Kristen Carder 0:05
Kristen, welcome to the I have ADHD podcast, where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults. With ADHD, I’m your host, Kristen Carter and I have ADHD. Let’s chat about the frustrations, humor and challenges of adulting, relationships, working and achieving with this neurodevelopmental disorder, I’ll help you understand your unique brain, unlock your potential and move from point A to point B. Hey, what’s up? This is Kristen Carter, and you are listening to the I have ADHD podcast. I am medicated, caffeinated, regulated and so ready to roll.

What’s up? It’s so good to be here with you today. I am just like enjoying life. It snowed six inches this week. My kids are on a two hour delay. Today, it is full fledged winter in eastern Pennsylvania, and I’m loving every second of it. My Drive to Phillies today was white and beautiful. Normally it would be gray, dreary, no leaves on the trees, mud everywhere, just like very, very depressing, but today, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping. There was white snow on the ground. It was absolutely gorgeous, and I enjoyed every second of it. I really did. I am pumped to be here with you today for a solo show. We’re going in all different directions, and I just I hope you’re here for it. I really do. I want to start off by saying that I have talked about this a little bit on the podcast, and I even had an episode this summer. But I want to let you know that I am one year and one month alcohol free, like Cheers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am so happy. I am so relieved. This is one of the best things that I’ve ever done for myself.

A year ago, so 2023, the what night was it? New Year’s Eve was the my last night of regular drinking. I was like, I cannot do this anymore. Something has to change in 2022 and 2023 I tried to reduce my alcohol consumption about 200 times. I tried and failed to moderate more. Now, if you listen to the episode this summer where I talked about being six months alcohol free, I was, I shared with you that like I was never blackout drunk. I was never drinking like in excess, necessarily, but I was drinking every single day, every single day, there was not a day that was going by where I did not consume an alcoholic beverage. So even though I made myself feel a lot better by saying, I mean, it’s not like I’m getting drunk, it’s not like I’m having three it’s not like I’m I’m, you know, forgetting things. And it’s not like it’s really impacting, like I had all of this inner chatter that helped me to just continue the habit of drinking. It wasn’t serving me. It did not make my life better.

It actually made my life worse. I struggled with headaches. I really, really struggled to sleep. I for the first, like, six hours of the day, I had major brain fog. I got headaches all the time, and I I, I wanted to be the person who could just drink on the weekends. I wanted to be the person who didn’t care about alcohol, who could go out and not drink. I wasn’t that person, and it was actually really hard for me to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t that person. I am a professional. I am a mom of three, I am married to a pastor. I am a person of faith, like all of those things, and I’m a woman like all of those things kind of lend toward maybe a little bit of shame around the fact that I was not someone who could be chill about drinking. I had to do it every day. I wanted to be the person who could go weeks between drinks. I tried to make myself into that person. And like I said, for two years, I tried to moderate. I tried to be like, Okay, I’m not gonna drink during the week. I’m only gonna drink on weekends. And then, inevitably, around 456, pm, I.

I would just like talk myself into having a beverage. And like I said, I wasn’t getting slashed. I wasn’t finishing the bottle. It was always a glass of Cabernet, red wine, usually Francis Coppola, not really like fancy, like, it was just a very delicious, robust red, not to sell you on it or anything. I still love it. I still think about it. I still crave it. I still want it. I absolutely love Francis, Coppola, Cabernet, however, let’s Shall we move on? Shall we move on? I, I was never the person that could just drink on the weekends. I was never the person that could just, like, forget about alcohol and only drink once in a while. Only drink for special occasion occasions. I then said to myself, well, I’ll only drink when I’m, like, out at like, you know, or like a restaurant or with friends. I couldn’t do it. I inevitably, I would always have alcohol every single day, every single day. And so for me, moderating wasn’t an option. I wonder what your experience is like. But for me, I couldn’t be the person who drank less. I was drinking the same every single day as I always did, one to two glasses of wine every single day, without fail, without interruption. 365 days a year. That’s interesting.

And so on December 31 30 days has September, April, June and November. Okay. December 31 2023, I three, I just was like, This is it? This is the last. And I had my last like drink, and then I didn’t drink again for quite some time. Now, I want to explain my thought process during 2024 it was a little too much for me to say I’m never, ever drinking again. And I found this woman, and I shared this on the last episode that I did that talked about the concept of local sober. So she was like, I don’t drink in my home state. So if I go out of state and something is that, you know, I’m on vacation, or I’m at a wedding, I will have a beverage out of state, but I’m not going to drink in my own state. And so that’s the rule that I made with myself. I was like that. I feel like I can do that. I’m not saying I’m never drinking again, which felt like too much of a commitment, but if I could just get myself to be a local sober that was at least allowing for alcohol to be a part of my life, but not in my everyday and that’s what I wanted to stop. I wanted to stop having it be a part of my everyday life. I knew it wasn’t making my life better. It was making my life worse. I knew that. But I couldn’t just moderate. I couldn’t drink less, and so I decided to be a local sober.

