Music is a big thing for me when I'm like overwhelmed. So Taylor Swift, Yeah, Oil Swift's mine too, really, Oh my.
God, Taylor Swift.
It's a Wednesday morning and I'm walking to school with sixteen year old Emily Martin. We talk Taylor Swift for a while, because when you find a fellow swift Y, the bond is instant.
It just feels like she's in my brain. Sometimes I'm like, how do you know.
This about me?
Like this feels like a song about anxiety, or like there are specific lyrics.
I'm just like, hold on to specific lyrics, like I'm the problem. It's me. You might recognize that from Taylor Swift's song anti Hero. There's a reason these words resonate with teenagers like Emily. She has dyslexia and ADHD. Nothing wrong with those, but we live in a society that still doesn't make space for different cognition, still doesn't really understand it. So for much of her life Emily has felt wrong.
I do have moments where I'm like self conscious of how I'm perceived, because then again I come back to the thing of I'm the problem. I need to fix something. It's my fault, and then I feel bad for putting all my issues on to someone else. I still have those underlying thoughts of that got to hate me.
I'm diving into the complex and fascinating world of neurodiversity. I'm not an expert, but my daughter is neurodivergent, and a few years ago I was diagnosed with ADHD. In this series, you'll hear from experts and from many wonderful people who experience the world in a unique way. We're looking at neurodiversity from the inside. Gelda. I'm Sonya Gray, and this is no such thing as normal. Series two.
Diagnoses like ADHD, autism, dyslexia, etc. Still carry a weighty stigma, despite all the awareness and all the people like me continually banging on about it. But if we view them through a neurodiversity affirming lens, these are simply natural, normal differences and very very valuable ones. So in this episode, I'm asking why it is that neurodivergent people are so prone to anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and general overall low
self esteem. Why are those with ADHD and dyslexia filling our jail cells, our mental health facilities, and our suicide stats. We're still saying the problem is with the individual. Just try a bit harder. But it's actually really hard, almost impossible, to operate in a world that tells you that who
you really are is wrong. Year old Emily Martin was struggling to find her place in the world from a very young age, and just her second year of primary school, she was referred to the public child mental health service in Auckland, the Cari Center. Emily's come a long way in the last few years. She is bright and vivacious, but that sense of I'm not enough it's still there.
I'm very good at masking, so people will say to me, Oh, you don't have anxiety. You don't have I'm like, actually, yeah, I do. I just mask it because of the judgment I've had in the past from people, and so it's very draining on me.
Can you remember the point where things were really really difficult for you? Can you give me an idea of what that looked like.
So I had gone to the Cowrie Center when I was about six or seven, but I guess I don't really know the purpose of me being there. It was like, Oh, I just feel nervous all the time. Where I feel anxious all the time, but I didn't know there was like a label for it or an explanation. At that time, I hadn't been diagnosed with ADHD. It was only the anxiety. But I don't think I was as ware that I was called anxiety. I guess I didn't really understand what was going on in my brain.
Emily tried two different primary schools, but she was miserable at both.
I was failing everything, Like if I was passing, it was barely passing.
I think the real low was when she was in year six, and.
That's Emily's mum, Joe, who guided her through that hugely stressful time.
And things were so bad academically, so bad socially. Emily was in a terrible state. Her self esteem wasn't absolute low when she wasn't passing, she wasn't in friendship groups where she could be herself, and I was just like, what am I going to do here? She had a teacher that caused significant grief and that's really when the anxiety really came out, because she was scared to go to school. She wouldn't eat in the morning at all, and this teacher had one day ripped up someone's work
in front of the class. This was in year two and Emily was petrified that would happen to her, and so it was probably through her whole primary schooling at both schools. She never ate breakfast. She simply could not, So we didn't fully understand what was going on.
What was going on was a kid in crisis and a schooling system which didn't understand and couldn't accommodate her. There was a mix of dyslexia ADHD and eventually disc caalculia, which is a specific learning difficulty with maths.
The effort that she put in was phenomenal to pass and to scrape in and so it wasn't obvious because of her intelligence and because of how hard she worked, so I understand it was hard probably for the teachers to understand that as well. But she got a dyslexia diagnosis I think in year five, and they didn't even embrace that. So Emily didn't get a lot of support with her dyslexia. We found out about the ADHD diagnosis, and then I think it was in year ten dyscalculia.
So she had always struggled with maths and she had been just absolutely driven to learn her times tables in year five and sex, and she simply could not. She tried every single thing she could, but it was always kind of like it was Emily's fault that she couldn't do her times tables.
I'm imagining you were seeing it at home, the repercussions at home.
Yes, absolutely, Oh my goodness, maths was not good for the whole family's mental health.
And what about just in general, Joe, in terms of how Emily was right through She got into the car center at six, so obviously you thought there's major problems. What were you seeing that really caused you concern?
