S2E40: ADHD Across Generations - The Power of Understanding + guest Ariel-Paul Saunders

Julie Legg speaks with registered therapeutic counsellor Ariel-Paul Saunders, who brings a relational, intergenerational lens to understanding ADHD. Diagnosed at 38, Ariel began questioning the traditional medical narrative after recognising that his most significant struggles with focus and regulation didn’t begin in childhood, but emerged following a major relational rupture in early adulthood.

Together, Julie and Ariel explore ADHD not just as a fixed neurological condition, but as something shaped by attachment patterns, nervous system regulation, and family lineage. From wartime trauma passed down through generations to the orchid-and-dandelion analogy of sensitivity, this conversation reframes ADHD as a developmental journey rather than a personal defect.

It’s an episode about compassion for ourselves, our parents, and our children, and about becoming the generation that transforms what gets passed forward.

Key Points from the Episode

• Why Ariel’s ADHD symptoms intensified after a relational rupture in his early 20s
• What felt incomplete about the traditional medical explanation of ADHD
• The role of nervous system regulation in how ADHD presents
• Attachment, safety, and how connection shapes focus and executive function
• The “orchid vs dandelion” analogy for sensitivity and environmental fit
• How trauma and emotional numbing can be passed down without intention
• Reframing ADHD as lineage rather than personal failure
• How understanding our parents changes how we understand ourselves
• Supporting children by seeing the state beneath the behaviour
• Growing through ADHD traits, not necessarily “out of” them
• Becoming the generation that shifts relational patterns forward

Links

• FREE CONSULTATION: https://securelythriving.com/book-a-call
• FREE RESOURCE: https://securelythriving.com/free-resource
• ARTICLE: Why-my-adhd-didnt-appear-until-age-21
• ARTICLE: The Neuroscience of How Attachment Shapes ADHD: From Dopamine to Executive Function
• ARTICLE: Three Generations of ADHD
• INSTAGRAM: @securelythrivingfamily
• FACEBOOK: @securelythriving
• LINKEDIN: Ariel-Paul Saunders
• YOUTUBE: @securelythriving

Thanks for listening. 

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 🌐 WEBSITE: ADHDifference.nz  

 📷 INSTAGRAM: ADHDifference_podcast 

 📖 BOOK: The Missing Piece: A Woman's Guide to Understanding, Diagnosing and Living with ADHD 

 ℹ️ DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect those of the host or ADHDifference. Read More

Transcript

ARIEL: We're all developing and development doesn't stop up until the moment we die. We have the opportunity to keep growing and changing. The original perspective on ADHD was it's a childhood. It's a set of childhood traits that people grow out of and mature out of. And then we said no, actually it there's plenty of adults who have ADHD. It's not one or the other. There are children who have those traits, who grow out of them, who... and there are adults who can also grow through them. Not that those traits disappear, but grow from a kind of disordered experience of those qualities to a more ordered experience of those qualities where they're they fit within a person's lifestyle in a way that's actually beneficial and harmonious.

JULIE: Welcome to Season 2 of ADHDifference. I'm your host, Julie Legg, ADHD advocate, author of The Missing Piece (a woman's guide to understanding, diagnosing, and living with ADHD), and an unapologetic doer of many things. This season, we're turning up the volume with a global lineup of brilliant guests, bringing their lived experiences, insights, research, strategies, and resources. And of course, along with a healthy dose of humour and humility. Whether you're neurodivergent yourself or just curious, there's something here for every curious brain. Let's dive in. Today, I'm joined by Ariel-Paul Saunders, a registered therapeutic counsellor specializing in attachment and nervous system therapy and someone whose own ADHD diagnosis at 38 led him to question the traditional medical story. Although ADHD is often described as present from birth, Ariel-Paul's most significant struggles with focus and regulation didn't emerge until his early 20s following a major relational rupture. That timing led him to explore ADHD through a intergenerational lens, one that considers attachment, nervous system sensitivity, and family patterns that shape how ADHD shows up across time. In this conversation, we're exploring how understanding ADHD in context, not as a personal defect, but part of a larger family story, can open the door to deeper compassion and lasting change. Ariel, welcome to the show. [Thank you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Great to meet you, Julie.] Look, you were diagnosed with ADHD at 38 but your most significant difficulties with focus, organization, and emotional regulation didn't begin until you were around 21 following your parents' separation. I was wondering if you could take us back to that time and share what you were experiencing then. 