And so for four months, from January to April, I did not have one beverage. And I’ve shared this with you. It was very hard. It was harder than I wanted it to be. It was harder than I want to admit to you. It was harder. It was embarrassed. It was embarrassingly hard. The amount of cravings, like guys, alcohol is addictive. I don’t know if you know this. Alcohol is addictive. So I, while I would not consider myself to have been an alcoholic, I was absolutely addicted to alcohol. As many of us are as most people are, right? Anybody who is drinking regularly likely addicted. It’s an addictive substance. Okay? Anyway, so in the course of 2024, for the last, whatever year, I had four beverages total, and I remember every single one of them outside of my home, outside of my state, I could run down them with you. But like I had a modelo in Mexico, it was great. I had a glass of wine in Florida. It was great. I had a beer at a pub in England. It was great, like the they were like experiences, and it was great. And I didn’t bring the habit back to my home. And I just have to say, in a year, my life has changed so much for the better. I heard someone say once that nobody regrets getting sober.

I want you to like, sit with that for a second. Nobody regrets getting sober. We so often regret how much we drink, but nobody ever regrets getting sober. I sleep like. The baby, I sleep so much better. I can’t even explain to you how much better I sleep. That didn’t happen right away. That took a couple months, but I sleep so much better. I feel better, far fewer headaches, far less brain fog, so much more energy. My circadian rhythm has been totally reset. So this year, that was a huge difference. So if you struggle to go to sleep and you struggle to wake up, and like all of that, I eliminated alcohol, and my circadian rhythm is rhythming, like the it’s the rhythm is rhythming. It is so amazing. I did not intend for this to happen, but I lost five pounds, like right around the center of my belly. Um, I’m a mom of three. I’ve carried three babies, all of them over eight pounds. They were large, large babies, um, and so, yeah, I had, I, like, have mom pooch, but which is fine. I accept it and embrace it. But I lost five pounds right there without doing anything differently, just cutting out alcohol, I’m more alert, I’m more creative and innovative. I’m getting so much more done.

And I understand how annoying this sounds, because I used to listen to people talk about being alcohol free and being like, Bitch, Don’t take the one thing that’s good in my life away from me. Sorry. I got a podcast review recently that said I was very vulgar, which I think is hilarious, but I do admit that I just said the B word, so apologies. Apologies. But, like, seriously, I used to get so annoyed because I would be like, life is so hard, like, look at your life. Look at my life. It’s so hard and you want to take away the one thing that relieves stress in my life, the one thing that allows me to escape in my life, the one thing that makes my perception was like, That makes parties more fun, that makes gatherings more fun, that makes me less anxious and social. Said, you want, you want to take that one thing away from me, like, hands off, cut it out. So I remember, like, if that’s how you’re reacting to this, it that’s fair. I’ve been there. I have done that. I I had that perspective for years, but something shifted when I realized that it wasn’t just like adding fun to my life, it was also adding a ton of anxiety, a ton of inability to sleep, a ton of, like, brain chatter in my head, and I didn’t have control over it when I really realized that, like, because I did dry January, and dry January was, like, so hard, and I was like, This is so embarrassing.

This is so embarrassing that dry January is so hard. So I, like, stayed dry and like did February, and then I was like, Dang, this is so hard. It took me three months for those cravings to subside. Three months. That’s not nothing. And like I said, I want to remind you I was not getting drunk. I was drinking every day, one to two glasses of wine. I was not getting drunk.

I was not like, I’m not blacking out. I was not doing anything that I regretted, other than being like, more impatient with my kids. But other than that, I wasn’t like, there weren’t any behaviors that I could point to, like, you’re blacking out and you’re or you’re, like, buying stuff on the internet, or, like, I couldn’t point to any of that, but I know it wasn’t serving me, and now I just feel so free. So in 2025 I don’t plan to drink at all. I am really, really, really relieved to not have it. Have a hold on me anymore. I don’t think about it. I don’t crave it. It’s not a part of like, my brain chatter. Anybody who struggles with alcohol understands the brain chatter that comes along with it. Like, should I drink? Shouldn’t I drink shit? Like, what time, what time’s appropriate? Like, how much, so much brain chat? I don’t have any of that. Do you know what I have? I have a fridge full of sparkling water. It’s so delicious. That’s what I have. I have a fridge full of sparkling water. Oh my gosh, if I could write a love letter to sparkling water, here’s what it would say, Dear, sparkling water, I love you so much. You have changed my life. You give me so much fizzy dopamine in my mouth, I just like it courses through my veins. I. Love you. San Pellegrino, I love you. Perrier, I love you. Spin drift, I love you. Liquid death, I love you. Polar ice, I love you. This is my love letter to sparkling water. I I love you, I love you, I love you.

