In this insightful and empowering episode, I’m joined by Vanessa Gorelkin, an occupational therapist who brings a deeply compassionate and practical perspective to supporting ADHD, especially when it comes to emotional regulation, energy management, and creating environments that help us thrive.

Together, we explore how occupational therapy (OT) can be a game-changer for adults with ADHD to help us understand our sensory needs, emotional responses, and daily rhythms. We also explore Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS), two powerful frameworks that offer tools for navigating emotional ups and downs with more ease and self-compassion.

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

Key Takeaways:

• What occupational therapy can look like for adults with ADHD
• How DBT techniques like emotional regulation and distress tolerance can help ADHD
• The importance of workplace accommodations for neurodivergent individuals
• Energy management and the mental health impact of overcompensating for sensory challenges
• How to identify your optimal conditions to avoid overstimulation and burnout
• The role of the sensitive nervous system and being stuck in a high-cortisol state
• Using the diving reflex to regulate your internal state (yes to sighing, cold water, and essential oils!)
• Why timing matters when it comes to meditation and rest
• How Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps us understand our behaviours and emotional triggers
• Why a holistic approach is essential in ADHD therapy and wellbeing

Whether you're managing anxiety, experiencing burnout, or looking for practical, holistic strategies to support your nervous system, this episode is packed with supportive takeaways for you to try!

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
• Visit Vanessa's website or check out her Instagram (@itsvanessagorelkin)

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. 

Welcome to the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast.

I'm Kate Moore Youssef and I'm a wellbeing and lifestyle coach, EFT practitioner, mum to four kids and passionate about helping more women to understand and accept their amazing ADHD brains.

After speaking to many women just like me and probably you, I know there is a need for more health and lifestyle support for women newly diagnosed with adhd.

In these conversations, you'll learn from insightful guests, hear new findings, and discover powerful perspectives and lifestyle tools to enable you to live your most fulfilled, calm and purposeful life wherever you are on your ADHD journey.

Here's today's episode.

Welcome back to yet another episode of the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast.

And today I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Vanessa Gorelkin.

Now, Vanessa is talking to me, me from Arizona, but she works globally and she is a licensed therapist.

She's also an occupational therapist coach and she works with neurodivergent ADHD people all over the world.

And she is very passionate about helping more people manage their anxiety, their emotional regulation and mood issues so they can live their lives to the fullest.

She has also just launched a brand new podcast called Real Over Ideal, and we're going to get into some really interesting conversations that we've not quite touched on in the podcast before.

So I'm really excited to welcome Vanessa to today's episode.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm delighted to be here.

So we're going to be talking about some different topics.

I mean, this is all connected to, like we said at the intro, helping more neurodivergent people understand themselves better, understand perhaps why they're more predisposed to anxiety and to emotional dysregulation and just feeling a little bit off balance, more sensitive and bringing in some of the tools and the skills that you used over the past however many years have you been practicing?

It's a couple of decades.

I have been in the professional world for 30 years, some of it practicing as an occupational therapist.

And I don't even know if we discussed this beforehand, but I have also been an executive professional.

I've been an administrator and in hospitals.

So I've been on both sides of health care.

And with my degree in occupational therapy, I've really been able to help people in a lot of different ways, both through organizations and personally and individually.

So let's touch on the occupational therapy first.

I've never had an OT on the podcast, so you're My first one.

And I'm really excited to bring in how occupational therapy can help not only kids, because my experience was my daughter, when we first suspected there was perhaps some dyspraxia there, way before she got diagnosed, and she was probably about five at the time.

And we went to an occupational therapist a few times.

And I don't know how an OT can help an adult, especially when we've been diagnosed later on in life.

So I'd love to discuss a little bit, if you can.

If someone's hearing about occupational therapy for the first time, can you explain what it is?

100%, it is my thing that I have done pretty much since I got my degree and probably even while I was in graduate school, because occupational therapy, unfortunately, is sort of confusingly named.

Occupational therapy refers to occupation and helping people in their daily occupations.

And that's what people do every day in their life, not their jobs.

So with children, their occupations are play, being a family member, going to school.

But our adult occupations are being a partner, being a worker, being a friend, being a party planner, what have you.

And so occupational therapists are people who help people to live their lives to the fullest.

And, and typically, things that occupational therapists do include helping people to manage when they are having difficulties.

