3w ago

Request: basic communication skills

Hey everyone, I'm hoping to get some advice for my partner.

She and I both have ADHD. She consistently has great difficulty communicating clearly and neither of us is sure what to do about it. Where an ideal narrative could be mapped in a straight line, hers would look like a series of loops, whorls, and jagged deviations as she frequently repeats herself, relays events out of order, changes topics inappropriately and without warning, omits entire parts of sentences, etc.

I love her so much so it pains me to say that it's bad. It's really, really bad, and I see how it frustrates her. It's interfering with our relationship as it makes even low stakes conversations agonizing and higher stakes topics often impossible. It holds her back in her personal and professional life. I used to have the same issue, but what helped me isn't really applicable for her.

Does anyone have any resources, ADHD specific or not, that might help her get started in basic, effective communication? She's such a wonderful, intelligent person, and I just want to help her succeed in being able to share that with others.

15 comments

I think the best thing to help her-because I have a friend who is strongly on the AuDHD spectrum and is helped a lot by his incredible girlfriend, is converse with her in a series of questions that creates external structure.
Not everyone's brain is the same of course, but the communication issue is that her brain is running faster than her memory can keep track of and her mouth hole can finish thoughts coherently. The information is there, its always been there, she struggles to parse it in a neurotypical way. What you have to do is take away the ADHD "decision matrix hell" that our brains get trapped inside and create a single track with limited offshoots so we do not get immediately overwhelmed and derailed.
Try sitting her down and simply ask a series of questions about whatever topic at hand. Who? What? Where? Why? Don't ask how because that can trigger a tornado of thought train processes. But get her to work inside of a structure that's simple. Each of those questions should boil down to an answer less than 10 words for most things. It might help to start this on paper too, leave her one to two lines for each statement.
This could help in professional communication too if she can start to practice answering everything in the four-W format, it will be a lot easier to keep things clear.
Afaik, there is only so much that can be done there without medication. Medication is the single biggest impact on ADHD (not so much other things, such as Autism, but ADHD definitely).
Otherwise, the main thing that will need to be trained is you. You could have her write out an outline of what she wants to cover and cross off each item as she gets through it, so the visual reminder helps her... but she won't remember to even start on the outline unless you remind her, right?
I am no expert, but this video helps me understand things: https://youtu.be/SCAGc-rkIfo.
- I like the outline idea! I suspect it's the abstraction that makes conversation difficult. A physical, manipulatable, visual reminder might help. You've given me an idea for like... a dry erase worksheet.
  Unfortunately, she's already medicated - the maximum daily adderall dosage plus strattera. I think she'd do a lot better if she added in lifestyle changes like improving her sleep hygiene, exercising, meditating, reminder systems, etc (that's what keeps me okay), but we need to get where I can discuss that with her without the conversation quickly going off the rails.
  
  Yes it will be difficult, and the medication I would presume would help clear the way for the upcoming changes, being somewhat necessary though frustratingly not fully sufficient to accomplish everything entirely on its own:-).
Glad to see she’s medicated, and that’s a bummer that it isn’t helping. One thing I make great use of (and I am well aware I will be immediately downvoted into oblivion for saying this) is an LLM. I can feed my disjointed and unorganized thoughts into it, and then ask it to spit me out a coherent run down of the idea I am trying to get across. LLMs excel at this because of what they are: Large Language Models. Self-explanatory. They are utter shite at numerous other things; for example, it simply cannot give me a mockup of what my kitchen cabinets will look like because it’s not a a Large Image Model. It can’t “see” the difference between 3 or 4 cabinets. But it nails the linguistic organizational tasks for me. I know this is lemmy, and I will receive much scorn for my use of this specific tool, but with my AuDHD this thing is a game changer when I am thinking faster than I can get the words out verbally.
- This is great! True, Lemmy is often staunchly anti-AI, but I think this is exactly what AI should be used for - enhancing people's lives and helping them overcome difficulties. I upvoted you with an extra hard mouse click to compensate.
  I wish I had thought of this before - I can communicate clearly but it can be so hard for me to be concise. I wouldn't use it for everything, but for "big ticket item" conversations, definitely. It could help us get over the communication difficulty hump, then we can start handling more on our own. Do you have any recommendations for particular models, methods you've found useful, or the like?
  
  Try out goblin.tools - it's a collection of tools specifically made for neurodivergents.
  
  I personally use ChatGPT and I am sticking with 4o as long as I can, as my experience with 5 was a dumpster fire. I’m pretty experienced with Copilot as well, but I find its language to be a bit rigid, and not always better than my own prose. That said, it’s what I mainly use at work, so that makes sense, and it generally is good at summarizing with very good accuracy. GPT does a decent job of approximating my own tone. I can’t stand Google and Meta, so I avoid them. I think I made an mistral account to give it a shot, or maybe it was anthropic? Anyway, I haven’t gotten into whichever one that was yet.
AuDHD here.
One thing that helps me a little bit is I learned that when I switch topics, I always try to switch them back at the end of the conversation, so that my brain goes through all the other associations again and when I missed something that's when I remember at least parts of it.
This is a me thing so take it with a grain of salt.
Btw it sounds like your partner's ADHD is quite strong and I've heard in extreme cases you kinda have to look into medication. I know it's not always the end all be all but maybe that's something to look into.
Otherwise I wish both of you good luck with your search for answers :)
- I like the strategy, it seems like you're tying everything up at the end instead of ping ponging back and forth, which I've been guilty of. Thank you!
- That reminds me of the kind of thing I do when I get off topic and forget what I was saying. I'll say "what were we talking about before this?", and given that my conversation partner has a decent chance of also being ADHD, we often end up remembering the thing that was a few topics back, and then tracing forward from there.
  It helps to retrace your steps in the conversation, I've found. It can also be helpful for helping me to remember the broader shape of my argument, if these topics being strung together is actually getting at a larger point
When I get stuck and the words aren't working, I like to have a piece of paper to draw on. It helps with physical location and orientation, but also social dynamic stuff. Blobs and arrows. It helps me get my point across.
Note: I've never been diagnosed with anything but I also haven't been seen by anyone who could diagnose me since the late 1990's.
she frequently repeats herself, relays events out of order, changes topics inappropriately and without warning, omits entire parts of sentences, etc.
IANAD but are you sure that this is ADHD? Was she formally diagnosed? It sounds like something else... and severe...
- Yeah, she was diagnosed years before I met her. Her ADHD is quite severe, not gonna lie. I used to have similar issues, where I'd forget details so I'd bounce back and forth between events in a narrative or I'd think I'd said something but didn't so my listener didn't realize I was referring to an unintentionally internal comment.
  I got communication and organization skills hammered into me over a decade in science, but that isn't her jam.
  Edit: if it helps, here's a decent article I just found about the issue. It's apparently not uncommon. https://connectedspeechpathology.com/blog/the-difficulty-organizing-thoughts-into-words-adhd-adults-guide

15 comments