ADHD grief isn’t linear — and that’s totally normal

Grief can be overwhelming for anyone — but for people with ADHD, it can show up in surprising ways.

Therapist Rachel Hopkins joins host Cate Osborn to unpack the intersection of ADHD and grief. They discuss how time blindness, emotional intensity, and memory challenges can shape the grieving process — and how ADHDers might mourn in nonlinear, unconventional ways. Rachel also offers some insights for anyone struggling to grieve “the right way” while living with a neurodivergent brain.

We love hearing from our listeners! Email us at sorryimissedthis@understood.org.

• From the ADHD Aha! podcast, Love and grief with ADHD (Steve Wesley’s story)

• Grief-Fueled ADHD: Strategies to Manage A Complex Combination by Rachel Hopkins

• The Invisible String by Patrice Karst

• The Grand Hotel of Feelings by Lidia Brankovíc

(00:48) A word from Cate on ADHD and grief

(03:05) Nonlinear ADHD grief

(06:11) Executive function challenges and grief

(09:34) Emotional regulation and planning immediately following a loss 

(11:03) Time perception challenges and processing grief

(15:34) Rejection sensitivity and worrying about others’ judgement of our grieving

(20:19) Balancing distraction and avoidance

(26:24) The importance of acknowledging that your ADHD will affect your grief, and celebrating your wins

(27:29) ADHD and delayed grief reactions

(29:30) Advice for neurotypical people supporting an ADHDer through grief

(30:44) Rachel’s last thoughts and advice for any ADHDer going through grief right now

Cate: Hi everybody, welcome back to "Sorry, I Missed This," the show where we talk about ADHD and all things relationships, intimacy, and communication. It's me, your host, Cate Osborn, and today we have a very special episode. Today we are talking about the ADHD relationship to grief and what it's like when you lose someone and how the ADHD brain can sometimes really hinder the grieving process. 

Joining me today is expert Rachel Hopkins, who has really and truly dedicated her life to creating resources and mentoring people through ADHD and grief. And she's so smart, and I'm so excited for this conversation. 

The first thing that I want to say, very truly, very honestly, this is a very personal episode for me. I lost my dad right before I turned 21, and at the time, I didn't know I had ADHD. I didn t know that I was neurodivergent. I didn't know that my brain worked differently. All I knew was that my dad died and I didn't know what to do. 

I really struggled with that grief for a really long time and it took a long time in therapy and it take a long of living in a better and more fuller understanding of my neurodivergency to really accept that one of the reasons why I struggled so much was because I have ADHD and my executive functioning and my perception of time is different than other people. The other thing is that I really wanted to make this episode because so many people and when I say so many, I mean thousands,  I have gotten thousands and thousands of messages from ADHDers all over the world who asked the same question, "Why do I struggle with grief so much? Am I a bad person for forgetting that my dad is dead? Am I a bad person for not moving on? Am I a bad person for moving on too quickly?" 

And so today, as we move into this episode, I want to invite you to be really sensitive to yourself, be really kind to yourself. Be really compassionate to yourself. This episode might be a little bit touchy. And if it's not right for you right now, I hope that you will come back to it when you are in a better place. The other thing is that I really want you to think about your ADHD, your executive functioning, and how it manifests in those moments of grief, of loss, of anxiety, of sadness. And really think about the ways that you can serve yourself. 

Think about the way that you can start building supports and structures so that the next time this happens, hopefully you won't feel so alone. You won't have to send an email asking if you're a terrible person, because you're not. You are not alone. I have quantifiable proof that literally thousands of people all over the world are going through this and experiencing grief in a way that we just simply don't talk about. And so, that is why I'm so grateful to Understood and so passionate about this particular episode and especially to Rachel for being here to facilitate this conversation. 

Thanks for being here, Rachel. 

Rachel: Thank you so much for having me, Cate. 

Cate: Rachel, I have pulled up your biography, your CV, your qualifications, because there is a huge list. You have so much experience. You are a licensed professional counselor, you are a certified rehabilitation counselor, you have an AS in early childhood special education, a BS in human services, an MS in clinic, you have so many letters. 

Rachel: Oh, gosh, how did I inherit all those letters? You make it sound so impressive. 

