Around the time that I was diagnosed with ADHD, I was a baby therapist reveling in the delights of the fellowship of my colleagues at the Portland DBT Program, Portland, OR. I attempted to grasp the meaning of my ADHD and started a course of medication, which was very helpful and helped me mitigate some elements of my executive function deficits. I was already steeping in the principles and practices of DBT, which adherent DBT therapists are coached to embody in their daily lives rather than merely “know them” theoretically as concepts to be doled out to patients.
Although it would be another ten years before I began to do a deep dive into the neurobiology of ADHD and a more serious mindfulness practice, I began to intuit that I was living as a divided and fragmented person. I intuited this fragmented living was not necessary. I have to say, twenty-six years into practice as a DBT therapist and a beneficiary of the entailed behavioral technology, I experience myself as increasingly coherent, congruent, competent, and confident, correlating with ongoing living into integration with mindfulness and DBT skills.
I can say that one very critical way that I’ve benefitted from growing my knowledge of ADHD and my DBT practices over these last twenty-six years lies in the practice of radical acceptance and self-compassion.
You see, if you’re an ADHD adult like me, perhaps you know the exhaustion that comes from pretending to be a competent adult. This is well-known these days as the unfortunate verb to adult. “I’m not very good at adulting,” or “I’m still learning to be an adult,” and so on. The exhaustion I once experienced emerged from my attempt to bilocate my personality, projecting an image of hyper-competence outwardly on the one hand. On the other hand, I was living with rejection-sensitive dysphoria and fear of judgment, which, ironically enough, was rooted in my judgments and criticisms about myself. I was ping-ponging between my hyper-competence (something DBT calls apparent competence) and my self-loathing for lacking competence.
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