My fridge is full of sparkling water, and that’s what I crave now. It’s the best. Like, you know what? I could really go for San Pellegrino, and then I drink it, and it’s literally water, and it’s fine, and I move on, like, it’s so, so so great. That’s probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever said, is like a love letter to sparkling water. But I think that’s fine. So again, I want to say that I understand that alcohol is a tool that I had to use in order to survive my life, and I did. I used it as a tool, and I did survive my life. I understand that there was nothing wrong with me, and there was also, I don’t look at it as something wrong with using it as a tool. I didn’t have other tools in my tool kit.

I was going through a lot, if you knew anything about my life, in 2022 and 2023 I was just I was going through a lot in the last five years, and so using alcohol as a tool to self soothe was something that I actually needed. But then I realized that it was not serving me anymore. And here’s what I want to say many of us with ADHD, many of you listening, you’re undiagnosed or untreated or, like, I want to say improperly treated. But what I mean by that is like whatever medication you’re taking is just like, maybe not the right fit for you, but it’s like too hard to find the right one. Your doctor is gaslighting you or calling you a pull pitch, a pill pusher, or whatever the case may be. So you may be undiagnosed, or you may be diagnosed and mistreated, or you may be diagnosed and not taking meds, whatever we need, something to help us feel stable and regulated. That is a fact, like people with ADHD, need something to help us feel stable and regulated. Many of us turn to alcohol. Many of us do. This is actually very, very well documented. There are many studies published. I’m going to link a couple of them in the show notes. This one is from Science Direct. It says that impulsive decisions and a maladaptive reward system. Hello, our dopamine reward system is straight up broken. It makes individuals with ADHD vulnerable for alcohol use, and up to 43% develop an alcohol use disorder. In adults with alcohol use disorder, ADG occurs in about 20% but and hear this, this is important, is vastly under recognized and under treated. So it’s far more than 20% that occurs in people with alcohol use disorder. It’s just unrecognized and untreated.

Okay, another study published in the National Library of Medicine says that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a childhood mental health disorder that can lead to alcohol and other drug related problems if it persists into adolescents and adulthood, which we now know that, yes, ADHD persists into adolescence and adulthood, several findings suggest that ADHD contributes to the development of alcohol or drug use disorders, and ADHD generally precedes hear it, hear it. ADHD generally precedes alcohol use and is correlated with developmentally inappropriate levels of alcohol use or abuse, meaning ADHD precedes alcohol use disorder. You have ADHD. Maybe it’s not treated well. Maybe it is treated well. Like in my case, I knew I had ADHD.

I was being medicated for ADHD, but there was so much going on in my life that I didn’t have the tools to support and I suspect that if I had met with an empathetic clinician who would have prescribed me, perhaps an anxiety medication, maybe I would not have leaned on alcohol as much as I did. I think that I could have really benefited from an anxiety medication over the last five years?

This is just a suspicion. So obviously, I don’t know because I didn’t try it, but I do wonder if an anxiety medication and. Treating the turmoil in my body and like the need for dopamine, serotonin, self soothing, treating that with an anxiety medication rather than alcohol, I do wonder if that would have prevented what I now understand and accept was an alcohol use disorder like straight up, absolutely okay. I just want to draw your attention back to this statistic from the study published in Science Direct ADHD makes you vulnerable for alcohol use, and up to 43% of ADHD ers develop an alcohol use disorder. So this like middle class mom of three pastor’s wife having ADHD and a likely alcohol use disorder. It’s not shocking. It’s not shocking like this, this, I’m just part of that stat.

And I guess I want to share my story, to normalize it, and to let you know that if you are suspecting, like, I wonder if I could, like, stop drinking, but like, I don’t really want to, but like, I wonder if it has some control over me that’s just like, continue to think about it, continue to observe your internal experience. Continue to observe if it’s serving you, continue to observe if it’s helping you to sleep, if it is actually helping your anxiety. There’s so much research now to show that, like it doesn’t actually help anxiety, it is a depressant at first, and then what happens is, your brain actually ends up producing more serotonin. What is the one with that starts with the C cortisol? Sorry, are you? It was the raw it was the wrong hormone. Your brain actually ends up producing more cortisol and flooding you with those like that anxiousness because of the the way that alcohol depresses your system. So for me, being able to be like relatively alcohol free in the last 13 months has been absolutely incredible. I was thinking the other day as I was preparing for this. You know, what’s considered, quote, unquote, normal amount of drinking in America right now is seven ish drinks a week for women, and 14 ish drinks a week for men.

