Unknown Speaker 0:04
Hello,
Unknown Speaker 0:07
just check I've got the chat.
Unknown Speaker 0:10
Yes.
Unknown Speaker 0:13
Welcome.
Speaker 1 0:15
Hey, Emma. Hey, Penelope. Hey, Suze. How are you this evening you can you should be able to comment in the chat. Hopefully you can see that, hopefully you can hear me. I would love it if you could just let me know
Unknown Speaker 0:33
by typing hi or something in the chat. Yay.
Speaker 1 0:37
Thanks, Emma, that's awesome. Welcome. Okay, so this is the second time I've done this presentation today. Hi, rev, good to see you, and this is a presentation. Oh, that's so good. I'm so pleased. Well done everyone. Well done for being here. I wrote this presentation originally for an ADHD group I was presenting in. And sorry, it's a bit dark in my room. Otherwise, the lighting is really fluorescent in here, and I really don't like it. But welcome. I presented this probably about a year ago for an ADHD group, or a group of parents of ADHD kids. But the more I work with women, I have no voice. Oh, I'm sorry, sweetheart. I'm so sorry. I've been so sick this week as well. It's I was like, I didn't even know if I was going to do this. Be able to do this today. But I hope you're I hope you're on the mend. But welcome tonight. And I found, as I've been working with women over the years, mainly women. I also work with men as well, but primarily women, one of the things that I've really noticed, and it was funny, I made a social media post about this a couple of days ago, and I was talking about one of the reasons that women drink is because it's the only way sometimes that it feels like we can quiet the busy brain. And I'll talk about busy brain and what that looks like shortly. But there was a comment that came back on the social media post by a guy called Terence, and he just put in inverted commas, willpower, as in, you know the solution to drinking is willpower. And I was thinking, Well, you've totally missed the point of what I was saying. But also just kind of really showed me how ingrained the belief that we have about what changing our relationship with alcohol is about, and so much of what we've been taught, and it's not just about alcohol. This is about anything that we use, you know, in a way that like a behavior that we have that we don't want to have, or the behavior that we have that is making us unhappy, a coping mechanism that we're using. And, you know, this old fashioned kind of attitude of, you know, it's all about willpower and knuckling down and gritting, put up and shut up. And, you know, there was no autism in my day, and all that kind of stuff. It's like, it's so indicative of our culture and explains exactly why we have busy brain, because busy brain is is, and we'll talk more about this, but busy brain is so much about
Unknown Speaker 3:35
punishing ourselves
Speaker 1 3:38
because of what our culture tells us we have to be like to be an acceptable human being. And I'll come on to that a bit more in a minute. But this is here we are. And I love this title, The Alchemist within. It's a workshop on mastering the art of inner peace. And really, what I'm talking about there is not like we're all going to run around being middle Zen masters at all. What I'm talking about is that we are we get to change the experience that we have of living in our bodies and our brains, and we don't have to rely on something like alcohol to anesthetize and numb that experience, right? That's not, that's not we think it's the only solution. We're like, oh my god, I can't think of anything else. And I under and like, I get it right? I'll explain why I get it so well. But the idea is that we're letting go of judgment and busy brain overdrive so that we can kind of get on with our lives and not feel like we're living in a war zone inside our own brains.
Unknown Speaker 4:47
So welcome. Let's begin.
Speaker 1 4:52
And in true ADHD fashion, I was mucking around with my slides just before I came on, so I apologize if anything's in the wrong order.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
Um, but I was like, I need to change this. This isn't right.
Speaker 1 5:03
So some questions for you, um, have you ever felt like you needed a break from your own thoughts? And this is like, you know, I hear I just need a break from I just can't. It's the only way I can sit down, it's the only way I can stop or it's the only way I can push through. It's the only way I can keep going. It was all about, you know, overriding our nervous system in one way or another.
Unknown Speaker 5:31
Have you ever wanted to just have a pause button for your brain?
