#adhd & possibly even rsd from the looks of the assessments i did......

[actuallyadhd]

hiie!

i'm 18 and i've been trying to self-diagnose. i'm curious about adhd and abuse. i relate to the adhd experience of executive dysfunction, depression, rsd, time blindness, sensory issues, emotional dysregulation etc. but growing up in a super strict and abusive household i've never even had hobbies let alone hyperfixations. so is it possible? to mask so severely that you have no hyperfixations??

i've heard from diagnosed folk that have had an abusive childhood but they all say that it made them hyperfixate more as an escape mechanism. but then i went in the opposite direction, so maybe i don't have adhd? i might have had some hyperfixations ig but it never lasts as long as peope with diagnosed adhd say it does. so ig they are not hyperfixaions but just things i like a lot.

i also don't "stim", i feel like i've forever been understimulated as my mother would remove anything stimulating books/games/TV/music etc. any "stimming" actions were condemned and ridiculed (leg shaking, finger-tapping or even simple vocal stims), this has been enforced in my brain as socially rude and uncultured so uhh ig it could be that i've been masking. that could explain why i did so well in school because there was either math or no stimulation at all. but maybe i'm just having a bad time from all the other things and not adhd?

idk i am like 70% sure i have adhd but i have no access to a clinical diagnosis, so i'm doing extensive research and i want to be thorough before i can make any claims.

Sent April 12, 2024

It can be really hard to know whether some things are due to trauma or ADHD or something else. I have a friend who grew up in an abusive home and got assessed for autism but the clinician couldn’t give a diagnosis because the amount of trauma was making it hard to tease out what was causing which things.

I do think that a lot of ADHDers have trauma because of how we get treated due to our differences. That doesn’t mean ADHD is actually a trauma response; it means that sometimes, trauma happens because we are different due to ADHD. I can recommend Crappy Childhood Fairy on YouTube if you are interested in learning more about trauma and some ways you might be able to deal with it.

Hyperfixations/special interests and stimming are really common ADHD things, but they are not part of the diagnostic criteria. Have a look at our self-diagnosis post to find out more about how to figure this out.

Regardless of whether you have ADHD, you are welcome here. You may find some of the printables at the web site useful, so do consider checking them out.

Followers, what do you think about ADHD and trauma?

-J

[foreverxdaydreaming]

life's just one big bruh moment after another

[boylikeanangel]

adhd anon here 1) your experience with adhd things that are dismissed in women so they go undiagnosed for a long time 2) rejection sensitive dysphoria!!! i just read about it and started to cry 3) what did you think about your mental health before you were diagnosed like what diagnosis you had for yourself unofficially i always had my eyes on anxiety but now i suspect something else i wonder what that is 4) hyper!!!!fixations!!!!! please and thank you

1) from what admittedly little I've read on it, ADHD tends to go undiagnosed in women (counting myself as a woman here because like even tho I'm nb I've been socialised and treated as female my entire life for obvious reasons) because it tends to manifest verbally rather than in physical behaviour. girls with ADHD tend to be excessively talkative which is often overlooked since ADHD is most commonly recognised through hyperactive body language and restlessness. A kid with ADHD manifesting in not being able to sit still is much more likely to get diagnosed than a kid whose ADHD manifests in them talking too much, which was the case with me. I haven't really looked into this side of it too much because my struggles relating to like. It taking so long to get me diagnosed wasn't because of my gender but because of the fact that I was a "gifted" kid. ADHD is seen as an intellectual disorder rather than what it actually is, which is a developmental disorder, so the general opinion is that ADHD = stupid, and someone like me, who is just overall very intelligent and always excelled in school when I was younger, couldn't possibly have ADHD. The fact that I was intelligent allowed me to fly under the radar until around GCSE's (16 years old for those who don't know) because school work didn't require much concentration. But when it got to exams and I actually had to put real effort in and do work past the six allotted hours a day and take the initiative to voluntarily learn and produce work, combined with the fact that I was able to breeze through 12 years of school without having to learn how to revise and study properly, the realisation that there was something wrong hit me hard and fast and I was forced to confront something that I simply hadn't had to think about earlier on. My lack of diagnosis wasn't necessarily caused by the fact that my ADHD manifested early on in my life in a way that was overlooked; it was mostly caused by not having to consider I may have a learning disability until I was expected to take my learning past a point that could be completed and set aside quickly and easily with minimal concentration involved.

