ADHD and the art of friendship

Juggling everything that ADHD throws at us can make us struggle in our friendships. Trouble with executive function affects our ability to communicate and remember things. And the shame that comes with ADHD can lead to us hiding our challenges and pretending to be someone we’re not. 

In this episode, host Cate Osborn welcomes a good friend of hers, Elizabeth Kilmer. Elizabeth is a clinical psychologist and researcher in game studies. Join Cate and Elizabeth as they talk about what it means to be friends with ADHD and how having friends who “get it” can be a lifesaver.

Related resources

• Making friends as an adult with ADHD

• Understanding trouble with social skills

• Elizabeth’s website, elizabethkilmer.com

Episode transcript

Cate: Hey, everybody, I'm Cate Osborn. You might know me as Catieosaurus. And welcome to "Sorry, I Missed This," the show where we talk about talking and all things ADHD, intimacy, communication, and relationships. 

Today I'm asking the question, how do you be a great friend with ADHD? To answer that question, I've brought on my very special friend and incredible guest and very, very smart doctor of psychology, Elizabeth Kilmer. 

Being seen, being heard, being validated is an incredibly powerful experience for anybody, but I think especially if you have ADHD, I don't know about you, but for me, I spent a lot of time feeling like I had to be somebody else and that my very presence was often wrong or inconvenient. And so, when I started making friends as an adult, and especially friends who have ADHD, who understand ADHD, I felt seen in a way that I had never felt before, and that was a really great feeling. 

But it was also exhausting. And I carried this weird guilt and this weird embarrassment about my difficulty making and keeping friends, because now I had people in my life who understood me and they were excited to know me, and it was great. But at the end of the day, I was still managing all of my executive functioning issues. I was still managing my life and my home and my work and all of this different stuff. 

And then one day I was talking with my friend Elizabeth Kilmer, who you're going to hear on this episode a little bit, and she said, "Well, I get it, though. I understand what you're going through because I'm going through the same thing. I know what it's like. I know what it's like to be tired. So, why are you trying to show up and be somebody that you're not for me? Because I know what it's like. You don't have to do that." And I went, "Oh, that's how being friends works." 

And so, I'm really excited to bring you this episode, not only because I get to introduce you to my fabulous, intelligent, wonderful, creative friend Elizabeth Kilmer, but also because we have a real conversation about what it means to be friends with ADHD and what it can feel like to be without friends with ADHD. 

And so, if you're a person who struggles with friendships like me, if you're the person who forgets to text back and shows up late to brunch sometimes, I see you, I validate you. Welcome to the party. Navigating the social and emotional and executive functioning issues necessary to have friends is difficult, and so if you ever feel a little bit bad about that, I just want you to know that you're not alone. Anyway, I'm so excited to welcome my dear friend and psychologist, Elizabeth Kilmer. Let's get into it. On with the show. 

Elizabeth Kilmer, welcome to the show. 

Elizabeth: Thanks so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. 

Cate: Can you please, in three sentences or less, tell me how to friend good with ADHD. Go. 

Elizabeth: OK. Three sentences or less. Oh, I've burned so many of my sentences already. I thought you were going to say words instead of sentences and it threw me off.

Cate: Yeah, I was going to say five words, and then I was like, three sentences. I just, I, like, waffled, so really, that one's on me. 

Elizabeth: I would say clear communication and setting boundaries and having an understanding about how to figure out what you need and what other people need and how to squish that together is the most important.

Cate: OK. So, OK, so I'm curious, you are a psychologist, you work with people. And I want to mention very specifically you do a lot of work in gameplay and therapeutic gaming. So, like D&D and teach RPGs to help people build social skills and you know, like intimacy around the table, that kind of thing. What are the ways that ADHD can just impact friendship? How does that show up in our lives?

Elizabeth: When we think about ADHD, we often know, like OK, difficulty concentrating and difficulty remembering tasks and difficulty sustaining focus, especially when things are boring. Well, if we think about how we build relationships with people, we are often engaging in shared activities and we are having conversations with people, which means we need to pay attention to what they're saying. 

And sometimes the things our friends are saying are really, really interesting. And sometimes they're kind of boring because we're all people. And so that can make it harder for us to engage. 

