My neurodivergent struggle with God| S2: E1 Authentic On Air

Let's talk about it today on Authentic On Air, season two, episode one, My Neurodivergent Struggle with God. Welcome back to Authentic On Air. This is season two and it's gonna look different. For my followers out there who've been listening for a while, bear with me. It's gonna take me a minute to find my bearings, but I think you're gonna enjoy the new and improved Authentic On Air. This season is gonna be all about the... the new tagline is where neurodiversity and authenticity meet.

I spent a season exploring the broad, broad world of authenticity and what it's like to show up as yourself. And now I want to narrow in as a ADHD and autistic adult male parent. I think that it is really interesting to dig deeper into that intersection between authenticity and neurodiversity. And I think there's a lot of growth to be had there. And I think there's a lot of exploration to be done. So I'm really excited for this new direction.

Today, I decided to just dive right into the deep end and get really deep to start off. I want to set a really raw bar that is going to show that in this show, we are going to be getting absolutely the realest of real. And it's going to start with me. I've never really held back on this show and been afraid to share, but I don't feel like I've given as much as I could to to really help those out there who might be struggling. was showing up as their selves.

And I think that this first topic that we're going on to, my neurodiversion struggle with God is one that might really ring true with a lot of people. So that being said, welcome to season two. If you have ADHD like I do, if you have autism, like I've recently figured out I do as well, you may have often asked yourself if you are worthy of God's love. I struggled with this for... I don't my entire life basically, because my brain is a liar.

It likes to tell me how terrible I am, how much and often I will fail, and how undeserving I am of anything good for my life. It doesn't as much now that I've done a lot of work in kind of understanding how my brain works, but back whenever I initially started my religious interactions, I felt a lot of that. I think it's really interesting because religion asks for the ultimate impulsivity followed by ultimate consistency.

You were asked to step out on faith and believe in something that you can't see and you can't prove. That's an impulsive decision, right? And then you're asked to show up and perform as a Christian. I'm going to speak mostly from the Christian perspective because that's what I've explored and that's what I am. So. But as a Christian, you were asked to.

perform consistent acts to be a prayerful person to, I don't know, control your emotions and treat people as you want to be treated and do lots of things that kind

of sounds to me like being a neurotypical. So the question I decided to ask is, does religious practice need to look different for neurodivergence? So we're going to start with a story. As we'll call this from here on out, story time. I really dug into, my life as a Christian, as a teenager, back somewhere around late 1990s, early 2000s. And what I found myself is that I think I hyper -focused on religion. I didn't know I was ADHD. Autism wasn't even something that was on my radar.

I really had no idea about these things, but I went so deep. into what it meant to be a Christian that I was all in. And that sounds like a good thing. But whenever you're ADHD and you hyper -focus and you don't know that that's

something you're doing, it can get really out of hand. So as I was immersing myself in this culture, I was also a prisoner to the rules that I was learning about with ASD. I had no idea about this, but I... read these rules and these the dogma of Christianity and I thought that there was no margin for error. If I was not exact and performing across the board the way that the Bible states that you are supposed to perform I felt crushing defeat.

I would in the negative dialogue that I now know exists in the ADHD brain whenever it goes unchecked would just go crazy talking. I don't know, just telling me that I'm a failure. I'm a monster. I don't deserve God's love. I am not worthy. And I would go to church on Sundays and I would float between being moved by the message because you know, it's a good message. I went to a missionary Baptist church and the pastor was moving.

At the same time, I'm having rampant sexual thoughts and objectifying every woman on two legs, even in the wheelchairs because I was, you know, 14 to 16 years old and everything that moved brought out sexuality in me, which is something that is, I now know, tends to be a thing with ADHD men.

Then on top of that, I felt deep, deep shame and guilt and that autistic strict adherence to rules as I'm objectifying the women I was just destroying myself internally for being such a pervert and That fear that I had that shame to share that with anybody made me feel like I was absolutely alone in this world and that it was not okay to have sexual thoughts ever because that's not what that's not what you did you You were if you were a good little Christian boy

your mind stay focused on God and trying to do good acts and trying to be a better person, not on trying to have sex with everything that moves, even though you don't even actually have sex, but I just had these, it was another hyper fixation and one that I didn't have anybody to talk to about. So, you know what they say about things in the dark, that's where mold grows. That's where, you know, all the bad things happen and multiply. That's what happened with me is these deep dark thoughts got.

more and more out of control for years, for many years. Even after I left church, I still had this perverted idea of what sexuality was supposed to be. And my ADHD liar mind just increased the severity as those internal conversations were just telling me that I was a disgusting freak, I was a pervert, God hates me for being sick and perverse.

