Bonus #096: Neurodivergence: The Cost of Fitting In, the Freedom of Being Yourself With Lisa Richer

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Dwight: Welcome to another edition of Community and Becoming for the Love of Creatives. You're joined by your Connections and Community Guy hosts Maddox and Dwight, and today, we're going to have a conversation with Lisa Richer

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Dwight: Lisa, why don't you share with our audience of creatives exactly who you are and what you're about?

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Lisa Richer: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited about the conversation.

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Lisa Richer: I meet… I love the messy middle. I'm gonna start with that, and I… we can talk about that as we talk through today. But I am a neurodiver… a neurodivergent success partner and advocate, where I help people transform from stuck

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Lisa Richer: to success. It can be with students, athletes, professionals, or.

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Lisa Richer: Excuse me, or parents, and I'm the creator of the Clarity, Confidence, Courage Journey Map.

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Lisa Richer: And what that means is I bring the what and the how, people bring me their why, and together we navigate the internal, relational, and systemic roadblocks that keep people stuck so that they can truly thrive.

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Dwight: That's beautiful. That is.

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Maddox: Beautiful. And oh, so needed.

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Dwight: Yeah, well, and as you talked about the various segments that you serve, I believe that you can actually talk to some of those from experience. I mean, of course, we've all been students.

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Dwight: But you also have some experience as an athlete, and you've also had some experience out in the corporate world. How do you, draw from your own lived experience in your work?

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Lisa Richer: That's a great question. So, depending on which audience, right, who comes to me with their why, I pull from that lived experience. And you're right, I was an undiagnosed neurodivergent person growing up, so grew up that way, was an undiagnosed athlete, student.

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Lisa Richer: corporate leader, and all of those things. So I have the experience across all those avenues. And then I was gifted not just one, but two neurodivergent boys, both with very different neurodifferences, and so I leverage my lived experience, my professional experience.

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Lisa Richer: my parental experience, and my education, depending on what that why is that someone brings me.

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Lisa Richer: And then, as I was sharing, we moved through that what and that how, and it looks different for each circumstance.

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Dwight: Wow, that sounds like quite a test just to get through your day.

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Maddox: And.

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Lisa Richer: It can be exhausting.

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Maddox: Stated really is about… I mean, you're really highly qualified to talk about and do what you do, because it's permeated every area of your life.

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Lisa Richer: That hit me here, Maddox, and kind of went through my whole body. You're absolutely right. It has impacted every area of my life.

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Lisa Richer: Yes.

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Dwight: Yeah. And you mentioned that you had a later in life diagnosis.

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Lisa Richer: Okay.

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Dwight: What was that like to just suddenly have some kind of a frame that wasn't there before looking back at everything that came before it?

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Lisa Richer: Oh, gosh, that's a deep question. I'm taking notes, because if I don't, I'd interject, or I'd forget what you said, so just bear with me. And that was part of that clarity.

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Lisa Richer: Gosh. Yeah, I was diagnosed.

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Lisa Richer: My first diagnosis, I think, was like in my early 20s with the anxiety. But it was you have anxiety. That's why you're sleeping, or that's why you're not doing this, or that's why you're here's some, you know, searchlene, Zoloft, and go about your day. Like, so no one ever explained to me what any of it meant.

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Lisa Richer: It was like, you have… so then I was on and off the Zoloft for years, and I'm like, oh, I feel better, but no one was giving me any tools or interventions to help me figure out how to regulate, how to deal with it, how to work with it.

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Lisa Richer: But then fast forward. I was 48. It was Covid.

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Lisa Richer: Had a reaction to my second COVID shot, went into

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Lisa Richer: awful burnout. I mean, I've been in and out of burnout, you don't just go into burnout out of nowhere, but I say I was burnt to ashes. Like, we had a couch back here where I am in my room, and I couldn't even get up for weeks. Shaking, such dysregulation, my craniosacral person was like, wow, your cranial rhythm is just completely off, there's so much happening.

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Lisa Richer: It was the very worst and best thing that ever happened to me.

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Lisa Richer: It was the worst because I had never had anything like that happen before, and we were trying to figure out what was going on. But it was the best thing that happened because it was when I recognized I didn't need to be the strong one. My husband, we were at the doctor's office. He's like, whoever said you had to be the strong one? I'm like.

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Lisa Richer: And I just lost it, right?

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Lisa Richer: Well, I was the people pleaser, I was the fixer, I was all these things, so my life growing up from as early as 5 years old led to all of this.

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Lisa Richer: Fight, flight, freeze, please, you know, all these things, which turned into that burnout. Through that, I finally gave myself permission to ask for help. I'd gotten help for my kids, I'd helped my spouse, my friends, my family. Of course, you know, but not myself.

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Lisa Richer: it's always easier to help others, right? And so that was probably one of the biggest, the heaviest parts of the lift was

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Lisa Richer: I didn't even realize how heavy it had become, because I wasn't looking at what was impacting me and how I was impacting others by not getting help, and so I…

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Lisa Richer: Found a therapist who was phenomenal, somatic, EMDR, cranial sacral master, all sorts, I mean, just amazing, the right person for me. And she was referred to me by someone, and through that process.

