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Navigating Adult ADHD
#175 ADHD, Authenticity & Oversharing: Can you be yourself without sharing everything
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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. We are Navigating Adult ADHD today and I am here for it. I'm excited. So I want to start with a little story because, boy, does it relate to our topic today. So, the very first time I met my friend Jules in person, we were standing in line at a cafe waiting to order coffee. Now, we had known each other online for, like, quite a few months, so we knew each other relatively well, but this was actually the first time that we were meeting in person, face to face. And somehow, before we had even ordered our flat whites, I had managed to tell her that my dad came out as gay when I was 15 and that for a while, I lived in the same household with my mum, my dad and my dad's boyfriend. Just your, you know, typical first coffee conversation. Now, at the time, I probably would have said, you know, this is just who I am. I'm completely an open book. Which is true. I am an open book. That is genuinely who I am. I'm an open book. But looking back now, I can see that there was something else happening too. In that moment, I was desperate to create connection really, really quickly. I wasn't sharing my backstory from a calm, grounded, regulated place where I had consciously decided, yes, this is something that I want to share with her. It was more like my nervous system had grabbed the conversation steering wheel and yelled, quick, just tell her something like, incredibly personal so we can skip to being like BFFs. So, my friend, today we are exploring where the line is between authenticity and being yourself versus the over sharing that is a common symptom of adhd. That is something that so many of us experience is this kind of ability to word vomit onto people or overshare at the drop of a hat. So very first thing I wanted to say here is, being yourself is sharing from a place of choice. And when we are over sharing, our oversharing typically comes from a place of urgency. So urgency might sound like I need this person to understand me or I need to fill the silence. I need them to like me. I need to prove that I can relate. I need to create a closeness or a connection really quick. I need to get this thought out before I lose it. I need relief from the way that I feel. And that does not mean that the information or what we share is inappropriate or shameful or something that we, you know, necessarily shouldn't share or would want to hide. It simply means that we haven't paused, paused long enough to decide, do I actually want to share this with this person in this moment? So I want us to dive today into why ADHD can lead to oversharing, how to tell the difference and of course some of the things that can help when it comes to oversharing. If this is something that you struggle with, especially if you want to be authentic, you want to be yourself, but you don't necessarily want to be over sharing with a stranger in the supermarket checkout line. Okay, so let's start with exploring a few of the common ADHD ingredients, shall we say, that contribute to why we have this tendency to overshare. So the first one of course is impulsivity. So that's not getting the mental message to pause and think it through before we say it. So the thought appears and exists through the mouth before the internal, you know, bouncer in our brain has checked its credentials. You may realise halfway through the sentence, oh my gosh, I did not intend to come this far into my childhood trauma story before 10am in the morning. So of course impulsivity plays a big, big role here. The second thing that shows up as why or one of the common sort of ingredients for ADHD oversharing is our desire to create and seek out this connection with others. So many ADHDers, we crave depth, okay? And we find small talk to be tedious or incredibly uncomfortable. And that is 100% me. I, I despise small talk. I don't give a shit about talking about the weather, you know, that to me is just. So instead of gradually building connection, we may kind of cannonball straight into creating it by going very all or nothing, very quick, very deep, very quick. Now this can be especially strong for people who throughout their lives have felt misunderstood, rejected or different, which we know as late diagnosed adults is so common for us. When we come across somebody who seems safe or interesting, sometimes our brain will go, finally, one of my people, like, let's release the autobiography now. On that note, I do want to say, and just make sure this is very clear that I love and fully embrace oversharing. For me, I absolutely love knowing I am amongst good company. I am with my people, I'm with people who get it. When somebody over shares to me like, I am here for it. I love the deep, meaningful stories that people share. Like I said, I am 100% here for it. I love this and about us. I also have wrestled with it myself and I know that so many of our community struggle with this and sometimes it's something that they don't like about themselves or something that they worry about. So the third reason why this can happen for people with ADHD is people with