Shame, Influence, and Struggle Care with KC Davis

May 17

KC Davis is a licensed professional therapist, author, and speaker. She is the creator of the mental health platform Struggle Care, where she shares a revolutionary approach to self and home care for those dealing with mental health, physical illness, and hard seasons of life.

She's with us today to talk about her role in the neurodiversity community as a TikTok influencer, how she stumbled into her favorite video community.

We love KC not just for her TikTok, though. She's author of the book How to Keep House While Drowning, where she catalogs her approach to healthy living while embracing your struggles as morally neutral, not personality judgments. Her approach to living, shame, and struggle is, frankly, a breath of fresh air.

Learn more about KC and her work at StruggleCare. And, of course, buy the book in your favorite format now.

KC Davis:
When we approach all of that from this perspective of, "I need to do these things to get better, to be a more acceptable human, so that I can be more worthy and then I'll be happier," it doesn't work that way. Those things are not designed to make you more worthy. They are designed to make your quality of life better. So, we have to start from a foundation of worthiness. We have to start from neutralizing all of these things. These things are all morally neutral. You're not a better person if you can meal prep. They're just functional things, and the only reason to engage in them is because they make your life better.
Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright, and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Oh. Hi, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hi, Pete.
Pete Wright:
How are you? Are you feeling good?
Nikki Kinzer:
I am feeling good. How about you?
Pete Wright:
I'm relieved. We have a new website.
Nikki Kinzer:
We do. We have a new website, takecontroladhd.com. Same-
Pete Wright:
It's still-
Nikki Kinzer:
URL.
Pete Wright:
Still takecontroladhd.com. There's lots of things to look around.
Nikki Kinzer:
But it's a different look.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, lots of things that moved around. What has not changed is how you find the podcast episode. So, I didn't update any of the URLs. Everything still should work the same way it has worked. We just made it to look a little bit different.
Nikki Kinzer:
We say should because...
Pete Wright:
As of today, it's very new.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
If anything is broken and you know where to find me on Discord, please DM me and let me know if you find something that's all mucked up. I kept Melissa up way too late last night-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, my gosh. You guys are awesome.
Pete Wright:
Doing link checking and clicking all the buttons and submitting all the forms and testing things. So I guess that is to say, if it's still broken, it means Melissa and I failed to see it. And so, we appreciate your contributions there. You're the best. So new website-
Nikki Kinzer:
Go check it out.
Pete Wright:
Very fun. And much more new stuff coming, now that we're on the new website. So, stay tuned. We are talking to KC Davis today. Influencer, TikTok-
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Big on TikTok. Are you getting closer to wanting to be on TikTok, Nikki?
Nikki Kinzer:
No.
Pete Wright:
With these conversations?
Nikki Kinzer:
No.
Pete Wright:
No, not yet. Okay, all right.
Nikki Kinzer:
No, because-
Pete Wright:
I just want to know.
Nikki Kinzer:
She's doing such a great job.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, she's doing it for us. We don't need to.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Because she's doing fine.
Nikki Kinzer:
She has a great message. I love her message. I love how she frames all this stuff. So, it's a great conversation.
Pete Wright:
I think so too. She's wonderful. Before we bring KC out, head over to takecontroladhd.com, oh yeah, the new website, and get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there as you always have been able to do so, or subscribe to the mailing. Let's just scroll down to the bottom of literally any page, and you can add your name to the mailing list. We'll send you an email each time a new episode is released. You can connect with us. First and foremost, join that ADHD Discord community. It is wonderful. You can jump there. Anywhere you see the little Discord happy icon on the website, it'll take you to the invitation. You can join the free community. But if you really want to connect with us, you can become a patron at patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. Your membership allows you access to all kinds of fun things that the free community does not see.
It just unveils, like walking through platform nine and three quarters, and you see so many new, wonderful things when you do that. And so, we hope that you check that out. If you've been listening to the show for a long time and you've wondered what these resources are, or if you just think, "Hey, you know what? I really like the ADHD podcast. I like what Nikki and Pete are doing, and I want to support that. I want to support them continuing to be able to grow the show," then support us. A few bucks a month gets you access to all kinds of new things, including Pete's new podcast, the Placeholder podcast, which is available only to members of Patreon. You get coffee with Pete and coaching with Nikki at the supreme, platinum level, and we have special bonuses at every level of Patreon support. So, we'd surely appreciate you there. Do we have any other news for the good people?
Nikki Kinzer:
No, not at this point.
Pete Wright:
Excellent. Well then, it's time. Let's boot up the old TikTok and bring out KC Davis. KC?
KC Davis is a licensed professional therapist, author, and speaker, and is the big brain behind the mental health platform, Struggle Care. KC began her mental health journey at 16 when she had her treatment for drug addiction and mental health issues. And she got sober, and then she became a speaker and an advocate for mental health and recovery, and then an influencer on the internet. She's amazing. And quite recently, she introduced me to Hamper, the coolest laundry service I've ever seen with a level of enthusiasm that is unmatched for laundry. For all of the above and so much more, thank you, KC, and welcome to The ADHD podcast.
KC Davis:
I am so glad to be here.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, my gosh. So where do we even begin, Pete?
Pete Wright:
Let's talk about you. You're in Houston, right?
KC Davis:
I am.
Pete Wright:
Okay, in Houston. Husband's a lawyer. Delightful. You don't really care about him right now. I am fascinated. We're doing this whole series on influencers in the broader sort of mental health, ADHD, neurodiversity community, and you have a fantastic community yourself. And I'm so curious how you ended up putting yourself in a position where you are a voice to so many people. I hope we can kind of wind our way through that conversation today. And when you're asked how you ended up where you are, what do you say?
KC Davis:
I typically start by saying it was an accident.
Pete Wright:
As all great things are.