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Lisa Richer: The Adhd diagnosis came to be Cptsd came to be.

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Lisa Richer: Several years earlier, with my younger son, he was getting… he had vision therapy, and we were looking at him going to a home program, and his vision therapist said.

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Lisa Richer: You said you were an elite-level gymnast. You said you competed internationally for the United States.

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Lisa Richer: How did you do that? And I was like, what do you mean, how did I do that? I'm, you know, we're having a conversation. She's like, your visual tracking is way off. Your depth perception is so out of whack.

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Lisa Richer: Did you ever feel like, as you're running down the runway to the vault, like, the board was, like, moving, or with beam, with mounts and dismounts, and

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Lisa Richer: Looking back, Dwight, to your question.

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Lisa Richer: Yeah. Oh my goodness. Everything was moving, because the closer I got to it, it was like the mirror… side view mirrors. Everything in the mirror is closer than it appears.

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Dwight: Yeah.

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Lisa Richer: My eyes were constantly playing tricks on me, and it was only through my son getting diagnosed with it and being shifted to a home program that we realized that I had that my whole life.

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Lisa Richer: And that brought out a wow, I was even more resilient than I thought I was.

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Lisa Richer: Maddox, yeah.

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Maddox: Well, what's coming to me right now is that's all you knew. You had never seen those things be still. They had always been moving like that, so you wouldn't know any different.

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Lisa Richer: But what it caused, if we stick on the gymnastics piece, was When I look back.

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Lisa Richer: on, well, my back fractures, they, I think, just came from lots of pounding and training. But my wrist, I cut my toe open at the end of a beam, some of my other injuries were directly correlated to a dismount off a beam, a vault, and a bar mount. And

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Lisa Richer: It was those places where every time it would move, my coaches didn't know different either. My dad, when I told him about this, he goes, why didn't anybody ever tell us? I said, that's a really great question because we didn't know back then.

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Lisa Richer: But that's where… looking back and that framing, you know, that you all are talking about.

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Lisa Richer: it's allowed me to recognize the things that I knew, I didn't know, my gut instinct felt, but I didn't trust it because others told me not to, because they didn't understand me either.

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Lisa Richer: And that went all the way through my life until I hit burnout. But that unbecoming

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Lisa Richer: Has allowed me to.

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Lisa Richer: become who I am, and finding that clarity and that chaos. And that's actually a book chapter that I've, I was a part of, in the past, last December it launched, and so I would love to offer that to people. Like, it's on my website, they can all download it, but it gives a glimpse into the past and a glimpse into how I became where I am and what I'm doing now.

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Maddox: So we will definitely put a link to that in the show notes. So audience, if you're listening, there'll be a link to that.

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Maddox: Lisa, I just… I feel called to say.

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Maddox: What a gift your husband gave to you by what he said to you that day.

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Maddox: You know, I mean…

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Maddox: It's powerful in and of itself, but I stepped back for a minute, I've been… it's been running in my background for a moment while I've been listening to you, and…

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Maddox: What really hit me was he played a huge role in your becoming.

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Maddox: I mean, you had to shift from being a person that couldn't ask for help and was carrying the weight of the world. You had to become someone else, someone that could ask for support, someone that could lean on others.

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Maddox: And perhaps even dole some of that responsibility out to those around you, and that's not… I mean, most of us have lived that in some form or fashion.

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Maddox: of us have carried the weight of the world on our shoulders.

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Maddox: Perhaps maybe 1 of the hardest becoming things that we might do.

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Lisa Richer: Absolutely. It's in that book chapter. That's how impactful it was. It was such a pivotal and transformational piece of

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Lisa Richer: Me letting go of… that…

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Lisa Richer: that weight that I thought I needed to carry because of how I grew up. That piece of always being the fixer, turning… turning into a people pleaser, always trying to solve things and fix things, rather than

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Lisa Richer: solve things and resolve them. And… and so I wasn't resolving those things within, but a lot of it I didn't even remember. And so that… that one… that one phrase from him, absolutely, it… it was the beginning of me

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Lisa Richer: become re-becoming who I am at the core.

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Lisa Richer: And a layer of… When my kids were born, it was like kind of like a rebirth of

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Lisa Richer: I started to trust my gut again, because our very first pediatrician, my son was a week old, he was crying, he's like, he's still… he's hungry, he wasn't nursing, and she's like, your gut was spot on, don't trust

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Lisa Richer: When an expert says something to you and your gut tells you something else, trust your gut because that expert doesn't know your child like you know it, or you know, or know your know you like you know yourself. And that was the very first moment of me truly beginning to trust my gut again. But I only trusted it as a mom.

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Lisa Richer: in motherhood. I didn't trust it as what my gut was telling me about myself and my surroundings.

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Lisa Richer: And it really wasn't until he made that statement that I

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Lisa Richer: was, in some ways, the burnout forced me to let go, but it wasn't until he said what he said that it connected, like, literally, like.

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Lisa Richer: broke apart.

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Lisa Richer: the…

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Lisa Richer: the wall, or the… maybe it broke the shackle of what was making me believe that I wasn't allowed to ask for help.

