Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder isn’t really about not paying attention—it’s about having a nervous system that regulates interest, not importance. That means things that feel urgent, novel, or emotionally charged grab your focus fast, but “boring” or routine tasks (even important ones) can feel impossible. It’s not a lack of discipline. It’s a mismatch between how your brain works and how the world expects you to function.

ADHD can look like forgetfulness, messiness, or procrastination—but it can also be intense creativity, lightning-fast thinking, and big-picture vision. Most of us learned to mask it so well we didn’t even know we had it. For a lot of people it doesn’t get diagnosed until adulthood, after a lifetime of thinking they were just lazy, chaotic, or “too much.”

Turns out, we were never broken. We were just using a map that wasn’t made for our kind of brain.

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder isn’t just about what happened to you—it’s about what kept happening. It’s the slow, grinding erosion of safety over time. Not one event, but a thousand little ones that trained your body to stay on high alert. It's what happens when you grow up in chaos, neglect, emotional abuse, or situations where you had to abandon yourself to stay connected to others.

CPTSD can look like mood swings, people-pleasing, perfectionism, disconnection from your body, or feeling like you don’t know who you are. It’s the fog. The freeze. The inner critic that never shuts up. It’s the panic when nothing’s actually wrong. And the guilt for not being “over it” yet.

But here's the truth: it’s not just in your head—it’s in your nervous system. And you’re not broken. You adapted.

Healing from CPTSD means learning to feel safe in your own body again. Slowly. Gently. In layers. It’s not linear. But it is possible.

Not always cloaks and Kool-Aid. Sometimes they look like your childhood church, your family, or the place everyone said would keep you safe. A cult isn’t just about beliefs—it’s about control. It’s when a system, group, or figure convinces you to trade your critical thinking, boundaries, or identity in exchange for belonging, salvation, or fear-based obedience. If questioning makes you feel unsafe, disloyal, or wicked… that’s not faith. That’s indoctrination. And calling it what it is might be the first breath of freedom.

Executive dysfunction isn’t about being lazy. It’s about the part of your brain that’s supposed to plan, prioritize, start, and finish tasks being... offline. You want to do the thing. You know you should do the thing. But the bridge between intention and action feels like it’s missing planks.

It can look like procrastination, disorganization, forgetfulness—but it feels like staring at a mountain in flip-flops. People say “just start,” and you would love to. But your brain says “nope” and hits the brakes, even on things you want to do. And then you beat yourself up, thinking it’s a willpower problem. It’s not.

Executive dysfunction is the invisible wall you run into over and over. Recognizing it is the first step toward climbing it—with compassion instead of shame.

Gaslighting is when someone tries to convince you that your reality isn’t real—on purpose. It’s not just lying. It’s the slow, intentional unraveling of your trust in your own mind. Over time, it can make you question everything: your memory, your instincts, even your sanity.

It sounds like:
“You’re too sensitive.”
“That never happened.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“Stop being so dramatic.”
“You always twist things.”
“Don’t you know I love you?”

Gaslighting isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s a calm tone with cruel words. Sometimes it’s love laced with manipulation. Sometimes it’s silence after a wound. The result is the same: you stop trusting yourself.

The damage runs deep because it doesn’t just hurt—it rewires. It teaches you not to believe your gut. It makes you small. Confused. Dependent. And worst of all, it makes you gaslight yourself.

But that fog? It lifts. Slowly, steadily, with support and truth and time. And when it does—you begin to trust the quiet voice inside you again. The one that always knew.

Late diagnosis is when you finally get the name for what you’ve been living with your whole life—usually ADHD, autism, or both—but it doesn’t come until adulthood. By then, you’ve already built your identity around struggle, shame, or survival. You didn’t know why things were so hard, just that they were, and that people seemed to think it was your fault.

It’s a strange kind of relief. On one hand, things finally make sense. You can trace every “failure,” every meltdown, every coping strategy back to something real. Tangible. Nameable. On the other hand, it hurts like hell. Because now you know it wasn’t laziness. Or selfishness. Or being too sensitive. It was wiring. Biology. Something you never asked for but spent years struggling with anyway.

There’s grief in it. Grief for the younger you who wasn’t supported. Who was mislabeled. Who worked ten times harder just to keep up. But there’s also freedom. Because once you know the truth, you can stop pretending. You can start healing. You can build a life that fits you.

It’s not too late. It never was.

Neurodivergent means your brain works differently from what society labels as “normal.” It covers a range of conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and more—but at its core, it’s not a diagnosis. It’s a description.

Being neurodivergent doesn’t mean broken. It means wired in a way that sees patterns others miss, feels things more deeply, processes information on a different frequency. It means navigating a world that often wasn’t built with you in mind—and figuring out how to survive, adapt, and eventually thrive anyway.

The term itself is a reclaiming. A way to name the experience of always feeling a little “off” or “other,” and realizing you’re not alone. You're not defective—you’re different. And difference is not a deficit.

Neurotypical refers to people whose brains work in the way society expects—more or less in line with the standard. They tend to process information, emotions, and social cues in ways that are considered "normal" by mainstream standards. They’re the baseline most systems are built around: schools, jobs, relationships, expectations.

It doesn’t mean life is easy for them. But it does mean they’re usually understood. Their struggles get support. Their habits aren’t pathologized. And when they speak up, people tend to listen.

Neurotypical is what most people assume you are—until you aren’t. And for neurodivergent people, that assumption can be exhausting. Because the rules weren’t written for us, but we’re still expected to follow them.

