From complex developmental trauma and lifelong ADHD struggles to a growing sense of ease, security, and freedom.
Something rather extraordinary has been happening lately.
I've written before about my personal experiences with the Integrated Listening Systems (iLs) Focus program, and how it has been contributing to some remarkable changes in my life.
One thing I've noticed is that progress doesn't always happen gradually or predictably.
Sometimes changes seem fairly subtle, followed by what feels like an enormous leap forward.
Lately, I've been experiencing another one of those leaps.
And this one is showing up in some of the most ordinary parts of my everyday life.
Things like putting ketchup back in the refrigerator.Washing the dishes.
Keeping my house tidy.
And, perhaps even more remarkably, setting boundaries without feeling responsible for everyone else's reactions.
These might not sound like particularly exciting accomplishments.
But for someone with ADHD and a very significant history of complex developmental trauma, they represent something I once couldn't have imagined.
Life is becoming easier.
Not because my circumstances have changed, but because so many things that used to require enormous effort are beginning to feel almost effortless.
I've lived with very signficant ADHD my entire life.
Like many people with ADHD, I've spent decades struggling with organization, household routines, clutter, and the seemingly simple tasks that other people appear to manage without much thought.
I've always known what I should do.
I've understood the concept of touching things only once, for example. Instead of putting dirty dishes on the counter, put them directly into the dishwasher. Instead of leaving the ketchup out, put it back in the refrigerator immediately.
It's not complicated.
But knowing what to do and being able to consistently do it are two very different things.
For decades, I would look around my house and see things that needed to be done. Clutter accumulating. Things left out. Tasks that should have taken only a few minutes.
I wanted to take care of them. I often felt bothered by them.
But somehow, actually doing them felt impossibly heavy.
I could spend far more energy feeling overwhelmed by a task than the task itself would have required.
And then, when someone was coming over, suddenly I could spring into action, racing around trying to accomplish everything I'd been unable to do before.
It was exhausting.
What's happening now is that the gap between wanting to do something and actually doing it seems to be disappearing.
I don't have to convince myself to put something away. I just put it away.
I don't have to summon the energy to clean up the kitchen in the evening. I just do it. Every single evening!
And the most surprising part is that it doesn't feel like I'm working particularly hard at any of this.
It feels natural.
I've also been experimenting with some of the principles from BJ Fogg's book Tiny Habits, and I'm finding that they are working beautifully alongside the changes I've been experiencing with iLs.
The strategies themselves aren't necessarily new to me. What's new is how easily I'm able to implement them.
My mornings are a great example.
When I get up, I spend a few minutes doing Pilates on my reformer.
Then I go downstairs and let my dog outside.
While she's outside, I feed the cats, clean the litter boxes, and vacuum the mudroom, laundry room, and downstairs bathroom, including the surfaces in those rooms.
A robotic vacuum takes care of vacuuming and mopping the floors throughout the rest of my house every day.
Then I let my dog back inside and feed her.
While she's eating, I find one thing in my basement to declutter.
And then I sit down with my coffee and my Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) lamp because it's that time of year.
That's my morning.
And somehow, it all flows.
I'm not constantly negotiating with myself about whether I feel like doing these things or having to summon motivation.
One activity naturally leads into the next.
I'm also noticing that when I see something out of place, I generally just put it away.
Sometimes I'll even find myself tidying before leaving the house, despite knowing that nobody will see it. I live alone!
Not because I feel obligated to.
Because having an orderly environment feels so good, and putting things away has become easier than leaving them out.
There is something incredibly calming about that.
This is so different for me that it feels like a miracle.
One of the clearest indications that something significant has changed came from an unexpected place: getting ready for my cleaning service.
For the past year, I've had cleaners come every two weeks to take care of the more detailed cleaning.
I'm increasingly comfortable recognizing that I don't have to do everything myself, and that paying someone to take care of tasks I find particularly challenging can be a wonderful investment in my quality of life.
But historically, getting ready for the cleaners was an enormous undertaking.
They were coming to clean, but first I had to tidy everything so they could clean.
That could take days. It was stressful, overwhelming, and often accompanied by considerable anxiety.
Then one day, I realized they were coming and there was almost nothing I needed to do to prepare.
I was genuinely confused!
At first, I assumed it was a fluke.
But then it happened again.
And again.
It's now been several weeks, and preparing for the cleaners has become almost a non-event. The house is already tidy!
There simply isn't much to do.
I can't adequately describe how extraordinary that feels after a lifetime of struggling with these things.
