Transcript
Kristen Carder
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 you’re listening to the I have ADHD Podcast, episode number 20. I cannot believe I made it to 20 episodes. This feels like the accomplishment of a lifetime. My name is Kristen Carter. I am your host, and I have ADHD, and I’m so excited to be with you today. The sun is finally shining in Pennsylvania, I will tell you what. It has been a tough year for those of us in the note in the northeast, it’s been Gray, it’s been rainy. It has really been horrible, and today the sun is shining. I just mapped out this podcast episode outside on my computer, sitting outside under my pergola, just like so excited that the sun is shining, my face is probably sunburned. It’s a problem, because I always forget to put, like, sunscreen on, you know, like a normal human would put sunscreen on, and I just forget. So I know I should buy moisturizer with sunscreen. I think I did. I’m sure I have it somewhere. I need to go and find it. But let me just say it’s not priority numero uno, you know I’m saying so, I just haven’t done it.
So I will deal with the red nose for the rest of the week. And frankly, darling, I do not care. I’m so happy to be with you today. Today we are going to be talking about regret. Who huge issue for us adults with ADHD, at least most of us, I will say that in my Facebook group, there are a ton of posts dealing with regret, the shoulda, coulda woulda of life. I wish I had been diagnosed sooner. I wish that I had made different choices. I wish that I wasn’t in the situation that I am currently in. And so I wanted to talk about it today and hopefully frame it in a way that helps you to feel very, very powerful because you are, you are very, very powerful. First, I want to give you a little treat. Actually, it’s a treat for me. I want to read the review of the week. This is from amo, and this review is so awesome.
Listen to what she says. She says, I’m only on the sixth episode, but I am relieved to hear your words so far. Your description of what your 20s were like could be describing my 20s and early 30s. I especially got a chuckle about the closet of shame. I have been fascinated to learn more about how my brain works, and have gotten countless tips on how to implement better systems down to tidying and asking the question, Does this have a purpose? I’m relieved to know that I am not the only one with so many of these challenges, and that it’s not a matter of my laziness, but of my brain architecture. Ooh, I said that word wrong. Let me try it again. My brain architecture actively working to inhibit some things. Thank you. I love, I love that concept. It’s the brains architecture that’s amazing. That’s such a i that just like, hit me. Okay, did that blow your mind? Like, it blew my mind. I really like that. Yeah, it is our brains architecture, and we can’t control that, right? So we can be mad about it, and we can regret it, but we really can’t control it. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today, and I am going to invite you to be the very powerful person that you are. So let’s talk about regret. Is regret something that you deal with? I think a lot of adults with ADHD really struggle with thoughts and feelings of regret, if only I’d been diagnosed sooner, if only I had taken my ADHD seriously sooner, if only I had been medicated, if only I had not gone into debt or not married that person, or not gotten that tattoo or not exploded at. My boss or not lost that job, or whatever you fill in the blank.
A lot of us really, really struggle with regret. Here are two things that I want you to know about regret. I’ve learned them recently, and it’s been so freeing for me. Number one, regret is optional. I never realized this, and I know I’ve been saying it a lot recently, but our thoughts are not just reporting the news. They’re not just true. Our brain does not always tell us the truth. Regret is optional. We can choose to feel regret, or we can choose not to feel regret. You are not a victim of your brain. Regret is optional. So that’s number one. Here’s number two, regret keeps us stuck. We start recycling old thoughts, maybe thoughts from childhood or from high school. We recycle those old thoughts, and they keep coming back over and over. I wish I hadn’t I’m so stupid. I can’t believe I did that again. I’m such a dodo. I can’t believe that this has happened again. We spend so much of our mental and emotional energy on our thoughts of regret, we stay stuck in our past, instead of moving forward toward our future, we torture ourselves with the feelings of regret, rather than allowing ourself to feel release. So let’s go back to that concept that our thoughts are actually optional. We have so much more control than we realize. We’re not victims. Our thoughts are not just reporting the news.
