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Actually it's not mine but it plays into what I've read..... what about women with ADHD? On other forms related to ADHD you seem to find a lot of women predominantly.... but those are more of self-help or for people looking for information and answers specific to them not their relationships.
I had a reply already typed out and then lost it rats.... so I'll jump forward a little bit and just say that d&i are not only speaking but we spent a weekend together in a motel room recently ....no sex mind you... but as friends for now that's enough. It certainly establishes a different set of rules that we ran up against only in one time but this time we were able to work things out which is a huge difference from before. Part of it came from me making the effort to contact her and smooth things over from where we left off, and now in hindsight my thoughts have a lot to do with this. It's not important exactly how we were able to this... but more of that I just kept showing up even if it was wrong according to her. The fact is there was no wrong or right there wasn't one good way to do anything I just kept trying and eventually she listened.
The bottom line is I was reacting to something that was not just in my head but when someone cannot articulate what it is that they are doing or what they want it makes it difficult when you have to guess and all you can do is speculate and fill in the blanks yourself. That's a dangerous game to play when you start second-guessing what another person is thinking... but as I found in just one quick moment in time how things can go from great to sour almost immediately and I ran into one of those moments and I simply wouldn't let it go. As I see it if we are going to be friends I'm going to apply the same rules or standards that I do for any of my friends... I don't have to psychoanalyse them and wonder what they are doing if they do something that's disrespectful I'm going to let him know and I'm going to do it right then I'm not going to beat around the bush or wait for another time and if we can't get it resolved then there's going to be a problem that's going to prevent us from moving forward until we figure it out. That's what I expect of my friends but that is my reality...D can think anything she wants, she's free to do so and as long as I'm not living with her or sharing in the the duties of a household it doesn't matter except when it comes to one of these moments. These moments need to be addressed have nothing to do with household chores or sharing a life together Under One Roof... these are moments of a matter of respect and it's mutual respect not in a domineering way either being submissive or dominant... not that kind of respect.
To cut right to the chase and forgo all the details we were able to work it through but not without the same thing happening as it always has except this time I didn't let it go I said something right then and that didn't go over well and she tried to shut it down.
Amongst the things that were said the word demonstrative popped out and it immediately reminded me of my oldest sister who in many ways shares some of the same views as D. But these views are not out of the norm in any way in fact stereotypically female in many ways problem comes I believe is that many times these behaviors done by a man or done by a woman get interpreted different ways and that's as much a mystery today as it was thousands of years ago... men and women are going to have a different way of seeing the same thing simply being a man or a woman if you want to make a gross generalization many times it's not true but many more times it is... to say not uncommon would be a fair statement .. they simply on experience and being exposed to women all your life.
The example that I used to get a point made and it was simply trying to make one simple point that was so difficult but I realized.... d was not seeing where there was anything wrong... on her part, and was not understanding what it was that she did or said that would have caused the reaction in me. I also realized more importantly but what she was seeing was correct... I was being demonstrative in respect to the way I was expressing myself but but not interpreting it in the way she did which caused her to react and away it went. Her presumption however was wrong... and when she said is this how you are with your friends?... I thought about it for a moment and I said yes yes it is in fact this is how I am with everybody up to a point not a complete stranger but people I know.
This led to me using her friend who has ADHD as an example as I reminded her about how bad she is about interrupting people, talking over them... and kind of hijacking the conversation and moving it into a different direction away from what you were originally talking about. I know exactly what she's doing because I do it myself and I used to be really bad at it but a point came where I had to stop. When I first had a business in my twenties I realized that this was a problem and I couldn't do this with customers or in my business relationships and I dedicated myself to not doing it and it took several years to really be able to get it under control. After that however it got to the point that I stopped doing it at all but that's not because the impulse is not still there it's there to this day I just learned a way to stop myself and practice it enough until it became second nature now I don't even think about it because it's not a problem anymore. That's not to say that I never do it but at worst.. I might get one or two words out and I immediately arrest myself and pull back and let the other person speak. That much you might see me do regularly but it goes mostly unnoticed because I stop and I listen to the other person and allow them to finish and hear what they say... it's not the interrupting or the beginning to interject that's the problem... it's the talking over the top of the other person and then continuing on with your train of thought even if it's going in a direction away from what the person just said or not indirect relationship to the topic at hand. mostly it's the interruption and the hijacking of the conversation .. and then going off on a tangent that's unrelated to what they just said or in some way tied in to make them feel like you didn't just take over the conversation and make it your own... and interrupt and talk over the other person in order to do so... that's what's offencive... especially if it happens every time you talk to someone.