We also know that individuals who have ADHD are impulsive, so we can make poor decisions around the things that we are saying. We cannot, we cannot have this space where we start talking before our brain has really thought about what we are going to say, and sometimes that can get us into trouble. 

So, it has to do with the basic building blocks of friendship around spending your time together, sending cues back and forth to each other that we care about the other person, and we find them interesting and engaging, and being able to do the kind of reliability things that we build friendships on. 

Friendships should not necessarily be this "You do one thing and then I'll do a favor for you, and then you do a favor for me." But that reciprocally around giving and receiving help and support and feedback are part of that friendship process. And if your friend is really good at remembering to text you back and you text them back once every 1 to 3 months, that can send some really mixed signals and create a lot of challenges in building those friendships over time. 

Cate: I'm exactly guilty of that. Like, I'm a person who is so excited to meet people, so excited to get to know people. I love being at the cocktail party and being like, "You have the coolest job I've ever heard of. Let's chat." And then, like a week and a half goes by and I realize that my schedule is already full. I have no time on my calendar. I've got all this stuff going on. I don't have time to start a new friendship. And now I've just sort of like, ghosted out of this person's life. And that makes me feel guilty and bad. 

So, like, how do we know ourselves, know our challenges while still making friends and supporting the people around us? 

Elizabeth: I want to acknowledge that I'm a clinical psychologist. I do this for my job, and also I overbooked myself to just a ridiculous degree this week. And that is the thing that I will continue to do for the rest of my life, because we have this now, not now piece, right? Of "Oh man, that is in the future and I have time in the future, until all of a sudden the future is the present." So, there is going to be that piece of you're not going to necessarily fix all these pieces, but you can figure out how to more effectively manage them. 

And some of that can be that upfront conversation with an individual. Sometimes when we are having a cool conversation with somebody at a cocktail party, we don't have to become best friends with them or friends with them at all. And so, starting to realize like, "Oh, am I having a really nice time and this is a really nice moment, or is this moment something that I want to invest the time and the energy and the effort into building into something other than a moment, but building it into a friendship?" 

Cate: How do you make that decision of like, "Wow, this is a really good conversation, but I don't maybe have time to have this person in my life all the time." Like, how do you make that distinction in terms of like wanting to build friendships and wanting to, you know, expand your social circle while also being, shall we say, tired?

Elizabeth: Yeah. So, I think some of that has to do with how good does this feel in the moment? We met on a panel, and then we had the opportunity to meet at a conference, and then at that conference we spent a whole lot of time together for several days. And so, that gave us a lot of time to figure out, like, "Oh, do I actually like this person? Or were they just fun to be on a panel with? " And I will happily be on other panels and see them in the future. 

You may or may not always have time to devote to figuring out whether or not this friendship is a good fit, and I think figuring out how to effectively communicate that to other people. So "Hey, it was so nice to meet you. I really hope that we get the chance to connect in the future, but my months are really busy, so I'm not sure that there's not really anything I can commit to at this time."

That can send a clear message to someone that you generally have good vibes and would like to spend more time with them. And also you are not saying, "Oh yeah, I'll get coffee with you next week." I recommend for other people, it's something I'm practicing for myself, is starting to think about the way that you can communicate "I like you, and I think this was a fun conversation" without necessarily making a plan that you are likely to not be able to follow through on. 

Cate: You're so right. And I really like the idea of having those sort of like built in boundaries of I know that I'm a person who tends to rush into friendships, so I'm going to make a point of saying, "Hey, I'm really busy right now, but I hope to see you around at the next convention that maybe we can get to know each other a little bit better." Like, I think that's really smart and a really actionable item of don't go to the party without reminding yourself of those boundaries that you're setting up for yourself.

One of the things, Elizabeth Kilmer, that I love about being friends with you is that we are two neurodivergent people in the world. And so, I am just going to shout you out. Like I'm just going to tell everybody what a wonderful friend you are. This patient and beautiful human. I forget that the phone exists. I forget to text like I am that friend and I've always been really embarrassed about that. But like Elizabeth and I like, we stay in touch. Like we've done, like, physical therapy check-ins. We've done like, you know, like, "Oh, I'm walking my dog." We're going to do, like we find those moments.

