 10 or 10 for high intensity uh adhd folks are really known for being one or ten we tend not to just rest at five like our typical counterparts do uh we tend to be big or small and you guys know that already so using that number line can help you kind of go oh i'm feeling this at a seven right now or i'm feeling this at a ten holy cow i need to do a catharsis first before i try to think through this through uh some of my clients and i come up with an uh color system um usually the color system uh i think one of my clients uh i forget it was a couple years ago now she goes you know it's like the terrorist warning system and she was kind of making a joke that her emotions can be terrorist sometimes and so she had read for um be very very careful your emotions could hijack you at any time and then orange was um hey we're we're getting at high alert so we're going to be careful we're going to move slowly through emotions today and then uh they went all the way down to green and uh that was her way of understanding how her emotions fluctuated during the day and the alert system helped her kind of calm down she was also verbally quick so calm down her intense verbal reactions to others uh so whatever you do i i want you to find a way to measure your emotional intensity uh the other daily practice um that i recommend um and i write about this cam got excuse me camp god and i uh came up with the adhd emotional health ladder and i write about it uh in my book on the emotional health ladder cut it will help you understand like how emotionally health are you and it considers your adhd so the benefit of that is it it says if you have this kind of symptom then this is maybe where you are in the emotional ladder uh one of my coaches was telling me that uh she used the amount emotional health ladder that morning she was getting ready for work coming into the office and she looked down and she's missing a button and for those of you with adhd you know mornings getting out of the house getting dressed i mean that is complicated stuff happening and she was ready to flip her lid over it instead she said well i had just reviewed the emotional health planner and i thought to myself hold up i don't want to get unhealthy just because i lost a button okay if i don't want to do that where do i want to be on the emotional health letter and so she found a way to measure the emotional intensity but then choose where she wanted to be and that's really the key for us is as we're practicing this resilience we need to choose where we want to be on the level of intensity now as we're wrapping up i want to be clear about a couple things there is freedom when we manage emotions we get more freedom and we get more power and we're empowered to kind of think more clearly and act better i want to be very clear though what i'm not saying is emotions are bad emotions aren't bad they tell us things but how we release emotions can be quite dangerous and so i really want to encourage us they can be dangerous right to others or ourselves or inanimate objects even so i want to encourage us how can we figure out a way to accept if you have adhd you're people with big emotions and we don't have to be ashamed but we we can't do is learn to become much more emotionally resilient all right i think we're ready for questions wonderful thank you so much um dr rozier there are many questions so i will jump right in one i'm backing up a little bit to the beginning you talked about having healthy emotional beliefs as a trademark of emotionally resilient people um can you offer any mantras or um you know sayings that we can we can repeat to ourselves out loud or otherwise to sort of reinforce what a healthy emotional belief might be yeah so this usually takes a lot of work when i'm working with clients this takes a lot of work to kind of get to what are emotionally healthy beliefs what are unhealthy beliefs and i shared with you an unhealthy belief i have i had growing up was tamara your emotions are too big no one should ever see them right so i started with unhealthy belief and then i say well if that's my unhealthy belief what would be my healthy belief and so no i i'm not going to give you a mantra but what i am going to do is say uh think through what are some beliefs you have that really are unhealthy and um and sometimes it sometimes your mantra or your personal thing would be i let it go i let it go but i encourage you to come up with your own words so that you can start to teach yourself um having said that i will tell you two of mine um is i take a deep breath in and as i let the air out i'm just like letting it go and i started that um after i saw frozen you know elsa let it go let it go and i thought wow that's just really a great way to look at this the other thing i do is i swipe my hand as if i'm dismissing the emotion swipe move on and so it's like i don't want to date that emotion right now and so i swipe it um and that actually remember my hand is moving and so it's letting energy out um and i do that if if you watch me working at my computer you'll see me swipe my hand like nope critical i don't have time for that right now because i i don't need that okay we have a tough one here there are a lot of parents and spouses who are listening in order to help their loved ones uh and the pattern that i'm seeing is that their loved ones are hurlers who tend to blame others so the challenge of course is how do you initiate helping someone who doesn't necessarily recognize that they need that help oh yes okay so this is a hard one guys and thanks for understanding that it's really hard um i'm going to attempt to answer this the best i can um it does begin with you and healthy emotional beliefs so uh i work with a lot of hurlers and hurlers cause damage so first when someone's in the hurling mentality i really suggest you treat them like they're drunk in other words you don't try to have conversations with a drunk person you don't say hey go get in a car and drive you they aren't capable of rational thinking and so you wait till the hurling's done because what happens in the adhd brain is if you start to go don't talk to me like that the hurler is like oh yeah that's more energy that's more fire for me to breathe i was working with a husband who would come through the door and just be a hurler to his wife who asked about the broken screen door and when i confronted him on it and said this simply is not okay he's like well she should know and that's any time you hear she should know or you should know not just talk to me in that state that is a boundary uh that you need to think about having that no you shouldn't know he should be or she should be responsible for her emotions so now i can hear people going but how you cannot control the other person you can't teach them and you can't help them i really strongly suggest uh finding an adhd coach a therapist uh an adhd informed therapist someone who can help the person learn to take responsibility for his or her emotions and so that is really the key here in the meantime you see the hurler you identify the behavior you don't argue with behavior in the moment afterwards you return and say by the way that hurling that hurts me