KC Davis:
Yeah. I never set out to be an influencer. I never set out to do any "I'd be an author," any of that. Because I went to rehab when I was young, I worked a majority of my therapist career in addiction. And then, I started to be a stay-at-home mom. When I started being a stay-at-home mom, I started just doing family work. So I worked with families that had loved ones in drug rehab, doing boundary work, things like that. And all along that, I've always been a messy person. I've always not really understood how people did clean as you go. I've always been someone to have a mess and kind of a dirty house. But it's always been moderately functional. Well, I guess it's fine.
And I think what was interesting was that when I was in my addiction, there were several things that people could point to, that they would say, "This is part of why you're not functioning. This is part of what we need to rehab about you." And part of that was I didn't take care of myself physically. So I didn't shower very often, I didn't brush my teeth very often. I never cleaned anything. I was failing out of school. I was late to everything. And then, I went to rehab and I was in rehab for 18 months inpatient.
Pete Wright:
Wow.
KC Davis:
And we had these very strict schedules. You'd do chores every day, you have to shower every day. So they not only rehabbed all of these things about my personality and mental health that needed help, but they also attempted to fix these other ancillary issues about not caring for myself and being messy and not being responsible, and then some other delightful things about me, like how I interrupt everyone, how I don't wait for people to finish their question before I start answering. And those things were pointed out to me as, "These are ways in which you're being selfish and self-centered, and that's-
Nikki Kinzer:
How interesting.
KC Davis:
Going to get in the way of you recovering from your addiction and this is a part of you being arrogant." So then I get out of rehab, and in many ways it was very helpful. I'm sober, I am in therapy. I don't have a ton of distress in my life anymore. My mental health symptoms have all mostly been resolved. And from the first 24 hours of out of rehab, immediately, it's like... And surprise! I'm still messy and don't shower every day.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Yep.
Nikki Kinzer:
That didn't get fixed.
KC Davis:
Yeah, it turns out that wasn't actually connected to the addiction.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
KC Davis:
Certainly, my ability to take care of myself was impacted, but turns out I am just a messy person. And I just am never going to want to shower every day and I'm never going to want to brush my hair every day. And I think the other thing that happened was recognizing... Recently, I got an ADHD diagnosis as an adult. Looking back and realizing all of the things that sort of got put up as these moral character failures-
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
KC Davis:
That now, I'm like, "Oh no, I just had ADHD."
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. And that's what I mean when I say, "Oh, it didn't get fixed." Right? Because of course, it's not going to get fixed. It's not broken. It's just part of your ADHD. And that is something I definitely want us to hit on. With your book that I found so fascinating was how you did say a lot of these things, they're not... It has nothing to do with morals. Care tasks are neutral. Contributing to the household are neutral. Outsourcing care, your weight, your food, these are all morally neutral. Can you talk more about that? It's fascinating.
KC Davis:
Yeah. I think that most people... And maybe I have a confirmation bias because I was a therapist and sort of a high school fuck-up, but most people that I know personally and professionally are really plagued and or driven by a deep seated terror that they suspect they are not worthy of love and they are worried somebody will realize that. And so when you feel that way, it's really easy to over moralize everything in your life because you're constantly looking for that answer, you're constantly looking for evidence of that fear, and constantly looking for validation that maybe that fear's not true.
And I think one of the blessings that I got from going to rehab so early, there's a lot of things about my rehab that I don't necessarily agree with, but at the end of the day, I spent a year and a half with 16 other girls that eventually we all just broke down and bared our souls to each other and talked about how much we hated ourselves and how terrified we were that we weren't worthy, and all of the things that we had done that we were ashamed of and all of the things about ourselves that we were deeply ashamed were irrevocably broken. And we did that and then at the end, sort of realized that nobody was running, screaming from the room, and had this moment of, "Oh, we're all broken. And yet, we all have this deep vulnerability of wanting to be loved and we could just decide to love each other."
And having that experience of community where somebody knows every single part of you and everything you think is failing and shameful and having them love you anyways was deeply healing. And so, I think that going from that and realizing I really am worthy of love, it made it easier to see how many things we look to, to try and build that case, whether it's, "Oh, I have the perfect diet," "I have a small body," "I'm very responsible," "I work really hard," "I'm such a great lover." All of these things that were moving through life, not necessarily trying to figure out what is most functional for me and what brings me joy and what gives me a meaningful life, but instead, constantly on this journey of, "What could I do to be good enough?" And then when I feel like I can't do those things, "How do I hide that from everybody and try again harder?"
Pete Wright:
I feel like that's the thing that I really connect to because... I have a passage from the book and we should say it's How to Keep House While Drowning, and it's fantastic. There's a passage early in the book where you talk about, "In my work as a therapist, I have seen hundreds of clients who struggle with these issues. And I'm convinced now more than ever of one simple truth, they are not lazy. In fact, I do not think laziness exists."
And I say that not so we can dive necessarily into laziness, but all the things that you're talking about, the things that I respond to when I am feeling judged, whether it's laziness or fear or anxiety, whatever the thing is that is being foisted upon me or that I'm taking on from the world, that is triggering my rejection sensitivity so heavily is all self-imposed, right? It's so self-imposed. It is that interest paid on a debt that never comes due, right? I love that so much. And it is likely a projection of someone else who can't figure out all of the same stuff in their own head and body and space, right? Am I getting to something there? Because that is really how it touches me.
KC Davis:
Yeah. I want to hold space for that. I mean, I think it's hard to thread this needle in the self-help space of there is a great amount of my own joy or distress that is within my control by shifting my mindset, by letting go of these sort of self-imposed judgments of realizing like, "Oh, nobody's looking at me. I just think everyone's looking at me." There's a huge amount of control I have over that. And I also want to hold space for people in more marginalized communities are not just dealing with a mindset shift. And you don't even have to be a marginalized community, but for example, I have a lot of followers that have been in abusive relationships where part of that abuse from their partner was being told they were lazy, right? And so, it's an interesting, as I say, needle to thread that we can't fix all of your very real barriers, and there's a good amount of distress that we could decrease in your life by recognizing, "What part of this have I been unknowingly kind of carrying around that I could just put down right now?"