And we are typically not necessarily trying to change things about people who need occupational therapy.

We're trying to adapt things so we can certainly rehabilitate.

You'll find occupational therapists just about everywhere in the healthcare system, including mental health and physical disabilities type settings, from acute care to, like I said, rehabilitation.

But the running theme is helping people to be able to live their lives the way they want to, even if they have a disability or they have something that is standing in their way.

Okay, thank you for that.

So if we break it down to our audience of mostly women who are being diagnosed later on in life, and they've always had these emotions, the overwhelm, the anxiety, the rejection, sensitive dysphoria, just this, the feeling that life is hard.

Life feels hard.

And doing the things that people normally would consider are easy, you know, with our executive functioning makes it more challenging.

What would take me to an occupational therapist for these issues?

I would say, as opposed to a therapist, a coach, medication.

I'm interested to know what, what avenue would you go down with an ot?

Yeah, well, occupational therapists are really holistic professionals.

And so what we have, what we bring to the table that is unique, is that we really, truly look at the whole person.

But rather than being non traditional, not in the allopathic like you'll have your homeopathic medical practitioners, you have Chinese medical practitioners.

Occupational therapists are in the allopathic medical model, the Western medical model, if you will.

And we have medical training and mental health training.

So a person with adhd, and I have many of them in my practice, may come to me with issues at their job or in their family or difficulties.

What I see a lot of, because this is what I speak about a lot when I'm on podcasts and on my podcast and so on, is emotion regulation getting in the way of virtually everything that happens in our day to day lives.

I'll give you an example.

So when you have difficulty managing irritability and anxiety, and that shows up with not being able to get out the door as an adult to go to work because that person bothers you, who sits next to you, and your boss reprimanded you yesterday.

Those are the sort of things that people will show up in my office to try to work on.

Because we can't really change the people around us.

We can't necessarily change the institutions, but we can change our response, we can change the way that we cope, and we can change having supportive, understanding professionals around us who don't just instantaneously say, okay, well, here's a pill, now you're fixed.

Goodbye.

And that is not to say for one moment that medication is not valid.

I am 100% supportive of anyone who takes medication, but I think that medication isn't the only thing that can help people who have adhd.

There's so much more to it.

Yeah, I mean, what's coming to mind is a distress tolerance or, you know, helping people with that.

With regards to DBT or dialectical behavior therapy, does that weave into occupational therapy?

Yes, well, dialectical behavioral therapy was originally created by Marshall Linehan, who was a social worker, but.

But actually she was kind of stealing occupational therapy, if you will, because, you know, it's not a competition.

But occupational therapy is about teaching people skills for living and that is what that model does.

So dbt, which I use in my practice, Dialectical behavioral therapy.

The model is to teach people mindfulness, interpersonal communication abilities, the ability to tolerate distress, distress tolerance and so on.

I mean, what's coming to mind for me, I'm remembering the version of me, how old am I now?

Probably like 15, 20 years ago, maybe 20 years ago, who had no idea about my ADHD.

I felt intolerant to a lot of things in my working environment, though, and I always struggled to work with anyone next to Me.

So for me, a lot of my sensory sensitivities were with regards to sound, smell, light, noise.

So if I had somebody, and I did, who had an unfortunate habit of.

Of sort of clicking or tapping or something like that, all I could focus on was the clicking and the tapping.

And it would almost send me into, like, this sort of spiral of almost losing my mind, of like, please stop doing that.

I'm gonna.

You know, I couldn't concentrate.

No one was wearing headphones then, so I didn't have that option.

I literally had to use every bit of my brain power to tune out to the point where I would be so exhausted.

And when I'd come home, I couldn't have a conversation, I couldn't make dinner.

All I needed to do was have a hot shower and not speak to my partner.

And so from an outside perspective, I looked pretty normal, inverted commas, pretty altogether.

Was very on top of my work, but inside, I was really, really struggling.

So would you say that would have been a good time for me to have a bit of dialectical behavior therapy?

Certainly.

I mean, as.

As a technique.

So oftentimes, you know, dialectical behavioral therapy came out of the need to treat people with borderline personality disorder because they were having difficulty functioning in the world in very big ways, in very serious, difficult ways.

And so you'll often find dialectical behavioral therapy in hospitals, in inpatient or in outpatient, intensive outpatient programs, I think.

In the uk.

