Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright, and I’m here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Hi, Nikki. How are ya?
Nikki Kinzer:
I’m doing good. How are you?
Pete Wright:
Feeling so good. So strong.
We’ve got another continuing conversation, and this one’s continuing from maybe even a little further back, last season. We started a conversation. We actually set up a conversation in two parts last time around, and in the course of that conversation we only covered one of them. So it was a real setup, like a real sort of Acme, roadrunner, fall-into-a-trap kind of a thing. And we’re going to solve that today, because our guest is back.
Dr. Dodge Rea is back, and he’s going to be talking to us, continuing the conversation about misattunement. And whatever he was talking about last time is going to be finished this time. That’s the ADHD Podcast guarantee.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
A hundred percent. That’s right. There’ll be no questions left.
Pete Wright:
None. Dr. Dodge Rea, you are back. Hi.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Hi, I am back.
Pete Wright:
You’re allowed to speak.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Thank you for having me back.
Pete Wright:
Well, you’ve been here a number of times. I think it’s fair to say you probably entered the Hall of Fame. I didn’t do the count, but I think you’ve been here enough that you’re a Hall of Famer on this show. We sure appreciate you being here.
And last time you were here, we had this question that didn’t get answered: what happens when the person you’re most out of sync with is yourself? In this conversation, this journey toward misattunement. Now, I will also say that you said some things in that last episode that have become mantras around these parts.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Oh my goodness.
Pete Wright:
It’s not your fault. It’s not your fate, but it is yours. We talk about that all the time. Shame isn’t evidence of brokenness.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
It’s loyalty to old lessons that no longer serve you. Yoda, what?
That is so brilliant. So we started this conversation about shame and misattunement, and we want to kind of move that forward. Our intention with the show is right about that solo experience of misattunement, long before another person even enters the room. We want to talk about what it means to be intact with yourself.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
That is a worthy topic right there.
Nikki Kinzer:
Just that. That’s all we want to talk about.
Pete Wright:
Just that.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah, right.
Pete Wright:
Let us start with just a bit of a recap. What is attunement, and why is it important in your line of work?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I’m never one of those guys who thinks in just succinct definitions, but let me see if I can get my arms around it. I think you may have actually brought an actual definition out the last time we talked about it. A big part of attunement is what we talked about last time, this fundamental challenge of relationships, which is to be both in touch and intact at the same time. That means aware of and attuned to the other person’s needs and wishes and desires and essence, while also remaining attuned to our own needs and wishes and desires and fundamental essence.
And there’s an interesting thing for ADHD, and for lots of folks in the world, where there’s a lot of early training to be hyper-vigilant about the other’s experience first. And sometimes when we do that, we can really lose track of our own. It can look like, as soon as I start to get empathetic about the other, I lose track of having any thoughts of my own at all about what’s going on.
But in general, the thing about those two ways, as we talked about last time, is we all tend to be a little better at one of them than the other, or a lot. And even when we’re good at both of them, it’s really hard to do them at the same time. What’s easier is to sort of pendulate, where for right now I’m worried about you, or super empathetic about you, or really connected to you, or really aware of everything you need, and I’ve totally lost track of where I am in this. Is this okay with me?
It’s that classic thing, I betcha everybody listening can relate to, where somebody says, hey, can you do this for me? And you’ve said yes before you’ve remotely considered whether you can actually do this for me.
And that’s what the in-touchness looks like. The intactness is often where we get to when we’re either in a state of hyperfocus, or we are hurt or angry or something, and we can move totally into this-is-where-I-am and I can get maybe really defensive or really distracted or really something, and I’ve totally lost track of the context for, wait, am I aware of the other? It’s a part of, say, time blindness, but it’s also a part of a conversation where somebody’s saying, this is not a big deal, are you hearing me on that? And we are reeling in our own experience over here and have totally lost track of even the good parts of the other person.
