← Navigating Adult ADHD
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You are listening to the Navigating Adult ADHD podcast with your ADHD coach and expert, Xena. Hello, my friend. Welcome back. Today we are navigating adult adhd. You know the drill. That's what we're doing. And today we're actually talking about something that I know so many of us struggle with, but we don't always talk about it, and that is ADHD and free friendships. Now, we do have a previous episode where I talk about ADHD and friendships. It is number 23. I'll link to that in the show notes. But we are diving deep into this today and coming at it from a different angle with a really powerful example that I know you're going to relate to, because let's be honest, like, friendship can be beautiful, right? They can be supportive, they can be hilarious. They can be the thing that makes life less lonely. But friendship can also be confusing. It can be exhausting, and it can be emotionally draining, especially when you have adhd. Because ADHD doesn't just impact your work, your house or home life, your time management, your motivation, or your ability to remember why you walked into a room. It impacts your relationships too, right? It impacts how we connect, how we communicate, how we interpret other people's behavior. ADHD impacts how we manage conflict, how we repair after things get awkward, how we maintain friendships, when life gets busy, when life is overwhelming, or just when we're feeling like everything's too people Y. So I want to actually start out today with a real story, a real example from somebody that I coached recently. Now, obviously I'm going to keep details anonymous and I'm going to change names, but I want to share this because I think that so many of us will hear this and go, oh, yep, been there, done that. Okay, so the woman I was coaching, her name is Tina, or at least we're going with Tina. Tina had been friends with Cali for years, like properly years. Okay. They had a lot of history. They, you know, there was years of connection. They had a lot of adventures, a lot of memories, a lot of really good moments. But then a couple of things happened. So Tina's father in law passed away and she told Kelly about this, right? She went to her friend to lean on her friend, but Kelly didn't say, I'm sorry for your loss. She didn't ask if she needed anything or if there was anything she could do to help. Instead, what she did is she withdrew. So my client, Tina, was really disappointed. She thought that Cali just did not care. And she told me that she Thought this friendship had run its course. Now I wonder if you've ever done this. Have you ever taken one moment, Maybe it's a comment, maybe it's a missed message, Something that a friend did or did not do and used it as evidence that that entire friendship is over. Maybe you've used it as evidence that they don't really care, that they never really cared, or that you were just fooling yourself all along. Because this is the thing, my friend. It's not that the hurt wasn't real. It was. It's not that Kelly's behaviour didn't matter. It did. It's not that my client wasn't allowed to feel disappointed. Of course she was. You've heard me say it before. Our feelings are always, always valid. And it's our thoughts that we want to question. But we're going to get to that, okay? But what happened Next is where ADHD's, you know, emotional dysregulation, our rejection sensitivity and our meaning making brains, they can take one moment and turn it into something incredibly, incredibly painful. So I want to break this down for us using the Steer model, which is one of my absolute favorite self coaching tools. If you're one of my clients, you will be very familiar with this. Now if you haven't heard me talk about this before, I'm going to go through it really briefly. So Steer S T E A R stands for situation, thought, emotion, action and result. So this is actually a CBT cognitive behavioral therapy model or a psychology based model. It teaches us the relationship between our thoughts, our emotions and our actions, okay? It teaches us how our brains work, why we do what we do, why we feel what we feel. And it is an incredibly powerful tool. Okay? This is an absolute game changer, especially for those of us with adhd. This is life changing. And if you struggle to take action, if you struggle with procrastination, this tool is so good. Okay? So in this instance, the situation we are talking about is Cali did not say sorry when she learned about the news that the father in law had passed away. Okay? So that's neutral. That's a fact, right? There's no emotion in that until we have a thought, okay? And the thought that Tina had was she's not being a good friend. And that thought had her feeling, the emotion was disappointment. She was feeling disappointed because she was thinking she's not being a good friend. Okay? And when we feel disappointed right from that emotion of disappointment, we then take action. And the action was that she started to build a mental case against Kelly. She compared Kelly to her other friends. She started focusing on all of the negative elements