Is it called Emotional Instability disorder?

Not Borderline Personality Disorder, EUP or eu?

I've heard about borderline personality disord a lot, and that often gets misdiagnosed as, sorry, ADHD people or autistic people often get misdiagnosed with that.

And it feels a little bit outdated now that we understand neurodiversity a little bit more with its nuances and how it can show up.

So that's just a bit of an aside.

Well, you know, frankly, that's a whole other podcast about the misdiagnosis of women with borderline personality disorder when they have other things wrong with them, primarily major depressive disorder with anxiety, ptsd.

There's a seminal book called Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman.

Anyone who's interested in borderline personality disorder.

Great book to read about how men are diagnosed with PTSD and women are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

It's not funny.

It makes me nervous to even think about it.

That book was.

And it's still One of those foundational texts.

But in any case, you're hitting the core of the issue, which is that people with ADHD deal with emotional instability issues at times when they are being tried in their nervous system.

So you described your workplace as having smells and sounds and distractors and threats to you that felt really so challenging to you that all you could do was use your energy to manage that distress.

And I imagine that your work suffered as a result because you couldn't speak up and say, like, I can't sit next to this person who is going, or whatever is going on.

Well, no, interestingly so, not my work didn't suffer.

It was my mental health because I overcompensated.

So I pushed harder, tried more, overexerted myself, so I felt more burnt out.

So actually, from the outside, and I hear this a lot, that we have to overcompensate for the sensory challenges that we have.

Thought there's something wrong with us, that there's some form of, you know, dysfunction with us.

Whereas if I just had some headphones or I was allowed to work from a separate part of the office by a window, or I could work from home for a few days a week, I think this would have been balanced out.

And we hear this so much that if we are just given very simple, different accommodations that just help bring out the better conditions for us to work, then this burnout will happen, this overstimulation, overwhelm all the things.

But we're told that this is the only way, this is the right way to work.

And if you can't work in an open plan office, there's something wrong with you.

And if you can't deal with working with four people and a radio on and people walking past you and chatting over you, then there's.

Then you've got the problem.

And that's where I struggle a little bit, because it kind of feels like we live in this neurotypical world that is only just understanding.

We're really, really just at the tip of understanding.

And I know I could have done a much better job if my nervous system wasn't so always dysregulated.

In the end, I left.

I left the job and I've become my own boss for many, many years for that reason.

Yeah, well, I think that you've hit the nail on the head when you say that accommodations really help people with adhd.

And, you know, from the time that people are small in school who have adhd, they're taught fit in, stand in the line, color within the lines, and do what we say and be quiet and don't complain.

And that does really cause very serious mental health issues.

It's very hard.

And it also causes self esteem issues, I mean, which, which feeds right into mental health issues.

So it's no surprise to me to learn you are so distressed that actually you were able to put your energy into doing your work and the work didn't suffer, but that you did.

And that is a sad story.

It has a happy ending.

But, you know, my hope would be that we could help people to be able to work at their best with more flexible arrangements and with more accommodations and so on.

When there is no choice, though, sometimes we have to cope.

You know, if you've picked out, you know, 25 items in your basket and you're, and you're on your way home from work to cook dinner for your family, you, you know, it's not ideal to leave the line because someone ahead of you is wearing too much perfume and the person behind you is even listening to headphones that are too loud.

And so what do you do in those circumstances is sort of the thing that an occupational therapist could be very useful to help people with.

For example, I would say a big part of the educational process, psychoeducation process that I do with people is to teach people to recognize they're having a feeling.

You know, you're describing a situation where your feelings were gravely invalidated in the office, not because anyone said, you can't have a feeling, Kate, but because you knew you were not supposed to quote, unquote, again with the quote, the scare quotes there.

You weren't supposed to say you were having a feeling, and so you had to push it down inside.

Eventually.

The impact of that is that you don't even know when you're having a feeling.

And so if you don't know when you're having a feeling, all of a sudden you may be having, you know, for lack of better word, tantrums or outbursts or feeling very irritable or yelling at your partner for reasons that have nothing to do with what happened, with what your partner did at home.

And so it's really impactful across the board that people.

And by the way, I would like to say, even though this is an ADHD podcast, this is a human situation as well.

I mean, people with ADHD are not the only people who have angry outbursts.

I mean, certainly not.