And... And if I ever tell anyone how gross I am, I'll be kicked out of the church and I'll have no friends and I'll never be married or have anybody with me. So I kept it a secret and I would brutally punish myself because I knew that it was wrong to think these ways. I now know that it's, it's harder for me to control what I think about than some. It's not impossible.

but I thought it was normal for everybody to be able to just turn off bad thoughts and that I was, there was something wrong with me. On top of this, I'm, I know that it's wrong to engage in sex acts with my girlfriend because I wasn't married. I wasn't having actual sex when I was getting really close.

I knew it was wrong to objectify every woman who came into my view, but executive dysfunction is often characterized by the tendency to know what needs to be done and to do sometimes. literally anything else. And that's what I was doing. But I had no frame of reference to deal with that. So I thought I was just fucked up. I had a scientific or psychological or both resistance to a spiritual desire. I wanted, I wanted to give myself to God.

I wanted him to accept me, but my mind knew that there were parts of it. that it just wasn't going to do without being able to understand what was blocking me. And I, once again, they don't talk about that in the Missionary Baptist Church. There's no conversations about how you control your rampant sexual thoughts as an ADHD boy. There's nothing about that. They tell you that you need to fire and brimstone, you're going to hell.

If you don't... straighten up, toe the line and live a life for Jesus, you're done. There's nothing that you can do. And I felt that I felt every bit of that. I was freaked out. Being diagnosed years later, you know, at least five years after this process didn't really solve anything because they still weren't teaching how to manage faith and ADHD in my all black missionary Baptist church.

I still can't say for certain whether or not they would tell me that it's a demon that I need to exercise out Demon get out and get out of this man. You were possessed by they wouldn't say ADHD. They'd say by these negative thoughts and That's what I had to deal with that's that's all I had. That's all I was equipped with and It it made it very dark and hard for me. I So I blamed God. I was fucked from the start.

I... I rejected God in full when I went to college and I got a little learning on me. I thought I was too smart at this point to believe in something that I couldn't prove. Little did I understand that being smart doesn't preclude faith. And that's something I struggled with for almost 20 years after that. It's a battle that I'm realizing now was never me with God. It was never a war on church. It was a war on myself. I told myself I wasn't worthy.

I told myself I wasn't good enough to be given God's love. I told myself all these stories that told me I couldn't be a good enough Christian. And... I believed them because they were coming from my brain, but I also assigned them to the outside world because your ADHD brain loves to lie to you. So I, I was talking to my wife about this today. I assigned all these monstrous acts to the church.

I told, you know, for a long time, I was very bitter against religion because they made me feel so guilty about. how I felt in my mind and realizing now that there was definitely some fire and brimstone thrown around, but I never shared what was going on inside of me with anybody. So how could they persecute me? How could they make me feel like a monster whenever they did nothing but share the word of God with me?

How did I get from sitting in a sermon, listening to the pastor, to being persecuted by the church and saying that I will never do this again. It's simple. I believe the lies that my brain told me and I had no foundation or standard to fall back on. I had no, I had no compass of morality after to move forward with. And I had no foundation before and for a long time after to fall back on and having a foundation of solid.

factual evidence as to what's important to me has made all the difference in being able to. Sometimes step out.

I mean to step out on faith for sure to allow myself to get familiar with God again to allow myself to be loved by God and to practice faithfulness, it's wild because The church hasn't changed like I'm not a big churchgoer But the Bible hasn't changed religion hasn't changed, but I have this brand new view on it because I understand something about my brain now, that the war that I thought was waged between me and the church was always waged in my mind.

And the hate that I, that brewed in me for Christianity was actually hate for myself because I was the one putting these stories on me. pretty hard to deal with. But as I've... It was, I mean, there was also that standard of perfection that ADHD kind of guaranteed that I would fail without understanding what was wrong with me. You know, you're supposed to show up with consistency, constancy and normalcy. And none of those things are kind of in the ADHD playbook. They are learnable.

They are skills that you were able to acquire if you were, you know, self -aware and cognizant of the problem and you have the will. to make action on it, I think I've gotten much better at constancy, at much better consistency, much better at normalcy, and showing up in a consistent way in my religious practice. But I had none of those things back then, and I just thought I was broken. So earlier I asked, does religious practice need to look different for neurodivergence? I would say yes.