Our brain doesn’t actually have all of the answers. That’s why it’s recycling old thoughts. So today we’re going to be talking about new thoughts, optional thoughts that we can have instead of those thoughts of regret. What if you could use your mental and emotional energy on the future rather than worrying agonizing over the past, how would your life be different? So there’s a couple steps involved. I think if you, if you are someone who’s really dealing with regret. And the way you know, if you’re someone who’s dealing with regret, is if you keep thinking about your past, if you if it just keeps coming back up and it keeps coming back up and it keeps coming back up, that tells us that there’s some things that need to be dealt with, right? And the thing with the past is that it can’t be changed. It is what it is, right? So it comes back into our lives, and we have these thoughts about our past that we embrace for our present. And that’s really unfortunate, because what happens in those moments is we actually begin to live like relive the past. This is why you see patterns in your life, maybe negative patterns, patterns of the same things happening to you over and over, and you feeling like, you know, Why am I always the one who’s getting fired? Why am I always the one who can’t keep a relationship. Why am I always the one who’s in debt? Why am I always the one who can’t have a good relationship or a good friendship? Why am I always the one who is unhappy in my job? I want to offer to you that it is likely because you are recycling thoughts from the past. Your past comes up into your mind, you accept it as the truth, as the news, and you create that for your present.
You just kind of relive it. So here are five steps to letting go of regret. If you feel like your past is kind of torturing you, there are some things that you can do to improve it, to improve the way you think about your past and to move forward with relief, with peace, with acceptance. So the first thing that I would encourage you to do is write down everything that you regret. Get it all out. Chances are you are keeping so much in your brain and probably not even realizing it. There are probably tons of regrets that just come screaming back at you from time. Time, especially when you’re trying to sleep, am I right?
And the first step to like really recognizing them, owning them and getting rid of them is getting them out of your brain. Now if you have been listening to this podcast for a little while, you know that I am a huge fan of the brain dump or the thought download, and I would encourage you to do this with your regrets. What is it that you wish you could change about your past? What is it that keeps coming back to haunt you? What is it that you torture yourself with over and over and over? So I want to give you an example of my own. I got married when I was 23 years old. I was just finishing up a double major in college. I was working for an educational therapist, and I was engaged and planning the wedding. Okay, I was 23 years old. I actually don’t remember if I was medicated for ADHD at the time or not. I know I did have a diagnosis, but I don’t exactly remember if I was medicated and i didn’t enjoy planning my wedding. It was so difficult, it was so overwhelming. I didn’t know how to have a vision for what I wanted, and so I was just kind of like flying by the seat of my pants and just like, whatever, I don’t really care.
And I would just say I don’t care, when my mom, you know, or people would ask me questions about what I wanted, because I didn’t know how to think it through and think about a big picture and think about a vision and have ideas in my mind of what I wanted. So that was something that I was incapable of at the time at the age of 23 so then I got married, and it was a lovely wedding, and I mean, it was just great. But unfortunately, after I got married, I started to think about all of the things that I wish I had done differently at the wedding. I just I had this long list of things that I felt like I didn’t do well. I wish that I had changed. I wish that I had interacted with, you know, somebody differently, or I wish that I had placed someone on the stage differently, like all these different things about the wedding that happened a certain way that I wish that I could go back and change, and I am telling you that I allowed these thoughts to torture me for years, probably five, probably four or five years, which is just so sad looking back. I just, I feel so much compassion for my for my young self, because, you know, the past was in the past my wedding happened, there was nothing that I could control about it, but it was torturing me. And so I want you to think about those things, those things that come up, those past, things that you wish you could change, that are constantly just like, you know, popping in and saying like, hey, remember me. Remember how you totally sucked at that. Remember how you lost that job. Remember how you treated that person really unfairly. Remember how you yelled at your kids that one time. Remember how you exploded on your husband. Remember how you got divorced, remember how you went to jail, all of those things. I want you to write them down. Okay, make a long, ugly, disgusting list of your regrets. This is a really important exercise. I know it will likely be very uncomfortable, but I’m telling you, it’s very, very important, because what we do as ADHD ers is we let these thoughts pop into our brain without taking a stop and think moment to evaluate them. So this practice of writing things down is extremely important because it allows us to slowly and methodically write things down and evaluate our thoughts, to consider whether or not we want to keep thinking them. Okay, so get everything out. Get it all down on paper. It’s going to be a yucky list. You’re probably not going to feel good about it, but I’m telling you, this is the pathway to being free from your regrets. Okay, make a long list of your regrets, then step number two, I want you to look at that list, and I want you to ask yourself, is there anything on that list that you’re regretting that you actually do have the control or power to change right now?
