Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I am here today with—I’m gonna say dear friend, cuz we’re getting to that age where we can’t say old friends anymore—but with our dear friend Rick Green. And you may know him from so many different places. Right now, the best way to find him is on rickhasadhd.com, its website and his YouTube channel. And his funny is—we’ll talk more about it later. But we’ve been—Rick is one of the quintessential interviewers in the world of ADHD and with his comedic background, he brings insightful, conscious conversation and just the right dose of humor to understand ADHD and all its vagaries and all the things that come with it. Yeah, right.

Rick Green
Its complexities. Thank you. That’s lovely.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
It is—all the complexities. So, welcome. I’m thrilled to have you, and I get you all to myself. Diane’s got something going on today. Ava’s got something going on today, so we’re gonna—I’m gonna introduce and then, and then let’s see where we go with it. OK? OK. The topic is rejection sensitivity—or rejection sensitivity dysphoria, “RSD”—which has become increasingly discussed in ADHD circles in the last number of years. There’s not a ton of research on it, but what research there is correlates it very strongly with ADHD. I have some philosophy or theories about it. I can’t wait to hear yours. And it’s a topic that comes up a lot, but again, also a lot of people don’t wanna talk about because there is a sparsity of research around it. But I saw that you and your newsletter did something about it, and so when I knew we were talking, I reached out to Rick and I said, “Hey, you wanna talk about RSD?”

Rick Green
Absolutely. Yes. Yes. And then you said no, and I was so rejected. And so, yeah, we have the YouTube channel, and we’re supported by our patrons through Patreon, and we have chat rooms where they’re interacting, talking—a wide range of topics—pets and you name it. Anyway, one of the things that’s come up and people have glommed onto or jumped on board or just gone, “Oh wow, this—this is so me,” is rejection sensitive dysphoria. And as you say, it’s not an official diagnosis yet. It may just be part of ADHD, but I think it probably applies to anyone with autism as well. That’s another whole topic of the autism–ADHD, where it’s both—which I think I probably have. I have a degree in science, so, you know, there you go. And so the question becomes: why do we have this strong reaction? People are saying it’s physically painful. And I think there’s a bunch of reasons for it. One is we hear a lot more rejection. We get a lot more negative messages. I’ve forgotten the doctor’s name, but he has a study suggesting we hear 20,000 more negative statements directed at us—feedback—than our peers, our non-ADHD peers, the neurotypical ones.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And what’s the—what’s the timeframe on that? Just gotta know.

Rick Green
Over childhood. Through your childhood. Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Let’s pull back one second. So rejection sensitive dysphoria, RSD, is—what? First, let’s define it.

Rick Green
It’s an extreme reaction to any kind of rejection threat. It can even involve that there’s no intention to be rejecting or negative or hostile, but it’s taken that way. So there’s a hypersensitivity. It’s like being bruised on your finger, which you don’t normally notice. And then you bump it and it’s—“How? How?” So everything hurts more. Everything is more serious and more depressing. And that’s part of, I think, the emotional rollercoaster of ADHD—the crashing. “They said this about me,” and it’s like, it’s like being a teenage girl, drama queen squared—you know, add that up.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Well, and so what you’re saying—and I wanna highlight it—is it’s feeling the pain of a sense of rejection, but it’s also feeling the pain of rejection even if it may not have actually been a rejection, but there is a fear or feeling of being rejected, right? And so it’s not just when, you know, when your friend says, “I don’t wanna sit next to you,” but it’s when, “I bet my friend isn’t sitting next to me because they don’t want to.”

Rick Green
Right.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Right—it’s the stories.

Rick Green
Or, “We could use more chairs, I guess. Nobody wants to sit near me.” It’s like, “What?” You know, so that’s the challenge with it—part of it is perception. But, you know, we can all have that brief thought. It’s that it becomes crippling. It becomes paralyzing. And you end up shutting down—you don’t know what to say. Most people, if they’re being harangued by a stranger or by anyone—especially, actually, a loved one—it’s confronting and it’s hard to think straight. This happens all the time, and it ends up—if you can’t handle rejection—are you gonna ask people out? Are you gonna take risks? Are you gonna try new things? Are you gonna change jobs? The rejection can be so strong you either just become a people-pleaser or you shut down. You know, there’s fight, flight, fawn, and faint—and it’s either faint or fawn, and just go along and never—suck it up and don’t let anyone know, but you’re mortified. And I know a couple of people who have that, where someone will say something and they just—that’s it, they’re gone for the evening.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So what we’re understanding in recent years is that this tendency to be really hypersensitive to a feeling of rejection is very common in the ADHD community. And, to Rick’s point, it can show up in a lot of different ways and it’s got a lot to do with perspective—or with perception, with how people perceive they’re being interpreted—and then there’s the story. But because we have—we’re more likely to experience actual rejection, redirections, redirections, redirections—there’s this tendency to begin to interpret a lot of the stimulus coming towards us in life as a rejection, whether it’s intended to be or not. Is that accurate?

