ADHD Duos • The Flooded Brain: ADHD, Emotion, and the Biology of Overwhelm with Dr. Dodge Rea & Dr. Sharon Saline
Imagine your brain as a control room. On most days, the switches flick and the dials turn just as they should. But then something small—an unanswered text, a missed deadline, a critical glance—trips the wrong lever. Suddenly, that control room is submerged. The signals blur. The system floods.
This week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast, Pete and Nikki sit down with two returning champions of clarity and compassion: Dr. Sharon Saline and Dr. Dodge Rea. Together, they unravel the hidden mechanics of emotional flooding—not as a character flaw, but as a neurological response shaped by fear, history, and a sometimes-overzealous amygdala.
Through stories, science, and metaphor (including rogue trains and Wile E. Coyote’s ill-fated cliff dives), they reveal what happens when the ADHD brain short-circuits under pressure—and what we can actually do about it. Along the way, you’ll learn how shame disguises itself as control, how the body signals what the mind can’t process, and why sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is… go to the bathroom.
This is a conversation about reframing of the narrative so many ADHD adults carry with them: that being overwhelmed means being broken. It doesn’t. It never did.
Links & Notes
Learn more about Dr. Sharon Saline: drsharonsaline.com
Learn more about Dr. Dodge Rea: dodgerea.com
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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, hello, Nikki Kinzer. We are, oh man, we did a little entertainment clutch in the beginning for our members, and you could say that my pick is really adjacent to what we're talking about today. I picked Doctor Odyssey, oh, terror in the high seas, and we're talking-
Nikki Kinzer:
Apparently with sharks and orcas.
Pete Wright:
With sharks and orcas. Oh, it's so good. And now we're talking about emotional flooding, which you could say everyone in that cast is doing every time they go to work, emotional flooding. I can't wait to introduce you to our guests. We're going to do that in just a second, but first, head over to takecontroladhd.com and get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to our mailing list, and we would love to send you an email each time a new episode is released. Of course, connect with us on Bluesky or Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest, @takecontroladhd, and jump into the Discord community. That's where all the peoples are. Just head over to takecontroladhd.com/discord. That'll get you into the free stuff, the general and public community channels.
But of course, this is it. This is the plug, this is the pitch. I don't know if you've noticed, Pete gestures broadly, the economy is doing some crazy things right now and you know what's really helpful? If you can, if you're in a place to support, visit patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. This is listener supported podcasting and for a few bucks from you, from each of you, that adds up to a lot of team support for us. It's not just me and Nikki doing this thing, it's a whole bunch of people on the backend of the TCA team that are making this show possible.
So if this show has ever helped you and your relationship with ADHD live in a new way together in harmony, we would love you to visit patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. Of course, you get access to the double and triple secret Discord channels depending on what tier you actually join. And you can join us for live streams, you can ask questions live to our esteemed guests, all of the good stuff, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast.
You know that moment when your emotions stop trickling and start to pour, the pressure builds, and suddenly we're underwater like Doctor Odyssey? For people living with ADHD, this experience isn't rare. It's routine. Psychologist John Gottman called it emotional flooding. So what is it really and what can be done when those waves come crashing in? Today on The ADHD Podcast, we're diving into the flooded brain with the stories and strategies behind emotional flooding to help us navigate these turbulent waters. I am watching too much Doctor Odyssey is really what's happening. We're joined by two extraordinary guests and our final pairing in our ADHD Duo series with Dr. Dodge Rea and Dr. Sharon Saline. Dear friends, welcome, welcome, welcome back to The ADHD Podcast.
Nikki Kinzer:
Welcome.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Thank you.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Thank you. It's so fun to be here.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
So, so fun and so fun to have you guys together. You both are many-time returning champions of The ADHD Podcast and you both actually have diminutive nicknames in our community, Dr. Sharon and Dr. Dodge. So that's a status that few have achieved, so we're so, so glad to have you together. Let's start with where emotional flooding comes from. Now, I know this has originated from John Gottman, but he was a relationships guy. I'm wondering where the flooding part came from. Are either of you in a space to talk about where this comes from?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I don't know if I know the history around that. I mean, when that first got named, it was sure well named though, right? It gives you that sense of the feelings are coming too fast and too numerously in too many directions for me to really swim. And I feel like the water's rising, and I fear I can't breathe. This is a really cool topic specifically around ADHD because it is something I think neurodivergence can add to. It becomes that much more present in this community even than in the general one.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Some of the kids I've worked with, one of the kids I worked says, "It's like a tidal wave and suddenly I'm just trying to keep my head above water." So I think, I don't know about the history of the term emotional flooding, but I do understand the biology of it and that what happens is that a feeling is experienced by the body, sort of determined in a fight, flight, or freeze kind of sensation.
So when the body senses danger and some of these big feelings are basically experienced as danger, the executive functioning skills that work towards helping us manage our feelings kind of take a little trip to The Bahamas and our emotional brain starts running the show. And so when that happens, the feelings are what's taking charge. And we call that either an amygdala hijack, I call it an amygdala takeover.