Another example might sound a little ridiculous, but I think it illustrates these changes beautifully.
I live in a rural home with a water softener that needs to be topped up with heavy bags of salt.
For years, this was one of those tasks I just couldn't seem to stay on top of.
The bags are heavy. Dealing with them feels unpleasant. And because the task was aversive, I would go into ADHD paralysis and avoid it.
I'd eventually notice that my dishes weren't coming out clean and realize I'd run out of salt again.
Even when I remembered to buy some, the bags might sit in my car or garage for days or weeks before I got around to putting them into the softener.
Now?
Every two weeks, when the cleaners come, I take my dog out for an outing. We pick up chicken feed and water softener salt, and I stop at a donation centre to drop off things I've been decluttering.
When I get home, I put the salt directly into the softener.
I don't run out anymore.
It's simply part of the routine.
And it isn't difficult.
I'm not just getting better at forcing myself to do difficult things. So many of those things now feel easy and almost effortless.
As remarkable as these practical changes have been, something equally significant has been happening in my relationships, both personally and professionally.
I'm finding it dramatically easier to set boundaries.
I've always been a very giving person, particularly in my professional life. I genuinely care about the people I work with, and I have a tendency to go above and beyond to help.
Sometimes a little too far beyond.
Historically, when someone wanted something extra from me, I could find myself caught in a difficult internal struggle.
I might recognize that a request didn't really work for me, but I'd worry about disappointing the other person.
Would they be upset?
Would they feel rejected?
Would they think I wasn't being supportive?
Even when I knew intellectually that I was entitled to have boundaries, the emotional discomfort of maintaining them could be considerable.
That has been changing.
Now, when someone makes a request, I can much more easily recognize what feels right for me.
If something feels comfortable and genuinely good to offer, wonderful.
But if I notice discomfort in my body, or a clear sense that something isn't right for me, I can respect that.
I don't have to argue with myself about it.I can feel compassion for the person making the request and understand why they might want something from me. I can recognize that they may feel disappointed if I decline.
But I no longer feel compelled to make their disappointment my responsibility.
I can care about someone else's experience without abandoning my own.
It hasn't always been completely seamless. Some people who have known me professionally for years are accustomed to me being exceptionally flexible and accommodating.
But for the most part, it's gone remarkably well. A couple of people have even congratulated me on taking such good care of myself!
And perhaps most importantly, I feel good about what I'm offering.
It's far better to give from a place of genuine willingness than to overextend myself and later feel uncomfortable or regretful.
There's another part of my story that I think is important to share, because I don't believe it's possible to fully appreciate what these changes mean to me without understanding a little of where I've come from.
I have very significant ADHD, but I've also lived with the effects of extremely severe complex developmental trauma.
My childhood was not simply difficult. It was profoundly frightening and emotionally devastating.
My mother openly hated me, and at times seemed to take pleasure in my suffering.
When I was as young as four years old, she would tell me that nobody liked me. Not my grandparents. Not even the family dog. And certainly not my friends.
If I came home happy after spending time with my friends, she might say, "You think they like you? They're not laughing WITH you. They're laughing AT you."
Imagine being a kid, happy and excited, only to be told repeatedly over the years by your own mother that even the people who seemed to like you were only pretending.
When those messages come from someone who is supposed to love and protect you, and they're repeated throughout childhood, they can become deeply embedded in how you experience yourself and the world.
For much of my life, I genuinely struggled to believe that other people liked me.
Even when there was plenty of evidence that they did, some part of me wondered whether they were simply pretending.
That uncertainty persisted until just a couple of years ago.
The impact of my childhood extended far beyond relationships and self-esteem.
For many years, I lived with nightmares, flashbacks, dissociation, and intense fear and anxiety. I experienced extremely difficult trauma anniversary reactions, sometimes several times a week.
I had severe lifelong chronic insomnia, and times of the year when even leaving my house felt overwhelming.
There were chapters of my adult life when simply coping with everyday existence required an extraordinary amount of effort.
And some of the trauma therapies I sought out actually made things worse, because they didn't incorporate working with the nervous system and instead of healing it, actually reinforced trauma physiology.
More than one therapist has told me that my childhood experiences were among the most severe they had encountered in their professional work.
On top of the effects of severe developmental trauma, I'm also neurodivergent, with ADHD, and have a history of multiple brain injuries, as well as MTHFR gene variants that may add another layer of complexity to neurological and mental health functioning.
Understanding and supporting my nervous system has been anything but straightforward.
So when I talk about struggling with everyday functioning, I'm not describing someone who simply needed to learn better organizational strategies or develop more discipline.
