Inspired by the stunning film “I Swear” about living with Tourette’s, this episode explores why self-compassion is so difficult, especially with trauma, ADHD and AuDHD (autism and ADHD). Discover how acceptance and love can transform shame into advocacy, and learn practical ways to be gentler with yourself.

Using my Feel. Love. Heal framework, I (trauma therapist, ADHDer, only recently recognised AuDHDer - brand new emotional rollercoaster - senior accredited supervisor, Self care coach, author and columnist, Eve Menezes Cunningham) share some self-care ideas the film inspired. You deserve the same compassion you give others.

Is the Feel Better Every Day Podcast helping you? Please leave a ***** rating and review for this and other episodes you’ve enjoyed. Your sharing, subscribing, feedback and support helps me help more people (of all genders) with trauma histories and ADHD or AuDHD (autism and ADHD). You learning to take better care of yourself isn’t just good for you – it creates a ripple effect and helps others. My ultimate dream, in a world in which SO much is coming up for healing and so many people are unsafe, is to do my part to help as many people as possible heal from trauma. To help create a world in which everyone everywhere feels safe, welcome and loved - able to thrive.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Why it’s so hard to have compassion for ourselves

1:10 Understanding ourselves through trauma and neurodivergence

5:11 Using the Feel. Love. Heal. framework

10:25 Learning to help ourselves heal

14:18 Creating a world where everyone feels safe and loved

18:22 Healing through connection and community

21:11 The ripple effect of healing and hope

RESOURCES

Cattitude: Purr! Hiss! Freeze! Episode 48 of The Feel Better Every Day Podcast

Be More Cat: Episode 70 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast

Shadow Work with Black Cats and Sharks: Episode 71 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast

https://selfcarecoaching.net/2023/08/07/cattitude-familiars-and-polyvagal-theory/

https://selfcarecoaching.net/2022/10/19/cattitude-life-lessons-from-my-first-9-years-on-earth/

https://selfcarecoaching.net/feline/

https://selfcarecoaching.net/2021/02/17/bring-more-cattitude-to-the-way-you-move/

https://selfcarecoaching.net/2019/09/30/cat-coaching-for-self-care-3-cattitude/

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Why is it so hard to have the kind of compassion and empathy and understanding we so often find so easy to direct towards anyone else, towards ourselves, especially with trauma histories, with ADHD, with ADHD, with autism? Why?

This episode, 82 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast is inspired by the phenomenal film I Swear, based on John Davidson’s memoir about living with Tourette’s and becoming an advocate. I hope you enjoy it.

Hi, you’re listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast.

I’m your host and producer, Eve Menezes Cunningham. I’m a trauma therapist, trauma survivor, ADHDer. Now I’ve heard about the AuDHD, learning more about the autism, that the ADHD medication, it’s a learning curve. It’s a lot. And it’s also helpful, the more we understand ourselves, the better.

I’m a self-care coach, senior accredited supervisor, author, columnist, you can access more information about the Sole to Soul Circle, the book, full show notes and transcripts and links at selfcarecoaching.net and also thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I release new episodes every Tuesday, helping people with trauma, ADHD and AuDHD, take better care of yourself, create a life you don’t need to retreat from and help create a world in which everyone feels safe, welcome and loved, able to thrive.

And again, back to this amazing film, it’s just so phenomenal. I recognised an enormous, so sorry, I’ve just skipped ahead an enormous amount. I Swear, I’m recording it, it’s out in cinemas at the moment in Ireland. It might be out on one of the streaming services or still in the cinema by the time you see this in a few weeks. His memoir is available, John Davidson.

I sobbed, I howled with laughter, I was shouting at the TV, not the TV, the big screen. It was amazing. I had to leave the cinema at one point and I wanted to leave at other points with the brutality of what he was having to deal with.

And the film shows this young, confident football enthusiast lad starting high school and then developing Tourette’s. So you see him go from confident and like asking a girl out on his first day of school and being like told that a scout is going to watch the football game and then he begins to develop the tics and the outbursts.

I recognised a lot of the impulsivity and self-loathing and also the enormous potential for healing through compassion. But seeing it on the big screen, so visible, so desperate to just give him an enormous hug and move him away from all that pain, that kind of wishing that everyone could see this film and have more compassion for themselves and the differences they struggle with, whether to do with Tourette’s or any kind of physical or mental condition or emotional or any kind of difference.

Like you think about the way people are othering immigrants, refugees, people from other backgrounds, all sorts of gender. It’s incredible how this young man was able to turn so much pain into advocacy for so many people who needed that support and that understanding.

And through doing that, he found more for himself. It’s beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I wasn’t the only one sobbing in the cinema. And I think it’s, I can’t remember the last time a film ended and everyone just sat there. And one of the people I’ve been telling, watch this film, said, now when you do the podcast, don’t give the ending away, don’t give too much away. So I’m going to try and avoid spoilers.

But it’s based on his true story. We know he survives. We know he wrote a memoir.

We know he told the Queen to fuck off when he got to meet the Queen. They’re not spoilers. They’re all from the very beginning.

