Dear All,
One of the ‘superpowers’ of ADHD is a great sense of intuition and predictability of people and things. During my time in private practice I see many ADHD clients and one thing we all have in common is our ability to have a heightened sense of intuition about many things. One of my favourite ways of acknowledging this is what I call the ‘party observer’ example. In that you and me could both be at a party and just about anyone with ADHD could look around the room and tell the internal states of the people at that party. “She doesn’t want to talk to him anymore”, “He can’t wait to leave and go home”, “She looks tired and is ready to leave”.
This comes from a heightened sense of self-awareness and awareness of others. ADHD people have a rich history of ‘getting things wrong’ or ‘being at the wrong place at the wrong time’. After many years of experiencing this, we tend to become experts of not missing anything in our field, therefore, not missing much about what is going on around us. We have been overly concerned about what others think about us we become experts in looking for little signs from others. Furthermore, we tend to see that people with ADHD will scan a room and notice any irregularities before neurotypicals are finished walking in the door.
However, this ‘power’ tends to be a double-edged sword in that we also do not miss anything that comes our way. Many people with ADHD may hyper fixate or reminisce on what others have said to us or how we have behaved. This can cause a significant amount of anxiety and sometimes contribute to ‘over-analysis’ of ourselves and our subsequent interactions. In other words, we tend to overthink things.
One thing that I do remind my clients about this dynamic is that, yes it Is a somewhat of a gift, however, we do have to realise that this is not how everyone else sees us and the world. Every little mistake or mishap we make is not going to be remembered by everyone, we do not need to be perfect. It is important to keep at the forefront that this ‘skill’ has developed because our brain needed to feel safe. It is a survival technique from always having to be ‘on’ so that we do not get embarrassed or make an obvious mistake.