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Thank you for sharing your experience. I feel similarly

On a tangent, this makes me think about the explainability of ai models. In a way, discovering our childhood trauma and the way it affects us, is akin to searching for explainability

However, in practice, the best way to overcome whatever we want to overcome, might not be to first have an explanation of why/how it happened

Why are you sure it's really helpful for some people?

Before psychology you had religion, even in the oldest form of Christianity, orthodoxy, you are not too dwell on the past, not to blaim others.

I doubt it really truly helps anyone to dig up the past

What have you found that’s worked for your own executive dysfunction?

What you are describing is emotional neglect and a failure of parenting.

You were meant to learn to recognize and name that energy and emotionality, and then learn to sit with it and develop adaptive coping strategies as needed, not maladaptive ones like negative self-concept and emotional repression.

It can take quite a long time to realize all of this and unlearn the patterns, and unfortunately, first line therapies like CBT are possibly detrimental for these issues.

Edit: also, you need not be fair to your parents. They are meant to adapt to parenting you, even if you were legitimately overactive or overemotional. Instead, you adapted to them.

For me, making a distinction between the big Trauma with a capital T and little trauma with a lowercase t has been helpful. Any experience that has a lasting negative impact on you could be considered a trauma, but only very extreme stuff - violence, sexual abuse - would count as Trauma.

A car accident is a car accident. Sometimes they are fatal, sometimes the paint gets scratched. People sometimes get long term health effects from a fender-bender.

Sounds a lot like CPTSD, which is more about symptoms and responses you have now caused by the continuous situations like you describe. It’s older and there’s been progress on the definition since it came out but Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (and website) is a good resource for the differences between this type of effect form upbringing vs single event traumas.

Personally since reading it and working through my own responses I’ve grown in leaps and bounds where previously I would’ve described myself exactly how you did.

For what it's worth I was a similar kind of child. My problems entirely went away with about 10 (or more) hours of exercise a week. This required a hobby I cared about and the right kind of friends, but since then things have been smooth

> In some ways it was likely a good impact. I learned that my energy had no place in the world. I learned that my emotions would likely cause more problems than they would solve. I learned to shut up, and sit down, and follow the rules, even when every ounce of my inner being wanted to do the opposite.

I'm kinda confused. Is that the good impact you think that had in you? Why?

One aspect of trauma is the helplessness of it: it's not just how severe the physical reality is, it's also about the inability to do anything about it (and the internalization of that inability).

The classic example is a child who drew a picture shortly after 9/11. The picture included people floating down the building on (I believe) balloons or umbrellas. Obviously unphysical; but the child imagining ways (however fantastical) that could have helped was a factor in reducing that child's trauma.

On a therapist can tell you whether you personally have trauma, but the lessons you took away from your experiences certainly sound like it to me.

Yeah so I think when most people these days say trauma, they simply mean "An ongoing emotional overreaction due to a past negative experience." I think that's a super useful concept.

In your case I'd just ask myself "Do I still feel like I'm a bother in situations where I know I'm not because of X?" And if so, it can be productive to see if you can change that directly or indirectly.

Your comment reads like a case study from "Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving" by Pete Walker. Many of his studies focus on childhood experiences that are overall "happy" but fall short of "emotionally fulfilling".

Scolding has been found to have pathways to some really bad things.

It doesn’t have to be the wrist experience to childhood to guarantee crippling adulthoods.

It’s not about little or big trauma, the focus on what any trauma did to the brain is what’s important because the fingerprint and footprint of trauma can be unique and underdeveloped the brain in certain areas regardless of source.

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 
  They may not mean to, but they do. 
  They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

Very similar experience here. It was my mum doing the scolding and I learned 3 things as a child:

1) love is conditional on behaviour - pleasing mum was the primary goal above everything else.

2) when I had been “bad”, only the most extreme contrition on my part unlocked the love I needed (as a highly precocious and literate child I’d write little suicide notes for her to find apologising for being so useless. I was single-digit age).

3) The dissonance between the private incessant scolding and the public display of praise led me to develop a rich, secretive inner life, and become adept at hiding maladaptive behaviour. I became a skilled liar and dissembler.

