Sari Solden
speaker
39 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Sari Solden’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Mm hmm.
This is Sari Solden.
I mean, so like for the 30 years, I like spoke everywhere constantly and I became a really great keynote speaker. And this is a famous speech I did.
I moved to the farm and we had sheep. And here's one of my sheep. You'll see what he looks like. So this is about shame. So we moved out to the country because I thought, oh, if I live out there, it doesn't matter. Nobody will worry about what my house looks like or anything like that.
And then on the way home from work every day, I would pass in these beautiful pastoral scenes and there's all these beautiful sheep and I got home and then I looked at my sheep and I kept getting depressed and I realized my sheep were messy. And then I felt bad every time I realized what I had was sheep shame. So I realized, so it didn't matter like what the context was.
I had internalized that no matter what it was going to be, I was going to be embarrassed by it or feel shamed about it. I had sheep shame.
When I went there, everything sort of fell apart. I was messy, you know, and it caused a big problem. A lot of shame developed.
I worked at mental hospitals. I worked in the inner city, you know, with farm labor camps. I did a lot of things in those days. And then... I got married, then moved to California, and then I got unmarried.
You'd have to move every hour, and I'd have to, like, stuff these clocks into a, drawer because I couldn't concentrate with the ticking. I put the fan on and closed the windows to block out that sound. And I was like hiding in shame from the administrative staff because I couldn't read my handwriting. And I wasn't talking at all in all these group settings. Nobody knew who I was.
Part of the test was showing me nonsense looking creatures and you had to remember their names. So nonsense names. And I got like a 16th percentile. I couldn't remember the first time I've ever had a test score that was terrible. And they showed me like that means like I had a terrible short term memory, but I've been compensating with context.
And when there's no context, I didn't know how to do this. So I said, OK, that's interesting.
I remember listening to it, and pretty soon after that, their book came out. And that was the first big book that talked about the fact that Adults continue to have difficulties even though they lost the hyperactivity.
I knew I had massive problems with organization, so I mean, this all made sense to me. I wasn't looking at it through the ADHD lens. All the books, though, about learning disabilities did talk a lot about disorganization, but they didn't attribute it to this.
I remember taking that book with me to a family wedding in Modesto, California, and that book really opened my eyes to that.
Where they really test all of your, like, verbal abilities, all your memory abilities. It's a very in-depth test. And your IQ, and they're looking for problems, you know. So for me, I had a big split between my performance, like visual, spatial. I can't do that at all. I have like a 99th percentile in one of my subtests, like for instance, of verbal abilities.
and a 9% in, like, putting things together in a thing, you know? So I can't unload the dishwasher. I tell my husband, look, here's my test results. I'm not making it up.
I'm seeing, okay, the women and men, even though they're telling me the same problems, having completely different reactions. So the men, they do not have the shame about the disorganization. And the women were hiding and pretending and ashamed and not being able to, you know, achieve or get out there or there is such secrecy. That was the thing I saw.
And it was really focused on their cultural expectations, what women have. internalized from the culture about what they should be able to do domestically, especially, you know, taking care of all the things, all the children's stuff, all the responsibilities. So they internalize these expectations deeply, even today still, and they idealize them and
Then they toxically compared themselves to other people and their self-narrative and the shame and the distortion. It was so much more for women. Women all the time say, how do other women do it? All they say is, how do they do it? They fantasize about some kind of organizational nirvana. When I get to that level, then I'll be happy and everything will be okay.
Often there's self-medicating with Diet Coke or caffeine, or sometimes you have like OCD-looking compensation for the ADHD. And, you know, and they're very, like, I get like that before people like you come over.
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