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Maddox: Well, and she she played a pivotal role in your becoming as well by saying, screw what the doctor said. Trust your gut.

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Lisa Richer: Yeah.

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Lisa Richer: And she is a doctor, she was a pediatrician, and she told me to… another expert, you know, and she also had shared… let me give you an example. She was in med school when she was, pregnant with her first child.

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Lisa Richer: And she said, they always said to read these books that are singular and, you know, very simple.

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Lisa Richer: I read my son's medical books to him.

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Lisa Richer: Do you think he cared? All he wanted was the voice.

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Lisa Richer: So it was also not just about trust your gut, but

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Lisa Richer: do what makes the most sense to you with your surroundings, and what you know and and what you're doing at the moment.

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Lisa Richer: And I had never shared that piece of that journey with her, but Maddox, she brought up a really interesting perspective that it it wasn't just about the gut, it was also about

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Lisa Richer: That piece of it, that what society deems as appropriate or normal is that because society deemed it so, not necessarily because it is so.

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Maddox: those.

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Lisa Richer: can be true.

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Maddox: I mean, what you're talking about is basically stepping out of the Matrix.

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Lisa Richer: I live outside.

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Maddox: On some level, we all live in this matrix where we're operating from all of these myths and things that we've been programmed to since the day we came into the world.

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Maddox: And it's… we're ingrained, we're taught to follow the leader.

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Maddox: Be a sheeple!

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Lisa Richer: Sheeple. That's an… I like that. I don't like that, but I like the term. I don't like… I don't like what I know it means, but I like the term.

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Dwight: Well, I had to imagine that being able to perform with that disability that you discovered.

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Dwight: It was the ultimate exercise in masking and trying to…

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Dwight: To fit into something that was such a high bar.

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Dwight: And I'd imagine it served you well when you transitioned to corporate life.

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Dwight: I think that… All the injuries and the burnout.

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Dwight: Kind of speak to the toll that you were carrying. You can't do it forever.

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Lisa Richer: Yeah, well, it's interesting what you just said, because

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Lisa Richer: You're right, I was unknowingly masking, because I didn't know that I even had these learning differences, or these neurodifferences.

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Lisa Richer: ADHD was also one that came about, but it did not get better in corporate. It didn't serve me well at all, because I was still that black sheep, not the sheeple. I was the outside of that place, right? And I don't know if that's an appropriate term anymore, but my great aunt.

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Lisa Richer: Her last name was Bloom, her married last name, that's part of where my business name came from. But we… we were, and for a long time, we would just go to the beat of our own drum, and corporate world was exact same as

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Lisa Richer: the society. It was, you need to fit into a box, you know, you need to sit in within the parameters of how you create a deck slide, or how you speak and how you dress in order to be a C-suite.

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Lisa Richer: I'm in a sweatshirt, because that's what makes me most comfortable. I don't know whoever thought that inventing

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Lisa Richer: suits and ties and skirts that you couldn't walk in and heels that hurt my feet and my back.

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Lisa Richer: was cool, but somebody in society did, and it became the gold standard. I was actually thinking about this the other day when I worked in the staffing world.

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Lisa Richer: we always had to have suits on, even though we were never on video, because back then, there weren't video calls. It was in the late 90s, and mid to late 90s. And so, half the time, I wasn't even out of the office, but I still had to be in this confined suit with a shirt that was so uncomfortable.

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Lisa Richer: And then, and IBM was another one, like, right, black or blue suits, to the knee length, white shirts, but then even their business casual now, because somebody took a stand and decided.

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Lisa Richer: That wasn't it, but I was so much in a place of

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Lisa Richer: not trusting myself, that my anxiety was increasing, I was masking all the time, camouflaging.

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Lisa Richer: being asked, like, aren't you smarter than that? You should know how to do this. How come you can't come up with the front of an objective and a list of topics for a presentation? But what I could do was come up with the entire middle

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Lisa Richer: where people were like, no, no, you can't do the middle without the cover page and the objectives. And I was like, well, I can't do the cover page and the objectives without the middle. But I wasn't comfortable enough or confident enough

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Lisa Richer: to say those things when I was sitting in these corporate roles, because

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Lisa Richer: I believed that these people knew better than me. They had been in it, they were doing it for a reason, and so I continued to become less and less of the person that I was until eventually burnout hit.

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Dwight: I feel that. That is.

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Dwight: I I think that is the affliction of our modern times.

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Dwight: Where so many people are trying to follow the template. You know, they they don't even fully understand where it comes from. They just go along because they think, well, it's what everybody's doing, so it must be right. And they don't even know who started it all.

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Dwight: If I.

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Maddox: Oh, go ahead, Dwight.

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Dwight: Well, I was just going to say, I know that you mentioned the burnout, but what was it that…

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Dwight: Allowed you to wake up and decide that you wanted to do something completely different.

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Lisa Richer: Well, that was before the burnout.

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Dwight: Okay.

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Lisa Richer: Yeah, so, it was… I mean, the burnout was coming, right? But, so I had…

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Lisa Richer: I had had a, change companies.