I would say yes. And this is something that I talked about earlier this week on my live stream is that I think that the neurotypical standard needs to be thrown completely out the window whenever it comes to ADHD and autistic people. But that doesn't mean that all standards need to be thrown out the window. You have to adopt a standard for yourself.

figure out what is actually reasonable, what is actually feasible for you and start taking action on it and stop making excuses that you can't do any of it. And I know that the ADHD mindset of all or nothing is it's really, really, I don't know, it's really attractive to us. Like either I'm all in on this or I do none of this. And that's helpful sometimes whenever you are. trying to, I don't know, add a new skill or cut out some like a bad habit.

But it's really hard to maintain whenever it comes to living a sustainable life. I find that you have to take time out of your day to make goals that are based off of reason, logic, and what's important to you versus how you feel in the moment or

how you think you'll feel or what you think you can do or the stories you tell yourself. At some point, You have to abandon all the stories you tell yourself and start to give yourself a chance to write a whole new book. I can't do this. I can't do this. I'm not built like that. My brain won't let me do this. All those are stories that you told yourself. They're self -limiting beliefs that you have accepted for who knows how long. I am a living example of this.

I had all these things that I just knew I couldn't do. My brain wasn't designed that way. Well, no, it wasn't designed that way. So there is a bit of a barrier to entry. There might be somewhat of an obstacle. It might be harder for me to achieve that skill, but it's not impossible. I'm not going to say that nothing's impossible, but most things are achievable to some degree.

If you decide it's important to you and you try to make some progress to it on a consistent basis, what consistent looks like to you as a neurodivergent is going to be very different as to what it looks like to a neurotypical person and who gives a shit like. What's important to you is important to you and that's important enough.

We have to stop trying to measure ourselves up to the neurotypical norm or the status quo or whatever the norms of our society are and do better because it's what we want. Move towards something it's because it's what we want to move towards. And going back to Having a foundation, it's so important that this is a foundation based on what's important to you at your core. This often doesn't work for people.

ADHD people really believe that they're not able to do these things because they don't fucking want to. It's something that they've been told that they need to do and they don't have any basis for framing that in a way that says, this is something that I want to do to... provide X, Y, or Z for me. It has to be tied to something that's actually freaking important to you. Because that's what it takes for movement for us.

That's what it takes to overcome that huge starting obstacle, to overcome that executive dysfunction gap. It takes care. And if you don't care at your core, then, you are likely going to abandon whatever goal it is because you don't, it was never for you. It was for somebody else or it was because you thought it was somebody else wanted, or because you thought it would make X, Y, or Z happened that was a secondary confluence of what, what you were doing. That's not going to work.

So for me, I made a conscious decision that I wanted to understand my relationship with God better. That was, something I made outside of how I felt at the time. And I knew that it was something that was important to me. And here, I want to get closer to God. It's important for me to have that for my family, for my kids. I want them to see a father who is open to the relationship with the higher power.

And that wasn't going to happen for me just like half -assing it and just thinking of what I want to do. I had to take action. I had to make a decision. I had to stop saying maybe and I had to say, yes, this is what I'm going to do. I had to start praying out loud. I had to, and all of these things, my brain is telling me, dude, you're stupid. Why are you doing that? He's not listening. They God, whomever God is not listening to you. He doesn't care about you.

And that was my, that's that internal dialogue that we have as neurodivergence. That is not, that's not how it is for neurotypical people. They are not constantly pushing against the naysayer in their own head. That's something unique to you and it's something that is not going to defeat you if you don't let it. But if you have self -awareness and you are able to accept and embrace who you are and how your brain works, then from there you can build on top of that.

I don't try to quiet my brain all the time. I accept that it's there and I try to use it as a tool. Sometimes doubt is good. A healthy skepticism is often helpful. It's often something that encourages me and motivates me to have that, you know, that naysayer saying you can't do it and saying, ah, yes, I can. I've done this, this, this, and this that you told me I couldn't do. That's just more fuel for the fire. This is, I'm gonna just dump that in my furnace and go harder.

That didn't happen overnight. It's not like I'm gonna give you these. keys to success and you're tomorrow you're going to wake up and be a completely different person who can accomplish any task that comes before them. And that's that's part of it as well. Being able to accept that you are fallible and that you have flaws and that there are going to be times that you mess up, but it's okay. Even in this life trying to walk closer to God, I'm going to make mistakes.

I'm going to say the Lord's name in vain because I was like, I must, I have the mouth of a sailor. I'm working on that and it's okay because my heart is in the right place. I know that I want to get closer to God and I know that I'm going to keep improving. I'm not going to let setbacks like that and then my liar brain dump on me to the point where I believe that I can't do it. I'll never succeed. It has to look different for neurodivergent people for there to be success.