Cate: It is very impressive. Your resume is wildly impressive. I'm really excited for this episode, because I don't know about you, Rachel, but when I first started out, I was really surprised about how many questions I get just honestly every week from people asking about ADHD and grief. And I think that experience of grieving my father and really feeling like I wasn't doing it right or there was something wrong with me or like I was convinced I was like a sociopath for a while, cause I was, like, "I don't feel anything about my dead dad. Like, I must be a terrible person." 

It can be a really lonely conversation. It can me a really isolating experience to deal with both ADHD and grief. So, I'm just gonna start with a very maybe easy slash obvious question is what is good grieving? How do we grieve well? 

Rachel: Oh, OK. I can give you, I'll give you my two train of thoughts, right? I'll reference first the neurotypical grief model, right? We have our Kubler-Ross stages, denial, anger, numbness, all of the things. Then you have the neurodivergent grief model. And it takes all of those stages and it puts them in a jar and it shakes them up. And, it's already the daily chaos of an ADHD brain, and then the emotional experience of grief, it's like ping pong ball in that jar. We're now balancing between anger, numbness, laughter, panic, denial, sometimes all within a singular day. And so, there really isn't a model to name for ADHD grieving. 

So, as far as good, I think it's what feels good for you. What have you come to acceptance with? And so that's kind of a not answer to your question.

Cate: No, I think that that's a really, really powerful answer, I think, right off the bat. In my experience, when I have lost people, big losses and small, it doesn't feel like it's like that linear, like, "OK, you're here, now you're there, now, you are here." I am feeling all of those things. And I think that's one of the reasons why I get so many questions from folks is because that narrative of, you know, the five stages of grief is like, well, that's how it's supposed to be. That's how its supposed to go. 

And then when it doesn't and it feels different and it feel messy and complicated. There's that sort of background narrative of like, "Am I doing this wrong? Is there something wrong with me?" So, yeah, no, I think that's a wonderful answer to start. 

Rachel: I like the way that you described it too, because I often hear clients say, "My grief is jagged. My grief is fragmented." They feel like they skip steps or they revisited, started the process they thought was resolved. And they feel like their failing at grieving as if we already as ADHD years don't feel like we're, we really feel like we're failing enough. And then already, this thing that we feel like we're not doing well either, that's perpetuated by this one idea of a model that we've seen. 

Cate: How does executive functioning interrupt or interact or impact, I guess, at all three, maybe, the grieving process? 

Rachel: The big things are time blindness and then also just that tendency to sometimes avoid the experience of not being able to sense the passage of time. And again, a society that says this happens, then we do this and then we memorialize this and so on and so forth. Again, you feel like you're not doing it well enough. And then again, that avoidance because we see people moving through in a slow wave and we're experiencing it in jagged way. We're like, "I'd rather just not because I'm not doing it right." 

Cate: I think it's really interesting that you talk about that because I also feel like, especially in our sort of Western, particularly American standard of grieving, it's like, "Oh, do you have a distant relative who died? You get two days off of work. Do you have a close relative who die? We'll maybe give you four." And so there's like a capitalistic timeline on which we are expected to manage and navigate through this really difficult time on top of executive functioning issues and emotional issues and all of that stuff. And that's a little wild to me. 

Rachel:  It's so wild and I'm so glad that you remarked on just that thing because already planning is hard as an ADHDer and then having this sort of two day, four day allowance off work combined with poor planning and not grieving linearly, having that feeling like this loss happened yesterday or it felt like it happened six months ago or hasn't happened yet. that time blindness combined with here's a nice little neat package that works for us as a society that we expect you to do these things within. It just it doesn't make sense and a lot of my clients are really pissed off about that.

Cate: Time blindness and grief is absolutely wild. Like I wish I could explain it to somebody who doesn't experience those like time perception differences. Because I know every year, every year I'm like at the grocery store and I'm passing by the little Father's Day display, and I'm, "Oh, I should pick something up, oh man." And then I like remember all over, you know what I mean? 

Rachel: Right. 

Cate: But it's not top of my mind. And then, I immediately sort of go into this cycle. Of like, "I can't believe that I forgot that my dad died. Like I'm a terrible daughter. I didn't love him." And I'm like, "No, I think maybe it's just my brain working differently." But until I understood that, until I really did a lot of work in therapy to like let that guilt and shame go, like I felt like a really shitty person a lot of the time. 