of their relationship or anything bad that might have ever happened. She ignored all of the good years of friendship, all of the memories, et cetera. She stopped speaking, speaking to Kelly. She gave her the cold shoulder. And she even started venting to other friends about Kelly. And the result that the actions created was that she wasn't being a good friend either. Not because she's bad, not because she's unkind, not because she doesn't care, but because she was feeling disappointed. And that painful emotion, that. That painful emotion led her to put her armor up. Okay. Which is something we're going to dive into. Right? So the. The thing that Tina did next actually really stuck with me because I have been there, I have done this, and I have, you know, heard a similar story from so many of the ADHDers that I have the honour of working with. So when her friend Callie came to talk to her and, you know, sort of confront her about this cold shoulder and what was happening, Tina said, I thought you just didn't give a fuck. And honestly, that sentence right there, I was like, yep, I can relate to that. I've been there, I've done that. That sentence is just a little bit of a tender truth bomb, because so often underneath that feeling of disappointment, there's maybe some anger underneath the walls, underneath the, you know, this friendship should just die kind of an energy. There's something much softer in there. There is the I just wish that you. You had shown some care. I just wanted you to notice. I really wanted you to show up. I wanted to feel like I mattered to you. And when you didn't respond to me in the way I had hoped for, what did my brain do? It made it mean that I don't matter, that you don't care. So that is the part that I want us to gently unpack today. Because ADHD can make friendships genuinely hard. And I don't want this to be an episode, you know, where I give you some just be a bitter friend lecture. Hell, no. That's not what I'm saying. Right? We are not the problem. We are not doing some beige advice today, okay? This. Having challenges with our friendships is not a character flaw. That's not because there's something wrong with us. It's not that we're lazy or selfish or dramatic or needy or too much or whatever, okay? There are real ADHD reasons why friendships can be harder to maintain, why we may have difficulty trusting people, why our friendships might Be harder to repair or to feel secure in. So let's talk about them. Okay, Starting with number one. The first thing is executive function or executive dysfunction in this case. Okay, so this is more of the boring but important friends, friendship, admin sort of stuff. So things like texting back, remembering birthdays, making plans, following through on plans, remembering to check in with people, right? Remembering that people exist when they're not directly in front of your face. And I say that with love because out of sight, out of mind is just so real in so many ways for us ADHDers. Not because we don't care, not because we don't love people, not because we're heartless little gremlins, but because our brains often don't get a mental reminder. Maybe you think about your friend in the shower at 7am and think, oh my gosh, I really should text her later. Then it's gone by the time you get out the shower, poof, gone. And then three weeks later you're driving and you think oh my gosh, I really do want to text her. I still haven't text her back. But you're driving, which is really unhelpful because right now you can't text. And then again by the time you've got home you've totally forgotten and then suddenly it's been six months now your brain is telling you, oh well, obviously it's too late and she's going to be really mad at me so I should just leave it. This is why I think it's so important to separate caring from initiating. Because they are not the same skill. Caring is emotional, initiating is executive function and ADHD can really mess with our executive functioning. So you can deeply care about your friend and still not text them back. You can miss someone and still not organise a catch up. You can really value a friendship but still let six months, 12 months go by. Now that does not mean that there are no consequences. Of course, like our friendships need some level of care and contact. But I want you to stop using your struggle to initiate as evidence that you are a terrible friend because that is not what it means. So next up is time blindness. Time blindness doesn't just show up when you're trying to leave the house or estimate how long it's going to take to, you know, finish that project at work. It shows up in relationships too. Months can just disappear. You can genuinely feel like you just spoke to your friend and then realize it's actually been a year. And then it might feel like it's too late, too awkward Too embarrassing, too hard to reach out. But most of the time that window has not closed. It's just that your brain tells you it has. Your brain makes up the story. Because all it takes is a tiny little message, a tiny little interaction to reopen that door. Maybe you send a text like, hey, I know it's