ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf]

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

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

> it was just not effective in tackling what I really needed.

That's how I would summarize my experiences with psychotherapy too. I think the only thing I have truly learned from therapy is what I feared most. There ain't much in this universe that can truly help with ADHD. Medications and other interventions barely move the needle for me. Seriously, I am at the point in my life where I am basically done fighting the condition. It's a Sisyphean effort that's mostly fueled by arbitrary societal expectations and my own egotistical desires and insecurities.

It’s not. There’s no evidence that it has any beneficial effects on anything other than the therapists wallet.

ADHD is an entirely made up diagnosis. There’s no evidence that any of this nonsense is real in any way shape or form.

It’s one thing: a lack of discipline.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Sadly it is still (and probably will be) too easy to deflect responsibility and have everyone believe their side. They will probably pass on with nobody realizing what they've done to me. It took me long enough for me to realize my own situation, was how severe it was. I hope more people wake up to the fact that people like me are out there.

The false diagnosis is a perfect distraction for you to continue to blame yourself for all your faults while they get away with everything, for decades. That lost time will never come back.

It's generally maladaptive but there's a reason the brain does it.

I continue to be traumatized by my disorder. In fact, I’m currently homeless living on disability with my mental illness and also connective tissue disorder.

You can’t have these disorders and not be traumatized, at least not at the level of disorder I have. I was a brilliant child and a brilliant college student, but had psychosis that made me drop out and having me change my major every other year. I still manage to graduate on the Dean’s list though it took me seven years.

So yeah, still traumatized by my family just not wanting to talk to him anymore because I remind them too much of my nephew who died by suicide. And that’s literally the truth. I didn’t do anything to them. I’ve never heard anyone in my life or even punch someone.

I was relentlessly bullied in junior high through high school not only by fellow students but also by my brothers all older than me. Mostly due to the fact that they had mood disorders as well.

But I know trauma isn’t the cause of my disorder. I know it cause I see it in my genetics. I’m a genetic freak and I can’t get anyone to care about it. And that further is a trauma. The sense of being alone and ignored even though you’re highly intelligent. I mean, I taught myself genetics and have conversations pretending I’m a scientist all the time with people who write all these studies it only falls apart when they ask me what school I went to, and I finally tell them the truth. Then they just stopped talking to me. That’s crazy right? That’s trauma. Anyway, just venting.

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

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”

Every person with headache I met had painkillers.

Therefore their pain is caused by painkillers.

Daft.

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 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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> Posting this here, Idk why, I'm kind of clueless about what to do at this stage.

It’s tough, but you already know what you need to do.

"gets really nervous, makes a bunch of noise, annoys his brother, like he can't be canalised if he's not focused." could be autism or ADHD.

btw, ADHD doesn't mean "attention problems", it is much more complex than that and it can manifest in many different ways.

e.g. assuming he would have it, the listening provides a baseline level of stimulation, but as soon as it stops, there must be something to provide that stimulation, thus all those things.

if there's more behavioral stuff that you can recall, that would offer more clues.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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...