Rachel: And it takes a lot of repetition when working with folks that are understanding their ADHD and their grief to build that firm foundation of this pyramid that there is one, a genuine neurological difference. And two, it's normal to feel like maybe it's been forever, or it just happened yesterday, because there are brain hasn't created a linear narrative around the loss. And above that, like at the best of times, it's normal to forget milestones, anniversaries and holidays, they always sneak up on us. 

So, having compassion with ourself is harder because obviously it's a person, it's not that we forgot a co-worker's birthday, it's someone that was close to us. But this lack of preparation, it triggers such an intense emotional response in a way that a normal forgetting something wouldn't. 

Cate: I'm also really interested in the sort of immediate afterwards of a passing, right? Your family member, your loved one passes away. And so, now you're planning the funeral, you're putting together the luncheon, you're doing all of this stuff, you writing the obituary, which is really hard, by the way. 

Rachel: Yes. 

Cate: It's really hard to write an obituary. But that ADHD is also going to affect those logistics as well, right? 

Rachel: Yes, absolutely. So, our emotional dysregulation that we come by, honestly, with ADHD, it makes that grief sharper. I think sometimes we forget that ADHD is not just a focus disorder. It's a regulation disorder, regulating attention, impulse, emotions. People with ADHD feel like they are drowning in this emotion of grief while everyone else seems to be keeping it together. And that sense of immediate emotional intensity, it make us feel ashamed or broken. 

Again, with that feeling most intensely immediately after a loss plus also it not following a schedule in the larger picture of incorporating a memory of a person, the typical sadness over a loss, it feels like despair and it gives way to shame and anger is rage. And we can't regulate these things. And so, we might just shut down completely when family wants to know how many are coming for the wake or, you know, how many chairs should we put out for Shiva. Whatever sort of memorialization you have, it's just not there because we felt it so intensely so quickly. We might be spent at that point. 

Cate: So, what does it mean to process grief when your sense of time is fluid or non-linear or it is that like it feels like it happened six months ago and also yesterday and also today? How do you avoid getting stuck in grief with those time perception challenges? 

Rachel: An age-old question. And this is where I feel like that tangibility of the work really comes into play because I feel like, "Oh, you just haven't processed your grief," it's something that a lot of my clients hear, and we go to this exact question is, what does that mean? Because our executive function is already impaired, especially during grief, what does that look like for us? And so, breaking our grief work, right, which is what I call processing into micro tasks and chunking it, building in grief anchors. 

So, for example, if we were to break our grief, work into microtasks. Doesn't mean that we're gonna do this perfectly. That's important to remember, but it might look like just lighting a candle and sitting quietly for five minutes and allowing your mind, your energy, your emotions to go anywhere in chunking that time for you and for some sort of memory. Again, writing down something, one sentence of how you feel today doesn't even have to be focused on the loss because oftentimes we know as anyone who is grieved, we all have at some point neurodivergent or neurotypical a memory or a feeling of sadness we can eventually tie back when we go to therapy and do those sorts of things. 

So, just writing down one sentence how we feel today is another way to chunk it. Texting a friend, calling in your community and saying, "Hey, I'm thinking of so-and-so today." Having your trusted people. Grief is so heavy already, and so we have to bite size it to make sure that we access it without avoidance. 

Cate: I'm curious about these grief anchors. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

Rachel: Sure, grief anchors is not a very common expression. I'm not sure how many therapists or people in the grief world are familiar with it, but it's small rituals to give your grief a place to live in the day or in the week or in month, whatever feels tangible for you with where you're at in your emotional regulation. So, a grief anchor might be wearing a bracelet, carrying a memento, listening to a certain playlist while you're walking, talking to the person you lost out during your commute. I am a raging car talker to myself. 

And just also speaking to the people that I can't anymore and pondering in a very creative ADHD way what they would have said now that I'm in the place to be able to do that without breaking down. That still keeps their memory alive. So, those are the sort of grief anchors that we may unintentionally go to, but we want to make sure we are intentional about in those really early days. 