Rick Green
Yeah. And I think we all do that. A neurotypical person does something goofy in class at one point to get a laugh and it doesn’t go well. That doesn’t affect the rest of their life for months. From that point on, they’re not creating a huge story. So that’s the issue—it’s an overreaction, and it’s so painful. That’s the term people use: it’s physically painful. “My chest hurts, I thought I was having a heart attack,” and so on. So it’s severe.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So this is not just embarrassment, folks. What we’re saying is that people have a physiological response to a sense of feeling rejected, right?

Rick Green
If you’re with a bunch of your girlfriends and somebody takes a shot at you, it’ll—like, ouch—but you laugh it off. Whereas this is the inability—because with ADHD, it’s always now, now, now—there’s no real perspective. There’s no “This is a friend, they’re gonna be in my life for years.” It’s just “Right now they said this.” So over—understand—tend—be over— It’s— The fact that there is so much anger in the world today, we’re being constantly pumped up. Even the Weather Channel says the stuff about big stor—tornado or earthquake destroys—where is it? It’s on the other side of the planet and it was 6.1, but they have a shot of stuff falling off shelves at a 7-Eleven and it’s like, this is not news, but it’s dramatic and it’s shocking. Every incident of road rage—now it’s on YouTube. You can find them and then watch 10 in a row and see if it doesn’t change your view on people.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And so, what you’re speaking to, it almost sounds like, is this underlying tendency towards catastrophizing?

Rick Green
Yes, absolutely. And it’s easy to be— The overwhelm partly also just comes from the amount of stuff that’s coming at us. I always advise people: turn off the news, take a break from your phone, because it’s—you know, used to have the nightly news. Now we have 24-hour news, and no matter what happens—“This just happened.” Well, it’s not—“This just in” is “Breaking news! Break, break, break.” The other thing that’s happening is, politically, it’s become this overwhelming your opponent with accusations and misinformation as a really powerful rhetoric tool. It’s rhetoric—it's called the Gish, and it’s after this televangelist, last name Gish, who would defend creationism. And the way he did it was by: “What about this? And what about that? And what about this? And what about that?” And so you have politicians now who are, “Oh, they’re this, and I’m working on that, and they’re—how’s that?” And it just—there’s no time to react to anything. They just spew for five—my five minutes—spew, spew, spew. None of it can be fact-checked. Your turn—how do you react? So you’re so pumped up.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So there’s this deer-in-the-headlights energy that we’re living in—this world where there’s so much information happening all at once and coming at us, and it’s really hard to process it. And so we have a tendency to put this lens on it that processes it in a way that puts us in a negative light.

Rick Green
And the media’s changed and everything’s changed. So that stuff gets—it’s the broken telephone. But there used to be newspaper editors and reporters, or magazine editors, who would—you know, it’s a “They found cold fusion, unlimited energy.” It’s—They reached a certain point where, for a millionth of a second, they actually achieved the breaking point. Great. But the headline makes it sound like, “Boy, next week we’ll be able to use all the electricity we want.” And rarely does the payoff in the video or in the news item, or whatever it is, match the reality. It’s always edged, and so on. Anyway, the effect is our cortisol levels are constantly pumped up, and people are not sleeping well, so they’re tired. It’s hard to focus, and ADHD is not just difficulty managing our attention and restlessness, but also managing our emotions. So there’s just—there’s so much happening. Reality TV, which has nothing to do with reality, but kids are modeling their lives on it. I saw a statistic: half of teenagers—their career goal is to become an online influencer on Instagram. Half of kids.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Well, OK, devil’s advocate. In my day, half wanted to be a, you know, superstar or a baseball player or like—you know. Is that so uncommon for people to look at the people in the public domain and say, “That’s what I wanna do”?