So attunement, I think of as not ever something we can maintain constantly. And there’s some really interesting research about that we can get to. But the effort is to maintain a sense of the other and the self at the same time. And if both sides are doing that, then we feel really attuned. And there’s one more piece, which is that the sense of the other being attuned to us has to land, on both sides. You with me?
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
So my spouse may be actually really pretty connected to where I am and what I need, and is really tuned in.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, talk more about that part.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And if I don’t have a sense of that, if I don’t know that, it’s a very different experience from if I can feel heard and seen.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Simple as that.
Pete Wright:
As you are talking, I realize — and I’ll speak just for myself, but I have a feeling others will relate — that I don’t have much experience in the middle, where I can be aware of both of those things. If I’m in a state of hyper-attunement to someone else, I’m in full people-pleasing mode. I don’t think about myself at all. But if I’m in hyperfocus and I’m interrupted, for example, by someone else who has great need, if I’m focused so inward on myself, the wall is up and it is impermeable.
It becomes an opportunity to snap, to lash out, to respond irrationally, when they’re coming with a relatively simple need from me that I can accomplish, that otherwise, in a normal space, I would be just fine dealing with quickly. That’s the space that I find is most troublesome, finding middle ground.
So, you talk about research first. How do you research that? I’m really interested in that. But second, how do you take that space of being pendulously hanging on one end or the other, as you put it? How do you slow the frequency of those swings and find experience in the middle to re-attune?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
We should probably just name right up front that attunement is a totally hopeless exercise.
Pete Wright:
Outstanding.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Totally hopeless. Totally hopeless, but not at all serious. Because our idea about it is, I need to be doing this 95 to 100% of the time, or else I suck. Or we suck as a pair of humans.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And that’s just not true. What’s kind of interesting is that going back to some of the early experiments with parents and children, babies in fact, like how they attuned to their mothers, what they find is they do not have to be attuned to each other 100% of the time to be okay. It needs to be like 30% of the time. And then we make repairs.
So have you heard about the still face experiments of Ed Tronick? They’re kind of horrifying to watch, actually. This is where they’ll put a mother with a baby, and they’ll let the mom attune to baby, and baby’s cooing and smiling and mom smiles back because you can’t help it and it’s really sweet. And her face just does whatever it does as she stays connected to baby, and then watch the baby mostly connect to her but then sometimes drift off and come back. And then they have mom turn around for 30 seconds, and then she comes back, and she just does her best to keep her face still. Still and serious, just expressionless.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think that baby’s gonna cry.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Now isn’t that fascinating? Yes. But what does he do first? He does everything he can to get a rise out of her.
Pete Wright:
Oh, sure.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
He tries to get a reaction. So he coos harder. He bangs his little hand. He’ll do something to try and get her to react. He tries to do whatever he was doing bigger. And if she still is non-reactive while looking at him —
Nikki Kinzer:
To react.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It’s like looking at a clown face where the expression never changes. It creeps us all out.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And so he starts screaming. I mean, quickly.
Nikki Kinzer:
Like, where’s my mom? That’s not my mom.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Right. This is really freaking weird.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And this is what misattunement feels like way, way, way deep down inside of us, in our brains, when we feel like, why can’t I get you to hear me? It’s scary to our little kid brain. Now, we’ve all grown since then, so we also have adult brains that are like, hey, hello, you’re distracted, can you not look at your phone right now? But somewhere deep inside, the misattunement on either side is hard.
Pete Wright:
I imagine there’s an inverse of that too. When I think about our adult selves, at some point a version of that kid begins to learn that their needs are the problem. Our ADHD selves in elementary school learn that we are interruptions, we’re inconvenient, we are the thing that makes the room tense. And that kid grows up into somebody who is also likely dealing with misattunement misjudgments.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It can be that way for sure. It can also start from the other side, which is, for some growing up in homes that are terribly misattuned, either neglectful or abusive or traumatic in some ways, when there’s been a fairly catastrophic loss of attunement somewhere, sometimes that can produce a lot of what we think of as ADHD. What’s that little guy doing at first? He is doing everything he can to — he’s feeling frantic. He’s not himself grounded. And that can often be the way you feel if the energy is high and you’re having a hard time grounding. And that shows up in a lot of interesting ways.