Using the Feel. Love. Heal. framework to move through some of the lessons from, I Swear, this gorgeous, gorgeous film. The Feel element of the framework I developed, it’s very much about the active self-care when you have the bandwidth to do things, to help yourself regulate, to help yourself feel better. And he got to the stage where he was able to research Tourette’s as someone with the lived condition.

But it took a long time for him to get there because unfortunately, when the symptoms appeared, his parents were not in a place where they could support him. Instead, they contributed to the shame and the pain and the horror of his young life, which he tried to end at a very early age. And luckily, he survived.

And also, very luckily, when he was a bit older, he meets the friend’s mother, an old school friend’s mother, who they all think is dying and she has six months to live. He kind of has an outburst saying something like, “Ha ha, you’re going to die!” something deeply inappropriate.

It was laugh out loud. It was so funny in parts, and so horrendous, and so relatable in so many ways, because all of us have shame, have fear, have embarrassment, have things we worry about being too much, saying too much, moving weirdly, all sorts of things. He had no control over it. And he learned to live with it.

He learned to advocate for others. But that was through his friend’s mother being the first person really to see him and to accept him and to help him begin to understand himself and come off the horrendous medication and work with life, stop arguing with reality, like kind of they all made mistakes, like everyone’s human. But her attitude, so accepting, so loving, it kind of takes me then to the love element of the framework.

But she was active. It was very active, her inviting this stranger into her home, telling her husband and her son, who was his friend, that she had invited him to stay. She recognised that things were tough for him at his home.

And her argument for doing so much to help him was she only had six months to live. He begins to find acceptance through, for the first time in his life, being accepted, being told to not apologise for anything he can’t help. And he’s had a lifetime of brutal, brutal punishments for things he can’t help, which, of course, we know would trigger a stress response, which would make it much more likely that these outbursts, that these tics would become more amplified, because he’s then terrified.

He’s in a sympathetic survival response, “Hiss!” in terms of the Cattitude [Polyvagal Purrs] way of explaining polyvagal theory. You can find links to the episodes around that in the show notes. It’s so obvious that, had the grown-ups, even not understanding about Tourette’s, just having a bit more care and compassion for a young boy in pain, how different his life could have been, and how he’s able to recognise that he might not have done any differently if he’d been in one of the different positions.

I’m a little bit all over the place. I’ve been so excited about sharing this film recommendation, because it is so beautiful. But my encouragement for you, whatever you’re facing, whatever you’re struggling to accept in yourself, research.

When I was first diagnosed with endometriosis when I was in my 20s, I had daily pain, and I’d had endless hospital appointments and intrusive tests, and they triggered flashbacks from childhood and trauma, blah, blah, blah. It was horrific. But I remember seeing a picture of what happened with endometriosis, like the cells. I remember actually throwing up. I was utterly repulsed by what was going on in my body. Having surgery, but that not working, like being told I’d have to have surgery every couple of years, having that chronic pain for so long, but being determined that I was going to, like I started yoga because certain poses helped.

I trained as a crystal therapist because they helped, and where hospital prescribed painkillers didn’t. I’m a huge fan of modern medicine, but I had to learn to help myself. So I really identified with that part of John’s journey, where he gets a job and his boss tells him that he needs to educate the police, he needs to educate the teachers, he needs to educate the public to help them understand.

I wanted to scream, why does HE have to do the emotional labour? Why can’t people be kinder? Why can’t people just be more understanding and nicer?

While also accepting I would probably have moved away from him on a crowded train, given a chance, because I’d have probably been scared!

I understand more about it now. I hope now I may be putting my loopy earplugs, but smile, or it’s just there are so many opportunities all of us have every day, where we can show that little bit more compassion to someone and to ourselves.

Moving to that Love part of the framework, the acceptance that you are part of the divine, you’re part of nature, there’s no need to improve anything, there’s no need to change anything. But sometimes love and acceptance can be the hardest thing in the world, when you’ve not been raised with love and acceptance, when you’ve been criticised, when you’ve, he was forced to face the fireplace, because he couldn’t help spitting when he ate, and the outbursts at dinner. And like, oh, so many, so many, so many things.

And self-love, self-acceptance is hard. I’m a little bit embarrassed sharing this. But the last time I had a verruca, I was repulsed, just like with the picture of the endometriosis.

With that, I put crystals around a big crystal to just help me send some love, some compassion to the ovaries, to the areas impacted by the endometriosis. I couldn’t look at something like the pictures, the microscopic amplified but I knew that that wasn’t going to help with the pain. I knew it was just going to make everything worse.

I had to learn to accept it and love it in order to transform it, in order to help heal myself. The last time I had a verruca, I did my best every day when applying the treatment to send it love, to say to myself, and this was like not 100 years ago, I’ve been doing this work for a long, long time. But I was saying to myself, “I love myself, warts and all.” And “Ewwww.”

It’s holding the part of me that goes, oh, that’s gross. And also, yeah, I am way more loving, way less self loathing towards myself than I used to be. It’s a practice.

