 Okay. So we've got another video here, ADHD and autism relationship accommodations. How to get your needs met by how to ADHD. I think I've said that already. I'll have a look at this thing. Um, as I said, well, as you know, I'm much more of like mostly just an autism person. Uh, but anyway, I do know quite a bit about ADHD as well. Um, so it'd be interesting to, um, hear what this lovely lady has to say. Hello, Brains and hearts. There are accommodations available for ADHD at school and at work, but what about in relationships? According to Dr. B at take this relationship accommodations are reasonable adjustments we make, which allow the other person to meet our needs. I think this is something a lot of us do in relationships kind of already and automatically to a certain extent where we know that we have a collaboration. Maybe we need a lot of touch and we know that the other person has some thing that gets in the way of meeting that need. Maybe they get overheated really easily. And so we turn on the air conditioning so that they can meet our need for guttling and we don't really even think of it as an accommodation. But there are times when we don't understand why our partner isn't meeting our needs. And I can relate to that one a lot. I have a heat like real, real easy. Like I quite like cuddles, but it does it does tend to like get a little bit too much. I think I'm like a human fairness. That can happen a lot in neurodiverse relationships. If one person is neurotypical and the other person has ADHD or one person has ADHD and the other person has autism, it can be really frustrating because the the needs are there and they're not being met. And it's really hard to understand why from both parties and we might jump to some conclusions like, oh, they're not listening. They don't care. They're just not trying hard enough. My needs don't matter to them. There are a lot of stories that I have within my dating experience where I was either dumped or chastised or things ended because I had difficulty reciprocating emotion in a way that was recognizable to the other person. And once I was diagnosed with autism, you know, everything started clicking and making sense. So there is definitely like the emotional component of relationships can be fairly difficult. I think mostly because of alexophymia, I would say. There is there is those aspects of cognitive empathy, which is, you know, to do with indirect communication, which sometimes can be an issue, but it's only an issue when direct communication isn't like established in the relationship. Like the alexophymia component can be quite hard because it makes it really difficult for the person to set boundaries in their moments about things. So there could be something that someone says or someone or that someone does that actually is not something that you like and not something that you want. But you only know until after the after the fact, you know, maybe a couple of days, couple of hours, couple of weeks, maybe that actually, you know, that wasn't that wasn't nice for me. And you put a boundary in like afterwards. And a lot of people are not very understanding about that. I don't think because on the one hand, it kind of makes them feel like they can't trust like our words about things. Like when we say that something's OK, that it is actually OK. But also from our side as well, it can feel quite pressured, you know, to to produce a response like we're not given enough time to process it, which can be quite difficult. And also understanding how our feelings just in general, like when someone asks like, how are you doing or how do you feel about that? You know, sometimes sometimes we got we got a bit of a bit of a delay on it and we need to take time to kind of process how we're feeling about things. Alexophymia is fun. This term of relationship accommodations came out of my bad experiences dating where I needed help essentially bridging the gap. So the other person could recognize what I was trying to do in terms of meeting their needs. A lot of us try to explain our needs harder or expect the person to try to meet them harder. And we know at work and at school that that doesn't work. It's usually not about lack of effort. In the rare cases where it is about lack of efforts because somebody's gotten frustrated and given up. But for the most part, there is some sort of impairment that's happening that's getting in the way. And so I think relationship accommodations are a great way to kind of bridge that gap where it's like, OK, I understand why you're struggling with this. Also, I understand that I have these needs and these needs need to be met. So what can we do? How can we figure out how to get these needs met? And that's a really important point that she's she's bringing up because I think there is a lot of situations within relationships or friendships or parental relationships where, you know, the issue is primarily caused by a by a like a miscommunication between two parties. You know, perhaps they don't understand too much about it. The other person doesn't want to, you know, you tell them something. They don't really want to do a lot digging into it. They just kind of make an assumption. It's I think it's good to. You know, within a relationship to like try and understand where someone's coming from and what they mean before making a judgment, especially if it's about something serious, because, you know, quite often our initial reactions or feelings about stuff can be wrong. And especially when you have a different neurotype to another person, it's like the chances of that happening is usually quite high. So you've really got to kind of temp yourself, especially when that the when there has been or there is an issue or an occurrence within a relationship, you know, and every everyone does have their own needs. And it's I think sometimes trying to think about how to meet them together is is definitely like a it's it's also it's good for actually achieving like someone's needs being met. But it's also I think it's quite a bonding and like trustful thing to do with somebody, you know, trying to problem solve things within a relationship, you know, yes, feelings are hard. My autistic boyfriend didn't text me for 24 hours, hurt my feelings. Yeah, I can't I can't say I can probably say that that that is, you know, I'm I'm really bad at texting usually. I think it's it's a lot to do with that kind of, you know, needing space like that social battery, I think as well. And needs and expectations and challenges, things that are getting in the way of them being able to