I think it was lot about not fitting in, sort of difficult relationships with peers.
Was she having meltdowns at home?
Oh yeah, I think just some quite oppositional behavior and not wanting to cooperate, or if she was feeling anxious, it would turn into something really big. She could go from zero to ten just like that.
The way I like to describe it, because when I call it emotional overwhelmed, it's the volcano exploding. And I find it very hard to explain to people. It can be like obviously oppositional behavior. It can be me having like a full meltdown, crying panic attack, which I very rarely now have, but when I do have them, they're very hard to control, to the point where medication has to get involved to.
Calm me down.
Tell me about panic attacks when they were at their worst for you.
When they're at the worst. I'm crying. I can't really talk. No one can really understand me. I feel like I'm going to faint, I feel dizzy, I feel but just disorientated. I don't know how to get the words out. A massive explosion. It feels like glasses shattering. It feels like the whole world is crashing down on me and the whole world is going to end.
Sitting here listening to you, I'm thinking, you know, you had this terrible situation with the teacher in year two, and people might go, oh, kids should be resilient and be able to handle that. But the kids I have interviewed and spoken to, it can be one year or one incident at school at that vulnerable age. It completely derails you and it's so to me heartbreaking.
Yes, you know, the self esteem issue was huge for Emily because she thought she was dumb, she thought she was always the problem.
Yeah, the problem is me. It's the silent mantra for so many neurodivigent kids struggling with internalized shame and often crippling anxiety.
So anxiety starts from something, usually fear.
That's Jane Kirsten, whose voice you might recognize from episode fourteen on Dyslexia. She spoke with her amazing son Michael. Jane has a private counseling and psychotherapy practice. Many of her clients are eurodivergent, and often they're still carrying feelings of shame and unworthiness from childhood.
If you have grown up failing over years, you know, then of course you're going to start feeling fearful of study, you know, of what other people are thinking, what other children are thinking. Children are actually feeling shame from a very young age, you know, children with learning differences, difficulties. Yeah, so from a very young age, children are growing up
feeling like they're less sin. And when you feel like you're less sin and you're not achieving, then you're probably likely to feel very anxious and.
Then you're not going to learn very well.
No, and the more cordex just shuts down, that's right, And then then comes the trauma piece. But my experience, because I work mainly now with adults, is that I see high levels of anxiety across the board, and as we work down into where this has come from, it goes all the way back through childhood. But it's across the board, feelings of not being good enough, failing, not fitting in, being different, you know, a range of things, and dependent on their temperaments and history, of course, that
makes them still very anxious adults. It can be ages later where the problem is suddenly now seen and that child is already experiencing huge shame in there for anxiety and that's been going on for a while. I mean, Brusheet, you're saying to me, you can't test children for dyslexia before seven, And I was like, oh darn, I think that we can. I knew my son was dyslexicat too, and we had diagnosis before seven. There's that whole thing.
By seven, that child might be two years or three years into a major anxiety or general nosed anxiety disorder or.
Absolutely, despite the fact Janeson Michael had an early diagnosis and a super supportive mum, he still suffered emotionally. He was a profoundly dyslexic student in the mainstream school system, and there's one particular memory of school that still haunts him.
You hear books start closing, and then people go up and give the book to the teacher at the front, and then I'd be on the first page, stool. I don't know what the heck I'm doing, And it was the pressure from the other people finishing before me. And not only did I finish last out of them all, but I was sitting there feeling really stupid because everyone was looking back at me, like, oh, we're still going because this kid's on his first page, you know what
I mean. I definitely carry, you know, even many years after being gone from school, I carry those anxiety and all those feelings because of how I felt back in class. For sure, it was like a living hell being at school for me personally, it was bad.
Michael's gone on to great things. He is a success story, but he still feels the shame from school.
He had had some trauma through being hit by a teacher in primary school for not listening or not paying attention, and yeah, needless to say, that was not good for him at all.
It's the anxiety around the learners that is the problem, and we can give all the supports and accommodations and they can get all the best marks. If they're anxious, they carry that with them. I feel like the missing piece is how are you? Therapist Jane Kirsten has great insight into the unique neurodivergent experience of anxiety and shame, so I'm keen to get her take on what happens after the diagnosis, particularly for adults. I am struck by
the enormity of what so many are still carrying. Supposedly postdiagnosis, they understand themselves and their brains better, but for many the struggle is ongoing and persistent. You get the diagnosis, Oh okay, it all makes sense, but then it's like, actually, who am I? Who am I? Because you've had the masker for so long you're great at playing the game. Yes, when you try and unmask it as such a process, yes, it's like that little kid is still in there, going
I'm still here. I don't trust that it's okay to unmask.