Unknown Speaker 5:36
I know I have. But
Speaker 1 5:41
do you find yourself reaching for a glass of wine or whatever your tipple is, just to get a reprieve from it all? And I invite you to Yeah, please, yes, etc. I invite you to type me. If that sounds familiar to you, because, and I'll talk, I'll come on to this a bit more, but busy brain is, is is a symptom of a problem. But similarly, alcohol is also a symptom of a problem. You know, we think that the problem is alcohol, and we think that if we get, you know, if we could just get hold of ourselves, if we could just use willpower, if we could just be better, you know, if we could, and that's that sort of busy brain in there, judging us naughty, be better, try harder, then the problem wouldn't exist and and this is the way our culture, yeah, me says, this is the way. Angela says I used to drink to excess and became an alcoholic to quiet the brain and underlying trauma that I didn't know how to treat exactly right? That's it. Nobody teaches us. Nobody tells us what to do with busy brain. And it feels like it's part of us, doesn't it? It feels like it's our personality, it's our identity, and we and we're like, you know, that's us, and we're living in this hell with this constant like, and you know, I'll talk to this more, but it busy brain can show up in so many different ways.
Unknown Speaker 7:21
It can show up as reminders.
Speaker 1 7:25
It can show up as trying not to forget things. For some of us, it doesn't show up as a narrative. For some of us, it shows up as a felt sensation. Can feel like a, you know, a feeling of shame in the tummy, or this horrible foreboding feeling. It can be rumination. It can be, it can it can get as extreme as, you know, in safety checks, you know, going, getting going along OCD kind of areas, just trying to make sure that everything's safe and we're okay. It can be the future catastrophizing. It can be, you know, future forecasting always, usually going to the worst possible
Unknown Speaker 8:01
end result is like,
Speaker 1 8:08
it shows up in so many different ways, and it really all comes from the same source. It comes from the same source, and, and, and it is a real problem for us, and at the moment, alcohol is the solution to that problem. Often, it might be, you might have other solutions for some of us. You know, it might be alcohol, it might be drugs, it might be Doom scrolling Netflix. It might be Doom scrolling Netflix. I don't make any sense. Doom scrolling social media, zoning out on Netflix, just do anything to try and kind of like quieten the brain down, because it just it feels really intense. And when we believe that it is us and it is our personality, and some of us wear that kind of busy brain personality is a badge of honor as well. You know, because it's, it has allowed us to do things. It served us well. Often it served us well. It's allowed us to push through our nervous system. It's allowed us to keep going beyond our ability, beyond what we naturally would do. It has kept us safe from fucking up, you know, it has, you know, it's done all of these things. So some of us are like, well, you know, busy brains, my personality, it's who I am.
Unknown Speaker 9:25
But if any of you have got that really unpleasant inner critic in there,
Unknown Speaker 9:31
she, you know,
Speaker 1 9:34
she makes this life very, very hard, and we and this is why I always say, you know, there's always a really good reason why women drink. Women don't drink for no reason, and it's nothing to do with willpower, and it's nothing to do with self control. It is 100% to do with a situation that doesn't feel safe or acceptable for us to stay with, and being in a war zone in your own brain sometimes feels. Very unsafe. So a little bit about me. Some of you know me, some of you don't. I'm Emma Gilmore. I'm a late, diagnosed autistic ADHD counselor, psychotherapist and alcohol coach. And my superpower, as I'm coming to understand it, is I really understand all the different types of busy brain, and I'm really good at helping people repurpose the deep desire that our busy brain has to keep us safe from harm into something that helps us rather than harms us. So at the moment, those parts of us that it feels like they're helping us, you know, whether fixating on a problem and trying to fix stuff and keeping us up. Keeping us up at night and not letting us sleep and going through all the stuff. And so it feels like they're helping us, because they're intellectualizing, they're keeping us focused on the issue, but really they're stopping us from sleeping, and they're making us drink wine, you know, and none of those things are good for us, and nine times out of 10, they're also making us be afraid to start things, you know? They make us procrastinate. They're, you know, they're judging us before we can be judged. And they're helping us. They're keeping us playing small. They're getting us to push through our nervous system. They're doing all this sort of things that we wouldn't want our children to be doing. You know, Doom scrolling is my new vice now at ADHD, burnout. Oh, mate Penelope, I am so in burnout as well at the moment. So I hear you. And you know what? This is. One of the things I would say, we don't we don't be mean to ourselves for this, right? This is, if we go through this process, we're going to be talking about self compassion all the way through. Self Compassion is 100% the answer. All of the research, all of neuroscience, shows it to be true, absolute opposite of someone going willpower
Speaker 2 11:47
and your nasty, judgmental self inside there, going, Oh, you're rubbish. Try harder, be better, same.