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Lisa Richer: Had a layoff, was at a company where,

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Lisa Richer: It was a very toxic work environment. I knew what was wrong, but the way people were coming at me with what happened and twisting the truth and whatever was going on, I just was like, okay, I'll take the severance and move on.

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Lisa Richer: So, then I went to another company where the person that hired me stated out loud how

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Lisa Richer: toxic this one boss was, how much of a gaslighter they were, and how they… they would never… that person was there because it was the old boys club, and that I… that… she would never treat me that way.

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Lisa Richer: So she. I was going. I went to talk with her about work for my husband because he was looking to change jobs at the time.

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Lisa Richer: And, she…

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Lisa Richer: was like, hey, I really need… I really want to bring you on. And so she ended up hiring me.

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Lisa Richer: But it ended up going south pretty quickly. There were things that were happening that I didn't feel comfortable with, and here I was standing up to an extent, that I was like, you know, our corporate lawyer in California was saying, this isn't on the up and up, I know we're in Maryland, I can't get behind this. Like, I will agree to disagree.

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Lisa Richer: But I can't get behind this. Won't go into all the details. Fast forward.

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Lisa Richer: I had reached out to someone and said, you know, I might

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Lisa Richer: be wanting to just get out of, out of corporate. And at that point in time, I had already gone to start my certifications in, special education advocacy, because

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Lisa Richer: Before I left that one company and went to the other, I had a principal who said, I'm retiring, I'm going back into private school.

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Lisa Richer: But I'm going back into private school because of kids like yours.

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Lisa Richer: Which is a good thing, not a bad thing. Some people, like, good. I'm glad you took it that way, Dwight, because some people go, why would he say that? It was because he wanted to help more kids like mine, who kept falling through the cracks, or they weren't…

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Lisa Richer: like, outwardly neurodifferent in ways that you could pinpoint what it was, which I don't mind, because diagnoses inform, they don't define. They should not label. They should provide more information. And so he had said, you should really do what you do as a career. He was talking about, like, being

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Lisa Richer: strictly an advocate in the school system. That's what he wanted me to do full-time. And I'm like, I don't know, and I don't know if I have the background for it. He's like, trust me, I've been doing this a long time. You have more than many, and what's most important is you put the child first. It's always about teen child. You come in, you wrap your arms around, you work with us.

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Lisa Richer: it got to the point where we would go into meetings, and he'd say, Ms. Richer, should we do an extension for this meeting? Because we know it's not gonna get done in 50 minutes, or in an hour. Like, that's the relationship I had with them, that they came in ready to have a conversation, no matter how long it lasted, and extend it if we needed to.

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Lisa Richer: So I was already getting those certifications. What happened, though, was, I was in this course.

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Lisa Richer: and it was 2016. So it was

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Lisa Richer: 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago now, I was in this course, and this is when this person asked me to come and initially be a consultant, and they're like, well, can you just come on as an employee? Like, fine, I'll come on.

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Lisa Richer: And then, again, the wheels got off the bus, and

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Lisa Richer: they ended up giving me a severance on the very same day that I had called a friend of mine and said, I think I want to pivot to getting this business up and running, but I need something else in the meantime, and I'm going to stick it out till December, because I want my team to have what they need. We were working on a big project.

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Lisa Richer: And then she walks in and literally puts it on my desk. So didn't even, like, have the courtesy to sit there and talk to me about it. And that was the moment in time where I said, I am never going back to corporate. I will work with corporations who are ready and willing to do the hard work, not just check a box, on understanding how to implement inclusivity.

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Lisa Richer: across all facets. Not a one-size-fits-all, but really do the work, have the conversations, implement and execute, reflect and evaluate, and leveraging my journey map as well.

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Lisa Richer: So that role, I was doing, I worked with the gentleman for years, in one of the staffing firms we worked at, and we had worked off and on. I did some consulting for him when my first son was born.

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Lisa Richer: So I started working for him and I got a lot more in depth with mindfulness and the intersections of mindset, self-limiting beliefs, and how letting go of that baggage, how leaning into the reasons you're worthy actually helped you find what you were looking for.

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Lisa Richer: For example, you need a job to get a job. That is a myth.

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Lisa Richer: You do not need a job to get a job. I will tell you 100% hands down. And some of the clients that I worked with were C-suite, and they were like, Well, I can't leave. They're not gonna want me to go to another. And it came down to can you show up as your true, authentic, best version of yourself if you're working 60 hours and trying to find an appropriate next career move?

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Lisa Richer: Sometimes people said, yes, it doesn't usually work. Most times people said, No, so they've either kind of let go a little bit because they were working at 120% down to 100%.

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Lisa Richer: And some even left their job to do it full-time. Then, when they got those jobs, sometimes they would hire me back again to help them with that next career shift. Because, again, it was about meeting them where they are.

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Lisa Richer: And I had so much experience with these toxic leaders that were telling me to be something that I wasn't.

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Lisa Richer: and I didn't have the clarity, confidence, or courage

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Lisa Richer: to push back against it, whether it was myself internal, internal with that person, relationship, or that systemic struggle, I didn't have those pieces. And so I decided to do, like, the twofold, the corporate… corporate clients, or professional clients that worked in corporate.