So, neurologically, part of what’s happening is, when we grow up in a place where we’re not getting enough attunement, which only is again 30%, and the rest of the time repair — we never finished quite that thought. With Tronick, what they found was the still face experiment can drive baby crazy, but mom can come back, reattune, and baby completely goes back to normal without lasting effects. So this also shows up in the trauma literature. You don’t traumatize your kid if you’re attuned and getting it right most of the time, and the rest of the time coming back willingly, making repairs. This goes better.
When that’s not happening, sometimes what that sets up for us is a whole lot of extra beta activity in the brain, which is fast-moving, but it’s constantly problem-solving and has a hard time just sort of sinking down into a settled, comfortable, peaceful place.
Pete Wright:
The more I listen to you talk about it, the more I’m seeing that it seems like we’re talking about attunement as a state, not a skill. There may be meta-skills around reading micro-expressions and reading your own internal expressions, but attunement is a state. Is that a fair assessment?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
No, I think it is a skill. The thing about it is it’s a skill that you can’t ever master, like all the worthy skills. It’s a constant exercise and willingness to keep coming back to self and the other, knowing you’re going to lose it again. It won’t stay there. And that’s okay.
So the in-touchness often works pretty well for ADD until there’s distraction. But emotionally speaking, the in-touchness part tends to be easier to maintain. Neurodivergent folks tend to be extraordinarily empathetic and intuitive, and aware of the other, sometimes even with vigilance. The harder part is coming back to the intact state.
Pete Wright:
“With vigilance” is an outstanding tag.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah. One gentleman I work with, who I just saw earlier in group and he’s been in group for years, to this day most of the time, if I ask him how he feels while he’s interacting with somebody else, he will perfectly tell me how they feel.
Pete Wright:
Wow.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
So I’ll say, hey, what do you notice going on inside? What’s the emotional experience right now? And he’ll say, well, I’m feeling her anxiety, but also just an edge of anger. And I’ll say, right, that’s what she’s feeling. Do you have any idea how you’re feeling? And he’ll, years into this process, look surprised. And now usually he’ll laugh and he’ll be like, right, God, there it went again. And then he has to close his eyes and take a few breaths to come all the way back to me, because he’s been so beautifully attuned to everyone else.
But that came from somewhere. There was a place in his life where that was necessary. Not his fault.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Also not his fate, but it is his. And the thing he’s having to keep remembering is, wait a minute, I gotta find a way to remember to ask myself, what’s happening inside of me?
Nikki Kinzer:
I just have to say something, because something’s coming up for me that is so interesting. I can feel the anxiety in my stomach when we’re talking about this. Because when we’re talking about attunement, you guys are talking about it in an ADHD lens, but what hits me the hardest is that I’ve got two people that I live with who have chronic illnesses. And the attunement of not being mad or resentful for the extra things that I have to do to make sure they’re taken care of. And how do you deal with that? I’ve been doing it for years, years. And so it’s so interesting to hear this conversation, because I’m just having a physical reaction to it. Because it is hard. It is hard to put your needs first when the two people you care most about in this world are hurting and can’t do what you want them to do, or that they want to do.
I know it’s not their fault. I know they need help. And so it’s me putting my needs aside and saying, okay, I gotta step it up a little bit. Because it is ours. It’s ours. It’s not just theirs. It’s mine too.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Right. Can I blow your mind a little bit with a really simple idea that most people have never even considered? Anger and blame are not the same thing. So when you’re saying, how do I not be angry at this person who needs something, I think what you really mean is, how do I not blame them?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, because I’m not angry. It’s not their fault.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
But you are. Wait, wait, wait.