So obviously I couldn’t go back and change my wedding, right? That just happened the way it happened. But if I felt like it interacted with somebody in a weird way or a yucky way or an inappropriate way that day, I could pick up the phone and call that person and say, hey, you know, I hope this isn’t weird for you, but I’ve been thinking about this for a couple years now, and I just want to. Make sure we’re good. Do you know what I’m saying? So I want you to actually get a separate piece of paper and put things that are in your control to change on that separate piece of paper. So if your long list of regrets, things from your past that keep popping into your mind, right and then you’re evaluating that list and saying, Okay, what do I actually have power to change here? What do I actually have control to do something about? Now, I’m not giving you a to do list, but I am trying to show you that maybe there are some things that you can, you know, take an action with and make a change about so if you’re regretting not paying your heating bill last month, the best way to get rid of that regret is to, like, pay your heating bill. Do you know I’m saying, Okay, does that make sense? So I want you to make a list, like, from that master list of regrets, make a list of things that you can actually change or actually do something about that? List is probably gonna be really small. Okay, that’s my guess, because we can’t control like when we were diagnosed with ADHD. We can’t control when we flunked out of college in our 20s. We can’t control that. We lost that job a couple years ago. We can’t control that. We exploded on our kids like yesterday. Do you know I mean, like, those things are done, so leave those on the master list, but we can control like, Hey, I totally exploded on my kids yesterday, but I could call them and apologize, or I could give them a hug today and tell them I love them all right. So two lists go in here. Now. Now, now, now, now, with the list of regrets that are just in your past that you can’t control. For example, my wedding, right? It’s in my past. There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s coming up to torture me. Every single night I’m losing sleep over it. Ask yourself, how do you want to think about it. Are you enjoying this process of reliving it? So for me, I just want to throw out there that I think it was a little indulgent, that regret, for some reason, actually did feel good. It felt good to relive it. I don’t know why, and I don’t really understand the psychology behind it, but most of the time, we do things because we actually think that it’s helpful, or we actually do feel good with it. So for some reason that torture felt right, and that’s not great. I’m not proud of that, but maybe you can relate. And so I want to ask you, Do you enjoy being tortured by your past?
That’s a serious question. If your answer is no, if you do want to think about it differently, I want to invite you to accept that the past happened the way it did. It happened. It’s done. We spend a lot of time and energy trying to actually change the past in our minds, we fight against reality. We torture ourselves with the shoulda coulda wouldas, right? So friend, I know that you know that I’m pretty hard hitting, and I can be a lot to handle, so this is just a friendly warning to you it’s coming. Okay, here’s the thing, you are the only one who can change this. You are not a victim to your thoughts. You do have the power to change it. Okay, I know that can be a little off putting, because a lot of times we don’t think that we have control over our minds. We think that our brains are just right, that they’re reporting the news, that this just is the way it is, and we don’t feel that we actually have power in the situation, but I want to tell you that you do. So if you do not want to continue to think about the past the way that you currently are fighting against it, allowing it to torture you, indulging in self pity. What I would love to offer you is there are other options. You can accept that the past happened the way it did.
