In this episode of More Yourself, I wanted to share a clip from a recent ADHD Women's Wellbeing live session that explored the concept of generativity versus stagnation —a theme that is very prevalent among late-diagnosed ADHD women.

This concept, rooted in Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development theory, invites us to reflect on how we create meaning and contribute to our own lives and to others as we move through the different stages of adulthood. For those of us who received a diagnosis later in life, this understanding can be transformative. It reminds us that our diagnosis isn’t the end, it’s the beginning of a new chapter.

My new book, The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit, is now available, grab your copy here!

What I discuss:

• Erikson’s 8 stages of psychosocial development viewed through a neurodivergent lens.
• The impact of unconscious masking on ADHD traits and energy levels.
• The concept of generativity vs. stagnation for late-diagnosed ADHD women.
• Seeing a late diagnosis as a new chapter for authenticity and evolution.
• The role of meaningful connection in women's reconnection with their identity post-diagnosis.
• The power of embracing change in midlife and beyond.

Timestamps

• 00:33 – Understanding ADHD and Psychosocial Development
• 03:30 – Overview of Erikson’s 8 Stages of Psychosocial Development
• 05:26 – Life Stages Through a Neurodivergent Lens
• 07:17 – Generativity vs. Stagnation Explained
• 07:54 – Generativity as a New Chapter of Potential
• 09:40 – Embracing Change and Authenticity
• 12:16 – Closing Reflections and Personal Growth

Join the More Yourself Community - the doors are now open!

More Yourself is a compassionate space for late-diagnosed ADHD women to connect, reflect, and come home to who they really are. Sign up here!

Inside the More Yourself Membership, you’ll be able to:

• Connect with like-minded women who understand you
• Learn from guest experts and practical tools
• Receive compassionate prompts & gentle reminders
• Enjoy voice-note encouragement from Kate
• Join flexible meet-ups and mentoring sessions
• Access on-demand workshops and quarterly guest expert sessions

To join for £26 a month, click here. To join for £286 for a year (a whole month free!), click here.

We’ll also be walking through The ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Toolkit together, exploring nervous system regulation, burnout recovery, RSD, joy, hormones, and self-trust, so the book comes alive in a supportive community setting.

Links and Resources:

• Find my popular ADHD workshops and resources on my website [here].
• Follow the podcast on Instagram: @adhd_womenswellbeing_pod

Kate Moryoussef is a women's ADHD lifestyle and wellbeing coach and EFT practitioner who helps overwhelmed and unfulfilled newly diagnosed ADHD women find more calm, balance, hope, health, compassion, creativity and clarity. 

Foreign.

Welcome back to another More Yourself episode here on the ADHD Women's Wellbeing podcast.

And today I'm sharing with you a snippet from my intro workshop that I did for the More Yourself membership.

It was a bit of a Q and A, a get to know me workshop, but also answering your queries about the membership.

And I just shared quite a lot as well.

I love doing this type of thing.

I love doing a live.

I love seeing all the people in the community.

And I came up with a concept that really intrigued me about ADHD women.

Now, I didn't come up with this concept, but it's a man called Eric Erickson, and he was a developmental psychologist, psychoanalyst, also known for his theory on psychosocial development.

Now, this sounds all very complicated, but essentially he came up with eight stages of psychosocial development.

And this piqued a bit of my interest when I got an email from a renowned psychologist where she was talking about the neurodivergent angles of these eight different stages of psychosocial development.

I'm gonna let the clip speak for itself, but I just wanted to share with you that the bit that really, really resonated and I think will resonate with the More Yourself community and anyone that's listening as a late diagnosed ADHD women was this generativity and sensitive stagnation.

It's generativity versus stagnation with this core virtue of care, of bringing more meaning to our lives.

And so I share this in the workshop as to why later on in our life, now that we've got this understanding and this awareness that this is a really key, essential part to our development and growing older, that we don't want to stagnate, that we want to keep evolving and growing and learning and being curious, and it doesn't matter what age we are, that if we don't have awareness of our adhd, it can.

Be really, really hard to grow and.

Develop because we're not understanding who we are authentically.