The point I was making to D was.... that this was something I used to do all the time and badly just like her friend... but I found a curious that being diagnosed at 45 years old looking back... and her friend knew she had ADHD as a child all her life... I found it interesting that I was put in a situation in my early twenties where this was simply not acceptable I had to stop or I would suffer the consequences which I was beginning to feel already each time I would slip. I was highly aware of it and doing everything in my power to stop it which eventually I did just by paying attention and being aware that this was something that I had to stop because it was causing a problem not only for me but for other people. Being in a position where I had to do it or else I found a way I didn't know I had ADHD I didn't know why I just know I did.
In contrast... I saw D friend... where I was some forty years ago... why is the difference? This is my take on it. as my oldest sister used the word demonstrative from her perspective and her reality being a five foot two introvert who doesn't like crowds, is uncomfortable around lots of people in confined spaces and does not like to be touched... someone who walked up to her in a friendly Manner and gave her a hug would already make her feel uncomfortable.... demonstrative person then would be a person who hugs and touches a lot as a manner just being themselves. I am far more this way then my oldest sister... but not nearly as much as some people I know. I'd say it's more normal to be the way I am about it then the way my sister is but as she sees it that's being demonstrative I see it as how people relate and interact with each other and it's just part of it... not everybody but not uncommon either I think that's a fair statement.
I think a lot of these behaviors depending on what gender you are will be interpreted differently and seen differently if they are out of place. As I experienced Dee's friend.... It's Not Unusual or even stereotypical for women to talk at once together talk in a manner that's different than men in a way that's acceptable and even expected to a certain degree... what her friend does however is unacceptable by anyone's standard but it gets masked by other things that would be less common for a man based on all other men or all other women.
It was within that the frustration and where things started going south where I was being compared to her friends and she mentioned a few the problem is they were all women there wasn't a man in the comparison and I said " at least compared me to a man you know I'm not a woman don't expect me to be one. That ended up with me making the point that you cannot expect a man to be a man and talk to him like you would in a manner that would not be acceptable. If you want mutual respect then you have to realize when you're being disrespectful and I don't even see you being the least bit sorry for it as I turned around and walked away from her. I was done with the day and done talking if we couldn't get past this one stumbling point and we needed to deal with it right now and resolve it before we could move further two getting along. In that moment she said she was sorry and it wasn't intentional.... which just reaffirmed exactly what I was thinking. She had no idea what she did or how she was doing it that was causing me to react but as I pointed out to her I reacted to something that much was clear? And I pretty much demanded that she give me a a real apology acknowledging what she did to hurt me how that must have felt and then saying what she did. It took me nearly 20 minutes of frustration of going back to that moment where everything was fine and then it literally was one sentence that changed the course of our entire experience. I can't even remember it at this point because it's not the words that were in portant it was the disrespect and how she said it which made me realize she didn't know another way. Not only that she didn't realize what she had done wrong? And from her perspective she hadn't simply because she didn't know.
I finally said well I'm sorry you don't like demonstrative people but I'm simply m a demonstrative person more so than you. I normally I'm much more physical in many ways touching holding hands you name it hugging .. as my sister would say demonstrative the same as you... the fact is I'm not that way around you because I know you don't like it as I would with my sister I don't do what I do with everybody else with her or you because I know your sensitivity to it out of mutual respect... that doesn't mean I'm not like that with everyone else because I am you're just not there to see it that I do for you because I know you... but it's not how I am with everyone else and that's the point. Out of mutual respect I'm not as demonstrative as I am with others or my friends, so to a certain degree I'm acting out of character only for you... but not with resentment but out of mutual respect because I know it's something that you need to feel comfortable... that's all.
