So in today's audio, I want to talk about trauma, ADHD, and overlapping symptoms, which can confuse diagnosis or self-diagnosis. I just want to ensure that all stimuli subscribers are clued up and aware of this really because it's important, as I've mentioned before, I think, I'm quite late to the ADHD treatment party. And it's very much a growing area of interest and passion for me. But historically, I've had a really strong interest in treating trauma and traumatic memories, chiefly for using EMDR and cognitive behavioural therapy. So before I start talking about what the difference between trauma and ADHD is, and the overlapping symptoms, which can confuse things, let's talk a little bit about how trauma can affect us.So it's very common for us to have adverse experiences, whether they're really terrifying individual traumatic incidents, or perhaps more sort of what we call little T's, relational traumas. What can happen is we've got two parts of the brain where we store memories, we have this very basic, primitive threat system, which is our alarm. And that's the amygdala, which I talked about in an earlier audio, the amygdala's job really is just to sort of tell us that we're in danger or to be on the lookout for that, and it's very unsophisticated. And another place we can store memories is the hippocampus, which is an incredibly intelligent part of our brain that can tell the difference between then and now, or real or imagined. Sometimes, particularly when we are highly distressed, or really fearful or in terror, for some of us, the hippocampus can sort of shut down and not work very well in that moment. And that can be a problem because that means the memory has only got one place to go potentially, and that's to sit inside the amygdala.So let's just pretend that I had a car crash. And it was really traumatic, and somebody was really badly hurt in it and you know, we're pretty resilient creatures, we have the ability to push traumatic memories to the back of our mind as best as we can and move on. Let's just say I'm able to get back in the car, and I try to forget about it and then I hear a screech of brakes or get the smell of petrol or something like that, that might remind me, or drive past that stretch of road where I had the crash, and that might remind me of the trauma that I experienced. My brain might then say, oh, there's that thing that you haven't dealt with, and it might show me an image of that event or replay the video of that. So now I'm seeing images of it potentially and also, because I haven't processed that memory it's sitting inside my alarm system, my threat system, I am now also feeling in fight or flight, it's sent a message to my body to tell me that I'm in danger. So I'm seeing it and almost feeling like I'm back there in that moment.Now, that's kind of what we might associate with a flashback. So if you are having lots of those and this real sense of now-ness and you're feeling like you're back there and needing to avoid certain places that might trigger that, or some sort of trigger in relation to that smell, sound, whatever that is, along with sleep disturbance and yeah, just feeling like you having to really work very, very hard to push that down. And it's maybe causing you lots and lots of problems. It's very likely to be an unresolved memory. But you may want to also get PTSD ruled out by a professional. It's potentially very treatable, the nice guideline-recommended treatment approach in the UK is EMDR and CBT. And both have between an 80 and 85% recovery rate for single incident trauma. So I would always encourage anyone who's got any unprocessed trauma to go and get that seen by a professional and get that treated because it can be very treatable. The more trauma one has, the harder it is to treat but it's entirely only possible to treat people with unprocessed traumatic memories.I've really wanted to get that message across to those of you that feel like you have some unresolved memories, where there's a lot of heat there. So yeah, go and see someone, that would be my advice. No need to suffer in silence. But I wanted to address as well the potential overlap where the confusion can lie. So, people who are traumatized might have these sort of strong feelings of fear and helplessness. They might feel edgy and hyper-vigilant, they might avoid reminders and be really irritable or quick to anger, might be wracked with guilt and shame connected to those memories. Or they might experience strong dissociation. And ADHD, obviously, we start looking at you know, difficulty in keeping attention and focus, you might be fidgety, squirmy. We might not be able to complete tasks properly, interrupting, you know, all of these common ADHD symptoms that we've already addressed quite comprehensively in this program.But there's a huge overlap with the two, really, and that's around difficulty concentrating, and learning, potentially being easily distracted. Perhaps looking like you're unable to listen, or are disorganised. So those can all be related to sort of quite strong dissociation, which might be a coping strategy to deal with the trauma that's not yet processed. And yeah, I've already mentioned sleep disturbance as well. So, obviously, I'm not trying to create a sense of fear in any of you that you might have loads of trauma, but I will ask you to sort of look within yourself. And if you feel like there are memories that need dealing with and are not yet resolved, I can tell you, it's entirely possible that you can do that.My advice would be, if you have yet to get an ADHD diagnosis, is to perhaps potentially go and get those memories processed with a professional, with a CBT therapist or an EMDR therapist and someone who's got a specific interest in trauma, because you may find that those overlapping symptoms might abate and you may no longer consider yourself to be someone who's got undiagnosed ADHD. I just thought it was an important audio for us to record because for some it won't be relevant at all, but it may just help somebody out there. And it's a really, really important subject to me. Hope that helps. Thanks.