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Lisa Richer: Some were entrepreneurs, and then really, the baseline of my business continued to be, because I had opened originally Bloom Special Education Advocacy in 2016, but then I stripped special education, I stripped advocacy, because I was tired of being met with this.

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Lisa Richer: And push.

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Dwight: that.

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Lisa Richer: Like, you know, no, not you, and pushback. So in the middle of COVID, I rebranded.

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Lisa Richer: And it was through that burnout.

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Lisa Richer: That's where that piece comes in is where I rebranded to journey to bloom.

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Lisa Richer: Neurodiversity consulting.

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Lisa Richer: neurodivergent success partner, and advocates so people can still find me, and then I opened my doors to these four avenues.

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Lisa Richer: because I had recognized as I started to heal from through the burnout, and over the last several years.

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Lisa Richer: That… As one of you said earlier on.

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Lisa Richer: I was impacted in every area of my life. And I thought neurodiversity is my lens.

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Lisa Richer: And if I can help each of these people when they choose to bring me their why, what would stop me from doing it other than society telling me I need to pick a more narrow lane.

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Dwight: Yeah, I want to applaud you for the way that you work through stripping away the things that didn't work. And as I was hearing it, I was hearing echoes of something that I recently discovered and fell in love with.

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Dwight: Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

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Dwight: wrote a book last year, 10X is Easier Than 2X.

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Dwight: And as you were describing your journey, I was thinking, oh my goodness, Lisa, you would be an excellent case study in exactly what he talked about.

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Lisa Richer: Interesting. Now you've got my, my, I'm circling that with a highlighter because I'm going to go back and look at that one.

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Dwight: You know.

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Maddox: This, this topic is, is very near and dear to our hearts. You know, Dwight is neurodivergent and I've never been tested. I don't, I, I don't have, I don't know. You know, I, I think there were, I did as a child, I realized that I learned differently than most of the other students.

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Lisa Richer: Mmm.

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Maddox: But… you know, I've never had any reason to go get tested.

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Maddox: We, we have… recorded two other episodes that are about neurodivergence. One of them we haven't published yet.

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Maddox: So you will be, you know, the third, and we have a couple of other possibilities. It's just near and dear to our heart, because in our exploration of the creatives community, it's…

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Maddox: remarkable what a high percentage of creative people are neurodivergent. It's almost like they

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Maddox: which came first, the chicken or the egg, you know? Are they creative because they're neurodivergent?

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Maddox: Or are they drawn to creativity because of that neurodivergence? I don't… I don't know.

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Lisa Richer: I would say, Maddox, that both are true.

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Lisa Richer: Both can be true for different reasons. Because sometimes it's.

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Lisa Richer: when the linear doesn't make sense to some neurodivergence, like, for me, the linear doesn't make sense at all. ADHD is one of my things. I also have dyscalculia, which is math learning disability. Figured that out through one of my kids, too. But.

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Lisa Richer: It's

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Lisa Richer: Those are things that were really hard for me. So I leaned into the writing and the self-expression to be able to articulate. And those are the things that lifted me up and made me feel good. And I was good at that.

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Maddox: And that was your form of creativity at that time.

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Lisa Richer: Yeah, and it still is. I still write. I'm still… I love to write poetry, I'm… I had that one chapter in a book, you know, that's in there. But the other side of this is.

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Lisa Richer: my young… so my younger son is more about, like, the creative writing and the psychology and the biologies and things like that, and you might think biology, no, but there's so many aspects of, like, where do they… where do they fit in, right? So it's that abstract

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Lisa Richer: Qualitative way of analysis that works with the two of us.

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Lisa Richer: My husband and my other son are more of the quantitative. But what's really interesting is, so my older son is autistic. Science has always been a thing for him. He absolutely loves it. Math was really hard for him, but he…

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Lisa Richer: but, like, algebra was really hard, but calculus is, like, one of his things. Like, it's really interesting, like, what I'm learning about him as he's now in college, but where I'm going with this is.

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Lisa Richer: For him, it was the linear of the math and the science, but then what he has explained to me more recently, because he started to get interested in, like.

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Lisa Richer: philosophy and theology and different things from how the parts fit together, and where they are disconnected, or where they have to be fluid, and where those two perspectives come in. And he's very much an empath.

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Lisa Richer: And so now he took Ap. Lang and

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Lisa Richer: AP Theology in high school as a senior year, or not AP, I think it was honors, and they did a lot of the philosophy pieces of it, and the theoretical, and the writings, and the conversations, and he was like, this is fascinating, how these parts fit together. So for him.

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Lisa Richer: now that creative side is kicking in. Now, that's not going to be for everybody. That's why I always say, when you meet one person that has whatever diagnosis it is, you meet one person. And if you met him at 4, and you met him now, people would never think it's the same person. Like, they know it's him, but there's just so much evolution. And it's through…

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Lisa Richer: tools and resources and interventions and supports, that's where I say.

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Lisa Richer: If you have a question, and you want to figure out what tools and resources may or may not help you.

