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Here’s something that happens to ADHD children a lot:  Getting pushed beyond their limits by accident. Here’s how it works and why it’s so bad.

Child says, “I can’t do this.”

Adult (teacher or parent) does not believe it, because Adult has seen Child do things that Adult considers more difficult, and Child is too young to properly articulate why the task is difficult.

Adult decides that the problem is something other than true inability, like laziness, lack of self-confidence, stubbornness, or lack of motivation.

Adult applies motivation in the form of harsher and harsher scoldings and punishments. Child becomes horribly distressed by these punishments. Finally, the negative emotions produce a wave of adrenaline that temporarily repairs the neurotransmitter deficits caused by ADHD, and Child manages to do the task, nearly dropping from relief when it’s finally done.

The lesson Adult takes away is that Child was able to do it all along, the task was quite reasonable, and Child just wasn’t trying hard enough. Now, surely Child has mastered the task and learned the value of simply following instructions the first time.

The lessons Child takes away? Well, it varies, but it might be:

-How to do the task while in a state of extreme panic, which does NOT easily translate into doing the task when calm.

-Using emergency fight-or-flight overdrive to deal with normal daily problems is reasonable and even expected.

-It’s not acceptable to refuse tasks, no matter how difficult or potentially harmful.

-Asking for help does not result in getting useful help.

I’m now in my 30’s, trying to overcome chronic depression, and one major barrier is that, thanks to the constant unreasonable demands placed on me as a child, I never had the chance to develop actual healthy techniques for getting stuff done. At 19, I finally learned to write without panic, but I still need to rely on my adrenaline addiction for simple things like making phone calls, tidying the house, and paying bills. Sometimes, I do mean things to myself to generate the adrenaline rush, because there’s no one else around to punish me.

But hey, at least I didn’t get those terrible drugs, right? That might have had nasty side effects.

#I wonder if this might potentially apply to people with autism as well?#because I haven’t been diagnosed with adhd but MAN do I fee this#and like I had the situation a lot of people went through#breezed through elementary and high school and in gifted and talented#but then college happened and I was LOST

There’s a lot of overlap between ADHD traits and autism traits.  Whether you meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, too, I have no idea (because I’m a random person on the Internet), but you might find ADHD resources helpful in figuring out your life challenges.

A lot of “help” for executive function skills comes from neurotypicals who are naturally good at it and lack insight into people who aren’t, which makes it spectacularly useless to the people who actually need it.

Well shit this explains so much about me

This is why I want to scream when NT professionals try to insist that forcing ADD people into “the zone” is the best treatment for ADD. Forced focus is exhausting because it’s fueled by adrenaline. We have reams of medical data that frequent adrenaline rushes in young people are horribly bad for their development and causes a laundry list of problems later in life, both physical and mental.

Literally NT professionals: I know you can accomplish this task if I push you into a state of artificial panic every time I want you to do it.

Me: Or you could, idk, help break the task into smaller, less scary bits, use a reward structure at each stage to reinforce positive association, or even turn it into a game because ADD people are kind of hardwired to love game-like structures and anything that has a whiff of fun to it.

NT professionals: That requires imagination, time, and mental energy that I, a NT person who is not struggling with overwhelming self-doubt and mental block at this moment, simply cannot be bothered to spare.

Me: Oh right, of course. Carry on with terrorizing small children, then.

Nothing like the abusive teaching styles described above happened to me, because I was good at doing work, until I magically stopped being good at doing work sometime in 9th grade and instead started being bad at doing work. At that point and at my school, teachers were more loose about when work got done, so I started procrastinating until the last minute. This worked really well for me and I have had all A’s and the extremely occasional B+ in every class.

It’s only now, reading this post, that I’m realizing why my clever “do it at the last minute” strategy works so well.

😦

One of the reasons I work in the stressful jobs I do (aside from my abysmal college performance)

Is that it’s hard for me to get any work done unless it feels like a life-or-death situation

So, I work at a place where life-or-death situations happen on the regs

I was a really great worker until I switched into an office track and realized that without the nonstop panic and stress of a retail/food service position i’m almost entirely unable to prioritize and complete tasks.