ARIEL: Well, the interesting thing is I didn't really even know what was happening. I just finished my second year of university at that point. I came home, I heard about the separation. It was tumultuous. They were not amicable. There was certainly difficulties adjusting and I was kind of caught in the middle of that. So the first feeling was this kind of relief of actually oh there was something that had been, that I had been feeling at the time. I felt like ah there's a relief that now they can, you know, everybody can carry on with their lives. What I didn't know is that actually even the year previously I'd already been feeling what was happening in the field in between them without even realizing it. And so looking back I can tell that sense of relief is oh now I get it. But then following that there's the next four months are kind of a blur. With the knowledge that I have now, I can look back and say actually I was totally in a state of kind of shock or shut down or numb. And so I remember very little of that time. I actually kind of reverted back to, I don't know, a younger version of myself. Up till that point I'd been, you know, had awarded outstanding student of the year at my university. I was I was on this trajectory that was really yeah focused and passionate. I was, I had started meditating at 16 and that had kind of helped some of my early ADHD qualities, helped me overcome addiction to cannabis, some of these things. So, I was really on an upward trajectory at that moment and everything. I just I stopped going to university. I spent three months at home basically playing computer games and not even knowing what I was doing with myself, not even having no sense of direction, no clarity. And so it was like a total breakdown of executive function. And then I started to want to do something again. I was motivated. I went to chef school. I did a semester of chef school. I was really interested in food and learning about the roots of how we nourish ourselves, the culture of food. And there again, I did a semester, it got time, it got to be exam time, and I just decided, you know what? This isn't, this isn't for me. Our values aren't aligned. I walked into the exam with a plate full of cookies, handed them out to my students, to my fellow students, and said, "I'm not writing the exam. I'm not going to actually, I'm not making the exam." We had to make a chicken soup. And said, "I'm done." And spent the next couple of months working in different food-oriented establishments, but always kind of jumping. I'd do one thing and then it would get challenging or I would get curious about the next thing and move on. And it was like I just didn't have the sense of a clear arc, a clear trajectory. It was, I was, I went from total shut down and not doing anything to very sporadic. I'm going to try this. I'm going to try this. I'm going to try this. And not sticking with anything. I had no concept of ADHD at the time. I had no way to... I wasn't thinking about executive function obviously. I was just acting. At a certain point, I went and spent, I started working on an organic farm and spent two seasons on that farm. And that helped ground me a little bit. That helped kind of land me back into something. Even though the... I wouldn't say my thinking was as clear as it could have been or as I would have liked it to been, it gave me a kind of stability that then set me up for the next few years of life. 

JULIE: It's interesting when you talk about your journey and at school you were having good grades and then at 21 at that time when there was trauma for you in your life, everything came to a standstill. And then this sporadic kind of interest finding yourself. It... they're quite three different extreme things and you experienced them in quite a short period of time. And being undiagnosed I can see how confusing that would be how one moment you could just have everything all sorted and the next floundering. I understand without a diagnosis wondering what the heck is going on which brings me to the question, when you did receive your diagnosis you said it raised many questions as it did answers and I'd like to know what was missing for you in the traditional medical explanation of ADHD?

ARIEL: My previous understanding of ADHD was the hyperactive kid at school, the kind of hyperactive stereotype, right? Or and as I engaged with the medical literature about ADHD, this idea of a kind of genetic predisposition and kind of fixed state. For me, that wasn't the case. It wasn't something that I had that had always been a problem for me. There's periods in my life, very specific periods where my kind of foundation got rocked and that's where the ADHD symptoms really emerged. And so that kind of doesn't fit within the medical model which says, well, if you have ADHD, it's been a problem since childhood. And I think there's a lot of people who live with ADHD characteristics and qualities who have the support they need to be able to manage those qualities and actually just have them reflected as gifts in the world. You know, just really experience the positive attributes associated with ADHD and not the kind of downside challenges that impact, you know, healthy development and kind of creating the life that they want for themselves. 

