Ep34: AuDHD Experience — Self-Concept and it's Influence on Autistic, AuDHD & ADHD Experience

0:00 If emotions are my whole experience of my body's response to and my understanding of myself in my context, then what's my understanding of myself in my context? We love an audio stimmer, harmony and self-acceptance. It's the Audi HD Psych Podcast. Hello friends, welcome back to the Audi HD Psych Podcast.

0:27 I'm Aaron Howe, a clinical psychologist, and we are different, not defective. Well, today I wanted to have a bit of a chat about self-concept, what it is, how we develop it as neurodivergent folk, and how we can change it to improve our experience. So I'll start with exactly that, a bit of a conversation around what self-concept is.

0:51 Then I'll talk about how human experience influences our self-concept and then neurodivergent experiences, how they give us potentially a different self-concept to the average person. And then finally, I'll have a little bit of a chat about how we can improve our self-concept and therefore improve our emotional experience.

1:15 Because emotion is the quality of our lives. It's what gives us the colour, the flavor, the meaning to our lives. So excuse me. Thank you, frog. Well I kiss you and turn you into a prince. So what is self-concept? Self-concept is really our understanding of ourselves. Am I smart? Am I not smart? Am I strong?

1:41 Am I weak? These ideas of who and what I am. So in uh in CBT, we talk about core beliefs. They would be the core beliefs about myself all woven in together into a single unitary idea of who and what I am. Pardon me. Plural identities aside, that's a slightly different discussion. This is a broader, more general conversation.

2:05 So I, as I mentioned in episode 32 about emotions, uh my description of emotions is that they are our combined or our integrated understanding of our body's response to and our understanding of ourselves in our current context. And that understanding of myself also draws on all my past history. So what does that mean?

2:38 Every experience we have teaches us something. So right now I'm sitting down, I'm looking at a camera above my monitor, and I'm learning that I'm getting better at not saying pardon me as a stim every time I need to have a pause. I'm learning something about myself. Previously, I would have used more filler, more pardon me every time I cleared my throat, which I still do quite a lot, but I'm slowly learning new things the more I record about how I can present myself in this medium so that my information gets across a little clearer.

3:15 For the other ADHDers out there, I know that uh you will feel me, or many of you will feel me, on how difficult it is to change that. But I think it's really important that I am learning that I can just have a little minute of silence there rather than filling that silence while I think about what I'm going to say.

3:35 That's this lesson that I'm having right now, and the previous 33 lessons that I've had recording this podcast have all taught me a little bit more about who and what I am in front of a camera when I'm trying to record a podcast. So that is true of every experience. And my self-concept isn't just me as a generality, it's me in all of the domains that are important in my life, it's me in my relationships, it's me at school in learning, it's me at work in my systems of productivity, it's me in my family setting, it's all of those core domains of life, they all roll into my self-concept.

4:19 And I'll have an understanding of myself in each of those. You know, I often tell the story about um I wanted to study psychology for about 15 years before I finally started undergrad. And the reason I did is because while still in the Navy, I worked with a person, we'll call them Maddie, because that's their name.

4:35 Um, Maddie, thank you. Uh, they were studying psych and said, Oh, I wanted to study psych when I was younger, but I'm academically stupid, was essentially the conversation. And it was that person that said to me, No, you'll be fine, you'll you'll pass it without any problems. Now, why did I think I was academically stupid?

4:55 Because as I've said a thousand times, um I failed year 12 and then I repeated year 12, and I failed it again because I no one had taught me how to use my brain and anchor it with novelty, interest, challenge. I knew how to anchor it with emergency, anxiety, last-minute deadlines. I'd worked that out.

5:14 So part of my self-concept there was from all of the uh not knowing how to motivate myself to plan and work for assignments over a period, I'd learnt to use anxiety to motivate myself to get the things done. But because I hadn't even used that particularly well, I'd also had a lot of failure experiences, and they had taught me that I was an academic failure or I was academically stupid.

