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As always, some beautiful thoughts. I love how great you all are.
I won’t offer any advice, @dithl. It’s just crappy.
My father passed away suddenly in 1989 and he is still in my thoughts.
What you are going through is the worst. And I do think most ADHD people feel things more deeply that other folks. And because we’re working on three new videos on ADHD & Emotions, I’ve been listening to a lot of very smart ADHD experts talking about this.
One of the videos with hyper-sensitivity. Being too sensitive. Too touchy. Over reacting. Feeling things so deeply that it takes us down. From the earliest days ADHD experts like Paul Wender, Thomas Brown, and Russell Barkley talked about ‘our sensitivity, emotionality, and depth of feeling, sometimes to where it’s a problem. ‘Emotional dis-regulation.’
Coach Barbara Luther shares some stories of her own experiences, and explains something called Empathetic Distress, which is pretty much what it sounds like. We can feel someone else’s pain so deeply, that we make it our own.
Sometimes that has happened to me. It’s why I can’t watch violent movies or programs where children are killed. They aren’t just characters on the screen. I end up caught up in thoughts of, “What if…?”
I hope you keep coming back and sharing where you are at. I can tell you Ava and I lost 7 family members over an 18 month stretch a few years back, and it’s still there for us.
I know you aren’t looking for advice. In fact, actually, just writing it out and letting others share their experiences, is a good way to get the emotions out. Keeping them held in or suppressed is exhausting. When my father died I basically put my own feelings on the back burner to be there for my mom and help cheer her up. Dumb, but hey, that was how I dealt with stuff.
Ridiculous now that I look back at it. You can’t cheer up someone who has lost their partner of 45 years! You have to let them grieve. I didn’t get that. Being a guy, I wanted to fix it, heal it, have mom move on and climb out of the sorrow and regret and suffering.
It delayed the process. And I hate the word process, because it sounds so industrial or clinical, but had I really stopped feeling bad about my father, who was an amazing guy, my hero, and what happened? It simmered and percolated and then it came out in waves of sadness, a mild depression, and losing myself in work to try to feel good.
When I was able to just sit and talk about how much I missed my dad, and let it out, and cry, I was able to also smile. (You can only cry so much. It’s weird how much laughter there can be at funerals.) I was able to focus on all the good stuff, and see that while my Dad had died sooner than we expected, and completely out of the blue, he had a great life.
I found that as I was able to get to the good stuff, and this took years and years, my mom was able to find peace too. We could talk about dad. And not have it turn into bitter regret on her part, and me trying to put a happy face on it to cheer her up. We could actually remember what a great character my dad was and laugh at stuff he did or said.
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