Pete Wright:
"That's not mine." That's the thing, right? I get into this with my wife all the time, just around anything. If there is something that I might say about my son, who's a teenager, "He's a teenager," right? If it comes off and he's projecting laziness, that's laziness to me, right? It's laziness because that's what I'm seeing. I am therefore saddling him with my perception of what he should be doing. And I feel like when I hear that from somebody else talking about me or my behavior, it is liberating to stop and say, "Wait a minute. That perspective is not mine to own."
KC Davis:
Yeah. It's not the objective perspective. Just like I said earlier, most people are moving through life with a deep terror of not being good enough. And so, what happens for some people is that there are things that, that person is naturally good at or maybe something that was sort of imposed upon them in an oppressive nature that they had to deal with for a very long time and put a lot of time and energy to conforming to that. And now, what they have is they've sort of "succeeded" at these things that society has told them make them morally good enough, yet still feel deeply insecure. And so now, what they're doing is using that by pointing out what you haven't done.
If they can just feel better than someone else, that can sort of be this cheap substitute for true self-confidence or that true worthiness is just, "Well, at least, I'm better than this person." So I need other people to be lazy, I need their failures to be of their own making so I don't have to deal with the anxiety that the world is just a spinning ball and nothing really makes sense. So, I think that's the other side of it is that we're constantly trying to push other people down because being above them... And I remember that was something I recognized early in rehab was realizing that I never felt equal to anyone. I only ever felt better than them or less than them. And I was stepping on the people I felt less than and using them for what they could give me.
For example, I had a friend that had a car and I didn't have a car. And I didn't like her and I wasn't nice to her, but I used her for that car, and I thought I was better than her. And then, I had friends or lovers that I thought were better than me and their liking of me and acceptance of me was pulling me up and making me feel good enough because they deigned to love me. And recognizing that I always felt like I was on the top of the heap or the bottom of the heap was one of the first "aha" moments of, "This one thing is really running my life and causing harm to a lot of people and causing harm to me."
Pete Wright:
And it becomes a discussion of the perils of fill-in-the-blank relativism, right? Whether it's emotional relativism or relationship or productivity relativism. I think about your book. It's like just because my house is dirty and my neighbor's house is clean, does not make me worse than them, right? By relationship. I love it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and it's interesting too, when you talk about trauma, because I don't think I have ever read a book about cleaning or even anything about cleaning, chores, organization that even touches trauma. And so, it was really interesting, and I am so glad that your voice is out there because I never personally related that cleaning a toilet could trigger someone. It never dawned on me until I read it in your book. And I thought, "Wow. Okay, that makes a lot of sense." I'm just curious, what were your thoughts on bringing that into this book?
KC Davis:
Well, it's interesting because I agree with you that most of us don't think about trauma and cleaning in the same space. But what I found is, I was making videos online and I was talking about sort of this gentle way of approaching home care, and all of these mindset shifts and all these sort of hacks for your neuro divergent brain to be able to get things done, I started hearing story after story from people that follow me about how cleaning is hard for them because of the experience that they had with cleaning as a child. And their experiences ran the gamut of the whole thing, right? You had people that said, "I grew up in... I was abused and neglected and everything was so dirty, and I wasn't cared for. And so, now I have so much anxiety around mess, I can't let anything be messy. And I feel like if the playroom is messy for five minutes, then I'm abusing my child."
And then you have people from that same environment say, "I'm now the messiest person ever, because there was no one at that time to teach me how to care for myself. And even though I recognized that, that wasn't safe for me, I still loved my mom. And so now, I sort of feel more familiar in this dysfunction, even though I know it's not good for me." And then you have people that would say, "My mom would never play with me, because she always had to keep the house perfect." You had people say, "My parents would scream at me to pick up my room and I didn't know how. And they would come in and put all my things in a trash bag and throw it away. I had my dad wake me up at 3:00 AM and start throwing things off my shelves, because he told me to clean and he came home at 3:00 AM and decided it wasn't good enough."
And I mean, these are not a small amount of stories. And I don't think even the people who were talking about these stories had connected because it's not like that was the only abusive thing their parent was doing. That was a little blip in the being abusive radar. But our society treats cleaning and dishes and stuff like it's this very easy throw-away character measure, like "Everyone can do it. It takes two seconds." And-
Pete Wright:
It's a choice. You make a choice to be clean.
KC Davis:
Exactly. So I don't think that many people give enough legitimacy to, "Oh no, I have a pretty screwed up emotional relationship to these tasks due to early adverse childhood experiences." There's this phrase that I love that says, "Neurons that fire together, wire together." And so, if you have an experience in a certain emotional context over and over and over, your brain begins to sort of pair those two things together. And sort of an interesting example of this is that for a very long time, I really disliked the sound of birds.
And the reason was because in the worst part of my addiction, I would come home from school, get high, wait for my parents to fall asleep, and then I would sneak out in the middle of the night and go get high all night. And then I would come home, sneak back in the house, and just lay there, either passed out or not be able to sleep. And when morning came, the first thing I would hear is the birds chirping. And there was this sense of, I just spent hours in this dark place, both physically and mentally. And then that weird feeling of the morning birds, that new life, new hope, it was almost kind of a slap in the face, if that makes sense?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
KC Davis:
This reminder that, "Oh, the rest of the world is now waking up to be productive, happy people. And I'm just this bridge troll that can't function, that comes out at night." You know what I mean? And so, that feeling of depression that I would feel in the mornings when I heard those birds actually got linked in my brain. And so for many years after that, when I would hear those morning bird chirps, I just got this uncomfy, gross feeling. And I don't feel that anymore because it's now been 18 years since that, but your brain will do that with things. And so if every time you tried to clean something, you were yelled at for it not being good enough, that may have not been "traumatic." But if it happened enough times, especially as a child, your brain pairs that feeling of disapproval with that act of cleaning. And if you're already somebody that struggles with the reward center of your brain and not getting enough dopamine, you're not going to want to go near those sort of tasks with a 10 foot pole.