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Lisa Richer: get the diagnosis. Because Dwight, you meant one of the two of you had asked about how did it later in life, how did that diagnosis kind of when I look back on that frame, right? When I'm looking back.

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Lisa Richer: And what it did do for me, while I didn't care if I was diagnosed, I didn't ask for it. The doctors, they just diagnosed me. But what it did do was it's allowed me to have so much more confidence and courage to speak up about these things, to say, oh gosh.

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Lisa Richer: I'm gonna take notes, because if I don't, I'm gonna interrupt you. Or…

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Lisa Richer: I can't get started on this project, because my head is in the middle, and you're just asking me for an overview of this deck, and I need someone to work with me. I need to co-work through that, and then you can pull whatever's important to you out. But I had to go through this whole evolution

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Lisa Richer: and I didn't realize it at the time. But the thing that's bound it together.

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Lisa Richer: is knowing that I have these neurodifferences, because now I don't see it as a deficit, I see it as just a part of who I am, and I can speak up and say, hey, this isn't gonna work. Dwight, I think when we first met.

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Lisa Richer: you had a background on, and I had said, like, can you please remove that background? I have visual processing disorder, and I can't, like, I can't focus with backgrounds on, and I say that in a lot of sessions, and people go, huh, I would never even have thought of that.

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Lisa Richer: And so, it's, you know, having the diagnoses and understanding myself better gives me the courage to do it, and that allows others to stop being sheeple.

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Lisa Richer: And start being people.

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Maddox: There's freedom in knowing what's going on with you.

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Maddox: You know, I know that when I read the Highly Sensitive People book, it illuminated so many things.

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Maddox: for me and helped me understand things about me that I had never understood. I have a question that's just absolutely burning me, and I don't want to run out of time before I ask it. And I want to ask it of both of you.

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Maddox: Because I suspect your answers will be very, very different, but…

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Maddox: Dwight's made references to masking, you've made some references to masking.

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Maddox: How did you come to the place where you even knew you were masking?

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Maddox: What? How?

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Maddox: I'm trying to think if that's the best way to answer the question.

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Maddox: I mean, that… how did you arrive at being able to say, oh, I'm compensating for something, and wanting the world to see something different about me than what's actually going on, because it will feel more acceptable, or safer, or whatever.

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Maddox: When did you realize you were actually doing that, and what did that generate? What did… I think this will be a question that our audience will really love to hear answers on this.

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Dwight: Well, I'll first remind our listeners of what you said, Lisa, and that is when you meet someone who is neurodivergent, you're meeting one person.

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Dwight: And so I'll describe a few of my own experiences, where I…

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Dwight: I know that I have a rich inner world, and I got to experience it very much as a child. I liked to… I somehow found myself always wanting to get more context, and really wanting to go deep on things, and figure out

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Dwight: everything about everything I encountered. And it's… it's something that's followed me into adulthood. I…

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Dwight: I love, I love cinema. I love movies. I love culture. I love literature and art. And I also like to.

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Dwight: find the origins of things. So, I have seen most of the iterations of the mummy. I have seen, every version of the.

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Dwight: the, 20s movie Metropolis, as they discover new footage for it.

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Dwight: And I…

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Dwight: love looking at patterns. You know, I I look at how you have your your framework that has three C's, and it's it reminded me immediately of another framework that's that also has three C's that I've been studying quite a bit about lately.

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Dwight: And I find myself having to…

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Dwight: filter myself quite a bit, because there's…

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Dwight: Such a flood of things that are going on between my ears that it would be overwhelming if I was to share it with the world.

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Dwight: And I learned that from the signals that I got.

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Dwight: From interacting in a way that was most comfortable.

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Dwight: And being told at very early age in many ways, some of them explicitly, and some of them just through the behaviors and the things that I saw, I picked up on the cues.

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Dwight: There's just a lot that I learned to sit on.

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Lisa Richer: All right. For me.

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Lisa Richer: I wrote some things down, and it surprisingly, Maddox, it came to me very quickly. And so I'm going to probably be the most concise I've maybe ever been.

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Lisa Richer: It was in therapy, at the intersection of burnout and unbecoming.

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Lisa Richer: So, it's through the therapy

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Lisa Richer: that I recognized how much I had been masking, how much I had been camouflaging, unknowingly, and that led to the anxiety and the stressors and the burnout. So.

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Lisa Richer: by giving myself permission to work with someone, but I had to be feeling psychologically safe, felt like I belonged, they were… they took it little pieces by little pieces. But it was that therapy, and it was at that, like I said, at the intersection of burnout and of becoming, for me, was therapy.

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Lisa Richer: and as I unbecame and be

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Lisa Richer: to become, right? And I found that clarity in the chaos.

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Lisa Richer: I became free to be me.

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Lisa Richer: And so, still, I recognize each day and in moments, or when I surprise myself with having a conversation that I never thought I'd be comfortably uncomfortable enough to have, that I no longer mask.

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Lisa Richer: I mindfully think about with intention.

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Lisa Richer: how I want to share things and what I want to say. We all get escalated, so we all say things sometimes in tones that we don't want to, but I'm very mindful

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Lisa Richer: But I'm no longer willing to hide it.

