Shelly and Cam continue to explore contextual pitfalls and ADHD. Last week they introduced contextual mad-libs. This week they explore two more contextual challenges, ‘locking in’ to a limiting narrative and conversely ‘spinning through’ multiple narratives. Both are contextual in nature and a very ADHD Valley experience. We constantly tether to how we relate to our world, drawing frames of reference that meet a need that may be keeping us in a current state or mode and delay real and positive change.

ADHD is partially an ‘access and regulation’ dilemma; accessing and regulating attention, emotion, memory, energy, motivation and action. Our experience is a ‘Goldilocks’ experience of too little or too much. For example, our emotional experience is often one of too much emotion or not enough emotion. The same goes for creating meaning in our current moment - tethering to our current context. Cam shares two successive periods in his life when he experienced both the lock-in experience and the spinning experience.

For the lock-in, Cam shares how he fueled a ‘One Down’ perspective with a singular limiting story and the energy cost of keeping this ‘roadshow’ going. He then shares how he switched to the spinning version to rationalize a behavior and ‘play it safe’. This ‘channel switching’ is the situational rationalization we’ve discussed before.

Cam and Shelly share practices for listeners to bring the Keen Observer to these unique presentations of contextual pitfalls.

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