They think they already understood.
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Well, especially if it’s someone you know well… say… your wife… you definitely can know quite often. It won’t be 100% but it can be a high enough percent that you’d rather the sentence be over w a ~10% chance of misunderstanding than to have to keep listening to a sentence that you’ve already assumed the end of and are thinking of a reply to.
My wife thinks she knows what I’m going to say all the time, and she’s often wrong.
Assuming she has adhd, maybe she just could use some meds to help her tame her mind and just listen. But even off meds, if I was demonstrably wrong at a high frequency, that fact would at least leave me reserving my speculations on your point until I was more sure, or till you fully explained it.
She doesn’t. She’s as neurotypical as they come. I’m the ND one, in a way that makes me a bit of a slow talker.
My first draft of that comment was a bit ruder and put the blame on you talking slow… shoulda gonna with that one. Damn.
Not a problem, I didn't take any offense or perceive any ill will or anything. I don't know you, you don't know me, in the context of the conversation, your comment was completely appropriate. I should have been clearer in the first comment I made, but I am still waiting for coffee to catch up with me.
I think the larger point I was thinking of was that "finishing someone else's thought" is not only a ADHD or ND thing. I know that when my wife either finishes my thought directly, or interrupts to respond to what she predicted my thought for me, and she's wrong, it is extremely frustrating, causing me much consternation. I know she's only trying to be helpful, but in the moment, my expressions are obvious. Then she feels like "we were just having a conversation, and now you're angry and I didn't do anything." The fact that she is able to put together cogent thoughts into spoken words much more quickly than I can escalates the pace, too, to a point where I can feel like I'm barely able to keep up as the train crests a hill, I'm trying to keep up and put on the brakes at the same time, and I don't know how steep the other side is. It can feel like I'm about to fall off a cliff, and the lizard brain reacts in fight/flight/freeze mode.
Wow. That kind of makes more sense of all that than I've ever really been able to put together before. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Good Ted talk, thanks 👏👏👏
But also, I’d be careful when bringing up the whole “X isn’t just an ADHD thing” thing… because it’s true for almost every single aspect, the whole point is that we have issues X,Y,Z to the degree that it has significant negative effects on our lives. Dismissing issues as “not just adhd” undermines the seriousness of ADHD which is already chronically underrated as a disability. (I’ll take suggestions for alternative wordings to “underrated as a disability”)
Oh sure sure - I did not intend to minimize ADHD in any way. I was just thinking about my situation where the "finishing thoughts" effect was related to a different kind of neurodivergency. My aim was to be more inclusive, not less.
maybe you should say it differently then
Well especially
Yeah I get it, it's really hard to know what someone means
It doesn't matter. I'm going to ask a question to see if I understand. I'm paying way more attention than you think and trying to assemble a puzzle. If we do it interactively it'll stick. If you just wanna talk, tho, tell me to stfu and I'll let you go off.
I'm going to ask a question to see if I understand
It's probably gonna be about something I was just about to explain before you cut me off lol
Depends on the subject, but it's 50/50. If someone prefers to repeat themselves a lot then meh.
I've had to have several conversations with my wife about her not using a bad mental autofill.
So much of the time (especially with important conversations), she's already decided what I'm saying within the first few words (of an entire conversation) and then the conversation gets way too long because it is very clear she's not getting what I'm saying because she's locked into her autofill. She's gotten better over time, but man is it frustrating.
Holy cow, you are also married to my wife!?! She's got some splainin to do.
Usually in this community we only allow "me too" and "neurotypicals are so annoying".
It's refreshing for someone to come and call this out like that. I'm surprised you're not downvoted to hell.
Yeah i have this problem with my partner. I say something innocuous, he creates a whole cinematic universe about what I meant with the sentence and refuses to adjust once I explain that he misunderstood. It's absolutely tiring.
I think I might be doing this with my mom. In my defense, she has earned this mental model I have of her. I've given her the benefit of the doubt enough times and got burned by it.
My Dad has a strong tendency to talk in circles, slowly working to his point like one of those penny rolling machines you used to see everywhere, and it drives me round the bend sometimes to the point where I end up having to prompt him to just get to the point
Is he also ADHD/ASD? Sometimes having to tell the whole story is like an OCD trait, you can't just get to the point. The whole story has to be relayed because that's how it exists in your brain.
