Dear Banananananner:

“It’s like the moment I detect that I have even an iota of unhappiness within a job, from that point on I can no longer force myself to stay… I have pretty bad social anxiety… I was recently diagnosed with ADHD-PI“-

– reads to me that the problem is that you have a low tolerance to discomfort/ distress. So, while other people are able to tolerate and endure distress for a whole week, a month.. a year and even years, you are able to endure it for a much shorter time. When a person’s anxiety has been severe and prolonged, it weakens the nervous system leading it to overreacts to small amounts of discomfort and distress.

This is what happened to me. By the way, although I didn’t seek the diagnosis and was not diagnosed with Predominantly Inattentive Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD-PI), I have no doubt that I fit the diagnosis since childhood and for most of my life.

anita

Dear  Bananananananer (this was hard to replicate 🙂 )

reading your post, this part caught my attention:

I have pretty bad social anxiety, my family moved more than 50 times before I even turned 18 and I consequently attended several different schools a year,

This is a lot of moving, specially for a child! If you were uprooted so many times from your friends and the things and people you got attached to, it leaves a mark. Perhaps that’s why you can’t keep a job either, because subconsciously you just don’t want to get attached to anything, knowing that you’ll be leaving anyway? The pattern of leaving things and people and projects might be deeply embedded in your subconscious mind…

• This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Tee.

Dear Bananananananer:

You are very welcome.  “Is there anyway to overcome this? Do you believe therapy could help me learn how to build that endurance for stress up, or is that something I will never be able to achieve?“-

– Yes, increasing your endurance to stress is something that you will be able to achieve, if you work on it. I achieved it myself. There is a concept in psychotherapy called emotional regulation: it is about learning how to lessen the intensity of distressing emotions (fear, anger, physical discomfort) and in so doing, endure (a lesser) stress  better. It is done in a variety of ways, such as the practice of mindfulness, as well as using CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) techniques and exercises. To simplify, it’s about taking a pause, or a break, between the Intense emotion/ discomfort (in the workplace, let’s say), and the reaction to it (walking out/ quitting). During this pause, you lessen the intensity of the distress.

I worked on it a lot in my CBT+ Mindfulness psychotherapy experience as a client, 2011-13, and I will be glad to share more with you, including certain exercises and techniques, if you are interested. You can give me an example of a time you felt distress at work: what were the circumstances, what were your thoughts at the time, your emotions, your physical experience, and we’ll take it from there.

anita

Dear Bananananananer;

You are welcome.  “I think I just honestly was most upset about the fact that I just didn’t know how to do the job I’d been training 4 weeks for. Maybe that’s perfectionism or expecting too much of myself? I’m not sure. I just felt like I should have known more, but I didn’t. And it made me feel unintelligent and frustrated, so I left“-

– the thought/s that went through your mind at the time seem to have been something like:  I should know more because I went trough the training, there is something wrong with my intelligent, I don’t seem to do anything right.

Is this,  paraphrased, the thoughts that went through your mind at the time?  If not, can you state your thought or thoughts more accurately?

Following stating your though/s more accurately, a CBT exercise would be to challenge each thought: to list evidence for the thought (supporting the thought to be true to reality) and evidence against the thought (supporting the thought to be not true to reality).. like in a court of law: evidence for and evidence against.

You are welcome to take it from here.

anita

You are welcome, Bananananananer, and thank you for your appreciation and wishing me well!

anita

Hi Bananananananer

I thought I have replied to this post. Unfortunately I have responded to another person instead. Sorry about that. The two of you have shared similar experiences so I thought the answer that I posted on the other thread might be useful here.

Sorry about that, as I was extremely tired after writing the response. It was my first one, and it was a late night so I was really tired and confused. I really wanted to share the experience with you so hope it could be useful in some ways.

–

Hi,

I am new to this forum and I was looking at some of the topics. I found yours from a while back and I am wondering how you are doing.

Hopefully things have worked out on your end. If not, and if you still want to chat about your experience we can do it here.

I saw some similarities between you and me in the sense that some of the jobs that I had in the past did not last long and I feel like I am such a disappointment.

However over time I have realized that people who share similar experiences are the ones that are often sensible (as opposed to “sensitive” to criticisms) and perhaps level headed, so we often find ourselves in situations where we have conflicts with the ones higher up. Also we are the ones that hold the truths and will stand our grounds, as it gives us inner peace.

But things don’t always work out and we find ourselves in unfortunate circumstances such as yours (e.g. even being “blacklisted”) and despite our best intentions we might be labelled as “antisocial”, “problematic” or “non-team players” trying to be the “backseat driver”.

Or “failing the job miserably” even though we see the values of our contributions.

For me I have found myself in a rut and I wasn’t making any progress despite my best efforts. That brought me back to a really dark place where I felt really depressed.

With the encouragement from my partner I knew that I had to break this cycle of shame and self-pity. I had to do better than that.

The first step I took was to recognize the fact that I didn’t fit into the organisations where I (or my parents or society) thought I would belong. I don’t need to be “higher up” to have self worth. I have learned the fact that the most outspoken ones on social media, and the ones with the most “successful” stories are not representative of all of our experiences.

The ones that don’t “fit in” would naturally “fit into” their own groups where they belong. This doesn’t normally happen on social media, for example, so if this is where you’re looking for support then you probably won’t meet the people of your kind. At least that is what I have learned.

You have to know where to find your people that will see your worth. Even if you don’t know where they are, by being yourself and trusting your gut, you are making huge steps that will lead you to the right direction.

It could be something as small as, for example, me walking around the neighbourhood to look for signs that someone is hiring, when everyone else is either on LinkedIn or sending their applications through the main recruitment sites which have failed me many times.

There are expectations for me to be there on par with the higher ups due to my academic background. However I choose to be simple and I want to work at a local store where I can make friends and be happy with my life. So I need to change my attitude, not only through the words that I use verbally and in writing, but through my mind.

By changing my mind I see where the opportunities are in places that I wasn’t even looking when I had too much going on in my mind. It turns out that the shop manager has been looking for someone for a long time but could not find anyone, probably because they do not have good marketing skills.

However I was the person that they’re looking for. It was a dream job for me, and I really wanted that. No one ever noticed that there was a small piece of paper on the shop window saying they’re hiring someone and the advert looked like scam.

Despite their horrible writing skills I thought there might be a chance so I tried and I got the job, something that I really liked. I am still not sure if I am going to quit.. hopefully not.

I guess you just need to focus on the good, and be honest with yourself about your situation. Look at the bigger picture – why is there a mismatch between what you see and what you think others would think of you?

What went wrong?

Have honest conversations with yourself and explain to yourself why that should or shouldn’t be the case. Don’t lie to yourself. Because if you cover it up with lies it will come back to you. You won’t like the job and that is one of the main consequences.

What is holding you back? What are the insecurities that you must face if you want to find something that you like and stay in the job?

I think you might have some answers for yourself. Sometimes it takes time to grow and learn about yourself as well.

I do not personally think that it has anything to do with ADHD as I do not agree that anyone should be defined, or limited, by any diagnosis that they have received at any point in their life which could well just be an opinion of an expert that is not approved by other experts that have other opinions