It seems as if you are not brought to the place where any of the symptoms actually creates a problem.... a problem either for you or for the other person namely the other person.... then it's really easy to call your behaviors all kinds of things and use blanket statements or stereotypical responses that kind of explain these things away but the fact of the matter is.... a person can deal with it once in a great while or to a lesser degree but not like her friend with the interrupting.... apparently she's been called for it at work and it's now at age 50 something she's really making an effort to work on it. the theory and thinking is that many of these things either get swept under the rug overlooked or just tolerated and accepted as just the way that person is... and in respect to a woman or a girl growing up the expectation or the situation just never presents itself in the same way as a man or boy. Some of the symptoms just seem to blend in with the woodwork ... or written off as something more stereotypically female and therefore emotional or hormonal or any one of the many stereotypical responses that one might come up with to explain someone's behavior. I can't tell you how many times I felt growing up how unfair it was that I was being held to a different standard then my older sisters simply because I was a boy but I immediately explain that away or rationalize that this is what men are expected to do and women are sometimes given a pass not in a good way always many times dismissed the written off or deemed not as important... not needed ....does not apply.... especially for those who are older say nearing 50 and above who grew when things were a bit different and attitudes and the way people saw things however not as much today.
The fact is.... I was reacting to something and so is she that much is real knowing what it is though and being able to articulate it to someone else accurately is really where this starts to fail if you don't have an answer ready and you don't know. The fact that d didn't fully understand what she had to say I said... and then immediately said well other people aren't like this..... I had to remind her what other people? all the people you're talking about our women.. I'm not a woman don't treat me like one and we'll be fine and I mean that with all sincerity. What came out of our talks which I have to say is such a departure from the past... and that being giving a moment or a little time D has has made a few remarkable Revelations to me .... and one of them goes right in line with this topic... as she said " I remember the teachers telling my mother that I was not good with losing...." which wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know because that is still present today. Not in respect to playing games with school mates but in relationships as well to Simply get along. That and she said " she did recall the men married to her mother spending a lot of time listening to her griping and complaining in silence and not saying anything so not to provoke her or get any more of what she was handing out. the only way she could get anything from anybody it seemed was to manipulate, complain, and put others down. I said... it's learned behavior you had to learn it somewhere... and this time she listened but it was her who brought it up... she's having second thoughts about things and reconsider thing them in a different way... which means she's becoming more aware of these things.... which has a lot to do with whether someone says anything or not. if I had said nothing and let that moment slide nothing would have happened. I still ran into some of the same things and frustrations.... but I can either accept it or not accept it... and having a relationship without mutual respect is not acceptable.
I found that just simply showing up even if you don't know the right way is better than doing nothing at all. but you have to know what to say and how to say it in order to get the other person to hear you. I think saying it a hundred times before finally sunk in when she was in a situation where she had to deal with it. necessity is the mother of invention you know. Ha!
I'll leave it right here.... living alone by yourself does have its advantages and one of them is perspective. There's nowhere to run and hide from yourself that's for sure. LOL
I think a lot of these behaviors depending on what gender you are will be interpreted differently and seen differently if they are out of place.
You may be right.
As for saying things straight out, at least in my observation, both women and men do that, but a lot of women I know will often want to situate the zinger in a context for the listener, before they let it fly.
I've been thinking about alexythymia some in the last few days. I thought about it again reading what you described in D..
In your description now and in earlier posts she sounds to me like she has alexythymia, for whatever reason: suppression, fear, lack of practice, something affected by ADHD neurology firing in a social situation. I would not even try to diagnose where her inability to notice and name her inner life comes from.
J, I can't remember well whether or not you described finding that you had or have alexythymia. You have a pretty full vocabulary for describing your thoughts and feelings. Over and over again, you've given us great help because you can describe yourself, not only in the present, but describe your general path from a prior state of being toward your better way now. It's been a great gift to the board, in my opinion. So you don't write like you have alexythymia now.
You describe D like she does. From my life, it's my guess that alexythymia isn't only a product of neurology; that it has a major component of it that does something like blunts or buffers the person that has it.
I came out of the household of my upbringing pretty much rubbed out as a human being. I was depressed, but that's only the surface, or part of the result of what I'm going to say. I cannot of course report about what from the inside, the alexythymia "feels like" or "does" inside a person with ADHD.
The first thing that I noticed what alexythymia felt like to me, in a battered state coming out of childhood, was that I couldn't locate feelings in my body. As in: am I feeling? Where am I feeling? In my heart? In my gut?