5:40 So that had really informed my self-concept so that at nearly 40 years old, I believed that I was academically stupid. That was part of my self-concept. Uh, I also had a lot of experiences in the Navy where I didn't perform particularly well as a member of a productive environment. And so I had a really mixed understanding of myself as a worker.

6:03 I knew that under pressure I could solve problems reasonably well up to a point. Uh, but I also had so many experiences of not getting things done that needed to be done. So they had all informed my understanding of who and what I am in the workplace. So that's examples of how we developed our self-concept, which I didn't really signpost terribly well, but here we are.

6:28 Um every single experience we have. If you have a conversation with a new person, maybe a barista, somebody in a cafe, that's informing your self-concept of who you are as a social being. And if I go into those situations having a past history of perceived failure, uh air quotes in brackets there for those not watching on video, pardon me, oh, there's that stim.

6:54 Then I'm going to have a self-concept that involves social situations are threatening, and I am less than the social situation. I'm going to enter them with that self-concept, and that's likely to reinforce that experience. Uh, I'm going to be really hyper-aware of all the mistakes I make, and then those mistakes will be the salient part that I roll into my understanding of myself.

7:19 Now that's true of every person, and it's true in a positive sense as well. Uh, since leaving the Navy and starting to study, I've learned that when in the right environment and given the right things to anchor my attention on, I'm actually academically reasonably very okay. I hedged that a lot. Enjoy that one.

7:40 Um, yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm quite bright. So nature, genetic lottery gave me that. I did nothing for it. Um, but I didn't know that because of my past lessons. Since then, I've had some success experiences because I've been able to anchor my attention with interest in psychology and I love people. So my self-concept as somebody who learns has changed considerably in the last 10 years.

8:07 And that's true of every single person. Now, neurodivergent people, in the uh in the prevailing perspective of a deficit-based model. Excuse me one moment. I do actually have a tickle in my throat this morning. In the prevailing deficit-based model, which, as I've said before, I'm not against the medical model, it exists to try to help people, but it does focus solely on what's not working.

8:34 And when that happens, uh, and I'm repeating past episodes now, when that happens, then the dominant idea about a construct, uh, in this case neurodivergence, becomes the construct is a deficit rather than we are looking at the deficits or difficulties associated with this construct. That becomes a dominant social narrative, and that is a lesson that we as neurodivergent people get over and over and over again.

9:03 And the flip side is true also, the lessons about typicality. When the majority of people have certain characteristics, uh, that is deemed to be normal, and normal is typically, as a heuristic, assumed to be right. That's not correct, but it's what we assume because our brains like to do the easiest job that they can.

9:25 So what I see most often is what I assume to be right. There's an implicit learning of self-fair when I don't have the quote normal characteristic, then I implicitly get these lessons that I'm not right, I'm not good, I'm not strong, whatever the value label is. So my self-concept as a neurodivergent, inattentive, vague little kid, was more likely that, ah, I'm vague, or I'm off with the fairies, or I'm impulsive, or I talk a lot, I love a monologue, or I'm obnoxious and boring.

10:03 This is the implicit feedback we get from people that informs our understanding of who and what we are. So if that's my understanding of who and what I am, when I go to start a conversation, I'm either going to expect it to go badly or have anxiety around it. And the more anxious I am, the less uh successful I'm likely to be in that social engagement, reinforcing that self-concept.

10:30 So that's talking about failure experiences, and I guess that nicely brings me to success experiences, and how can we change our self-concept? How can we improve our emotional experience to improve the quality of our lives? Well, that is getting new lessons. CBT does a really good job of this in terms of here's the thing that I'm scared of, here's what I'm going to do that I'm scared of.

10:57 That gives me new lessons, that gives me new understandings of who I am in that social setting, who I am in that performance setting, or that academic setting, or that professional setting. And we scaffold, we start low, we start with the low-level distressing thing or the low challenge thing, and we start to learn that there's a challenge, I can cope with it, manage it, and move on.

11:23 New lessons about self, new lessons about self in that context, new lessons about who and what I am, new confidence, improved experience. And so I can deliberately do things that change my understanding of myself. Now, I'm sure you've all heard me bang on about community. I love the notion of community, and I'll lean back into you know queer history, queer politics, and queer theory.

