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ADHD and Emotions

 When I was a child, I was labeled as "sensitive." The smallest slight by another child would often result in me bursting into tears. This is hardly the best way to handle things in a 3rd grade classroom, but I had no control over it. Everyone made fun of me for it and I was routinely called a "crybaby." I would also cry over happy things, although most people thought this was fairly normal. I was very easily frustrated. When I had difficulty completing a task (this happened A LOT!) I would often give up, kick at things, or push things onto the floor. This sensitivity continued well into adulthood until I started to learn ways to manage my emotions in therapy.  What I didn't know as a child was that I had ADHD and that one of my issues included emotional dysregulation. What's emotional deregulation? Simply put, it is an inability to control your emotions. It looks like mood swings, inappropriate reactions to situations, angry outbursts, or trouble calming do...
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I’m not crazy. My reality is just different from yours.

  The Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland is one of my favorite fictional characters. This line is the best example of why. Alice is constantly trying to make sense of the dream world around her. But every time she can’t, she simply calls it “crazy.”   If you think about it, we do this all the time. If we don’t understand something or someone, we simply call it crazy, as if the thing we can’t understand is what’s wrong. Often times, people will argue their own point, trying to prove they’re “right.”   What if we accepted that everyone’s reality is their own?   That’s the truth though. My brain sees a tree and interprets the colors of it as a tree – browns and greens, mostly. But if someone if colorblind, they don’t see it the same way. It’s still a tree but it looks very different to them.   So, who’s right?   Well, in society, we like to believe that the typical depiction of a tree is what’s right – brown trunk, green leaves. Typical because that’s what ...
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Reality Rejection

  If you look up reality in the dictionary, the first definition is “the state or fact of being real.”   Well, that’s helpful.   What is reality? What makes something real?   That, my friends, is what I want to discuss in this blog. Most people want to know why I would care though, so let me explain.   Our brain is a pretty incredible thing. Not only does it manage all kinds of automatic processes in the body like breathing and heart rate but it interprets the world around us. And that is the most important part, right there – it interprets.    One person’s view of the world is probably not like another person’s view of the world. Philosophers have been known to ask questions like “what is green?” But if you think about it, that applies to everything around us.    Our interpretation of the world dictates what we believe about the world around us. Maybe, by looking at the world through the questions of what other people see we can become more ...
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