JULIE: I agree. And you know with ADHD, the title of the podcast is ADHD 'difference' as opposed to 'disorder'. I agree. I believe that there are periods of our life we do have these ADHD symptoms but they're not always creating disorder. Right. Yeah. But the environments or being outside of a secure, happy, routine space, whatever it may be, can trigger the disorder in ADHD, but it doesn't always. The disorder doesn't always have to be there.  I agree. Sorry I interrupted you. 

ARIEL: No, thank you. I mean, I'm happy for this to be a conversation. That's the most interesting actually. I'm so interested in hearing other people's perspectives and in kind of learning together about this thing because we have obviously the medical model which tells us how things are and the patterns that are seen but it can be very regimented and structured kind of diluted to the to try to fit a certain framework. And so what happens in real conversations about, you know, what's been your experience, what's been my experience, and oh yeah, there's some relationship there and some coherence between our experiences. Then we can learn in a different way not actually that different than what how researchers learn but we get the first-hand exchange. Whereas theirs is you know, it's all been summarized. So, what your comment made me think of is it depends how regulated we are. And this is something I've just been writing about this week, but the level of regulation or dysregulation in our selves affects how we're able to work with ourselves. You know, whether those qualities present in a disordered way or a more organized and supportive constructive way. 

JULIE: And it's interesting too again the disorder based on whom, based on the standard narrative or what's decided as normal. Whereas our normal, we do things differently but our normal can sit quite comfortably with us but it's not society's normal. I'd love to talk to you or hear from you about in your writing. And you write bucket loads of very interesting articles, but you wrote about tracing your ADHD back through the generations, not through medical records but through your lived family stories. So, I'd like to know about how reframing your ADHD as part of lineage rather than this personal defect change the way you saw yourself. 

ARIEL: Yeah. Yeah. So, that was very interesting. You know, my grandfather on my mother's side is a bit of a... doesn't have the greatest reputation in with her, with my mom. You know, he had, he was in business in the textiles industry in in Montreal in Quebec and he went bankrupt and it really impacted their family. They had to sell their home. They had to... yeah it changed their family circumstances significantly. And then he spent a long time, you know, he was always self-employed trying to create his own business ventures and nothing ever seemed to work out for him. And so that was the story I had of this man who was my grandfather who I only met a couple times. And then learning about ADHD and I found these pictures of him of him, you know, skiing without his shirt on and you know, that discovered that, oh, he had horses. And my picture of him expanded to somebody who was actually quite, you know, in love with life and vivacious and had lots of interests. And I could kind of start to put together this this broader story that like, oh, this guy actually fits a lot of the qualities of ADHD. He's got lots of different interests. He's really passionate. He's full of ideas and creative inspiration and he's trying things out. He wants to, you know, he's looking for more excitement in his life than the average person. And unfortunately, it, you know, had some big impacts on the rest of his family, on my grandmother. It you know, it shaped how she related to money and this kind of much more careful conservative approach. Unfortunately it led to you know, a more challenging relationship between him and his daughter who is my mother. And you know, a lot of our relational experience, how we show up in relationships with our loved ones, is we learn a lot of that from our early relationships with our parents. And so I could see how then the impacts of that and her frustration with her father then influenced how her and my father related. And it's not, it's not linear, you know. It's like she kind of rebounded the other way to being super organized, super making sure that everything was really tight and battened down. All the finances were in order. There was no risks. It was all like super, super put together which... so she certainly wouldn't be diagnosed with ADHD, but I could see even under that there's a sense of "Oh I have to make sure I'm super organized or else things are just going to fall apart," right? It's like a reaction to that fun-loving inspiration-driven kind of state of being. 

JULIE: I absolutely can resonate with that because a lot of late diagnosed ADHDers, they've "got away with it so far" or they don't meet certain DSM criteria because they have all of these strategies in place that they created for survival to get to work on time, to get the kids out the door to school on time. And it's really quite very structured. It's critical for them to put them in place to make things happen. It doesn't Yeah. If they weren't in place, the natural flow would probably be to be more carefree. Before I jump into the next question, Ariel, I just want to say how wonderful it was that you found your grandfather's photo and what a different perspective it now brings. Not just the failed businessman but a man who was adventurous and looking for excitement and for you to see that other side I think that's a wonderful thing to have. 