11:51 We know that community for marginalized and minority peoples, pardon me, uh, is powerful. Why? In the context of self-concept, when I'm constantly comparing myself to typical or normal, I'm constantly feeling that I'm not meeting that mark. However, when I associate with people that are similar to me, more like me, I'm comparing myself against a much more realistic norm, a much more appropriate comparison for me with my characteristics.

12:26 I had the great pleasure last night of uh there is a group of us, uh, I am a board member for a not-for-profit, and I'm a member of a not-for-profit called Low Pack, the League of Autistic Psychologists and Affirming Colleagues. And we had uh a meeting last night where we looked at a presentation, a keynote given by a speaker, and then we all sat around and discussed that for about an hour or so.

12:49 It was a real pleasure, and I got to see other people that think like me, other people that get caught up in one little detail like me, and maybe don't move as swiftly on from that as the typical person might. And in that room, I wasn't deficient at all. I wasn't defective, or there was no deficit at all.

13:10 It was just simply a room full of humans who all have it autistic, and many of us have ADHD characteristics as well. So I was typical, I was normal, I was right in that room to use that particular language. What did it teach me about me? Not so much that I was right, but that I'm not wrong, that I'm not deficient, that I'm not disordered, that I'm not broken just because my attention works in a different way to the average person's, just because I associate the thing we're talking about with the five things that it's linked to, and typically three to five things that they're each linked to.

13:53 In that room, in that community, I didn't feel less than or more than, I didn't feel too much or not enough. I felt just like me, like somebody who was a member of that group. That taught me another lesson about myself. That increased my confidence in social settings with that particular group of people, and more broadly, I'm acutely aware that there are lots of people out there, thousands, tens of thousands of people, who start watching my podcast and stop watching very quickly.

14:23 I get that, I'm quite okay with that because you know, I'm not everyone's cup of tea, and that's fine. But I'm much more comfortable with who and what I am and doing this podcast because I also see a large group of people, a significantly larger group of people who engage with what I have to share and hopefully who take value from it.

14:44 So, in that way, I'm learning that my monologues can be really helpful as well as really boring to some people, they can be really interesting to others, they can be challenging to some people, and they can invite conversation, which is what the meeting that I attended last night was all about. And in a lot of ways, what this podcast is all about.

15:04 Starting conversations with ourselves to question that internal self-concept that we have. Am I actually broken? Or do I just have these lessons that I've learned that have informed my understanding of myself, that are based in a model that's looking for what's I quote wrong to help make it right for people, but then gives us an implicit bias of ourselves as being broken or wrong or deficient.

15:34 And when we can have that conversation with ourselves and others, we can change our self-concept, understand ourselves more truly and in a more balanced way. We're not superpowers, that's that's really unhelpful point of view, I think, as much as the deficit in disorder framing. We are humans like every other human, and we have different strengths and weaknesses to every other human, including people within our own group.

16:02 But we do have strengths and we do have weaknesses, and we do have characteristics that have no value, positive or negative, whatsoever. And that's really important to remember because then we recognize that we're people, we're valid, and we're good. So I guess that's pretty much the end of it. What did I really want to talk about today with self-concept?

16:24 What it is, it's my internal understanding of who and what I am. I learn it from all of the lessons across my life, and it covers most of the areas of my life that I can, you know, that I deem to be important. It's not set and forget, it's like our identity, it is constantly in flux, and everything I do, everything I say to others and myself informs my self-concept in one way or another.

16:51 And when I can change my self-concept, I can change my emotional state. When I change my emotional state, I'm changing the quality of my life. And that's the point. We are different, not defective. And when we know ourselves truly, we can love ourselves truly and love our lives. Well, thank you very much, friends.

17:12 I'll say it again we are different, not defective, and I look forward to monologuing at you again next week. See you, friends.

17:26 We love an audio stimmer, harmony and self acceptance. It's the Audi HD Psych Podcast. That was so much fun.