Living a happier, more manageable life: ADHD, acceptance & self-compassion
Summary:
This article explores how acceptance and self-compassion are crucial for adults with ADHD seeking therapy, as unique challenges in a neurotypical world are navigated. A safe therapeutic space allows exploration of experience, fostering self-acceptance without pressure to change inherent identity.
There are a great many reasons why people seek therapy! This is as true for ADHDers as for anyone. We are all unique individuals and not labels.
If you were diagnosed with, or self-diagnosed yourself with, ADHD (or autism or AuDHD) as an adult, you might need a space in which to recover from the effects of living as a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world.
You might want a safe space to learn how to be in a world that can sometimes feel, or be, very harsh, in ways that feel softer inside your head. So that your head is less of a battleground and more of a kind place to be.
You might want a safe space to explore how your feel about diagnosis. Diagnosis can be helpful but can also be unsettling or even harmful; sometimes at the same time. It may raise huge questions - starting with whether or not to seek it and including complexity and conflict and of feelings you may have around it as well as the relevant for you of ‘medical’ versus ‘identity-based’ models of diagnosis.
And you might have no desire to speak about it at all, and not consider it at all relevant in terms of your life, identity or personality.
All of the above are valid.
However, there is (in my opinion) one very important reason not to seek therapy for ADHDers. Neuroaffirmative therapy is definitely not about changing integral aspects of who you are; aspects that make you you.
Whatever brings you to therapy therefore, you might find two elements to be a critical part of whatever modality you choose: acceptance and compassion.
Researchers estimate that by the age of 10, ADHD children have already received 20,000 more negative messages and critiques than their neurotypical peers.
Acceptance and compassion are the cornerstones of any therapy when you have ADHD.
There is a “mechanism of harm” where ableism (and other forms of oppression) are concerned. Sustaining ongoing traumatic or difficult educational, relational or professional experiences often result in inner attack. The psyche attacks itself as it engages in its very innocent means of attempting to protect us from a threatening external environment. In other words we embody: “I will harm myself so you don’t have to”.
As we strive to be “good enough” - and to work with our dancing brains and bodies - a legacy of introjecting sustained, ongoing criticism or harm can show up as in many different ways, for example, as:
relentlessly picking at and judging ourselves
a sense of a lack of control over a vicious inner critic or other harsh. self-aggressing or violent thoughts
feelings of unworthiness or being less than, not good enough or found wanting
experiencing abnormally high levels of shame and guilt
self-doubt and constantly questioning one’s motives, thoughts or actions
chronic anxiety
disturbed breathing patterns
chronic muscular tension
collapsed posture
severe dissociation
addiction
Even when we decide upon a therapy modality where the main mechanism of change is internal/intrapsychic (for example via EMDR or a parts-based focus upon our own internal world and the relationships between different parts of who we are), a safe therapeutic relationship, and a soft place to land, can be fundamental to identify, and work effectively with, these introjected voices and their resultant emotional, mental, spiritual and physical pain.
Whatever therapy you choose, I hope you can find a therapist who embodies acceptance and compassion as you embody that same self-acceptance and self-compassion for yourself.
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
Max Ehrmann, Desiderata