At that point my body was no help in drawing my attention to what was going on outside of me, say, it's a conversation with like you. Nor was my body of help in sending up flares to me that I needed to pay attention and find out what was going on inside of me. I was disconnected from my body. I was very very numbed out J. I'd suggest to you that D may be.
It's a peculiar thing to try to use self-noticing, if you're in a deeply blunted and sort of interior comatose state. It's not someone being stupid, or sullen, or avoiding answering questions, it's that you can't FIND things in you, nor do you have interior pathways to walk to go hunt for something. What I discovered is that without a useable way of using the body sensations to tell one that something is happening to you in your inner life, it's much harder as well to find within oneself what thought connects with what feeling. If you can't find the feeling, you can't know what it is; if you can't know what it is, you can't then look to see what it's connected to; if you can't find it, know what it is, or see what it's connected to, you can't THINK. Not only feelings related thoughts. In my experience, ANY thoughts. You can have kind of spasm of mind reactions to things that happen but that isn't thinking, it's helter skelter, spasmodic reactions with the mind.
I know the territory I'm describing to you. I need no one to interpret this, or transmute it into something else that they think was going on in me. I'm telling it as it is. I suggest that you consider that D is in her own dark forest of alexythymia which means that she has a h of a time answering questions....
I was lacking the interior toolkit needed to evaluate myself and decide what I wanted or needed, or decide to change. This reminds me of what you've said about D.
I wouldn't guess how things are inside of D, though what you describe about her inability to deal with your probiing questions, it sounds like she's in some kind of alexythymia, which is not JUST a little thing. It's having NO lights of one's own by which to navigate. Oh, I came out of childhood with no inner life at all. I was there to hop and bop to what other people said and did....
If I can give you an image of my lack of perception of how my body, mind, and movements of feelings interacted with each other, when I stumbled on to discovering this about myself in my late 20s, what I had inside me was perceptible as dense, black fog that was so thick that it blotted out any feature of my inscape to my mental view. Some of the black fog was due to depression at that point, and I wonder about D and depression.
But in my case, and I propose to you to think over regarding D, my black fog of an interior was NOT merely a product of depression. And it certainly wasn't me being deliberately stupid or resistant. I had never developed any habits of looking around in there! I had no toolkit. And couldn't inner observe. I had no memory of decisions, no solid grasp on my values. I couldn't tap into it.
How can anyone see things inside if he or she doesn't know where to look or how to look in there?
Again, if D has ADHD, I don't know how much of my description of my alexythymia coming out of the childhood home is useable.
I suppose nobody, not you, not Russell Barkley, not anyone, can peer inside a person with ADHD who is "alexythymying"
I can describe things about my interior landscape because I worked on it for a very long time in myself, I'd say 15 years, and had to find out things like what it blocked my view of, and what I needed to do to go find my feelings and even know what they were! It was a long strange interior trip. In the first couple years of trying to find my feelings, I could get so that I could identify that I was having a feeling, but for the life of me I didn't know for certain what the feeling was. It was like a compass needle swinging wildly, trying to find true north. As in: am I excited with anticipation? Am I afraid? Am I happy? Am I reacting to something outside of myself? Did this feeling well up in me because of my thought?
I couldn't even tell, at the beginning, if it was a good feeling for me or a bad one. That's enough of my old storytelling, but I wanted to give you enough detail so that you could use any that suggested something about the D you know, or the D who might be in there, and discard the rest, of course. I hope you amplify your imagination of what her problems in this department are. Especially because you two still have a thing for each other (or you wouldn't have spent the time together in the hotel).
For me, it was very, very true, that my blunted, foggy, interior landscape meant as well that I couldn't find my thoughts. So if a person can't find her thoughts, she can't develop or challenge them. I had to find my feelings, before I started the journey of finding my mind. And I really mean that: finding my mind. D's alexythymia may have an impact on her ability to articulate her thoughts. Which needs practice to do, but you have to grasp your own thoughts before you describe them.
Once you're logged in, click on these names of men members
Submitted by Chevron on
They're all living with a partner with ADHD. It's not a complete list. A couple have been active on the board for years.
Love that girl
Big Surprise
c urself
kellyj (jjamison)
The board has been pretty quiet for awhile.
Well, I am a man and my wife's a woman.
