Disclamer
I’m going to say this at the beginning: if you’re neurodivergent, you almost certainly don’t need this article. This article is absolutely for the people who don’t know anything about the experience of having ADHD or Autism. However, if you’re recently diagnosed (self or clinically) or have close family or friends that you want to understand better, this will be a great read. On with the article!
As I was doom scrolling through TikTok one of these days, I came across a video where the creator performs a skit of how she discovered she had been clinically diagnosed with ADHD as a child. The punchline of the skit was that her parents never told her. Now, as a fully grown adult, she’s finding out and now has to deal with the repercussions of that knowledge.
Being a hilarious video that I related to in a small degree, I left a comment in the pattern of my dark humor, joking about how my parent’s didn’t want me to have the label, but now I have both ”the label and trauma from years of masking.” It was supposed to be a light hearted “hehehe, fml” millennial dark humor, leave the comment then walk away and never think about it again, type of joke.
To my surprise, I actually got a response to that comment saying “We’ve really watered down the meaning of trauma haven’t we…”
I would have loved to explain to this user (no picture, no videos on his account, by the way), but they seem to have blocked me after I invited them to DM me rather than hash it out in the comments on a video. Instead, I’ve decided to explain it all here for the world to hear.
Before getting into this, let’s put a couple things into perspective. Trauma is typically thought about in terms of wartime occurrences or experiences from abuse. These experiences are horrific, and often cause irreparable harm to a person’s psyche. In this article, we are discussing degrees of trauma. If we max out PTSD causing events (like participating in a war or sexual assault) at a 10, my experiences could easily be counted as a 3 or 4. My experiences are minimal at best, but the tricky thing about the body and brain is that it doesn’t give a shit about “objective levels of trauma” and instead works in relative scales for your ability to process and handle the world around you.
We could make the case that the amount of trauma I’ve experienced due to my struggles caused by neurodivergence is minimal, but there are some things that have caused me difficulties in my daily experience, my relationships with other people, and my relationship with myself. The real issue with trauma is how long you hold onto it. Without allowing yourself the chance to process your trauma, it ends up eating away at your psyche, changing your neurological pathways, creating patterns of thought and actions that can do damage to your self physically and mentally.
Let’s take some examples:
Rejection Sensitivity
One of the wonderful experiences of ADHD is Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD). With this lovely collector’s item, I feel rejections much more quickly and much more intensely than I “should”. Now, I’m putting quotation marks around “should” because what is the appropriate reaction to rejection? How much emotion is “too much”? A common experience with people with ADHD is an extended range of emotions. My joy experience tends to go from zero to one hundred with the littlest of things. Likewise my anger flies off the handle at the smallest inconvenience.
To live in this neurotypical world, I’ve had to learn to be mindful of my emotions and practice a smaller reaction when things don’t go as I expect them to. For example, I know that it’s not the end of the world when I pour way too much garlic powder in my stir fry, but knowing this doesn’t stop the physical reaction I get to completely shutdown (true story by the way). This is a perfect example of RSD: I (my body and brain) perceived a rejection (pouring too much garlic powder in the food I was cooking) which began to ruin the day I was having and throw off the flow state I was in. I knew (illogically) the food was going to be horrible now that I fucked it up. I was rejecting myself and my own ability to cook.
There’s couple ways this leads to trauma being stored in the body. I don’t remember if I specifically knew about RSD at this time, but imagine I didn’t. I’m getting mad about a simple mistake, and now I’m experiencing anger, frustration, and self-degradation, with all of it directed inward. What happens next week when I hit the curb as I’m driving around a corner? Or next month when my boss points out a mistake I made and offers some constructive criticism in hopes that I can perform better? If not given the knowledge that I feel things at a much higher intensity than most people, this simple one-on-one conversation can quickly turn into self-doubt and self-hatred about how I’m the worst person ever.
In the one response comment I got from that user, they asked “wdym by unpacked?” Without ever knowing that I have ADHD and RSD, I never can give myself the chance to recognize my response patterns. Just like with clinical illnesses in the body, I cannot fight or change what I do not know about. However, just knowing that it’s a thing isn’t enough. You cannot change anything unless you dig back into your past and understand better where you have been. This is what I mean by unpacked. I had to look back at all the times where my anger went off the rails or my depression dragged me down and figure out if it was related to this thing. My body was holding onto all this shit without ever realizing that it was an experience that most people don’t have and that it is out of the range of normalcy.
Executive Dysfunction
Another common experience with ADHD is executive dysfunction. Imagine you’re sitting on the couch thinking “I really need to get those dishes done.” But you lack the ability to actually stand up and go to the sink. Instead you sit there and keep scrolling on Reddit. Thirty minutes later, you think to yourself again “dude, what the hell, get up and go do the dishes,” but you don’t move. Next think you know, it’s 1:35 AM, dishes are still dirty, and the guilt sets in.
You suck. You can’t actually get anything done. You say you’re going to do better next time, but you do this same thing every night. I bet those dishes have been there for a week by now. You can’t get anything done. What a failure.
Turns out there’s a lot of little things you’ve been promising you’re going to do that don’t actually get done for whatever reasons. Promises you make to yourself, your partner, your friends, your family, all broken. How is this any different from verbal abuse we condemn when coming from a parent, spouse, partner, or boss? This naturally ties into RSD that we mentioned above, only making the experience worse. If this continues for an extended period of time, we quickly reach the territory of CPTSD, the close cousin to PTSD. The only difference being the “C” suggests small amounts of trauma building up over a long time. Once again, if this goes unchecked, you can easily spiral into self-hatred, depression, and all other things we associate with trauma.
