Let’s Talk About ADHD and Trauma

Jessica, thank you for asking the deep and tender questions. I haven't had trauma like you've described in the video, but I'm sure I've absorbed and re-enacted a constant desire to please people and "be good for once," after a youth of getting in trouble for not paying attention or being "too sensitive" to someone's comments or "overreactive" in my responses -- or even being bad by having "so much potential" when I asked for help. It's taken most of my adulthood to find and trust my own voice after deciding I didn't have the judgment to know whether I was good or bad or appropriate. I've heard the statistics on how comparably poor the outcomes are for people with ADHD, and my heart breaks for all of those whose joy has been stunted with addiction, missed education, and criminal records. (I also wish I had paragraph breaks on Android OS, but that's smaller potatoes.)

Can I just say I'm so thankful for this community? My mom is dying of ALS and if it wasn't for Jessica and the ADHD community I would never know how to get through it.

i hyperfocus on learning and people, so no one knew i had adhd, including me. recently diagnosed, but i also was first diagnosed with complex ptsd, because my life has been damn hard. when i started taking my adhd med, i cried the next day, because I was able to focus, even if it felt uncomfortable (because I wasn't used to it). and i didn't need caffeine, something I have self-medicated with since I was 8, basically. So the interplay of trauma and adhd is my every waking hour (okay, and sleeping hours; ptsd nightmares suck), and I'm glad the science has come so far, and understanding, because i need all the tools ever lol. Thank you for everything you do.

It can be difficult to untangle unrelated trauma from our ADHD and other neurotypes. Jessica deserves a lot of credit for making herself so emotionally vulnerable in front of such a large audience. It’s also important to recognize that trauma and neurodivergence walk hand in hand thanks to lack of acceptance and accommodation of both the diagnosed and undiagnosed (and closeted and uncloseted). How many neurodivergent people can credibly claim to make it to adulthood without some form of anxiety, depression or cPTSD/PTSD?

First of all Jessica I'm a grown-ass man and you almost always make me cry - in a good way. As a trauma-trained coach, i've more or less abandoned the labels. My thinking now is address the patterns and habits and if my tools help, great and if not, help find someone else...a very short expression of a lot of thoughts. Thank you Jessica for your incredible vulnerability. You make me feel less alone.

🙏❤❤❤🙏

This is actually a conversation I had with my therapist. I asked him, "If a person is born with Autism and ADHD but instability and trauma started before 2 years old, how do you actually determine which is the actual cause when they all have such overlapping traits and symptoms?" I forget what his answer was. 🙃 All of those things are genetic in my family. It's likely I have all three. I'll be checking out the video later.