Why ADHD Women Don't Know What They Want (And It's Not Indecisiveness)

hen someone asks what you want for dinner, do you actually know?

Or are you more I don't mind, whatever you want! and genuinely mean it, right up until they pick something and you feel that little flicker of disappointment? Maybe even a flicker of annoyance? 👀

Yeahhhhhhh…..

This is month two of our ADHD series, where I coach women through the messy middle of transformation. Last month we went deep into nervous system territory: regulation, the window of tolerance, the accordion.

If you missed that, go catch it first. It's the foundation for everything we're building now.

This month is about self-trust. Specifically, learning to believe your own knowing after a lifetime of being told, directly or indirectly, that your knowing is wrong.

Interoception is your brain's ability to read internal body signals.

Hunger. Exhaustion. Emotion. Desire.

For a lot of late-diagnosed ADHD women, that signal is genuinely quiet. Sometimes it is basically static.

So when someone asks what you want and you draw a complete blank, it is not because you're passive or indecisive or emotionally unavailable. It's because your brain has a harder time accessing that information in real time, especially when most requests feel urgent even when they objectively are not.

That's the neurological piece.

When you spend years being corrected, told you're forgetful or difficult or that you overreact or under-react, you start to outsource your own judgment. Not consciously. It just makes sense. Your reads on situations have been called wrong often enough that you stop trusting them. You look to other people to tell you what's true so you don't get it wrong, and over time, that becomes so habitual that by the time someone asks you what you want, you genuinely don't know. Because you stopped asking yourself years ago.

This is not a character flaw!!!

It's a logical adaptation to an environment that kept telling you that you couldn't be trusted.

For most of my life I genuinely thought I just didn't have strong preferences. Not in a zen, unattached way. More of a huh, weird, I must just be chill kind of way.

Pick a restaurant. Pick a movie. Pick a high school sport to try. Pick literally anything. I would shrug and be forreal. And because I had no preference, someone else's preference always won. Shocker.

Which eventually refined itself into people-pleasing. Which eventually became a whole personality trait I had to excavate and chisel daily.

I've traveled to nearly 80 countries. Tried improv. Gave the whole master's degree a whirl, twice. Produced a web series. Met people I grew up watching on television. And when I look back at how most of that happened, I just kind of rolled into it. Followed a few breadcrumbs other people left on my path.

Rarely stopped to ask whether the desire for the thing was mine or theirs.

What was underneath that was simpler and sadder: slowing down felt like being a burden. Taking time to figure out what I actually wanted felt like wasting everyone else's time.

So I skipped the check-in with myself entirely and hoped for the best. It would all be fine anyway, right?

That's what self-abandonment looks like from the inside. Not even that dramatic. Rarely obvious. Just quiet and chronic, and it costs you an enormous amount over time.

That cost shows up as external validation-seeking. As masks you build so carefully you forget they're masks. As perfectionism, inadequacy, shame.

I'm still working through mine, genuinely. Not claiming I've graduated!

What has helped, maybe more than anything else, is watching my hubby.

This man follows his gut like it's his full-time job. He will stop a whole conversation cold, change a plan, say exactly what he wants without a single apology. I used to find it so aggravating I could scream, which if you know me is really saying something because my voice does not really go above a low roar.

One fine day, I just opened my eyes a bit wider and realized that I wasn't ACTUALLY annoyed at him. I was annoyed because I had no idea how to do that myself. His preferences and opinions, albeit sometimes annoying, are the ways in which he takes really good care of himself, his energy, his emotions, his environment. I had no boundaries, endless burnout cycles, exhausted by 3p daily, pulled in too many directions that I said yes to!

In the transformational world, there's a concept that when you're triggered by something in someone else, it's usually because that piece of yourself is being highlighted. Maybe for not taking up enough space, like my inability to follow or trust my own inner voice, or for taking up too much, like getting irritated at the charming extrovert in the room because I want that spot.

He has been my most frustrating and most important teacher. He knows, trust me.

We're starting with one question: what do I actually want?

And we're going to sit with how much harder that question is than it sounds.

Over the coming weeks, we're going into the parts of you that learned it wasn't safe to have needs. The way doubt gets installed, usually by people who genuinely loved you and still got it wrong. And what rebuilding self-trust actually looks like when you're neurodivergent and have spent years being the least reliable narrator of your own experience.

We're not fixing anything. We're returning.