Ask yourself, what would you do in any given situation if you loved yourself more? Like what would a person who did love themselves do in a situation you might be in? Love is transformative. It is so powerful.

This woman, Dottie, his friend’s mum, she changed his life and she changed the world by changing his life, by having compassion for a complete stranger.

And that brings us to the Heal part of the framework. Dottie got him a job. He got the job, but Dottie helped open the doors. Tommy, his boss, was really understanding with the elements he couldn’t control. And he was a hard worker. He was reliable. He did amazing things, but so many people wouldn’t give him a chance before. So many people just judged and punished and hurt. And it was just horrendous.

And just thinking, I would love to live in a world in which everyone was safe, welcome, loved and able to thrive. Like all of us are mammals. All of us have a nervous system that is wired to thrive when we’re safe, welcome and loved. And yet we keep hurting each other. We keep perpetuating trauma. We keep hurting ourselves when we’ve been traumatised.

We’ve learned at some level that it’s safer to hurt ourselves to hopefully avoid pain from outside. But we can all do our part to heal that, to move towards post-traumatic growth with ADHD, with ADHD, with autism, with any kind of neurodivergence, with any kind of difference, to embrace it as much as you can, to love it as much as you can. Speak up when other people are hurting other people.

One of the hardest scenes for me, I don’t think I’m giving anything away. I don’t think it’s too big a spoiler, but it was when he was at school and there was a fight in the playground and most of the school was out yelling, “Fight, fight, fight.” I remembered one of the many schools I went to and every time that would happen there, I would kind of go in the opposite direction, trying to find somewhere quiet and like just feeling despair for the state of humanity that two people or more were having some sort of physical altercation.

And rather than being helped to resolve it, most people were encouraging the violence. And I still find that really hard now. And now I understand more about my brain, more about myself. I can be gentler with myself around it.

But where you are able to speak out against any kind of bullying, any kind of othering and including the bullying parts of yourself, the things that you’ve grown up criticising, being really harsh to yourself around, catch yourself and find that bully part of yourself as well as that bullied part of yourself and just send them as much love as you can. Think of what you could potentially do.

Mentally scan your life, the people you know. I’m not suggesting you take someone you barely know in off the street and pretty much adopt them as a young man and help them transform their lives. But think of how we do heal, we co-regulate in order to heal.

We’re mammals, we need each other and we need to feel safe with each other. How can you make yourself feel safer? How can you help yourself feel safer? And how can you help someone else or a group of other people feel safer?

I again don’t want to be giving spoilers, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, who am I kidding, it probably is a spoiler. He brings together a group of people with Tourette’s at a certain point in the film and most of them have never met anyone else with Tourette’s. They’re very isolated.

We’re now in 2025. Through the internet, I know I’ve learnt so much about ADHD online, I’ve learnt so much about ADHD, autism, trauma recovery, like I began that part of my healing journey before the internet was so kind of big, so kind of used. A lot of that was through books and trainings and things like that. But we have the internet now, which is a wonderful, wonderful tool when used in a way that you choose and curated carefully and moving towards what is nourishing and supportive. Find people who you can help and who can help you build your communities, join your communities.

In the Sole to Soul Circle this week, members tomorrow will be getting a special compassionate body scan, which I hope will be nourishing and delicious for you. You can join via selfcarecoaching.net.

Next week, it’s a gorgeous interview I’ve done with one of my favourite yoga teachers, Elizabeth Potts, at the Yoga Root here in Westport.

I’m really looking forward to sharing that with you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching.

You can find full transcripts and show notes and links and more at the blog selfcarecoaching.net and also at thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com. If this was helpful, please leave a five-star review. In a world in which so much is endlessly coming up for healing, I really want to reach as many people as possible with these episodes, with my work, to help as many people who are feeling unsafe to feel safer, to feel able to heal from trauma, to befriend their ADHD AuDHD brains, to help build a world where everyone feels safe, welcome and loved and able to thrive and to create lives that they don’t need to retreat from, to feel better every day. With trauma histories, with ADHD, with AuDHD, it can be challenging where there has been so much punishment, getting things wrong.

Growing up, they say 20,000 times more criticised than a neurotypical child. The trauma of living in a world that isn’t built to support you, it takes a lot to connect with the parts that aren’t what they call superpowers, the more special needs elements, the sensory issues, the inability to function in certain situations, to overreact, to have meltdowns, all these things that are so painful. And those parts of you deserve love, they deserve care, they deserve acceptance, and you creating, designing a life you don’t need to retreat from, that is then going to have a ripple effect as you feel better, as you learn to take better care of yourself, it’s going to have a ripple effect on the world around you, contributing to a world in which others feel safer, more welcome, loved, able to thrive, and potentially I’m nearly 50 and I haven’t given up on the idea of world peace.

Míle buíochas, a thousand thank yous, this episode, like all of them, was produced by me, your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham.

Be really, really gentle with yourself, if you haven’t seen the film, and if you’re anything like me, if you tend to cry in films, if you do get very engrossed and forget that it’s on a screen and not actually happening, although it was his...