Speaker 1 11:55
I have severe burnout and stress. I hear you, and this is what's happened, right? So we are busy. Brains have kept us safe in their minds by pushing through our nervous system, letting us go far, far, far more work far harder, far longer. You know, doing everything for everybody until, until we get to menopause, perimenopause or or younger or older, or, you know, for me, my children have chronic, chronic fatigue, autistic burnout, their bodies won't let them do what our bodies have let us do for for as long as they have. And I'll talk about this a bit more. But you know, eventually the body's going to say no, right? We know. We know that beautiful Bessel van der Kolk book, or quite challenging vessel van der Kolk book, around trauma and Gabor mate's book as well. The body says, No, you know, the Body Keeps the Score. We know that at a point our bodies go, we can't do this anymore, right? We can't do this anymore. And our busy brains are going, yes, you can. All right, so just a little bit about me, and I'll try and keep this brief, but I just think, for those of you who don't know me, just a bit of you know, I had no idea I was an autistic ADHD person, that my children were autistic ADHD people, until they got to puberty. So I was, I know, 50 or something, when I found out. And funnily enough, it was a couple of years after I stopped drinking, and I don't actually think I would have found out that my children were autistic or that I was autistic. ADHD, if I hadn't stopped drinking. It's quite interesting, because I think drinking is the biggest mask of them all, and it allows us to keep going through all of this stuff and pushing through beyond our capacity, pushing down and aesthetizing the problems that are really there. And I always say the problem's never alcohol. It's always the solution to the problem, right? And this is where self compassion comes in, instead of, like Terence said, it's not
Unknown Speaker 14:04
willpower. You're rubbish.
Unknown Speaker 14:08
Yeah. So this was me as a little one,
Speaker 1 14:12
the right hand picture. I have a very short fringe because I'd cut it myself because it wasn't cut properly by the hairdresser. I was doing my ballet exam, and I kept cutting it. I kept cutting it, and I kept cutting it. My mum, I was doing my first Holy Communion. I was brought up a Catholic, and my mum was chasing me around the bedroom with her hairbrush because I was showed up the family. And, you know, this is another part of it. You know, beautiful families, and I'll always talk about our families. And again, you know, this is something that in society, we, we, you know, one of the reasons why domestic violence has been so prevalent, and I hope that's not too triggering for anybody. Please take care of yourselves. If, if it is, take a break. Feel your feet on the floor. But. A lot of the Brene Brown talks about this in her book, The Atlas of the heart. You know, everything was pushed under the shoved under the rug, you know, but things, horrible things would happen in households, and we wouldn't. No one talk about them. It was private business, personal business, not to be talked about outside of the home. And Brene Brown talks about in Atlas of the heart. She says, you know, if half of us had spoken to our next door neighbor and explained what was happening in our homes, you know, just with the alcoholic parent, the you know, the the abusive parent, the you know, this person with mental health challenges, we wouldn't have all felt so alone. But as it was, we were all pretending. You know, we had to be perfect. We had to be performing perfect. I'm fine families, right? And we had to look and appear to the outside world to be fine, which is why my mum chased me around the house with a hairbrush. She couldn't catch me. I was very fast to smack my bum for cutting my fringe and showing her up in front of the family. This is me, little me with my little nurses outfit. Me with my I was singing in a play. I was about 11, and I was a dreamer, and my reports were all like, you know, head in the clouds, all that kind of stuff I was I was deeply unsociable in my home. I didn't want people in my house, especially as a very young person, my mum used to invite people around to the house, and I would kind of go off and sneak off and read my book, and my poor sister would be left playing with them. I was disorganized. I was messy. I always felt like a burden, because my poor mum would have to, by the time I sat down and did my homework, my poor mum would have to, like, go and phone up a friend and say, Have you got that book? Because Emma's left her school again and stuff like that. I left everything to the last minute. And you know, we'll all have