Cate: I love that idea of a grief anchor or a memento or something that you are doing to sort of process. But I'm curious about the internalized messaging, that sort of social messaging, again, that sort of capitalistic messaging of like, "Oh, I should be over this by now." Or you know, "Why is it taking me so long to get over this loss?" What does that look like in an ADHD brain that already might struggle with like timelines? 

Rachel: Great question. OK, I think part of what I tried to drive home when clients feel again, that intense pressure from themselves or societally, we're really asking ourselves, yes, the grief anchors are for us, they're for us. But also they are for predictability. And if we think about the largest pressure in the ADHD world outside of grief that society expects of us is predictability. So, even if it feels odd and something that we're still struggling with? It is a gift to us and it is the gift to, you know, the world to kind of verbalize, "OK, this is me doing this for this reason." 

We don't want to totally lean into what society wants from us, but it's also a gift to our communities to make sure that we remain a part of them. We're not ignoring our grief. We're just trying to find ways to survive in it. And moment and focus shifts can be a tool for resilience. So, making sure we're not ignoring the depth and the length that it takes. We're not trying to move through it too quickly or drag it out, again, to avoid any other anxieties that might come up. Just kind of trying to subtly shift if we feel like it's been a long time and we're stuck in grief. 

Shift things still within the grief sphere and find ways in other areas of our life to make sure that we're still moving while still honoring this piece of our trivial pursuit pie. Honoring that we have multiple timelines as people, right? We're just a grieving person and have been a grieving for years and years and year. We have piece of our pie that is grief and will always be, but that doesn't mean we don't have other timelines going too. 

Cate: I'm also curious, because I know that, again, I don't want to speak for like every person with ADHD, but I know I hear a lot from neurodivergent folks who are concerned about things like how their grief is being perceived, that feeling of being watched, of being, I want to say judged, but that feeling if I do too much or too little, people are going to think some kind of way about me. How does that impact the process as well?

Rachel: Yeah, I think perpetuating that self-shame, right, of I am not doing X, Y, Z in a world that's already not kind to grievers is so, so, real. And oftentimes when clients come in the therapy room with that, it's one of those moments where I say, "Damn, you're right. And I hate this for you, and I hate for us." And we kind of just mourn that together, the lack of understanding together, and we I tend to close around three quarters towards the end of the session with "But tell me like, what was your intention doing these seemingly odd things" and grounding clients and what their intentions were and kind of making peace and accepting that it's OK if not everyone else knows. 

Maybe that means if we're being judged, right, we are either A, not sharing with the right people, or sharing too much, like we can edit that to help our grieving process. Or if we need like, you know, some visibility of this grieving experience being normal in general, maybe we have a neurotypical buddy. We say, "Hey, I have random grief bursts. They're not gonna be the same as yours because I have a neurospicy brain, but does this happen to you?" And they can say, "Yes, this also happens to me." Not in your timeline, but it normalizes some of that too. 

So, all of these different things to normalize will still honor the uniqueness of it by tying it back to like, what was our intention? Tends to be pretty grounding. 

Cate: Do you think that there's a rejection sensitivity component in that as well? 

Rachel: Ah, so glad you brought up RSD. 

Cate: But I think about rejection sensitivity and I think the reaction that I wanted to have when my dad died. Like I wanted yell and scream and get mad and just like, ah! But like I didn't feel like I could. I put this like external pressure on myself I think to very demure, very mindfully process grief instead of just letting myself have that catharsis, have that big emotional regulating moment. And looking back, like, I regret it. I regret that I did that. I think that feeling of judgment, of being ashamed to process grief in a certain way, at least for me, like I really see the connection to rejection sensitivity.

Rachel: It's so real. Rejection sensitivity makes support systems feel unsafe, even when people are trying their best to be there for us, even one people are tying their best, to do societally or religiously or culturally all they know how to do that system still doesn't feel safe. Because RSD, it doesn't just add to grief, it colors it. So, every silence that we get, you know,  when we're just sobbing in what might seem like a moment or a time or a space where we should be keeping it together, every perceived social misstep on our end of oversharing in regards to the person that we're grieving, every change in the tone from the people that are responding to us in those spaces, not just at the funeral, but the before and after, it feels like a personal attack and a reason to withdraw. 

