Adult ADHD and Childhood Trauma

[Music] when i moved out of home at the age of 19 i often described that period in my life as being like almost feral uh kind of joke about it i was very traumatized not in my body i hadn't started any therapy work yet and i had really just left my family of origin under some really crazy and sad circumstance and i was pretty much a mess which was actually i would later find out that that was that mess was very appropriate for what my life had been like up until that point and at that time i just thought i wasn't good at keeping it together and functioning as well as other people could and when i think back to that time in my life i struggle i would struggle with any of the following issues being socially anxious most days very preoccupied on a body level about what people thought about me and it didn't matter who it was like a stranger the bus driver co-worker didn't matter socially i might have been a very interruptive um in like talker or very an unconscious talker not being present and grounded around others if i made it to a dentist appointment or a doctor's appointment if you saw me in the waiting room you'd see me nervously bouncing my leg or kind of chewing on something wondering if the receptionist hated me because i was 25 minutes late i was late to everything and i had this internal anxious motor going on all the time i also had you know like functioning issues like remembering appointments paying rent on time if i ask directions like where's the laundromat i couldn't listen and take in the steps i could ask but then i would probably become really self-conscious and consumed with what the what the person thought about me asking and i would mildly dissociate and not take in where the laundry mat was laundry and dishes were very difficult to get done days off or open days were a total mess for me like spending the day being anxious about what to do with my time or what to do with myself and then only leave the apartment at like 7 p.m just to go to a coffee shop just to go somewhere and i had issues with like the time space continuum i had magical thinking that i could use public transit and get from one side of town to the other side of town in five minutes when it actually takes 40. probably why i was late to everything i was impulsive with money with credit cards and paying them on time was a mess or paying them was a mess when it came down to practicing my musical instrument at that time i was always like today's the day you know and and i would never make the time or i could never hold the attention and i often had mood dependent behaviors going on and what that means is like thoughts like i'll quit smoking when i'm in the right place i'll do the laundry when i have more energy later in the day i'll get it together when i quit smoking weed and those are all mood dependent behaviors something has to happen in order for me to get something done and i worked at that time i worked evenings and usually got to bed around one or two a.m and i often have to get up or nine or be at work at 10. that was a total mess this was when i worked in restaurants um and i i have to would i'd have to really rally to get stuff done i dread doing adulting tasks like for a week like just paying a bill or something like that and then i would have to super focus for a day and get to get anything done like bills errands or laundry and just a year or so prior to that time in my life i almost didn't graduate high school for the same problems and functioning like not being prepared not showing up not graduating was a lot about my absences as well as barely passing grades and lifelong till therapy i never had the focus to do well in school or be consistent with assignments it really wouldn't take much to emotionally crash me it wouldn't take much at all to trigger me to intense shame or i'd dissociate or i'd become reactive depending on the person or the situation and i was extremely sensitive which was always exhausting i could be reactive i could be irritable and i could be in an anger-based trigger that could take over and i might be in that for a couple of days like not like dangerous but just really just upset um and i was both consistently anxious and depressed but i wasn't in my body enough to know that and i had no frame of reference meaning i was like that probably since mid grammar school up until that point in my life however i was able to you know get to my band rehearsals and gigs and sort of in a good enough way and work in a good enough way although i did lose jobs and i did lose gigs for lateness or general messiness either emotionally or function wise complicating all of this i was pretty much almost a daily pot smoker quasi drinker but even after sobriety these things continuously needed to be worked on most of my ongoing thoughts around that time was like an obsession like when am i going to get it together when when am i going to really rally and get my life together like that was perpetual around that time and let's talk about maybe some potential diagnosis for everything that i just told you you know you could hear all that and say well you know you were 19 you know it sounds right that could be valid or you could say probably was the drugs and the alcohol also valid or worse you could be like psychologically lazy and say i needed a swift kick in the pants and i just needed to stop screw around um or if you know if i had gone to a different therapist than the one that i started seeing back then i wonder what they would make of all that clinically like what might a different therapist make of all that maybe now adhd gad general anxiety disorder substance use disorder run-of-the-mill depression run-of-the-mill anxiety mood disorder like the person saying you say you rally but then you crash you know it's often really subjective to the clinician and all of these questions would depend on the therapist i think as well as just taking a lot of sort of like assessments with a psychologist and i'm not trying to criticize therapists here i'm i'm more pointing out to the confusion in overlapping symptoms over a variety of issues however if they asked me about growing up like the therapist i actually got did at that time it creates more of an in-depth picture about why those struggles and those symptoms were there my therapist just focused on my story what happened to me and related that story to those struggles and gave me tools to work on them and process the abuse with me in session as well as group the focus was on growing up with a father who was both alcoholic and probably had narcissistic personality or did have narcissistic personality disorder a mother who was also alcoholic and probably had something else going on something cluster b the chaos the stress the domestic