Meet Jamaal Simmons LCSW-C

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jamaal Simmons LCSW-C a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jamaal, so excited to have you with us today, particularly to get your insight on a topic that comes up constantly in the community – overcoming creativity blocks. Any thoughts you can share with us?

Writer’s block can be difficult, and it’s not a fun feeling. You sit there and ask, What do I want to talk about? It’s hard to put your thoughts down on paper, even though it’s something you specialize in, but despite all that, you get stuck in your head. It’s similar to brain fog that I talk about in my book, ADHD Life Skills 101. It’s like opening a drawer only to realize that there’s no drawer there, you’re just holding a handle, and you see the floor beneath you as you stand there, befuddled about your reason for even opening the door in the first place. I will say… what helped me was using AI. That sounds like a dirty word when it comes to writing, but AI allows me to get my thoughts out and even helps me to better structure my outline for my book, ADHD Life Skills 101. After artificial intelligence gave me some ideas for what to talk about and how to format them, I could plug them in and keep on going! Hey, I was actually really helpful for me to even edit my paper because I hate editing, and at least AI would catch stuff that I couldn’t, and then when I was able to send it over to an actual human editor, they call it even more stuff, thankfully LOL 

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

So I got into writing the book ADHD Life Skills 101 after I was first diagnosed in 2023. Yes, this is a fresh diagnosis. LOL, this is after my divorce in 2021. I was back out in the dating Market trying to figure myself out, I started to notice a trend that most of the women that I dated had ADHD. I thought that was hard, although I knew that those with ADHD often have issues in relationships. I admit that I can have an ego at times when my kids, my fiancée, or myself try to keep in check, and I was being hard-headed. I didn’t believe that I was neurodivergent. At that time, I knew I had depression and anxiety, but that’s it! I didn’t realize that a lot of those symptoms were stemming from my undiagnosed ADHD. I thought it was normal to have time blindness, brain fog, and leave cabinets open for no reason other than that I had accomplished my mission. I was going to do something else, or I was hyperfocused on a subject. I thought that was completely normal and that everyone did it. And remember, when I was dating, I was definitely not a player of any kind like some of my friends. Identify as demisexual, which means that I have to have a special connection(s) with someone before being intimate with them, so I didn’t have that many girlfriends in my lifetime LOL, so the fact that all of my serious relationships were with someone who was neurodivergent was a clue for me.
Once I met my fiancée, she was the girlfriend who insisted that I had ADHD and offered to take Adderall. When I tried some, I noticed that instead of being hyper, which is a more neurotypical response, everything slowed down, which is the more neurodivergent response. That’s when I freaked out and realized that I needed to contact my doctor to get checked. After that, I went to a third party who did assessments on me and confirmed that I had ADHD inattentive type! It made complete sense as to why or even how I graduated from graduate school, I was body doubling the whole time with my ex-wife, who was also body doubling with me! That was when I started to look and try to find books that would help walk me through this, as this is my first experience, but from the other side of the therapy desk. I noticed that some clinical people were talking about this experience. Some lay people describe their own personal experiences. Still, not many therapists are talking about their own experience with this, let alone black male therapists who are talking about it. Hence, I decided to start jotting down my symptoms, what I was noticing, what would help, and what wouldn’t help, and putting it together into a book with the help of my mentors, I was able to start this process and create ADHD Life Skills 101.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

My mentors were the three areas that were most helpful for me in processing, creating, and releasing the book. These figures inspire me and my own personal growth in therapy. Without therapy, I wouldn’t have been able to really process what I was feeling and why I was feeling that way. It took me about a year or so to really put together the pieces of my life because, as I understood that I had ADHD, everything else made sense to me. It was like I had to go back in my life and reprocess some of my old memories because once you ADD ADHD, they made sense. It wasn’t an internal feeling; it was that my brain works differently, so I need to work on how I work with my brain to accomplish what I do. I take responsibility, but now that I’m aware, I know why I do what I do. While my brain prefers to do what it does, so I can better work with myself to do what I need to do, therapy was helpful. My mentors helped lead the way and warned me of the hurdles I had to overcome to get to where I wanted to go. This helped make some things easier for me as I didn’t have to learn from my mistakes, I just had to learn from theirs LOL. One figure that I would definitely say I look up to is the character known as Rock Lee from the Naruto series. I’m about to get nerdy, so hang on to your suspenders! This character was influential for me, and continuing even when I didn’t feel like going forward, when I was running out of time, tired, or had other things to do, helped me keep going. Even when the world was crashing around me, which definitely happens depending on the election cycle as well, which by the way, I’ve noticed I’ve gotten a lot more referrals this past winter and spring, which is great for business but not a good sign for the world, but I digress. This resilience and tenacity helped me get here, and Rock Lee is one of the characters who inspires me to keep moving forward, even if I’ve been beaten.

For others, I would strongly recommend finding mentors to get to where you want to go because that makes the journey that much easier, that much more visible, and thus that much more doable.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

My most significant growth area has been exploring and untangling where my fear comes from and some of the roots of my anxieties about life and moving forward in my fear of failure/success. In therapy, I’ve been really working on some more stuff with my therapist, really digging deeper into the roots, because now that I’ve been challenging myself more often, these internal hurdles have been coming up more often. I don’t like that, LOL, there’s definitely been days where I said, ” we should really not do therapy anymore, let’s not do this whole therapeutic stuff.” Usually, that’s when a good session occurs. My fiancé picks up on that pretty quickly lol. It’s hard working on yourself and facing those fears; however, to paraphrase something Joseph Campbell once said,” often the darkest and most dangerous cave is the one you need to go through”. I live by that and I use that in therapy with my own clients as they face their own fears, anxieties, and past/current trauma. I totally get why someone wouldn’t want to do therapy. It’s not fun at times, and you must challenge the things you fear most. I get it. However, to receive something different, you have to do something different.

Contact Info:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smhllc
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/simmons-mental-health-loch-raven
• Other: Psychology today Profile: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/jamaal-simmons-towson-md/870507

  Twitch: twitch.tv/iorishakor

  Amazon Author Page: https://amzn.to/4dFDlTO

  Google Publisher Application Page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Jamaal+S.+Publishing

  Discord: https://discord.gg/iorishakor

  ADHD Landing Page: my.linkpod.site/adhdlifeskills101

Image Credits

Owned by Simmons Mental Health LLC and Jamaal S. Publishing LLC