Submitted by bowlofpetunias on
Yes, I put up with a lot over the years. Some fighting back, increasing giving in--but I think that is a patter for all spouses of ADHDs.
I was leaning toward thinking that she had Borderline Personality Disorder, but the stuff I am reading on ADHD marriages sounds very familiar.
I have a Theory
Submitted by kellyj on
Actually it's not mine but it plays into what I've read..... what about women with ADHD? On other forms related to ADHD you seem to find a lot of women predominantly.... but those are more of self-help or for people looking for information and answers specific to them not their relationships.
I had a reply already typed out and then lost it rats.... so I'll jump forward a little bit and just say that d&i are not only speaking but we spent a weekend together in a motel room recently ....no sex mind you... but as friends for now that's enough. It certainly establishes a different set of rules that we ran up against only in one time but this time we were able to work things out which is a huge difference from before. Part of it came from me making the effort to contact her and smooth things over from where we left off, and now in hindsight my thoughts have a lot to do with this. It's not important exactly how we were able to this... but more of that I just kept showing up even if it was wrong according to her. The fact is there was no wrong or right there wasn't one good way to do anything I just kept trying and eventually she listened.
The bottom line is I was reacting to something that was not just in my head but when someone cannot articulate what it is that they are doing or what they want it makes it difficult when you have to guess and all you can do is speculate and fill in the blanks yourself. That's a dangerous game to play when you start second-guessing what another person is thinking... but as I found in just one quick moment in time how things can go from great to sour almost immediately and I ran into one of those moments and I simply wouldn't let it go. As I see it if we are going to be friends I'm going to apply the same rules or standards that I do for any of my friends... I don't have to psychoanalyse them and wonder what they are doing if they do something that's disrespectful I'm going to let him know and I'm going to do it right then I'm not going to beat around the bush or wait for another time and if we can't get it resolved then there's going to be a problem that's going to prevent us from moving forward until we figure it out. That's what I expect of my friends but that is my reality...D can think anything she wants, she's free to do so and as long as I'm not living with her or sharing in the the duties of a household it doesn't matter except when it comes to one of these moments. These moments need to be addressed have nothing to do with household chores or sharing a life together Under One Roof... these are moments of a matter of respect and it's mutual respect not in a domineering way either being submissive or dominant... not that kind of respect.
To cut right to the chase and forgo all the details we were able to work it through but not without the same thing happening as it always has except this time I didn't let it go I said something right then and that didn't go over well and she tried to shut it down.
Amongst the things that were said the word demonstrative popped out and it immediately reminded me of my oldest sister who in many ways shares some of the same views as D. But these views are not out of the norm in any way in fact stereotypically female in many ways problem comes I believe is that many times these behaviors done by a man or done by a woman get interpreted different ways and that's as much a mystery today as it was thousands of years ago... men and women are going to have a different way of seeing the same thing simply being a man or a woman if you want to make a gross generalization many times it's not true but many more times it is... to say not uncommon would be a fair statement .. they simply on experience and being exposed to women all your life.
The example that I used to get a point made and it was simply trying to make one simple point that was so difficult but I realized.... d was not seeing where there was anything wrong... on her part, and was not understanding what it was that she did or said that would have caused the reaction in me. I also realized more importantly but what she was seeing was correct... I was being demonstrative in respect to the way I was expressing myself but but not interpreting it in the way she did which caused her to react and away it went. Her presumption however was wrong... and when she said is this how you are with your friends?... I thought about it for a moment and I said yes yes it is in fact this is how I am with everybody up to a point not a complete stranger but people I know.
This led to me using her friend who has ADHD as an example as I reminded her about how bad she is about interrupting people, talking over them... and kind of hijacking the conversation and moving it into a different direction away from what you were originally talking about. I know exactly what she's doing because I do it myself and I used to be really bad at it but a point came where I had to stop. When I first had a business in my twenties I realized that this was a problem and I couldn't do this with customers or in my business relationships and I dedicated myself to not doing it and it took several years to really be able to get it under control. After that however it got to the point that I stopped doing it at all but that's not because the impulse is not still there it's there to this day I just learned a way to stop myself and practice it enough until it became second nature now I don't even think about it because it's not a problem anymore. That's not to say that I never do it but at worst.. I might get one or two words out and I immediately arrest myself and pull back and let the other person speak. That much you might see me do regularly but it goes mostly unnoticed because I stop and I listen to the other person and allow them to finish and hear what they say... it's not the interrupting or the beginning to interject that's the problem... it's the talking over the top of the other person and then continuing on with your train of thought even if it's going in a direction away from what the person just said or not indirect relationship to the topic at hand. mostly it's the interruption and the hijacking of the conversation .. and then going off on a tangent that's unrelated to what they just said or in some way tied in to make them feel like you didn't just take over the conversation and make it your own... and interrupt and talk over the other person in order to do so... that's what's offencive... especially if it happens every time you talk to someone.