meet a person's needs in a relationship are different. So take all this is a grain of salt. But just hearing from my community, going from my personal experience, the research that I've read, there are some things that each year's tend to struggle with in relationships that do need accommodating. I'll talk about a few of those and then I'll pass it over to Dr. B to talk about some of the accommodations that might be useful for autism and alexithymia. First of all, for ADHD, we tend to struggle with planning and prioritizing and cleaning and organizing anything that doesn't engage our brains. So mundane, everyday tasks are really challenging for us. It's not that they're hard to do physically. And that this is also something that autistic people can experience as well, executive functioning issues, you know, big jumps in hyper focus for things that we're really interested in. Other kind of executive functioning related things, like just general life, things that you have to do can be can be sometimes really taxing. Although for some people, they might have another condition that does make that the case. It's that it's mind numbingly tedious for us and our brains do not want to focus on it. It can be really hard for us to stay on top of everyday chores. And we might need to gamify things. We might need help prioritizing one accommodation that can be really helpful for somebody with ADHD is if there are things that need to get done and there are some things that are more important, making it clear, hey, this is what the priority is, this is what I need help with, or this is this is the important thing that needs to be done. Also, side note there, if if this person is also autistic and has pathological demand avoidance, maybe don't do this tip, it's probably going to be like produce the opposite response, not going to lie. You know, giving them an order, this is the priority. You must do this. PDA senses. If only three things can get done this week around the house, these are the three things I would love to have happen. A lot of the time strategies that work for neurotypical people don't work for ADHD. We kind of have to tweak systems and do them in a way that works for us. And so a reasonable accommodation might be letting somebody with ADHD do the thing that you're asking them to do in the way that works for them or when it works for them. An accommodation can even be something like hiring a professional organizer or a housekeeper to come every once in a while, putting aside money in the budget for treatment for the condition, having accountability, having check-ins. So instead of, hey, get this done sometime in the next three months, and then the person with ADHD is like, cool, that's not now and totally forgets about it. Be like, hey, remember, we need to get that gift sometime in the next three months. That doesn't mean that. Cool. That's not now. Straight back into the hyperfixation of the day. Somebody, right? Nobody wants to be nagged. Nobody wants to be parented and parenting your partner is really not healthy for a relationship. Accommodating differences and accommodating needs, making sure that those needs get met should be a collaborative effort. It's not about one person trying to figure out how to fix the other person or get the other person to do the things that they need done. It's working together. And so instead of seeing the person that you're with as like a problem, letting all this resentment build up, you can see it as, oh, this person is trying to meet my needs and their ADHD is getting in the way. How can we accommodate that together? So one of the things that is a very good way of putting it as well, you know, and I think just naturally as human beings, we can all have some things that we don't find that energy taxing, that we do actually find a lot easier than the other person. I think, you know, you know, for example, if you find something very difficult at work within a team, like perhaps not the best thing to do is to, you know, for the manager to say, okay, right, well, that's part of your job or you do that. I mean, I think a lot of managers will do that. But, you know, perhaps it might be better to give them something that someone else is not very good at, and like switch them around and like. So it's all about like cohabitation, you know, it's not about codependency, but I think in any like successful relationship, you've got to have some level of communication, some level of meeting the needs of the other person, or like supporting each other. It's not codependency, I think is very different to that. But you've got to have some level of like, reliance on the other person. I know it's not really something that people talk a lot about as like a good trait. But it is definitely like something if you really want to, you know, make something last long term and you're very committed to a person. You know, definitely like, you got to lean on each other for different things. I'm sorry, Joe. It sounds like a really tough, tough situation for you. Ke'an Finney says well said, you've earned a sub. Thank you very much, Ke'an. To also bear in mind with this is that the impairments that exist in terms of relationships, or even in broader sense with folks both on the spectrum and with ADHD, is that our impairments can often be invisible. We've been socialized to try and speak neurotypical. But we're not good at it. It's like a metaphor I like to use is we're Linux computer. I disagree. I think we are absolutely great at it for like a different brain. We are so good at it. We're not as good as like generally not good as good at neurotypical speak as much as neurotypicals would be. But like we're definitely a lot better at neurotypical speak than neurotypicals are for autistic speak, you know, we do tend to make up a lot of like the communication like barrier, particularly in like friendships and relationships and things like that. From my experience, only if that person does have insight into how they work, you know, sometimes people don't, which can sometimes, I guess, be a barrier. That's why I like the term partner because you have to work together as a team 100% woodshed. Here's in a Windows world and you're essentially asking us to be Windows. We can't do that. Now, we might learn tricks for interfacing with Windows and communicating better. And that's really what relationship accommodations are going to allow us to do. And one of the greatest accommodation tips I have for me is for the other person to ask, what did you mean by that? Yes. What were you doing when exactly? Exactly. And it's the