different experiences of our scatteredness or our incredible perfectionism, or, you know, what what we did, what our brains did when we were young, and how we were made to feel about who we naturally were and the changes that we made to ourselves in order for us to be acceptable. So for me and my teens, and I think this is a very common trait with people who drink more than they would want to and neurodivergent humans, is that friendship issues? Yeah. So for me, I had a best friend in the beginning of high school. I was in England, and I was 11, and we were very childish. We play games and make believe and stuff and and sort of, towards the end of that first year high school, she dumped me, and I couldn't understand why. I found it very confusing. But what I did learn was that I was unacceptable as I was, and I needed to change. And, you know, so I started, you know, doing risky behavior, being loud, extroverted, the person that people wanted to be. But there was telltale signs of, you know, looking for attention, but also looking to control my situation. I had eating disorders, all very common for neurodivergent kids, undiagnosed neurodivergent kids,
Unknown Speaker 18:21
and I basically pissed around for a while,
Speaker 1 18:25
until eventually I went to uni and ended up doing really well academically. But I didn't begin with because I was very much involved in, like for me, the social side of things, and being, you know, fun and yeah, was more important. I kept self sabotaging, like, I'd go out for interviews at really good universities, and I'd get drunk or something on the way do really stupid things, and my mum would go, Emma, why? Why do you do these things? And I'd be like, I don't know.
Unknown Speaker 18:54
And I genuinely didn't, I didn't know.
Speaker 1 19:00
And so I moved to London at 23 I got a great corporate job working for Warner Brothers in Soho. I was very much part of that whole media scene. Lots of beers after work. I had to work very hard, and I worked very hard as obsessed with work. I think that's very common thing. It was my hyper focus. I loved my job and I cared about it deeply, really passionately, possibly a little bit too much. So I had a lot of fun, and I worked really hard, but I couldn't really progress. I got to, like, you know, middle management level, and I couldn't really progress. I just seemed to, I would always get, like, feedback, or, you know, you're not, you don't have the gravitas, or you care a bit too much. Sometimes you seem a bit unhinged, like, kind of a little bit to, like, care, you know, carrying a weed bit too much. But work was my identity, and I was really important to me. But I also had managed to change things so that, you know, the things that I had perceived as a kid I wasn't very good at, you. Know, organization. I became Ultra organized. I was so fucking organized. I would get appraisers and they'd be like, Emma's so organized. She's amazing. The mask that we put on the build, you know, this process that we build. So we knew, I knew as a 11 year old that I was unacceptable because I was quiet and childish and I wasn't very sociable, so I changed. I became rebellious, I became outgoing, I became and then, you know, at work, similarly, you know, I had to maintain that sort of identity, that corporate. And I've told this story before. Any of you who listened to my my story about bad, not that bad, but bad enough. I talk about the fact that when I was in corporate, I was in the Myers, Briggs scale, personality scale. I was an ENTJ. And an ENTJ is kind of like your your corporate human, extrovert, thinking, judgmental. And it's so interesting that, since I stopped drinking, moved out of corporate, and have begun the process of unmasking as a autistic ADHD human. My Myers Briggs profile, which is supposed to be like unchangeable. I took it every year when I was in corporate, it always came back the same. And then recently I took it and it was INFP, which is introverted, and I think it's the intuition was the same all the way through. And then it's like feeling rather than thinking. And then I can't remember what the P is, judgment was, was JP, I think it's percept perceiving, or something like that, anyway, almost complete opposite. So chameleons, right? Well, chameleons
Unknown Speaker 21:45
and and, and this is the role of
Unknown Speaker 21:47
our inner
Unknown Speaker 21:48
critic, our
Speaker 1 21:52
ruminator, our future forecaster, our catastrophizer, our to do list. Are busy. Have to keep busy all the
Unknown Speaker 21:59
time, doing stuff all the time. Make the house really perfect. Have everything great. You know,
Speaker 1 22:04
can't stop performing the human being that we feel will keep us safe in the world.