So I'm gonna play this clip.

I really hope it resonates.

And if you are still wondering about More Yourself and wondering what it's like, we have an amazing group of women.

If it feels like you just want.

More support, more connection, more learning, more understanding, it's a really lovely space.

It's super accessible, really low cost, and it' for you to sort of dip in and dip out of.

You can get all your money's worth and just, you know, do everything, or you can just show it for some of the lives or you can just connect with like minded women, it's your choice.

But I have created this space, I'm building on it.

So I'm really excited about how this is going to evolve and I'm also considering doing a live real life in person meetup with the community members as well at some point, probably in the new year.

This is a place for evolution and my place to bring more meaning.

So if it does resonate with you, all the information, information is in the show notes or just go on my website which is ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk and you'll see the tab for more yourself and go and investigate for yourself, see if it's for you and it feels aligned.

Here is the clip from my workshop.

And I really hope that this, this topic kind of sits with you and gives you that impetus to think.

Actually I do need a little bit more meaning and I don't want to stagnate in life.

Here it is.

It's eight stages of psychosocial development.

And he was a developmental psychologist, German, American and psychoanalyst.

And he was trained by Anna Freud, if anyone is interested.

And he was deeply influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis.

But he expanded on these ideas significantly about development.

Now these eight stages of psychosocial development range from infancy right down to late adulthood to stage one to stage eight.

But they have a really important lens that we can look through from late diagnosed adhd, especially in women.

And I wanted to reflect on perhaps the last five stages, which I think is why we are here tonight, and I think which will maybe help you understand why you are seeking this support network and this community space.

Because I really believe that when we have a bit more of this understanding, it can really help us heal or I say process, grieve, heal and then move through to this evolution stage.

I'm not going to confuse matters too much, but stage five is adolescence.

So this is the sort of the 12 to 18 of who am I?

And this is as a neurodivergent woman, you won't have known this because you weren't diagnosed.

If anyone is listening here, maybe they were, but most of us weren't.

And you may have felt this very deep role, confusion of people pleasing or perfectionism and self doubt, just not feeling enough.

And we can often go back to those times.

Many of us might go back to those times and see ourselves going through puberty or adolescence and really have struggled, whether it was at school, in family life, anything like that.

And sometimes we need to go back and do a little Bit of healing around that where we didn't know what was going on.

No one helped us, no one supported us.

And then we go through to the next stage of young adulthood, which is 18 to 40, which is a massive chunk of time.

And it's this sort of conflict of intimacy versus isolation.

Can I be truly seen and loved?

This is the core issue.

And when we don't understand or fully know or accept ourselves, it's really hard for us to build these sort of safe relationships, understanding why we're operating the way we are, you know, from the ages of 18 to 40, we're creating core relationships, maybe getting married, having kids, starting our careers.

And we are unknowingly masking.

There's emotional dysregulation, there's RSD rejection, sensitive dysphoria, burnout may have shown up, reared its head many a times, you know, from this age, throughout the different times.

And there may have been broken connections, broken relationships and loneliness and really not quite understanding who your true self or your true self wasn't seen.

And so when we get this late in life diagnosis, it allows many of us to slowly unmask and to understand why we feel dysregulated or why we felt too much or we've not felt right in that environment, or we've not been able to safely show up authentically.

So it gives us this understanding, this new lens of creating deeper connections, creating deeper intimacy.

And then we go into our middle adulthood, which many of us are in right now, which is ages 40 to 65.

And this is the concept that I really wanted to share tonight.

And it's about.

I never heard of this word before.

Generativity versus stagnation.

I'm going to say that again.

Generativity.

And that core issue is how do I create a meaningful life?

So if you think about it, there's that, that need for purpose, connection, meaning versus stagnation.

And we can go both ways.

We can really either make that decision that we can live in victimhood and, you know, life is never going to work out for me.

And we've seen it perhaps in our families or other family members, we've kind of given up and just going to be.

Or we use this diagnosis, this awareness, this understanding to be a kickstart.

It can be a next chapter of your evolution.

So we're not in any way disregarding what we've gone through throughout our lives.