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Lisa Richer: or to push it aside.

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Maddox: So, am I hearing…

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Maddox: That all of the weight and the burden of continually masking was what was generating a

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Maddox: Bulk of that burnout? Are they connected in that way?

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Lisa Richer: I'm sure it is, because I was carrying everybody else's problems and the weight and the things that I was told I should be, shouldn't be, how to be, and then also the things that I began to believe I was supposed to be, because of how life shaped me, and

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Lisa Richer: what… when adults let me down, things that I was supposed… I thought I was supposed to be responsible for.

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Lisa Richer: and needing my therapist to specifically say, looking at me.

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Lisa Richer: you do realize that you should never have been put in that position to do that, or you do realize you were a child, and that adult was there to help you, and they didn't help you. And I still feel it in my heart, because I was like.

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Lisa Richer: Maybe? I don't know. And then we would sit in it, and we would do some conversation around how is my body feeling, or EMDR therapy, because she knew under the covers, under that layers of that onion.

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Lisa Richer: that there were things that either I had suppressed or that I had just thought were

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Lisa Richer: just how life was supposed to be, versus where I was supposed to be the kid, versus the… be the… be put in the position to be the adult. And I really wasn't able to parse those apart. The lines got so blurred.

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Lisa Richer: That I didn't necessarily know what was true and not true, what to believe, when to believe my gut, when not to.

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Lisa Richer: Until burnout. I could figure it out for my kids.

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Lisa Richer: But it wasn't until I started working with this therapist that I started to

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Lisa Richer: piece together also how I enabled my kids from time to time, things I would just shut down about, or enable with my family members, or whatever it was, or how I would go into the fight, flight, freeze. And… and I've learned to take accountability for the pieces that were mine to own.

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Lisa Richer: And to let go of the things that were never mine in the first place.

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Lisa Richer: and that goes back to then starting to heal my younger self and that inner child.

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Lisa Richer: and those things have allowed me to figure out when I start to feel dysregulated, not going back into a burnout cycle.

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Maddox: I love that.

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Maddox: you know.

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Maddox: We all know when we talk about how a parent models for their children, sometimes the good, sometimes the bad. Do you think that…

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Maddox: Your children learn aspects of masking.

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Maddox: by watching you model that? Do you think they picked up on that, or… or…

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Lisa Richer: Quite the opposite.

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Lisa Richer: because…

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Lisa Richer: They do recognize that I was doing it, though. They do recognize the version of they see me now.

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Lisa Richer: They realize that I was masking, that I wasn't necessarily sharing everything about how I was feeling or standing my ground in times that I really felt the need to. And so they're recognizing that.

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Lisa Richer: But what I did model for them and what I did gift them were their own therapists.

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Lisa Richer: And so the greatest gift that I can say I think will ever be what I've done as a mom is given my kids the gift to be free to be themselves and be authentic no matter what.

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Lisa Richer: Because I have always held space, sometimes too much space, I will admit that, but I've always held space for them to be who they are, sometimes to that detriment, because I was being mama bear too much, not letting them fall and get back up. But society can be mean.

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Lisa Richer: And so, I'm learning to step away from those things, too, and take accountability for the part I played.

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Lisa Richer: But my boys are fully and authentically themselves, and I consistently tell them, do not let society take away who you are. You are amazing humans. Everyone's not for you, and you're not for everyone, and that is okay.

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Maddox: Those those children are truly, truly fortunate.

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Lisa Richer: Thank you.

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Maddox: I mean… I think we all wish that we had gotten that from a parent.

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Lisa Richer: Well, I wish I had gotten it too. And I, that's where I give the gift of what I, my younger self needed and I didn't get in most avenues. And you can't blame the older generations, but you can choose to do it differently.

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Lisa Richer: Or you can choose to say, I did it because it was always done that way, and I chose to do it differently. I will admit, like I said, I did go overboard in some cases, because I didn't have anyone modeling it for me. I didn't know where those boundaries were. I just knew that I didn't want them growing up the way that I was made to feel.

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Lisa Richer: Many times unintentionally, but made to feel that way nonetheless.

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Dwight: know, there are people that are listening to this now who might be seeing themselves.

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Dwight: But their circumstances may be such that they are trapped in a situation where they have to do things a certain way, or they feel that they do.

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Dwight: What's a small, low-risk step that they can take toward freeing themselves?

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Dwight: That, well, you know, and I get that

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Dwight: Circumstances are gonna be different, but…

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Dwight: If you were to reach out to someone and give them.

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Dwight: Permission, if they had had a question as to…

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Dwight: If they can trust their own gut.

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Dwight: What gentle nudge would you give him?

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Lisa Richer: So, I would say…

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Lisa Richer: for, like, what things that work for me are those small, slow steps. So what works for one might not work for another.

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Lisa Richer: We have to be willing to begin to give ourselves the same grace and space that we give our friends.

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Lisa Richer: and our loved ones.

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Lisa Richer: And I didn't realize that earlier. I thought, like, what I was doing was what my friends and family needed.

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Lisa Richer: But what came to…

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Lisa Richer: what came to be the truth was me not taking care of myself wasn't helping anyone, especially not me.