And so is sadness? Well, you would say, "Well, sadness is not a danger." No, but usually what happens is that that's a feeling and it builds and you can't manage it. So the feeling kind of overflows. And in that way, it's not a fight, flight, or freeze, but it's not not a fight, flight, or freeze. Do you know what I'm saying, Dodge? Can you explain that maybe a little bit?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Let me add to what you're saying, or at least give it some additional language. Let's see if we can understand how it is and is not a fight, flight, freeze state. So if the amygdala is this alarm center for the brain, this is this part of us that activates when we perceive ourselves to be facing the situation for which we're really under-equipped, that can be internal or external. And the amygdala will kick on when we feel like we are not going to be able to think through what's happening and we need to do something very quickly to ensure some kind of survival. And the basic moves towards survival are fight with what's happening, run from what's happening, or shut down, that freeze state. The first two are highly sympathetic and the second one is a massive flood of parasympathetic activity that says, "Let's just go ahead and prepare for death." And we get really, really, really stuck.
And when that's all happening, the blood's moving from the prefrontal cortex toward the back of the brain where we are much more efficient, but a whole lot less nuanced in our thinking. We can't look at a grizzly standing on her hind legs and think, "Oh, no wonder she's stressed out. She's got cubs, but isn't she beautiful? What a magnificent creature. And I bet you these kids, I mean they don't seem to be that stressed. I wonder if there's a way I could talk about this with her." You're dead by the time you've had any of these [inaudible 00:08:16]
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Right. That's why the thinking needs to go to The Bahamas.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Exactly. We've got to get out of there now, right? Yeah. And what I think I understand about ADHD, at least what I've read lately is that already, the amygdala is a little bit overactive. And the prefrontal cortex, this executive functioning part we talk about all the time is a little underactive. And it sets up a predisposition to this kind of flooding because the amygdala can keep generating more and more attention on what scares us. And the prefrontal cortex has a harder time assessing how much of that is real and useful and pertinent and how much it isn't. And so all of a sudden, you've just got a wall of water of feeling coming at you and it's hard to tease it apart.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
It's almost like the executive functioning skills are sort of a gatekeeper and they can kind of block out things that are either unimportant or help us to get small pieces of information that we can process appropriately. And there's a way in which I think that with the fight, flight, or freeze aspects of the amygdala that freeze is kind of like what the experience of flooding is. A lot of times people with ADHD talk about this overwhelm freeze or the sort of ADHD paralysis, decision paralysis, task paralysis.
And those are a lower order of the brain functioning. It's like I can't process all this information and so the feeling that I'm having is a response to that. Maybe I'm afraid, maybe I'm angry, whatever it is. And so we move into that kind of a freeze response. Dr. Stephen Porges just talks about the different types of brain responses in his work. That freeze is associated with a certain way of responding.
Pete Wright:
There are a couple of things you've brought up that have surprised me already. First of all, that the freeze is a part of emotional flooding because I guess in my experience, I've never associated, flooding seems like such a big concept. It's a big active concept. And I would've called it, maybe to stay with the Doctor Odyssey framework of today, emotional drowning, like I can't do anything because I'm so overwhelmed that all of this is a part of the same emotional sort of amygdala hijack, amygdala takeover is interesting to me.
How do I tell the difference? And I'm recognizing this is a complex question, but how would one tell the difference between this sort of emotional flooding, the amygdala-driven hijacked flooding and a panic attack for example, or some sort of anxiety response, or rejection sensitivity, RSD? We've talked about that a number of times. How do these concepts relate?
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Sure. So when we think about this idea, our system, our brain, we're wired for two things. We're wired for safety and danger. We either seek safety or we seek danger. And then our nervous system responds to things that we believe are safe and certain and things that are unsafe and uncertain, things that are dangerous. And that's part of what polyvagal theory talks about for those people who understand it, that it influences our emotional and our social behaviors.
When we think about rejection sensitive dysphoria or some of the other things you mentioned, those are states in which someone has an interactional experience that's then processed in a particular way. So if you have a history, for example, of being put down, of being told you're not good enough or you're not smart enough or you don't get things right, or you're rejected or you've been bullied, the tendency that you're going to have to respond to a situation that might smell of some sort of criticism or exclusion is going to be bigger than actually what the situation might be calling for.
And the bigness of that response with ADHD has to do with that overactive, whether it's the amygdala or some of the other systems in the brain that's saying it's a bigger response. And that bigger response can come in that way of flooding, of emotional dysregulation and of sometimes in overthinking what's actually happening versus what you think is happening. You're attributing things to a situation based on your history that might not actually be relevant for the current experience.
Pete Wright:
It's really interesting and sort of separates the emotional flooding to the lower case T trauma that we grow up with. And with ADHD, it also describes why ADHD gets flooded faster because of the out-sized weight of our history. Is that fair?
