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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

> 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”

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"Trauma" is a very bad name because it sounds violent and extreme, so you can easily think it doesn't apply to you. In actual fact, it can be caused by something as routine as "sleep training" where infants are left to cry themselves to sleep, or being snapped at for expressing emotion, all before the age of 5. The years before 5 are foundational, but you usually no not have memories earlier than 5 so it's very hard to say definitely what happened especially when causes for trauma are relatively routine.

You need a trusted therapist to guide you into exposing what the subconscious mind is holding onto from infancy. It is subtle, deep, difficult, rewarding work. But I do think people discount trauma because it sounds scarier than "someone snapped at me in frustration as an infant for expressing some emotion and I learned to disconnect from myself."

> You need a trusted therapist to guide you into exposing what the subconscious mind is holding onto from infancy.

This sounds like a great way to implant false memories

The honest way to handle this, which hopefully your therapist does, is not to claim that you can magically retrieve perfect memories from before 5 because you thought about it hard. What matters is what your impression is of what happened and what messages your subconscious is sending you. Whether or not it literally happened isn't that important and it's impossible to know.

The therapeutic relief comes simply from listening to your gut/subconscious and feeling the emotions that that brings up. Being a loving friend and parent to that part of yourself. You can do that effectively without pretending that you can know if the impressions are literally true or if that message your getting is simply the best way for it to express the emotions it's holding onto.

Again, you can maintain your integrity while being empathic and loving and listening to the message.

If I showed your comment to my psychologist, I'm confident he would strongly disagree with it–as would many of his professional peers.

Which part? Hard to have a discussion without specifics.

You are advocating for some controversial positions in psychology, without naming them – something roughly along the lines of Gabor Maté, "inner child work", reparenting, "Internal Family Systems", etc

Many psychologists who belong to different schools of thought – e.g. CBT, positive psychology – don't agree those practices are helpful and don't agree with their theoretical underpinnings

There is a lack of high quality empirical evidence for both the safety and efficacy of the kinds of practices you advocate, and also for the theories which motivate them. By contrast, more mainstream approaches such as CBT have significantly better empirical support

Is there any reliable scientific evidence for that or is it just woo?

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