And it doesn’t have to be over a certain amount of days that you could have 14 drinks in one day and and it still says that it’s like moderate drinking, which I think is absolutely ridiculous. But if I were to have not made this change, I would have had 365 drinks in 2024 at the minimum, I was having at least one drink every single Day. 365 that’s a wild thought. I had four, four memorable glasses of alcohol, which I did not regret, and I also did not carry into my habits. And that’s why I say I definitely do not identify myself as an alcoholic, and I know there’s like differences in that. But I am just so glad that I had four and not 365 or 700 or whatever it would have been. And in 2025 my commitment to myself is to have zero. And honestly, I don’t feel like I’m missing out, which I think is the biggest deal, to not drink and not feel like you’re missing out. I feel like that is the very biggest deal. So I just want to encourage you that if this is something that you’re thinking about, to just give it a try. See if you can go 30 days. There’s a couple resources that I shared in the podcast from the summer, obviously, aa, Alcoholics Anonymous, that is an amazing resource for a lot of people. But there are other ways to get sober. Talk to your doctor. If you drink in excess, you need to talk to your doctor first, because it could be very, very, very dangerous for you to go cold turkey, so make sure that you discuss it with your doctor.

And for me, I joined this like I joined this like mom group called sober mom squad. It’s so embarrassing to admit that to you. Oh my gosh. But I joined this like sober community. Many of moms who were who wanted to cut back on drinking, they welcome, like, sober, curious or like completely. So it was kind of just like an all, all are welcome in the space, kind of a situation. And that was really helpful to me. I also listened to the podcast, sober, awkward. I actually fell asleep listening to it last night, because that’s my new thing. I fell asleep listening to podcasts and sober, awkward podcasts. I’ve mentioned it on here before. I absolutely love it. Like resources like that were very, very helpful to me. So I I just wonder how you’re feeling after hearing this conversation, because if you’re anything like I was over a year ago, I would have resented this conversation. And if that’s how you’re feeling, I completely understand. I can handle it. You’re You’re welcome to have feelings in this space. I’m not scared of them, but I do invite you to question whether or not drinking is serving you and whether or not you might have any other tools in your tool kit that you would want to lean on. What other tools for feeling good in your body might you be able to lean on? Would it be worth I wish I had somebody say to me, Kristen, I think you could really benefit from an anxiety medication. I really do if I were honest about about, like, the addiction that I was experiencing to alcohol, I think maybe people would have said that, but obviously I wasn’t going to tell anybody the strong pull that I felt toward it. But I wonder, like in your case, what are the things that that could be? Tools? Would it be getting a proper like medication for ADHD, would it be maybe an anxiety medication that could be temporary?

It wouldn’t, you wouldn’t necessarily have to be on that forever. Would it be maybe some some therapy, a community you could join focused like any of these might be a help and a support for you that you could lean on instead of alcohol, all right, let’s change the subject. Like, are you ready? I sense some of you are totally enthralled and like, with me in this. And then I sense other others of you are just like, okay, get on with it. We get it. All right. We’re gonna change the subject. Everyone with ADHD knows what to do to improve their lives. You go to bed at a reasonable time and you wake up early, make a list, cross the things off the list in order. Yeah, we know what to do, but ADHD is not a disorder of not knowing what to do. It’s a disorder of knowing exactly what to do but not being able to get yourself to do it. That’s why I created focus. I’m a life coach with multiple certifications, and since 2019 I’ve spent 1000s of hours coaching adults with ADHD. Time for me to focus on you. Hello. Welcome to your coaching call. I know what it takes to help an adult with ADHD go from Hot Mess express to grounded and thriving. I’ll teach you how to understand your ADHD brain, regulate your emotions and accept yourself, flaws and all with this foundation, we build the skills to improve life with ADHD. And not only do you get skills and tools in focus, but you’re surrounded by a huge community of adults with ADHD who are also doing the work of self development right alongside of you. Dr Ned Hallowell says healing happens in community, and I have absolutely found this to be true. So if you’re an adult with ADHD who wants to figure out how to be motivated from the inside out and make real lasting changes in your life. Join hundreds of others from around the world in focused. Go to I have adhd.com/focus to learn more. That’s I have adhd.com/focused we are going to talk about pathological demand avoidance. First, we’re going to hear from a voice mail call in. Remember that if you want your question answered on the podcast, you can call 833-281-2343, we always link this in the show notes, so don’t worry about remembering it here. But let’s hear a voice mail from Jenna, and then we’re going to talk about PDA. Here we go.

