Women with Attention Deficit Disorder Quotes

“After a woman understands that she does have something called AD/HD and has had it for a long time, she begins to look back and see how deeply it has affected every area of her life. At this point she will often move into the next stage—anger. She often feels anger at lost opportunities, looking back at the paths that she didn’t take. She focuses on the point at which things started to go off course and begins to feel anger at a system that let her down as a child.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“In addition to beginning and maintaining relationships, many women have let established relationships slip away. Small occasions and important events with other people are missed: there are an increasing number of missed thank-you notes, missed birthdays, or invitations that are not reciprocated. The connections just aren’t kept up, and eventually they’re gone. They then anticipate scolding, rejection, or negative reactions when they think about trying to reconnect or rectify a situation, so they tend to avoid them altogether. While this may be true for everyone to some extent, women with AD/HD with particular histories or wounds are especially sensitive to and avoidant of this kind of potentially critical feedback further increasing the negative cycle.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“This feeling of not having control, even when one has a strong motivation or desire, is a strong contributor to depressed feelings.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Many women feel that no matter how competent others think they are, or no matter how much they achieve, they are really just fooling everyone.”
― Sari Solden, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“AD/HD is such a full-time job that some women have never had the opportunity to stop and figure out a way of doing things differently. They haven’t discovered how to change the rules, what it means to feel comfortable, or how to live without feeling overwhelmed. They just don’t have the concept.”
― Sari Solden, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“The reason that common AD/HD strategies alone don’t always work is because they usually focus on merely controlling the negative and difficult part of the AD/HD. You want to focus on supporting the new growth, not just taking care of the difficulties. As you grow and become more and more successful, you’ll constantly think of new ways to form cushions of support and structure underneath you. The emphasis should be on nourishing your successes, not just managing your deficits.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“If you go to an event, give yourself permission to leave early when you’re worn down, knowing that you want to go and connect to people, but that you want to leave before you stop enjoying the situation. Set it up and think it through in advance so you don’t feel anxious. Plan for your AD/HD.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Relationships simply bring too many things to do and to consider, adding to stress and feelings of being overwhelmed. Women feel, at some level, that developing more relationships or even a few relationships to a deeper point will put them over the top.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Women with AD/HD often move away from relationships in the initial stages of forming friendships because of their difficulty in making small talk or difficulty with finding the words that they want to say when they want to say them. Sometimes it is as difficult to find the words in your messy mind as it is to find a paper on your messy desk. Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo (1995, pg. 66) call this a “reaction time irregularity” They go on to point out that a person with this difficulty might look rude or disinterested when they actually may be having “trouble retrieving things from memory in a demand situation”.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Other women, even if they’ve had little support in high school, still manage to go to college. Unfortunately, because they have no idea what is wrong and what accommodations they could get to succeed, they are soon overwhelmed and either drop out or change schools several times. Others continue to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol to counteract their low self-esteem and bring them some form of needed relaxation, as well as a way to feel focused. Other young women might act out sexually with multiple partners or even tolerate destructive relationships in order to have the security of some kind of structure to come up against.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“They don’t know how hard they are working or how much of their energy is going into just surviving. They don’t know that living is not supposed to be that hard. Too often, like the frog, by the time they discover this is not the way it’s supposed to be they’re already depleted, depressed, or overwhelmed.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“The irony is that the more they achieve and the better they do, the less people are inclined to believe them, and the more they feel forced to then stay in the closet.”
― Sari Solden, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“When the snow lifted and I was able to get my medication, I felt like the tin man in the Wizard of Oz in need of oil to begin moving again. Then as I began to write, my mind was much more fluid. I had the cognitive fuel to function. My brain was the same brain it was the day before, I had the same interest, motivation, ideas, and abilities, but without the medication, I just didn’t have the fuel to access those parts of me and use them. Even a luxury car like a Rolls Royce isn’t going anywhere without fuel. In the same way, medication for individuals with AD/HD is often the fuel that allows the brain to function smoothly and work to its potential.”