The point I was making to D was.... that this was something I used to do all the time and badly just like her friend... but I found a curious that being diagnosed at 45 years old looking back... and her friend knew she had ADHD as a child all her life... I found it interesting that I was put in a situation in my early twenties where this was simply not acceptable I had to stop or I would suffer the consequences which I was beginning to feel already each time I would slip. I was highly aware of it and doing everything in my power to stop it which eventually I did just by paying attention and being aware that this was something that I had to stop because it was causing a problem not only for me but for other people. Being in a position where I had to do it or else I found a way I didn't know I had ADHD I didn't know why I just know I did.
In contrast... I saw D friend... where I was some forty years ago... why is the difference? This is my take on it. as my oldest sister used the word demonstrative from her perspective and her reality being a five foot two introvert who doesn't like crowds, is uncomfortable around lots of people in confined spaces and does not like to be touched... someone who walked up to her in a friendly Manner and gave her a hug would already make her feel uncomfortable.... demonstrative person then would be a person who hugs and touches a lot as a manner just being themselves. I am far more this way then my oldest sister... but not nearly as much as some people I know. I'd say it's more normal to be the way I am about it then the way my sister is but as she sees it that's being demonstrative I see it as how people relate and interact with each other and it's just part of it... not everybody but not uncommon either I think that's a fair statement.
I think a lot of these behaviors depending on what gender you are will be interpreted differently and seen differently if they are out of place. As I experienced Dee's friend.... It's Not Unusual or even stereotypical for women to talk at once together talk in a manner that's different than men in a way that's acceptable and even expected to a certain degree... what her friend does however is unacceptable by anyone's standard but it gets masked by other things that would be less common for a man based on all other men or all other women.
It was within that the frustration and where things started going south where I was being compared to her friends and she mentioned a few the problem is they were all women there wasn't a man in the comparison and I said " at least compared me to a man you know I'm not a woman don't expect me to be one. That ended up with me making the point that you cannot expect a man to be a man and talk to him like you would in a manner that would not be acceptable. If you want mutual respect then you have to realize when you're being disrespectful and I don't even see you being the least bit sorry for it as I turned around and walked away from her. I was done with the day and done talking if we couldn't get past this one stumbling point and we needed to deal with it right now and resolve it before we could move further two getting along. In that moment she said she was sorry and it wasn't intentional.... which just reaffirmed exactly what I was thinking. She had no idea what she did or how she was doing it that was causing me to react but as I pointed out to her I reacted to something that much was clear? And I pretty much demanded that she give me a a real apology acknowledging what she did to hurt me how that must have felt and then saying what she did. It took me nearly 20 minutes of frustration of going back to that moment where everything was fine and then it literally was one sentence that changed the course of our entire experience. I can't even remember it at this point because it's not the words that were in portant it was the disrespect and how she said it which made me realize she didn't know another way. Not only that she didn't realize what she had done wrong? And from her perspective she hadn't simply because she didn't know.
I finally said well I'm sorry you don't like demonstrative people but I'm simply m a demonstrative person more so than you. I normally I'm much more physical in many ways touching holding hands you name it hugging .. as my sister would say demonstrative the same as you... the fact is I'm not that way around you because I know you don't like it as I would with my sister I don't do what I do with everybody else with her or you because I know your sensitivity to it out of mutual respect... that doesn't mean I'm not like that with everyone else because I am you're just not there to see it that I do for you because I know you... but it's not how I am with everyone else and that's the point. Out of mutual respect I'm not as demonstrative as I am with others or my friends, so to a certain degree I'm acting out of character only for you... but not with resentment but out of mutual respect because I know it's something that you need to feel comfortable... that's all.
