Hey everyone, I’m hoping to get some advice for my partner.
She and I both have ADHD. She consistently has great difficulty communicating clearly and neither of us is sure what to do about it. Where an ideal narrative could be mapped in a straight line, hers would look like a series of loops, whorls, and jagged deviations as she frequently repeats herself, relays events out of order, changes topics inappropriately and without warning, omits entire parts of sentences, etc.
I love her so much so it pains me to say that it’s bad. It’s really, really bad, and I see how it frustrates her. It’s interfering with our relationship as it makes even low stakes conversations agonizing and higher stakes topics often impossible. It holds her back in her personal and professional life. I used to have the same issue, but what helped me isn’t really applicable for her.
Does anyone have any resources, ADHD specific or not, that might help her get started in basic, effective communication? She’s such a wonderful, intelligent person, and I just want to help her succeed in being able to share that with others.
A casual community for people with ADHD
Values:
Acceptance, Openness, Understanding, Equality, Reciprocity.
Rules:
- No abusive, derogatory, or offensive post/comments.
- No porn, gore, spam, or advertisements allowed.
- Do not request for donations.
- Do not link to other social media or paywalled content.
- Do not gatekeep or diagnose.
- Mark NSFW content accordingly.
- No racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism, or ageism.
- Respectful venting, including dealing with oppressive neurotypical culture, is okay.
- Discussing other neurological problems like autism, anxiety, ptsd, and brain injury are allowed.
- Discussions regarding medication are allowed as long as you are describing your own situation and not telling others what to do (only qualified medical practitioners can prescribe medication).
Encouraged:
- Funny memes.
- Welcoming and accepting attitudes.
- Questions on confusing situations.
- Seeking and sharing support.
- Engagement in our values.
Relevant Lemmy communities:
lemmy.world/c/adhd will happily promote other ND communities as long as said communities demonstrate that they share our values.
- 1 user online
- 65 users / day
- 98 users / week
- 301 users / month
- 1K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 672 Posts
- 10.4K Comments
- Modlog
Glad to see she’s medicated, and that’s a bummer that it isn’t helping. One thing I make great use of (and I am well aware I will be immediately downvoted into oblivion for saying this) is an LLM. I can feed my disjointed and unorganized thoughts into it, and then ask it to spit me out a coherent run down of the idea I am trying to get across. LLMs excel at this because of what they are: Large Language Models. Self-explanatory. They are utter shite at numerous other things; for example, it simply cannot give me a mockup of what my kitchen cabinets will look like because it’s not a a Large Image Model. It can’t “see” the difference between 3 or 4 cabinets. But it nails the linguistic organizational tasks for me. I know this is lemmy, and I will receive much scorn for my use of this specific tool, but with my AuDHD this thing is a game changer when I am thinking faster than I can get the words out verbally.
This is great! True, Lemmy is often staunchly anti-AI, but I think this is exactly what AI should be used for - enhancing people’s lives and helping them overcome difficulties. I upvoted you with an extra hard mouse click to compensate.
I wish I had thought of this before - I can communicate clearly but it can be so hard for me to be concise. I wouldn’t use it for everything, but for “big ticket item” conversations, definitely. It could help us get over the communication difficulty hump, then we can start handling more on our own. Do you have any recommendations for particular models, methods you’ve found useful, or the like?
I personally use ChatGPT and I am sticking with 4o as long as I can, as my experience with 5 was a dumpster fire. I’m pretty experienced with Copilot as well, but I find its language to be a bit rigid, and not always better than my own prose. That said, it’s what I mainly use at work, so that makes sense, and it generally is good at summarizing with very good accuracy. GPT does a decent job of approximating my own tone. I can’t stand Google and Meta, so I avoid them. I think I made an mistral account to give it a shot, or maybe it was anthropic? Anyway, I haven’t gotten into whichever one that was yet.
Try out goblin.tools - it’s a collection of tools specifically made for neurodivergents.
Great tip, this goes in the toolbox. With all the feedback I’m getting so far, I’m feeling optimistic!