And ADHD crosses lines, of course, with anxiety, depression, obsession with compulsive disorder.

I see that a lot in practice.

And, you know, you, you Touched upon that a few minutes ago by saying that the diagnosis, something about diagnosing and I think, oh, right, the borderline diagnosis being confused or ADHD being confused with borderline and vice versa.

There is so much OCD in my opinion missed in people with adhd.

Because what I say to my patients is I think of ADHD kind of a Venn diagram.

So you have adhd, you have ocd, you have anxiety, you have mood disorders, and all of that intersects with, with your personality.

And so you have a person in the middle who is responding through various lenses that are how they're wired.

And so helping somebody with their wiring can really help.

And that's what I'm referring to when I say wiring is like nervous system wiring because we're talking about nervous system responses, fight, flight, freeze or fawn, which are all things that happen when we're under stress.

Yeah, but it's, it's this propensity, it's this sensitivity like you say, to our nervous system being on such a hyper, sort of hyper vigilant and always being in that, that sort of cortisol state.

You know, the biggest thing I always say to people is like, we just want our day to day life to feel easier.

We want our day to day life to feel like there's a bit more calm and peace and self acceptance and compassion.

Because if we can have that, not every day, but we don't want like big fireworks and we don't want big highs and lows.

We just want it to feel like we can get through the day.

And it doesn't feel like all you want to do is lie in a dark room afterwards.

Because that is the most challenging part.

So I was wondering if I would love to just go back to the dialectical behavior therapy and if there's a few that you can think of that, you know, little tools or little tips that you can offer if someone's thinking, I would just love to be able to self regulate in the moment.

I would love.

If I'm in that very triggering situation where I'm in an office and something's happening, I can feel the irritability sort of rising.

Is there anything that you can think of that perhaps might help somebody in that moment?

Definitely.

I.

The place I would begin is recognition of what is happening and how turned up your nervous system is in a moment.

Because for example, if you are very.

Neurologically aroused.

So you are, you feel like your face is hot and you're shaking and you feel like your heart is pounding and you just feel like you're about to either jump up and down, run out of the room, punch somebody, that sort of thing.

The feeling, obviously that is not the time to meditate.

That's the time to use other tools.

So it's really important for people to recognize their state first.

What is the state of affairs?

Are you highly upset?

And as I sometimes talk about with my clients, upcighted, that's what I call like being upset and excited.

If you are super upsided, the best thing I can think of in an office setting, or if you're, let's say at, I don't know, at a party with friends or something, go in the bathroom and splash cold water on your face.

There are few things that are better than implementing what's called the diving reflex.

The diving reflex is putting cold on your face.

That's why people love a polar plunge.

Being immersed in cold is a shock to the system and it brings our heart rate down and it helps us to feel a sense of calm.

But it's also the proverbial kind of shaking someone by the shoulders or a slap in the face.

I'm sounding really violent.

There's a lot of.

That's like old school.

Yeah.

If someone was having some, like, hysteria, that.

Yes, but I wouldn't advise that.

I do not recommend punching or slapping or any such thing.

But the idea being like kind of getting out of the state of reality, excited anxiety and changing that state.

Right.

And then it's time after that, after you've been able to calm your nervous system down and you feel like you're literally back to thinking straight, then it's time to consider maybe breathing exercises like boxed breathing, where you focus or, you know, counting can be really hard in those circumstances.

So maybe just exhale.

Lengthening the exhale.

Don't worry about the inhale ever.

With breathing, I think nine times out of 10, people get very anxious when you tell them to breathe when they're upset.

So the best thing I always tell people is just, this may sound funny on a podcast, but go like, you know, make a raspberry with your lips, like.

Or go, you know, make a big sigh and do that a number of times.

So sighing cold water on the face, those are things.

And as a matter of fact, I always recommend creating what I call like an on the go crisis kit.

And you can put essential oils in there.

You could put a little card in there for to, you know, call your best friend or your favorite mantra.

Something that calms you down.

Like, you know, I love that Eleanor Roosevelt said, you Must do the thing you think you cannot do.

I love that one.

Or if you make a big mistake when you knew better, you did better.

That's.

I believe it's attributed to Maya Angelou, but I'm not sure if it's actually her.

In any case, there's a lot of little tips and tricks, so it's just a matter of trial and effort.

But back to the original.

Cause I do remember that you said meditation, which I am a huge fan of.