Nikki Kinzer:
I’m angry at the situation. I’m angry that they have these things.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
When you say I’m not angry, it’s not their fault, what you really mean is, I don’t blame them because it’s not their fault. But you might be angry. Some of the time. Not as a constant state, not as a belief system about them, but the passing experience of somebody’s chronic need that is never fully met and seems to fall on you disproportionately is inherently angering.
So the question isn’t, how do I stop being angry? It’s, how do I stay attuned to the fact that I am angry and I don’t want to take that out on these people I love. Otherwise you’re gonna have to shove all that feeling down here. And if you can’t stay in touch with it, you’re gonna find ways to act it out. It may be more passive-aggressive than aggressive, but you can’t help it. Feelings buried alive never die.
So knowing, man, this pisses me off, and it’s not their fault. And both are true. If I can have the anger, it doesn’t have to have me. If I can’t have it, it will have me sooner or later. It starts to eat us up. So how do I find a way to go be angry somewhere else? I don’t have to blast them. I don’t have to blame them. I don’t have to believe something new. I don’t even have to devalue them. But I do have to at some point maybe call my friend Pete or Dodge and say, oh my God, I love this person so much, but this drives me crazy.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And maybe I need to get a pool noodle and cut it in half so that I can take half a pool noodle and just go whack and make a bunch of noise when somebody else isn’t around, and release that for a minute. So I can get to the other side of it.
Or, wait a minute, maybe part of what I’m angry about isn’t about their chronic illness. It’s about me not giving myself enough rest. Or saying no sometimes, or getting extra help, or something. Maybe when I’m angry, I’m really more angry at myself for not meeting or recognizing a need I have, because their needs always trump mine. So this is what intactness sounds like.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
This is not, they no longer matter because dang it, it’s my turn.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
They do matter. I love them. But also, how do I recognize — I was thinking about it before our show. I was thinking, what is intactness to me? It’s not a complete definition. Surely in three hours I’ll think of a fourth thing that I should have mentioned, but for now, these three came to mind.
I think of intactness as a combination of authenticity, of self-valuing, and of a kind of sturdiness. And all three of these are states of willingness. They are things we give ourselves permission for, not things we go out and achieve.
Why are those three important for attunement? They’re almost self-explanatory, but it’s worth walking through. Without the authenticity — which, by the way, is difficult for everyone and nobody maintains all the time, so I’m going to keep saying that over and over again, because every ADD brain I know goes very quickly to “I can’t,” unless it’s a giant impossible dragon-slaying goal. And then they’re the ones who are like, yeah, we can do that. Which is awesome.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. And we can do that in a day.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And often true. And do that today.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
But very quickly can go to, oh my God, I can’t do it. And the biggest fear I notice is, I can’t do it consistently. And if I can’t do it consistently, it will be a failure, and I can’t be a disappointment one more time, so I shouldn’t even take this on. It’s just too painful.
So here’s the great news. You don’t have to do this consistently. It’s like breathing. The inhale, man, those are awesome, but you’re gonna have to exhale in between. It’s okay. Those are awesome too.
So, authenticity. Why is this a big deal? Well, for starters, you don’t really have any attunement if the person doesn’t know who they’re attuning to. If they don’t know who you are, what you need, what you want or love or value, they can be all kinds of attuned to the mask that you’ve put on. But it never feels good to you, because it wasn’t the real you in the first place. It doesn’t even feel good to them, because at some level they know that.
So trying to stay close enough to myself to know, what do I need? What am I really feeling right now? What’s happening for me? Where am I also in this conversation, even with this person who’s in the state they can’t help? But also, do I ever get to say, this is really hard? I think I need more help. I’m just too tired too much of the time, or something. You may not need to say that, but you could at least tune in and know if you could.
The self-valuing part, though, is that we teach the people around us how to treat us. We don’t know we’re doing it, but we do. We teach them out of the book that we pick up the most often. We have all the books around us. One of my books says, I matter. Another one says, I suck, I don’t matter at all. Another one says, in fact, I do matter, but only because I’m so terrible. I’ve got these books around, and I’ve read them all.
