Off My Chest: I just had a very long talk with my father
That ended with me finally explaining to him how the way he and my mother treated me as a child, with undiagnosed (and really not even conceptually understood at the time) ADHD caused me lasting trauma that persists to this day. I’m a 45 year old man, and I cried.
Hey brother, it fucking sucks and I can only imagine how teachers and folks around you responded to you out of ignorance when, with understanding, there are excellent ways to mitigate and control your expression and thought process in a healthy manner.
I'm glad you figured yourself out and I hope things get smoother from here on out. Much love from a fellow neurodivergent - if you need to vent or talk things through we're always here and listening.
Eventually the science will show ADHD and a slew of other ND psychoclassifications are entirely genetic. It's very likely one of your parents are driving the same brain around as you, with all its faults and strengths. In their childhood psych didn't have the labels and treatments, you didn't really want to mess with those abusers. Society also found it ok to beat children that didn't behave. The parent with the ND brain was probably beat by their parent until they figured out how to wear the right mask. And not just beaten by their parents, but every single authority figure, teachers, pastors, etc. The cycle of physical abuse was only recently broken. We still haven't broken the cycle of emotional abuse this society forces on ND people. The majority of psych pseudoscience still ongoing considers ND to be subhuman, excluding us from studies, using derogatory language that only serves to dehumanize and not empathize, recognize, and accommodate. They fail to recognize the positive aspects that are unique and common amongst ND, so we end up not even realizing in ourselves. In your parent's generation they'd treat perfectly capable ND people with a lobotomy. There are probably more psych professionals practicing today that were taught by books written by the same folks who practiced lobotomies, than those that learned the still incorrect (but at least more correct than a fucking lobotomy fixes everything) science from 10 years ago.
Sorry for the rant.
one of your parents are driving the same brain around as you, with all its faults and strengths
... and a firmly-rooted "I accomplished so much through anger and self-hate, so you can too" image. Don't forget that.
The problem is people like you grew up in a time when things didn't really need to get done like they did in your parents time. Their generation didn't have the luxury, yes luxury of being treated differently because of shortcomings like missing a limb or being ND. They had to get things done to literally survive.
So to their generation, saying you can't do something because of ND over and over again starts to sound like nothing more than an excuse.
If a blind person can do xyz, what's your excuse as someone with ADHD?
There is literally no way to tell the difference between someone who has ADHD trying to do a task like clean the kitchen (and failing) and someone who simply doesn't want to do it.
This is the core of why people doubt people who don't have visible disabilities: there is no way to tell if you're just faking or not.
Once you realize this, working with NT ppl becomes somewhat easier.
This is me, so much. Both my parents, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents. After I got my diagnosis, it's like all of a sudden my family's whole history of immigrant trauma snapped into relief.
Imagine there being no ND diagnosis at all, no concept between normal and short-bus, and the parents mostly taking advice from fellow Christians because there were no other authorities to look to beyond the family doctor.
You missed that wonder by about a decade.
Also, those previous gens were obvs not diagnosed themselves, and had their own traumas they were masking.
If you're up to it, think about where those parents came from.
The 20th century was toxic, we're just starting to climb out.
Yes, and the intergenerational trauma goes back to time immemorial. Healing my own trauma has made me recognize how absolutely ubiquitous it is. I feel called to do what I can to help shift things for others, seems to me to be the thing this world needs most.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse
I feel you. Even with diagnosed ADHD my parents treated me like I was “lazy”. Feels bad. I’m glad you were able to have that talk with your dad.
Meanwhile I have done my best with my kid. My best obviously wasn't good enough. Even a psych degree did not prepare me, and I still feel like that talk is headed my way in a decade or two. ADHD is a fucking nightmare.
I saw my own parents trying so hard with me and my siblings: to be better than their parents, and more sensitive than the society around us. They succeeded in being better than their origins, but still fucked us up in their own unique way.
I think we can only expect our parents to love us and to try their best, given the cards they were dealt.
It can take some processing to get to that realisation though. I hope your kid sees that you love them and were trying your best.
I'm 43. I feel you. Lately I started processing what happened to me because of ADD. I'm lucky, fell on my feet and have a good life but I've lost so much time and was misunderstood for so long.
This is me, too. Undiagnosed ADD until my 50s. No H, probably like you. Misunderstood for decades. It was really hard for my parents, but they had no idea and are now passed.
Learning about it made everything click about my difficult life, but made me proud of what I had accomplished in spite of ADD. And now I have a toolbox of methods I can use to recognize my ADD as it is happening, and help counteract it. I also have medication to help.
I think one of the things I needed to know is, ADD / neurospiciness can also be an asset at the workplace. One of the marketable I excel at is learning new things. Whenever I am given a new skill to learn, I dive into it passionately. I love learning new stuff! So that fits perfectly with IT, which is constantly moving forward with new technology.
And with that I'm currently working on a late-life Masters degree in IT. So, happy ending, I guess. Find your niche!
There is a before and an after. Once you get diagnosed you can start mitigating. There are many tricks but one thing I've learned is being vocal about it. My colleagues know I'm forgettable so they send me meeting requests and tasks all the time. They've also learned not to bother me with questions all the time because a simple question can turn into a deep dive for me.
I did the same thing as you. Got my masters degree in public management 2 years ago.
Finding a niche is hard when you like to learn new stuff all the time. Setting up a home lab got me into IT so a few days ago I also payed for my inscription fee at the uni.
I feel like I'm having that conversation with my father all the time and he still doesn't get it.
The icing on that cake is that he totally has undiagnosed ADHD and PTSD, and he's a rich old white man so he gets to go through life ignoring the consequences (for other people) and saying things like "That's not my problem," when anyone calls him out.