And so, I guess I didn't really have a question. I just wanted to compliment you on being a really excellent friend. But I will turn it subtly and imperceptibly into a question by saying, do you think that there's anything to the sort of tropey meme of neurodivergent people work really well with other neurodivergent people? 

Elizabeth: I think neurodivergent people absolutely work really well with other neurodivergent people, in part because our brains might make a little bit more sense, even if I don't get your brain exactly, it does feel similar to some of the things that I've experienced. Or we've also had these experiences of being very misunderstood by broader society, feeling like we don't fit in, feeling like we're always on the edges, and that is something that we can kind of share, have this kind of shared bond. 

I think we have also, a lot of us had to learn extra social skills, like we have this idea that, autistic individuals and ADHD individuals may struggle with social skills, and so, we have to teach them more. But there's also a space in which, so, like my partner is autistic and a psychologist and like, has a communications minor because he was trying to figure out, like, how do people communicate? Like how do we how do we figure this out? And so, he has, in a lot of ways, way more knowledge about communication than most other humans, because he has worked so hard to gain that knowledge. 

Cate: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: And we have this kind of natural propensity around like direct communication as well as he's got all of this information about how you should communicate that, I think has led to me and then like recommendations that we see with friends like more conversations directly about like, what does this behavior mean? 

And I think that kind of conversation, and this is something where tabletop RPGs, I think, have helped to also normalize this in spaces where we have these session zeros, we are talking about informed consent. All of those kinds of pieces allow us to go, "OK, hey, I sometimes really struggle with text messages. How soon do you expect me to text you back? Is there a way where you can let me know that this is something that is urgent versus just a cool, friendly chat?" 

Cate: I love that you brought up consent as part of friendship, because I think it's really easy to sort of put consent in like a basket with like romantic and sexual relationships, but there's actually consent and communication involved in forming healthy, strong friendships as well as, you know, like romantic relationships. So, can you talk more about how a person with ADHD can use consent models and consent tools in order to be a better friend? 

Elizabeth: Absolutely. And I think this ties into something that I think we're going to talk about around shame as well and accountability, which is when we are talking to somebody, it is important to understand that any humans — this is not just neurodivergent humans — are not always going to have compatible needs and compatible wants and compatible abilities and compatible desires. 

And so, it's important to have a conversation about, "Hey, these are the things that I need, or these are the things that I come with. Is it going to work for you? Is this something that we can agree on?" And it's really important to me that in my friendships generally, people text back within an hour or within 24 hours. 

And I think a lot of us who have spent so much of our lives trying to bend over backwards and fit into boxes that do not fit so that we are deemed worthy of love and respect and companionship, often tend to just contort ourselves in ways that are really unsustainable. So, we might say, "Oh, texting within 24 hours is really important. Like, I have to do that now," and you're probably going to burn out on that friendship pretty fast, and you're also probably not going to do it successfully enough where it is going to meet the needs of that other person. 

So, having those conversations around what is working and what isn't, and also being able to acknowledge some of your behaviors that might be annoying without getting caught in those kind of shame spirals of "This thing that I do is probably likely to be annoying to a lot of other people." 

Cate: I'm curious about letting people go. When you get to that point where you're knowing yourself a little bit better, you're knowing your needs, you're realizing that, you know, this friendship is maybe a little bit more emotionally draining than you're looking for, or a little bit more complex, what do you do in order to facilitate like a kind and emotionally mature friendship breakup, maybe is the right term? 

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think it obviously is really going to depend on the situation. If this is somebody you talk to every day and suddenly you want to never talk to them again, or you only want to talk to them once a month. I do think some kind of clear communication is important. 

And this does not mean that you call the person you talk to you like every few months, occasionally up, and you say, "Hey, I actually don't like you. You suck." No thank you. There are times in which it is appropriate for relationships to kind of just fade out, especially if you're not needing to set a boundary or there isn't any kind of animosity. 

But there may also be times in which friendships need to change, and some of that is the person is totally fine, but you don't have the capacity that you thought you did for that amount of texting or that amount of communication, or that your interests have changed and you really want to focus on something else. 