Unknown Speaker 22:13
And so I moved to Australia,
Speaker 1 22:17
and things, I had the kids, and things started to go bit of the spout when I had the kids, because I was, I'd bought into the 80s dream, as I'm sure many of you had as well, if you were in that sort of era, that you know, I could have it all. I was very like, Yeah, I'm going to be corporate person. Like, I'm going to go to work five days. My kids are going to go to daycare. Little did I know, the autism and the ADHD and the school cards and all of these kind of things would come up to bite me on the bum, and also all of the controls that I had put into my life. And I think a lot of neurodivergent and humans with trauma as well, you know, very sensitive human beings, we've created this, this set, this control, you know, of everything we've got everything just so and we know exactly what to do, and we know how to make it work. Bring children into the mix,
Unknown Speaker 23:07
and the whole thing goes to shift because you
Unknown Speaker 23:09
can't control them, and suddenly,
Speaker 1 23:14
yeah, it's overwhelming. And also, half the time we don't realize that with these sensitive folks, all people who drink, my experience has been a very sensitive folks, whether you have trauma, whether you have and trauma, big T, little T, whether you are a nerd of a neurodivergent, however you identify, we are sensitive human beings who experience the world in a very intense way, and the world doesn't do that. Well, I had workplace bullying, and that knocked me for six because my identity was my work. I was good at it, and I loved it, and I was passionate about it. It was my special interest. If someone said to me, what do you what do you like to do for fun? I like to drink and hang out with my mates, and I like to work, and I love my work so much. And so when all of a sudden my workplace bullying situation happened, it really, you know, highlighted how, how brittle the mask I was wearing really was, and I looked, to all intents and purposes, like I was so freaking successful, but I wasn't. I was drinking to manage the fact, and I didn't even realize this at the time. I didn't even realize this until I stopped that, you know, my marriage was all for my just everything I was doing, I was trying to escape myself all the time because I, you know, I was ravaged with, you know, RSD. So you know, feeling imposter syndrome is such a common experience for us, right? And so, you know, probably I went for a few years going backwards and forwards over stopping drinking, and eventually I made the decision to trust my gut. And guts are very hard for us to find, particularly as we're. Mean people who use neurodivergent humans, particularly as humans who have had trauma, because, just as female assigned at birth, humans, because we have stuff down our intuition. We have stuff down our needs. We don't even know what our needs are, right? Some, I mean, that's the first part of the journey, right? So what are my needs? I No idea. I've been pushing down my my I've been suppressing my appetite. I've been forcing myself to exercise and work beyond my I don't I'm so out of touch with what the hell's happening in my body. I have no idea. I have no idea. You know, there's different from world. And this is the work that we're doing here. We're talking about, you know, this is really important. It's important to acknowledge as well that we don't all have the same experience, and that doesn't mean that this work isn't applicable to us, right? You know, we all have different experiences, but the end result is the same, whether or not you have you know your your judgment voice or your inner critic is is coming to you in imagery, in video, kind of scapes in your brain, in music, in in a felt sensations in your body of fear and and dread, or whether or not you've got that sort of internal narrative, it's the same thing, right? It's coming from the same place, and the same work that we're going to do here tonight is the helpful thing to do. So this is what we're going to talk about tonight. So I went through a bit about me, because I just want you to understand who I am, my journey. I mean, I'm so far away from I don't have this sorted at all. I've got the drinking side of it sorted, but the rest of this is a work in progress. And this is what I love about this work. And the reason why what I do, I think, you know, when I talk about alchemy, I talk we know what alchemy is, right? So alchemy is originally the idea