adhd, we connect and we relate to people through personal stories, okay? So we often show our empathy by, by sharing a similar story. Someone says that their relationship is struggling, and then maybe you tell them about your divorce, or someone says that they are feeling anxious, and maybe you tell them about that panic attack you had last week in the supermarket. It's not that we're necessarily trying to make it about us. It's our way of saying, hey, I totally understand. I get it. And you are not alone. Now that sometimes, without context, especially around neurotypical people, I have discovered sometimes that that person's experience of that is not fully understood, or they may look at us funny, let's just say, because they don't get what we're trying to do, they don't necessarily understand that the way that we've shared or potentially overshared is our way of connecting, is our way of saying, hey, I relate. I get it. So the fourth thing that I see with ADHD is, and why we have a tendency to sometimes overshare, is we can have a real difficulty sensing social timing. And this is definitely true for myself. So you might know a story is really personal and somebody's, you know, potentially telling you a personal story, and you have something that you want to share, share, and perhaps relate to them with, but you struggle to gauge whether the relationship you have with this person is ready for that level of intimacy. But also you struggle to potentially gauge at what point to put it into the conversation, where do I share it? Okay, so there's the trouble noticing the cues, right? Is that person uncomfortable? Are they surprised? Are they trying to move the conversation further along? But there's also that trouble understanding. Is the relationship and the connection I have already built with this person ready for this level? So again, it's like that difficulty in sensing the social kind of timing or air quotes, appropriateness, I guess we could say in another word, number five, and this is 100% so on point is the dysregulation, right? Emotional dysregulation is such a big part of having adhd. And when our nervous system is dysregulated, if we're feeling anxious or maybe excited or overstimulated or just desperate to be liked, our capacity, our ability to pause and think, hmm, do I want to say this? Is this a good time to share this? That just disappears, right? The Pause button's broken. It's just vanished. Okay? And this is really important because oversharing is not a communication problem. It is a regulation problem. And if we are dysregulated, if we're feeling uncomfortable, right, it might be anxious or overwhelmed or overstimulated, even if we're feeling really excited. So we're on the good side of dysregulated, but we're, like, really excitable. That can be something that we just want to kind of get out of us. We want to get rid of that feeling, or we want to numb it or cover it or suppress it or share it, what have you. And therefore, we can sort of word vomit or overshare unto that person, all those people in front of us. Number six. The final reason why people with ADHD can have this tendency to overshare is because of the shame and the masking. So many of us have spent years hiding masking or sort of monitoring ourselves, monitoring what we say, what we do, trying to censor ourself. And so when we have this goal of just be yourself, and when we're with people who create a sense of safety and we feel like we can be ourself with, that can feel so incredibly liberating. But then boundaries can get muddled. Especially with masking, we sometimes start to question, is this me? Is this actually who I am? And it can get really, really murky. So you might worry if I hold something back, am I then being fake? Am I not being myself? And these are questions that I have wrestled with. So here are two really, really, really important things that I want to say to speak to this. Privacy is not dishonesty. Okay? Privacy, like choosing what to share and who you share it with is not dishonesty. If you choose to hold certain that's not being dishonest. And the second thing I want to say here is boundaries are not masking. So we're going to get a little deeper into this so we can be ourself, right? You can be yourself, my friend, and you can be authentic without giving every person immediate access to your entire history, your entire life story. Now, this podcast actually came about because of a question we recently had inside of my program, adulting with ADHD. So one of our ADHDers asked the question, do you have any advice on how to approach disclosing ADHD whilst going through recruitment at a new employer? And she went on to say she's applying for a new role. It's the first application she's made post diagnosis, and she was really unsure about how much she wanted to disclose up front, how well it would be received. But she said to me, I really want to be myself, which is being upfront. So it would be really great to get some advice around the difference between being upfront and then what becomes oversharing or ADHD's. TMI. Too much information. So specifically for this question, if this is something that you are wondering about, I do want to be clear that you do not legally have to disclose in 95% of professions. So there are certain professions, such