And so, thinking about how you can understand for yourself why you want this to change, and then how you might be able to communicate that to somebody else. Because sometimes it may be, "Hey, I think that you're really cool. And I'm realizing that I need to refocus my life in other areas right now. And so, I think I'm going to be communicating a little bit less" is perfectly fine. 

Cate: It's really interesting to me that you can also draw a direct parallel between that rejection sensitivity component and sometimes keeping people in your life once you kind of have grown out of that relationship, or the relationship has shifted and changed because it feels bad for people to be hurt, it feels bad for people to be upset or angry or mad at you. But it also, I think there's a real vulnerability to looking at a relationship and saying, "Hey, like, it's been great being friends, but I'm in a completely different place in my life." It's curious to me. 

Elizabeth: It feels like a failure. 

Cate: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: And I think that something that we have a huge problem with as a society in terms of, there are certain things that you're allowed to do for a while and then stop doing, and that's considered fine. School, right? Like you graduate and then you're done with school and then you move on. But if you start a business and you run that business for a while until it stops sparking joy, it stops being fun, and you decide to shut that business down, that is considered a failure. 

And so, we see the same kind of things when it comes to friendships. And the reality is it is very, very normal for our values to shift over time, and our friendships just shift over time. We often want to see that people have some stable friendships that follow them, kind of for a longer period of time, but the intensity of those friendships may change, right? 

I might have friends that I have had since middle school, and we check in with each other every once in a while, but we're not having as intense of a friendship because we don't have the same kinds of shared interests. We're not always in the same life places. 

So, thinking about really reframing what does success in a relationship mean, and what does it mean to have had a friend that you don't continue on with? I think the one place I think that this happens for people where they're able to be like, "That person was great, that friendship was great," and then it's not anymore is like the camp friends.

Cate: I am a person who, especially like in my friendships, there's sort of a compartmentalization that happens where I have convention friends and I have theater friends, and I have magician friends because of all the, like, weird jobs that I've had. But it's not necessarily that I'm always reaching out to my magician friends. Sometimes it's more of the group chat lays dormant until somebody has a question about, you know, like card tricks or whatever. 

And so, that idea of, yeah, you know, we're summer camp friends, it's fine. But it doesn't have to be more than that. We're not expecting more than that from each other, and that's OK. And we've both sort of consented to that. And we're in agreement and on the same page. 

Like, those friendships can be really rewarding because it's not like the kind of thing where you have to constantly be doing the work to maintain and spending that emotional energy, but when you see them, it's fantastic and great and amazing. That's how I feel about you. I just think you're so great and it's like, I don't get to see you very often, but what I do, I'm just so excited. 

Elizabeth: I know, I feel like we just, we continue to stay in touch because we find reasons to have our work overlap. 

Cate: Yeah. We're like, what if you just stop by my podcast? Would that be so crazy? 

Elizabeth: But we also had, I remember very distinctly, because this was a space where we met and we had this explicit conversation where I was like, "Hey, are we friends now? Like, is that what is happening? Are we just work colleagues?" Because it's that space where there's a lot of ambiguity at the beginning of friendships and the beginning of romantic relationships where it's like, I don't, what's what's happening?

Cate: OK, I love that you said it's not, I'm getting like, I'm getting heated. I'm getting heated up. That is the thing that I struggle with so much because I am outgoing. I'm enthusiastic. I love learning people's stories. I love hearing about the stuff that they do. But a lot of times that can come off as "And we are best friends now." 

Elizabeth: Yes. Or "I want to date you."

Cate: Yeah, yeah. Something that I like to do with all of the guests that we have on the show is ask them if you know, a magic information wizard appeared and granted three pieces of information to everybody with ADHD about this topic, what do you want people to take away? What do you want people to remember? What do you want them to know? 

Elizabeth: And this is a wizard. So, can I implant this knowledge into people's heads? And it's like there, this is now internalized knowledge for them? 

Cate: Yes, I rolled a 13. So, however much information the wizard gets with a 13, that's how much I would like. 

Elizabeth: It's got enough. I'm not trying to implant terrible knowledge in people's brains. It's just good knowledge. I think the first thing I want people to like, really know and internalize is like you are deserving of love and respect and having friends and connections like the way that you are right now, without changing and being better and using planners, are deserving of friends and love and respect. 

