And how your Intentional Self can help you get unstuck
With ADHD, it is common to cycle between high dopamine—which shows up as high energy, motivation, enthusiasm, and creative flow—and low dopamine, where we might feel adrift, uninterested, unmotivated, and even depressed. When we are like a sailboat becalmed, that is, stuck without wind or direction, motivation or purpose, Intentional Self can be the oar stashed below deck to move ourselves along. This becalmed state typically comes when we are in a ‘low,’ often after a big expenditure of energy and dopamine.
This month, my family and I took a big road trip, going from our home in Colorado up through Yellowstone and then out to the Olympic Peninsula to visit the big trees and show our kids the rainforest while it still exists. The trip itself lasted almost three weeks, with each day bringing new terrain, new enchantments, and new challenges. Because I’ve done a lot of work with my own ADHD and complex trauma, I knew how to work with my own ‘highs’ of excitement and dopamine throughout the trip in order to lessen the burnout, exhaustion, and low feelings that I knew from experience to anticipate afterwards.
Since I’ve been doing this work within myself for a number of years, my highs and lows have become much more moderate than they were in my twenties and early thirties. At thirty-eight, I feel as though I have a pretty good handle on my cycles and how to tend to myself through them. In fact, I felt so confident toward the end of my trip, that I let the specter of a ‘low’ recede from my awareness. I felt good both physically and emotionally and was even able not to get too overwhelmed by returning home and all the unpacking, laundry, and organizing that reassimilating four people who have been on the road for three weeks takes. It was not until the day after we pulled in, when a friend sent me a recording of herself on a local radio show, that a slow but mighty implosion began.
My friend did a lovely job, and I was proud of her, and told her so. To my partner though, I expressed nascent feelings of envy and frustration. “I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done, I’m so excited to share it, and still, I have no platform. I’m not an influencer. None of the yoga studios around are producing workshops right now. I haven’t had a new client in two months. All I want to do is teach and share this work I’m doing and once again, I’m isolated up here on this goddamned mountain while everyone else gets airtime. Gets noticed, gets seen. I feel like I’m twelve again, getting passed over. I feel like I’m good enough, but no one wants what I’m bringing. I’m completely stalled out. And if I do what I want to—rent an office space that has room for groups and bodywork and everything else—I’ll have no time with you and the kids and I’ll be stuck just trying to make rent each month.”
My husband absorbed all the pain and frustration of my many italics and said simply, “I know, Sal. I’m sorry. I see you. But I get it.” I thanked him for letting me vent and continued with my unpacking spree. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t tossing and turning, I was just wide awake by one a.m., which is rare for me these days. The next morning, I meditated and found the same self-doubt, the same narratives, the same listlessness and desire for someone to come rescue me from my own stuckness re-emerging. As I made tea, I found myself staring at the little painting in our living room that always balances out my brain and my own words, uttered so many times to clients, came suddenly into my mind: Narratives formed in a dysregulated state are inherently untrustworthy. “Oh,” the reality dawned on me, “I’m in a low.”
This realization was like watching one of my kids when they were a toddler finally putting a round block through the round hole after fifteen minutes of trying to cram it into the hexagon. It did not instantly alchemize my self-doubt and frustration into something positive and productive, but it put it into the right shape, into the right box, which allowed the smallest bit of ease to seep in. I know what this is. I’ve seen this shape before. Paradoxically, because I had become so adept at working with my cycles, I allowed myself to believe I had moved past them. They have become more subtle, which makes it easier to mistake them for real and true. When my dopamine deficit started to produce listless, frustrated feelings—and those feelings generated narratives of self-doubt, stuckness, and despair—I believed them, because I missed that a subtle but present ‘low’ was creating them. In believing them, I stalled myself out, like a sailboat stuck on the water with no breeze to move forward, or to come home.
Intentional Self—that midline between the prefrontal cortex and the spiritual heart—brought me to my meditation cushion that morning and watched my mind churn. Intentional Self brought my gaze to my favorite painting and let my brain marinate in its brightness and symmetry. Intentional Self offered my own insights back to me when I needed them. Intentional Self recognized the shape of my anguish and exhaustion and gave it a name, making sense of it. Intentional Self brought me to my computer to write about my experience. Intentional Self was the oar that I used to move my becalmed heart and mind back toward shore.
This oar, this tool, was available to me because I have spent years strengthening and honing it, even before I had given it a name. In my late teens and early twenties, I called it, “the me that is Me,” distinct from all the me’s that were fragmented parts, personas and masks, orbiting this nucleus of Self. I don’t put a lot of stock in the idea of authenticity, because it suggests something solid and unchanging, and for a lot of us, trying to figure out who we really are is exhausting and leads to blowing through different identities trying to find one that will stick. The “me that is Me,” or the Intentional Self, is not solid and unchanging; it is not a persona. Rather, it is a throughline of feeling, intention, and awareness that runs through the ever-changing personalities, needs, desires, and life phases that we embody throughout our lives. It is related to the Witness in Buddhist practice and to Wise Mind in the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy model and to the Self in Internal Family Systems.
It is the oar with which we row back to ourselves time and again when the winds of emotion, conditioning, trauma, distraction, rejection, and disappointment blow us out to the middle of the open sea and leave us there, seemingly stranded. It is the gaze that we fix on the shore as we row through discomfort, exhaustion, and apathy toward what is needed or sought. And it is the felt sense of something clicking into alignment, fitting into its rightful place, when we touch land.
If this resonates and you want to learn more, click for information about ADHD Coaching, Therapy for complex trauma and/or ADHD, or reach out here to book a free consultation with me.