All of that fear and that anxiety has made funerals and the grieving experience and the before, after and in between, feel very sterile. And there's not safety in them being sterile. It's much better to be raw because some of us can't help it to be wrong on a daily. So, we'd much rather have people be raw with us. You know, death already triggers unresolved feelings of abandonment when we're struggling with RSD as well. To have a community around you, especially in the case of neurodivergent individuals is so, so essential. 

And I'm not just talking about a fun little free support group that you're going to online. That's fabulous. I'm talking about true spaces that you have vetted or have the potential to vet or someone else has vetted for you where you can just scream or create some ugly art or tear something up or run or sit still with a blank look on your face and just have someone and hold your hand. Whatever it looks like.

Cate: If we don't know how to process big emotions. If we don't how to mourn in a way that works for us because we're just copying what we see on TV, I feel like you're gonna have a bad time. 

Rachel: Yeah, it's just another layer of that masking that we so often go to. And then on the flip side of that too, if we can't quite verbalize and figure out what our support needs to look like, but we know it's not what we hoped for, we feel abandoned all over again. 

Cate: I'm curious about the sense of abandonment, but also the phenomenon that happens for a lot of ADHD folks, especially women with ADHD, who are excellent in a crisis. You've got that hyperfocused, decisive, handling everything, like, "Oh, no, something bad has happened. I'm going to be the person to run support on this." 

And again, I'm not speaking for the whole community, but at least in my experience, I know that I really resonated with that theme of both abandonment, but also having to be the person who was there for everybody else and that duality, that sense of nobody knows how hard I'm working. Nobody sees all the stuff that I'm doing and I've just lost this person that I really care about. But then on top of that ADHD, like I am good in a crisis. I do have these skills. So, of course I'm going to be the person. You got anything, Rachel? That's not even a question. That was sort of like a big feeling I have. 

Rachel: I'm so glad that you shared it. And so, I will try to make the stars in my mind come together in a constellation for you. 

Cate: Galaxy brain too close to the sun. 

Rachel: We're trying here. OK, so when I think about being good in a crisis, when we break it down to the core of what we're doing, and keep in mind, I don't see distraction as a bad word for us, right? I think distraction is a coping skill, especially for ADHD. So, if you see us leaping into action, if we view that as a distraction, see distraction then as a coping skill, our need to move is actually us self-regulating, allowing moments of distraction in support of other people during chaos. Without shame, it actually helps our emotional flooding. So, that's not us ignoring our grief. We're finding ways to survive through it. 

So, often when we're springing into into action and taking on a lot and people are like, oh, are you sure? Sit down, have a cup of tea, we're actually, "No, actually, this is how I'm surviving. This is how I'm regulating. I probably will hit a critical juncture too much, in which case, I'll let you know." Right? We use distraction when needed, and we return to our grief when able and we titrate between the two. I don't think distraction is a bad word when we're grieving. 

Cate: So, that's especially interesting from the framework of how do we know when being good in a crisis, doing that work is not a distraction. It is the mechanism by which we are, you know, like you said, emotionally regulating that kind of stuff. But then also can being good in a crises, can throwing yourself into this crisis, be a way of deferring emotional processing and saying, I'm not gonna deal with the loss. I'm gonna deal with, you know, the luncheon and the weight and the Shiva and like all of that stuff instead. So, like, how do we know when it's a good distraction or when it is a, I don't want to say bad distraction because distractions aren't bad, but do you know what I'm trying to say, kind of? 

Rachel: You're absolutely right. Yeah, when we have taken on too much out of avoidance and when like our distraction is actually propelling us forward. Great question. So, when we have engaged in so much distraction that, you know, initially, which was to prevent emotional flooding, and we feel like at least I can feel, and this might be again, I have no doubt this is from years of work, being able to sense when I'm on the edge, when we start to feel like we're on the edge, right? When we start to feel again, our RSD is maybe more heightened than ever. We're not just our normal baseline level of ADHD sensitivity. 

I can think of an example from my own life. When my grandmother passed away, I was asked to do a eulogy of sorts representing all of the grandchildren. And in working through it again, it started to feel like distraction, a coping skill, self-regulating. And it was helping with that emotional flooding until it got closer and closer to the funeral. And I realized,  OK, I have taken on too much because even the idea of going to this Word document and printing it out, it feels like too much exposure, like I have hit my limit and there, I ignored it. I pushed through, OK, I'm opening the document and it feels too much to the point to where when it was my time to share the eulogy, I could not get through it. 