2) (I'm gonna talk about the pre-diagnosis before RSD because it kinda feeds into that nicely) I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety when I was 12, and while I definitely think I was suffering from what the professionals call "low mood" at the time that was unaffected by my ADHD, I don't believe that those two things, at least now, exist separately from it. ADHD is often diagnosed as anxiety and/or depression, especially in teenagers and young adults, because the inability to concentrate and commit to anything is attributed to the lethargy and apathy of depression, and the rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) is attributed to the paranoia and forced asocial behaviour of anxiety. It's understandable considering the stigma around ADHD being "a child's disorder" that a lot of people with ADHD are labelled with depression and anxiety, but it can be so harmful to those who are misdiagnosed, simply for the reason that anxiety and depression are "temporary" issues. You can get therapy to fix depression and anxiety. You can learn it out of you. It takes time, but it's possible. That's not the case with ADHD. You can't CBT the ADHD away. It's something you're stuck with for life, and mislabelling the symptoms of ADHD as disorders that you can fix gives you false hope that one day, if you try really really hard, all of this will go away and you'll just be "normal" again and everything will click into place. I was failing all of my subjects, but I convinced myself that this inability to work through it was just a barrier I could overcome if I worked at it, because it was caused by depression, so eventually I would feel better and it would go away and I'd be able to magically fix my grades. But ADHD doesn't work like that. You can't prevent it; you can only learn coping mechanisms. The realisation that my inability to perform to the standards expected of me because I could just Not Do What Was Being Asked Of Me, even simple things like a worksheet or a research task, was not something I could just power through, brought about the realisation that the path I'd set out for myself of getting qualifications, going to university, getting a degree, etc. was impossible because the kind of things that were expected of me were things ADHD would not allow me to do, which was and still is crushing, and I've basically been forced to have to rethink. My entire future. And that fucking sucks. And all it comes down to really is that I wish I'd been diagnosed sooner. (I'd like to talk about this more in depth at a later date but this post is already so long so I'm just gonna leave it here. Basically: if you've been diagnosed with depression or anxiety but you suspect you may have ADHD, please assess your symptoms and see which they fit into best. You may have been misdiagnosed. It'll save you a lot of time and stress.)

3) RSD!!!!! IT'S NOT FUN!!!! I don't wanna talk about this too much because it just makes me sad but yeah I had no idea this was a thing until one of my friends with ADHD pointed it out to me and it was like the mist cleared and for the first time I saw clearly what the fuck had been going on with my stupid brain for the last however many years. RSD fucking sucks man. I've lost friends over it. I've missed out on a lot of experiences because of it. If you have been diagnosed with anxiety but you suspect you have ADHD, I am BEGGING you to read up on RSD. It's a very specific type of anxiety exclusive to ADHD and it definitely called me out more than once.

4) (I cant do much more of this because my head is killing me but I'm trying my best ok) hyperfixations!!!!! they rule my life!!!!!! and every single one is bigger than the last!!! every single time I get a new hyperfixation I'm like "I'll never care about anything else as much as I care about this" and then six months later I CARE ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE MORE. IT'S NEVERENDING. ADHD brains are wired to think about one thing All The Fucking Time, so everything makes me think of good omens. just like everything made me think of pacific rim this time last year. everything can be related to the hyperfixation. there are no exceptions. looking back on my childhood I definitely had a lot of hyperfixations that went unchecked, like the one with the hunger games when I was 11 where I would force my friends to play pretend games where we murdered each other in the fields behind our houses.....that and like. dinosaurs. basically every year or so I reshape my entire personality around a new obsession. I cannot just Enjoy things. I must Become them. and no one else gets it!!! NO ONE ELSE GETS IT. I get made fun of a lot by people around me for getting so excited and emotional all the time over seemingly tiny little things, which in turn plays into the RSD (ADHD is its own worst enemy for fucking real), which is why I enjoy being here so much. because like....everyone else is exactly the same. and I'm really thankful to have found people who feel things as strongly and care as much as I do. so....thanks for that everyone

if you want me to talk about anything else or go into more detail I would be very happy to but unfortunately it is 2am and I have a splitting headache and also I've typed nonstop for about an hour now and that's more than the stupid hyper dumbass idiot brain usually allows and now I'm exhausted lmao....but thank you for taking interest in this and I hope this. idk. helps in some way??? gn