The flip side is just giving someone the punch line or answer to a situation and getting frustrated that people haven't reached the same conclusions as quickly as you have.
I dunno', I also find a lot of people in technical/detail driven fields will often circle their thoughts. Not that they meander stories around over superfluous detail, but they literally repeat and refine specific statements or messages multiple times, sometimes even verbally.
This can easily appear as, "talking in circles" when all they're doing is refining their statements for better accuracy. Sometimes, it's literally circling back to clarify points that might not matter outside of doing the thing when people might simply be curious.
I realize a lot of these are mental disorders when they're bad enough, but that's my point: Talking in circles can mean many things. Maybe they just often talk about nuanced topics that need circling back to fully discuss and OP doesn't like nuance.
My dad and my wife begin telling their anecdote and it finally involves me in having a mental and emotional breakdown trying to figure put their point.
I used to fight them initially into telling the point in the few seconds to no avail. These days, I just tune in enough to listen every 10th word.
I sometimes finish the sentence for them to speed things along. It's a bad habit of mine and I try not to be rude about it. Hopefully it just comes across as understanding and supportive rather than usurping the conversation.
It's the second one, definitely the second one. I do it to though, so don't feel bad. We just have to try to catch ourselves when we do it, and apologies and let them finish.
Surprise! My mom does this too, and the frustrating part is that she's wrong about the second half of my sentence a LOT of the time. It ends up being rude and makes the conversation even longer because I have to waste additional time going, "No, I was going to say..." instead of simply finishing the sentence and continuing on.
So congratulations. You're playing yourself. (I also have ADHD.)
So you have ADHD, but when you start a sentence you already know how it's going to end? How do you do that?
Honestly, there are times after my meds wear off that I have literally forgotten what I was going to say halfway through the sentence. Lol
Personally I do it by my brain always being like thirty seconds in front of my mouth. Sometimes I wish I could open my mouth and just yell in white noise that somehow conveys the totality of what I'm thinking.
everyone hates it, and no, you don't know what people are about to say all the time.
I'm usually right about 60% of the time with strangers, though I'm intentionally not finishing the sentence aloud.
With friends and coworkers it's usually that we've forgotten a common word somehow and just appreciate the other person remembering it for us.
it's literal torture working in retail and having this happen. I just have to sit there with a fake smile plastered on my face, mind running a mile a minute and watching the line behind this person grow as they explain to me what I already figured out. On the plus side, outwardly I appear really patient to others!
Especially when they drag their point out for dramatic effect but the point was so glaringly obvious that it comes off as smug on top of the tonguebiting you have to do to not just torpedo their pathetic attempt at tension-building.
Then it turns out you didn't understand them at all and jumped to a completely wrong conclusion.
My doctor says I don't have ADHD but this happens to me a lot. Then when I explain things, I explain things overly complex because I assume that since people are so bad at explaining things to me that they're not going to understand it when I explain things to them.
I would always recommend people get a second opinion from an ADHD&Autism specialist, because unfortunately many medical professionals go through all of their education/training without ever actually being taught any thing about ADHD. Many doctors' knowledge of mental disorders are also decades out of date.
A decent chunk of doctors just know ADHD (and many other disabilities) off of stereotypes and/or misinformation, it's a common thing in the medical field sadly.
Many times people are either misdiagnosed (sometimes a person with ADHD might also have another disorder which causes the doctor to not think it's ADHD causing specific problems) with an anxiety disorder, BPD, a depressive disorder, or even Bipolar, unsurprisingly ASD too. Symptoms often present similarly to those.
Many ADHD symptoms present similarly to a depression and/or BPD, and ASD & ADHD symptoms can overlap a good bit (but they're not the same despite some people thinking ADHD is part of the ASD spectrum).
