ADHD, Shame, and Approaching Women: Real Talk for Neurodivergent Men

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching, courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. Are your relationship difficulties, specifically in the world of dating and attracting a mate and keeping a mate, Does it have to do with your neurodiversity, like your ADHD, or is it something deeper? Let's talk about it in today's Dear DSO submission. And you can submit your own story or question at deardso.com. Fill out the form, and if your submission's a good one, I will create a video out of it for the whole world to see or for the podcast listeners to listen to on the Dad Starting Over podcast, available wherever you may listen to your podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, You name it, it's on there. And if you are watching this on YouTube, do me a favor, pause for a moment and go down below and click on subscribe, click on like, hit the little bell, leave a comment, share, you know, all that good stuff. That helps me out a great deal. Thank you so very much. Now on to today's submission. And this comes from, I don't know how to pronounce this, K-R-T-E-K, Kertek? I don't know what that is. Is that some kind of Scandinavian thing? I don't know. I just want to say Gesundheit when I read that. The subject line is, explain normal man's experience to a neurodiverse guy, please. Dear DSO, he says, that's me, stands for Dad Starting Over. I recently viewed your video with Dr. Zakreski. Oh, cool. This is actually on another podcast called the Help for Men podcast and YouTube channel. You can search for Help for Men, Matt Zakreski, that is spelled Z-A-K-R-E-S-K-I. He is an expert on all things neurodiverse. Or neurodiversity. I have the Help for Men channel over there on YouTube, podcast as well, and that is reserved just for interviews with important people talking about men's issues. So check it out. But he says he viewed the video with great interest. Continuing on, he says, I have a— I have pervasive ADHD, and it was valuable for me to hear that someone has some observations on the role of neurodiversity in dating. He says, since puberty, I have had feelings that I am kind of defective in interactions with the opposite sex. It is difficult to explain, but it seems that I don't have certain characteristics that make women perceive a man as a potential partner. Could you please make a short description for us neurodiverse guys of experiences of a typical man? Do normal men usually have some kind of intuition on how to talk to women? I'm asking this because there are so many confusing things for me. Here are some of the questions that I have accumulated. He's got 8 questions here. All right, let's get started. Question number 1, uh, most generic advice is to be confident, but how do you feel confident if women have basically all the power in choosing a partner and gazillions of options? So you are basically saying, um, how in the world can I feel worthy of approaching this woman, this woman who has all the options in the world? I am measured against all these literal thousands, if not millions of men that are at her disposal. How am I supposed to feel real confident in myself? I— this is— this number— question number 1 is the tip of the iceberg for what we will see. I've already read this, obviously. For what we will see is a general pervasive theme of shame on the part of Mr. Kurtek. And, um, one of just— he just doesn't like himself a whole heck of a lot, and he's not sure why anybody else would, basically. Um, number 2, he says, how do you feel confident if you're nothing special? See what I mean? Number 3, how do you balance being interested/assertive while not being needy? It seems a man is kind of needy if he approaches because he felt a need to, after all. Continuing on here. Number 4: How are you expected to take a lead if the woman ultimately decides if something happens between you? Number 5: How do you show that you're physically attracted but you don't overemphasize it? So in other words, uh, I, I feel a lot of shame by showing my interest in somebody. How do I not go overboard with my interest? "how do you know what to talk about when you approach a woman? Do normal men really notice signals of interest from women? I think it happened to me 2 times in my life." Probably more so. "Is it normal to feel that many women could be interested in you? Because I never feel being attractive to women in general." Mr. Kurtek, this is overall sad. I get it. This sounds like very stereotypical, like kind of, oh, socially awkward nerdy dude who just doesn't get the whole mating dance, if you will. And really what it boils down to is a lack of confidence in yourself, a great deal of shame. You don't like yourself a whole heck of a lot, and you don't have much experience, it seems like, getting out there and chatting up people. A way to overcome a lot of this is simply to— oh, it's what the experts refer to as exposure therapy. I've talked about this in other videos, but it applies to you as well. How do you get better at something? You do it again and again and again and again. Let's take for example something silly like, I don't know, skateboarding. You ever try skateboarding? I tried that when I was little. I remember seeing all the guys on TV just zooming down the street and doing little tricks