Meditation is the equivalent of having a parachute for when you jump out of the airplane, right?

So if you consider jumping out of the airplane the time when you're really upset and you're really.

What's the word?

You're being.

It's a trial for you, Right?

You should not be weaving the parachute or sewing it together while you jump.

Right?

So in other words, to make that very clear, meditation helps you build the parachute.

And so the more you do it, which is a sort of hateful act for people with adhd.

So if you're all scratching your head and saying, is she out of her mind?

How.

How is she telling us to meditate?

Here's what I mean by meditation.

Stop worrying about meditation being in some pretty place where, you know, you're sitting in the lotus position and you know everything is beautiful.

No, no, no.

Meditation can be.

You're walking down the street and you feel.

You pay attention to every time your heel hits the ground or when you are brushing your teeth.

You focus in on what the water sounds like when it's running, what your toothpaste tastes like.

This is a bad example for people with adhd.

It's dental oral hygiene is often rough.

So I don't want to call attention to that if that bothers people.

But things like that, focusing in and learning mindfulness first is a really great way to get towards meditation.

And there is such a thing, as I was referring to before, as walking meditation.

And so you don't have to be still.

Oh, one other thing.

Long ago, you know, I myself as a therapist have had therapy for sure.

I had something happen that was very anxiety provoking at my hospital job.

And I told my therapist about it and I said, you know, right after it happened, I tried to sit down and meditate and calm down.

She said, well, that couldn't be a worse time to do that.

Like, that is not the time to try to meditate right after something bad happens.

The time to meditate is any day that you can remember to meditate, not right when you've had something upsetting happen because you, you're not going to be able to pay attention in the moment without judgment, which is mindfulness and meditation.

Yeah.

And then that just exacerbates the sort of self criticism and exacerbates that kind of like that nervous system that is already heightened already.

So I mean, I love, I love all those examples.

And it is very much, I go back to, let's not over complicate this.

This is all about anything.

You know, we're talking about occupational therapy and dialectical behavior therapy.

It all sounds, you know, lots of like restrictions or things that we need to understand and know.

But essentially this is about soothing our nervous system.

This is about, you know, and we feel regulated when we've got a soothed nervous system and we're able to cope with stress better and we're able to manage those difficult times in our day and our life, which are always going to happen.

Because no matter how many boundaries you put in place and accommodations, we're still going to be put in situations that don't feel comfortable to us, that are going to detest us.

And that happens.

Like you say to everyone, it's not just with adhd, but if we can almost take responsibility for soothing our nervous system when we can, it's a compounding effect, isn't it?

So like you say, if we meditate once in a highly stressed situation, that's not going to help.

But if we choose four minutes a day to be more mindful and more present, that's gonna help.

Eventually we're gonna notice a nervous system that just feels a little bit softer and able to withstand more challenging moments.

But I think when we have higher stress tolerance, we're able to do some of the things that we kind of wanna do.

Like you say that quote is like, do the thing you don't wanna do that makes you feel uncomfortable.

But once you get through it, the other side, it's like, oh, I did that.

And then we've got evidence that we can do it again.

Yes.

Yeah.

There really is psychological research on exposure and response prevention therapy that literally explains the, the mechanism of being exposed to things that are difficult and doing them again and again.

I mean, that's how we treat ocd.

So if someone is afraid to walk past the, the stairs outside of their residence, getting them to walk out and take one step out and then do that again and again and build through the distress and tolerate the distress and then move forward, anything like that.

So exposure to difficulty in and of itself can be really good for us, especially if we Go back to dbt.

One of the really key skills in DBT that you learn is behavioral analysis.

And so if you make a mistake, if something inevitably, which inevitably will go wrong, you can look back on that and look at the behaviors that went down in that circumstance and then learn from yourself.

It's especially helpful if someone can help walk you through a behavioral analysis.

But a very quick and dirty way to do a behavioral analysis is to simply say to yourself, if you, let's say if you lost your temper or if you have found something very difficult in a circumstance like you, maybe you didn't lose your temper, but your mind wandered, which frequently happens in adhd.

Ask yourself what happened directly before and maybe a little bit before that and then see if there is a pattern that you can identify is did something happen?

Oftentimes when people are having stress reactions, it's because something stressful occurred for them.

But they don't really make the connection that the stressful thing happened and then that they did a behavior that they do all the time to manage the stress that occurred.