That's right. It's one thing to know something right, it's another thing to experience it through to a place of healing. So we can have a diagnosis, which I think is incredibly important. But then we've got to do the processing and usually we've got to go back to the original pain. Yeah, and that makes it very, very hard when you're someone
that finds processing emotions difficult. And I think that this is a major problem that I'd like other therapists to really understand, because our people with ADHD dyslexia, even some gift of people, really really do struggle to process their feelings.
This makes a lot of sense. Those with unique cognitions feel the world in bold and when you feel so much, it's a lot to process. It hurts literally. There are studies that show intense emotional pain or rejection activate the same region of the brain is physical pain.
This guy in my research that said he'd rather take a greater to his foot than feel that emotional pain again. And so that was a very profound explanation by him around facing the emotional pain.
The greater to the foot a great way of explaining just how intense it can be. So I wonder if these lifelong negative emotional experiences can be called trauma. Jane Kirsten says, it's complicated. Everyone's different and there are different types of trauma which have different effects.
Trauma is specific in itself as to what it is. I think that most people I've worked with have a level of trauma because of their learning difference or neurodifference, and that tends to come from specific ways that they've been affected. You know, it's not necessary everybody. I don't think we're right if we say everybody has trauma. I don't think we're right in saying everybody who's neurodifferent has trauma.
There's lots of neurotypical people with loads of trauma. Yeah, but I think there is a specific type of situation that happens that causes trauma in our children and then later adults.
When does a negative experience or experiences cross the line to be called trauma. We talk about small tea trauma and big ta trauma. When do we capitalize the te right?
You know, our brain has capacities to process certain things right, and so it's when our brain has not got the capacity to process some horrific thing that trauma starts encode. So trauma itself really is trappedness. It's when something has happened that we are unable to fight or flight. The brain's amygdala when danger is Basically, hormones are sent to it lightning fast and it goes into the danger of
fight flight freeze response. And so if we've been in a trap situation, example, a child in a classroom and something bad has happened and they can't get out and they are highly upset in that feels like they're going to be trapped and almost like they might die as something horrendous is happening. The teacher might be angry at them, other kids are laughing that child is trapped. They can't
get out of that classroom, they're not allowed out. That's enough to create a trauma response in them, you know, and it can become a really difficult, hard spiral for somebody who gets quite trapped in that. Like you're saying, old patterns and old experiences. So it needs disseminating, it needs opening up and understanding all the different facets to it.
Probably what it needs is an expert to guide you through it, because working with trauma beg T trauma all Little Teacher Warmer can be traumatizing in itself. And Jane says, the healing process is not just in the head. It has to include the body. You need to feel to heal, it's.
Vital and feeling. Yeah, you're not going to heal if you don't feel you need to take the story away from their fest you do and just feel it's like having an observer, to be able to observe what's happening to us without becoming one with it or one with a story about it. That's the key to feeling, to healing, because to face into things that are really hard is very painful, right, And we're creatures that don't want change, really and we don't want to face pain. Yeah, but
to heal, we've got to face pain. There's no other way back to that body. And can't go round, it can't go over. It's like we're going on a bear hunt. Do you remember that book? Can't go round, it can't go over, it can't go under. It got to go through it. You have to face the beer.
But what happens when there's more than one beer in someone's picture, when there's other layers of trauma? I'm guessing that's not a straightforward.
Oh no, not at all. And so the more sort of developmental situation that you have, like it could be you could have a child with who's dyslexic their parent. One of them is dyslexic but not identified. They don't like what they're seeing in their child. The child is already struggling at school, they've already been felt like they had a trauma situation where they've been trapped in the classroom, can't get out, they're shutting down. They go home, they
get told off by that parent. The parent yells at them, they don't want to understand them. That's enough to add more trauma to that child, let alone other major abuses that we know about. Yeah, so the more you get that consistent experience of trauma over and over, the more complex and more likely for PTSD. And that's why I'm a great believer in the therapy process, for going into the pain and into helping integrate, you know, and come through that trauma and that pain.
But is it possible? And I say that is all right, But it sounds hard. If there's unsupported ADHD, autism or dyslexia plus other layers of trauma, it's a lot to process. So maybe this is where the rest of us come in, shifting how we think about and treat those with different cognitions, essentially removing the blame but changing long held views. Isn't easy either.
It's very very challenging. How do we do this with a lot of acceptance and a lot of caring for each other in all of our differences.
How can we best help those who experience the world differently and are carrying trauma and shame. Jane Kirsten says empathy is key and an understanding that the diagnosis is real, and so is the pain.
To actually understand someone, you have to be able to identify. And I think that because we're human, we all know shame, and anyone listening to this who says they don't, I just think it's not true. We all experience shame. Therefore, we can all identify with each other and then we can have empathy, because that's how we get empathy is identification.
Joe Martin, mum of sixteen year old Emily, says there's a lot of empathy in their family now and it's come quite literally through identification. Despite all that Emily's been through, there's a silver lining.