been ages. I've been a bit, you know, I've been in a bit of an ADHD cave. Right, lately, but I've been thinking about you. I'd love to catch up. Right, that's it. Just something super simple. You don't need to, you know, create a 40 page slide deck of an apology. You don't need to explain every life event or everything that's happened and why you haven't. Just reach out and be honest. So the next thing that shows up in our friendships is emotional dysregulation. And this, my friend, this is big. Because when something goes wrong in a friendship or when something feels slightly off, ADHD can make it feel enormous. It's like our emotions are turned up onto full volume. A missed text message doesn't necessarily feel just like a missed text. It can feel like abandonment. A weird tone in their voice doesn't just feel like a weird tone. It feels like, oh my God, I'm being rejected. A friend cancelling plans doesn't feel like a friend just cancelled plans. It feels like proof that you are not important or maybe proof that they don't want to be your friend. And before you know it, your nervous system has grabbed the steering wheel and has driven you straight into pain and spiraling town. And this is also where rejection sensitivity comes in. So you might know it as RSD or Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria. Now I want to be clear that RSD is not simply being too sensitive. It is not that you're being dramatic. It's not that you need to toughen up. It is a very real, very intense emotional and physiological response to perceived rejection, criticism, disapproval, exclusion or disappointment. Now the key word in there is perceived, okay? Because sometimes the rejection is real. Sometimes somebody has been unkind, sometimes maybe somebody has let us down or, you know, sometimes somebody is not being a good friend. But sometimes our brain reads certain situations or it reads uncertainty or unknown as rejection. Sometimes our brain will read silence as rejection. It'll read someone being busy as rejection. It reads somebody not reaching out in the exact way that we had hoped as rejection. And when your nervous system truly believes that you're being rejected, that can feel like a full blown emergency, right? It can be A full body. Stomach dropping, chest tightening, Brain melting. Emergency. So what do we do? What do humans do when they feel rejected? Of course they protect themselves. Okay. And often what that protection can look like in a friendship is we try to reject first. Okay, this is what I would call the friendship doom spiral. Something happens, okay, let's say your friend doesn't reply or they don't say that thing you'd hoped that they would say. Maybe they make a comment that lands badly. Maybe they forget something important. And then your brain adds meaning to that. Your brain makes it mean they don't care. I'm not important. I always, you know, care so much more than my. Than everyone else. I'm too much. This friendship is a waste of time. And then your nervous system panics. You start building a case. You collect all of this evidence as to why, you know, they're terrible and awful and look at everything that they might have ever done wrong. You ignore all of the evidence of, you know, how they have been a good friend or why you have been friends for so long. And the care and the warmth and the loyalty and the history and all of the memories. You talk to other people about how awful they are, you pull away, they feel that distance. The friendship gets weird. And then your brain says, see, I knew they didn't care. And now your brain thinks it has proof because it created it with that spiral. So there was actually a question that I remember sharing in episode 23. I did an episode on ADHD and friendship. I'll link it, as I said. And that friendship is just so sorry. That friendship. That question is so, so fucking powerful. The question is, what are you making it mean? Because this is one of the most useful friendship questions that we can ask ourselves. Okay, what am I making it mean when they don't text back? What am I making it mean when they don't respond the way I want them to? What am I making it mean about me? About them, about the friendship. Because there is a huge difference between Kelly didn't say sorry when the father in law passed away, when Tina's father in law passed away. And Kelly doesn't care about me, right? One is what happened, right? She didn't say sorry. The other is a story like she doesn't care about me. That's a story. And again, I'm not saying that story is impossible. Okay, maybe Kelly was being thoughtless. Maybe she did drop the ball. Maybe she was not showing up in the way that, you know, she would normally show up. But Kelly's behaviour is about Kelly okay, meaning your friend's behavior is about them, not about you. Kelly's behaviour in this example was about her awareness. It's about her capacity, her experiences, her trauma, her challenges and all the shit she has going on behind the scenes. I actually know that this came out later in the conversation, but I found out that Kelly had in fact lost both of her parents in the last year. So one