But the ones that I pick up the most often are the ones I tend to teach from. And if I am doing my best to remember I matter, and take in the feedback from people who love me who say I matter, then I tend to teach people to treat me like I matter. This is a big part of attunement.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
If we don’t, what we can easily do — and this is everybody — is go out and pick people who don’t treat us like we matter, or project onto them how we feel about ourselves. Or just perceive them not thinking we matter, even when they’re trying desperately to tell us we do. And when that doesn’t work, we’ll even provoke them into treating us like we don’t matter.
Pete Wright:
That’s the first thing that jumped out to me, and I immediately went to: I’m angry, I don’t know how to attune to the world, so I’m going to go join a fight club.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Right. And call it marriage.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right, for sure.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Right, that’s one easy way to do it. But it can be so much subtler than that. It can just be, my needs don’t matter, so I don’t talk about them. My birthday doesn’t matter, so I don’t let anyone know that it’s coming. My new book, my new song, my new piece of art doesn’t matter enough to show it to anybody. And then I still feel hurt on the other side when I don’t feel recognized. And that loss of attunement was at least partly on me.
Pete Wright:
I just want to dig into that point a little bit, because we’re talking about signals that we’re missing in ourselves. Again, from an ADHD perspective, is it an attention problem? Is it an interoception problem? We’re just unable to read and understand and define our own internal state, our own emotions. How?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Wow. That is a million dollar question. I mean this both as a joke and totally seriously: the disappointing reality is that you absolutely can do this. And the disappointment there is that the part that would really love to be off the hook from all the work it takes to do this well would probably rather hear, sorry, your brain can’t go there.
Pete Wright:
Yes. Well, mostly because there is this extra question, which is, there’s a difference between not noticing what I need and what my internal signals are, and not trusting my internal signals and not believing myself. And that gap is what allows us to say, oh well, I guess my brain can’t handle it.
Nikki Kinzer:
And from my experience with my clients, it’s the trusting. They don’t trust themselves. That is definitely the heavier weight that I see.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah. And the sad, painful reality is that they’ve probably experienced a whole lot of reason not to trust themselves. The impulsivity part can act on the first flicker of an instinct, and it may not have waited long enough to weigh that against the second and third and fourth ones that go, wait, that doesn’t feel quite right. And so sometimes they’ll just say the thing, or jump at the thing, or do the thing, and then go, oh man. See, I can’t trust myself at all. I always screw it up. And so the wait part can be hard.
But coming back to your phenomenal question, Pete: how does one start to get attuned to oneself? I think we need to back all the way up to a place where we can just take a minute with a breath or two, or a journal entry, or ideally maybe a therapist if somebody’s got a sense that they’ve got some really good reason for this. Let’s just pause for long enough to know, is there a chance that life taught me not to give myself permission to know myself? Is there a reason maybe it was important to be vigilantly attuned to everyone else’s needs and not to mine? Why do I keep jumping out of my body?
There’s a reason for it, most likely. And if I could just name that, that’s okay. A whole lot of people in the world have grown up in a world where it made sense to jump out of your body and be attuned to everybody else. I don’t have to do it forever. Not my fault, but not my fate. But it’s still mine.
Pete Wright:
I want to ask you a question that — I mean, you and I, for those who are new to you as a guest on this show, you and I have been friends for a very, very long time. Which some would argue too many years.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Thirty-two years, almost.
Nikki Kinzer:
I don’t think anyone would argue that.
Pete Wright:
I have seen some ups and downs for you. And I also know that as a practicing therapist, somebody whose entire career is devoted, on some level, to finding an attunement with other people’s trauma, grief, uncertainty, doubt, fear — I look at you as someone I aspire to in this regard, because I see you as a guy who generally is able to remain attuned inside and outside of that context. And it is kind of incredible to watch.