same, the opposite around as well. Like, I get told a lot that autistic people, we do pick up on indirect communication. And I agree to a certain extent. We do know when things are different in a situation. We don't always know why or what that is. So there's quite a lot of situations that I think that I can think of within relationships and friendships in my past where I have definitely like noticed that something's changed and I've asked about it. And the ideal situation would be what's, you know, I would ask what's changed. And then the person would tell you sometimes they don't. Sometimes it's a bit more kind of passive or that passive aggressive or that which can be difficult. Other times, quite straightforward to communicate. I think it does definitely come across as somewhat like a needy behavior, but it really isn't. It's literally just like an accommodation. It's the, you know, it's the same thing. I wish I wish that it wasn't interpreted that way. But I think it does sometimes. Thank you very much, Jackie. Learn it. Five gifted 40 or two autism podcast memberships. Wow. Thank you so much. I think that's like the biggest membership dump I've ever had. So thank you so much, Jackie. SW Supernova Tritero Rudolph. I spent English Gypsy Rose. Make sure to say thank you to Jackie if you can. I'm sure they would really appreciate that. Increasing the team. Thank you, Jackie. Mary Farm says that since I have delayed processing, I know that something is a bit off, but sometimes it takes hours or days to figure out what actually happened. That is exactly the Alex Fimea. That is, it is, it is tough. Like it's hard to manage, and it's especially hard to manage if either you as an autistic person don't know, or the other person doesn't really understand it or isn't willing to try and understand where you're coming from. Jackie says I love what you're doing, intending slash sharing, Thomas. Thank you very much. Back to the video. Because for me, I have a tendency to go off and just sort of think on my own and work through things. And from an outside perspective, it might look like I'm ignoring things and asking openly and honestly, what were you doing when what was your process, you know, open ended questions like that to help learn what the other person is doing. That's a huge accommodation for folks, for me at least a lot of relationship difficulties with folks who are neurodiverse, come from misunderstandings of intent, misunderstandings of action, yes, or feelings of inadequacy and anxiety, often because we come from an entire lifetime of literally not being accepted for who we are. Again, relationship accommodations need to be reasonable and allow the other person to meet our needs. Sometimes accommodations aren't enough. There are some jobs where no matter how many accommodations they provide, it's just not a good fit. And there are other jobs where they can't provide the accommodations that we need in order to be successful at that job. Oh, speaking of accommodations, hey, Chloe, bring me my meds. And here's the thing as well that I don't think a lot of them have talked about in the context of this. You don't have to get all of your needs from other people met by a partner. You don't. Like it might be an ideal situation in your head of this kind of like romance, kind of collaboration thing, but you can get a lot of your needs met by through friends or through family or through other means other than just your partner. And I think like trying to expect someone that you're seeing, someone that you're dating, someone that you're partners with to meet every single one of the needs that you want from another human being, you're going to be like a situation where you can meet all of their needs and they can meet all of your needs. It's going to be very, very difficult to find. I think it's sometimes very unrealistic. You know, you don't you don't need to get everything met by your partner, just the things that are important to you within a relationship. And sometimes if you if you try to focus too much on getting everything that you need from your partner, then you could lose someone who is who's really good for you. And, you know, like having a reason to go outside of the relationship and get your needs met in a different way with someone else can sometimes be quite good for you as well. It doesn't always have to be this was against the world kind of attitude. You can you can have friends. You can have you can see your family. You can chat to people, you know, Chloe. Come here. This is a fantastic accommodation for me. This is Chloe. I'm training her as my service down and she brings me my meds because it is not a reasonable accommodation for me to ask a human to bring me my meds every day, especially if they are also forgetful. Needless to say, can I get a dog that brings me my meds? Can someone buy me a dog that brings me my meds overnight? Is it a thing? Is it a thing? Can someone look it up? Because if so, I need I need a papa that will bring me bring me my meds overnight. I suppose it's not a reasonable accommodation. I mean, most of the time I can get my meds taken it's just annoying that the times where I'm more likely to forget my meds are like the times when I really need my meds the most. Don't all have to be met by your partner. You can absolutely have other ways of getting your meds met. But there might be some needs that you need to get met in the relationship and for that, accommodations. Thank you to my brain advocates and all my Patreon brains for sponsoring all of our content on this channel and the website that we made and all kinds of really cool things that we've got going on. Without you, we wouldn't be able to do half of what we do. Thanks for hanging out. Let us know in the comments below how you accommodate the neurodiversity in your relationship. I would be really curious to see that. I'll talk to you soon. And how do you accommodate the neurotypicalness in your relationship? I suppose neurodiversity covers that as well, to be honest. Really great video. If you haven't already, please go and like this video this is from how to ADHD. ADHD and autism relationship accommodations, how to get your news map. With any video that I react to, you've got to remember like in terms of production, the amount of time that goes into making these reaction videos, like in post, like when I put them out, very little in comparison to the work that's gone into actually creating this content, these videos. So I definitely go over, try and give them a subscribe, give them a like, show them as much love as you can.