Now, my coach, Brooke has this phrase that I absolutely love, and I think about it often. One she says it was always meant to be this way. I think she actually got that from Byron Katie, if I’m remembering correctly. So this is like third hand info, but it is powerful. It was always meant to be this way. Now, how do we know that it was always meant to be this way, the way that we know that is because it was this way. We can’t go back and change it. You were always meant to be diagnosed at the age that you were diagnosed, you were always meant to ignore your ADHD until you woke up and embraced it. It was always, always meant to be this way, the way that we know that is that it was this way. It is this way right now. I know this isn’t a podcast about faith, so I don’t want to hijack it and spill out all of my Christian beliefs everywhere, but I do want to say that if you choose to believe in a divine power or in Destiny or in a purpose greater than yourself, accepting the past can be a fairly simple practice. Now I want to say that I’ve gone through a lot because I’m a human just like you, so you’ve gone through a lot, and I’ve gone through a lot, and I’ve had to make peace with a lot things that I would never share with strangers over a podcast, but one of the things that’s really helped me to accept what I’ve done, or what’s been done to me, is that we live in a broken world, but God’s love is always available to us. So the world is fallen. It’s a broken place, but God’s love is always here if we want it. So I’m not sure if that resonates with you, and if it doesn’t, that’s totally okay. Like I said, this isn’t a faith podcast, but it is an episode on accepting your past and letting it be and letting it go. So my question, I guess, is, how do you want to think about your past? How can you choose to make peace with your past? Do you want to continue to resist the reality of it? Do you want to continue to try to change it over and over and over in your mind. Or do you want to accept that it was always meant to be this way, that you were always meant to walk this path, that you were always meant to be diagnosed when you were or have that thing happen to you when it did, because it’s allowed you to become the person that you are today, and you’re not done becoming there is still more for you. So that leads me to step number four, embrace the now, I don’t think that this can happen until you’ve gone through steps one through three, you have to recognize your regrets, change anything that you have control, to change and decide to let the past be the past. But once those three things are done, you do have the option then to embrace the present. What’s awesome about the present is that we do have control over it. We have choices. We have options. We don’t have options with our past, right? It’s just done. It’s gone. It happened already. We don’t have opportunity to go back and change it. We don’t have any power over our past. It is what it is, but we do have options now. We can choose in one split second to change our lives now, which brings us, my friend, to my very last point number five, begin to dream about your future. Most of the time, we are cycling through the same situations over and over and over because we haven’t let go of the past. We’re reliving it. We’re reliving it over and over because we are literally reliving it in our minds, right? We lay in bed and we think about the past and we regret it, or we wish we could change it, or we we get mad at it, or say like it shouldn’t have happened this way. It shouldn’t have happened this way. So we keep reliving it in our minds, and then we relive it in our reality. We relive the same bad relationship. Relationship, or the same dead end job or the same friendships where people are taking advantage of us because we haven’t actually let our past go, we haven’t embraced our present and we haven’t started to dream about our future.
So I want to invite you to dream. What kind of future do you want to create for yourself? What changes in your thought patterns do you want to make so that you can be a different person and live a future that looks completely different from your past? What would happen if you spent your mental and emotional and emotional energy dreaming about the possibilities of what could be in your future, instead of torturing yourself with what happened in your past, this is possible, my friends, I am living proof. I know that you can find acceptance when it comes to your past. I know that you can let it go. I know that you can stop letting it torture you, and I know that this is all in your control. You are not a victim to your thoughts. You’re not a victim to your ADHD. You have so much power, I want to encourage you to take advantage of it. So let’s review the steps one more time. Here is how we can let go of regret. Number one, write everything down that you regret, all of the yucky, yucky, yucky things. It’s going to be uncomfortable, but this is your pathway to peace. Number two, look over your long list of regrets and ask yourself, can you change any of it? If you can put those things on a separate list, you can choose whether or not you want to do anything about those things, and then look at the list of things you can’t control. And number three, ask yourself, How do you want to think about those things? Now I obviously invite you to accept them that it was always meant to be this way, but you get to make that choice. Number four, embrace your present. Embrace it, embrace the now. And number five, begin to dream about your future. Spend your mental and emotional energy creating a vision for what you want your future to be like rather than torturing yourself with all of your regrets, you are a lovely human worthy of living a peaceful life.
I hope that you have an amazing week, and as always, if any of this is confusing or hard and you want to work it out, one on one with a coach. I would absolutely love to work with you. You can find me on Instagram at, I have ADHD podcast, or you can email me at Kristen at, I have adhd.com I would love to hear from you. I would love to work with you, and I would love to help you feel the peace that I am able to feel as a grown adult living with ADHD. Can’t wait to talk to you next time bye.