Masking
Let’s finally get to probably the worst part of being neurodivergent. Making is the term used by people with ADHD and Autism to describe the experience of figuratively putting on a mask to make yourself and your personality and mannerisms more palatable to society at large. Everyone uses masking to a degree. We act a little different when we’re interacting with coworkers than we do with our family. We also act differently when we interact with family than we do with friends. The issue with neurodivergent masking is that it attempts to act neurotypical. This ends up being a very difficult task for autistic and ADHD individuals because neurodivergent brains are wired different. I process information in a completely different way when compared to a neurotypical person. I respond to different stimuli. An experience that is fine for most people can become physically heavy for me.
As a basic and harmless example, take the T-Rex arms of Autism. This is a behavior and sensory experience shared nearly universally autistic individuals (or at least the internet would have you believe, I’m not here to make definitive statements like that). However, it’s not “proper posture” and is seen as weird by neurotypical brains. If just five of your classmates start teasing you or making fun of you for walking around like a T-Rex by the end of the week, you’re going to become hyper aware of your arms and how you’re holding them. You’re going to start finding ways of hiding the impulse to hold them in a stance that satisfies the behavior in an inconspicuous manner, e.g. holding the straps of your backpack, crossing your arms, putting your hands in your pockets.
Now, obviously the way you hold your arms and your friends teasing you can be harmless and may not result in long term trauma response. However, let’s add
- a random sound that you always repeat out of context just because you think it sounds funny (no, we are not talking about turrets here),
- the constant impulse to click your pen,
- the optics among your classmates of being the only one answering the teacher’s question because this if your favorite subject in school and you actually read the textbook,
- the constant vigilance to display correct emotions on your face in a heartfelt conversation with your friend to make sure they feel comfortable,
- the lingering accusations of making every conversation about yourself when you just want to share similar lived experiences to show you understand.
Not only are these things you are constantly thinking about, but also you have to consciously stop yourself form doing them. You start acting in a different way that is different from what your brain wants to do by
- only allowing the sound to play out in your head, though that removes the satisfying mouth feel
- letting your foot bounce or chewing the inside of your mouth instead of actually clicking your pen
- letting the answer burn inside your brain while the heavy silence lingers in the class because nobody else wants to engage in class
- forcing your face to move to match the emotion your friend is conveying as they tell their story
- holding your story in while you try to listen to every word your friend says, all the while, knowing all your friends would enjoy your story just as much as theirs.
This turns into an all day struggle. This is the mask you wear to ensure that people like you, or at least tolerate you. Do this for long enough and it gets easier to put on the performance, but the weight and anguish it causes never gets lighter.
Learning to accommodate yourself
Then one day, after you have come to grips with your ADHD diagnosis, you hear about this thing called masking. You learn that you suppress all these traits — the RSD, the Executive Dysfunction, the extreme emotional reactions, the need for physical and verbal stiming — just bring yourself into compliance with social expectations. You realize that there was never actually anything broken with you. You learn that your brain is wired differently. You learn that you were not the only one that experienced these situations. You start connecting with other people online and start learning how to take off the mask.
Little by little, you start seeing more and more of yourself coming through. You naturally put the mask on in certain settings — around new people, at work, at the store — but now it’s a little less intense of making. You let yourself fidget with a worry stone or spinning disk you keep in your pocket at the store. You use your over ear headphones to block out the kids being loud at breakfast instead of yelling at them, because it’s not their fault their kids. You start singing lines from your favorite songs because they have a weird voice. You do that weird dance you made with your buddies in high school while cooking dinner. You allow yourself that deep dive into a YouTube rabbit-hole (just maybe make sure you get to bed before midnight if you work a 9-5). None of these things are bad, they just made other people uncomfortable and they bullied you into changing the way you go through life.
Bringing it all back together, this is what I mean by “unpacking”. I had been conditioned into living my life in a certain way. This way was fundamentally incompatible with how my brain defaults to. I’ve had to look a myself and find what still works for me, and what doesn’t. I’ve allowed myself tools and techniques to work with my ADHD instead of always trying to hid and control it. I didn’t get put on medication as a teenage, and I only came to grips with what ADHD actually looked like in about 2021. Coincidentally, this was at the same time I was deconstructing and unpacking my religious, societal, and political beliefs. I had been feed a narrative about what life should look like, and I had to take a good two years to really look at everything and figure out what works for me and what does not. Technically, I’m still doing that. Different stresses and stimuli call for different ways of navigating life, and what worked for me last year or even the year before that won’t necessarily work for me today.
What I hope you learn
When reading the book When Religion Hurts You, I learned that everyone experiences trauma differently. She primarily spoke to religious trauma, but the statement stands regardless of the source. So many things in our life cause us trauma. Poverty, negative religious experiences or teachings, bulling, narcissistic family members, military deployment to war zones, sexual assault, a global pandemic, and ADHD can all cause trauma. This is because everyone responds to it differently. Some are more intense for some individuals, some are felt universally, but all need to be taken care of, healed from, and worked through in order to keep yourself healthy.
Please believe other people when they talk to you about their traumatic experiences. Don’t minimize them by saying things like “other people have it so much worse.” If you are able, support them in whatever situation they may be going through. Don’t be afraid to evaluate your own life and find work through the shitty experiences you had to go through, no matter how small you may think they are.