as, I know, the police force in New Zealand. The. There would no doubt be other potentially medical professions. I'm not sure there are a few professions where you do have to disclose and it will be in your employment forms. They will literally ask you outright, okay. Those are the instances where you have to disclose, but in 95% of cases, we do not have to disclose. Okay. So I did want to put that out there and I will still answer this question for you and bring it back to our topic. But where they've asked, you know, do you have any advice about how to disclose or how to approach disclosing? I thought about this and the answer I gave was, in this instance, I would recommend that you ask the question about the workplace and how they embrace neurodiversity in their workplace. So how do you embrace neurodiversity in your workplace? Right. That's a really sort of broad question that you could ask when given the chance to ask questions about the role or the workplace, etc. That question will give you such good insight into their workplace practices, into the level of awareness that the person interviewing you or the people interviewing you have around neurodiversity into their level of sort of acceptance, etc. That to me is like a really good vibe check before you decide if you want to go deeper. Okay. If you want to share further. So for me, that's what I would do. I would do a vibe check by asking a question like that to kind of get a read on the situation and their take on it and how they approach neurodiversity. So what I went on to say to this person was that being yourself is sharing from a place of choice. I said that at the beginning of this episode. Being yourself is when we share from a place of choice. Oversharing is when we're sharing from a place of urgency. So you may feel or see that show up as sort of an impulsive need to get it out. You may see it or feel it as anxiety or wanting to Create a connection really, really quickly. But the key difference here is not necessarily what you share. It's whether you feel safe, grounded, and in control of that sharing. So am I sharing this because I genuinely want this person to know, or am I sharing it because my nervous system wants relief or reassurance or an instant connection? Being ourself does not mean that everyone is entitled to every part of us. We can still be authentic and have boundaries. So a really important detail here, as I just said, is oversharing cannot be purely defined by the topic. Okay? Talking about trauma is not automatically an overshare. Talking about sex or grief or mental health, family money, none of that is wrong. It's not automatically classed as over. Sharing the same story or topic may feel completely right with one person and then it may feel like you are exposing yourself with another. Okay, so if we were to think about the difference between vulnerability and exposure for a moment. Vulnerability, whilst, yes, it can feel uncomfortable, right when you're being vulnerable, it feels a little bit like you're naked in public, but it feels. Vulnerability usually includes choice, an element of safety and discernment. Okay? Whereas exposure feels like suddenly noticing that you are naked in a cafe and you haven't even received your coffee yet. And I think that the Jules story, the story I shared at the beginning of this episode, is a great example because the content itself was not wrong. What I shared. I was, you know, telling the truth. I was being myself effectively. I was being honest and upfront. But the speed and the intensity of that sharing was driven by this need to manufacture closeness, to get over the small talk hump of the conversation. Before, our real world relationship had kind of caught up to the online one that we had created. So the question is not, you know, was that topic too personal? It is, did I choose to share it and did this person, had they earned access to it? I think that this is a really great way to think about it. And this is sometimes what I will think about in hindsight. If I have met somebody and potentially thought I've overshared, I'll think, you know, did I choose to share that? Was that a conscious choice or was it just a very impulsive thing? And do I feel like that person had earned access to that part of me? So I wanted to share a few questions that we can use when we are considering sharing something or, you know, in this situation where you may be meeting people for the first time, maybe it's you meeting your boyfriend's parents or friends of your new partner, maybe it is that you're in that, you know, job. Job application process and going through that recruitment process and meeting, you know, potential employers, teams, et cetera, what have you. Here are some of the questions. Number one, why do I want to share this right now? Number two, do I trust this person with this information? When I think about that question, I think about some of the things that I have shared with people over the years, knowing that I felt potentially, what's the word I want, like, out of alignment with that person, like, their values didn't really align with me. And so had I have thought about, do I trust that person with the information? The answer would have been no. And I would have potentially not necessarily shared what I did