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Well, yes. And also a lot of people with ADHD, I think 10 to 20% of children with ADHD have sensory processing issues. And so what happens is we take in information through our senses and then I believe our thalamus processes that information. And if there's a danger, it will send a signal to the amygdala, danger, and then activate the hypothalamus, which sends cortisol and adrenaline running through us so we can tighten up our muscles and run really fast from the tiger.
And today, we don't necessarily have tigers in our lives, but we experience things as tigers. So you get an email from your boss at nine o'clock at night that says, "I want to meet with you in the morning," and suddenly the tiger's in your house. And so it's not like, "Oh, okay." This is part of anxiety. It's like, "Great, we're going to have a meeting. That's great." What goes through your mind is, "What did I do wrong?"
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm getting fired.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
I'm getting fired. And so there's all of these worst-case scenarios. And we see that a lot with people with ADHD because of the history of the thousand paper cuts a day, that sort of perpetual trauma of living with a neurodiverged brain in a neurotypical world.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah, I'd be interested in all your takes on this. I have a sense that emotional flooding for ADHD, very often at its core is a combination of fear and shame. There's this sense of I'm scared of the boss meeting in the morning, the wait a minute, I just lost the whole morning and most of the afternoon and I have way too much to do and I won't get it done. So that's scary. And then the next thing is, and there I go again, I suck, or it's too much, I'll never be able to do this all and now I'm in trouble.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
I think there's so many connections to that. There's so many connections. And I think that the shame is so deep for so many people. And no matter how much self-compassion training or radical acceptance people are reading about, the challenge for them is that each day of living offers a new opportunity to mess up.
Pete Wright:
Yes, okay.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
And not forgive yourself. I want to also say something about what I said earlier about Dr. Porges's theory of polyvagal. So he talks about three different things, a ventral vagal, which is social engagement and you have safety, and then there's sympathetic state, which is that fight to flight, and then there's the dorsal vagal state, which is the shutdown. And so I think that when I think about freeze, overwhelm, excuse me, overwhelming emotions or emotional flooding, I'm really thinking about the dorsal ventral state because you're sort of like stunned.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
And there's a fourth state that's worth naming too, that gets talked about sometimes in polyvagal theory, where they make a distinction between the dorsal vagal shutdown and a free state. And I'd never heard this named or I'd never heard this distinction until, I don't know, in the last few years where somebody said a free state is one where you have all of your sympathetic nervous system activated. So all of the gas pedal is on. This is the part that wants to fight or flight or do something. And all of the pollies, the parasympathetic system fully activated, which is the brake pedal that says stop at the same time. So it's like gas pedal on the floor, emergency brake on, and your whole system is just activated. All your muscles are tense. You want to take action, you don't know what to do. That's like a panic attack.
A dorsal vagal shutdown is we're one notch past that, where parasympathetic has totally taken over because sympathetic had nothing it could do. So it would be like, imagine that you're on a boat that's sinking and you're in a cabin below deck. And the water has started to climb and it's up your shins. This is where you go from parasympathetic to sympathetic. This is the part that says, "I better do something fast. I got to get out of this room. I got to get up above deck. I got to get on a lifeboat." Do something, right? Fight it or flee. So you're either bailing water or you're getting out of there.
Imagine then that it gets to your chin. At this point you can't figure out what to do, but you're desperately trying to keep your head above water and breathe, but you can't get out of the room. You're trapped. That's the freeze state of like, I'm activated but I can't do anything. And this is I think where a lot of us get to when we're flooded.
And then the dorsal vagal is the one where it's now over your head and you're just preparing to drown. And your face goes slack, your muscles go weak, you're dissociating. You're watching yet another episode of a show you've already seen because you're in total avoidance of what you really needed to be doing that afternoon or preparing for your meeting the next day or calling your friend to find out if really they do hate your guts or not, whatever might be activated. It's like you're now totally underwater and you're starting to just collapse. Does that make sense?
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And it also describes for me why when I think about my emotional regulation curve, if I'm plotting just what the shape of that experience is like, it's very, very quick to get me to that heightened state and very, very long to get me out of it again. The curve is straight up and then a long, long shallow arc over time.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
When you say that, Pete, the thing is it takes nanoseconds for our systems to activate that, oh, we're in danger and we need to do something. And it takes the brain, I think somewhere around three minutes to recover from that, but it takes the body like 20 minutes because that's what some of the research that I've read says. So of course, it's like you're activated and then you're like you're still activated for a while.
Pete Wright:
Which leads me to, especially in the context of ADHD, I want to talk a little bit about the consequences of living your life in this state, both from a sort of practical emotional impact and a sort of somatic impact. What is it doing to your body when you're living in this sort of emotional flooded state?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Let me narrate the thought process as I go. It's a really interesting question and a very important one because it really matters. And I'm scared to answer it because of the people who live here a whole lot of the time. I'm afraid it's just going to add to the shame and paralysis that goes with, oh, great, on top of being completely useless, I'm also killing myself with stress hormones. Awesome. You know what I'm saying? Because it's not very good for us to live under chronic stress.