Similar story. The old man was adhd/asd/ptsd and went through life a narcissist burning everyone around him, but it was never his fault when there were negative consequences. Hope you have better success, mine never really learned or accepted what he was doing.
E: damn autocorrect. It’d be better to leave it misspelled than the nonsense it puts out.
I have doubts as to how much really sank in
I've just had to explain to the 80yo grandmother that you can't yell at my 19yo son because his anxiety ticks are annoying you.
She went full send on telling him that no woman or friends would ever want to be around him unless he stopped.. She got even angrier because she yelled at him to stop, and the ticking got louder and more frequent.. (duh..)
The only way I managed to get even a glimpse of consideration out of her was to leverage her pride in being a "baby whisperer" as a grandmother, and explained that yelling at an anxious ND about their ticks is like yelling at a baby to make them stop crying...
Only then did she stop for even a moment and actually have a thought about what was happening...
She still yells at him, but at least now we have a way to puller her back a little, as this description makes her feel terrible enough about it, that she leaves him alone for a bit out of feeling guilty...
I'm 21 and my parents don't even want to acknowledge it. It's taboo in my society and it sucks I can't move out cause I have yet to complete my degree and it feels impossible in this situation. It feels like a cycle that I can't get out of.
Hope you feel better.
Oh my gosh, that’s terrible. Happy to chat anytime. Took me 4 tries to get my degree.
The biggest issue was that when I was in a phase where I pursued something worthwhile, such as a science project, electronics, programming, they stopped me and said I obsessed too much over it, took it away, said I needed to focus more on something else. Which then did not stick, as it was forced, of course.
That's exactly the kind of obsession that leads to success, though, and it took me years to recover after moving out. Wish I had those skills I wanted to get in all those areas, but I had to focus on one thing at that point, as the end of my 20s was approaching.
Also when they forced me to do something like "clean your room, immediately, until it is done". With the tools at hand now, I know that I have to talk to myself like "in 20 minutes, set a 15 minute timer and get as much done as you can" or "pick one aspect (garbage, floor, desk) and do that immediately". Or with homework: I know now that one tool I needed was to set everything up at the desk ready to start to get over that first step. An order like "all homework needs to be done immediately to perfection" does not work.
With my own child, the problem is that I don't know who he really is down to the core. Is "10 minutes of cleaning on a stopwatch before dinner" just the right push, or too much sometimes, or too little?
I think a little push is right, to yourself and to your children, but it needs to be a "relative push", depending on the person, the day etc. Some days, just staying in bed and crying is already the best you can do. At our best, we might be capable of doing 10 hours focussed tasks and just need a little "come on, do it". Which of those is it? That's the question. I find that meditation helps best to get a feeling for that. Sometimes, I just need a nap and didn't realise, and that's why it felt like the world is ending.
I was lucky. I had one of those working class families where school was important and they essentially wanted you to go into science, medicine, law, engineering and such. It actually was bad for my sister who wasted some time as a biology major before she moved to being a music major which really was what she should have been the whole time but my family had pressure to go into academics.
It’s interesting that you mention sleep. I have awful sleep apnea, and i wonder how much it is affecting my mood and divergence. I got the Inspire surgery though, so hopefully when this ramp up period is over, i can finally get some real sleep and see if there’s any improvement.
Am 44. Masked nearly all of my childhood to avoid beatings. Understand 100%.
I have started to mentally replace "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" with "every hurt you heal makes you stronger". I am sorry you got hurt, I wish you the best on your journey to heal.
Been there, had that talk. Thankfully, my parents are mature, capable of introspection and have worked on becoming better people throughout their lives. So it went quite well, although I will say it doesn't make much of a difference with regard to the past. That's for me to sort out now.
If you would, could you tell how you initiated that talk? I just turned 40 and I need to have the same talk...
Unfortunately it happened at the tail end of a much longer conversation that just started up spontaneously. It was a pretty unusual occurrence.
I'm not OP, but I wanted to wish you good luck.
I was diagnosed in my 50s after my parents had passed, so I can't do what you want to do. But one thing I've found with a neurospicy brain is - there are bad things and good things associated with it. For example, I am really good at learning new things, so I know a little bit about many subjects (and admittedly deep knowledge about some things that don't matter very much). But that can be a marketable skill.
Finding techniques that work for you can help minimize the bad stuff, while maximizing the good stuff. For example, me making physical lists helps me to unburden my brain and concentrate on other tasks. Checking off tasks when complete is a physical reminder of doing stuff and gives me a feeling of accomplishment.
It's the only brain you've got. You'll need to find out what works for you, and write that shit down so you don't forget! 😎 But on your talk to yourself and others, and to that, I think it's important to frame both the bad and the good.
Best of luck to you!
Fucking good for that. That conversation sucks and I'm proud of you for doing it!
I'm 54. My upbringing was less than stellar; not actively harmful, but I was kind of "on my own" for most of it, even as a kid. Whether this was related to any neurodivergency, or contributed to it, I will never know.
My father passed a number of years ago. My mother moved across the country decades ago. A few years back, I decided that I didn't need to talk to her anymore, so I stopped. I didn't feel a need to explain this.
So after some of the regular intermittent weird secret squirrel passive aggressive voicemails that I didn't answer, I hear from my wife that my mother is confused about why I am not responsive. "Okay."
Then one day, a card shows up in the mail. Generic greeting card, inscribed with "Just because I love you" and a check for a thousand dollars. It took me days to figure out what the hell I was going to do with this situation, and my final decision was to do nothing. Not cashing the check, not sending it back, not acknowledging its receipt - just nothing. I don't play.
I'm not saying that this decision is one everyone should make, but it's certainly a decision that is available to anyone.