abuse the domestic of violence poverty neglect manipulation several moves medical trauma emotional abuse verbal and psychological and sexually off behaviors in the adults and spending most of my time of my week the weeks in my childhood were spending bars waiting to go home so that's what we focused on and in the model of therapy that i do the client story is way more important than the client's symptoms you know and symptoms are important but they're not the sole thing that is talked about in the room so if you're new to me or new to the channel welcome if you like this video feel free to hit some of the buttons on the screen you can't mess with any of the buttons especially the subscribe button and the notification button and subscribing greatly supports the channel as well as creates a wider community within the channel and if these videos are helpful to you and helpful to your recovery you can consider supporting the work that goes into these videos over at my patreon i do not take on any third party paid sponsorships on this channel because i think it must things up for the viewer which is you and in addition you can go to my website and do some childhood trauma e-course work that i offer there including a recent webinar recording that discusses working on childhood shame triggers through an inner child exercise called dialoguing if you follow this little ball up here the white ball that'll take you to those courses and you can also get in touch with me through my website and you can also connect with me through my instagram or as well as my tic talk and i will have all the links to the description in the in the video below here are some things about adult adhd which is the focus of this video and discerning adult adhd from from adults who have grown up in childhood trauma i'm not focusing on adhd and children in this video at all so there is some research that links adhd to our genetics you know there's an 80 parental correlation meaning if your parents had it it's highly likely that you'll have it there is research that links to smoking and drinking during during pregnancy like in the womb there is also research that links it to exposure to lead which is which was really used in the us between the 1920s through all the way through 1986 and we were all exposed to lead via gas emissions at the time given that they had leaded gasoline um think how they stopped doing that and symptoms can appear start between the ages of three and six four percent of americans over the age of 18 struggle with adhd it used to be known i'm sure you guys know this it used to be known as add which is no longer used and adhd addresses the attention and hyperactivity but you could struggle with both of those or just one separately in no way am i saying that all kids who have adhd symptoms or carry the diagnosis are traumatized i repeat this is not a video about saying it's all about trauma adhd can vary can very much just happen on its own for kids in all kinds of families and all kinds of severity of symptoms in this video we'll be looking at adult-based adhd and contrasting with adults who grew up in childhood trauma and here is some more about adhd let's see what it looks like so i've divided the symptoms between the hyperactivity as well as the attention with with the the attention being difficult focusing forgetfulness poor planning poor time management you can also include difficulty in making decisions under that problems with task completion hyper focus such as with games or hobbies or something of strong interest to the person in the middle i've included sensitivity and low self-esteem for not really falling in either of the the two categories of attention and hyperactivity in my mind for hyperactivity we have low frustration um low frustration tolerance i mean interrupted sleep like busy consciousness or busy brain during during sleeping hours a tendency to have that going on hyperactivity which can be described as like having an internal motor going all the time impulsivity poor mood regulation verbal communication problems which is also something that we're going to come back to later in the video and adult adhd can be exhausting clients can describe it as always feeling like they're on edge because they are forgetting something and they could be fired for it or forgetting something could be dangerous to themselves or to their family it's very shaming as well as to not be organized or forgetting major things like a work project or in remembering something important that our partner just said to us i can think of a lot of adults with adhd that who have had at some point pretended like they heard the directions or the thing or the questions but they were really somewhere else in their head when the questions were asked and they kind of have to fake it so it's disconnecting and it sucks to also feel constantly behind the eight ball or just treading water with our functioning and if you identify with having adhd i'm sure you're familiar with lists like such as the one that i just put up on the screen now let's bring in some childhood trauma symptoms for adults and compare it with what we were just looking at and i struggled with this diagram the struggle was that these two issues have way more in common than they do and what they have indifference initially it wasn't a venn diagram it was more like a single blob of symptomology this diagram and video is my clinical opinion my expertise is in childhood trauma and abusive family systems not adhd but here i'm going to try to do my best feel free to correct or comment or add if you'd like to do so in the comments the arrows in this diagram is to emphasize the extremes of differences adhd on the left in my mind doesn't have the extreme symptom differences to childhood trauma however i think childhood trauma does display some major differences to adhd and that's what you see on the far right of the of the infographic so let's get into the gray area and we're going to come back to some of these later to look at the childhood trauma stuff in them i've listed the overlapping symptoms as as others have in other diagrams it says such as difficulty focusing low frustration tolerance interrupted sleep disorganization dissociation highlighted in yellow because i'm also going to be focusing on that later verbal communication problems low self-esteem related to the symptomology forgetfulness impulsivity shame and guilt and as well as sensitivity i have the remaining adhd symptoms such as poor planning and hyperactivity to orbit the gray area meaning they are they are also kind of pulled into the commonality of childhood trauma and could also be qualifying as an overlapping gray area i think in some cases i've also done this with the childhood trauma symptoms of emotional