Fortunately, there is also some research out there that's saying stress isn't always as bad for us as we think, as long as we find ways to feel effectual. If we can find yes under stress, I can manage, I can handle this, I'm swimming just fine, that's not so bad. What's not so great is when we're constantly in this place of, there I go again, I suck. I'm just going to add to that case I've been building against I'm not so great. Either I deserve the rejection that I've been so sensitive to, or I don't really believe in myself to be able to get out of this or to live a life that I can feel proud of and happy about. Well then that's not so great, right?
Dr. Sharon Saline:
When we talked earlier about shame, and I want to come back to that, Pete, because I think that if we're building backwards of shames in the deep basement and then we have the negative things that we tell ourselves, like you're not smart or you don't get it right or you don't matter or you're not lovable, and then we have above that, oh my gosh, I made another mistake, and then we have above that, I'm just going along living my life. And then it's like you trip and you stumble and you realize, I didn't even know I made a mistake. It's like I'm getting feedback that I did something that wasn't okay when I didn't know it wasn't okay. So then there's a lot of shame and emotion that can happen there.
And then there's the other thing where you are actively triggered by a situation or a person that sets you off and you kind of lose it. And to me, we haven't really gotten into that part yet, what do you do when the fight part of your amygdala has taken over and you are really racing against that tiger and the person that you're yelling at is your ten-year-old kid or your partner who you actually love but you just lost it?
Pete Wright:
And they just happened to be in front of you at the time.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Or, kids have this amazing ability to press the invisible red button on your chest that sets you off. Nobody else sees it, but your kid knows it's there and they just wail on it. And so they do these things that are really provocative.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I have this thought. Before we jump into what do you do about it, I want to run a parallel narrative for what's happening. We've got the neurological one, we've certainly got lots of psychological ones. There are a lot of ways to understand what exactly is emotional flooding. I have another one I wanted to add that just came to me strongly this week. What if emotional flooding or limbic hijacking is essentially a trance?
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Like a dissociative state?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
A little bit, yeah. So I did a bunch of hypnosis training along the way, and the definition of this particular school of thought for trance is going to sound a little weedy, but we'll break it down. It's the psychophysiological state of aroused focused awareness with a corresponding diminution of outside awareness. So you are aroused and hyper focused while also able to ignore all evidence to the contrary. And think about what ADHD is so good at and bad at, at the same time. Hyper focus is both the superpower of ADHD and the kryptonite at the same time. It's that state we can get into where if we're stimulated enough, we can't let go. If we're not stimulated enough, we can't seem to lock on to something we need to focus on. If we're too stimulated, we can't let go.
But that makes things that are novel interesting, challenging, or urgent, especially really interesting and make them hard to let go. And so if our amygdala starts to kick in with I'm not good enough, or there I go again, or oh my God, my kid is freaking driving me crazy, or I have too much to do and I'm failing again, we start to get scared and we hyper-focus on all the evidence that pushes our old buttons as Dr. Sharon's talking about, our historical stuff around what I can't manage.
What if it's a trance state that we get hyper-focused on and then we start to ignore all of the useful data around us that A, we can do it, B, Wait a minute, my kid does love me, and so on? And when we get stuck in that place, it becomes kind of this echo chamber inside us that we can't escape and then we either get really activated or we totally shut down.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
I do feel like that when you're in a limbic takeover, there is a way that you're present in the situation because you're responding to the situation, but you're not present in the effect that your response is having on other people. So you're present but you're not present.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah, we lose context. We can get stuck on what's wrong and then lose all the context around either the effect I'm having or the number of choices I have that I might exercise that would feel really good, or even the fact that we've stopped breathing normally. You can get really stuck there. So I wanted to bring that in as a parallel track because I have a feeling a lot of the really cool ideas we'll have about how to stop this runaway train turn out to be ways to also break a trance.
Pete Wright:
Well, and that's exactly where I want to go because there's this whole idea behind building a sort of repair conversation. Like to Sharon's point, when you've just freaked out at your kid for something they didn't do, they just triggered you inadvertently, how do you begin building this sort of regulation and recovery tool to get yourself normalized, to take back over your limbic system? What are the triggers that we use? My favorite term, what is the pattern interrupt? How do you break where you are and jolt yourself back into a sense of reality where you could see that the bear is beautiful and has cubs?
Dr. Sharon Saline:
I think it starts before. And this is what I work on with my clients and it's part of my STAR approach, stop, think, act, recover that's sort of grounded in the 5 Cs. We have to notice our physiological changes that are signals that we're heading off into the limbic nowhere land. If you think about Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, this is my favorite example. So the Road Runner is running, running across this plateau, and then he turns a hard left and Wile E. Coyote is chasing him on the plateau and he is going too fast to turn left and he goes off the plateau. And he's hanging in the air and he's realizing like, "Oh, shoot. Oops." And then he crashes to the ground and then that was the end of the scene, and then they would start over with him in a new place as if that had never happened.