Rick Green
No, it’s not. I mean, we all have heroes growing up, but it’s not—I grew up on Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, so that’s what I wanted to do and ended up doing.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
You did, right?

Rick Green
Yeah, it worked out great. But an influencer is just—you’re trying to sell stuff and promote stuff. It’s like—and what do we know about you? We were in a restaurant yesterday, and a woman—we had lunch with the kids, went on for a good hour and a bit—and there was a woman next booth, beautiful, made up, just scrolling. And I happened to catch a couple times, ’cause the way she would move her screen, which my eye would be drawn to. And there were videos of women—beautiful women—long hair going. And she was like, “What truck?” It’s like, “Oh my God.” Anyway, I just—I feel like we’re bombarded with stuff and it’s so immediate. Everything is so immediate.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So, we’re gonna take a quick break and we’re gonna come back and talk a little bit about how to navigate some of this. Right. To my conversation with Rick Green. We’re talking about rejection sensitivity dysphoria, and all of the things that come with it. And, you know, Rick’s just been talking about all the reasons in our common society these days that we are kind of bombarded with things that add to our sense of rejection, that add to our sense of overwhelm and the difficulty in processing information. And the time to process information. I think it’s all coming at us so fast that we often don’t have the time, and maybe part of the rejection sensitivity is that tendency to just reflexively interpret something as a negative because we actually don’t have time to process and think through what might really be going on before the next bit of information hits us.

Rick Green
Yeah, and I think we are more prone to rejection. We messed stuff up. I spilled it, making lunch. I dumped stuff all over the counter. It took me 10 minutes to wipe it up, and I’m cursing my clumsiness. I’ve just done a video, or we’re just working on a video about ADHD and clumsiness. There’s just this constant sense of frustration and failure. And, you know, as you well know, when kids come home from school tired, and they can explode at their parent and then come back 10 minutes later and say, “Let’s go to Dairy Queen,” and it’s gone. But it’s this explosion and that’s that. It’s always now, you know that. And if you say, “Why were you so screaming?” I’ve seen adults do this. An ER nurse—her husband said, “Why were you screaming?” “Whatcha talking about?” And it was that she’d get off her shift, come home, and vent for 20 minutes, and then she was fine.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I have techniques for that. We’ll hit that in a second, but—so, what I’m hearing is we have—people with ADHD often struggle with managing emotions.

Rick Green
Yes.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Right. We have a dysregulation of emotion issue that’s—an executive function that we may not have learned to manage yet. We don’t have a lot of good role models for it in the public space right now.

Rick Green
It runs in families.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
We have a culture that is contributing to this now—and this immediacy of kind of assault of information. I say to parents in my community all the time, Rick, we are not raising kids now in the world we grew up in, and we’ve gotta stop holding them accountable to what it was like when we were kids, because that world is not here anymore. We are in a whole new world. So we’ve got a whole lot of intensity happening in the world. And then you add to that this kind of environment of constant redirection, correction, redirection. We make a lot of mistakes. We fail—if we’re lucky, we fail forward—but we have to redirect ourselves a lot and we get redirected a lot. And that contributes to this negative self-talk and negative self-concept. Did that kind of capture?

Rick Green
Yeah, and I think there's also the not being able to long-term and think ahead. There's a reason a lot of people with ADHD end up at 60 years old and nothing saved, and—or even 40 years old and no money—but I'm gonna have a house and kids, and so what are you doing about that? Oh. It's that, so that thinking—so again, it's that immediacy. So the solution: there's a bunch of things that work, apparently. Medication is helpful for managing emotion. The same ones that you would take for ADHD and, for me, yoga and meditation. I'm currently doing hypnotherapy, which is really interesting. Basically going inside, relaxing, and then a series—you’re listening to an audio that gives you all of these statements that you process and take in and—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Once a day down and giving yourself space to process.

Rick Green
Yeah. 30 minutes a day listening to this and then occasionally seeing the hypnotherapist. And she's wonderful.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Well, and the context I would give for what you're describing—in at Impact, we call it activating the brain. You could do meditation—like yoga. You could do it in all kinds of ways, but the notion is to recognize that because it's a brain-based condition, we've gotta pay attention to how are we supporting our brain in helping it be successful in dealing with what it's dealing with.