Pete Wright:
So, let's talk. You said your ADHD diagnosis came relatively recently. When was that?
KC Davis:
Last year.
Pete Wright:
Last year. How do you reflect on the things that you were able to reassess, given the gift of hindsight and a new awareness of ADHD? How did those things connect?
KC Davis:
I did experience some grief when I got the diagnosis. There were some things about my life that were really hard, but in general, I have such a wonderful life now that I don't have this grief of, "Oh, things could have been so different," because truly, I'm sober and I'm happy and I have a lovely family and a lovely career and all these things. I did so much therapeutic work to get to a place where I accept myself and like myself. I think where the grief came in was, "Man, I had to work so hard for that. And it shouldn't have had to have been that hard."
I got there eventually. I got here, right? But it's sad that I had to work so hard to be okay with myself. I'm grateful that I developed the skills to not interrupt people, because I know that there are many people that feel as though they're not being valued by me when I do that. But I look back and think, "We could have met those goals without making me feel like my personality made me a piece of shit." We really could have still done that. We could have gotten sober, we could have talked about how... And I was a very selfish person, but we could have talked about how I was being selfish without demonizing whole personality traits.
It could have both been true like, "Hey, you're not a bad person because you interrupt people. And when you interrupt people, this is the impact it has on them. So you need to reflect on whether that's the kind of relationship you want to have, whether that's the kind of impact you want to have on people. And if you would like to not have that kind of impact on people, if you want to be more loving in your relationships, because you want people to feel valued and heard, here are some skills that we could implement to sort of stop that impulsive thing." You could still do that. You could still teach someone the impact of interrupting and how to not interrupt, without basically making them feel like interrupting people makes them a selfish piece of shit, and so they just shut it down and lock it down forever.
Nikki Kinzer:
So, I'm curious about your timeline. So your book, it came out in 2020?
KC Davis:
Yeah. So I self-published the book in 2020, and then I just released an expanded version through a publishing house. So I worked with Simon & Schuster to do this updated expanded version, because the first version was maybe 50 pages. And since then, I've done a lot of work sort of bringing those principles to life and getting some more clarity around those principles and a lot more practical tips. So the interesting thing was when I started my TikTok channel, I was not diagnosed. But I quickly started to attract all of the little ADHD community to my page going, "This is the first thing that's ever helped me. These tricks-
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
KC Davis:
Work so well for my brain." And people would ask me, "Do you have ADHD?" And I'd say, "No, I don't." But these things just worked for my brain also. And I remember making one that's saying, "Hey, I don't have ADHD. I just follow a lot of ADHD people. I just have a lot of tips that help people with ADHD. I just relate a lot to a lot of AD..." I maybe need to make a phone call. But I didn't think I was worried to self-validate that maybe I had ADHD because although I did fail out of high school, I also had an addiction. And previous to that addiction, I did very well in school. I've had a great career. And so, I thought people who know me are going to think that I'm just being a fraud for the internet if I start saying that I think I have ADHD, because I'd been so successful. I didn't think-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, because you tied the success-
KC Davis:
Exactly.
Nikki Kinzer:
We've talked about this before. I can't be successful if I have ADHD.
KC Davis:
Yeah. I-
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, interesting.
KC Davis:
Got good grades. I'm very intelligent. I liked school. I'd never felt distracted during school, but I also never did my homework. And so, I literally had people that follow me just begin to comment over and over like, "KC, I'm not trying to be inappropriate here. I'm not trying to diagnose someone on the internet, but you really seem ADHD. You should really get an assessment." And so, I actually luckily was already transferring psychiatrists away from a postpartum unit because I had postpartum depression onto a psychiatrist.
When she first met with me, she's like, "I see in the notes that you have concerns you maybe have ADHD. Why is that?" And I was like, "Well, the thing is, is that it's really hard for me to keep up in my home unless I have these elaborate systems. Everything has to be systematized that just feels good to my brain. Otherwise, I can't do it. And when I create the system, the system has to be visual." And I showed her this whole planner that I had created myself like, "These are the five things I do every night. This is the one thing a week I do. This is my star chart in order to keep track of it. I do this little list of five things every night."
And I talked to her about how I didn't seem to have very good memory. I only remember things if I'm being visually stimulated to remember them. If my kids spill some applesauce on the floor, I can think to myself, "Oh, I need to clean that." But then if I turn around and see that the cats haven't been fed, I go, "Oh yeah, I got to feed the cats." And then I forget about the applesauce on the floor, until the next time I see the applesauce on the floor and I go, "Oh, I got to clean that applesauce off the floor." And when I had two children, that at the time were six months and 18... Yeah, six months and two, or I don't know, that all of a sudden became untenable because there's so much going on that I'm constantly just ping ponging back and forth and can't actually get everything done.
And I showed her how messy my room was. I said, "Even though I do the same five things every night, I can't remember them. I have to look back at the list every single night, multiple times." And she said, "Okay, well, this honestly sounds exactly like a presentation of adult female ADHD," and then said, "Let me ask you some questions about your childhood." And she asked me if I had any of the learning disorders. And I said, "Yes, I have dyslexia, dyscalculia, and auditory processing disorder diagnosed in the third grade." She said, "Well, there's a pretty high percentage of people who are diagnosed with those who are also ADHD. Did you have any addictions?" And I was like, "Well, yeah. I had a lot of addictions."
