ADHD’s ultimate weapon to overcome - forgiveness

I’m sure if you have ADHD, then you may know what it feels like to have Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD). RSD can make up completely spiral after any perceived rejection, catastrophising and wallowing in despair of how awful we must be to have accidentally spoke over someone one time.

So how does this have to do with forgiveness? Who is this forgiveness for? Other people?

The forgiveness is for ourselves. Think about this carefully - do you look at a child learning about the world and scorn them for not knowing that what they’re doing isn’t perfect? Is perhaps a little rude? Do you scorn any person that has just picked up a hobby and isn’t instantaneously perfect? Or perhaps a friend that accidentally bumps into you, speaks over you (accidentally), etc? Usually, you afford all this forgiveness and understanding to these other people. Why aren’t you affording it for yourself?

Of course, you may be thinking “easier said than done” and you’re right. Learning to forgive ourselves is not an easy feat. But you can learn.

Step one is first recognizing when you’re in an RSD spiral. Hit the pause button. Step two is to take some deep breaths and try to engage with this feeling. Ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? What do I need? Sometimes the answer is a snack haha. But sometimes it’s that you might need to turn the TV off because it’s overstimulating you. Sometimes it means you need to excuse yourself to calm down first. And that’s step three - action and remedied action. Action as in how to ensure you are calming down in order to address the situation the way you want to. Remedied action as in action you do that is healthy instead of your comfortable RSD spiral actions.

You can apply this to many areas of your life. Forgive yourself for not being perfect. Forgive yourself for not always getting the chores done quickly. Forgive yourself for the occasional social faux pax.

This isn’t going to be a snap your fingers and it happens kind of thing. It’s going to take you a long time to even get step one down of recognition. But celebrate every time you make progress towards the change you want to see in yourself. Did you recognize it this time when you didn’t before? Fuck yeah! Compare it to how you maybe are learning basketball and you finally got the shot into the basket after all that practice. You get excited; you celebrate! It’s the same thing. You practiced so hard and you should celebrate even if it’s a small win.

For an example, I struggled a lot with getting too overstimulated and crashing out from it. It took me maybe a few years to get from recognition, to step two of pausing and engaging, and finally to no longer need to consciously remind myself. Every time it happened, I told myself - hey, this is a lot better than before. This time I’ve only fallen to old habit once this week when before it was multiple times. Then if it happened again I would recognize that it was less intense. And every step that I got better I celebrated it. I was proud of myself. I don’t need to consciously do the steps now because it’s finally a lot more natural to do. Just like any skill it takes practice until it becomes natural.

I want you to celebrate yourself every positive step you make. You deserve to be proud of yourself for learning gentleness for yourself and the subsequent forgiveness. You deserve forgiveness too.