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Lisa Richer: And so

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Lisa Richer: Giving yourself permission to take five minutes or even three minutes. Like for me, I started with this like focus calm app where it was like a three-minute morning.

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Lisa Richer: Set your intentions.

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Lisa Richer: And I was like, oh, I can't… I can't even give myself 3 minutes. I gotta get lunch ready, I gotta get the kids out the door, I gotta drive… you know, I had every reason why I couldn't give myself the same grace that I would ask someone else to go take 5.

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Lisa Richer: So it was it's through all this process. It might be put a journal beside your desk and write down whatever thoughts come.

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Lisa Richer: Read them, but don't judge yourself for them.

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Lisa Richer: Those are two really simple things that can start to shift your thinking without much effort.

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Maddox: Lisa, you said something that's universal.

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Maddox: And that is, you figured out that

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Maddox: Not taking care of yourself was not helping anyone else.

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Lisa Richer: you.

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Maddox: And especially not helping you.

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Maddox: And…

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Maddox: As we've said, every neurodivergent is one person, but what that one statement is universal. It applies to every human being, neurodivergent or not.

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Maddox: When we don't take care of ourselves, we can't take care of others.

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Maddox: Now, the way we go about learning how to take care of ourselves would be that one person at a time, very individual.

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Maddox: But it is… Truer words have have.

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Maddox: Not been said. I love the way you worded that.

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Lisa Richer: Thank you.

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Dwight: Yeah.

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Dwight: And I.

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Dwight: I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I see our time is drawing to a close.

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Dwight: Is there anything that you'd like to share with our listeners?

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Dwight: and parting.

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Lisa Richer: Ugh.

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Lisa Richer: Give yourself the gift.

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Lisa Richer: to heal yourself, whatever that looks like for you.

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Lisa Richer: I promise you your future self will thank you for it.

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Dwight: That is lovely.

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Maddox: Beautiful.

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Maddox: You know, and I just want to call out, you know, we always touch on community, but you have done such a beautiful job of covering that without us saying it out loud, but I do want to say it out loud, and that is, you've talked about your therapist, and you've talked about your children's therapist.

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Maddox: And you've talked about varying doctors that you've worked with, and then the different people in your life, and that's all community.

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Maddox: You know, we're, we don't do it alone. We never really do it alone. If we do it alone, we don't do it well.

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Lisa Richer: Yeah. We're not meant to do it alone. That's another thing that I've learned. And I knew that. I knew it because I never let anyone else do it alone.

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Lisa Richer: but I didn't give myself permission to ask for help. And if you're listening and you're someone like me.

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Lisa Richer: I look like I have it all together. I look like everything is great and golden.

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Lisa Richer: Don't let the book out.

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Maddox: Masking, don't you think?

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Lisa Richer: Well, yes, but it was unknowingly. Like, I didn't know it, right? I didn't know it. Now, I just openly share, I don't have my shit together all the time, and no one does. And if you're looking at a site, and you think you do.

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Lisa Richer: They're lying… you're lying to yourself, and you're lying to them, because It's not reality.

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Dwight: Right.

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Maddox: The saying my shit stinks because coming to me right now.

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Lisa Richer: There's a saying, you can polish a turd, but it's still a turd.

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Maddox: Yeah.

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Dwight: Yes.

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Maddox: Yes, no, no one has it all together.

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Dwight: No.

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Maddox: I lived for a period of my life trying to make myself and everybody else believe that I had it all together, and it really didn't work well for me at all.

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Lisa Richer: Usually doesn't.

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Maddox: Didn't work well at all.

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Maddox: Lisa, this has been amazing.

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Maddox: What a contribution.

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Dwight: Thank you very much.

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Lisa Richer: So much fun. Thank you.

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Maddox: And such.

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Lisa Richer: Time flew by. It was so fast.

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Maddox: It does, every time. It does. And such an honor to be

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Maddox: privy to the depth of your story and your family. Thank you for honoring us.

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Dwight: Yes, thank you.

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Maddox: So openly, it was… it was beautiful, and moved me on…

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Maddox: Several times through this hour has, has moved me deeply.

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Lisa Richer: Thank you. Thank you for the things you lifted up that I hadn't really fully connected the dots on, too. I learned

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Lisa Richer: some things about this journey to getting here that I hadn't fully connected before today. So thank you for that.

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Maddox: You know, it's amazing how many people come back to us with, sometimes not right away, sometimes it's a little bit later, with some statement that's similar to that. I connected dots in my life that I've never connected before, or I saw things from a perspective that I'd never seen.

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Maddox: There's something very magical about sharing

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Maddox: Your whole journey story, not just the little bits and pieces that we tend to get to tell people. There's something very magical about this process.

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Lisa Richer: And thank you for the gift that you give to everyone that listens, that comes on like myself, unscripted, authentic.

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Lisa Richer: That's where the magic happens in that messy middle of life.

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Dwight: us.

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Lisa Richer: When we choose to have the conversation for what it's worth.

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Lisa Richer: Take the pieces that make sense and let go of the ones that don't.

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Maddox: Yes, absolutely.

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Maddox: Thank you so much.