Pete Wright:
He's very resilient, Wile E. Coyote.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
He's very resilient. But the thing is, I think that happens to people with ADHD. It's like they're running so fast and they're off the cliff, and then they realize too late, oops, I have completely lost it. And then they either do a number of different kinds of coping mechanisms. One might be blaming other people, one might be being over apologetic, one might be hating themselves on the inside, but acting on the outside like everything is fine. There's all kinds of ways that people cope with these situations or try to cope.
And I think that we got to start before the running or that you have the urge to run or that you notice that your voice is getting louder. For me, I ask people, where do you feel it in your bodies? I'll ask you each right now. When you start to get activated, where do you feel it? I feel it right here. I start to feel tightness in my chest and sometimes now I feel it right in my solar plexus kind of like something is off
Pete Wright:
It's connected for me behind my eyes, I get a little dizzy and the world gets a little small, and then it's a shooting anxiety from my back of my head into my chest.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Okay. How about you, Nikki?
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, definitely in my stomach. I can feel myself tightening in my stomach almost like I'm doing a pushup. I mean a sit-up, not a push-up, a sit-up.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
And Dodge, you?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I relate to all of those. If I catch it early enough, I'll even feel it in my eyes. It's like my eyes start to grip things instead of just allowing them peacefully to come in. My eyes get a little bit grippy and it feels like my attention narrows, like triangular, forward, kind of in a narrow state.
Pete Wright:
I think what's so interesting about this metaphor, and I'm going to go ahead and belabor the Wile E. Coyote metaphor because I too love it. One of the things that's missing there, Sharon, and I think for ADHD-ers is important is when does Wile E. Coyote fall? He falls when he looks down. And I think that for me, I can operate in a fake emotionally regulated state for a long time after the ground has long left my feet. And the crash comes when I'm stupid enough to look down. I could practically fly if I just stopped looking down, which is why I think it's so important to start this process as a practice when there's still ground beneath my feet. That prevents the crash. So that looking down part is an important trigger that I'm about to crash.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
I absolutely love that because I think in a way if we continue with this metaphor, it's not even looking. For people, when you were losing it or you're spewing or whatever, it's kind of like suddenly looking around, breaking that trance and looking around at people and being like, "Oh, wait a minute, what I'm doing is not okay."
Pete Wright:
Yeah, the difference between this sort of intrinsic emotional experience and the extrinsic emotional awareness, like I can be totally focused on my own shame and dysregulation and not read the room. And reading the room is what actually can trigger the crash. It brings me back to awareness. It brings me back to, oh my God, my behavior isn't inappropriate right now. I just yelled at my child.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Certainly can be a part of when the shame comes in.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
It's so painful. I mean, I definitely yelled at particularly one of my kids more than I wish I had. And as an adult they let me know that that was traumatic for them and-
Pete Wright:
And that they remember it.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I have felt horribly guilty. I mean, I'm going to just say that perimenopause and adolescence and ADHD are not a good mix. So I can be accountable, which I have been. I apologized and accountable, yes, I did that. And then the third leg of the stool is change in behavior. So you can say you're sorry and you can own your behavior, and then if you continue to do it, those things don't matter anymore. It's, what are you doing to respond differently to the intense feelings that you have? You're not letting it go into an amygdala fight or flight. You're actually feeling that panicky thing, but you're taking care of it in a different way.
And my number one favorite way that I recommend to everybody is to go to the bathroom. Literally, if you are feeling triggered and you are in a public or at your house situation, excuse yourself and go to the bathroom. Because A, going to the bathroom is generally something people do on their own. Even kids understand that. And B, while you're there, you can wash your hands. That can be very grounding. You can splash water on your face. You could take your phone with you and text your lifeline friends or family members or coach or whoever. You could put the seat of the toilet down and sit there and check a magazine that you might have in your bathroom to distract yourself, a healthy distraction. And then when you're feeling like you're more intact, you can leave.
And I will tell you that I have at times sat with my bottom up next to the door of the bathroom because on the other side of the bathroom, there might've been a young person banging on the door screaming at me. Okay? And I couldn't leave yet because I wasn't ready and they were still mad. So this I think is a very simple, straightforward way to go. And if you're not able to manage it for too long, this then goes into my stop, think, act, recover plan, which is calling a stop when things are building to take a time apart rather than after they've exploded.
Nikki Kinzer:
I just want to say I really appreciate the going to the bathroom idea because my kids are older now, and so I don't have to do that. I mean, they know when I need to have a time-out myself. But I could have used that when they were younger for sure, because I think that, like you said, children understand I need to go to the bathroom. Because I can't tell you how many times, I had a particular child follow me around the house as I was trying to get away, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom. And to have that tool to say, "Just a moment, I need to use the bathroom," it would've put the door in between us and I would've found that very, very helpful. So thank you, Sharon.