And so behavioral analysis can be really helpful not only with little children, but with adults and with ourselves as well.

It's this recognizing, isn't it?

It's that awareness and building that self awareness of seeing where we are and seeing why we feel like that.

And I'll go back to my previous example.

I don't think I even knew why I felt so overstimulated at work and how much of an impact that person's habits were having.

And that's the smells and the lights and the noise and the.

I worked in a very busy and open plan office with so much noise and a radio playing and meetings happening in the open plan office.

I just knew I felt very overstimulated and fraught, but I didn't have the language and I didn't have the understanding that I do now.

So that may have helped me at the time for validation of no wonder you're feeling like this.

No wonder when you get home after being stuck in traffic for an hour that all you want to do is have a hot shower and not speak to anyone that would make sense.

But no one validated that and I didn't have the understanding, which is.

Is what it is.

And thankfully one of the reasons why I wanted to do this podcast was so we can share these conversations so more people feel validated and there's more awareness and we can.

We always, when we share stories, we always see something in ourselves as well.

I wanted to ask you before we Kind of close off.

I know that you were, you were talking about internal family systems.

And again, I don't want to use another piece of jargon or whatever with all the, with all this going on, but I am really interested in ifs and I've not spoken about it properly on the podcast before, but I wondered if you can explain how you describe it and I guess how you blend it into what you do as well with neurodivergent people.

Well, internal family systems is a, is a technique and yes, I, I hate jargon, so hopefully it's going to make sense quickly.

And that is the, it's the idea that we have a family inside our own psychology or if you prefer, team some sort of group of different types of personality types inside of us.

And I think some people sort of say, I don't understand, I have a family outside of me.

How does it mean?

How do you mean I have a family inside of me.

So the idea being like, you might have this protector type that comes out when you're angry or you're having an argument with your partner and maybe you remember times when people would yell at you or criticize you when you were small, if that's a thing.

You might have an exile part or parts that hold a lot of your stress or maybe even trauma if you've been traumatized in the past.

Most people have what we call small t trauma, which is, you know, difficulties in their past, but also trauma like, you know, life threatening trauma can be held by exiles.

So, and then we have firefighter types.

Those are also protectors, but they're the ones that'll do anything to make bad feelings go away.

They're the ones who binge eat or drink or do drugs or sometimes do self harming type behaviors.

They don't care what they need to do, they just need to make difficulties stop.

And so with internal family systems, we begin to learn to listen to our internal feelings or voices, if you will.

And it's, there's nothing wrong with having a voice or a part of you that functions in a different way than other parts.

And I can prove this by saying, think about any time that you've said something along the lines of, a part of me wants to go to that event, but a part of me would really like to stay home and sit on the couch and put my feet up.

That's almost a universal feeling.

Or a part of me wants to go out on that date with the new person.

And a part of me wants to avoid dating because I hate it.

And so you are literally speaking of the various parts of you.

And so how is this useful in terms of talking about distress and anxiety?

I'll use a personal example.

I have health anxiety.

I am anxious about having mammograms or going to doctors and things like that.

And for years and years I tried the wrong technique.

I tried to act like it was sort of an OCD fear and try to just, just distract myself and move on from it.

But when I turn towards that voice inside of me and I realized it's like a child that was five years old practically saying, I don't want to go to the doctor.

I'm afraid what's going to happen.

I'm afraid what they're going to do to me and listen to that fear.

Obviously I am not five years old, but there was a part of me that was hanging on to fear.

And when I could kind of soothe that part, I didn't need to make that part go away.

It wasn't a bad part of me.

It was just a part of me that needed a different type of soothing than me saying, shut up, sit down.

Because there are sometimes where it is helpful not to say shut up and sit down, but to say, it's not time for that thought right now.

We need to set that aside and do our work.

We need to set that aside and do the dishes and so on.

So ifs internal family systems is very helpful and it's actually a good self help model.

You can go on to YouTube and find tons of videos about helping yourself.

And this is one of those things that really irritates psychologists and therapists because it's like, what do you mean you can help yourself?

I'm not suggesting that people do their own therapy, but I am suggesting that it is a model that's meant to democratize helping yourself.

And so you can learn about ifs, you can get workbooks and you can learn how to identify what parts of you are operating in circumstances where you're having trouble.

And not to go on and on.