You know, through Emily's journey and also our son is autistic in ADHD. But it's also led to the various members of the family realizing that actually they are too, so Emily's father, through seeing our son and Emily's journeys, realized that he was autistic in ADHD, and so, you know, at fifty was able to get those diagnosis and sense was made about his world, things that had always been difficult for him, and suddenly he understood himself.
The autism ADHD combo can come with a lot of complications in the world. It was he like, Oh, I've only i'd known, I would have, you know.
I think it was more just relief. He did also get a dyslexi diagnosis about ten years before that, and that was the first time I ever saw him in tears because it was just such a relief. So for him, it was the relief and thinking back to when he was a child, there was even less known about neurodiversities. So now he understands, and he understands why he finds group situations and why he doesn't like all the small
talk that kind of networking side. He'd rather be one on one with someone, and why he gets overwhelmed at times. So we talk about that a lot as a family, and understanding and seeing the triggers or knowing when to pull back if someone's in a moment.
One thing I'm talking about with this is it self esteem peace, And I just wonder, you know, it's so interesting for adults that get diagnosed late. Do you think like there's a relief for him, But is his self esteem good?
Would you say?
Intelligence actually mastered it and so he was able to find ways to cope and get through, But it didn't you know, it was actually really hard. And I think the thing also with your adversities and especially ADHD, it takes its toll on your brain because you're constantly working on all these things and trying to work it out and trying to make sense what your brain's doing and what the world around doing, and so it's exhausting. So he now has a meaning for what his life's been,
and so I think he's accepted that. But the diagnosis has definitely helped actually his self esteem, I would say, because he knows why he does things. And yeah, some people say labels aren't good, but our experience is that labels can help you understand, and they can help the people around you understand. And then from there, his sister got diagnosed, and then his mother got diagnosed, and so it's been a really good journey for the family. And while I don't have ADHD, I do have anxiety. So
it's really helped everyone understand each other within the family. Yeah, it's actually been a real benefit pursuing those diagnoses. Yeah, because of that understanding.
Understanding is key, But it was lack of understanding that met. Joe's daughter Emily was deeply unhappy and anxious right through primary school. They tried the public system, they tried the private system, and after reaching crisis point in year six, the family took a risk. They found something completely diff Mount Hobson Middle School, which had a holistic approach to learning and just twelve students in each class.
And it worked going to that school, Like I said to mom, in certainly, I just felt accepted, and I just felt welcomed, and I just felt like I could unapologetically be myself. Honestly, I don't know what I would have done without that school.
What was it specifically that school gave you.
It gave me a sense of belonging. I felt everyone was a bit quirky, everyone had something a bit different about them. It was eye opening for me and the way that I got to experience so many different people and see so many different personalities. I think it helped me in accepting myself and accepting others.
Sadly, Mount Hobson Middle School no longer exists. It couldn't afford to stay open, which is a big loss. Emily is now doing really well at her local high school, but she says it would have been impossible if she hadn't had the support at Mount Hobson.
I'm still in contact with a lot of the teachers from there because they genuinely changed my life and it just felt like a family.
It needs to be a place of refuge, doesn't it.
Still Yeah, I actually want to go into primary school education when I go to university, and I guess in a way, I want to be the teacher that I wish I had had from a younger age, because like I don't think any teacher fully got it when I was younger. I want to be the teacher that can be supportive and so in a way, I think as a teacher, I want to do that and help kids and give the education I wish I had received from a younger age.
At primary school, Emily was the kid who barely passed anything. She believed she was dumb. But now in year twelve. Even with dyslexia, ADHD and dyscalculia, she's getting top Marx, She's excelling. He is part of a monologue she did for English this year.
My heart stopped.
In that moment, my heart stopped. All I remember was repeating for myself, stay strong, stay strong, stay strong.
Life is still hard, The anxiety is still there, but Emily no longer believes that she is the problem.
I think overall, I've gotten there. It's been hard, but you know we've gotten there.
Yeah, next time on No such Thing as Normal? What's it like to live with Tourette syndrome? What is the worst tick? The one that if you could take it away, you would.
The f would?
Why Because when I'm in class or in school, people think I'm like just saying it on purpose.
But my class knows.
Let all the year fives know, but not really the year sixes sixth there.
If you like this podcast, please rate and review it. It helps people find it. No Such Thing as Normal is produced and presented by me Sonia Gray. The editor is Jamie Lee Smith. Owen O'Connor and Mitchell Hawks are executive producers, and Bridget Mills helped with research. You can find us on Instagram. No Such Thing as Normal Podcast. The series is brought to you by the New Zealand Herald and teen Uniform and it's made with the support
of New Zealand on Air. New episodes of No Such Thing As Normal are available wherever you get your podcasts.