The second piece is you, like everybody else on this planet, do things that are annoying sometimes and that cause problems, and you might be more likely than other people to do a particular set of things that can lead other people to think that you don't care or that you're disrespectful. And it's important to know and acknowledge that. But that doesn't negate the number one where you are deserving of love and respect. 

And then the final piece is have clear conversations about what you want and what you expect and what you think is happening, even if it feels really awkward because it is way more awkward to not have those conversations, and then six months later, find out that you've been accidentally dating someone. 

Cate: Has that happened to you, Elizabeth Kilmer?

Elizabeth: Not six months later, but I have had a number of times where I was like, "We had a cool interaction" and they're like, "You were hitting on me the whole time." And I was like that… 

Cate: Like, no! 

Elizabeth: I was like, "How?" And they're like, "Well, you were really interested in what I was saying." And I was like, "I don't." 

Cate: That's not how any of this works. OK, well, you are a psychologist. You're a very fancy, a fancy person with many smart ideas in your brain. So, what I would like to know is what do we do about it? Like what are the how-tos? What are the strategies that we can employ when we're either having these conversations, setting ourselves up for success, or even just figuring out the weaknesses that you know, we have when it comes to supporting friendships and moving past them? That was so many questions. I asked you 17 questions in one question. Good luck. Go. 

Elizabeth: I mean, basically you're like, what do we do? What are the strategies? 

Cate: Yeah, what do we do? What do we do about it?

Elizabeth: I think if you are somebody who has a safe person that you can talk to you, whether that is a therapist, whether that is a friend, whether that is a family member, about what are the kinds of things that you do that work really well in relationships, like what are your relationship strengths? And also what are the things that can cause challenges. 

And again, when I say safe person, I mean person who is able to say like, "Man, it really sucks that you don't call me back, and I'm always the one who's reaching out and calling you," without you just devolving into a shame spiral. Because we want this balance of like understanding that we cannot be perfect and we cannot be everything for everyone. 

I used to have this ad for mayonnaise from a newspaper, no from a magazine, and it's stuck…

Cate: What? 

Elizabeth: On my... Yeah, and it said "We're not for everyone" or "Not everybody likes us. We're not ice cream."

Cate: Oh, OK.

Elizabeth: And I saw this as like a 16-year-old. And I was like, "Oh, not everyone has to like me," and then continued to spend the next like 15 years trying to get everyone to like me. 

Cate: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: Obviously. But I have that reminder. So like, you are not going to be everything for everyone and that is OK. But understanding and like really spending some time thinking about journaling, talking to people about what are the ways in which you are an awesome friend? Are you the person who they can call when they are really overwhelmed and really stressed? Are you the kind of person who is always down to do a last-minute plan? But please do not plan anything in advance. 

Are you the kind of person that is so good at like delving into like really ambiguous text messages? Or are you the person who's always down to play games and make silly voices, right? Like, what are the strengths that you have? And then what are the areas that you need to be upfront around or you need to kind of plan around? So, are you somebody who tends to be really reliable until you fall off the face of the planet? Are you somebody who maybe needs to, like, set a calendar reminder that your friends exist? 

Cate: I do that 100%. I do that, and it literally has saved so many friendships, and I feel no guilt about it because I'm like, this is, for me, it's literally an accessibility tool. It's so helpful. And so many people look at that and go like, "That's unhealthy." And I was like, "No, because it helped. It helps me so much."

Elizabeth: It's so weird that people would say that. Like, I went to my, like, aunt-in-law's house and she has like this piece of art on the wall that is all of her family members like birthdays and like important anniversaries and dates and stuff like that is displayed on her wall in this, like, cute little Etsy way and like, she is the person, she's the family member that I always get a text from on my birthday. I always get a text from her. 

Cate: That's so nice. 

Elizabeth: So, that is a great strategy. I think the key thing that has helped me stay in touch with friends, because most of my friends do not live in the same space as me, is figuring out ways that we can communicate that work with my brain. So, I am so good at talking on the phone for a couple of hours. If I'm on a run or I'm walking the dog for the 18th time that day. I am not good at talking on the phone and paying attention and being engaged if we are sitting on a Zoom call for three hours, or if I'm supposed to be just like sitting somewhere and talking. 