Your measure of success has to be completely different than what the neuro -typical one is. But if you have the... The Bible is your guide. You have a support group of people who believe in loving you or a person who believes in loving you or just yourself believing in yourself. It's a start. It's hard by yourself, but it's possible. I I don't... Anything's hard by yourself. I don't want to say that you're going to set out on this mission on your own and you're going to find peace immediately.

None of it happens immediately. I think that as neurodivergence, we often want results so stupid fast that we give up on so many things before it even has a chance to take. I strongly encourage you to whatever your dream, whatever your goals are, whatever your dreams are, whatever you've been putting off that is important to your, to you at your core, because you can't try harder, try longer, make. smaller goals and take smaller steps but keep moving. Keep going.

So the new question to me becomes, isn't it better to look different than like the abject failure or the total success of being religious and to modify and make adjustments in your practice so you can make room for your success?

Because if the goal is to get closer to God, the goal is to have a relationship. It has to start somewhere, right? And if you start the relationship somewhere and you continue to grow that relationship, aren't you getting closer to God? Aren't you winning? Isn't every step a win? As I move closer to God's embrace, I feel the winning. I don't know. I mean, this is going to be a touchy subject. I'm sure people are going to talk shit and say that, you know, it's a scam.

You don't really feel anything. I feel it. I feel him moving in my heart. I feel him ordering my steps. I feel him calling me closer and giving me my next moves because I've stopped listening to the little voice back here telling me that I'm not good enough and things are opening up for my life that have never opened up for me before because I'm trusting in God and I'm showing faith. The show isn't gonna be all about God all the time, but today I thought it was important.

Because this is what's on my heart, it's what I'm going through. And that's what I wanna talk about on season two. I wanna get much deeper into the raw and the real. And right now, it is raw and it is real, and I'm digging through some deep hurt, pain, and trauma that I thought was caused by the church. Sorry for the false blame, God, because it was me. I'm the problem. It's me.

So. Yeah, a couple last points to wrap up on this is I've come to accept that across the board neurodiversity is just, it's just not a valid reason to accept failure. Like I'm neurodiverse, so I failed. I have to disagree. You only fail when you quit. You don't quit because you're neurodiverse. You quit because you, you were weak. You're, you're unaware of the problem of your, of your capacity, of your capability. You quit because it's hard. You quit because your goals are wrong.

Your goals are fucked up. If your goals don't match what's in your heart, then you are going to fail a large majority of the time. And whenever you do succeed in those goals, you're gonna wish you hadn't because they don't actually do anything for you and they actually make you feel worse when you achieve a goal that isn't aligned with yourself. So do the work. Do some research into who you are and what you want. Figure it out. I don't know.

I'm gonna continue my practice moving forward with grace because I would much rather make allowances for myself, have grace for myself than be a fucking quitter anymore. It's just, it's not okay with me. I can't be that kind of father. I can't be that kind of husband anymore. It's empty. It's how I ended up in a life that I was so disengaged in that I was barely even alive because I was so... I was so in love with maybe. I didn't commit to anything because I let my feelings make the decisions.

Like, well, I might be in the mood for that. I might try to work out. I might try to pray. How you feel can't be the decision maker on all things. What's important to you at your core has to drive you to want to achieve more.

Despite how you feel at times because if you are having the worst day ever are you in your let's try in Let's talk about this like if if my ADHD mind is telling me how unworthy I am and I am letting those feelings of Excuse me just the depression and despair Make my decisions. I'm gonna pull away from God My goal is to get closer So when those feelings of depression and despair start to take over, I pray. Because I know what is important to me is to grow closer to God.

This, my brain is telling me something that is going to pull me away from God. It is a fact that these two things cannot exist together. I have to choose one. I have to make a choice. That's not something that's beyond ADHD or ASD people. You can make choices. choose to do the thing that is going to help move you a little closer to your goal. Or if nothing else, not to not move you farther away from your goal. Make the right choice. Be committed. Say yes.

Or I mean, if it's something that's pulling away, say no. Choose it. Anyways, the bar I hold myself to will never again look the same as a neurotypical bar. And I believe that God will accept that because I am made in his image after all. I don't think he made me this way on accident. I think he made me this way so I could talk to you and I could say, it's okay to have a different bar. It's okay to set a different standard. It's okay to get there how you need to get there. Just show up, choose.

to do more and keep moving forward. Keep getting closer to God if that's your goal. Keep taking action to get the things that you want. I don't know what my time is 30 minutes 30 minutes for a podcast is a little short for me. I usually like to go about three hours I'm not gonna be doing that anymore.

