Alcohol

[Bythemillpond]

Adult dd is going through testing for ADHD. As am I.

One of the things we have discussed is alcohol and our reaction to it.

I don’t drink as the room starts spinning on an liqueur chocolate.

Dd doesn’t really drink as it doesn’t have any effect on her. She likes the taste of red wine and Prosecco and can drink a few glasses but whilst everyone around her is falling over drunk from the same amount she feels stone cold sober. She doesn’t get any sort of buzz or relaxation at all from drinking and a lot of the time doesn’t bother with it.

I know that studies show that people with ADHD can have a low tolerance to alcohol but can it go the other way?

Does anyone have their experiences of how alcohol affects them if they have ADHD or is there something else that is akin to ADHD that has this high tolerance to alcohol

Or is the high tolerance to alcohol a more genetic thing.
I can’t really say about my own family as they weren’t really drinkers.
I do know a female relative who had to take 5 times the dosage of anaesthesia to knock her out before an operation.

I have quite a high tolerance to alcohol, I feel sober very quickly after a few drinks, too.

I was diagnosed with ADHD as a teenager, in my 40s now. I like having a drink especially when my head is buzzing with too many thoughts, and I can't slow it down. Alcohol slows down my brain enough so I can relax and stop fizzing, if that makes sense.

I do worry about how people with ADHD are prone to addiction, so I take breaks now and again from drinking, right now I'm on a break and won't have another drink until next month, when friends are coming round. During periods of stress, it's very easy for me to slip into a drinking a couple of glasses of wine every night, which is unhealthy in many ways.

Dd has never felt anything but completely sober.

I have witnessed her drinking similar to her friends and she says she doesn’t get any sort of buzz or even quietening her brain down whilst they are clearly quite drunk.
I get that thing about quietening my brain with alcohol but for me a glass of wine and I would be dancing on the tables.

She only drinks stuff she likes the taste of. Vodka shots and Jaeger bombs are to her just horrible and don’t give her any sort of effect.

She ticks the boxes for ADHD but I was wondering was there something else going on.
She loses everything. Will get off a train regularly without her handbag/coat/phone/school bag when she was in school
She does seriously risky things so she can think clearly.
She can’t read a book or even a newspaper article because it bores her but can organise a wedding reception down to the last detail.
She has lost so many passports that the passport office have called her because they thought she was selling the passports. She has lost her driving licence 9 times. Then found it again after she has sent off for another and now doesn’t know which one is the latest one.

But then her organisational skill are incredible. And her temper is off the charts if you don’t do things immediately or things go wrong. We had a nice evening last night watching a film but then when she got up she knocked over her glass of cola onto the rug. She bent down to pick up the glass and asked if I could help her. I went to stand up but then got screamed at for not moving quickly enough and she had sorted it by using one of her white socks which she had taken off earlier and was by the sofa which was now stained with cola because I wasn’t quick enough getting up. There wasn’t a pause between asking for help and saying too late I wasn’t quick enough.

I know I tick every single box for ADHD. Even down to the extremely low tolerance for alcohol which I thought must have been genetic although I didn’t think even with our mixed bag of family members we didn’t have any Asian branches of the family.
Everyone agrees I can’t focus on anything and I couldn’t organise a party in a brewery. I struggle putting food on the table so we eat out a lot (Lock down has been hugely stressful just on the cooking front)
What I was wondering was if Dd was actually ADHD or ADHD with traits of something else that got things done quick (but missed a lot of stuff out) super organised and with a horrific temper.
On the temper front she knows she is being a bitch but it is like listening to someone else saying the words and can’t understand why she says them when I am trying to help and haven’t done anything wrong.