Pete Wright:
And I find the bedroom is family space. Even our master bedroom, our kids were always in and out, but the bathroom, we could close the door with impunity.
Nikki Kinzer:
It is personal.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
I think emotional flooding can feel like a runaway train. And if we switch from Wile E. Coyote to other old-fashioned TV for just a minute, think about how would you stop a runaway train back in the black and white Westerns? You couldn't just set up a roadblock, which just turns into a train wreck. You can't always divert the train. You have to board it. You have to ride alongside on your horse and then jump on top of that thing and then start to climb forward and redirect it.
So I love your idea of go to the bathroom because it's a way of boarding the runaway train. Like I am aware right now I can't have this conversation with my kid, or I can't stare at this computer screen any longer because I'm freaking out, or I can't keep going in this conversation with my spouse because I'm going to start to yell.
And it's a way of saying, "I'm just going to climb right on board this runaway train and start steering," which might be toward somewhere where you can break the trance, get out of that situation, move your body in some new way up the stairs, or at least go from sitting to standing or standing to sitting and reading a magazine. But yeah, it is a way to break a trance and it's a lovely way to create a context shift too, which is part of that same thing. So back to the 5 Cs.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Well, I mean I think that the 5 Cs, self-control is that you notice when you're becoming dysregulated that we have to pay attention to those signs, those physiological signs. Or you can pay attention to some repetitive negative thoughts, but that's usually harder. It's easier to catch the physical, I'm feeling that thing in my stomach again. And then that's the self-control, okay, I'm having that experience. What are the self-soothers that I've identified previously that I put on my notes section on my phone that I can engage in or what's a lifeline?
And self-soothers could be I'm going to get up and get a glass of water. I'm going to excuse myself from this meeting and use the bathroom. I'm going to stop what I'm working on, leave a Post-it with some breadcrumbs and take a walk, whatever it is, but you've decided in advance what that is. And then compassion is remembering the effect of your dysregulation on other people because it's having compassion for them.
Pete Wright:
That's the read the room aspect, right?
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Correct.
Pete Wright:
Remember, you're not alone.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Right. The self-compassion piece is okay, people get upset. I need to practice forgiveness. But it's two sides of the same coin in a way.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's taking a little bit of the accountability piece too, I feel. Like when you say that is that you're recognizing that this impacted somebody else and my behavior impacted somebody else.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Right. And that's very hard to do when you're in a takeover, when you're flooded. And particularly for ADHD brains that are now, not now brains, now is so big and intense. I watched a kid yesterday I was working with, and he is mild inattentive ADHD, and his father is ADHD. And the kid believed that his father was going to be late to pick him up from the session, which meant that the kid could get to his soccer practice late. And this almost 14-year-old big boy, sort of writhing around on my couch, freaking out that his father might not get there in time for him to change, for him to get to practice. And totally, it was in his body and his thinking. His body started.
Nikki Kinzer:
Interesting. All right, so collaboration.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
So this is actually asking for help, having something set up, people that you can call that you can talk to, to help you process if you are dysregulated. And then with kids, working with them on a behavior that they don't like about themselves when they become dysregulated, and how you might be able to assist with that without them feeling blamed or shamed.
Consistency is a steadiness. We're never going to be perfect. We're going to make mistakes. That's okay. We accept that about ourselves. We're aiming instead for steadiness. So more often than not, I'm noticing when I'm becoming dysregulated and I'm making a different choice, not all the time, but more often than not. And that's true for our kids too.
And then celebrating, noticing, validating yourself, like, okay, no one else is going to notice that I actually regulated myself in this situation except me, but bravo to me.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, but I will. Okay.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
But I will.
Pete Wright:
It's heady.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
And that's part of the frustrating thing. It's like the 9 times out of 10 where you regulate yourself and nobody notices, and then the 10th time you don't regulate yourself, that's the one people talk about.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, so true.
Pete Wright:
I want to turn to Dodge because one of the things that I've been adjacent to for many years is the GRACE Sequence. You've been on the show to talk about the GRACE Sequence and it gets me thinking about how you might use the GRACE Sequence to do some of the things we're talking about here today, to break the pattern and build the read the room response as well. Can you just give us a quick reminder?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
So the GRACE Sequence is a process that can be used as a modality for practitioners, but in this case very valuably as just a practice for oneself. And it's a way of being with your experience when sometimes not everything that's going on inside is solvable. Sometimes our best shot is to dissolve it. And we can get really active in our problem solving, but often we have to start with the first part first.
So Dr. Sharon's 5 Cs are freaking brilliant. As soon as you can get to any part of your adult brain that can make a choice and take an action. And before that, there's this whole world of terror that can happen for people when they feel really flooded and they don't feel like they can think straight or help themselves yet.