Presence of symptoms also causes anxiety (as in when you were in school and you had an assignment due in a few hours, but you can't force yourself to do it, but you don't want to do anything else because then you'd feel bad about doing that instead of the assignment, so you sit for hours in a pool of anxiousness and ADHD paralysis while not doing the assignment even though there's theoretically enough time to)
ADHD also has extremely high comorbidity and link with other disabilities, like the ones named above as well as things like Schizophrenia, Dyspraxia, Dyscalcula/Dyslexia/Dysgraphia.
The biggest problem though is that there's this massive stigma against ADHD, it's seen as a bad thing for someone to have ADHD (especially to parents of kids with ADHD, who often deny it vehemently and take it as a personal attack) and there's this perception of it not being real or serious, plus there's a whole myth of it being universally overdiagnosed (ADHD is actually extremely undiagnosed, despite some people getting the opposite impression that doctors just say every kid has ADHD these days). It's just something conflated with this concept of "laziness" or "just normal things everyone experiences", like a lot of other disorders are (victims of chronic depression and panic attacks can often relate)
Basically always get another opinion if you're still not sure. Someone with ADHD that only finds out later in life may have to change their entire view & approach on the world/life and learn to come to terms with how current society works against them, and how they can try to minimize the massive disadvantage they're given in most situations. So knowing is pretty important.
With a perspective on both sides, I have come to realize that while I hate waiting for others to finish what they say, I even more so hate being wrongfully summarized.
It is a very large part of my current relationship that we constantly work on, both being ADHD, and it has taught me how impatient I have been myself in regards to my own ADHD. When we try to “cut to the chase”, we take away agency from the other person. It’s quite hard to explain because it is context sensitive, but just try to be patient with people. Make it a personal mental game to guess what they are saying, but at least let them have the independence to say it themselves
Only time I make people "Cut to the chase" is when they want to order me to do something or want a favour.
I don't need a life story or context. Just tell me what you need and I'll give you a yes or no on if it can be done. The faster I have the relevant information, the quicker I can get starting on the request
This is inaccurate, planks are way easier!
I've learned to be patient because sometimes I might not have gotten it.
But still accurate when they ramble about completely unrelated crap that has nothing to do with the point because I can only handle so much at once and the pointless details are making it harder for me to stay on track with the actual point. Like I don't care if Julia was married three times and her first name was Bob and her second was Mark and she has three children and drives a Subaru when being told that she needs help with something that doesn't involve any of those things.
My mom: "So you know Maryland, right? Maryland? It's Finley's mom. So her mom, Mary Lou, you know her, right? She had the Cat House. Madeline remembers the Cat House, the across from the stairs down to the beach. Well, she sold that, so she's actually living at another place, on the same property as Maryland. And Alex, you know Alex, right? She's Mary Lou's partner. So anyway, she wasn't answering calls, and so they went out to check on her and she was unconscious, so they rushed her to the hospital. It was really fortunate that she was on the same property, otherwise it could have been really bad.
So I have to go get Finley and watch him for the next few hours."
Me, after she's gone: "I have no idea who any of these people are, and I have no idea who is in the hospital."
Note: Alex was in the hospital, Alex is a woman, and Finley is a dog. Everything except Alex being the one in the hospital was included in the monologue, so as you can imagine it was even longer than what I wrote.
So accurate!
My mom is the opposite of that. She'll reduce entire sentences to one or two words that are utterly incomprehensible without the larger context. Also, and this is more of a regional thing where i'm from rather than something specific about her, but when talking about other people she'll often just use a generic slang in my language that just means "person" to refer to them, as if assuming i know who she's talking about. So picture your story, broken up in 50 two word sentences, with all the names replaced with "that guy/girl", except starting from the end, with me trying to work my way back enough to understand it.
That's just another day for an ADHD guy listening to another ADHD guy
My first day back to the office on lisdexamphetamine I found it crazy how much I enjoyed casual conversation and catching up with people. It's like I could actually focus on someone and enjoy a slow conversation. I'm a really social person in general and didn't expect this effect from the meds, I'm usually talking really fast and feel like I'm either at 0 or 10 in a conversation, but one-on-one with people is sometimes a challenge as I feel distracted and disconnected vs small groups. Really welcoming effect.
How it feels like to grammar.
Now take this and replace the other side with someone who is talking really slowly and hates being interrupted...