Suffice to say that this did not do me any favours in life. For the longest time I was able to “fake” being a successful, functioning, and sensitive person. But in reality I was throwing mental landmines into my own future that I eventually stepped on, resulting in addiction, depression, anxiety, almost constant suicidal ideation, a painful divorce (due to my own behaviour), and the estrangement of my adult children. I broke down a couple of years ago, landed in a psychiatric clinic, and started unraveling the effects of a lifetime of living with this baggage. I’m now 61 and have had two of the hardest, most challenging, most heartbreaking, yet also most happy and serene period of growth ever. I feel I’m finally coming into my own and the power my childhood trauma has held over me is broken.

Formally diagnosed two years ago as ASD, ADHD.

Have you read the PDF? It is whichever of the choices explains your lack of success in the real world, and this then brings relief from blaming yourself for that.

Really, that's it. Read the PDF.

The article even acknowledges that psychiatrist answer is wrong, and that all of the above are on a spectrum and nobody is ADHD-free or 100%-autist. This is not a problem because the answer is not meant to be correct, but only to be helpful and to "alleviate shame to enable people to achieve their fullest potential".

So there isn't even an answer.

Which, judging by your post, I'm guessing you will find a deeply unsatisfying way to look at the world, as you sound like someone with a positivist view (facts are correct and everything is true or false, you either have ADHD or not, and even on a spectrum there's a number. But there isn't)

I find this fascinating. "Relief and grief", but one way or another, you were always in trouble or being blamed for being "you".

The thing we call ADHD is just one phenotype amongst thousands. Every behaviour has a cause, and anyone out there who has been through a childhood with traumatic experiences and feelings of guilt and inadequacy need to understand that they don't need to be told that they have the currently-fashionable condition in order to forgive themselves.

This sounds flippant, but I don't mean it to be: What if I said that this happened because you had Mercury in Taurus? The point is here that nothing is your fault. Conversely, everything is; this mirrors the free-will vs predestination paradox.

I simply wrote to the psychiatrist a note that whatever my parents say, they'll make themselves look good, and therefore will paint a rosy childhood for me. I guess it also helped that my then partner was there and told her of how my parents told a "funny story" that made his parents gasp in horror.

Not sure if you noticed the play. You don't have ADHD or autism, you just suffered from trauma.

Government doesn't like that "too many" people want to get support, so looks like they reach for academics.

Same crap they did with cannabis and others when it was impacting certain interests.

> the innate parts that existed prior to birth

What does this mean? Do you mean the congenital aspects of a disorder?

I know plenty of people with ADHD diagnosis and normal childhoods without any unusual trauma. Most of them also have comorbidities (stuff typical to autism spectrum, learning or motor function difficulties).

I think ADHD is something you are born with, but there are many other things that can cause similar difficulties, including trauma. And as the linked article mentions, neurodivergent children are more likely to have parents who suffer from similar difficulties, which may increase their chance of suffering some sort of childhood trauma.

There have also been studies showing that ADHD and autistic individuals are more likely to develop PTSD from traumatic experiences than others. Not to mention the rate of comorbidity can be fairly high, hypothesized for a variety of reasons.

I have some friends that had hard experiences growing up from their parents because of their ADHD. ADHD effects kids earlier in development and requires some extra attention from parents (who also may have ADHD). It might be more likely that kids with ADHD have trauma because of their parents reaction to it.

For what it's worth I know people with ADHD who have no evidence of childhood trauma.

I'm saying this to offer an honest counterpoint to your anecdote. I don't think you meant to imply that ADHD is entirely due to trauma, but in fairness to parents it's probably worth entertaining the idea that some kids are just born that way.

> I'm not a scientist, but from personal experience every single person I've met with ADHD has had severe childhood trauma

I have an ADHD diagnosis. The only particularly traumatic thing in my childhood was my parents getting divorced when I was a teenager because my mother had an affair. I already had some symptoms of it before that happened. Prior to that, my parents might not have been the best parents you could possibly have, but they didn’t do anything that would merit the label “severe childhood trauma”

I believe current research results indicate about 75-80% of ADHD can be attributed to genetics. In other words there are room for other factors but genetics clearly dominante in our current understanding of ADHD.

Too much heritability for trauma alone to be the whole story. It's likely genetics produce latency and environment triggers, if trauma is indeed a big part of the picture.

> every single person I've met with ADHD has had severe childhood trauma.

Every person with headache I met had painkillers.

Therefore their pain is caused by painkillers.

Daft.

this is simply not true, and there's tons of scientific evidence of the contrary. ADHD makes you vulnerable to abuse because generally speaking people have a hard time dealing with the foibles of ADHD people. That makes you a target. We know that from science, there's no point in theorizing. ADHD is mostly genetic, highly hereditary and both under diagnosed and under treated. That's all there is to it.

