A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD: Embrace Neurodiversity, Live Boldly, and Break Through Barriers

Product Information

This journey will help you shed the layers of shame and judgment so that you can honestly, quickly, and compassionately identify, appraise, and engage in supporting actions for your needs as a woman with executive functioning challenges. It is also about how you view and express your true self as a woman with invisible differences, which are challenges that other people can’t see from the outside.

ADHD-Friendly Chapter Takeaways pp Women with ADHD often harbor shame related to messages they received in childhood about being a person with differences.When you think about the concept of difference—whether visible or invisible, your own or that of others—what feelings or thoughts pop up?

Within its pages are strategies, tips, and worksheets to help readers overcome negative self-talk, combat the shame that may follow (and/or precede) an ADHD diagnosis, and connect with an understanding and supportive community. Because we can’t include everything we know about ADHD, this book assumes some familiarity with most ADHD basics. Or we can decide: I’m not going anywhere as long as this annoying person is somewhere on this train with me! You probably understand what we mean when we say that having ADHD can feel like you have something wonderful inside, just waiting to bloom, if only you could break free from all of the things holding you back. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

These preferences are communicated in innumerable ways—from media and books to our first-grade classroom to conversations with our classmates and parents. An ADHD-friendly guidebook that skirts the dizzying array of superficial strategies to address the powerful inner lives of ADHD women. When group norms promote fear of differences, these beliefs flow through generations, communities, and families insidiously.

It takes a great deal of awareness, introspection, courage, and assertiveness to break free from these invisible chains of fear. Your Core Sense of Self Your core sense of self, as we mean it here, refers to the unique, nuanced composite of all of the things you are: all of your qualities, quirks, and experiences.Perhaps you feel as if you’re caught in a web that binds you as much to do with to a limiting sense of yourself in the world. If you’re ready to develop a strong, bold, and confident sense of self, embrace your unique brain-based differences, and cultivate your individual strengths, this step-by-step workbook will help guide the way. Or maybe you shame yourself, which involves converting something external into an internal, painful core belief about who you are. These management functions of the brain can affect your ability to activate yourself enough to begin a task, to sustain focus once you start the task, and to stick with it when your energy or interest wanes—and that’s just for starters! We know, without a doubt, that tackling the issue of shame is absolutely imperative for people with ADHD.

Oftentimes, these messages contribute greatly to the tangles that keep us trapped in layers of shame, guilt, fear, and general not-good-enough-ness. It is a beautifully written, inspiring resource and tool that every human being living with shame, blame, and misperceived negative emotions of being ‘less than’ needs to refer to daily. We know this to be true because the response was thunderous; women around the world felt empowered by the simple knowledge that they were not alone, and that their struggle had a name. Many of the messages and limiting beliefs that we as women with ADHD have deeply internalized come from our early experiences with differences and the perceptions of those close to us.During early stages of living with undiagnosed ADHD, it’s likely you felt overwhelmed simply trying to get through the day as unchecked symptoms flared up, “ADHD mind” prevailed, emotional storms overpowered, and every day felt like constant firefighting. As a rule, systems of all kinds resist change, because the group members are familiar and comfortable with the “way things have always been”—even if that way has always been unhealthy. While an in-depth description of these terms is out of the scope of this project, we want you to understand that challenges with these management functions of the brain cause many of the struggles for women and are very descriptive of the way you may experience ADHD.