ARIEL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's really it's changed my experience of him significantly and my experience of myself, you know, because I could see myself in him and I could really situate my life knowing that, okay, here was this man with all of his gifts and challenges and how can I bring those gifts forwards without replicating the same challenges with new wisdom, new understanding that we have today. Because in his time, diagnosing somebody with ADHD was basically unheard of. You know, it's a very new collective understanding that we have really in the last 70 years. [Absolutely.] And it's and even up to this day, it's still contested. You know, there's still psychiatrists out there who say it doesn't exist. 

JULIE: And I understand that ADHD is one of the most researched mental conditions and it's evolving all the time which is great. So the more lived experiences we can share, that all gets added into the pool. So it's no longer just a committee of psychiatrists telling it how it is. There's a lot more feeding into the system, which is great. That's right. Now you propose that ADHD symptoms often emerge not just from fixed neurology but from attachment disruption and nervous system dysregulation especially during key developmental windows. Yeah. Can you help us understand that connection in layman's terms, in plain language?

ARIEL: Yeah. So when you and I are relating right now, we're making eye contact. We're... when we feel connected to another person and we feel kind of open and that's happening both ways. There are neural pathways, you know, that shapes our brain, that shapes our experience of the world, that shapes our sense of connectedness, which is regulating. We're social beings. When we feel connected, we feel calmer. We feel safe. We're wired to feel safer when we're connected with other beings, when we're in connection. And when we're not in connection or when we question the safety of our connections, we get nervous. There's a dysregulation that happens. There's a searching that happens for where's my sense of connection? Am I safe? Am I, you know, grounded in my context? Am I supported? And that can lead to distraction. It to me, it makes so much sense that it's so simple in the sense that if I feel like I'm safe and I don't have anything to worry about because I'm connected with other people in a way that is satisfying for me, then I can relax. I'm not looking for where that connection is going to come from. If I don't feel that for whatever reason and here we have to acknowledge that every individual is organized uniquely and has unique needs for what that connection looks like and feels like. So what's suitable for one person is not suitable for another. And some people are more sensitive. And there's this beautiful analogy of the dandelion and the orchid where a dandelion is super resilient. It can grow in almost any environment and it'll produce a flower. An orchid is not very resilient. An orchid needs a very particular set of environmental conditions to grow and blossom. And if those conditions are met, such beautiful flowers. And if they're not, then you know it won't grow and blossom until it finds those conditions. 

JULIE: Ariel, in your article, you also speak about how your grandmother's experience of war and a grandfather's displacement and or appearance, grief, can sort of shape the nervous system of the next generation. How do you... how do these experiences get passed down without anyone intending for that to happen? 

ARIEL: We learn our relational strategies, our relational approaches through social interaction. If we grow up in an environment where emotional expression, for example, where it's we're rewarded or it's more advantageous to be very contained and task oriented rather than connection oriented. That becomes the norm and it enters the subconscious. So that's, it becomes the accepted way of being in the world. And then when it comes time to raise children and parent, it's not even a question of choosing to do this or that. It's simply kind of the existing guard rails of what has to be done in order for us to put food on the table to get through the day to, you know. 

JULIE: I loved and I understand what you said about normal or what becomes the norm within a household growing up. You observe and we look to our parents and their parents as role models in a way. If we don't have anything else in our life to look and compare our lives against and so we only know what we know. 