It's an article with no clear conclusion it's normal to feel confused.

My read of the article is balancing the fact that there's a lot of overlap between CPTSD/ADHD/ASD in the symptoms (emotional dysregulation, hyperarousal, etc) and in hereditary factors (undiagnosed parents causing trauma more often on average). Also that traumatic childhood experiences are more likely to stick around as CPTSD in adulthood if there's also neurodivergence.

The author says there can be incredible relief to be correctly diagnosed with ADHD/ASD, so obviously she says it's helpful.

But she also warns that wrong treatment can often happen (eg. Giving stimulants to perpetual fight or flight PTSD brains), or inneffective therapy.

Through a quick read I understood...

- People with ADHD and Autism have higher probabilities of childhood trauma and abuse. They might seek a diagnose in adulthood and that can bring them relief and be helpful.

- People with non-ADHD/autism related childhood trauma are more likely to perceive themselves as being neuro divergent. They might have executive disfunctions, and try to find an ADHD diagnosis (that could probably get, as it matches their symptoms) but as of today seems like there isn't evidence (yet) that ADHD stimulant medication helps with non-ADHD executive disfunctions.

- Hence, is important for professionals to verify the history of the patient and make sure they had ADHD symptoms when they were children (that would confirm ADHD), and if not, maybe try to find different psychotherapeutic treatments that would be more helpful to their complex PTSD.

I think it says that psychologists/psychiatrists do not really know what to do when adhd/autism symptoms overlap with childhood-rooted complex ptsd/trauma in adult patients and more research is needed. That's how I read it mostly.

> My hot take is that a ton of ADHD cases is primarily lack of restorative sleep due to sleep disordered breathing

Uh huh. Explain the completely opposite reaction to Amphetamines and basically being impossible to become addicted to them. Explain the altered brain structure.

Everyone has a 'hot take,' it's amazing that they all lead to it not being a thing.

Now let me help you, the sleep disturbances are the hyperactivity of the brain not letting you go to sleep until you hit complete exhaustion and the dysregulation of the circadian rhythm.

>> I never had an issue with ADHD growing up in Asia. Nobody friggin cares. It's only western people making a huge deal outta nothing.

Interesting, I thought that Asian countries are the most hostile countries towards neurodivergent people.

ADHD is spectrum, just because it doesn't bother you so much doesn't mean there aren't those with more severe symptoms. Studies say that ADHD is way more prevalent among prison populations, for example. I would say ending up in prison, homeless or a drug addict due to untreated severe ADHD is a pretty big deal for those people.

Because it's widely but not overtly discriminated against and in some cases you can't get into certain professions at all.

Unless you get quite lucky, it can be extremely difficult to hold down long-term employment, build stable relationships, or get anything done, and in some places it's very difficult to get treatment.

It makes life more difficult than it needs to be unless it doesn't.

ADHD results in a dopamine imbalance which results in the sort of novelty seeking behaviors they tend to exhibit.

Part of pubescence is incrementally transferring your reliance on your parents to reliance on your peers. Which is why teenagers test boundaries constantly. They have to divorce from their parents incrementally, and on their own timeline, not the parents’. Your brain has reward systems to encourage that, but can also be hijacked by substances, which is why we pay special attention to substance abuse in children. But there are many reasons for children to fail to socialize, some of them environmental, and a biological drive to fill that with something (including The Internet and “engagement” in particular) if it can’t be filled with social safety. And once it has begun it can be a feedback loop of intentionally choosing one over the other.

There are some models of addiction medicine that say that people with hope and connection have a much easier time giving up physical addictions than people who don’t. There isn’t enough stick in the consequences of addiction to get you out of the cycle. You need carrot to transition, and the bigger the carrots the easier the journey.

Yes, our modern world is perfected to provide as much distractions to ADHD brain as possible, while working life has become more mentally demanding. Lots of people who struggle now would have done okay 50, 100 years ago when there were less distractions, and larger share of population did physical jobs instead of knowledge work.

Meh, I think this is the impression people who don't have it tend to get, or maybe it's like that for some people deep into the hyperactive dimension. While I do find some of it problematically engaging for a little while, I think it's the people around me who don't have ADHD that get more fixated on that stuff. It wouldn't be as chronic as it is if it wasn't much more broadly appealing than there exists a population of people with ADHD.