like it was nothing and going up the ramps and all other stuff, and I was like, I want to do that. I don't remember how old I was, probably like 9 years of age. Got on the skateboard and immediately Boom, fell on my butt. The skateboard I just kicked like, you know, 100 feet in front of me and my butt fell straight down. And I tried it again, same result. And I tried it again, same result. And then I tried it again and stood up, you know, for a little bit. Hey, I'm— boom, on my butt again. And then I just gave up on skateboarding completely. Well, guess what? Every dude who, like, you know, those experts you see on television that are zooming around on the skateboard that I mentioned and going up the half pipes and all this other stuff, They all started the exact same way. Got on the skateboard, fell on their butt. Got on the skateboard, fell on their butt. Well, what makes them different? They didn't stop like I did after the 4th or 5th time. They stopped— well, they never stopped. They did it 100,000 times to get to the point what you see here. I bet you, Mr.— I keep forgetting your name— Kertek, you haven't done this dating, approaching women, and socializing with people in general. You haven't done it a whole lot. You may have, by virtue of what you call your neurodiversity and your ADHD, you may have a little bit more difficulty compared to the neurotypical dude, but that doesn't excuse away a lot of this shame that you have and lack of self-confidence, self-hate, and all this other stuff which is coloring your perception of this whole, uh, dating game in general and the opposite sex specifically. What will help reverse that is simply putting yourself out there over and over and over again. Having those women look at you real weird, like, who are you, weirdo? Why are you talking to me? That— oh, I bet that just thinking about that just fills you with all kinds of dread, doesn't it? You gotta do it, dude. You gotta fall on your butt. Back on the skateboard, you're gonna fall on your butt. It's gonna hurt. You may break your tailbone. You may go to the hospital. You'll live. Gotta do it again and again. And those expert skateboard dudes, they've broken like dozens of bones on their body. Lots of bruises, probably into the hospital, probably some really serious scary shit too at some point, but they got back on. Same thing applies here, dude. You got to do this shit like 10,000 times before it feels comfortable and before eventually you feel comfortable in yourself and you realize this is no big deal. That the guy that I see who's picking up women like it's nothing, watch him, watch what he does. He goes up with zero shame. Zero self-awareness, if you will. It almost comes across as a little dumb, for good reason. People— there is a link, by the way, and I hate to say this, but there's a link, a correlation between intelligence and anxiety. You ever notice that the guys that are really good at sales, sales dudes, are not the most deeply intellectual, thoughtful human beings in the world? They're pretty simple dudes. I'm not saying they're stupid, but they're not the most They're not going to sit down and contemplate life and philosophize and wonder what is. They're going to just do. That's their whole life thing, man. They just go up to dude, do you want to buy my product? Yes or no? No. Cool. Next. A very anxious-y, deep thinker type person with a lot of shame and self-loathing goes up to somebody, do you want to buy my thing? You see the difference? Please. And you The guard's like, no. Well, what if I showed you, you know, look at my brochures? Like, no. Oh God, I'm never doing this again. The guy stops being a salesman, you know, whatever. Put yourself out there over and over and over again to the point where it doesn't feel so weird anymore. It— you, you realize that we're all the same. Nobody has any special gifts or talents. We all learn. This is something that is, um pushed out a lot there is that women want just a natural, a guy who is just naturally good-looking, naturally confident, naturally charming. The funny thing is, is that there's no such thing literally as natural. He wasn't born that way. There may be some genetic component to a lower, lowering of, or a low level of anxiety, sure, in somebody. Some people are born, thanks to their parents, with a baseline level of anxiety that's higher than normal, and that will have an impact on your socializing and everything else, sure. But how do you overcome that? Well, and let's just say that you're maybe a neurodiverse dude who has an underlying level of anxiety, attention deficit, or whatever it may be, which makes you a bit of a spazzy dude, which makes you a bit of an awkward dude, which has over the years caused you to not be so confident in yourself, which over the years has caused you to shrink and go in your shell more so than what you should have, which has in turn led you to the path of being a guy who is not a whole— who has not a whole lot of social experience, and when he thinks about dating and meeting women, he gets scared to death and he just hates himself and all this other stuff. Well, that means that instead of, let's say, the 10,000 times that neurotypical dude had to, you know, had to approach women and get in social situations in order to feel better about himself, maybe your number is like 30,000 times. That sounds