But let me bring it back to adhd because ifs really works nicely for people with adhd.

So, for example, a common problem saw it yesterday with my son trying to write a paper on a Sunday evening for school that was due tomorrow.

He was in procrastination mode.

Okay?

So the parts of him that were operating were the perfectionist part, the part that was like, I can't do this paper because I'm going to mess it up.

So I don't.

There's no point in even starting and the part of him that preferred to play video games instead of doing his schoolwork, and the part of him that felt resentful, they had.

He had any work to do whatsoever.

And the part of him that was mad at himself because he hadn't done the paper sooner.

And so all of these parts were operating at once.

And he didn't talk to me about it last evening, but we've talked about it in the past.

And he's learned ways to work with all of those parts of himself to be able to say, okay, everybody, like, somebody's gonna come in.

The self, which I didn't mention.

Excuse me, before.

We are all built, like, inherently with a self and that never breaks.

And the self is like our wisdom.

And his self was able to come in and say, okay, it's time to do the paper.

Perfectionist.

It's gonna be okay.

Self soothe on that angry part.

You know, chill.

We'll do something fun a little bit later.

Video games, part play later, that kind of thing.

And so it applies really nicely in ADHD as well.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

And I've sort of done a lot of research on it myself, read lots of books, done some courses, never really practiced it with clients, but I've sort of brought it in with actually my tapping with my eft.

And it's called Parts Parts Work, Parts Therapy.

It's a lot about sort of soothing the inner child as well.

It's.

It's sort of inner child work.

And I like the way that you can blend it.

There's different ways of bringing in and blending it.

But I totally agree with you because a lot of people will always have, especially diagnosed later on in life, will have trauma from not understanding themselves.

So that could just be the trauma.

And they'll kind of think, well, I didn't really go through anything too terrible.

And then they'll break it down and go, well, yeah, my parents did kind of get divorced.

It wasn't so great.

But, you know, we were.

We were okay.

But I never really understood why I didn't fit in or I never really understood why I felt like I had to mask or be a perfectionist or a people pleaser.

And all these different things.

And that in itself can be, you know, the trauma.

And these parts of us do come out when we're adults and we don't understand why they're coming out.

So which is why I like, ifs because we are able to start understanding why.

So why do I binge eat?

Or where is.

Where does that addiction of behavior come from?

Or why do I feel this, this need to overcompensate all the time for other people's behavior?

And we will always know that there's, there's something that's gone on in our system, you know, throughout our life.

A book I found actually very helpful was Gabby Bernstein's book called Self Help.

And it's all about ifs.

And she worked with Dick Schwartz on it.

So it's kind of been approved by him, who is the creator, he's the founder of IFS therapy.

And Gabby Bernstein's sort of broken it down so it feels a lot more non therapeutic.

So there's lots of ones that are, if you're a therapist, it's probably a lot more academic and theoretical, whereas Gabby's brought it in and I think is sort of just presented it for the layman for any of us to understand.

And I actually found that a very helpful book.

So if anybody is intrigued by ifs, I would recommend that book actually, because it really does, and it really breaks, breaks down the self as well.

Understanding.

Because I was like, what's the self like?

I'm just, that's just me.

But actually I now trust myself better.

And it is about self trust, isn't it?

Leaning into like you say, that inner wisdom, that part of us that really does know what's best for us, but we have all these other noisy parts telling us what to do instead.

Yeah.

And there are no bad parts.

Like, you know, that is a very important thing to say.

Even our parts that are firefighters that are doing the thing like that we don't really feel like we would like to be doing, but somehow we're, we feel a compulsion to do like binge eats, stay home all day when we have chores to do or whatever the case may be.

But you know, one thing you touched upon that I think is really important is ifs is just another way of naming what we already know psychologically.

And I think you made a very good point, and I'd like to put a fine point on that.

You can call it inner child work, you can call it healing your childhood, you can call it trauma work, you can call it ifs, you can call it anything you like.

But when you get it right about various things, you always wind up saying virtually the same thing with different names on it.

So folks out there who are concerned with jargon, it doesn't matter what you call these things, but if you have a sense of peace and wisdom, some people call that your wise mind, some people call that the self.

Whatever it is, there's a part of you essentially that knows what's right and knows what's right for you.

And it's that feeling of peace and like the part that just goes like that can really take that exhale.