She was like, "Well, there's a pretty high percentage of people that get cross diagnosed with addictions in ADHD. Did you ever have any vocal tics or OCD behavior?" And I was like, "Yeah, actually I developed a vocal tic when my parents were getting divorced. And I had this weird thing about lights, which was for a while. They really only come out when I'm really stressed." And she was like, "Hmm, because there's a really high percentage of people with vocal tics." And it was just like, "This is so bizarre." And then, she finally explained to me that ADHD is not about the inability to pay attention. It's about the inability to regulate your attention.
And that the reason that me and so many other girls sort of fly under the radar is she said, "You were interested in school. You were interested. So you didn't have to study, you didn't have to do homework, you didn't have to do any of these things because you were interested in the lecture and you could retain everything that you heard because it made sense in a systematized way in your mind. And when you got to a place where you were removed from that structure, you could not create it." I said I kept thinking, "I'll remember this homework," and then I would forget it, or I would write it down and then close the journal and then forget that I had ever written it down. I just had no way of creating my own structure to do homework.
And when I got into high school, they changed the way that grades were weighted. It used to be that your class participation and your tests were the main percentage of your grades. So even though I never did any homework and I mean straight zeros, I was really fast. And so, I was finishing a lot of my homework in class because I would get done with assignments before everybody else. And then anything left over, I was getting straight zeros on, but I was still getting A's because of the way everything was weighted. Because I was getting 100s on tests, then I'd go into...
The other thing is that they would say, "Okay, I'm going to teach you chapters one and two. Then I'm going to give you a worksheet on one and two, then homework on one and two. And then, I'm going to test you on chapters one and two." So, I'm listening to the lecture on one and two and I've got it. I don't need to do any of this other work. Then I ace the test. You move into high school and they start doing this thing where they go, "I'm going to teach you chapters one and two. You're going to go home and read chapters three and four. And then, I'm going to test you on chapters one through four." And all of a sudden, just paying attention-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, yeah.
KC Davis:
In class wasn't cutting it. And I had no skills to figure out how to study or do work outside of school.
Pete Wright:
But what's so interesting about that is just to be fair, the structures that they were teaching you were not built for the structures that you then had to create for yourself. So-
KC Davis:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Right? Again, in terms of taking responsibility and ownership for our own shortcomings, part of it is because we don't understand universal design for education yet and we'll figure it out.
KC Davis:
Right. So looking back at that and going, "Gosh, I wish somebody would have noticed and just realized that what I needed was for someone to sit down with me and look at that, and I needed for my teachers to communicate directly with my parents what the homework assignments were," it just makes me sad the amount of things that I could have done had I had more accommodations.
Nikki Kinzer:
Here we are today. So, what is the message that you want to communicate to your followers? What are you hoping that they get from you?
KC Davis:
What I hope that they get is I hope that people who, what I affectionately refer to as the "self-help rejects," where you've tried to get your life together, you've tried all of the different books and programs and worksheets and planners, you've tried all of these systems on how to sort of get it together, because you kind of feel like a mess all the time and it's not working. And my message is that one of the reasons that, that's not working is because we're approaching that from this sort of journey of worthiness where we feel like we're unworthy and if we can get it together, then we'll finally be worthy and happy. And we're never going to find that where you're looking for it. We're looking for how to be better at anything from manifesting to budgeting, to doing laundry, to meal prepping, to the kind of diet, the kind of exercise, the kind of relationship.
But when we approach all of that from this perspective of, "I need to do these things to get better, to be a more acceptable human, so that I can be more worthy and then I'll be happier," it doesn't work that way. Those things are not designed to make you more worthy. They are designed to make your quality of life better. So, we have to start from a foundation of worthiness. We have to start from neutralizing all of these things. These things are all morally neutral. You're not a better person if you can meal prep. They're just functional things, and the only reason to engage in them is because they make your life better. So if you're in a season of life where exercising isn't making your life better, don't do it.
Pete Wright:
Right.
KC Davis:
Or if you're in a season of life where exercising would make your life better, but so would therapy, and you only have the time and energy for one or the other, prioritize whichever one is more important to you, not what society is telling you your life needs to look like. If we start with a foundation of worthiness, and my suggestion is that the best way to do that is through self-compassion. I'm not a big fan of self-esteem. But through self-compassion, we learn how to change the way we talk to ourselves about our house and our home care and our body care and then neutralize as morally neutral all of these things. Then we can begin to go, "I am a person that deserves to function."
I can sort of start being creative and think outside the box about, "I'm a person that deserves clean clothes." And since doing laundry is morally neutral, the only reason to do laundry is to have clean clothes. And if I'm not able to do laundry, because some part of this is getting me stuck, then I get to retrofit laundry in any way that works for me. Whether that means I don't fold anything anymore, I send everything out to get washed and delivered in 24 hours, I mix my colors and my whites, I get rid of everything except for seven days worth of clothing, you name it. I have a family closet where everybody's clothes go in the same closet.
Any way that gets you to the functional piece of clean laundry, this is where we get into how do I hack my ADHD, how do I find adaptive routines and embrace this sort of adaptive imperfection, looking at these things as accommodations that I'm giving to myself and my home. What I notice is I don't have to do a lot of prescriptive "Here's how to do the laundry," because if you set someone free from that journey of worthiness and realize that they're on a journey of care, all of a sudden, their natural creativity comes out when they stop hating themselves for not being able to do the dishes.
