Instead of telling yourself, “I should get up,” or “I should do this,”
Ask yourself, “When will I get up?” or “When will I be ready to do this?”
Instead of trying to order yourself to feel the signal to do something, which your brain is manifestly bad at, listen to yourself with compassionate curiosity and be ready to receive the signal to move when it comes.
My therapist calls thinking “I should do this or that/I shouldn’t have done that” constantly, “shoulding all over yourself”, and that it’s waaayy healthier to ask yourself when you’ll be ready, as well as recognizing that you’re placing judgement on yourself, and that self-judgement accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Shoulding all over yourself means you’re stuck thinking about the past, while asking yourself when you’ll be ready is living in the moment, and gearing for your next step. Very good advice from OP!
Tag: executive dysfunction
as a child, i had this really interesting way of dealing with executive dysfunction:
when i needed to do something but did not get the impulse to actually start, i counted to 20.
and at 20, i did the thing.
i started this in order to get me out of bed in the morning, and after a few weeks it was a reliable source of starting impulses. every time i hit 20, i got started.
somewhere along the way i stopped doing it, because it was weird and nobody else needed to count in order to do stuff.
it makes me wonder, how many brilliant coping skills do we loose or never develop because we live in a neurotypical world and nobody teaches us these things? because we think they’re weird, because we don’t have words for what we’re doing, because they seem to have no place in this world?
queerhomestuck 