And that is OK, and that is normal, and I've forgiven myself for that. There was no hard feelings. I did it in an authentic raw way. That's not how I wanted it to be. And perhaps if I had honored that distraction versus avoidance, right, balancing distractions and avoidance, I would have been able to say, "Yes, I'll write this eulogy. Let's split it into chunks between the cousins and let's take turns because I can sense myself being on the edge."

Cate: And it's actually wild that you use that example, because I had such a similar thing happen to me with my dad's eulogy. And for me, it was a combination of external pressure and internal pressure, because I'm like the writer of the family, right? And so, everybody expected me to have this like performance, like they expected a thing to happen. So, you know, like I put so much pressure on myself to create like the perfect eulogy. And then at the same time, I'm trying to like hold everything down for my family. Like my mom was not OK. Like she completely fell apart, which like, of course she did, right. And so, I'm like the only person. And so, I was like, I have to fix this. I have run this, I have to plan this. 

And then there was like this external pressure of like, "And you're going to have a really good eulogy, right? What are you going to say? What are going to about your dead dad?" And I'm, like, "I'm 20. Like I don't, I am not qualified for this." It was like right before my 21st birthday when he passed away. And so, I wound up having like a full meltdown, like I wound up like at the funeral having the like, "I can't do this moment" and I played always look on the bright side of life for Monty Python because my dad loved Monty python and then they got mad at me because it said shit in the song and that's not appropriate for church. And that's the story of my dad's eulogy. The end. 

Rachel: It's such a reflection on, you know, OK, heaven forbid we have to do this again, right? Thinking about my experience and your experience, knowing what we know now, what is going to be different when we body double these emotional tasks next time, when we do hard things next to someone else. Now we know what we now. Obviously, it's not going to be great because grieving is not great. That's just the reality. It's still going to be complicated. It still going be messy. But doing something hard next to somebody emotionally, it's gonna not be as awful. 

Cate: You know, executive functioning and all of these different things are part of grief, and it's not separate, and it is not this like other thing that you have to deal with. It is like absolutely part of not only the human experience, but also the ADHD experience of developing the coping mechanisms and skills to move through these really difficult moments. 

Rachel: I think through our grief experience, especially as ADHDers, we tend to just completely forget our wins. And so, reinforcing our growth and our successes, it supports our dopamine and it counteracts our shame spirals when inevitably we're going to be triggered by our grief experienced and our loss experience when we forget the card, when we forgot the anniversary, whatever it might be. 

And so, keeping kind of a grief wins log. And now I'm telling you this so truly from person to person, woman to woman here as someone who does this for myself. Like, you made it to work today, even though you cried getting dressed, you asked for help instead of pretending that you're OK. And you didn't spiral after seeing their photo, like those sort of things. Again, person to person important to remember to do for yourself. 

Cate: I don't want to say normal, because I don't want to cast dispersions, but is it common for ADHDers to only start grieving past a certain point, right? Weeks, months, years later, once that kind of holding everything together, the doing, the making sure the casserole dishes are returned, stops, right, when you find yourself in that stillness of maybe everybody else is kind of moving on a little bit. Maybe life is going a little bit back to normal, but like you're still here with this hole and this and this loss. How does that work with delayed grief and ADHD? 

Rachel: I'm going to say with my population, which I would say, I think about 60% of my caselod are women, late diagnosed, of course, grieving and ADHD, I would say that 75 if not 80% of them had a delayed grief reaction. 

Cate: Wow. That is so much higher than I thought you were going to say. 

Rachel: I'm being so serious with you right now, because I think again, we walk the line of distraction not being a bad word. And then if we perhaps let's say this loss caught us off guard, which it so often does not knowing ourselves perhaps to that degree, not having enough previous therapy on our belt before the grief kicked in of being able to know where our limit is, it's after it's all said and done. And I think that what do we do with that right from then on out? If our grieving is delayed, what do we do without? 

Of course, we talked about chunking and compassionate scheduling and making sure we're keeping a grief wins log of sorts. But also the base of that pyramid is expecting inconsistency, right? We will have, if not dysregulated functioning, at least uneven, we're gonna have some days where we feel functional and even inspired. And then we're going to have some days where we forget our meds and we skip meals and we cry into the laundry. Grief is a long-term project and ADHD does not like long- term projects. So, we want to build in forgiveness really often and just really early. As best we can once we start to realize it's all hitting me now. 