Jenna 29:37
Hi, Kristen. My name is Jenna. I am a mom of three living in Southern rural Virginia, and our oldest two are adopted from foster care, and we have a biological child, and my oldest has really severe ADHD, which actually, even though he’s adopted, learning more about him made me see my own diagnosis. So I’ve been diagnosed for. Two years, and one of the biggest things I see that he struggles with is perceived demand avoidance. PDA, a lot of kids are often diagnosed with oppositional defiance, odd, but I don’t think that’s fair to do to neurodivergent kids, and I see a little bit of that in me. And so going to therapy in the past, you know, they mainly try to do CBT cognitive behavioral therapy, but that doesn’t work, because that just gives me more demands on an already overwhelmed system. And I feel that way about joining something like focus that you give no doubt you do help so many people and you can help so many people, but that feels like another task that I have to complete Am I already overwhelmed life of being a mom of three working full time and a mom of neurodivergent kids with trauma, so I was just wondering if you could touch on that. What does PDA look like? What does it mean, and how do we overcome that? Because it can stand as a barrier to us taking care of ourselves when someone else suggests something that we should do for ourselves. So thanks.

Kristen Carder 31:05
Oh my goodness, I’m so glad you asked this. Jenna, thank you so much for calling in. So I need to say right off the bat, I am not an expert in PDA. I have been researching it, and I also see it in one of my kiddos. So I’m going to talk through that lens as someone who has done some research. I follow some PDA accounts on Instagram. What my favorite one is, at peace parents. That one is a really, really good, informative one. I have a couple PDA they refer to themselves, and so I’m gonna refer to them as PDA ers, so it’s like ADHD er but like pathological demand avoidance. PDA, PDA ers, so I have a couple PDA ers in focused who have really educated me on this subject, and I intend to have a guest expert, come on and talk about it. So these are my disclaimers. Okay, I intend to have somebody come on and talk about it, from the autistic experience, from the experience of someone with pathological demand avoidance, or sometimes it’s called persistent drive for autonomy. I’m not an expert, but I have been researching it, and I believe that one of my children is PDA, and so we’ve totally changed our parenting style with him, and it’s made a huge difference. So that’s the perspective that I’m coming from. Okay, the first thing we need to understand and know is that it is currently under the umbrella of autism, not ADHD. This is not to say that people with ADHD don’t experience pathological demand avoidance, but it is a profile of autism right now, and so there’s a huge overlap between autism and ADHD. So it makes sense that ADHD ers might struggle with it, but it’s really important that we or that I am clear that PDA is a profile of autism.

not an official diagnosis in the US. It is something that is like coming to the forefront that we’re learning, we’re beginning to learn about, we’re beginning to understand, and hopefully, the autistic and PDA community are the ones like leading the charge on that, as with everything else with neurodivergence, like it’s really difficult and hard, and what’s the word like upsetting when neurotypical people are the ones talking about the specific neurodivergence, because someone who’s neurotypical is just approaching it from a completely different lens, and so we want to make sure that we’re allowing the people who experience it to drive the conversation about it, which is why I’m going to have somebody come on. We’ve actually, I’ve asked her to come on, and we’re working on scheduling. So the best way that I can describe pathological demand demand avoidance is it’s actually a nervous system disability where the PDA person’s nervous system literally goes into fight or flight at a perceived demand or loss of autonomy or control whenever there is a perception that a demand is being placed on them, or when there’s a loss of autonomy, when they don’t have control, when they’re not in charge of their own space, of their own body, of their own day and schedule their their nervous system goes into fight or flight. So this can lead to very oppositional behavior.

Absolutely there is literally a temper tantrum, a meltdown at the perception that their autonomy or their control is being taken away. What this. Looks like in kids and and what I saw in my own sweet, sweet, wonderful, perfect child is that he wanted to be in charge of everything from the moment that he came out of the womb. He was not like other kids, and I was parenting alongside of other women, my friends, who were also having babies, and my baby was not like their baby, and and, and I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand I know. I don’t understand why my child’s not sleeping. I don’t understand why my child’s crying all the time. I don’t understand why my child is like having a melt, like he’s waking up from a nap and he’s having a meltdown, a meltdown that sounds like a night terror, like a terror. I did not understand. I also didn’t understand how much my child was masking so my sweet, sweet child would go to a babysitter, or they would go to a friend’s house, or they would go to a family member’s house, and they would be easy. They’d be so easy. It would be so easy and and the the person who was watching them would be like, I don’t really know what you’re talking about, because, like, he’s so easy. And then I would bring my child home, and they would melt down, and they would be defiant, or what seemed like defiance, they would want to be in charge of it. What I, what I, what I know now, is that because I was his safe place, and I was the person that he could be his himself with, he was allowing his nervous system to go to like, be honest, and he wasn’t having to mask like he did at, you know, a family member’s house or at a friend’s house. So it looks like in a child, it looks like a lot of meltdowns, but it can also look like refusal to do basic things like eat or sleep or toilet regularly.

