My Journey With ADHD
This feels embarrassing to admit, but here it goes….
I didn’t realize that I had ADHD until my oldest daughter was 8. This was just 2 years ago. Barely.
I am 40 years old and a licensed mental health therapist.
I didn’t realize how much I was struggling until now. I always knew I was different. I chalked up my parenting and life struggles to my dysfunctional childhood and not having a good parenting template to help me through my difficulties.
Learning about ADHD has been a game changer for me and my parenting.
This is how I found out that I had ADHD- I noticed that my oldest child was having difficulty with her transitions (getting out of the house or going back home from fun activities), and also completing mundane tasks. I thought it was something that all kids struggled with because #kidproblems, but I noticed that other kids transitioned easily between activities and seemed to not fight back as much when prompted to do chores or self maintenance tasks such as brushing their teeth or taking showers.
I thought, maybe if I became a better parent, more efficient and effective with communication and letting them know about my boundaries, spending more 1:1 time with my child, they would be more compliant and find transitions to be easier.
These things were valuable FOR ME, but not for my child.
I could do all the 1:1 time that the parenting experts recommended, but that wasn’t really helpful for my child. 1:1 time was valuable for me to connect and bond with my child. That SAVED my relationship with my child. I didn’t know this at that time, but this was the honest truth: I have parts of me that strongly disliked (and maybe hated) parts of my oldest child that struggled with ADHD. I felt lost and confused on how to parent my child. I struggled with shame with my feelings of dislike towards my child.
I did not have compassion for my child with ADHD.
Little did I know, my child was my torMENTOR. Someone who was inflicting pain onto my parts, but are also shining light on areas that I needed healing.
I didn’t know this at that time, but I was a parenting with ADHD, while struggling with ADHD myself. Parenting while having ADHD and complex trauma can be a mindf*ck.
Here’s why:
1) parenting requires multi step planning and organization. people with ADHD struggle with complicated tasks for themselves…. so you add on taking care of children, it is DIFFICULT.
2) parenting in America is lonely AF. Having ADHD makes it difficult to maintain relationships. The combination of parenting in America with ADHD makes the experience exponentially more lonesome and difficult. The struggle with rejection sensitivity is one part of it, but also, it take multiple steps to build a friendship (texting, phone calls, arranging social gatherings, etc). It is hard.
3) parenting brings on emotional turbulence. ADHD heightens any emotional responses and magnifies existing self doubt. Parenting while having ADHD means that you are helping to manage your child’s emotional landscape while having a highly activated nervous system, so your emotional landscape is activated too. Your child’s dysregulated emotions + your own emotional turbulence = an explosive combo. As a result, parents with ADHD can struggle with self doubt and crippling shame.
4) parenting while having unchecked ADHD can mean that you are binging on Netflix shows after your kids go to sleep and might be sleep deprived. There are two reasons for this: adhd causes us to hyper focus on stimulating activities. Also, ADHD can cause us to have a delayed melatonin release. 2am can feel like 10am to people with adhd. for a while, I struggled with staying up way too late binging shows on my phone/TV and having to wake up early to make breakfast for my kids. It made for a terrible time for my kids, who experienced a sleep deprived, under stimulated and short tempered parent.
5) parenting while having ADHD can mean that we are really good at masking or hiding our symptoms with perfectionism and over functioning. This could mean that we don’t reach out for help. This is also a struggle for folx with parentification trauma, where we were a parent to our parents or a parent to our siblings. Folx that over function have loud negative self talk from our inner critics, telling us that we are terrible, lazy, selfish people that should “try harder” to be considerate towards others.
Complex trauma symptoms can show up similar to ADHD symptoms. Unchecked ADHD can lead to severe depression and anxiety, all of which I struggle with as well. Unchecked complex trauma can show up as depression and anxiety. It can be hard to tell, do I have depression and anxiety from unchecked ADHD or complex trauma? or both?
For me, one of the things that was very revealing was that my children don’t struggle with complex trauma, but have ADHD. That’s how I know that I have ADHD AND complex trauma. Seeing how ADHD shows up in my children (who don’t have complex trauma) helped me to see that I also have ADHD.
That was the game changer.
Realizing that my kids and my brains are structured differently helped me to have so much more self compassion.
As a result, I know now, that these things are important to me:
1) moving my body regularly to increase seratonin and dopamine
2) engaging in a form of therapy (both giving and receiving) that is compassion focused and works on improving my relationship with my inner critics that deliver so much negative self talk (Internal Family Systems is my recommendation)
3) writing out and processing the events of my life has not only been important, but vital. I try to engage in writing as my daily practice.
4) protecting my sleep. My rule of thumb is that I go to sleep when my toddler goes to sleep so I can ensure that I get 8+ hours of sleep. I don’t do anything on my bed except for sleep. No scrolling. No reading. etc.
5) I try to make plans with my friends one or two weeks ahead of time to ensure that I have something on the calendar. If I don’t have a one social engagement per week, I start to isolate and feel down.
6) I practice mindful/intuitive eating as a way to honor and respect my body’s needs.
7) I am trying to learn the difference between focus and hyper focus. I can easily scroll for hours or binge and forget about my responsibilities.
8) I am learning more about how to be even more connected with my emotional landscape moment by moment.
I am learning how to cope and heal through self compassion in my journey as a parent with ADHD and complex trauma. Looking forward to letting y’all know how things unfold.
Please drop a comment to let me know if this resonates!
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