Pete Wright:
As soon as they realize that the person that they're afraid is judging them isn't in the room with them watching them pull laundry out of the laundry basket. Nobody's watching. Nobody's opinion is going to change the view because that's the way you do your laundry.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and it is accommodation. It's interesting. I remember watching a session conference at the Chad... International conference. I don't know what I'm trying to say. But anyway, it was a session. And one of the gals that was talking was saying that, "Having a house cleaner, having somebody that comes in and cleans your house is accommodation. It's not a luxury." And we so tie it into this luxury thing to have, but it's not. It's an accommodation, just like what you're talking about with the Hamper service, right? Being able to do that. I don't know if it was in your book, but I have said this before as well and I think I did see it, have paper plates sometimes, right? If you don't want to do your dishes, that's a hack. Get the paper plates. Don't worry about it. Who cares?
KC Davis:
And it doesn't have to be black and white. I for so long was, "Okay, you're either someone that never uses paper plates or you're someone that only uses paper plates." And recently, what I did was I sort of faked a dish downsize where I moved all of my dishes up to a different place. And I picked out the amount of dishes that wasn't overwhelming for me to wash every day. Because generally speaking, my kids will use six plates, I'll use two plates and a bowl. I have two cups for them, two cups for me and my husband. And then, they have their water cups and I have one coffee cup. And I put them in this one thing and I just said, "This is it. If I saw all of these dishes in the sink, I could still do them." And what I do is that, obviously not every day's the same, but if I ever use all those and need more, that's when I dip into my compostable plates, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
KC Davis:
It's not all or nothing.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
KC Davis:
Some days, I never use them. Other days, for whatever reason, I ate more meals at home or we did more. So it's this overflow that I go, "No matter what, I won't be overwhelmed because I only use a certain number of my washable dishes." But if I need something more than that, or if I go... Frankly, this morning, I was so tired I didn't know what was going on. So I went, "This is the meal I'm going to use a compostable plate for."
Pete Wright:
Sure.
KC Davis:
You can mix and match.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, absolutely. And I can even see myself saying, "Okay, I want to keep the kitchen just a little bit cleaner a little bit longer. So I'm going to go ahead and do the paper plates right now, just so that I don't have to see the mess just a little bit longer." So, I love that. It doesn't have to be [inaudible 00:42:50]-
KC Davis:
And my other sort of ADHD awakening was so many people, it makes me so sad, would comment and say, "I went to my psychiatrist and brought up the ADHD and they said okay, I probably did have it, but since I'm not in school, I don't need medication." Or the amount of times I've been told, "Hey, it's really good to..." So my psychiatrist at first said, "It's good to take a break. Try to not take it on the weekends or try to take one day a week." But what happened for me was I went back to her the next week and I said, "Well, here's the problem. I'm on an SSRI and antidepressant. But the biggest breakthrough in my postpartum depression was when I started taking Vyvanse." I said, "It is a life raft." And it is so capitalistic and patriarchal that we tell people, "You're allowed to have medication to go to work."
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Not at all.
Pete Wright:
"But you should take a break on the weekends." And it's like has nobody spoken to a freaking mother about this? Because I need that medication on Saturday and Sunday. Honestly, almost more than I need it during the week.
Nikki Kinzer:
You bet. Yeah, I agree.
KC Davis:
My kids are two and four, and Vyvanse stabilizes my... What I realized why I was snapping and getting irritable all the time and I thought that was a depression thing, and it might have been, but what was happening was I... For a lengthy amount of reasons, the ADHD, the postpartum depression, the trauma from the pandemic, when I experience this sort of dopamine lag of I'm tired and I'm not motivated and I can't engage my task initiation, and physically, I feel like I have no energy in my body, well, you pair that with little kids that are going to ask you for something every seven minutes, that's going to require you getting up, and you're either going to do it because you feel guilty, because you don't want to be a shitty mom, or you're going to say no and then feel guilty, and then...
And so eventually, you just start getting irritated at them for asking. And you know that they behave better if you get them out, but you can't get your shit together enough on a task basis to get them out the door because that requires so many steps. And I said to her, "Here's the thing. I cannot afford to feel that way when taking care of my kids. I need to take care of my kids. I get them snacks, I need to do the laundry, I need to clean up the house. I need to do all of these things on Saturdays and Sundays." And God bless her, she said, "Okay, I think in this case, you should not stop taking them. You need to take them continuously." Parents deserve to function on the weekends.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
And that has been so largely debunked, the idea of-
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Needing a break. We had with us Bill Dodson on the show talking about... There he is writing a textbook about how to teach practitioners and prescribers how to prescribe medication, and said point blank, "Stop it. Stop saying that to people. Don't you want to feel as productive and good on the weekend as you do when you are at 'work'? Don't you want to be as productive as a student doing your homework on the weekend as you do when you're in class at school?" There is no medical reason, there's no physiological reason to stop. So, it's debunked.
KC Davis:
And it just goes along with that sort of myth of ADHD that it only affects work and schools.
Pete Wright:
Yes, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
How is that even rational?
KC Davis:
That executive functioning isn't required to live-
Pete Wright:
Right!
KC Davis:
The rest of your life.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
KC Davis:
And I think that idea that it's an attention problem. So the struggle must be that you can't pay attention at work or pay attention in school, but why would you need to pay attention that much on Saturdays and Sundays? Instead of really looking at it as the... To me, the executive functioning problems are the most disabling.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
KC Davis:
I mean, I honestly probably require a higher degree of executive functioning when I'm taking care of my kids than I do when I'm working on my online stuff.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. Well, let's transition because we're getting along. I want to hear about the influencer part. I want to get back to that question I opened with.
KC Davis:
Okay, yeah.
Pete Wright:
How did you end up with 1.4 million followers on TikTok?
KC Davis:
Okay. So, my sister told me to get on TikTok because she thought I would think it was funny. And I posted a few things here and there, no big deal. And then one day, I ended up getting some time. It was miraculous. My kids took a nap at the same time and I videoed me cleaning my house, and it was a disaster. And I have always had this way that I have sort of kept myself from being too overwhelmed. And it was something my psychiatrist mentioned to me that one of the reasons why I had escaped being diagnosed for so long was because I was engaging in compensatory behavior at such a high level, I was surpassing even neurotypical people's functioning for the most part.
