Send more love to your ADHD brain and whole self this Valentine's Day (and beyond)

With special guest Jayne LeonardWATCH HEREDoes the idea of loving your whole self (including your ADHD brain and/or traumatised parts) feel impossible? You’re not alone. In this episode, I welcome my vegan and ADHD friend Jayne Leonard of Vive Counselling back. Our conversation includes shock that we’ve both found it easier to accept ourselves since a psychiatrist gave us permission! Even though this is our WORK. You too may be surprised at how much better your life feels when you amp up that self care, self love, self compassion and self understanding. Even by a tiny bit. It all adds up.Thanks for listening or watching. I really appreciate it. New episodes come out every Tuesday morning (Ireland time) and if you subscribe (via your favourite podcasting app or by becoming a Half Moon member of the Sole to Soul Circle), you’ll be notified about each new episode.This week, the Half Moon bonus has some ideas for visual and kinaesthetic ‘anchors’ to keep you focused (sorry, I know I hate that word but they really do help). And the Full Moon and Super Moon deeper dive is to help you discern between what’s right for Now You and Future You and all the other Yous…FIND ME ON SOCIALSYou can find me almost everywhere – please say ‘Hi’ and let me know what questions or comments you have:YouTube @evemenezescunninghamSubstack @evemcBluesky @eveimcTikTok @evemenezescunninghamInsta @evemenezescunninghamFacebook @FeelBetterEveryDayI’d also appreciate you leaving a review and/or rating this and other episodes you’ve enjoyed. Your feedback and support helps me help more people (of all genders) with trauma histories and/or ADHD take better care of their whole selves and create lives they don’t need to retreat from.OTHER WAYS TO WORK WITH ME·       There’s the book – 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing – and all the book bonus videos.·       All the free resources I share across my platforms and the growing library of self care ideas and practises at selfcarecoaching.net ·       You can join the Sole to Soul Circle on Substack (evemc.substack.com) and get bonus content designed to enhance each podcast episode. Half Moon members (free subscribers) get self care ideas to support balance and harmony and Full Moon and Super Moon members (paid subscribers) get more self paced self care recordings to help you support your nervous system and whole Self as you expand your comfort zone to shine even brighter. ·      If you want to support my work but don’t want to commit to a membership, even for a month, you can choose an amount HERE ·       While my private practice (trauma informed and ADHD friendly therapies, Self care coaching, clinical supervision and supervisor’s supervision) is almost always at capacity, if you’re based in Ireland or the UK, it’s still worth completing the short form at https://selfcarecoaching.net/contact to BOOK YOUR FREE TELEPHONE CONSULTATION in the hope that we can find a mutually convenient time to work together.TRANSCRIPT maybe I don't need the reason. Maybe I just need to say, well, I am how I am regardless of whatever it is.And I'm just gonna allow that. And I do have two small kids and I say, well, they do all these things. And I still say, oh aren't they lovely? They're great. That bit maybe wasn't great, but they're lovely. They're great. So it's trying to do that then for myself.I love it.Hi, I'm Eve Menezes Cunningham and welcome to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. I am so excited to be sharing new trauma informed and ADHD friendly ideas for you to help you take better care of your Self: That highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant and miraculous part of yourself, as well as the basic self-care which we all know can be so challenging at times.I really appreciate you tuning in. If you want a deeper dive, you'll be getting bonus content each week. Sign up to the Sole to Soul Circle. You can do that for free or from as little as €8.00 a month. And you can also find more ideas in the book 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing.So welcome again, Jayne Leonard. Thank you so much for joining me for these ADHD chats around some of the themes we're focusing on. We're both late diagnosed, both diagnosed 2024.And today you're joining me to talk about for Valentine's Day, self-love, self-compassion, thinking about whatever your relationship status, how the more loving and accepting and compassionate we can be with our whole selves, the more we can offer that to our partners, our loved ones, children, if you have them, strangers, whatever it might be. So welcome, thanks for joining me again. Thanks, thanks for having me.So what would you say you struggle with and find easier about self-compassion and self-acceptance? I know you spoke in the previous episode about acceptance, radical acceptance. Would you like to say a little about that? Yeah, I think sometimes it can be really, really easy. Sometimes it can be so easy and then other times it's just a little more difficult.I definitely think getting, even realising I had ADHD, which was years ago and I only got diagnosed last year because I said, you know what? I might try some medication, but otherwise I was fairly confident I had it myself. But definitely realising that has made the acceptance even easier. Like just getting that understanding of myself.Oh, this is why I do what I do. It's not actually because there's something wrong with me or I'm weird. It's because I have this brain and this brain works like this.And so I wish I had kind of been able to practice that before, but that's a learning I've taken since. And I kind of say now, look, maybe I don't need the reason. Maybe I just need to say, well, I am how I am regardless of whatever it is.And I'm just gonna allow that. And I do have two small kids and I say, well, they do all these things. And I still say, oh, aren't they lovely? They're great.That bit maybe wasn't great, but they're lovely. They're great. So it's trying to do that then for myself.I love it. And that tone of voice with Polyvagal Theory, it's so important. I regularly encourage people to talk to themselves like they would with a beloved cat or child or puppy or lizard or whatever, because we're generally more accepting. But I completely agree. Up until the day I had the diagnosis, I still, part of me thought I was wasting everyone's time.I'd worked with so many clients who'd gone through the process and so many people had told me that I had it. I had a brain scan in like 2013, around I think 2013, 2014. And it showed an abnormality, which when I Googled it correlated with ADHD.And back then I dismissed it. But then with perimenopause and menopause, it was like, oh yeah, there's definitely. But up until that day, it's like, I'm wasting everyone's time.I'm wasting, and she's like, yeah, severe ADHD with combined presentation. It's like, oh. So even though I had massively amped up the self-compassion over the decades of doing this work, but then also realising like kind of self-diagnosing in a tentative way, because I'm a trauma therapist.I'm not a psychiatrist. I can't diagnose. But I remember us talking when we first met.We’re both vegans. We both thought we had ADHD. We were both going through that journey, but I'm absolutely shocked at how much easier it has been to accept myself since a psychiatrist gave me permission.Yeah, I know. Isn't it amazing? It is. I had the same experience, even though I knew, oh, I struggle with focus or hyper-focus or whatever else I do.Once you understand it through that lens, it's like, oh, that's fine, so. But I think, oh, you know what? You actually could have done this for yourself before. So I've really taken that now, and I'm really trying to say, okay, you're doing this, that's okay.Yeah, a differently wired brain, just a differently wired brain. And like the other day, I was nearly, this sounds ridiculous, but I was nearly crying, surrounded by piles of bank statements and receipts as I was trying to get my bookkeeping for 2024 fully onto the new accounting system. I've never used an accounting system before, and I've been in the process of it since May, end of May.And I got there last night, but the day before yesterday, my living room was just covered. And I just felt like all I have to do here is put things in date order and add them to an already created spreadsheet. And it was just like every fibre of my being, like, I can't do it, I don't want to.And it's like, I can do all sorts of other things. And recognising that, holding space for the part of me that really struggles with numbers, and the part of me that's really good at other things, that finds other things easy. And I think the diagnosis has helped me.Like, I used to feel like I was cheating a lot. Like if something came easy to me, I'd complicate it, I'd make it harder.Whereas now it's like, no, some things are really hard. Let what's easy be easy. Yes, yeah. And I actually have had a similar conversation with so many other people who have neurodiversity.It's like, we do almost feel like we're cheating if it's a certain area that's trickier for us. But...