daunting. That sounds like, oh shit, I'm not doing that. But that's what it takes, dude. I'm just being realistic. Back to the skateboard analogy. It's kind of like, I want to ride a skateboard. Well, you better get on there and ride it like 10,000 times before it feels natural. Yeah, but here's the catch. I got one leg. Oh, shit, dude. Well, you're going to have to figure out something. Maybe figure out how to skateboard with a cane or a crutch, or maybe really work on your balance with the one leg. Maybe get online and look up other one-legged skateboarders and reach out to them and say, how did you do it? And get some advice from them. It's going to be a lot more difficult for you than it is going to be for the two-legged dude. Same kind of thing with you, dude. Get out there and do it again and again and again. The whole notion of approaching a woman for the express purpose of, you know, starting a relationship with her and getting to know her and hopefully getting into her pants and all that good stuff. I mean, let's— sorry to be crass, but that's what we're talking about here. That is fraught with a lot more anxiety and a lot more downside, if you will, versus normal social interactions that you have on a day-to-day basis. So start small. Start with the normal daily interactions, such as, you know, I always use this as an example to my anxious guys that I talk to. You're getting out of your car at the grocery store, you're walking along, and you see a dude standing next to his car, and his car is actually really cool. This happened to me. I saw this car and I was like, what am I looking at here? Is that a Corvette? What is that? The guy was getting out of his car and I said, excuse me, and you can see he's kind of like And it's like, your car, what is that exactly? And he said, that's the new Corvette model. That's like a 2024 something something. And I was like, whoa. I said, that's very supercar looking. I mean, it almost looks like a Ferrari or something like that. And his face just lit up because he's like, you know, that's, that's what every Corvette dude wants to hear. Like, this is a really awesome supercar you got here. And then we talked about what kind of horsepower does it have and 0 to 60 time. And we talked about, you know, Tesla cars and how fast they are compared to the gas engine. And but he likes the roar of the gas engine and he, he'll open it up and had me sit inside and look at his car, and it was like it's sitting in a cockpit of a spaceship. And next thing you know, it's like a 20-minute conversation about his car. Those are the type of interactions you need to have often, every day, for a while. And then you can graduate to the next thing, which is, excuse me, miss, my name is Kurt Tech. Might want to work on that one. My name is, my name is Kurt Tech. I saw you from over there and I decided I needed to come say hi to you. How you doing? Woman may say, buzz off, creep, I don't want anything to do with you, buzz off, I have a boyfriend, or whatever. By virtue of the fact that you had 1,000 or so interactions with other strangers before that, you'll notice that that doesn't have the sting that it used to have. You're just like, oh well, she's kind of a dick, and I don't want to be, you know, hang out with a person who's a dickhead like this. And then you notice, oh wow, I think I'm kind of over the hump. That doesn't really make a difference to me. Let's do it again. And you go to the next gal and she says, oh sweetie, sorry, but you're a little too old for me. Like, oh, all right, next. Now you've hit your stride. Now you're one of those guys who say, this is no big deal, what was I so worried about before? And then by the 19th woman, and say 18 women told you no in various ways, but the 19th woman's like, oh, well hey, Maybe if you buy me a drink. And away you go. That's the key, dude. Do it again and again and again. Repetition. Get your reps in. Just like anything else. You didn't start off in the gym by, you know, bench pressing 315 pounds. You started with the bar and it was very wobbly and awkward. Years go by, many, many repetitions, thousands of repetitions go by, and next thing you know, you're putting 3 plates on each side and you're repping it out. Give yourself a break, dude. Don't lean so much on your neurodivergence, or diversity if you will, as a crutch. It's like the dude with the one leg on the skateboard. It is what it is. Learn to deal with it. Learn to work around it, work with it. Get some professional help if you need to. And may I suggest, surround yourself with other dudes who have been there and done that. And we have a group just for that. It's called the Brotherhood, and you can learn more at help4men.com or jump right to the join page at help4men.com/join. Hundreds of men from around the world, some divorced, some never been married, some currently married. A lot of them are kind of in your shoes, like, how do I get this confidence? How do I, how do I get over the hump? Um, I see everyone around me seems to be make this look so easy. I don't get it. We have discussion forums, we have live Zoom meetings, we get together in person. There's coaching, there's courses, all kinds of good stuff. So check it out, the Brotherhood at help4men.com. I look forward to seeing you, Mr. Kertek. And guys, thank you for watching, and we will see you on the next one.