Now, that's not going to work for everybody. Some people are going to say like, "Oh man, there's road noise sometimes. Or like you occasionally have to talk to your dog. And that makes me feel disconnected to you." So, that's a thing to navigate. But I think most of the time we've talked in the last several months, I have been on a run or walking the dog. 

And so, figuring out what are those kinds of pieces that allow you to fit those things, and it means I'm less bored when I'm walking the dog, and I'm more likely to run the amount of miles that I told myself I was going to run.

Cate: I was going to say, you've absolutely heard me congratulating my dog for going potty in the backyard. So, that's just part of it, is I'm just gonna yell at my dog in the middle of this, and that's fine. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. 

Cate: I do want to circle back to one thing. I'm curious, as a person who works with people who deal with this kind of stuff, what is your advice or suggestion for stopping that shame spiral? "Oh, my God, I'm a bad friend. I'm a terrible person. I'm the worst in the whole world." What's like step one to saying, "Actually, let's roll that back a little bit." 

Elizabeth: Step one, depends. It really depends on the person. It really depends on your history. It depends on your own experiences with shame, your own experiences with therapy, your own experiences with language, with cultural stuff. So, like very, very big disclaimer like I am not everyone who's listening to this podcast's therapist. Do not follow this advice if it will not work for you. 

But I think for me, something that has been helpful and is helpful for a lot of my clients is taking a second to like, distract yourself if needed, right? So, regulate first. If you are really dysregulated, you're probably not doing any good thinking. You're probably not going to like CBT your way out of this through a worksheet because you're dysregulated, you're sad, you're upset. So, like find ways to support yourself. Whether that is take a walk, stick your head in the freezer to get some cold air on it, whatever that looks like for you. 

And then think about like, "OK, this thing is showing up for a reason. The shame is showing up for a reason." Like emotions are kind of like a smoke detector. Smoke detectors are annoying. They go off when they're not supposed to go off. They're loud. They're awful. We hate them. We also very much need them. When your smoke detector goes off in your kitchen, you probably don't just ignore it because it's really loud, and you also probably don't run out of your house and call the fire department without checking to see if there's a fire first. 

We can acknowledge that that smoke detector is annoying and we can acknowledge it has a purpose, and it is helpful. If we go into the kitchen and there is no fire, we're also not going to let the smoke detector keep going. We're going to like push the button and make it stop. We can do the same kind of thing around our emotions and around that shame spiral. We can go, "Oh, this is showing up because it's probably important to me. My emotions are trying to tell me, 'oh, this matters. And there might be a fire, there might be a problem.'"

Then we can say like, "OK, how big of a deal is this? Is this other person upset? Is this part of a pattern? Is this something that I've already figured out how to fix, or do I need to spend some time fixing it?" And we can like really engage with like, what is the actual problem, and your emotions can hang out there the whole time, right? Like they can hang out there and they can exist and they can suck, but we don't necessarily have to change them. Like you can feel shame and also go through this. 

And what we often find is like when you realize like, "Oh, the other person isn't mad at me. And I was so anxious about this and so upset about this that I went ahead and put calendar reminders in three different places. So, it's very unlikely to happen again," we may find that the shame itself dissipates. 

Cate: It's such a good analogy. It's perfect. 

All right, everybody, it's time for what I'm going to call for this episode, Cate's Corner. But we all know that we haven't decided on a title yet. But, Elizabet, so here's what happens, is we asked our lovely audience to send in questions, comments, concerns that they had, and I pick one. And then I share it with our guest, and then we talk about it a little bit. And that's, it's like Delilah, but with ADHD. 

Elizabeth: I love it. 

Cate: That's good. OK. OK. 

"Dear Cate, as an adult with ADHD, I find it challenging to maintain friendships. I often feel like I'm walking on eggshells, worried that I'll say or do something to upset those I care about. Sometimes I don't notice that it's been days, weeks, or even months since I reached out to my friends. Not because I want to, but because my brain gets overwhelmed. And if they aren't right in front of me, it's hard for me to remember that they exist." 