when that happens sometimes the hurler is going to be so ashamed uh sometimes it's not going to go well and if it doesn't go well that's where you bring in the professional for that uh so be very clear on your own emotional beliefs watch for codependent behavior because that's where i see a lot of really oh oh we're just going to avoid her trigger here we're going to do that no my number one rule is we trust grown-ups to be grown-ups and grown-ups manage their own emotions okay the uh the next one is we're kind of moving into some of the questions about catharsis and i just have to share one of my favorite comments was from a listener who said she was also an english teacher and that she used to describe the word catharsis as an emotional bowel movement i'm sorry if that offends anyone but i thought that was absolutely perfect so i wanted to say that too so whoever wrote that thank you i have been censoring myself uh you know i put vomit on there but that's exactly what a catharsis is like and so thank you thank you listener for adding that um so one that we got from both uh teachers and students who feel big emotions in the midst of a class do you have any ideas for catharsis that would not disrupt others and their own ability to sort of carry on with life in the moment okay i want to be clear so the teachers are having big emotions or they're students um the teachers in some cases adult teachers with adhd who as you can imagine are tested in all kinds of ways during the day and then separately we also did get questions from some um high school and college students who are themselves recognizing that they are having emotional flare-ups during class and they're looking for ways basically in public how can you not let any yeah how can you absolutely so we always go to breathing for the first one right and so the slow deep breath in um and out through the nose is the the best to start with um in this case i didn't get into this um in the presentation but i kind of think of emotions as hot or cold emotions so the hot ones are like the explosive kind of ones those are where you're you're going to lose your stuffings right that case uh try to get out of the situation as fast as possible go to the bathroom put your hands under cold water especially your wrist that is amazing how it can reset your brain pretty quickly okay don't don't resort to pinching yourself or biting your lip or anything like that you try to use like cold water an ice cube something like that if they're the kind of cold emotions like that sinking gross anxious feeling um again i go to the breathing i change the posture um and a lot of times i i will do self-having uh self-having is when this is overly simplified you cross your arms and you could pat yourself um you can do that and still kind of look okay just by crossing your arms and you just gently rub at your elbows and so that's that's kind of a way out you know really you're hugging yourself but no one really needs to understand if i'm starting to get tense and i just want to jump in to a conversation i will actually put all my my five fingertips together and feeling my five fingertips together and just letting my hands rest like that it's very calming so so find ways to kind of reconnect your head and your body excellent very helpful um i'm gonna read this one from one of our listeners because it's an interesting nuance she wrote when do you know when to express your emotion to the person if you feel affronted or when to manage that emotion um she said i've stuffed things down for years and lost my voice i'm now trying to find the the balance yeah i isn't that you know i'm sorry that happened to you that happened to me too and so i i want to point out though you're drawing a false dichotomy there it's not one or the other it's both so you're saying hey i either have to express it or stuff it um i want you to manage and then express and so um there's times i want you to think uh like you're like whoa i'm really upset about this take a moment manage it and then think about how you can express it so let's say your husband comes home and he was just an idiot and said something like your new jeans just looked bad he wasn't thinking it was just and that really hurts you so what you want to do is go okay this really hurt me i feel like crying about this and so you're kind of you're going through the catharsis and it's a catharsis might just take five minutes and then when you're calm you can go hey honey i i need to tell you when you gave me that feedback that that actually hurt my feelings and so that's how you regain your voice back you're empowering yourself to feel the emotion letting it out but then you're expressing it in a healthier way okay and we have um i'm gonna try and fit in one more question that was very prevalent and that was about repairing this was a theme that really did hit home and and there's one question i think that reflects many viewers today um a mother who says she's a hurler she knows it's harmful she's made a lot of progress but um she's still not clear what needs to happen to repair so she gave the example that you know she she says she i lost it on my teenage daughter after she was rude eye rolling muttering under her breath i can usually stay present and address this with her but i just started hurling now i don't know how to repair that love love that question i'm sorry but i i i'm sorry for your experience thanks for asking it i have four daughters of my own so i may have lost my stuffings once or twice in my life um and you just feel miserable because you love your kids so much and you want the best for them here's why it's important to repair and this this person's saying hey i know it's important but it is important to repair because we're modeling for our children how to repair with us and so it goes something like this hey i lost my stuffings on you and that's not fair because even though you were behaving like that and i was frustrated that's not okay for me to do that to you and so we're gonna set aside your behavior for a second and i just want you to know i'm sorry i really work at being a heart i work hard at being a good mom to you and i love you and that's not how i want you to experience me and then i i personally would wait about a half an hour before i pick up on the child's behavior otherwise it just gets into the same old match okay well i might steal that one um i have the terrible news that we are out of time for today but i do want to uh thank you dr rozier and the attitude audience for joining us today and for everyone contributing their voices to this conversation i hope that if you're listening you will join us next week for our free webinar which will be on insights into the adhd brain with jeff copper and to make sure that you don't miss any future attitude webinars or articles or research updates you can sign up for our free newsletters at attitudemag.com newsletters so thank you everyone uh please join us again and thank you dr rozier for this really helpful conversation thanks for having me

Channel: ADDitude Magazine

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Length: 60min 21sec (3621 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022