ARIEL: The other thing that I would add is when we grow up in a state of fear, so wartime or being new to a culture, new to a place, feeling isolated, our baseline level of activation and kind of hyper-vigilance, protectiveness is higher. And when that's the case, there's less room for emotional experience. Because we have this beautiful capacity as human beings to be able to compartmentalize, be able to put things away that are too big to feel. But the thing is when we, if something's too big to feel and we have to kind of narrow down the scope of what we actually what's safe to feel, it doesn't just go. It's like a soundwave. It doesn't, we can't just narrow down the bad feelings and keep the good ones high. If we're gonna numb out and kind of get through the situation, which is a very perfectly effective strategy for all sorts of contexts. There's lots of times where we need to do that depending on our circumstances. Even today, there's cases all over the world. There's people all over the world who have to really narrow down their scope to get through the day, the emotional tone becomes more muted. It's without conscious effort to transform and integrate those states. The kind of baseline instinctive response is just to kind of go numb. And so that's a lot of what I'm talking about in this kind of experience of yeah, if the grandparent grows up in a wartime, they're raising their children, they're going to be more in that kind of threat response survival state. Their child doesn't have the same opportunity to for this kind of warm experience of connection which then is a developmental activity in and of itself. The repeated experience of warmth and connection. 

JULIE: We talked earlier about the frame of mind that ADHD in its diagnostic sense is quite clear according to the DSM and this is what to look out for and there are other things that we can bring into the fold. So you're really clear that it's not about denying the biological reality of ADHD, and can we chat more about holding both truths that a bit of biological and also involving some measurable brain differences and that expression shaped by this developmental context? 

ARIEL: And that's exactly where that dandelion orchid analogy is so beautiful. It works so well to describe that we're all built with certain tendencies. We're born with certain tendencies. We're, you know, we inherit these bodies in a certain sense with a whole set of capacities and a unique calibration that in the right circumstances can thrive and grow. I have a friend who's an amazing classical musician and is hyper, hyper sensitive and hyper vulnerable. They had an amazing family upbringing to hold that and support that every step of the way. And you can see how that you know, that same quality of hyperfocus really refined attunement to sound and to the environment could be disastrous for somebody, could, you know, could be a nightmare if it wasn't cared for, guided, given a path of expression, and bolstered along the way. 

JULIE: So, we're talking about understanding and support and nurturing just like we would with the lovely orchid. So when ADHD is viewed through this inter-generational and relational lens, how does that change the way we support our children, adults, and other families? 

ARIEL: It starts with understanding. We have to reach for a sense of the other. Whether that be, you know, our parents looking back at how we've been raised or our children looking forwards at who they are and how they're expressing, and see through behavior to underlying state to their underlying state of being. So I could looking back to when I was 21 go, "Oh, my damn parents, they, you know, didn't have it together and blew up the family and threw me under the bus." And or I can go, "Oh, neither of them had the tools, had the resources, had the guidance they needed. My dad's dad died at 21. You know, they didn't have the relational scaffolding. They needed to know how to navigate the world that we live in, which is challenging. And so when that empathy and understanding comes in, then we can just relate to one another from a very different place. Same with as a parent with my children. My son is prone to big reactions. He's prone to, you know, he has all sorts of quirks. Can be get really, really, really focused on things, totally distracted, you know, and it's helped me so much to understand. Understand what's going on for him in order to recognize that the behaviours that I find challenging and frustrating aren't personal. He's not doing them to out of any ill will and it really changes things and it's work. It doesn't, you know, it's not a one-time realization that stays. It's an ongoing process. 

JULIE: Understanding is such a simple word but it does take some digging and looking from different perspectives rather than just taking what's in front of you and understanding that. So it's a bit deeper. Going back to your situation, you could have understood from your mother's point of view that about your grandfather. But once you saw the broader picture and saw the photo and could understand the greater situation, that gave you an even deeper understanding. Similarly, my husband's grandfather was... he didn't have a particularly good reputation according to the grandmother, he... when he came back from the war he apparently was a different man. And now goodness me, understanding what it is now PTSD, actually surviving the war after going through the torment that they did you know, there was no counselling back then. Now we can understand going what was happening at that time. It wasn't just one person's perspective, it's like that's very unfortunate that she experienced that, but there were a whole bunch of other things happening at that time. So understanding and perspective, I'm all up for that. I think that's great. 

ARIEL: And we have to, and it starts with actually understanding ourselves because we can't offer any understanding to another person that we can't actually start by offering to ourselves. If we're dysregulated, then we're reactive. And when we're reactive, the things that other people do, they do it feels like they're doing to us rather than just doing them out of their own state. And so we learn to perceive the other through I mean through understanding ourselves more. At least that's been my experience. 