I've spent decades understanding these challenges, both personally and professionally. I've learned the strategies. I've tried the approaches. I've done enormous amounts of therapeutic work.
The difficulty was never a lack of knowledge, intelligence, motivation, effort, or desire to change.
It was that knowing what to do didn't necessarily mean my brain and nervous system could consistently make it happen.
That's why these latest changes feel so extraordinary.
I share this not because I want my story to be defined by what happened to me, but because I want people to understand that even when the effects of trauma are profound and longstanding, meaningful change can still be possible.
And the changes I've experienced extend far beyond my ability to manage everyday tasks.
For much of my adult life, my attachment patterns reflected the insecurity of my earliest relationships. I could move between anxious attachment, fearing rejection or abandonment, and avoidant responses when closeness felt threatening or overwhelming.
Remarkably, it's really only within the past year or two that my attachment patterns have shifted so dramatically. Today, I experience my attachment as secure.
I don't live with that underlying fear that people don't really like me, or feel that I need to earn love by being endlessly accommodating.
I no longer feel afraid of being alone.
In fact, I absolutely love living alone! And I also love being in a committed, loving relationship in which we each have our own homes while sharing our lives together.
There's no sense that I need another person to complete me or reassure me that I'm worthy of love.
I feel secure in who I am.
And that security has allowed me to continue discovering who I am, sometimes even completely reconsidering aspects of my identity that I'd taken for granted for decades.
There's something incredibly freeing about no longer needing to hold on to an old understanding of yourself simply because it's familiar.
I can change.
I can grow. I can discover new things about myself.
And I can trust myself through that process.I think that's also part of why setting boundaries has become so much easier.
When you grow up believing that love and acceptance are precarious, disappointing someone can feel genuinely threatening, even when you know intellectually that it shouldn't.
But when that underlying sense of threat begins to shift, you can recognize that someone might be disappointed in you without interpreting their disappointment as evidence that you've done something wrong.
You can care deeply about another person while respecting your own needs.That is an extraordinary kind of freedom.
Of course, I'm still a work in progress.
I still have ADHD. I still encounter challenges. My life isn't perfect, and I certainly don't consider myself finished with healing.
I'm not sure I believe there is such a thing as being finished. I think healing and growth are lifelong processes.
But the difference between how I experience myself and the world today and how I experienced them in earlier chapters of my life is almost impossible to describe.
It's as though more and more of the energy that once went into simply coping is becoming available for actually living.
Although my healing journey has involved many different approaches over many years, I want to be particularly clear about something.
I am quite convinced that iLs has been a major catalyst for this latest explosion of progress.
I've been using the Rest & Restore Protocol (RRP) regularly since June 2024, listening most nights, and I continue to do so. I also listen to the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) regularly.
Both have contributed to extraordinary changes in my nervous system regulation, relationships, and overall well-being.
RRP especially has helped me experience dramatically better sleep, along with some improvements in executive functioning and rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD), healthier eating, and feeling much more connected with my body and being in my own skin. I believe RRP has also played an enormous role in my recent shift toward secure attachment, and since introducing iLs, I've noticed those changes deepening even further.
SSP has especially helped me with social anxiety, assertiveness and self protectiveness, sound and sensory sensitivities, and reduction of chronic pain associated with fibromyalgia and arthritis.
Somatic Experiencing, Brainspotting, NeurOptimal neurofeedback, and other forms of trauma processing have also been enormously important throughout my healing journey.
But here's what I find particularly fascinating.
Despite all the progress I'd already made, many aspects of everyday functioning remained stubbornly difficult.
Then I introduced iLs.
Within a few months, I began noticing changes in my day-to-day functioning that were quite unlike anything I'd experienced before.
And rather than plateauing, those changes have continued to build.
There have been these sudden remarkable bursts of progress, almost as though something has shifted into another gear.
Things that had been difficult for decades started becoming easier.
Then easier still.
And now I'm experiencing this extraordinary sense of momentum, where new routines, habits, and ways of responding seem to be developing almost naturally.
Of course, I'm continuing with SSP and RRP, and benefiting from the cumulative effects of many years of trauma healing.
But the timing and nature of these particular changes have made me extremely confident that iLs is playing a very significant role.
It feels as though SSP, RRP, and trauma processing helped create the foundation, and iLs is now helping me build on that foundation in ways I hadn't previously been able to.
And perhaps even more excitingly, I suspect there's a synergistic effect happening.