of the things that's possible here is that she was struggling with her own grief and loss and was unable to have the capacity to support someone else with that. Maybe. Right, but what we definitely know is that in this instance, it's not a verdict on your self worth. And this part really matters, right? Your friend's behavior, the things they do, the things they say, the things they don't do. Don't say that has nothing to do with your worth. It's about them, like I said, about their capacity, their experiences, their trauma, whatever's happening for them right now, but nothing to do with you. Right, but so often we take someone else's behavior and we turn it into a statement about our lovability, right? About there being something wrong with us. They didn't message me back, so I don't matter. They didn't invite me, so they don't want to be my friend. They didn't ask how I was, so obviously they don't care. They cancelled plans, so I'm not important. Right, but other people's behavior is not a reliable measure of your worth and it never has been. Now I know that that can be hard to believe when your nervous system is screaming otherwise. Okay? So I want to offer you this reframe. You can feel disappointed about something your friend did without making it mean anything about you, about the friendship or about your self worth. You can feel hurt without deciding that the friendship is over. You can be honest about your needs without abandoning yourself. And you can be a good friend to someone without tolerating behaviour that repeatedly hurts you. That's important too, because I don't want this episode to sound like I'm saying, well, every friendship needs to be saved. No. Hell no, it doesn't. Right. Some people are not your people. Some people repeatedly dismiss you, minimize you, mock you, use you, compete with you, or make you feel like you have to shrink to some, you know, tiny little version of yourself. Okay? This episode is definitely not about gaslighting yourself into tolerating shit behavior. Hell no. It's not about making excuses for people who constantly hurt you. Right. It's not about saying, well, I have adhd So I must be the problem. No, absolutely not. This episode is about learning to pause before your brain takes one moment, one comment, one action or lack of action, and turns it into a full on friendship funeral, right? Turns it into some very painful, awful experience. It's about noticing when your nervous system has mistaken hurt for danger, okay? It's about checking the story before you start acting from it. It's about giving yourself enough space to ask, is this friendship actually unsafe? Or am I feeling rejected and am I trying to protect myself? Because both are possible, okay? But they require different responses. So now I just want to talk briefly about masking for a minute. Because friendship can be complicated. Let's be honest, right? For those of us who have spent years masking, maybe we've been spent years pretending to be easier to love. A lot of late diagnosed ADHD is right? Have been masking for decades, trying to be the funny one, the capable one, the low maintenance one that was always me trying to be like low maintenance, the helpful one, the chilled one. I always tried to be the chill one, right? The one who doesn't need anything. The. The no worries one. When actually there are a shitload of worries, right? Been there, that's for sure. Now masking has a place. It can definitely help us socially to survive, to feel safe, but it can also leave us feeling incredibly lonely. Because if you pretend to be someone else to make people like you, then they don't actually like you. They like that pretend version of you. And that can feel very empty. Okay, I know this. I have been in this situation where you can just be surrounded by people and still feel like nobody knows you, nobody gets you, like you're not connected to anyone. You can have lots of social contact but very little real connection. You can be liked by lots of people but still feel very lonely because nobody is actually getting to know the real you. And maybe you struggle to know the real you as well. And I think a lot of ADHDers know that feeling, right? That feeling of being too much and not enough at the same time. Too emotional, too intense, too chatty, too forgetful, too intense, too sensitive, too inconsistent, too chaotic, too needy. I think I might have doubled up some of those. But also somehow not enough. Not organized enough, not reliable enough, not calm enough, not normal enough, not good enough at friendship. And my friend, that is heavy. No wonder friendship can feel hard. No wonder sometimes we pull away or we overthink or we cling. And actually that reminds me of another intense sort of pattern that I see in friendship. Another thing that happens and that can be. A new person appears and they are interesting and they're funny and they like you and you get them and they get you and you guys like the same things. And, you know, suddenly, boom, there's this friendship hyper focus. You're texting all the time, you're sending memes, you're making plans, you're having deep and meaningful