So it can be very, very concerning. And again, I don’t know enough about it. My child never got to that stage in his in his childhood where he did not get, ever get into the stage where he was refusing to eat, refusing to sleep, or refusing to toilet. However, there was a period of time in his adolescence, and this is when we began to aggressively pursue a diagnosis. There was a period of time in his adolescence when he did resist these things when, when he was in what looked like burnout, when I couldn’t figure out why my kiddo, what just like was isolating, wasn’t functioning, couldn’t get out of bed, wasn’t able to do any of the quote, unquote, normal, regular tasks. He was exhausted all the time. He was engaging in behaviors that were not helpful to him, that were actually harmful to him. And so when, by the grace of God, one of my focused clients posted about pathological demand avoidance in our community, I started to cry as I read the research, because I was like, Oh, this is my kid. This is my kid. When something feels like a demand, even if it’s something that he wants to do, his nervous system freaks out, even if it’s like something that he knows that he needs, and it’s like, I need to eat, and then he’s like, You can’t tell me what to do. It’s like, this internal freak out and battle. It’s not their fault. It’s not something they can control, and it’s extremely debilitating.

Oh, this is a lot, Michelle, are you getting more than you bargained for? I’m just I’m really happy to be talking about this, because, like I said, I’ve been wanting to have a whole episode on this topic, and I really want people with ADHD to begin to look into it. You can google PDA. You can google google pathological demand avoidance. You can google persistent drive for autonomy, and also begin to follow autistic creators who fit this profile, because that’s really going to help you to understand the demands that PDA ers resist. Can be internal. They don’t have to be external, and they do a ton of masking, which is why they go into burnout, because they know what’s normal. They know what they should do. They know it’s good for them. They know what the rules are, and so they they spend so much time forcing themselves to do the typical, the normal, the right, the good, like everything in society that says that this is what you’re supposed to do. And then they burn themselves out.

Okay, so let me tell you what we began to do differently as we realized what our child was experiencing, we actually lowered demands for him, meaning we took away a lot of rules, a lot of rules. We Greg and I like rules. We’re both type I type a people. We’re both pretty uptight. We both like things to be black and white for different reasons. We both like we we want things to be a certain way, and we parented that way, and our child has not thrived in that environment, and while it seemed like logically, he’s not meeting expectations. So we should create more rules.

Pathological demand avoidance is actually the way that you kind of treat it or work with it. It’s very counterintuitive. You actually lower demands. We took away all screen time, most screen time restrictions. We started doing everything for him. Now this was just a short period of time, but while he was in like a not a great place, we started doing just everything. I did his laundry, I cleaned his room. I just, I just lovingly, happily served him, and that helped him to get out of, like this burnout stage. I just became someone who stopped telling him what to do. I rarely told the child what to do. I rarely looked at it. I just, I tried to take away every single demand and just create a safe environment for him and let him be himself. And someone with pathological demand avoidance is going to thrive in an environment where they can be them. I don’t know enough about it to speak to it specifically, like here are the steps to do, but I can tell you what. What helped me was lowering demands for my kid. I lowered a ton of demands. I give him control as much as possible. I rarely tell him what to do.

I ask him if he wants to do it as I and sometimes he can perceive that as a demand. When I’m asking him to do something, he knows that I’m actually telling him. And so I’ve even had to work on that, like not not being manipulative and pretending that I’m asking what I’m really telling but working on my soul at my core, being like, no, he gets to decide. He gets to decide. And I will tell you that in a year of parenting him in this different way, I guess it’s been a year and a half now, he’s a completely different person, taking so much more responsibility for himself and doing things in a way that I am just so proud of, not that that is the point of his life to make me proud. It is absolutely not. But as I observe him existing as a human, I’m so so so freaking proud of him. It is so amazing. And so I just want to say to everyone. If you are resonating with like when a demand is placed on you, even if it is a demand inside of you, and you start to freak out, look up PDA, look up, pathological demand avoidance or pervasive drive for autonomy start to follow autistic creators who talk about their own experience of PDA, if they have the PDA profile, and start to just learn more about it.