We're acknowledging it, we're seeing it.

We're sending compassion, we're sending love.

There may be healing.

That's needed outside of this space.

Through therapy, there might be a recognition that we need to forgive, we need to let go.

There might be resentment there, there might be deep hurt.

But we make this choice.

We make this choice to use this as a pinnacle moment in our lives, to create a place of meaning and connection and purpose.

And this is where I get really, really excited because this is concept of my book.

Underneath the title is embrace your authentic self and harness your true potential.

That title was created months and months and months before any of this came to light.

But it was clearly that driving force to what I wanted to be able to offer to this community after the initial stages of the ADHD diagnosis.

So this is kind of like chapter 2.0.

This is like you've graduated, you've had the awareness, you've had the understanding, you've got the diagnosis, whether it's self or it's, you know, official.

And you're now here to say, now what?

I'm ready for more.

I'm ready to be more of myself.

I'm ready to step into more of my authenticity and I don't want to stagnate.

So many women find themselves here.

So we're drained.

We're drained from the over functioning, the masking, the people pleasing, the perfectionism, the doing things according to other people's rules and regulations and conditioning and all of that.

We're kind of like, oh, I want to rip it all up and where can I start from?

We're not working like this very idealistic, dreamlike way.

I'm not saying like sell everything, quit your job, move somewhere else.

This is just gentle, very gentle, sustainable, authentic shifts to help bring more meaning to your life.

And so much of it is in the last few chapters of my book where I really wanted to share more of this, more of the purpose, the joy, the creativity, the simplification, the fulfillment.

And this is where I feel my natural evolution is coming with this community as well.

So there may be this sort of ask or this pull to ask yourself, what have I done with my life?

Where's my energy gone?

And was this what I wanted?

You know, is this according to my own desires?

Is this according to someone else's?

And there's also this yearning to give back, you know, to build something purposeful or live more in alignment.

And this doesn't mean that you have to start a charity or you need to change your job or anything like that.

This is, there's no judgment, you know, you can still be doing what you do, but you can just be doing something that just feels a little bit more connected to you.

And I see this all the time, this stagnation in so many people.

They don't think they're worthy.

They don't think they're worthy of change or evolution.

They may not see it in their families or their, in their social circles.

It might be very, very conflicting.

It's like there's a rule book that says you just do, you know, that's your career and that's what you've trained for and that's what you do, or that's where you've always lived, or that's the person you've always been with and that's just who we are.

That's what you know.

But I know that this life that we've been given is a life of creation.

And that life of creation means that we always got this opportunity to change and evolve and grow and develop and expand.

There's no reason for us to stagnate.

So what I wanted to share with this is that this is your turning point to lead this renaissance.

That's what they've used, this, this word of creativity, of self advocacy, of your self expression and healing.

So then you move into this reclamation of your identity after this late diagnosis and knowing that this isn't just where you end.

The diagnosis is not the end.

This is the next evolution, is the beginning of this next chapter.

And you're able to see things through this fresh understanding, with more compassion, more knowledge, you're able to build more authentic relationships.

There's no reason for anyone to not make brand new friends later on in life from a place of feeling much more authentic, much more, you know, like you want to just strip everything bare, be really truthful, be really vulnerable.

And I've had that many times where I've just had a conversation with someone who I tell more about who I am and my life story and my truth in the first five minutes of meeting than I have with some of my friends I'd be friendly with.

20, 30 years.

Life is too short to not find these meaningful connections and learn and grow and evolve.

It always, always comes back to, this is like we are worthy of it.

And for us to sort of grow into our purpose and no longer be weighed down by any of the shame or the guilt or the embarrassment or the misunderstanding or the masking.

Like we are able to, to do this.

So this is the reason why I'm here today.

This is why I wanted to share with you, I guess more of a snippet into how we can become more the more authentic version of ourself and whether that's going to be through well being lifestyle changes, little tweaks and tips and guidance and hints and ways that we can just sort of change those sort of little ways we do life, the routines, the structures that we do life.

And I, hopefully I'm going to be there to give you those nudges along the way and share and bring resources and create this community for, for everybody.