Here’s something that happens to ADHD children a lot: Getting pushed beyond their limits by accident. Here’s how it works and why it’s so bad.
Child says, “I can’t do this.”
Adult (teacher or parent) does not believe it, because Adult has seen Child do things that Adult considers more difficult, and Child is too young to properly articulate why the task is difficult.
Adult decides that the problem is something other than true inability, like laziness, lack of self-confidence, stubbornness, or lack of motivation.
Adult applies motivation in the form of harsher and harsher scoldings and punishments. Child becomes horribly distressed by these punishments. Finally, the negative emotions produce a wave of adrenaline that temporarily repairs the neurotransmitter deficits caused by ADHD, and Child manages to do the task, nearly dropping from relief when it’s finally done.
The lesson Adult takes away is that Child was able to do it all along, the task was quite reasonable, and Child just wasn’t trying hard enough. Now, surely Child has mastered the task and learned the value of simply following instructions the first time.
The lessons Child takes away? Well, it varies, but it might be:
-How to do the task while in a state of extreme panic, which does NOT easily translate into doing the task when calm.
-Using emergency fight-or-flight overdrive to deal with normal daily problems is reasonable and even expected.
-It’s not acceptable to refuse tasks, no matter how difficult or potentially harmful.
-Asking for help does not result in getting useful help.
I’m now in my 30’s, trying to overcome chronic depression, and one major barrier is that, thanks to the constant unreasonable demands placed on me as a child, I never had the chance to develop actual healthy techniques for getting stuff done. At 19, I finally learned to write without panic, but I still need to rely on my adrenaline addiction for simple things like making phone calls, tidying the house, and paying bills. Sometimes, I do mean things to myself to generate the adrenaline rush, because there’s no one else around to punish me.
But hey, at least I didn’t get those terrible drugs, right? That might have had nasty side effects.
#I wonder if this might potentially apply to people with autism as well?#because I haven’t been diagnosed with adhd but MAN do I fee this#and like I had the situation a lot of people went through#breezed through elementary and high school and in gifted and talented#but then college happened and I was LOST
There’s a lot of overlap between ADHD traits and autism traits. Whether you meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, too, I have no idea (because I’m a random person on the Internet), but you might find ADHD resources helpful in figuring out your life challenges.
A lot of “help” for executive function skills comes from neurotypicals who are naturally good at it and lack insight into people who aren’t, which makes it spectacularly useless to the people who actually need it.
Well shit this explains so much about me
This is why I want to scream when NT professionals try to insist that forcing ADD people into “the zone” is the best treatment for ADD. Forced focus is exhausting because it’s fueled by adrenaline. We have reams of medical data that frequent adrenaline rushes in young people are horribly bad for their development and causes a laundry list of problems later in life, both physical and mental.
Literally NT professionals: I know you can accomplish this task if I push you into a state of artificial panic every time I want you to do it.
Me: Or you could, idk, help break the task into smaller, less scary bits, use a reward structure at each stage to reinforce positive association, or even turn it into a game because ADD people are kind of hardwired to love game-like structures and anything that has a whiff of fun to it.
NT professionals: That requires imagination, time, and mental energy that I, a NT person who is not struggling with overwhelming self-doubt and mental block at this moment, simply cannot be bothered to spare.
Me: Oh right, of course. Carry on with terrorizing small children, then.
i feel like this is common for adult child abuse victims too. i dont have anyone to yell at me and force me into an anxiety attack that forces me to do things now that i moved out and got out of that situation. i have no motivation to do anything when im not under pressure. and idk how to positively reward myself for doing good things because that almost never happened when i was younger. people assume you should be better when you’re out of that situation, but like y’all said, learning something under panic or with threat of punishment doesnt equate to being able to do it calm or without fear.
All of this. My ADHD doc said that a study using brain scans showed that the part of the brain that activates when a NT thinks about a task they need to do and how to do it (like the dishes) does not light up in someone with ADHD. Instead, our emotional centers light up.
ADHD people literally do not have a “just do it” part of our brain, aka an executive function center. The ONLY way we think about tasks is emotionally. That’s why it’s so fucking hard to motivate. That’s why we procrastinate and can only do shit when panicking, or when the task is novel and exciting and new.
NT people all have a tiny Shia Labeouf in their brains. ADHD people are lacking tiny Shia telling us to “just DO it!”.
yesssSSSSSS
I’ve thought for years about how the only way to make sure I do something is to emotionally commit to doing it.
I was just thinking today about how the reason to-do list apps work for me now, and didn’t before, is that before, I was trying to use them as motivation to do specific things. Now, I’m using them to keep track of specific things that I really really want to get done.
There’s a big difference between “my list says i have to sweep now, so i will,” and “oh my god i really really want to have this room be clean enough to not distract me or give me sensory overwhelm, and i have a list of what that will take so i can actually achieve it!”
That difference is executive function.
This is amazing to me, because I just figured that everybody needed to make an emotional commitment to a task or event, even subconsciously, in order for it to happen. Until i read this thread, I didn’t realize that that was, kind of, what we do instead of using executive function!
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