But I want you to unpack that for me from your perspective. What does it look like for you when you are actively attuned to yourself? What does Tuesday look like for you, when you notice you are aware of your experience in your skin and able to balance that with the experience of those around you?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t know how much of it was that I came from two parents who were really good at attuning to others, how much of that is my sort of life’s training, or maybe there’s something in just sort of my soul’s journey that’s a little like this. But I can acknowledge one of my gifts is to be able to really tune into somebody else in a way that is what Carl Rogers would describe as a mix of unconditional positive regard and genuine empathy.
The hard one is that the third ingredient he really wants to have there is congruence. Which is to be connected enough to myself that it is a genuineness that I bring to that. And most of the time I do that really well. Some of that is lots and lots of years of practice, but I have to acknowledge that it’s a little bit precarious to do this for a living for me, because it encourages me to stay so much attuned all day long to other people and not to myself, on the surface.
Thankfully, that’s not actually what it is to be a really good therapist or psychologist. What I really do on my best days is, I am with them, but also with me. And that’s not just better for me as a person, it’s better for them. Because if I’m staying attuned to me, what I’m getting is, I’m noticing, interesting, when they talk about this topic, that’s the third time I found myself holding my breath. Something’s up. Or, I’m really tired today.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I need to be aware of that. Or, interesting, I feel angry. What is going on? Is this mine or is this theirs? So I have to stay with, what’s the emotional content, what’s happening for me physically, how’s my energy, and so on.
And these are the kinds of questions, going back to your earlier question of, so how do you attune to yourself? First thing is, you have to give yourself permission to do it. And then you’ve got to decide, am I willing or not willing to do this? And as I have said a thousand times to my poor kid, you can’t be good at anything you aren’t willing to be bad at first. Would I be willing to be terrible at this?
Pete Wright:
Yep.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And keep trying.
Pete Wright:
Yep.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Maybe not.
Pete Wright:
It’s exhausting.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I don’t know if I want to be bad at this.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I think I’d rather just attune to everyone else.
Pete Wright:
But also, that’s a delightful line that tells you, you’ll know it when you find it. You’ll know when it’s exciting enough to be bad at something that you want to keep doing it in spite of that.
And you just gave me a mantra. I’m with them, but also with me. I can imagine — you said that, and those words. I’m with you. I’m also with me. I’m with you. I’m also with me. That’s like a mantra I can keep in my head that I can’t let go of.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Absolutely. That’s right.
Pete Wright:
That’s the attunement mantra. I’m with you. I’m also with me.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
That’s right. And that level of self-valuing leads to that third part, which is the sturdiness. Part of being intact is to be sturdy, and that means willing to receive feedback, willing to provide feedback, willing to hang in there for fierce conversations. To say the hard thing in as loving a way as I can, and to hear the hard thing with as much love, not just for them but for me, as I can.
Part of what gets in the way of all this, the antagonist, is this bedrock thing of shame. You guys have talked about it a bunch on this show, and it is a hell of a topic, because ADHDers love to come back to their shame.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Man, you get right on the edge of it starting to evaporate, and you can watch them go, wait a minute, wait a minute, I want to keep that. That was all happening in group this morning. One of the dudes has got a ton of shame about something. And you could see he’s right on this place where he could sigh and let some of it go. And then he’s like, wow, it’s scary to let go.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
But that is so vital for attunement, because that lets us hang in there for a conversation where somebody goes, you were late again for dinner. What is going on? And you say, that’s really got to drive you nuts. I get it. I’m really sorry. And they say, you said you’re sorry last week, and the week before.
And that’s where I want to go to shame. And I have to stay with, wait a minute.
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
The authentic part is, yeah, it’s scary when you say that. And I feel really sad. And I want to go to shame. But if I don’t go there for a minute, what else is left? I feel mad, kind of at myself. I feel mad at you for not understanding. Do you remember who you married? I feel scared that I’m never going to be able to get this right. But it really matters to me, because I want to be on time for dinner. I’m so sorry.