It seems as if you are not brought to the place where any of the symptoms actually creates a problem.... a problem either for you or for the other person namely the other person.... then it's really easy to call your behaviors all kinds of things and use blanket statements or stereotypical responses that kind of explain these things away but the fact of the matter is.... a person can deal with it once in a great while or to a lesser degree but not like her friend with the interrupting.... apparently she's been called for it at work and it's now at age 50 something she's really making an effort to work on it. the theory and thinking is that many of these things either get swept under the rug overlooked or just tolerated and accepted as just the way that person is... and in respect to a woman or a girl growing up the expectation or the situation just never presents itself in the same way as a man or boy. Some of the symptoms just seem to blend in with the woodwork ... or written off as something more stereotypically female and therefore emotional or hormonal or any one of the many stereotypical responses that one might come up with to explain someone's behavior. I can't tell you how many times I felt growing up how unfair it was that I was being held to a different standard then my older sisters simply because I was a boy but I immediately explain that away or rationalize that this is what men are expected to do and women are sometimes given a pass not in a good way always many times dismissed the written off or deemed not as important... not needed ....does not apply.... especially for those who are older say nearing 50 and above who grew when things were a bit different and attitudes and the way people saw things however not as much today.
The fact is.... I was reacting to something and so is she that much is real knowing what it is though and being able to articulate it to someone else accurately is really where this starts to fail if you don't have an answer ready and you don't know. The fact that d didn't fully understand what she had to say I said... and then immediately said well other people aren't like this..... I had to remind her what other people? all the people you're talking about our women.. I'm not a woman don't treat me like one and we'll be fine and I mean that with all sincerity. What came out of our talks which I have to say is such a departure from the past... and that being giving a moment or a little time D has has made a few remarkable Revelations to me .... and one of them goes right in line with this topic... as she said " I remember the teachers telling my mother that I was not good with losing...." which wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know because that is still present today. Not in respect to playing games with school mates but in relationships as well to Simply get along. That and she said " she did recall the men married to her mother spending a lot of time listening to her griping and complaining in silence and not saying anything so not to provoke her or get any more of what she was handing out. the only way she could get anything from anybody it seemed was to manipulate, complain, and put others down. I said... it's learned behavior you had to learn it somewhere... and this time she listened but it was her who brought it up... she's having second thoughts about things and reconsider thing them in a different way... which means she's becoming more aware of these things.... which has a lot to do with whether someone says anything or not. if I had said nothing and let that moment slide nothing would have happened. I still ran into some of the same things and frustrations.... but I can either accept it or not accept it... and having a relationship without mutual respect is not acceptable.
I found that just simply showing up even if you don't know the right way is better than doing nothing at all. but you have to know what to say and how to say it in order to get the other person to hear you. I think saying it a hundred times before finally sunk in when she was in a situation where she had to deal with it. necessity is the mother of invention you know. Ha!
I'll leave it right here.... living alone by yourself does have its advantages and one of them is perspective. There's nowhere to run and hide from yourself that's for sure. LOL
J
Interesting
Submitted by Chevron on
I think a lot of these behaviors depending on what gender you are will be interpreted differently and seen differently if they are out of place.
You may be right.
As for saying things straight out, at least in my observation, both women and men do that, but a lot of women I know will often want to situate the zinger in a context for the listener, before they let it fly.
I've been thinking about alexythymia some in the last few days. I thought about it again reading what you described in D..
In your description now and in earlier posts she sounds to me like she has alexythymia, for whatever reason: suppression, fear, lack of practice, something affected by ADHD neurology firing in a social situation. I would not even try to diagnose where her inability to notice and name her inner life comes from.
J, I can't remember well whether or not you described finding that you had or have alexythymia. You have a pretty full vocabulary for describing your thoughts and feelings. Over and over again, you've given us great help because you can describe yourself, not only in the present, but describe your general path from a prior state of being toward your better way now. It's been a great gift to the board, in my opinion. So you don't write like you have alexythymia now.
You describe D like she does. From my life, it's my guess that alexythymia isn't only a product of neurology; that it has a major component of it that does something like blunts or buffers the person that has it.
I came out of the household of my upbringing pretty much rubbed out as a human being. I was depressed, but that's only the surface, or part of the result of what I'm going to say. I cannot of course report about what from the inside, the alexythymia "feels like" or "does" inside a person with ADHD.