conversations at 11pm at night about, you know, childhood trauma and whether or not you should cut your hair and get a fringe. But it feels amazing, right? It feels like connection. It feels like, oh my God, is my person. They finally get me. And then the novelty fades. Not because that person stops to matter, not because the friendship wasn't real, but because adhd, we have an interest based attention system. So when something becomes less interesting, when it becomes more familiar, naturally our interest will shift, right? It's like, oh, we've got all of the dopamine out of this and now it's starting to drop. So the texting slows down, the plans become, you know, few and far between. The dopamine has kind of. It's almost like, what is it where you like, shake something up and then it just, like the dust is sort of settled now the other person may be left wondering, what happened? Did I do something wrong? And you might be feeling guilty because you didn't mean to go quiet. Okay? So of course that pattern can be painful on both sides. So part of friendship with ADHD is learning how to build friendships that can survive our natural rhythms. Friendships that don't require constant contact to be real. Friendships that have enough honesty in them to say, hey, I'm not always great at replying quickly, but I genuinely care about you. My silence is usually from overwhelm, not from a lack of love. I have had that conversation with so many of my friends because that sentence can save a lot of confusion. Now I want to get personal for a moment because this topic is, you know, of friendships is not just theoretical for me. I have had friendships end in some ways that have really hurt. For example, my childhood best friend. We were close, like inseparable basically from the age of 14. And then I think around age 22, she got married. So we were both about 22. And the day after her wedding, there was no big fight, Nothing happened. She stopped talking to me and never spoke to me again. No dramatic falling out? No. Just went completely silent. Ignored my texts, ignored my phone calls, everything. No explanation, no closure, just gone. And let me tell you, the ADHD brain does not love the unknown. And Unanswered question, right? It will chew on that forever. And I have chewed on that. I would say I chewed on that for at least 10 years thinking what did I do? What went wrong? For the longest time I made it mean horrible, awful things about me. I was too much. I did something wrong and I don't know, I should have been a better friend, right? I'm the kind of person that people eventually leave. So of course that hurts. That story, so fcking painful. But when you don't get that closure from someone else, your brain is going to try and create it itself. It's going to create stories and sometimes the stories it creates, the closure it tries to get for you is cruel. It fills the silence with self blame. Then there was actually another situation back in 2014 when I moved to London and I had a really close friend from the travel industry who was already living there and I moved over to and I was living with her and we were living close. And when I say close, I mean we were sharing a bedroom and we were even sharing a bed. I was led to believe that that's what you do in London to try and keep costs down. So there's this tiny double bed, it's not even a king, it's a double bed and we had to share that. Imagine if you like brought someone home. Let's not, let's not imagine that. It just gets weird. Anyway, we were sharing a bed and then that friendship fell apart. And that was devastating because I didn't have any other friends in London at that time. It was so hard. Like the rejection I felt, the devastation I felt was all consuming. At the time I didn't even have language for that. And looking back now, I can see things so differently, right? I can see that my friends do not exist just to validate me. I can see that their behavior, even when it hurts, is a reflection of their own world, right? The reason that we had a falling out, that's, you know, the reason she said and did the things that she did and me as well, right? That was because of her capacity, her thoughts, her values, her wounds, right? Her own trauma, her own history, her own past, her communication skills, right? Her emotional availability. Gosh, I think back to me back then and I had no emotional availability, I had no communication skills. I didn't even know about the trauma I had. So I can only imagine what a shit show that was for us both. But again, that was not a reflection of my worth, of my self worth. And I can also see at times, you know, I bought Walls into friendships that needed openness. I brought armor where vulnerability was needed. Right? I armored up. I was so busy trying to protect myself from possibly being rejected that I was the one sometimes rejecting and creating that distance. And I say that with a lot of love and compassion and understanding for my younger self because, man, was she just trying to stay safe. All right, I wasn't trying to sabotage connection or sabotage friendships. I was just trying so hard not to get hurt. But