For me, I need something more deeply stimulating and long-form. A good weekend outing for me is a 14 hour hike with a sketchy scramble. I don't get any value out of constant context switching, constant bright flashing lights like rythym games or any of that, and I'm way more comfortable than most literally just sitting quietly and thinking.

I think the big divergence between how I respond to my environment and how normal people respond to their environment is that normal people tend to be problematically attracted to artificial gamified stimulated experiences, like academics, slot machine style social media, scary movies, sports, stuff like that. My biggest difficulty is that I just don't really care about arbitrary competition, benign social threats, existential danger etc.. I'd much rather be in a position where I'm actually in real danger if I mess up, or if I write some program incorrectly and risk leaking sensitive data. That's where my brain works at its best.

Right now I'm hesitating to go back to school because I have no idea if I—as a man in his mid-thirties—will be able to trick my brain into being stressed appropriately when exams come around, at least enough to show up and complete them.

I see a lot of myself in this.

i don't understand the downvote. i'm printing this out and putting on our fridge. we have 4 kids all with ADHD autism but trying hard not to complex trauma them.

Autism has so many possible symptoms and associated problems that it's unlikely someone affected checks all the boxes.

One of the first signs I noticed in my childhood was that I was asking myself why everyone treated me differently for no apparent reason, and I would say that is a pretty clear indicator for autism as it stems from neurotypical social interactions being more or less a foreign language, and both sides subconsciously recognize that.

> Mostly he's aggressive, low patience, disobedient AF, requires a ton of attention.

I happened to be friends with someone who'd fit that description, the way he behaved at home with his parents was genuinely crazy. But then turned out shockingly normal years later. Sometimes it really is just a phase I guess.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8328933/#S20 might be a good starting point here?

I recommend seeing a specialist for a proper diagnosis. It'll be worth it.

Sounds like you were abused as a child and you find this upsetting.

The medicine isn’t bad for people who need it. Most parents are trying to do the best for their kids. They’re trying to find ways to help their kids. In many cases these medications are extremely helpful to people who need them.

Think of growing up feeling inadequate. Even in the eyes of your parents. Then learning that you don't suck and were completely undeserving of being mistreated as a child.

(No child is deserving of being mistreated but that's a whole other bag of worms)

Some people were abused in various ways in an “attempt” to get them to stop presenting those traits. Calling friends parents, teachers, etc about thing that really should have been private (if not in fact grounds for CPS interventions), physical abuse to try to “break habits”, physically breaking objects associated with the child's special interests, etc.

Learning that you were not, in fact, a horrible and wicked child that your parents had to endure is life changing.

Sounds like bad management. Explanations aren't excuses, they're simply the reason something happens.

ADHD is often an executive function disorder. As a manager, have you offered them an accommodation?

Lots of “I” statements from you and not a whole lot of understanding.

Imagine some people have been calling you "crazy" all your life, in a bad way, and then, at 40 years old, you do something that you expect the other person to think is crazy and they just say instead: "ah, don't worry, that's normal to do if you have adhd", and then it suddenly clicks that you are NOT crazy and have never been your entire life, you just had a condition you didn't know about and people were ignorant, and acting like this is completely normal given the condition.

It's like being forced to write with your left hand the entire life, and suddenly you realize that you are right handed, and it's ok to be right handed too...

This is what makes me doubt a lot of diagnoses today. The people who really have these issues/conditions seem to notice themselves in childhood before they even know what they are or what they're called. Leaving the reaction for the diagnosed to be mostly nothing in that they already know.

I'm sure it's very fun for everyone abusing adderall to get a doctor to believe their story (after all, they barely understand these conditions themselves), but it's a difficult life to have these conditions. Lot of what I hear described by the people self diagnosed or have a more "modern" (I'll just put it this way) diagnosis just sound like garden variety trauma due to less than tactful parents.

Even some other people with ADHD seem to treat it like a trait, and not like a disorder.

This worries me.

Also, what's so noble about hiding own struggles?

And also, why shouldn't I be relieved when I understand a big factor in my struggles?

This is a very confusing comment.

Perhaps you should not be a manager beyond rote supervisory responsibilities if you cannot understand this aspect of people.

A lot of traditional ways of "dealing with circumstances" are very unhealthy (and often toxic) and have adverse effects on people around you. Unless your methods are deemed healthy by a mental health professional you can't be sure.

Then you don't have adhd