Rick Green
Yes. And also just recognizing this is what's going on, that not everybody else is. I think that's why it's caught on so much is—I mean, everybody doesn't have this where they're shut down for life over—or whatever—over some reaction or rejection, or anger that comes at them. And the trick is to be able to, as it's happening, to notice it. And the key, from everything I've read in my own experience, is to be able to step back just enough when the other person is talking or yelling, is to step back and just notice: my chest is tight, I'm sweating, I can hardly speak, I don't know what to say, my mind is racing, now it's paralyzed, I can't even think straight. But that trick is to find that first moment, just that little, uh, little eloquent of consciousness that, ah, OK, this is what's going on. And then there's a couple of tricks that I've used once I realized—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Can I just say something about what you just said? Because the key to managing emotional emotions, to regulating your emotions that Rick's speaking to, is that we can't manage it if we don't recognize it's happening in the first place. So, you know, we teach it as a five-step process or whatever it is, but slow down. The first step is always to notice and recognize. So what you're saying is: look for your tells. What are the things that tend to happen in your body before you start reacting? Do your palms get sweaty? Do you feel that thing on the back of your neck? Do you feel your chest getting tight? Does your voice start to go up, or voice start to go down? Does your breathing change? Begin to notice what's happening in your body that tells you that you're beginning to start feeling reactive to something?

Rick Green
Yeah. And then the easiest thing from there is deep breaths—three or four as they're talking. Just stop trying to interrupt or get your point of view in. And this is where I think it's really powerful to simply detach. Stop listening to what they're saying and pick a spot on their face and just find that interesting and focus on that for a moment, just to give yourself time to breathe. And then once you've got that focus, if you look down, I’ve found if I look down, then I come back and look when a person's really upset. If I look up, I look for the fear, because people—anger comes from fear. So when you look for it—that the boss who's shouting about what everybody in this office is doing and how far beyond—it's because he's scared to death of losing his job. He's scared. Fear drives all of this. And so that looking for the fear tells you, "Oh, they're not in control. I could be the one in control." And it gives you that opportunity.

Now, it's hard to do this when someone's yelling at you. And here's what I've suggested, and what I've done myself: you put on a show that has a lot of screaming and yelling. There's a British show—at home with the something where others—it's this dysfunctional family. It's gone on for like five seasons, and I couldn't watch it. It was just constant yelling. But if you watch that show and turn the sound off, you can see the fear, and then you could start adding your own soundtrack, which is anxious, can do. And when someone's yelling at you, tune out what they're actually saying—"I'm a big boss person, I'm..."—and you just do the goofy—"and I'm a little scared, and now I just scream and explode like I'm..."—and if you start looking for that, it just gives you this—you don't wanna smile; that's gonna trigger them. It does. You kind of calm down.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Before you get to "and then," OK. I'm slowing it down because this is really—so the step one is to notice you're triggered in the first place. Step two is—what the language you're describing, we call it "reclaim the brain," right? You gotta downregulate, you gotta get to calm, take the deep breaths, slow your brain down. What you just described—making silly voices in your head—almost sounds like what they used to say when you were talking to a group is "imagine them all in their underwear."

Rick Green
Yeah, right. But then I get excited—you know, it was very awkward.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So, reclaim the brain. And then what you're saying is begin to change the story in your head, right? You've got a story that's, "Oh my goodness, they're coming after me." And when you reclaim your brain, you can begin to say, "Wow, they're really afraid. They're really scared. They're really having a hard time. They're really angry." But it takes it from "it's about me" to making it be about them again. Is that correct?

Rick Green
Yeah. Or they're using this anger cuz they know it'll work on me—cuz they're manipulative—because they're family or friends or your boss. And that's how that boss operates. And not just with you. With everybody.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Everybody, right?

Rick Green
Yeah. And then you can come back with responses, and there's a guy named Jefferson Fisher who's wonderful. He's a trial attorney—I follow him on, I guess it's Instagram—and he has a whole bunch of suggestions about what to do when you're under attack, especially from narcissists, but from anyone. And the most powerful thing you can do is silence. Just—[pause]—and let it hang for 20 seconds. And that person, especially if you're in a group, and everybody—the all the power goes from this person over to you—just you listening. And so, we're vegan, we're leaving a party, and some smart guy goes, "Well, hope you don't pass out on your way to your car if you have enough strength."

