Episode 031: Can you use your shame…for good?

David takes us back to second grade and playing following the leader, where you do the same maneuver on the jungle gym that the ‘leader’ did. He always felt his leadership was undervalued. It was finally his shot to be the leader and he wasn’t going to waste it—he is up way high in the air and looks down and says “Follow the leader!” And he lands with both feet about 15 ft down onto the wooden beam he was aiming for. Everyone looks at me and goes “You win! We quit!” That’s a perfect example of response cost: as a child, I didn’t think that if I nail this, no one wants to play anymore, and if I fail I might end up as a quadriplegic or dead. No thought of those consequences and what they would look like two hours later. Thank goodness no one went after him, he never thought that the other kids not getting it would be bad. The impulsivity in that jump and the response cost that was forgotten. The take away is it’s not worth it to win that game by beating everyone--it's also not really a lesson learned. Bobby shares his story from the week, and is in a show and is an understudy, where he has to do all the prep on his own and doesn’t get to do the reps with the other actors. Hard to do with ADHD. Also hard to do when he already had a bunch of work on his plate and took on the extra load and found himself procrastinating on memorizing the lines. David wonders, did the task get done, though? Did Bobby memorize all his lines in a day? He didn’t, but he did do a big bulk of it and did one scene per day and it’s been a challenge but he’s been more successful doing that way. He’s listening to the scenes on loop and does it in the background while he’s doing other things. We have all been there, where there’s a reality where we don’t get to make the structure until we’re in the crisis—now I have a plan, why didn’t I make this plan before? It’s because you weren’t in your sweet spot of stimulation. And he’ll (and we’ll) do it this way again. David points out that Bobby is learning his authentic way of working and not judging it. What would have happened if all the internal freak-out judgements and questions—if someone else had asked you those? Bobby admits he would have crumbled under that pressure, it would have deeply affected his productivity. Isabelle thinks she knows where David is going with that question, and recalls podcasts she’s been listening to on anxiety that were echoing the notion that what you resist, persists—and it's the same with this. Acknowledge the anxiety and roll with it. What she’s learning is that if you think you need to beat yourself up to get something done, you can remove that part, and still get it done last minute. David learned this very late in life. He was talking to his partner, Robin, and was stating that they were going to clean bit by bit in preparation for the people coming to visit them. And she looked at him and said: “you’re not going to do it bit by bit, you’re going to wait until the last minute, and freak out, and while I’m at work, you’ll get it done.” And he was like “yeah, you’re right. Is that okay?” And she’s like “yup.” If I can talk about it without shame, a lot can change. And if you’re trying to beat yourself up so someone else can’t, you get totally distracted from the task. It becomes a perpetual motion machine of shame, and it takes so much energy. Isabelle describes how her motor (or brain) keeps running and sometimes gets locked into a space where there’s no brakes and so sometimes, the setting is on shame. She is a champion shame spiraler. David describes how we lock in on the activating state we have the most tolerance for. David has a lot of excitement in his life, like a golden retriever, he authentically labels things closer to excitement rather than anxiety. Where does shame or anxiety displace stimulation from the task? For some people, you need the shame—it’s something someone else makes you feel (like peeing your pants in public is shame, peeing your pants in private, guilt). Shame is incredibly stimulating: "If I don’t get this done, I will be socially rejected and annihilated." This gets your heart pumping, adrenaline going. We’re all adrenaline junkies. How do you turn the shame into a tool? (Pause for siren and airplane noise and acknowledgment of us recording in a landing strip right now) Isabelle pictures the scene from Star Wars (errr, Empire Strikes Back, thankyouverymuch), where Luke goes into the cave. If you can acknowledge the fear that’s happening, you can face it. David uses the example of doing a talk in a big crowd and his shame spiral goes to a very black and white extreme where if he messes up his talk he’s going to end up homeless. So the first time he gave this talk he took weeks. And then he got better at it and wasn’t starting on it so far ahead. So what if he could just plan on doing it on the 6 hour flight? The Shame Force is ready to go—but ready to go at an appointed time, not for weeks in advance. No one way I’m not going to do this thing, and so that black and white fear of failure is ready to help boost and let him finish his prep for this big talk on the plane. Bobby and Isabelle struggle to catch up with that idea, is it using guilt instead of shame? No, it’s removing the shame from HOW you do the thing, and instead letting the fear of failure and potential shame do its work at an appointed time: having a plan and honoring the plans you have. So David will get ideas for the talk and put it on the calendar for the plane ride and then during the plane ride, let that fear of not finishing the talk and failing hit, but not until the appointed time. If we fail, how can we learn something from that and not fail next time? How do we work with goals when we fail and not achieve things? It’s about effectiveness rather than our idea of what things look like: studying, effort, trying—what do those things look like (because we are little stimulation-generating machines). The trap is: if I spent more time on this, could it have been better? If we are living in “could’ve been better” we’re always trapped. So the question is: “was it good enough?” And what if the next question is: “what can we do differently?” What if we focused on the outcomes, rather than the process, and just judged what we did (and set a goal to learn how to do this all in one night, rather than the 30 years it took David to learn).

DAVID’S DEFINITIONS

Response Cost: a neurological skill that helps you know the consequences of your actions later on down the road. This is a forebrain skill that is often harder for folx with ADHD.

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Cover Art by: Sol Vázquez

Technical Support by: Bobby Richards