That is a really different apology from, yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was busy. I’m sorry. God, we’ve talked about this.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
That is not “I’m sorry.” But to stay in your feelings, to stay authentic, lets you be way sturdier, because you can be so much more flexible.
Pete Wright:
It’s a fascinating twist to remind myself that my own shame becomes sort of plot armor in the narrative that I tell about myself, or in the story that I’m building about conversations I don’t want to have.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
There is a part of me, weirdly, maladaptively, that doesn’t want to give up the shame, because I don’t know how to live without it.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
And that doesn’t mean I can’t live without it. It also doesn’t mean that things wouldn’t be better without it. It just means I don’t know, and I’m terrified of that experience. So I better use it as armor.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Right. And it is a very effective armor, because it means it’s very scary to say, hey, I need something from you, or could you be different, to anybody who carries a ton of shame. Because you know they’re going to absolutely collapse and dissolve, and that will break the attunement even further.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
So the threat is, if I wound you, which is easy to do, then you’ll disappear on me, and then I will have gone even further away. And all I wanted was to repair this and connect to you.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And so we have to be aware that we can carry our shame like a threat. And the other knows it. A child will know not to say to a parent, hey Dad, blah blah blah. And I think my son knows that about me. I have to remind him, it’s okay to be mad at me. It’s okay. I may even do that thing where I spiral for a minute. I will come back up. I’m not gonna drown in that. I’ll be back.
And then I’ll find a way to make it right. And by the way, I’m gonna screw this up several more times, but I’m hopefully gonna screw it up at better and better levels. I’ll catch it faster.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I’ll be more able. I’ll start learning systems. I’ll get better at this. But I’ll screw it up a lot, because this is one of the things that’s hard for me. It just is. I hate that. I hope you can relate in this moment, because maybe you’ve got some things that are hard for you you can think of. But this one’s hard for me.
And what I like to remind people of in an apology is, please don’t mistake the behavior for how I feel about you. I may screw this up indefinitely. I don’t know if I’ll ever quite get this right, because it is that hard for me. But I love you to pieces, and I would love to get this better for so many reasons. So I’m working on it.
Pete Wright:
Once again, I’m with you. I’m also with me.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
There it is. That’s right.
Pete Wright:
It’s perfect.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And that kind of flexibility gives us sturdiness.
Nikki Kinzer:
I love it.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
We can hang in there for a tough conversation and be like, yep. You nailed it. You were calling me out on the right thing. I’m mad at myself about it. I was mad the whole way home, knowing I’d be late.
Pete Wright:
As always, Dodge, what a treat to have you back and to have you help us out.
Nikki Kinzer:
It sure is.
Pete Wright:
You’re a fantastic teacher. Thank you for taking the time.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Such a pleasure. I know this was kind of a heavy one. We were talking about some of the painful stuff. I’ve got extra time if people have questions, and either way is good.
Pete Wright:
Well, that’s what we’re going to take advantage of you for next, for the live stream folks. We are going to be hanging out a little bit after we wrap this up, and we encourage you to become one of those people who gets to hang around and ask Dodge questions after the show. We’d love you to be a part of that. And you do that over at patreon.com/theadhdpodcast.
Dodge is a practicing therapist at the Lotus Center in Nashville. And if you were to see him in person, you’d be able to sit in his office with a view of the Vanderbilt clock tower behind him. It is picturesque. It is an absolutely gorgeous location. If you’re not in Nashville, well, sorry. You’ll just have to find him here on the ADHD Podcast.
Dr. Dodge, thank you. Thank you so much.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It’s true. Always a pleasure. And last message to everybody out there: don’t do this perfectly. You don’t have to do this perfectly. Get it right a bunch of the time, and then make repairs, and keep at it.
Pete Wright:
Love it. We appreciate all of you for downloading and listening to this show. Thank you for your time and your attention. Don’t forget, come hang out with us in the Show Talk channel. We’re heading over right there, the Discord server. You can join us there again by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level or better. Patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and Dr. Dodge Rea, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