The greater sense of safety and regulation I've developed through SSP and RRP seems to complement what I'm experiencing with iLs.
Meanwhile, the improvements in everyday functioning that have emerged since introducing iLs seem to be making it easier to put other aspects of my healing into practice.
Strategies from Tiny Habits, which might previously have been difficult to implement consistently, are now working beautifully.
And the emotional work I've done around boundaries seems to be translating more easily into how I respond to people.
I'm not having to work nearly as hard to translate what I know and feel into what I actually do.
I find myself wondering whether iLs is helping to strengthen and integrate capacities that other approaches have helped make possible.
I can't establish exactly how these approaches interact from my personal experience alone, but I can certainly describe what I've observed.
For me, iLs hasn't simply been another helpful intervention. It feels like an accelerator, helping to propel years of healing and growth into increasingly meaningful changes in everyday life.
The longer I work with SSP, RRP, and iLs, both personally and professionally, the more enthusiastic I become about their potential to complement one another.
I have come to think of them as an extraordinarily powerful combination.
Not because everyone needs all three, or because they should necessarily be used simultaneously.
And certainly not because more is always better.
One of the most important things I've learned, particularly when working with highly sensitive or complex nervous systems, is that pacing matters enormously.
Sometimes a very small amount of input is more helpful than a larger amount. Sometimes one approach needs to be established before another is introduced. And sometimes a person needs to pause, integrate changes, or work through trauma material that has emerged.
There is no universal formula.
But I find it fascinating to consider how different approaches may support different aspects of the healing and developmental process.
SSP is designed to support autonomic regulation and the capacity for connection, while RRP focuses on settling, restoration, and physiological regulation.
iLs offers longer-term programs involving auditory, sensory, and motor experiences intended to support attention, coordination, organization, and other aspects of everyday functioning.
Somatic Experiencing, Brainspotting, and other trauma-processing approaches can help address experiences and patterns that continue to interfere with regulation and well-being.
And practical strategies, like those described in Tiny Habits, can help translate emerging capacities into everyday routines.
I don't see these as competing approaches. I see tremendous potential in thoughtfully bringing them together, based on the individual person's needs and responses.
Of course, my personal experience isn't evidence that everyone will experience similar results. Research on these approaches, particularly their combined use, is still developing.
But my experience has made me increasingly curious and excited about what becomes possible when improvements in nervous system regulation are supported by opportunities to develop and practise new ways of functioning.
If you had told me years ago that I would one day be writing excitedly about consistently loading the dishwasher, vacuuming the laundry room, or remembering to put salt in my water softener, I might have laughed.
But these are not small things when you've spent your life struggling with them.
They're the things that determine how much energy you have left for everything else, including the fun and enjoyable things in life, and the people who matter to you.
When everyday tasks are difficult, life can become an endless accumulation of demands.
There's always something you've forgotten, something you're avoiding, something you need to catch up on, or something you're criticizing yourself for not doing.And when those demands begin to feel manageable, something remarkable happens.
There's more room to live.
More room for relationships.
More room for enjoyment.
More room for the things that actually matter to you.
I still have ADHD. I still have days when some things are harder than others.
But I'm no longer spending nearly as much energy fighting with myself just to manage ordinary life.
And perhaps that's the most profound change of all.
I haven't become a different person. I'm becoming increasingly able to live as the person I've always wanted to be, without so much effort standing in the way.
One of the reasons I share my personal experiences is that I know what it's like to feel as though you've tried everything.
I know what it's like to have a complicated nervous system, to experience setbacks, and to wonder whether meaningful change is still possible.
I know what it's like when approaches that are supposed to help actually make things worse.
And I know what it's like to understand something intellectually but still be unable to make it happen in everyday life.
My experience doesn't mean that everyone will respond to these approaches in the same way.
But I do believe my story offers a reason for hope.
Healing and growth don't necessarily happen in a straight line.
Sometimes changes are subtle. Sometimes they emerge long after we expected them. Sometimes one approach seems to create possibilities that another approach helps us build upon.
And sometimes, after years of struggling, something that has always felt impossibly difficult simply starts to feel easier.
I'm now 55, and some of the most remarkable changes of my life are happening right now.
I think that's worth remembering, especially for people who have spent decades struggling and may have begun to believe that this is simply how life will always be.
The changes I've experienced since introducing iLs have given me an entirely new appreciation for what's possible, even after decades of healing and growth.
And perhaps the most wonderful part is that I don't feel as though I've reached the end of this journey.
I feel as though I'm still gaining momentum.
And I can't wait to see what happens next.