The first thing that I noticed what alexythymia felt like to me, in a battered state coming out of childhood, was that I couldn't locate feelings in my body. As in: am I feeling? Where am I feeling? In my heart? In my gut?
At that point my body was no help in drawing my attention to what was going on outside of me, say, it's a conversation with like you. Nor was my body of help in sending up flares to me that I needed to pay attention and find out what was going on inside of me. I was disconnected from my body. I was very very numbed out J. I'd suggest to you that D may be.
It's a peculiar thing to try to use self-noticing, if you're in a deeply blunted and sort of interior comatose state. It's not someone being stupid, or sullen, or avoiding answering questions, it's that you can't FIND things in you, nor do you have interior pathways to walk to go hunt for something. What I discovered is that without a useable way of using the body sensations to tell one that something is happening to you in your inner life, it's much harder as well to find within oneself what thought connects with what feeling. If you can't find the feeling, you can't know what it is; if you can't know what it is, you can't then look to see what it's connected to; if you can't find it, know what it is, or see what it's connected to, you can't THINK. Not only feelings related thoughts. In my experience, ANY thoughts. You can have kind of spasm of mind reactions to things that happen but that isn't thinking, it's helter skelter, spasmodic reactions with the mind.
I know the territory I'm describing to you. I need no one to interpret this, or transmute it into something else that they think was going on in me. I'm telling it as it is. I suggest that you consider that D is in her own dark forest of alexythymia which means that she has a h of a time answering questions....
I was lacking the interior toolkit needed to evaluate myself and decide what I wanted or needed, or decide to change. This reminds me of what you've said about D.
I wouldn't guess how things are inside of D, though what you describe about her inability to deal with your probiing questions, it sounds like she's in some kind of alexythymia, which is not JUST a little thing. It's having NO lights of one's own by which to navigate. Oh, I came out of childhood with no inner life at all. I was there to hop and bop to what other people said and did....
If I can give you an image of my lack of perception of how my body, mind, and movements of feelings interacted with each other, when I stumbled on to discovering this about myself in my late 20s, what I had inside me was perceptible as dense, black fog that was so thick that it blotted out any feature of my inscape to my mental view. Some of the black fog was due to depression at that point, and I wonder about D and depression.
But in my case, and I propose to you to think over regarding D, my black fog of an interior was NOT merely a product of depression. And it certainly wasn't me being deliberately stupid or resistant. I had never developed any habits of looking around in there! I had no toolkit. And couldn't inner observe. I had no memory of decisions, no solid grasp on my values. I couldn't tap into it.
How can anyone see things inside if he or she doesn't know where to look or how to look in there?
Again, if D has ADHD, I don't know how much of my description of my alexythymia coming out of the childhood home is useable.
I suppose nobody, not you, not Russell Barkley, not anyone, can peer inside a person with ADHD who is "alexythymying"
I can describe things about my interior landscape because I worked on it for a very long time in myself, I'd say 15 years, and had to find out things like what it blocked my view of, and what I needed to do to go find my feelings and even know what they were! It was a long strange interior trip. In the first couple years of trying to find my feelings, I could get so that I could identify that I was having a feeling, but for the life of me I didn't know for certain what the feeling was. It was like a compass needle swinging wildly, trying to find true north. As in: am I excited with anticipation? Am I afraid? Am I happy? Am I reacting to something outside of myself? Did this feeling well up in me because of my thought?
I couldn't even tell, at the beginning, if it was a good feeling for me or a bad one. That's enough of my old storytelling, but I wanted to give you enough detail so that you could use any that suggested something about the D you know, or the D who might be in there, and discard the rest, of course. I hope you amplify your imagination of what her problems in this department are. Especially because you two still have a thing for each other (or you wouldn't have spent the time together in the hotel).
For me, it was very, very true, that my blunted, foggy, interior landscape meant as well that I couldn't find my thoughts. So if a person can't find her thoughts, she can't develop or challenge them. I had to find my feelings, before I started the journey of finding my mind. And I really mean that: finding my mind. D's alexythymia may have an impact on her ability to articulate her thoughts. Which needs practice to do, but you have to grasp your own thoughts before you describe them.
Best wishes to you both,
Chevron