― Sari Solden, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Some of the social skill difficulties leave adults with ADD sometimes hesitant to participate in important situations at work and in their social life. These often lead to anxiety and withdrawal since you don’t know if today will be a good or bad brain day. You may not be able to think of a single thing to say during small talk or be able to answer a direct question. You may simply go blank, unable to retrieve information you know. You may not be able to tell a story in a linear way and people may start to stare at you several minutes into the story and you know they aren’t following you. You may find yourself interrupting, wanting to get to the bottom line, and finishing people’s sentences for them (because you know what they are going to say!). You may mentally wander off in conversations, not following what is being said, which is especially difficult in groups.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Women with AD/HD also sometimes have difficulty with their relationships when invited to parties or family gatherings. Quite often they feel bombarded by too much stimulation, especially women without hyperactivity, and therefore withdraw, sometimes offending people without intending to as we discussed in earlier Chapter 9. They feel overloaded and exhausted, and they can’t keep up. They might have difficulty carrying on a good conversation, trying to think of what to say in the middle of so much activity. Many women with AD/HD mysteriously retreat to another room, become quiet, upset or withdrawn, or just don’t show up for these kinds of events. All these responses may give the message to others that you don’t care about them. They don’t know that you’re having a hard time or why.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Ultimately what I’m talking about is living with controlled disorder, not trying to get rid of it or waiting to get over it. It is not done in a day, and it is not done with medication alone (although it is usually not done without it). You need to ask yourself, “How can I make my life work? How can I make my relationships work? How can I make my career meaningful?” If it means doing things a bit differently than other people, then be different; it takes courage to break through the barriers of shame and guilt to ask for support. If it means breaking the mold, then break it; it takes courage to accept that you can’t do what other people can do. If it means challenging the “way it’s always been,” then challenge it; it takes courage to celebrate that you can often do what other people can’t.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“One way some women mask their AD/HD symptoms is to anchor their lives with extensive systems and controls. They may seriously limit the amount of activities in their lives in order to keep things under control.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Women with AD/HD want to connect but because of their difficulties with executive functioning, they often develop emotional barriers. The combination of cognitive struggles and emotional barriers or the intersection of these makes them avoid relationships even more which decreases the likelihood of starting or maintaining relationships or of reconnecting after a break in the connection. Many fears, negative expectations, and much pain surround these areas. They key for these women to take stock of their barriers and make a plan to slowly start getting back on the road to relationships.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Many women report just being awake and alert all day as a huge improvement in this area. They feel a tremendous difference in their ability to counteract “ the paralysis of will ” that leaves many bright women sitting for hours, remote in hand, aimlessly changing channels with a million intentions and good thoughts trapped inside their head not being translated to action.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“These women often believe they are fooling anyone who thinks well of them because without any warning the switch inside their heads could turn off and their feelings of inadequacy would be exposed. They worry that they won’t have enough time, that their systems won’t work, or that people will drop in unexpectedly. Any minute things could fall apart.”
― Sari Solden, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“She said at the national ADDA (Attention Deficit Disorder Association) conference that their AD/HD symptoms often only show up at home after an exhausting effort to “hold it together all day.”
― Sari Solden, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” —Maya Angelou”
― Sari Solden, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Even today with most women working, even women without AD/HD have issues around money and taking care of their financial affairs. They aren’t as knowledgeable about financial matters as they’d like to be and often have control, power, and dependency issues. Combine this with AD/HD and feelings of being overwhelmed, and it creates an even greater tendency to shut down and tune out in this area.”
― Sari Solden, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“They also say that we may have difficulties taking the time to making deep connections, even if we talk to a lot of people in a social setting. They advise—just concentrate on making a few close friends instead of worrying about creating a large social network. They also encourage us by saying that many of these quirks that seemed weird as children now often work for adults who are seen as interesting or special. They point out that adults with ADD often have creativity, special talent, humor, or zest for life that can be a social magnet!”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Many menopausal women are now being diagnosed with AD/HD for the first time because previously developed coping skills that hid the symptoms are compromised once the estrogen changes exacerbate the symptoms.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Paying attention also requires inhibiting certain responses when making the above choices. This involves inhibiting the following: Acting until information has been processed Speaking out one’s thoughts (This involves internalizing speech or “talking inside your head” without actually speaking one’s thoughts out loud unless that is the desired thing to do!)”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Women with AD/HD often feel that despite years of trying to keep their heads above water that they are sinking deeper and deeper and are feeling more trapped and helpless. Many women with undiagnosed AD/HD are unable to explain or have anyone else help them understand their experience. It may be incomprehensible for others to believe that a seemingly successful woman, or a woman who has never been hyperactive, may have AD/HD. Instead, she may be written off as having typical “female emotional problems” or serious psychological disturbances. The greater her outward signs of success, the more baffling it is to those around her. And if she has been visibly struggling, it just reconfirms other people’s opinions that she is indeed weak, incompetent, or helpless.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“Because their discrepancies are much larger, people with hidden disorders are confusing to themselves and perplexing to other people. Because their range can be very wide, individuals can’t easily encompass and incorporate both their strengths and their weaknesses into their self-image. This is especially true before they know the nature of this challenge.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“As the non-AD/HD person continues on through life, the pieces continue to make sense. They don’t get A’s one day, and F’s the next; they aren’t called creative one day and lazy, unmotivated, and irresponsible the next. When people without these difficulties try to do something, their efforts usually pay off. In other words, there’s a direct relationship between the effort and the results.”
― Sari Solden, MS, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life

“As one client of mine said when it finally dawned on her that her friend had free time on the weekends, “You mean this woman doesn’t have six months worth of unfolded clothes piling up around the house? She doesn’t have stacks of unopened mail to wade through or unpaid bills to confront? You mean she’s not constantly worried that the phone or electricity will be turned off or that the rent check will bounce?”
― Sari Solden, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life