ADHD is a trauma response, not a disorder
One of the biggest misdiagnoses and misconceptions in the world is ADHD. ADHD is a trauma response, not a disorder. If you look at all the symptoms of ADHD (Difficulty focusing, overthinking, being forgetful, inability to sit still), they are all symptoms of dissociation. For example, being easily distracted helps distract yourself from feeling your pain.
Dissociation is what a child does subconsciously in response to emotional trauma in order to not feel the pain of it. We carry dissociation into our adulthood and it can manifest itself as many things, one of them being “ADHD.”
A lot of my clients have tried to combat their ADHD symptoms with all their might and have even created intricate systems so they can be, for example, less forgetful. However, they never succeed because there is no cure for ADHD. Why? Because ADHD is a bandaid. What does that mean?
Cure your ADHD symptoms and you will have to remove the bandaid that it is, thereby forcing you to feel the pain of your underlying emotional wound. We don’t want to feel pain, so that’s why we don’t want the cure even if it presents itself.
The reason why we love the ADHD label so much is that it’s much easier and pain-free to tell ourselves and rationalize away our forgetfulness and difficulty focusing by saying, “I have ADHD” - as opposed to saying, “I have pain and trauma.” If you acknowledge your pain, you will have to feel it. Again, we don’t want to feel the pain.
As I am writing this blog, my mind is wandering and splintering off to all the other things I need to do. My mind will also distract itself by wanting to watch a mindless video on YouTube. I then feel a sense of hunger and I wonder if I should make something to eat - again just to distract myself from my feelings. I am realizing more and more that when I am doing all of this, I am just in a state of dissociation, which is what I subconsciously learned to do as a child to not feel the pain of my emotional traumas.
I normally feel overwhelmed or even hopeless at times from “all the things I need to do” and feel like I will never be able to complete it all. However, I am just really using “all the things I need to do” as a mere distraction and a way to dissociate how I did as a child.
What can you do instead of distracting yourself from your feelings through dissociation? There are many things you can do, but I want you to first off, begin with just sitting with and feeling your feelings. Instead of being in a state of dissociation, be in a state of feeling. Feeling your feelings acknowledges your inner child which is ultimately what they want and need, because remember, “trauma is when parents don’t acknowledge how you feel.”