sometimes the strategies that we use to avoid pain can become the very things that keep us lonely. I'm going to say that again. Sometimes the strategies that we use to avoid pain can become the very things that will keep us lonely. Armour protects you, but it also stops people from getting close. Okay? And this is one of the biggest lessons that I have learned. The more you like yourself, the less you will worry what other people think of you. Man, I've learned that so many times. No, let me rephrase that. I continue to learn this lesson over and over, okay? The more you like yourself, like, the more you have an amazing relationship with yourself, the less you worry about what other people think of you, the less you need them to validate you or, you know, do behave in certain ways. And I don't mean that like some, you know, fluffy Instagram quote. I mean it very practically when you don't like yourself, right? Every friendship becomes this kind of, you know, referendum on your self worth. Every text tone matters. Every cancelled plan hurts like it's a personal attack. Every silence feels so loaded. Every friendship wobble becomes proof that you are unlovable. But when you build a better relationship with yourself, other people's behavior still matters, but it doesn't define you in that same way. Okay? You can be hurt without collapsing. You can be disappointed without deciding that you are, you know, flawed or unwanted. You can have a friendship end without making it mean that there's something wrong with you or that you're impossible to love. That is a very different way to live. And the friendships in my life now that feel the easiest are the ones where I can just a hundred percent show up as myself. Warts and all. I actually don't have any warts, but you know what I mean. You know, not some polished version of me. Not some, you know, low maintenance version. Although I'm probably going to turn up in my active wear. Let's be honest as I record this for you. I'm sitting here post gym workout, sweaty, and I'm a mess. I'm so glad you can't see me today. But those friendships where you can truly be yourself, right? Not polished, low maintenance, you know, not always having to perform to be funny, to be available, to be fine with, whatever, easygoing, right? You can just show up as you like. I show up. Me, with messy brain, big feelings, cat hair stuck all over me. Swear to God, I walked into the gym today with my black tights on, covered in cat fur. But the right people, they don't give a fuck, right? They stay. They like that about you. And not everyone is going to be your person or your people, right? And that's okay. The goal is not to be liked by everyone. How exhausting would that be if you had to be friends with everyone and. Ugh, no. And if you had to be liked by everybody, you'd have to be someone different for everyone. Ugh, exhausting. So, very briefly, because I do love me some research and some science. We know that. But very briefly, I just wanted to touch on what the research says. So don't worry, I'm not going to drag you into a PowerPoint or anything. But I do want to validate that what so many ADHDers experience in friendships is very real. Okay. Adults with ADHD often report fewer close friendships and more friendship instability than neurotypical adults. And when we talk about everything we just talked about, that makes so much sense, right? Executive dysfunction makes the friendship admin harder. Time blindness makes the regular contact more difficult. Emotional dysregulation makes conflict feel so big. Rejection sensitivity makes uncertainty feel threatening. Masking exhaustion makes social energy harder to sustain. This is not because ADHDs are bad friends or because there's anything wrong with them. It's because ADHD creates real challenges in the systems that friendships often rely on. Things like consistency or initiation or emotional regulation or communication, repair, planning, memory, follow through. Those are all things that the ADHD brain has difficulties with. And if those things are hard for you, for your brain, for friendship, it may require more attention, more honesty, and more external support. Not more shame, that's for sure. So let's talk about what actually helps. I'm going to give you three things. So the first is, and I've already mentioned this, asking that question, what am I making it mean? Okay, this is so helpful in all relationships. I use this in all relationships in my life. Asking the question, what am I making it mean? Before you go into a spiral, before you pull away, before you build a case as to why this friendship should be over, before you send some angry text message or, you know, mentally, just delete them from your life, pause and ask, what am I making this mean? What story am I telling? What do I actually know here? What are the facts? What am I assuming? What evidence do I have? What evidence am I ignoring? What else could be true? You don't have to dismiss the hurt. This is not about taking, you know, ignoring your feelings. Your feelings are so valid, they are allowed to be there, right? You can feel disappointed, you can feel