So this process, the GRACE Sequence arose out of a specialty in trauma and working with a guy, I guess maybe 17 years ago now, who had run out of time in his therapy and run out of money and had to move away and really loved the work we were doing and asked me to teach him to do to himself everything that had come from my doctorate in years of trauma specialty and all of that. And I thought, "This is not possible."
What came to me in working on it for a little bit was to just teach him a process of joining his experience first with as much compassion as he could come up with and as much as he could to get out of his head because this is where we get in trouble. I think especially with ADHD and high IQ and very active imagination, it's easy to feel something strongly and jump to a thought and then believe the thought and then start building on it, like I feel scared, but I'm not aware of that. All I know is I think my friend hates me. He didn't say hi again. He never returns my texts. Now we can build on that.
Well, he never returns my texts because nobody returns my texts. That's not even true, but we think it, so it's true. Nobody returns my texts because I suck as a friend. I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. And before you know it, you are completely paralyzed in what is wrong with me that I deserve this? This has been true since junior high. And we're conveniently forgetting all evidence to the contrary, and we've got ourselves really stuck. It can happen, bam, bam, bam, like that, so fast.
So the GRACE sequence is a lot of how do you get out of your head when you are having a big experience? And the idea is first of all, see if you can pause long enough to notice you're having one and what form it's coming in, maybe thoughts coming through, memories coming through, ideas about the future or the past or whatever. Whatever it is, the question's always the same, how's that showing up in your body right now? Part of being in a trance is we are completely unaware of our bodies. And when we start coming back into our bodies, immediately we begin to board the train and have a chance to change the direction of the trance. We are really good in ADHD at creating trances. We have not yet developed our ability to direct them.
And what's really cool about ADHD is there is a special ability to do that once you realize that's a possibility. So I work with a lot of clients on, I think you're highly hypnotizable and you hypnotize yourself all the time. Have you ever thought of getting good at that?
Pete Wright:
Interesting.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
It's a fun way to work. So anyway, back to the GRACE Sequence. If you can notice where that is in your body, I just encourage people to go toward that even with their hands and bring it some kindness. So we gathered what's going on, we're just reaching, this is G-R, reach to just be with that with some compassion.
And then A, just allow it to get bigger. Could you for just a minute, not change anything about this? You're freaking out, great. Freak out as hard as you can, but do it physically first and leave the thoughts alone for a minute. Who knows if those are true? But at least what you do know is your chest is tight or your belly is twisted upside down, or your shoulders are hanging up near your ears. Could you just be there for a minute and just take a full breath into, I'm just going to let myself feel this way for a second?
And then in this work, what we do is, and this can take a little practice, you connect to something that's bigger and outside you. It could be a beloved grandparent on the other side. One client I have loves the almost supernatural sound of wind and trees. So he'll just sit in his mind against a tree. He might be sitting in the bathroom with his back against the door, but in his mind be sitting against a tree and he'll just imagine, "Can I take this experience and offer it to the trees?"
My son, years ago when we had a friend over who was feeling pretty shattered by the loss of his spouse, Benji was only five, and this guy really needed a safe place to eat dinner. And when I was around the corner, I think washing dishes or something, I overheard this friend say to this little boy, "Hey, Benji, what do you do when you're really sad like me?" And Benjamin said like he'd been expecting the question all evening, "Oh, you have to go hold it in the beautiful light."
Pete Wright:
Oh, Benj, adorable, amazing.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
So I encourage people to just take whatever's going on inside and for just a minute, we're not going to do anything about it, just a minute, just a breath. And you hold it out in front of you as though you're holding it in a beautiful light, just one nice breath in. And on the exhale, just let your eyes go back and forth between your hands. So it might look this, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right.
And if you whisper that to yourself, it'll slow your breath down so you get at least one long slow exhale. And that's really good for stimulating your parasympathetic system. But for just a minute, you're just holding it in the light as it is. And it's kind of this act of humility and surrender, kind of act of gratitude for whatever light or being or presence or universe's compassion might be out there, might just come and be with you while you're just freaking the hell out.
So I try to get people to stop and not do anything yet, not even think, just stop and be in their bodies and move their eyes for a minute and offer this to the life and then come back, fingertips together like this, and take a big letting go breath and notice where am I right now? You might need to do a couple of passes of that. But there would come a point where you start to feel a big shift inside. At that point, you've got a lot more choices.
Now these 5 Cs are actually available because your frontal cortex works a little better. You're not just in your limbic system, which is fully formed at four years old, literally. And all it knows how to do is desperately run for significance, safety, or belonging. It just desperately wants one of those, but it can't think. And until you restore some access to the rest of yourself, your body, for example, it's really hard to come back into any kind of clear thinking about what could I do right now? And then all of these beautiful options are available.
Well, one of the first actions you can take is move all that feeling over to, technically the Broca's area of your brain and form speech. Say something to someone, "Hey honey, I am really freaking out right now. I realize I'm way behind on my schedule and I'm in a complete panic inside and I think I need to say that out loud, or it's going to run away with me." Or call your friend Pete and just be like, "Pete, I'm in that thing I do where I'm in a shame spiral." And then Pete's like, "Hey, that's your brain damage. Let's just hold on for a second."