And when you can find that part that can lead you, that can make things really helpful, that's the part of you that helps you maybe quit a job that's terrible or leave a partner who's abusive.

And so that's the self or the wise mind.

And those other parts around us that we, that we feel where we're finding them.

You know, again, scare quotes.

Problematic are more parts that are clamoring for our attention in one way or another.

And so if we turn towards them instead of away from them and we focus in on their needs as well, it's a lot easier to function.

I spend all day pretty much with people trying to help them feel their feelings.

And it is a scary thing.

But the truth is that when you feel your feelings, it makes it a whole lot easier to go through your life.

When you ignore your feelings, they show up anyway.

So what we resist persists.

That's what some people say in the therapy world.

And so allowing yourself to have feelings or finding something space for those feelings is important.

And I think that's important with people with ADHD because there's feelings of disappointment, stress, strain, longing, and those things you're allowed to feel.

And when you feel them, you can heal from a lot of the things that went on in, in the past where you felt invalidated or misunderstood.

Yeah, thank you for that.

And that's.

It's so powerful to hear that, isn't it?

Because we may have been brought up by people who were taught themselves to suppress and repress and not talk about these things or get on with it.

And all of a sudden we're being opened up to actually you can trust yourself and you are able to talk about what is upsetting you and that's okay and nothing bad's gonna happen.

And just to finish off what you were saying, I was thinking about, you know, sometimes we can find it really hard to make a decision we're overthinking.

And then all these different parts come in and say, what about this?

And you might not have enough money or you're not professional enough or you're not this or like, how's that going to look and what people going to think?

Like, you can hear the voices already.

But then you move through and you make that really difficult decision that feels so uncomfortable and scary and fearful and I always know when self is sort of driving you because it is scary to make that decision.

But then afterwards you kind of go, ah, I'm not even challenging myself.

I know that was the right decision.

Like you say, whether it's leaving a job or moving house or leaving a partner, whatever that might be, that is when we know that self is driving and we can kind of go, I'm at peace with that decision now.

And then I guess that that tolerance goes up.

So the more we can trust ourselves in that, we know that yes, making those choices can be scary.

Leaning in is scary and horrible, but what we get on the other side is, is worth it.

So.

Yeah, but I I just want to thank you so much, Vanessa, because I love I Despite the jargon that we've sort of thrown at everybody today, I actually think that what we've given, I hope in this conversation is just little tools and insights and techniques that people can make choose from and hopefully at least one will land and that will just make life feel a little bit easier.

That's what I hope anyway.

Can you tell people, you know, thinking I'd love to work with you or listen to your podcast, tell us how they can find you?

Yeah, so I do.

This is the first podcast that I have appeared on where I have a podcast.

So this is a momentous occasion for me because I've been on some other podcasts in the past.

So my podcast is called Real Over Ideal with me, Vanessa Goralkin, and you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

It's a short more it's very ideal for people with adhd.

It's short form.

You could speed it up.

I don't talk that fast because I am a Gen X, not, not a gen whatever alpha.

So I, I, I've been told that sometimes people want to speed it up.

And so it's a short, firm podcast where I talk about all sorts of psychological and mental health, wellness kind of things.

You may have a whole episode on ifs.

I have a website my name which I think will be best to find in the show notes.

I also I'm on Instagram at its Vanessa Gorelkin and I love it when people reach out to me.

You can use the contact form on my website.

I answer people when you email people sometimes send questions after podcasts and I love to share knowledge.

It's one of the reasons why I have my podcast because I just feel like as a person with 30 years of experience that's real and valid.

I want to share there because it's expensive to see a therapist individually, and while I encourage it, I just think sometimes it's hard to access that.

So my podcast is meant to sort of provide some of the key information that I think everyone should be entitled to in a democratized kind of way.

Thank you, thank you.

And also just to say that you do work globally as well.

So even if, yeah, even if you're not in the States, you are able to work globally together online.

And I think that'll be very helpful for lots of people.

So thank you so much, Vanessa.

It was so good to finally connect and look forward to speaking to you again very soon.

Thank you so much for having me.

If this episode has been helpful for you and you're looking for more tools and more guidance, my brand new book, the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit is out now.

You can find find it wherever you buy your books from.

You can also check out the audiobook if you do prefer to listen to me.

I have narrated it all myself.

Thank you so much for being here and I will see you for the next episode.