But it shouldn't have to be that hard. She was like, "It's not measured by how well you're doing. It's measured by how hard do you have to work to do that well." And so, what I've always done when I look at a room and I see a thousand things in it is I say, "Okay, there's not a thousand things in this room. There's only five." And any room you have ever been in, there's only five things. There's trash, dishes, laundry, things that have a place that are not in their place, and things that do not have a place. And I start with trash, and I get a trash bag and I clean up all the trash. And so I made this sort of this video showing, "Okay, look how it looks like when all the trash is gone. And then, I get all the laundry and now look at it." And I said, "If you're somebody who struggles with depression or ADHD, or you just have kids or you feel overwhelmed, see if this helps you."
And that video blew up and people started saying, "This is the first thing that's ever helped me." And so, I just started sort of riffing off of that and making more content like that and answering questions because I'm a therapist. The first time someone said, "Thank you for showing your house. I have so much shame over my inability to clean." And the idea to hear somebody say, "It's okay, just do it a different way." And so, I just sort of noticed that those were the videos getting the most hits. So I was like, "All right, I'll keep talking about that and about that intersection of mental health and therapy and home and self care." And I think that there's just not a lot out there about home care, and lifestyle care in particular, that isn't hyper aspirational and-
Nikki Kinzer:
It's so true.
KC Davis:
About being aesthetically pleasing.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. And going back to you even bringing up the trauma when it comes to cleaning, this information is not there. It's not available.
KC Davis:
And that aspirational stuff-
Nikki Kinzer:
Until now.
KC Davis:
Yeah, until now. That aspirational stuff feeds into that existing problem of, "If I just get my life together, I'll feel better." Because there's something that happens when you watch someone do a perfect pantry restock, or when you watch someone talk about this perfect rainbow bookcase or their perfect what-I-eat-in-the-day meal plan. You have an emotional experience watching that. It's peaceful or it's calming, or there's some sort of joy that brings or calm that brings. And that's fine. But I think what most of us do is we mistake the emotional experience of consuming that media for believing that it's a foregone conclusion that, "Okay. So then, if I just did what this person is doing, then that feeling I had in 30 seconds of watching them, that could be my whole life." That's how I would feel all the time. I would feel this whatever emotion... That would be the feeling that I'm having, if I were to do that.
And that's not actually true. You can still enjoy your aesthetic cleaning videos and your organization stuff and your... Those videos, they're like ASMR, right? They still are cool to watch. But you can also just be okay with that emotional experience, just being... It's like when you look at a video of a puppy and you go, "Ahhh," and you feel, "How cute that is!" But to then conclude that if I were to get a dog, I would feel that way all the time and it would significantly... The quality of my life would just go through the roof because I would have that feeling all the time, would you get that feeling sometimes? Yeah. But in some ways, it would be worse because you'd be picking up poop, you'd be dealing with the-
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
KC Davis:
Chewing up your shoe. And so, I think sometimes when it comes to social media, just recognizing, "Okay, the feeling that I have about how cool and warm and fuzzy this looks, does not necessarily translate into I would feel that way if I just had a pantry that looked like that."
Pete Wright:
I mean, I love home remodel shows. I love them when these external people come into somebody's house and they work with them and they build a plan, and then the people go away and they come back for the reveal. Any of those formula shows-
KC Davis:
Ah, so good.
Pete Wright:
I'm absolutely in. But what I really want to see subversively is I want to come back to that house a month later, because I guarantee you, it will be destroyed, a dumpster fire, because real life doesn't look like that. It looks like my house all the time. And I just-
Nikki Kinzer:
You mean you don't have little fresh cupcakes on a tray-
Pete Wright:
Oh, my god.
Nikki Kinzer:
On your island in the kitchen?
Pete Wright:
Oh, dare to dream.
Nikki Kinzer:
Just ready to eat all the time.
Pete Wright:
But that's why I watch home remodel porn because it satisfies that chemical attraction that I have. And it's the same reason we watch anything to make that. I just find that so delightful. I want to make that show, the horror show that is one month later. Let's just see how real people live in this fancy house.
KC Davis:
I try to think of it also as eating a good meal. It is true that when I get to a Sunday afternoon and I clean everything and I organize everything and I light a candle and I get some... It is true that, that gives me a peaceful feeling. That feels good like, "Wow, how serene!" But it's not possible to hold that feeling all the time and actually live in your house. And so I try to think of it as, "Hey, I also like the feeling..." Pizza.
When I eat pizza, when you eat a good meal, that feeling of, "Oh, it's amazing. It's incredible," nobody expects you to have that feeling with every meal you eat. No one thinks that, "Well, so then if I just never stop eating pizza, if I just eat pizza every second of the day, I could have that feeling all the time." Right? We kind of know that. We know it's okay to think that, that's peaceful. It's also okay to not exhaust yourself and berate yourself at not being able to hold that space in that perfection all the time as if it's an obligation or as if it's even reasonable to be able to do so.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. And so, that totally sidetracked us from this discussion of how you ended up doing this.
KC Davis:
Oh yeah, sorry. I'm [inaudible 00:54:20].
Pete Wright:
You did the first video. And then-
KC Davis:
I did the first video [inaudible 00:54:23].
Pete Wright:
And now, there's this.
KC Davis:
In one week, I went from 6,000 followers to 20,000. And someone commented and said, "I'm just so grateful to have found my people. I didn't think anybody else was like me." And I remember responding and saying, "Listen, I had 6,000 followers, posted that video, and now I have 20,000. You're not only not alone, I think you're in really good company." And I said off the hip, "Welcome to Struggle Care." And that's where the-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh.