Cate: What advice would you have for someone who maybe is not ADHD themselves, but might have an ADHD partner who is going through grief or is going to go through grief? 

Rachel: My mind goes to a partner who might be able to support an ADHD griever with visual externalization. So, our ADHD brains, we already struggle with internal tracking. And so, we're a partner, who might not have those same struggles can come in as they might be to help with visualization around grief. So, they might be the one that buys the sticky notes and sets up grief reminders like "It's OK to cry, take it slow today." They might be the people that set up, you know, a feelings wheel or a chart or a word bank to help us identify when there are just no words and we've just gone non-verbal. 

They might create our grief shelf for us, right? They might hang up the shelf. We'll order the shelf, but we're not going to hang it up. They may hang up a grief shelf with objects that bring comfort and remembrance and prompt us, as well as being our kind of our partners. In that, we talked about holding space with someone else. They actually give us a gentle reminder with these visual reminders of  "Hey, let's chunk this time like we planned. Let's actually do this thing. And you're not alone." 

Cate: Before you leave us today, is there any last thoughts, suggestions, best practices, words of wisdom and compassion that you have for our dear listeners? 

Rachel: Knowing that your path it's not gonna be linear, it's just not, doesn't make it any less valid. And when we start to feel alone, making sure that if we're not in that lonely place now, we're doing the work to build up some safe spaces, some safe people that we at least have, some go-tos that can remind us of these things if it's hard to remind ourselves. This is where I'm gonna get a little kooky. Bear with me, people who are listening. 

Cate: I trust you. 

Rachel: I would totally recommend, and I do this for myself, go back to children's stories about grief. So, a classic is "Invisible String." And "Invisible String" is a great one that explains grief in a very picturesque way that the forward six-year-old brain can sort of comprehend it. When we are in our activated emotionally flooded state, we need that. "Grand Hotel of Feelings" is one that I love just on a personal level too. As obscure as it sounds for me to say, "Hey, buy children's book about grief," the base truths remain the same. And we sometimes forget that in trying to navigate our complicated adult worlds. And it's very comforting to remember that this is a universal experience. 

Cate: Honestly, I think that's amazing advice because I think picking up like a thick psychology book about like the mechanisms of grief in the brain is like useful to a certain extent. But when you're in, when you are deep in your feels, when your deep in that moment of "I'm really not OK," I would much rather have LeVar Burton read me a story than have like a scientist tell me about like where grief lives in my frontal cortex. You know what I mean? I get it. I get that.

Rachel: Exactly. Thank you for backing me up on that. I think I would much rather see gorgeous colors of people that are maybe crying, maybe smiling, talking about this metaphorical or very tangible literal idea that just feels like I can grasp it in that moment. If I go towards that big heavy exploratory novel, I'm only going to feel more stupid. And this is a five minute little read where you're just like, "OK, I feel seen. I'm not unusual. This is a universal experience, and even though this sucks right now, I'll be OK." 

Cate: Rachel Hopkins, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so for having this incredible conversation. I'm so excited about this episode and I hope that you can come back and educate us more again soon. But until then, we'll see you later. 

Rachel: Thank you, so much, Cate. Thank you. 

Cate: Anything mentioned in the episode will be linked in the show notes with more resources. Have a question, comment, burning story you'd like to share? Email us at sorryimistthis@understood.org. This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/give. 

"Sorry, I Missed This" is produced and edited by Jessamine Molli and Margie DeSantis. Samiah Adams is our supervising producer. Video is produced by Calvin Knie and edited by Jesse DeMartino. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright, who also mixes the show. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. For Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, Seth Melnick, and Jordan Davidson. And I'm your host, Cate Osborn. Thank you so much for listening. 

Rachel: Can you guys hear the leaf blower again? 

Cate: It's OK. It feels a lot like theater school where you wake up at 8 a.m. to bury your soul and they're like, "Do it again." And I'm like, "It's fine. I am used to it." 

Rachel: Tell me again about your struggles, Cate. 

Cate: Yeah, I'd love to tell you more about my struggles.