I'm gonna try to keep the show between 30 minutes in an hour and 15 minutes and I Think that that's gonna be good I think that season 2 is gonna it's gonna take off and people are really gonna enjoy the content and how we're doing things now What I want to finish with is if you are going through this stuff and you're wondering if if you could use the help of a life coach, that's what I do.

I was supposed to say at the beginning, I'm an ADHD life coach and I have found that that is what I'm called to do. That is what God is moving me to do and what I'm supposed to have a legacy of impact in with my life. And I like, I don't, I love it. I absolutely love it. I love the process. I love the people. I love seeing the transformation of somebody who thinks all the same things I just talked about that they can't, they never, they will never be able to, they don't have the capacity.

They've told themselves all the stories that we talked about and they believe them with everything except for enough to reach out and ask for help. to see them break out of that shell of the prison of impossibility, that prison of not acceptance, not acceptance, I'm okay with that.

And to see who they are becoming on the other side is so, like it's addictive. I absolutely love it. And I encourage you to go to authenticidentitymanagement .com forward slash assessment to see how I might be able to help you. Take the quiz, see if there is, a service or resource that I can offer you that makes sense.

There's free resources, there's paid resources, there's consultations, there's all kinds of things that this quiz will tell you will be, it'll tell you exactly what your next step should be. If you are an ADHD parent who is struggling to engage with passion and purpose in your life, it'll give you your exact next steps. I want you to understand that it does not have to hurt this much. It does not have to feel so hard every day.

And I just, all I want to do is help people get through that pain that they've been feeling for so long because ADHD feels like it owns their whole life. It can, it owned mine. And I was a total victim to every ADHD consequence. I f - Felt like I had zero control of my life. Life just fucking happened to me. And it just, like I was, everything was everybody else's fault. Everything happened to me. Like I said earlier, it was God who ousted me and told me that I wasn't good enough.

None of that is true. I am the one who was in my own way the entire time. And you are too. As soon as you can accept that, that's where the path forward is. You have to be able to accept that you are the problem, but it's fixable. You deserve better. Your family deserves better. The lowered capacity for conversation, interaction, and engagement because you're so full of overwhelm because of your ADHD symptom is not good enough. It's not. Being married to that person is awful.

Being that person, I can tell you, I look back and I'm so embarrassed of who I was. I'm so embarrassed at how little weight I carried in my household, at how little responsibility I took for my relationships, for my responsibilities, for my job, for my growth, my education. I didn't take any responsibility for anything. I allowed myself to be swept along from place to place by emotion, fear, doubt, regret, like whatever.

And then I end up in something and I get sucked into the next thing and that's like, here I go. It doesn't have to be that way, but you have to make one tiny decision and say yes to something. It doesn't have to be me, but you have to say, if you're, if you are in the place I was, you can say yes to a book. You can say yes to a YouTube video. You can say yes to something that's starting to take control of what your future looks like.

And I'm offering you a chance to say yes to an assessment, a free assessment tool that is going to help you then say yes to another tool that is going to help you then say yes to start improving your life. I can tell you it will make a difference for you if you are an ADHD parent 100%. I guarantee it. Money back guarantee. If it's a free resource, well, sorry, no money for you.

If you were to ever engage in a coaching relationship with me and you feel like you, you are not able to engage in your life with more passion, more purpose after any of our sessions, I will refund your money. I am this serious about it and I have seen the results work that well that I know I can help make a difference in people's lives. You just have, you have to say yes. You have to stop living in the land of maybe, and you have to learn yes or no. Say yes to growth. Say yes to possibility.

Say yes to a new life. Or say no to the depression. No to the lack of control. No to the emotional outburst and the embarrassing behavior. Say no to the late all the time. Say no to the not, nobody being able to depend on you. Say no to the. relationships that have fallen apart, say no to the depression, say no to the brain who tells you that you're worthless, say no. Stop saying maybe. You have to stop saying maybe and take action. That's it.

Take the assessment, go to authentic identity management, forward slash assessment, take the assessment and start yourself on a road to acceptance. You don't have to live like this anymore. That is it for today's episode. Sorry if I got a little intense there because this is some real stuff to me. Like it matters. It matters. And you matter. Thank you so much for listening to Authentic One Air with Bruce Alexander.

This has been episode one of season two, my struggle against God as a neurodivergent. I'll be back next week with another episode. Be yourself, love yourself, and have a great week. Peace. Go take the assessment.