share. So it was so interesting for me to think about that one. Number three, am I sharing to connect or try to force connection? And I know in those instances, it was definitely the second one I was trying to force connection. Number four, will I feel okay if they respond awkwardly, dismissively, or not at all? And number five, would I still choose to tell them this tomorrow? I love that question, that last question, because for me, often the answer is no. It can be no, because in this moment, I'm feeling quite dysregulated, and I just want to desperately create connection or desperately get over this, you know, awkward conversation bit or what have you. So sometimes it's like, actually, no, I probably wouldn't. Now, I'm not saying you should ask all five of these every single time you interact with somebody. Oh, my gosh, heck, no. Let's be honest. We're not going to remember all five. But even one of them just kind of can help create that pause to put us back in the driver's seat. And I'm such a big, reflective person. I love to learn. On the flip side, I consider everything I do as gathering data, having a conversation with someone. Like, I'm gathering data about myself, about them, about communication, about interaction, about everything. And then I like to sift through that data and ask these sorts of questions to learn about myself, about other people. Right? So here's a really great way to think about it. Authenticity says this is true about me. Boundaries. Ask who gets access to that truth. Okay, so authentic sharing can sound like, this is personal, but I feel comfortable or safe to tell you this. Whereas urgent oversharing might sound like, I don't know why I'm telling you this, but I laugh because I have so been that person saying that, I don't know why I'm telling you this, but. And then I've actually Been on the flip side of that where people have told me things because I think they often feel safe, like I'm hopefully, I hope I am a safe place to tell some of the things that I've heard. And trust me, I feel like I have heard everything by this stage. Authentic sharing can sound like I'm sharing because this feels relevant and I trust this person. Urgent sharing might sound like I need to say something impressive or funny or shocking or vulnerable so that they like me. Authentic sharing often sounds like I can stop if I begin to feel uncomfortable or unsafe telling this, whereas urgent sharing often will sound like I can hear myself talking, but I cannot seem to stop myself or find the breaks. I've been there, too. Now, I do just want to reiterate this and be super, super, super clear, my friend. Okay? Now, if your mind has gone wandering, come back to me, because this, this part is so, so, so important. Okay? If you have wandered off, come back to me now. All right? You with me? Good. Oversharing is not bad. Oversharing is not a moral failing. It does not make you a bad person. As I shared earlier in this episode, oversharing is one of the things I enjoy and love about our ad community. I love to go deep. I love that we can skip the small talk and that that's okay, and that we create that safety for each other and we normalize that. And I also know from years of personal experience that have come from oversharing that there can be a thick layer of shame and regret. You can be kept awake staring at the ceiling at 2am, replaying that conversation that you had earlier in that day, thinking about all of the things you should have said. Okay. Completely unhelpful. Yes. Also, incredibly painful. Yes. So I just want to say it again. Oversharing is not a moral failure. Doesn't mean that you're an attention seeker. Doesn't mean you're broken or too much. It simply means that your brain was trying to create connection or safety or understanding or get relief in that moment. Okay? So let me share with you what I remind myself of and what I lean into as I am in this with you, as I navigate my own tendency to overshare. You do not need to become quieter, colder, or less of yourself. You don't need to turn every single conversation into a carefully managed PR campaign. You are allowed to be open, warm, honest, enthusiastic, and deeply human, whilst remembering that being yourself does not mean everyone is entitled to every part of you. It is okay to let connection build slowly. You can allow someone to earn your trust. And you can share a story because you've chosen to, not because your nervous system is desperate to fast forward the relationship. Authenticity does not require immediate access okay, I'm going to say that one again. Authenticity does not require immediate access to all of you. You are still being yourself when you pause. You're still being yourself when you keep something private. And you're still being yourself when you decide this part of me is precious and I'm going to wait before I hand it over. And hear me when I say this, it's also totally okay if you do over share. You can still love yourself and accept all of the messy, beautiful parts of you. And just know, even if you don't love and you struggle to accept the oversharing parts of you, I love them. I am here for them, my friend. Huge, huge love to you. Take care out there. I'll speak to you next week. 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 adult adhd.com.