I would just like to say I literally said this exact same thing less than five minutes ago. Anyway. "I recently had a close friend tell me that my inconsistency makes it hard for them to rely on me. I love my friends and I feel like I can be myself around them. But what do you do when being yourself means forgetting your friends or being bad at staying in touch?"

Elizabeth: There's a bunch in this, but I think one of the key pieces was that space of like getting the feedback that you're unreliable and knowing that the kind of unreliability is not coming from a lack of interest or a lack of caring. And what I would recommend doing is having a conversation with this friend where you got to be really careful. You can't come off as super defensive because that will not go well. 

But like acknowledging like, "Hey, I can understand why you might feel I'm unreliable. Can you help me understand the specific areas in which the unreliability is a problem? Is it that, you know, we make plans and then I cancel them? Is it that you don't trust that if you called me in an emergency, I would pick up the phone? Like, where is the unreliability happening?"

Because it could be that the thing that that friend needs from you is actually something you are totally capable of providing. You know, I might not be great at responding to text messages all the time, but if I get two phone calls in a five-minute period from a friend, I'm going to move hell and high water to answer that phone as quickly as possible. 

And so, that is a space in which I am likely to actually be pretty reliable. But if that person doesn't realize that that is the thing that needs to happen, they're saying they don't answer text messages as very well, therefore they wouldn't answer emergency phone calls that may not be happening. 

It may also be a space in which that friend may not understand that the reason that the lack of communication is happening is because of that forgetting. Having that communication about "This is not about our relationship. It's about my brain." And then also, "This is what I'm willing to do to help mitigate that," may be really helpful. 

Cate: Something else that I have noticed in a lot of the work, and sort of speaking that I do, is that it's really easy for, especially women with ADHD, to say "I am a bad friend" or "I am bad." I think I said it on this episode like I'm not great at making friends. 

But I think sometimes using that linguistic trick that is in the past "I have not been a good friend. You know, like I am guilty of occasionally being a bad friend," because then it's like "I'm not a bad person. There isn't something fundamentally wrong with me. It's that in the past I have done things that I regret, and now I can look at those, I can learn from those, and I can move forward. Hopefully, having learned my lesson and being a better friend going from here." 

Elizabeth: I don't know that I would even say that in the past I've been a bad friend necessarily. I think that really focusing in on the behaviors "In the past, I have not texted you back within 24 hours. In the past, I have not responded," because two pieces, right? We don't want to internalize it like "I used to be a bad person, and maybe I have the hope of not being a bad person in the future," but also getting on the same page about like, "What are we upset about?"

Because so, so many challenges and breakdowns in relationships happen because I say that you're being unreliable and then you work so hard to respond to my text messages. But what I actually meant is that you show up five minutes late every time we get coffee. 

Cate: That specificity is super important, I think. Elizabeth Kilmer, thank you so much for being here. I'm so appreciative of your insight and your advice and your general continued positive presence in my life. Can you do me a favor and tell our dear listeners and our dear viewers where they can find you and find your work? 

Elizabeth: Thank you so much for having me. I've had a blast. You can find me on the website that used to be called Twitter @DoctorKilmer, I'll spell that out, K-I-L-M-E-R. Or my website, which is ElizabethKilmer.com. I don't have a whole lot of presence on social, but I do exist in those spaces. You can find me doing work at takethis.org, or at Save Point Behavioral Health where I do my clinical work. And generally, if you Google me, I will show up. But do not expect super fun engaging social posts because you will not get them. 

Cate: Thank you for listening. Anything mentioned in the episode will be linked in the show notes with more resources. Have a question, comment, burning story you'd like to share? Email me at SorryIMissedThis@understood.org. This show is brought to you by understood.org. 

Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. Learn more at Understood.org. 

"Sorry, I Missed This" is produced and edited by Jessamine Molli and Margie DeSantis. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright, who also mixes the show. Ilana Millner is our supervising producer. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. For Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick. And I'm your host, Cate Osborn. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to be kind to yourself. Remember to be kind to others, and I'll see you again soon. 

If you heard my dog barking in the background, no you didn't. This is a very professional podcast.