I want to say to you, Michelle, that understanding as an adult like obviously, you have a lot of demands placed on your life, but how can you lower demands for yourself? How can you practice low demand parenting with your child? And how can you practice low demand re parenting with yourself? How can you talk to yourself in a way that is nurturing and gentle and gives you choice and autonomy? So much about PDA is the the absolute need to have choice and autonomy. It is. It is not optional. It’s not optional. People who are PDA, they absolutely must have choice and autonomy. So how can you give that to your child in a safe way? Obviously, kids need boundaries and rules to keep them safe. But how can you give your child as much autonomy as possible, as much choice as possible? How can you lower demands to the best of your ability? How. Can you do your best to lower demands for your child, and then, how can you do it for yourself? How can you give yourself as much autonomy as possible, as much choice as possible, as much like, as few demands as possible? And I understand like joining a community, like, focused, knowing that it’s a coaching program, knowing that, like, if you’re going to get anything out of it, you do have to, like, participate, at least to a very small degree. That can really feel like a demand. And I would encourage you, if you’re wanting to join, if you’re thinking about joining, to maybe ask yourself, what demands can I lower for myself in other areas to make room for something like focused? Because I agree with you, just adding it in and adding in the pressure and adding in the expectation and adding in the demands like you might want to do some work on the forefront first before doing that, because I agree that adding it in might just overwhelm your system. So in what areas can you lower demands? What can you let go of that? Like, okay, I’m telling myself I have to do this, but maybe I don’t have to do this thing over here, and eliminating that will make room for a self development program like focused. I’m just really curious about that.

Guys let me know in the comments or on Instagram if you have questions, or if you want me to talk more about this. Like I said, I’m not the expert, but I absolutely want to have someone on who is an expert. And there’s such a huge overlap between ADHD and autism that I know that people listening are experiencing this, or have kids that experience it. And so, yeah, I’m really interested to continue the conversation about it. You okay, I do have the research of the week here for you, but I have to warn you, it is about alcohol. So if that conversation annoyed you, buckle up. Get ready, because we’re going for more. I don’t know if you saw but the Surgeon General released what they called Let me find it, alcohol and cancer risk Surgeon General’s advisory. And it’s not cute y’all and what it said, I’m going to talk so much about it, but the reason why I want to highlight it is because it said less than half of Americans understand the correlation between alcohol and cancer less than half.

And so if I can do my part of of educating at least a couple 100,000 of us about the link between alcohol and cancer, I’m going to do it. So let me read a little bit of it. This advisory highlights alcohol use as a leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, a leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, contributing to nearly 100,000 cancer cases and about 20,000 cancer deaths each year. Alcohol use is common. Obviously, 72% of adults in America report that they consume one or more, one or more drinks per week, but less than half of the US adults are aware of the relationship between alcohol consumption and cancer risk. There is a direct link, y’all, and we know it. The direct link between alcohol use and cancer. Was first established in the late 1980s and evidence for this link has been strengthened over time. This body of scientific evidence, which is the Surgeon General’s warning, which we are going to link in this show notes you already know I was going to say it, it demonstrates a causal relationship between alcohol use and increased risk for at least seven different types of cancer, including breast cancer in women, colorectal cancer, esophagus, liver, mouth, oral cavity, throat and voice box cancer, the more alcohol consumed, the greater risk of cancer for certain cancer, like breast cancer, mouth and throat cancers, evidence show that the risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day.

So as someone who was drinking at least one class of alcohol every single day, I was increasing my risk of cancer by a lot, by a lot, lot, lot. That’s actually very scary to me. This advisory describes the scientific evidence for the causal link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk. Okay, what’s really important that we understand is that alcohol use disorder affects at least 43% of people with ADHD and alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, right after tobacco and obesity.

That’s concerning my friends, so many of us are using alcohol to cope, and alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, right? I want to highlight this. We’re sandwiching this episode with alcohol information, because this translates to nearly 1 million preventable cancer cases over 10 years in the US. I’m I’m concerned. I’m concerned. There’s a lot of breast cancer in women. The largest burden of alcohol related cancer in the US is for breast cancer in women. Like maybe we should stop with the like the mommy wine times, knowing that alcohol use causes breast cancer in women, I just I think it’s really important that we are understanding the risk that we are incurring. Now, did I know this prior to 2024 Yeah, I did. I did. This is one of the reasons why it’s so obvious that we are addicted to alcohol, because we know it causes cancer and we drink it anyway. So I feel like I’m getting a little bit like high horsey right now, and that’s annoying, so I’m gonna but I’m speaking to me. I’m speaking to myself like I knew that it increased my cancer risk, and I still continued to consume it because it filled a need that I wasn’t able to get met in another place.

And so again, I don’t judge anyone who uses it as a tool, because anyone with ADHD has a broken reward system, a broken dopamine system. We, so many of us, cause carry trauma. We know now that there’s a huge link between ACE scores, adverse childhood experience scores, and alcohol use. We know now that there’s a huge link between trauma and alcohol use. So like, obviously, those of us with ADHD are going to struggle in this area. I just want to make sure that I’m a voice. I feel a huge responsibility to to say to you, like, let me be a voice for you that says this is not serving us. If we are leaning on alcohol, it’s because there’s a need that needs to be met, and that is legitimate, and that is understandable. But the question we need to ask is, What is the need that needs to be met, and how can I meet it in a way that is healthy and that serves me? What do you think like, Are we okay?