JULIE: And for parents listening, especially those who recognize ADHD traits in themselves and their children, what's the most hopeful takeaway from this perspective?

ARIEL: That we're all developing and development doesn't stop up until the moment we die. We have the opportunity to keep growing and changing. And the original perspective on ADHD was it's a childhood, it's a set of childhood traits that people grow out of and mature out of. And then we said, no, actually it there's plenty of adults who have ADHD. It's not one or the other. There are children who have those traits who grow out of them who h and there are adults who can also grow through them. Now, not that those traits disappear, but grow from a kind of disordered experience of those qualities to a more ordered experience of those qualities where they're they fit within a person's lifestyle in a way that's actually beneficial and harmonious. [Absolutely.] So the qualities associated with ADHD when we talk about it as a disorder, that's just one expression of a kind of personality type that also has the potential to be you know, celebrated and really effective and ultimately a gift to the world. 

JULIE: Definitely. You write and talk about the possibility of becoming the generation that changes what gets passed forward, which is awesome. So, what does healing look like in that context? 

ARIEL: A lot of what we've talked about today starting with understanding, starting with learning to recognize what is there for what it is. Regulated or dysregulated nervous system states, which is qualities and attributes that can be really wonderful and effective in the world or can be really challenging depending on the kind of supports that are in place and available. Then acting from that understanding. I'm working both ways. I'm working with my parents to offer them more understanding and support and also to ask for what I need, you know, to beg their understanding and support. And then I'm working to the next generation with my children, the same thing, to cultivate understanding and supportive relationships. Beautiful. And when we can build that unified field where we're all in a sense working together, we're stronger and that's where the transformation I think really happens. I really want to emphasize that we're relational beings. The foundation of our whole lives is our relationships. Without we... nobody lives in isolation. And so anything that we can do to strengthen our relationships and our relational bonds is ultimately going to lead to a more satisfying life. And you can't have a relationship to something you don't understand. So we have to... so that's where it starts. 

JULIE: For someone who's listening who spent years really asking "what's wrong with me?" and let's face it, there are many people out there including myself who have asked themselves that question, what would you most want them to understand about ADHD, sensitivity and the stories that began long before they were born? 

ARIEL: Well, that makes me think of this broader arc that we're all a part of. I was in Greece this spring, walking on a town site that had been around for 5,000 years, feeling the trajectory of how my life today is connected to the lives of these people, these evolutionary processes that have started long before this time period that we're in. Yeah. So to connect with that larger stream of human unfolding can be strengthening. We're at a time today where there's so much wisdom and knowledge available to us. It's immensely challenging and it's full of potential. It's up to us to decide how we want to participate in that. And we get to choose. This is the unique gift that we're each given is the opportunity to choose how we want to participate in this context that we're all in. 

JULIE: Thank you, Ariel. I love that perspective because often one can think about their life in isolation and all of the weight of the world on their shoulders. But again, to see it from an angle is we are part of this line. We're part of this arc. And we can do our bit. Life will go on beyond us as it did before us and what we can achieve in this arc and be really great and positive and beautiful. 

ARIEL: Yeah, I think it can inspire us, right? It can shift the narrative from what's happening to me in my life to what am I showing up for? How do I want to contribute to this world? 

JULIE: Ariel, I would just like to say thank you so much for being on the show. I could absolutely talk to you for hours. I love your perspective and the insights that you can bring and I'm sure our listeners will really appreciate them too. So, thank you so much for your time today. 

ARIEL: Thank you, Julie. It was really a pleasure. Yeah, love to carry on the conversation with you as well. And likewise with anybody who's listening who wants to speak more yeah, I'm very happy to make the connection and yeah, find a time. I'll leave my scheduling, my calendar booking link as well. So, yeah, I do work with people one-to-one counselling, supporting relational experience, and yeah, I'm always just very interested to meet people and hear their stories. It's a gift. Yeah. So, thank you, Julie. Thank you so much for reaching out and initiating this conversation. [Most welcome.]