It’s not a bad word. It’s just not our word.

RSD is like a smoke alarm in your nervous system that goes off at the possibility of rejection. It’s the panic you feel when someone seems upset with you. The spiral that starts when a text goes unanswered. The gut-punch of believing you’ve let someone down—even if nothing’s actually happened.

It’s not just being sensitive. It’s an emotional allergic reaction to real or perceived criticism, fueled by a lifetime of feeling “too much” or “not enough.” With RSD, feedback feels like failure. Disapproval feels like abandonment. And even minor conflicts can feel soul-shattering.

This isn’t weakness. It’s a nervous system shaped by fear and wired for protection. Learning to recognize RSD doesn’t make it hurt less—but it helps you separate what’s real from what’s reflex.

A set of lasting psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical effects that arise from prolonged exposure to authoritarian, fear-based, or spiritually abusive religious systems. RTS often includes symptoms of complex PTSD, such as guilt, shame, dissociation, identity confusion, hypervigilance, and difficulty trusting oneself. Unlike a single traumatic event, RTS is the slow-burn impact of indoctrination, exclusion, and spiritual manipulation—especially when tied to childhood development or family structures. It’s not about losing faith; it’s about surviving systems that taught you fear was holiness and obedience was love.

The freeze that happens when you know something is coming—an appointment, a meeting, a scheduled task—and it paralyzes your ability to do anything useful before it arrives.

You technically have time.
But your body says, “Don’t start. You’ll just have to stop.”

In MGEL, this refers to the nervous system's shutdown response to looming events—especially when past experiences have taught you that time is unreliable, interruptions are unsafe, or effort gets wasted.

It’s not laziness.
It’s emotional limbo dressed up as logic.

Subconscious survival patterns stored in the body—especially in the amygdala—that dictate how you respond to stress, shame, danger, or emotional triggers.

In MGEL, these are the pre-programmed scripts your system runs when something feels familiar in the wrong way. They're not conscious choices—they’re emotional muscle memory from earlier trauma, learned helplessness, or chronic invalidation.

Often outdated, often invisible—but deeply powerful until rewritten.
They’re not who you are. They’re what kept you alive.

Hyperfocus is the other side of the ADHD coin. It’s when your brain locks onto something so intensely that the rest of the world fades out. Hours pass like minutes. Hunger, noise, people—none of it registers. You’re in it.

It can be magical—like finding your superpower. You get more done in one burst than most people do in a day. But it can also derail your whole schedule, especially when you fall into a rabbit hole that isn’t time-sensitive or urgent (but feels vital).

Hyperfocus isn’t control. It’s a current that pulls you under. The trick is learning how to catch the wave and how to get back to shore. Because when it’s managed well, hyperfocus isn’t a flaw—it’s fuel.

Masking is what happens when being yourself doesn’t feel safe. It’s the performance you learn to put on to blend in, to avoid judgment, to survive. For neurodivergent people, especially those with ADHD or autism, masking can look like smiling when you're overwhelmed, forcing eye contact, rehearsing conversations in your head, or copying how others act so you don’t stand out.

It’s knowing you’re different, and trying to camouflage the parts that might get you excluded. Not because you’re fake—but because the world taught you you’d only be loved if you were easier to handle.

Masking isn’t just exhausting. It’s disorienting. It chips away at your sense of self because after a while, you can’t tell what’s the mask and what’s you anymore. You start to wonder if anyone actually knows the real you. Or if you even do.

Unmasking is a slow, brave process. It’s not about being raw all the time—it’s about choosing when, where, and with whom to be fully yourself. And learning that you were never too much. You were too masked.

The intense nervous system freeze that happens right before doing something that draws attention to yourself—especially something that feels vulnerable, exposing, or new.

In MGEL, it describes the moment your mind knows you're safe, but your body still remembers the last time you weren’t.
The fear of falling again—metaphorically or emotionally—causes a full-system hesitation, often misinterpreted as weakness or procrastination.

But it’s not failure.
It’s just your body saying, “Are you sure? Last time we crossed this bridge, we almost drowned.”

The moat feeling doesn’t mean you’re broken.
It means your survival system is active—and you’re doing something that matters.

The earliest emotional injury that shaped your internal world—often from childhood—where identity, safety, or connection was first compromised.
It marks the beginning of a split between who you truly were and who you had to become to survive.
These moments aren’t just painful memories; they’re blueprints that influenced your nervous system, beliefs, and behaviors long after the event passed.
Recognizing the Original Wound can be the first step in reclaiming your voice, your truth, and your wholeness.

The opposite of self-gaslighting. A deliberate, sometimes defiant act of turning toward yourself with tenderness, even when your brain insists you don’t deserve it. It means believing your pain matters without having to prove it. It’s refusing to abandon yourself in the aftermath of abandonment. Not a loophole or excuse—but a doorway back to humanity when shame tries to shut you out.

A sudden wave of shame or self-invalidation triggered by expressing hurt, vulnerability, or truth—usually accompanied by the internalized voice of an authority figure dismissing your pain.

For me, it refers to the mental backlash that tells you you're overreacting, faking it, or “stealing valor” from real victims. It’s not about being too sensitive—it’s about being told you’re not allowed to be.

Someone who has survived trauma but feels they don’t deserve validation, care, or recognition—often because their suffering was minimized, disbelieved, or self-silenced. A result of gaslighting, cultural shame, religious indoctrination, or comparison with others who “had it worse.”