sad, angry, rejected. But feelings are not facts. They're signals, they're information. They are instructions. And sometimes the most powerful thing that we can practice doing is just to create a tiny gap between the feelings and the actions. Okay? Because in that gap, we get to choose. We get to choose. What do I want to make this mean? What else could it mean? What do I want to make it mean? Right? You can choose to ask a question instead of making an assumption or an accusation. Maybe you choose to be vulnerable instead of being defensive. Maybe you choose to repair instead of to disappear. Maybe you choose to say, hey. When you didn't say anything after my father in law passed, I felt really hurt and my brain made it mean that you did not care. So I just wanted to check with you, you know, what's up, what's going on, rather than pulling away. And that's so different from saying, you're a terrible friend, you don't care about me, right? One opens the door, the other one kind of sets the house on fire. So that question again, what am I making it mean? Is just so powerful. The second thing that helps when it comes to friendships is designing low maintenance friendships. Not all friendships need to be high contact to be real. Some of the best friendships, like, and this is true for my two closest friends, like my two best friends, right, are the ones where you go quiet for a while and then just come back, hey, you know, I often send the meme to one of my friends from the hangover movie. The meme that says, but did you die? Like, we send that to each other maybe every six months just to check in and then, you know, we'll have a conversation via memes. But you know, like those friendships where you can just disappear and say, hey, sorry, I've been in my cave. And they're like, awesome. Welcome back. Those are gold. And I think adhders need more friendships that are designed around our real capacity, not some social performance. Because if your friendship expectations require you to become a completely different person, to perform on cue, to, you know, show up at the drop of a hat all of the time, that is not sustainable. So my advice is to be up front where you can. You don't need to over explain your adhd. You don't need to give them a TED Talk about ADHD or your nervous system capacity. Sometimes it's simply saying, hey, I'm really bad at texting back. But like I genuinely care about you. Please know that, right? I actually have another friend and we are both bad at texting back and it's hilarious because we'll make plans and we have to make sure we get them locked in because we'll both just go silent. We forget to text back. So funny, right? And maybe you say, hey, sometimes I go quiet when I'm overwhelmed. It's not personal. I still love you. Maybe it's communicating. Hey, I'm better with voice notes than texting or I'm better with calling than texting. That's so not me, by the way. I do not love phone calls. My phone rings and I just stare at the screen. I wait for it to go to voicemail, right? But voice notes are great. So if that's you communicate that, right? Maybe saying I love you. But I do not have the social battery for plans after 7pm Hi, that's me, right? I'm a morning person, not a nighttime person, right? But build friendships around what actually works for you. Maybe you're not a texting person. Maybe you're a send memes every three weeks kind of a person. Maybe you're a walk and coffee person. Or maybe you're a voice note whilst folding laundry once a week person, right? Maybe you're a low pressure catch up every few months, but it's always lovely kind of person, right? I have such a variety of friendships and all of those sorts of things apply to different friendships. That counts, right? Friendship does not have to look like constant, consistent contact. It just needs enough care, honesty and repair to stay alive. So here's another tiny practical thing that you can do. I have done this and sometimes, yes, I forget I have the list, but every now and again I remember. And it's so helpful. It's just to create a list on your phone of your friends. Literally. Like people I love but forget exist. Make a list, right? And in that note, make a list of your people, people you want to stay in contact with and create, you know, maintain a relationship with. And then once a week or once every couple of weeks or whenever you remember, which is how I operate in this regard is you just send the laziest possible message. Send something like, hey, saw this and thought of you. Miss your face. No need to Reply, just thought of you. Just sending some love, right? Maybe you say, hey, I've got no capacity for a proper conversation, but I love you, or I just thought of you, right? Anything like that. These tiny little messages count, these tiny little interactions, they create connection. If you're part of my world, it's memes. I just love to send a good meme. That's how I stay in touch. It's like my love language. Memes. Just sending memes. Okay? So the third thing that helps in ADHD relationships is remembering friendships, specifically, just remembering that repair is always available. Okay. This