I think it’s really it’s just so important that we are understanding the science that we are understanding, the risks that we are understanding that like this is why, when people talk about medication for ADHD being like stupid or being addictive, which is such bull crap, because nobody with ADHD gets addicted to medication. Hello. How many of us forget to take our medication. Did I ever forget to drink alcohol? No. Did I forget to take my ADHD medication? Yes, okay, oh, my goodness, when that kind of BS is like touted out and about, when doctors even are resistant or reluctant to prescribe medication to people who have been diagnosed with ADHD. This can be the result alcohol use disorder can be the result I I’m trying to think if I should share this when I spoke at SpaceX, somebody came up to me and said, Hey, I don’t think I’m on the right dose for my ADHD medication, but I’m reluctant to talk to my doctor about it, because I don’t want to be accused of being a drug addict.

My friends, I this fires me up so much because that poor human being whose doctor made them feel like they were some sort of druggie, some sort of addict, when really they have a neurodevelopmental disorder. Disorder that deserves to be treated, and if they don’t properly treat it with medication, obviously we’re going to get something to treat it. Maybe that’s going to be weed, maybe that’s going to be alcohol, maybe that’s going to be pornography or sex, or whatever it is that we use for dopamine to be able to fix that broken reward system inside of us, it will be something so why not have it be a proper medication for the disorder? There’s a lot of work that doctors need to do across the board, clinicians, there needs to be so much more understanding about ADHD and we, we, I’m saying we. I’m not included in this. I do not perpetuate this stigma.

I am not a clinician. I have absolutely no ability to prescribe medication. But clinicians, my friends, please, you need to understand that when someone is diagnosed with ADHD, they and they want to be treated, and they’re choosing to be medically treated, they deserve to be treated with empathy and kindness and not be made to feel like they are some sort of drug addict just looking for a fix, that’s That’s embarrassing, that is demoralizing, that’s defeating. And you know what? That makes them do that? That makes people say it’s not worth it. I It’s too embarrassing. I don’t want to be called a drug addict. I don’t want someone to insinuate that I am here for drugs, so I guess I just won’t be treated for this disorder. I guess that I’ll just go about my business and find other less healthy coping mechanisms. This makes me angry. So if you want to know what triggered me this week, that’s what it was, that’s what it was.

This is what triggered me this week, is having a conversation with a very intelligent, amazing human who’s who’s saying to me, I don’t know how to talk to my doctor about ADHD medication, because I feel like my doctor thinks that I just want drugs. Doctors do better. This is ridiculous. Why are you making ADHD patients feel like they’re drug addicts? Are there people out there who are just looking for who are like, you know, addicted to Adderall, yes, obviously they’re crushing it. They’re snorting it, they’re selling it. This is not your typical patient with ADHD. I know 1000s of them. I know 1000s of them.

Okay, this is not your typical patient with ADHD. The typical patient for ADHD just wants to feel stable and they’re going to forget to take their medication at least a quarter of the time, and no one who is actually addicted will be forgetting to take medication. Am I right? Like people I had a psychiatrist tell me I can’t remember who it was. They said, If ADHD medication is so addictive, why do my patients constantly forget to take their medicine? Yeah, that’s the question. That is the question right there. If ADHD medication is so addictive, why do people with ADHD constantly forget to take their medication? So clinicians, my friends. A word to clinicians, please treat your ADHD clients patients with respect and empathy and understand that the instability that they feel in their body needs to be solved, and if it is not solved with medication, it will be solved another way. Trust me and people with ADHD who are wondering if their doctors feel like they’re like, just addicted or want drugs. I want to empower you to be a little sassy and to fight back and to get some courage with your doctor, and to like it, are you trying to insinuate that I am just a druggie?

Are you trying to insinuate that I am addicted? Are you trying to insinuate that, like, What are you insinuating doctor? Because what I am looking for is feeling stable. That’s what I’m looking for. I’m asking for nothing more than to feel stable in my own body and to be able to function at a baseline level. So if you’re insinuating that I’m asking for more than that, I resent that, and I’m offended by that, and I’d like you to actually write that down in. My Chart and make a documentation that I am highly offended. Well, there you go. That’s what you’re gonna be this week, my friends, how you doing? Are you okay? You’re along for the ride. I hope it was great. I adore you. I love you. I am so proud of us as a community. We have a long way to go, but we’ve come really, really far. I can’t wait to see you next week.

Hey, ADH, dear. I see you. I know exactly what it’s like to feel lost, confused, frustrated, and like no one out there really understands the way that your brain works. That’s why I created focused. Focused is my monthly coaching program where I lead you through a step by step process of understanding yourself, feeling better and creating the life that you know you’re meant for. You’ll study, be coached, grow and make amazing changes alongside of other educated professional adults with ADHD from all over the world. Visit. Ihaveadhd.com/focused, to learn more.