I’ve been talking a lot with clients recently about the importance of location in our daily functioning and mental and emotional health. Especially for people with ADHD, location in time is often a problem (see here and here for more on this). But there are also questions about location in place, and in relationships. These three dimensions overlap and impact one another, and how we locate ourselves in each will often dictate how we feel about ourselves, about other people, and about our lives. When we get dislocated, there can be great anxiety, a sense of being “lost,” confused, unmotivated, sometimes depressed.
If you have ADHD, it can be very helpful to realize that many of your difficulties are connected with time: being late for appointments, missing deadlines (or scrambling at the last minute to meet them), losing track of time (by getting distracted, or by becoming “locked in” or hyperfocused), procrastinating, having trouble getting started on projects or estimating how long something might take, forgetting what someone said to you just now, or blurting out stuff at the “wrong” time and regretting it later. As Ari Tuckman puts it, “It’s hard to do the right thing at the right time if you don’t know what time it is.” You may have come across the terms “time blindness” or “future myopia,” which likely describe an all-too-familiar difficulty locating yourself in the flow of time.
The other two dimension, place and relationships, are perhaps less specific to ADHD but can be equally impactful. We’re often moving between one environment and another; from work or school to home; maybe from your home office to the kitchen or living area; between family home and your own place, or a partner’s home. It can be hard to adjust at times (and it seems that ADHD brains often have a particularly hard time with transitions). It’s also very easy to get absorbed in your internal world and not really register what’s going on around you, so that even if you are apparently in the kitchen, or the bedroom, with your partner, you’re not really all there!
Which brings us on to questions of location in relationships. How do we know “where we stand” with people? Who is “close in,” and who is more distant? Where are my boundaries with other people? When we find ourselves distant or in conflict with the people we love, how do we repair and reconnect? These are questions we need to answer in order to feel safe and solid, purposeful and properly grounded at the centre of our lives. They’re questions that face us all; and ADHD adds its own particular flavour!
A lot of the work I do with my clients involves looking closely at these questions of location. When do you come “untethered” from the flow of time? Where do you lose your bearings in your changing environment? How do you lose touch (or get too sucked in) with the people you interact with? Once you can see these “dislocations” clearly, you can learn to reorientate and reconnect, with yourself, with others, and with your environment.
If that is something you’d like for yourself, get in touch.