might be one of the most important things I think, for those of us with ADHD to hear. You do not have to let friendship die just because of a patch of silence or because your brain has made it mean something. Your brain has jumped to a conclusion, right? You do not have to let one awkward moment become the end. You do not have to disappear forever because you took way too long to reply. You do not have to wait until you can explain perfectly before you reach out. You can repair. You can say, hey, I know I've been quiet, I've been overwhelmed, but I miss you. Maybe you say, I think I pulled away because I felt hurt, but I don't really want to lose this friendship. Right? Maybe you say, I'm sorry I disappeared. Didn't mean to make you feel unimportant. Right? There are so many, like, little things. And one of the things I have found really helpful is with my list of friends is like, I literally have some of these ideas when I see them or when I think of them or when I've used them or someone else has used them on me, and I'll just copy and paste them and stick them in there. That's where this is coming from, my little bank of phrases I have ready to go, right? I've been telling myself a story that you don't care. And I realized I really want to check in with you and see if this story is true. Right? And again, that vulnerability, that willingness to be vulnerable is so powerful because vulnerability really does create connection. Thank you, Brene Brown. She has proven that, done the TED Talk on everything, right? But that willingness to be vulnerable, it can feel terrifying when you have rejection sensitivity. Trust me, I know, right? Because your brain would often prefer the safety of silent resentment over take the risk of having an honest heart to heart conversation. But that silent resentment is not actually creating safety. It's creating distance. And distance can become very lonely very quickly. So I want to come back to Tina the Woman that I was coaching, right? When Tina could see the spiral that she'd been in, I showed her her steer model on the board. Something shifted, right? She could see that Kelly not saying sorry had really triggered a story for her, right? And that story had become, oh, well, obviously Kelly doesn't care about me. And she could see just how quickly her brain had started to collect evidence, how she'd, you know, started to compare Kelly to her other friends and how unhelpful that was. She could see that, yeah, she'd really been focusing on all of the negative, all of the wrong things and filtering out the years and years of good, beautiful, wonderful friendship and memories. But she could also see that she was doing that to try and protect herself. That's why she'd pulled away, so she didn't suddenly decide, oh, everything's fine, right? I think that part's really important. This wasn't some magical and then she journaled and become enlightened and it was all okay moment. No, she still felt some hurt. She still had things that she wanted to talk about. But she stopped making Callie's behaviour mean that their friendship was over. She stopped building that case, right? She stopped. She actually opened the door rather to the possibility that, you know, maybe this is worth repairing, maybe this is worth connecting and having a conversation and doing so without the armor, without the defense up. So that's what I want for you too. Not that you keep every single friendship. Not that you tolerate shitty behavior, not that you abandon your own needs, but that you stop letting your friends, fear and your, you know, RSD decide the whole story. Okay? And you certainly do not let any behavior in friendships decide or determine your self worth because your worth as a human is not determined by how anybody else behaves. My friend, you were born worthy. We all were. Right? You are worthy. You're worthy with a messy brain, with big feelings, with forgotten texts, with friendship gaps, with the nervous system that sometimes panics before you even know what's happened, right? You are not a terrible friend because you struggle to reply. You're not needy because you wanted your friend to care. You're not broken because friendship feels hard or confusing. And you're not immature because rejection hurts. And you're not doomed to be alone with no friends because some friendships have gone sideways. Okay? So, my friend, I want to leave you with one question this week. Is there a friendship that you miss? But then your brain has kind of created a story around it telling you, well, it's too late, it's too awkward. You know, it's too broken. It's whatever. And what might happen if you sent one tiny, honest message? Not a perfect message. Not a huge explanation. Not a five page emotional thesis. Okay, no, just a tiny message. Maybe it's I miss you. I've been thinking of you. I know it's been ages, but I'd love to catch up. Just start there. Okay. Huge, huge, huge love to you, my friend. Hey, friend. If you want some more help navigating and thriving with adhd, and some help applying everything that you're learning here on the podcast, then head over to our website, navigating adultadhd.com.