Rick Green
I was like, yeah, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s a vegan. Jackie Chan is. Half the Tennessee Titans are vegan. The world’s strongest man, Patrik Baboumian, is vegan. I’m as strong as an ox cuz they’re vegans too. But anyway, I could come back with all kinds of stuff, and I just bit my lip—it was so unlike me. Then, of course, the other thing you do when someone’s ranting is just: “Wow. I can see you’re upset. Anything else?” “Well, yeah—” “Wow.” (Not “You’re right, that’s bad,” just “This is really upsetting you, isn’t it? Anything else? And what else? Is there anything else?”) You just keep asking until—“Anything else?”—no, they’ve got nothing else. And so, again, this is hard to do when you’re prone to rejection sensitive dysphoria, but it is something you can practice with a friend. And, as I say, turn it— that’s why I like watching a show and just being able to watch the argument. You have no stake in it cuz nothing they’re saying matters to you.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, I used to do— for those of you who have kids who have a tendency to be on the negative side and they come home complaining about everything— I used to do exactly what Rick was saying. It’s like, “Really? Wow. What else? What else? What else?” until they were done complaining, and then they would kind of shift into what was going on that was right, cuz eventually they’re done. You know, the— Sorry, there’s one more thing I should say.

Rick Green
One more tactic: if someone’s losing it, you can also just say, “Let’s take a break,” or “I don’t respond to that tone,” or “Let’s come back to this later,” or even, “You know what, why don’t we take a minute? I need a minute.” Just so you— you know, because people can get violent or they can end up saying stuff they— well, they may not regret, who knows? But—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
We might regret.

Rick Green
Yeah, that’s— I think there’s always that. Be aware of your own safety—which we’re not necessarily good at reading people, so that’s tricky.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. So, you know, we started off talking about rejection sensitivity and ended up in this conversation about all of the things in the modern world that can really trigger us. And that it’s perfectly reasonable, in some ways, to feel like it’s targeted at us if it actually is targeted at us. And then there’s that added tendency to make us think that it’s about us even if it’s not. Right? So we’ve gotta look at, “Is this really true?”—is one of the questions, right?

Rick Green
Because so often in the past it was us. You know, we did forget, we did lose, we did whatever.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And then what I hear you saying is that once you recognize, “Oh, I'm starting to become reactive here,” it can stop the spiral of going down into that rejection sensitivity by stopping the spiral, kind of downregulating, reclaiming the brain, making up a new story about what's going on, instead of that tendency to default to a story that really just aggravates and makes things worse.

Rick Green
Yeah, the catastrophizing was— I do that all the time, still can slip into that. It's basically, “What's the worst that could happen?” And I'm learning to— and I've learned to— go, “What's the best that could happen?” So my daughter's just bought a condo. It's a huge investment. She's terrified. She shouldn't be. She's an amazing person, you know, service director for a major airline, handling 300 passengers at once, but she's always, “What about this? And what about that?” Well, we'll deal with that. We'll handle it. And so it's that phrase of “What's the best that could happen?”— is the phrase I often think is the one to remember.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I love that. So, so Rick, we need to start wrapping the conversation. Yep. Let me tell people how they can find out more about you. I think I started off and I'll, I'll bring it back again. The one and only Rick Green, everybody— he has, you can find him at rickhasadhd.com (https://rickhasadhd.com). On his website, the biggest place is go to YouTube: Rick Has ADHD (https://www.youtube.com/@RickHasADHD). There's so many great resources. If you do not already subscribe to the Friday Funnies, it is one of the things I look forward to every week in my week, and it is a constant conversation amongst my family group chat, by the— um, so you can get the Friday Funnies, subscribe to the newsletter— all of that at rickhasadhd.com (https://rickhasadhd.com). If you wanna support the work that they do, Patreon is a great place to do that (https://www.patreon.com/). And, um, cannot encourage enough the amazing resources and— in terms of how to live and thrive with life with ADHD.

Rick Green
And that YouTube is so important for us because when our— when we started our documentary, ADD & Loving It?!, which was running on PBS, made us— sustained us for four years, five years. And then we had the shop and all sorts of things. And now it's really just the channels. So that's the make or break. You know, you must get this too, where people— you'll give a talk and people say, “Oh, that was so valuable. I got more out of that than 12 sessions with a therapist.” And it's like, yeah, right. And how much did you pay for the— the 12,000— you know, whatever. It's like, uh, anyway, it's funny.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. Yep. Support the content producers. Vote yes. That's the subliminal message here.