KC Davis:
Sort of brand name came from. My website is called Struggle Care. My hashtag is strugglecare. It's this idea that, "I don't know really how to make you not struggle, but I can teach you how to care for yourself in the midst of that struggle. And we will work together on you being able to believe that you're worthy of that care, even if you're struggling. You're worthy of kindness, regardless of your level of functioning, even if the kindness is only coming from you."
Pete Wright:
That's beautiful.
Nikki Kinzer:
Love that.
KC Davis:
And from there, it just kind of took off. I mean, it just continued to build. I got up to about 500,000 followers. I've had several videos go viral, but I had a video go mega viral, like 11 million views. And it was a video where I said, "You are not lazy. There are hundreds of reasons why people struggle to do care tasks." Now, there are other influencers out there doing kind of the unfiltered cleaning and things like that, but I think that I just got lucky that TikTok is a platform that really works well for my brain.
I also think that as a therapist, being able to take this idea and actually break it down into, "Okay, there are really six pillars that make up this foundational shift," and being able to actually pave a way for emotional change, as opposed to just giving practical tips about laundry or dishes, being able to do both of those things, I think has created a space that is unlike other spaces. And so, it's just been attracting people. Then I had a literary agent reach out to me, and then they hooked me up with a bunch of publishing houses. I started pre-recording a podcast season. It truly is just this bizarre trip of just the growth, the followers just keep coming, and I just keep making the same kind of content.
Pete Wright:
How does it impact your actual practice as a therapist? Are you still seeing people?
KC Davis:
No, I actually stopped seeing people, I stopped really working when I became a stay-at-home mom. And then, the pandemic happened and I was at home with both of my kids. And I feel like this platform has been a personal lifeline for me, because all of these sort of hacks that I've made in my home have all been since I started this channel, with the exception of that "five things" thing that I've been doing my whole life. And I think what a lot of people don't realize is that they're taking this journey along with me-
Pete Wright:
Sure.
KC Davis:
As I'm sort of solidifying some of these things and identifying them and changing the things around my home. And it's been a lifeline to me to experience feeling like it's really meaningful work for me.
Pete Wright:
You dropped "viral" and "mega viral". What does that do to you when something goes viral? We've heard from others that it's not always what it's cracked up to be.
KC Davis:
I'm pretty good at knowing what kind of criticism a video is going to bring, and there are certain criticisms that I don't care. I know someone's going to call me lazy, I know someone's going to call me a bad mom. I'm prepared for that, and in fact, I welcome that because I like to respond to those in videos because number one, not necessarily to defend myself, because I don't need to defend myself against strangers on the internet, but I like to show people an example of number one, me not feeling ashamed so that they could feel like they don't have to be ashamed. I like to give people an example of how to speak to their inner critic, because the truth is that we call ourselves all of those things.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. But it's not like the outer critic is early to the party.
KC Davis:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
KC Davis:
So, that doesn't bother me at all. I mean, I say it doesn't bother... It sucks. It stings to have people say that. But I know that they just don't understand and they don't get it, and I'm totally confident in who I am. The only ones that really bother me are I have made some videos where I talk about gender issues, especially division of care, where I've talked about the effect of patriarchy on women. And whenever those videos go viral, and I could always tell when they get outside of my normal demographic, because I start getting extremely hateful, misogynistic comments. And so typically, on those types of videos, I eventually will turn comments off.
Videos will grow faster when comments are on. But there comes a point at which I've already meaningfully engaged with the criticism or the hate in a way that's helpful to my audience, and so I'm not just going to sit around and be bombarded with abusive language day after day. So, I usually will turn the comments off on those kind of videos eventually. But for the most part, it's pretty predictable what people are going to be mean about. And so, that doesn't bother me as much anymore.
Pete Wright:
You're predominantly on TikTok? In terms of favorite platforms, it seems like that's the one because it works for your brain as you say. But do you have interest elsewhere?
KC Davis:
Yeah, because I can turn a camera on and just start talking.
Nikki Kinzer:
So, you don't have to...
KC Davis:
Versus sitting down and having to write captions and things.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. So I was going to ask you, what we're seeing is just off of the cuff a lot of times? Just turning it on and saying, "Hey, I'm going to do this," or whatever and...
KC Davis:
Almost always.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, that's right.
KC Davis:
Which is why it's funny when I get brand deals and they're like, "Hey, can you do a TikTok this month?" And I'll be like, "Okay." The idea of having to think of an idea because I just wake up... I go to bed every night thinking, "I have no more ideas. This is the end of the road for me." And then wake up and be like, "Oh, I have an idea."
Pete Wright:
Well, it's lovely, and we're so grateful for you.
KC Davis:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
Thank you for sharing your wisdom and experience. It's great. And the chat room has been very active over the last hour that you have been with us. So remember, if you were listening to this on the main feed, if you were a patron, you'd get a special version of this where KC actually answers these questions that are coming to us. So, head over to patreon.com/theadhdpodcast to learn more about that. KC, so tell people officially where they need to go subscribe right now.
KC Davis:
So on TikTok, I'm at Domestic Blisters.
Pete Wright:
Awesome.
KC Davis:
You can go to my website, strugglecare.com, and you can really get to anything I do from the website. You can get the book, an audio book. I have online courses on how to clean your depression house, ADHD friendly. I have workbooks on how to declutter, how to help your kids with care tasks, and then the information for any events that I'm attending. So the whole thing is just right there, plus all the links to my socials.
Pete Wright:
Beautiful. Thank you so much. On behalf of KC Davis and Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright. We appreciate your time and attention, everyone who is downloading and listening to this show. Jump over to the Discord channel in the show talk... Show talk channel in our discord server. That's where we're going to be hanging out talking about this show. Thanks, everybody. We'll catch you next week right here on Taking Control: The ADHD podcast.