Pete Wright:
Oh. Man.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Pete's been calling that my brain damage for a lot of years, which always [inaudible 00:53:41]. He's just saying, "No, that's just brain damage. That's not actually happening right now." And I'm like, "Thank you. I needed to hear that." But it could be as simple as reach out to somebody. It could be what is the smallest thing I could do right now? Maybe all I could do would be to take one lap around the house. Maybe I could go pee. Maybe I could breathe on purpose instead of breathing like a panicked person. But could I do one small thing?
Pete Wright:
One of the things I like so much about what you're talking about and how these work together as emergency regulatory strategies is that I think we often undersell the value of reclaiming our body in this process. And I think living with anxiety, that's another thing that your body just gets out of your control so quickly through weird pains and heart racing, and why can't I feel my left arm anymore? And good Lord, why am I throwing up? I don't know what we're talking about anymore.
So if you're listening to this and thinking, oh, I could never do that, is not doing it ever worked for you? That's just the question. You got to give something a shot if you're feeling like you're living in this flooded state and not doing a thing is a strategy and it may not be playing out the way you think it is.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Sometimes I am myself, 17 years after coming up with this and teaching it to God knows how many hundreds of people, I cannot do all of that if I'm scared enough or upset enough or angry enough or something. So I can do part of it. And it might be just to pause long enough to notice where is that in my body and see if I can bring just a little bit of kindness to that part of my body and take a full breath. That's it. If I do that much, usually I'd be willing to maybe move my eyes back and forth. And then that starts to down-regulate the amygdala just like we do every night when we dream. And if I can do that, then I can sometimes connect to something bigger than me too, or call a friend, or take an action. But you can do just any part of that, including just moving your eyes back and forth. That right there may be calling to you.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
I teach, I created something what I call triangle breathing. So you breathe in for four, you hold for four, and you exhale for six, pausing at empty. And that's a very tangible way, not only to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system because it's a longer exhale compared to box breathing where it's the same, but then you also have that chance for the pause that you're talking about, Dodge, just being where you are. And I think that that's so important and often scary for people.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah, and if they can know that they are scared and that's okay, all kinds of things start coming back online.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Yes.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
A wisdom keeper of mine, 25 years ago almost, said to me, "Dodge, if I could give you any gift in the world, it would be just to know when you are scared." And I was like, "If you could give me any gift in the world, I can think of a lot of better things than that. Seriously now-"
Pete Wright:
Because it was 25 years ago.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
" ... I got a whole list of ideas for you." And over 25 years, I've come to realize that's probably the most valuable possible thing he could have given me because when I'm scared and don't know it, all kinds of things happen that don't help me much. I can go into all kinds of thinking that doesn't go well. I can go into all kinds of self-soothing that doesn't go well because I just take the pain over there and make that painful. I can go into all kinds of compulsive behavior or I can yell at my kid or say something mean to my wife, or often say things that are terribly cruel to myself. And it's all because I don't know that I'm scared and that it's okay for me to just stop and be scared.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Or you might know that you're scared, but you might not feel that it's okay. Right?
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah, that it's okay.
Nikki Kinzer:
There is a reason we got these two together.
Pete Wright:
I know. This has been an epic finale to our Duo series.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's been great.
Pete Wright:
And thank you both so, so much for your vulnerability coming on and meeting each other and doing this together essentially for the first time. And you are two of our very favorite people, and thank you for lending your wisdom to the show today.
Dr. Sharon Saline:
Thank you so much, Pete and Nikki for having us and to have a conversation that veers from intellectual to deep feeling and back again and strategic ways to cope with intense feeling. Thank you for this opportunity.
Dr. Dodge Rea:
Yeah, and thank you for this show. I love being able to send clients your direction, friends, family members, because there are plenty. And I want to point out one resource that I think a lot of people forget about, and it's the Ask Pete and Nikki window at the bottom of your website. I don't know how many people understand that every single episode has been digested by AI, and you can ask questions and get really sophisticated answers about ADHD. And then it will cite the guests and shows where you could learn more about that.
More than 600 episodes digested with guests of all these amazing sorts, have answered ... I mean, that's literally the first place I go when I have an ADHD question. I'm like, "What the heck is with the da, da, da, da perfectionism thing?" And I'll find three episodes I could go listen to right now. Yeah, it's really cool.
Pete Wright:
Thank you for shouting that out, Dodge. That's really, really great. Thank you both. We could do this all day. This has already been an epic episode, so thank you for hanging out everybody and be good to each other. Thank you for your time and your attention.
And don't forget, if you have something to contribute to this conversation, we're heading over to the Show Talk channel on our Discord server, and you can join us there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level or better. On behalf of Dr. Sharon Saline, Dr. Dodge Rea, Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, we'll see you next time right here on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