Rick Green
Yes.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Because a lot of us are out here doing really powerful work and, um, and it's hard to keep doing it for free the way that we all do.

Rick Green
Yeah, absolutely. But it has to be sustainable at some point. And, uh, that phrase— every time I hear “I don't know how I can ever repay you,” it's like, I know.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Got some ideas for you.

Rick Green
Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So, so Rick, as we wrap up this conversation, is there anything you wanna highlight that you've hit, that you wanna, like, really double-click on for people? Or is there something we haven't talked about that you wanna share before we wrap?

Rick Green
I—I think the biggest thing, and this may just be me lately, just because of what's happened in the last little while in the news and around the world, is to turn off the news— you've gotta protect yourself. You know, people say, “Oh, I can't watch horror movies.” They're embarrassed by that— “Oh, I can't watch scary movies.” My take on that is: how can somebody enjoy watching a horror movie with gore and blood and fright? Like, there are so many other things you could be putting into your brain that are so— and I'm gonna give you a quick recommendation.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Good.

Rick Green
This is, I think, was the most— the most wonderful read I've had in ages; it's called Humankind by Rutger Bregman. He's a Dutch historian, and he takes apart all of the legendary stories. You know, the famous— the, what's it called, the electric shock therapy, that— and you could turn anyone into a Nazi torturer within five minutes just by having somebody in a lab coat say, “Keep pushing the buttons and sending electric shocks to the person.” Scream— was completely wrong. Completely. The results were faked but published. The press ran with it. The guy who came up with it later admitted, “Uh, yeah, it was nothing.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Fake news is an old story.

Rick Green
Yeah, well, it's— back in the day. You know, and the other one— Kitty Genovese— the news, you know, the woman who was murdered on the streets of New York in the early sixties and nobody— 32 people watched. No. Thirty-two people were questioned by police. One or two people figured out what was going— and they came— she actually died in the arms of a friend. Anyway, don't give—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So, bottom line, what's the point that you're saying here?

Rick Green
The point of all this is that the world is not as bad as you think, that people— there are people out there you have to protect yourself from and— you know, nasty and gossipy at sabotaging your career. But by and large people— well, they just do— they wanna do well. It's in human nature. And that book— I love it because it shows through archaeology, even, how we've always been wired this way. So, I think that the thing is to take a break and just— you— it's easy to read what's going on in the world and be frightened. It's like, I can just go and look out the bathroom window at the trees out the back— it's OK here, you know? And we need to keep doing that, getting out in nature and so on. Beautiful.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So as we wrap this conversation, is there a favorite quote or motto that is coming to you in the moment?

Rick Green
“It's not about you— it's their stuff.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah.

Rick Green
You know, it just— you know, someone who's holier-than-thou isn't just holier-than-thou with their daughter or their sister. It's everybody.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And that— and that's their burden to carry. I love that. I appreciate that. My version of that is maybe not quite so clean, so I'll clean it up to say, other people's stuff is their stuff. I don't usually say it with the word stuff. Yeah. Like— like other people— when people are having a reaction and you're reacting to it, it's their story. And you don't have to bring your story into their story is what I'm—

Rick Green
No, exactly. Yeah. It's— and it's easy to do it, it's natural to do it. But it's— it's not helpful.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
OK, we gotta— we gotta wrap this. I hate to do it, cuz, you know—

Rick Green
Yeah, me too.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
—out for hours. But everybody, my guest has been Rick Green— the one and only Rick Green. rickhasadhd.com and YouTube and Patreon are where you can find him— one of the greatest leaders in the ADHD community in terms of really identifying the solid resources and interviewing people who really understand what they're talking about—

Rick Green
Thank you.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
—and demystifying it in a way that really helps people understand. So thank you for your work.

Rick Green
Thank you.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Thank you. Before we go, just one moment. To those of you listening, take a moment and check in with yourself. Slow it down. What are you— what are you taking away from this conversation? What's your insight? Rick took a nice deep breath, right? What are you aware of in this moment before you leave? What are you thinking about now that you weren't thinking about half an hour ago that you might wanna take forward with you into your life this week? And as always, my friends, thank you for doing what you're doing for yourself and for your kids, for tuning in, listening, becoming the conscious parents and providers that our kids really need. At the end of the day, you make an extraordinary difference. Take care, everybody.

Rick Green
Lovely.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Have a great week.