Leading Consciously Reflection #19

A few nights ago, I spent a couple of frustrating hours rifling through papers, looking for one particular document needed the next day. As I went through stack after stack, I felt gloom descend upon me until it had overtaken my thoughts.

I’ve read enough about ADHD to know I was in the thick of it. Being organized and remembering where we put things are not our strong suits.

As I futilely picked up yet another pile of papers, I could feel myself ruminating helplessly that diagnosis meant destiny. I reminded myself I do know better. I was well aware I do have tools. But where was the #$%^& document!?? 

And [rumination continues], “If I could find it – obviously if I had a different brain with the appropriate slots to remember where I put things – I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

As I was getting ready for bed with document still unfound, I remembered the keywords “executive functioning” – the brain process that trips up people with ADHD from executing the willpower to complete tasks.

Back into hopelessness and self-pity: “If my executive functioning worked normally, I wouldn’t be going through this and I wouldn’t have these stacks of paper and I would have the document in my hand.”

From afar, my Truest Self watched what I was doing to myself, yet was too far away to crack through the defensive fog of self-pity.

By the time I made it to bed, I was filled with gloom. My term for this is “the fog” – I’m lost in a fog, can barely make out shadows of my real life, and there is nothing to do but wait for the fog to lift.

The heaviness was nearly unbearable. I don’t often descend into gloom and doom. I write about emotional clearing and how to achieve emotional clarity; I have 1000 tricks for how to do it, yet I couldn’t imagine any of them were working, so I didn’t even try.

I had a restless sleep and, in the middle of the night, woke up to the words “executive functioning.” On a whim, I got up, opened my iPod, and did a search for “executive functioning ADHD.  “

Uncovering the fog

On YouTube, I landed on a panel discussion. Brooke Shittman, podcast host, was interviewing Jeff Copper on the small challenges people with ADHD face with executive functioning and emotional self-regulation.1

Copper explained he would illustrate with a math example without her writing it down: What was three to the fifth power?

The conversation went like this:

Copper:  Can you calculate three to the power of five? Brooke [rolls her eyes]: Three times three times three times three… No, I would have to write it down.  [pauses] But I could do three times three which is nine and then three times three which is nine and then 9 times 9 is 81 times 3, so 81 times 3 is 243. Copper:  Exactly! Now how do you do that exercise… so number one that is working memory. You've got to calculate the numbers inside your head and keep track of how many times you've multiplied three times itself. People get kind of lost when they're going from 27 to 81, but that's not why I had you do the exercise. Did you see yourself roll your eyes before you started? Brooke: [nods] Copper: Absolutely, that was an emotional reaction that you had, thinking it was going to be difficult. You started it and you gave up in the middle.  And so often when I do this exercise, I'll get an “oh crap” or “I'm not any good at math.”  ….  But if you understand this, when thinking is difficult, there's a reflexive emotional reaction to escape to something more comfortable….

When you're in a situation where you're feeling criticized or whatever, you have that fight, flight, or freeze response, which is a survival mechanism. But when thinking is difficult, there's this urge to escape the pain and move to something that's a little bit more comfortable. And this is the part that I don't think a lot of people really pay a lot of attention to. 

And so going back to the question is because executive function is impaired, because thinking is impaired, inside you there's a very big emotional response. To be self-aware is threatening you. But actually to look yourself in the mirror and say well, this is what I am, that's uncomfortable and people have a tendency to resist it.

3:00 am and I’m riveted with what he saying.

I flashed to those piles of paper that have given me such revulsion last night. Copper was saying that my thinking about what was inside the stacks was difficult because of my ADHD. This meant my self-image was threatened because I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling – dread and revulsion and a blow to my self-esteem.

Copper was saying I could release myself from the self-imposed bondage through self-awareness and acceptance: “This is what I am.”

In my mind’s eye, I looked at one of the stacks of paper and said to myself, “This is what I am.”

As if by magic, the fog lifted and the revulsion and dread ceased.  What was left was simply a pile of papers that I could pick up and go through. They were no longer imbued with the meta-meaning of “something is wrong with me”; they just were some papers that I could look through to find my document.

I looked around the room to see if I was hallucinating, the change was so dramatic. A fog had lifted, and I could see around the room clearly.  I closed my eyes, and there was no overlay of dread. I was simply in my bed with my eyes closed.

What had happened?

In both our books – Reframing Change and Conscious Change – my coauthor and I talk about the three basic ingredients of emotional clearing:

Feel it

Intensify it

Release it

Prior to listening to that podcast, I was not allowing myself to feel the distress of not being able to find the papers. Instead, I was rebelling with self recriminations about having ADHD, not having properly put the papers up in the first place, having stacks of paper to go through that were not neatly organized, and on and on. 

Instead of feeling the reality of the situation, I was labeling and judging myself, wallowing in shame and distress. This put the focus on me and my presumed deficits rather than the true cause of my concern – not having the right documents for my meeting because “thinking is difficult.”

What I was feeling was a straw man. 

Much easier to think self-recriminating thoughts than to allow the feelings of distress from not having found those papers.

“This is what I am” says the papers are misplaced, I misplaced them – probably because my executive functioning for organizing papers has to work harder than most (“thinking is difficult”). And that’s okay.

I am good and creative in so many ways – translating theory into practice, facilitating groups, building leaders, writing stories that matter. In the grand scheme of themes, I can accept that organizing papers is not my strong suit. This is what and who I am.

As I was mentally sorting this through, I deliberately intensified the feeling of “this is who I am” and suddenly found myself smiling.  In a previous Reflections I had written about how it really is okay to be green, as Kermit the Frog told us.

This is who I am.  It’s okay to be green.

I followed my own advice from my books, allowing myself to look at those papers and really feel the pain of what they meant to me, then intensified and stayed with that pain. And all that suppressed emotion just disappeared from my mind.

The fog lifted and suddenly the papers lost their magic hold on me. They were just a bunch of papers for me to look through. No angst, no inferred meaning. They were just a task to perform.

Now, you may not have ADHD, but I know from others that my experience is universal. I know someone who is filled with recriminations because she doesn’t think she speaks forcefully enough, and she’s subject to retreat into a shadow if she feels overlooked. Another person I know bemoans her chronic depression, another person her body type. I could go on.

We all have an internal tyrant (inner critic, according to Peter Michaelson2) who tells us not only that we aren’t good enough, but that we should also suffer as a result.

Copper is saying it’s okay to be green.  Accept what there is to accept about yourself and be okay with that.

Will I find some tools to help me get my papers better organized? Of course. But that’s tomorrow. 

Meanwhile, my job is to allow myself to feel what I feel, so that suppressed emotions will release their stranglehold on me.

I fell immediately to sleep.

Here’s the postscript: When I told my meeting partner I didn’t have the necessary documents, she said, “Oh, well we don’t really need them anyway. There’s a website we can go to and get what we need.”

I could only laugh. If I hadn’t made a point of finding help in the middle of the night (the podcast), I would have had a wasted night of little sleep. 

1 Schnittman, B. (2023). ADHD Power Tools with Ali Idriss & Brooke Schnittman. Executive Function & Emotional Self-Regulation [GUEST JEFF COPPER] - B. Schnittman, Coaching with Brooke.

2 Michaelson, P. (2023). Leading Consciously Podcast. Healing ourselves: How to resolve our inner conflicts and use our power for good. J. Latting.  Healing ourselves resolve inner conflicts #106