of Alchemist is an alchemist is someone who changed, you know, metal into gold, a transformation. And there's archetypes that we talk you know, there's great archetypes that we have in our world. One of the archetypes is, is, is an alchemist. And Alchemist is somebody who who transforms things. And I remember, when I was 17, I was reading this book by Ben Johnson. It was written in the 1600s it was called The Alchemist. It was a play. Had to read it for English, and that was all about alchemists and and alchemists as charlatans, as con artists, right? And I this is where I think that when we are all about surface and we are all about the top 10 Tips, and we're all about alcohol and stopping alcohol and battling the wine witch and, you know, hunkering down and gritting and having this really awful time. And you know, all of the narrative that we hear about stopping drinking from most of the places that we hear it is very much, at surface level, what I would call fool's gold. It works because we're very good at white knuckling. We're very good at depriving ourselves. We've been doing it for years. We've been doing it in millions of minutes away. So we've stuffed down, we've suppressed, we've escaped. But there comes a point, and I'm sure you guys aware of this, but there's a guy called Daniel Siegel. Was a neurobiologist, and he came up with the idea of flip lid, and we use it with children. And the idea is that, you know, our brain, and our brain kind of has different parts that were developed at different parts during our evolution, but the kind of more primitive part we call the reptilian brain, this is kind of where our fear comes from our safety. It's all about safety. It's all about, you know, keeping ourselves safe, safe by not expending energy, safe by not you know, because change is expending energy, and one of the main reasons that the body works is to keep ourselves safe from expending energy. But the mammalian part of the brain, or the thinking part of the brain, the part of our brain that was developed later on, you know, the part, because when we when we when we drink, when we didn't want to drink, we're always like, Oh, I'm such an idiot. The judgment comes in, you know, what a dick I am. Um, but what's really happened is that we've had an experience, and that experience has has meant that we what Daniel siegling would call we flipped our lid, and when we flipped our lid, and we work with children on this concept, is when our thinking brain is no longer active and we are in dysregulation. And when we are in dysregulation, there's no good talking to us. There's no good telling us off. There's no good trying to reason with us. There's no good that we should know that the hangover tomorrow is going to be shit, because at that point we don't care, because our lid is flipped, we're in discomfort and the role of our brain and the parts of our brain. Mean, we've been so conditioned to feel that any kind of discomfort that we have we have to get rid of as quickly as we possible. And that's when our firefighter, little guy comes out, which is a part of us, which we call the wine witch, and she is just like, You need to drink right now. Don't even think about it. And sometimes you don't even know, right? You've, suddenly, you've you've opened the fridge, you poured the glass, you've dabbed it, you're like, What the hell happened? And that's busy brain as well. So judgment comes in. She's beating us up for something that is massively disregulating For us, right? Having this voice in our head, or these experiences beating us up, ruminating, catastrophizing, hugely dysregulating. So of course we want to drink. We're tired. Of course we want to drink. We're pushing stuff through when we're absolutely on our knees, exhausted, and we still want to keep doing the thing. Of course we have a drink, right? And this is the attitude of self compassion. So first of all, as we go through this, we're going to talk about busy brains. We're going to talk about what busy brains are all about. We're going to talk about self compassion, and we're going to talk about how, what are the tools that we can use to help us, help us allow the busy brain to rest, so that we don't have to use substances or other things that harm us in order to numb and suppress our experiences of our own kind of like subconscious. If that makes sense. Has anyone got any questions before I carry on? I know I'm talking a lot,
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