dysregulation hypervigilance emotional reactivity and isolation meaning i think those symptoms orbit strongly the gray area the overlap as well i think think of like a gravitational pull towards the middle here the differences i think the major differences between these two issues is the etiology of the symptoms that i've listed such as attachment issues body memories or or flashbacks if you like relational control of self or others or you could also list that as codependency if you like numbness like not celebrating graduation wedding promotions or extreme being disconnected from our feelings and that last one belief-based self-sabotage or harm i know that last one is a mouthful these are what i see as childhood trauma symptoms here and you may or may not see these specifically described in this list but they're kind of ballpark for symptoms elsewhere for childhood trauma you could also look at the far right childhood trauma symptoms as cptsd i like to use childhood trauma to include the story of childhood trauma but simply it's very similar to what we call cptsd it just depends on when the trauma started so those extreme right symptoms i think are rooted in the ideology of our childhood story and perhaps the whole point of this video is discerning um adhd from childhood trauma is the presence of an abuse story which for some is tricky to figure out or source feel like you qualify for having that abuse story and related to that let's look at a few of those gray area symptoms and talk about how they might be rooted in a childhood trauma story as opposed to only being considered an adhd symptom so and we're going to look at some of the things that were in the gray area and see how they could be about childhood trauma so let's look at the symptom of having difficulty focusing from that middle that gray area that overlap of symptoms this could also fall into things like having brain fog or simply being preoccupied from a childhood trauma lens my clients including myself at the time have difficulty focusing because i think that their inner child or aka their limbic system is too active which in turn results in having our executive functioning that happens in our frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex that the limbic system is too active and in turn actually shuts down our executive functioning frontal part of our brain and it's not as active and it's not as engaged there is also research that concludes the same findings in adhd that if there's a disengaged and not utilized frontal lobes and an overly activated amygdala and hippocampus which are parts of the limbic system that i mentioned and it's very similar to the physiology of being triggered like being adrenalized so the frontal lobes and the prefrontal cortex allow for planning planning and finishing tasks i describe those parts as allowing to be able to be able to think and feel at the same time and the limbic system causes us to be all an over engaged limbic system causes us to be all feeling all raw emotion fight flight freeze shame cry for help all that stuff for trauma survivors and adhd clients the limbic system it's like it's too large and in charge for the prefrontal cortex and the frontal lobes to be more engaged and to be more functioning for childhood trauma survivors children growing up in abuse are incredibly stressed let's picture a fourth grader with a homework assignment of writing just two paragraphs about say like a bird species or a science idea or something that requires focus and follow-through if that kid saw his parents being violent with each other the night before or if that kid is so neglected that they don't see a parent until 10 pm or there's a bullying sibling or a bully in their life and they get no help with that and the adults aren't safe if they're growing up in chaos poverty substance abuse all that stuff that kid has way too much going on to be able to focus on two paragraphs and the penmanship rules and now they're usually incredibly overwhelmed and anxious about the assignment itself so it's a lot and this anxiety and shame will carry into their adulthood not just because of one homework assignment but that's i'm just giving an example of like the everyday trauma that happens to kids who grow up in childhood trauma about issues like that as i work with my clients on developing their inner adult to help their inner child with those old triggers of the overwhelm and the shame it's really kind of unlike getting the person's prefrontal cortex and frontal lobes online to take care of the limbic system you can also look at it like that the inner child will hold trauma-based beliefs about their ability to perform follow through and their ability to focus and these beliefs need to be processed in adulthood and addressed by an engaged inner adult any child would need you know any child in that scenario would need consistent repetitive help from parents on such of an assignment like that i know that that may be some shocking for those of you that grow up and neglect as kids need a lot of help so there's that issue of focusing let's move on to verbal communication problems this symptom can definitely happen in non-abuse based adhd so what i mean about all this is what this can look like is anxious talking blurting things out not knowing how to describe a situation overwhelmed and communicating something and somewhat kind of tripping over their thoughts or really struggling with having a back and forth with somebody that's like has flow to it for example i'll often see a client struggling with describing a chain of events to me let's say the chain of events could look like trying to communicate something like or this is what the chain of events would be i had a fight with my partner last night over the kids brushing their teeth we sent some angry texts to each other for not wanting to get intense around the kids and we still haven't talked about the issue in person since then we have this pattern so that's like the the chain of events the bullet points and often a childhood trauma survivor might try to tell me all that but it comes out like well we had a fight and see i was holding oliver's iron man toothbrush and then there were glumps of kids crests like all over the place and i know i know i should be using the organic stuff but they don't carry that at the usual place and we'd have to go two exits up so we don't so we don't go there unless we need other stuff too then well and i couldn't find a new battery for the toothbrush and my partner just came in and just took the whole thing over saying loudly like let me handle it and so so i leave and i go back to the dishes and i can't do them because i'm triggered so i start texting her and it's just like the park last week and as the therapist in that i might try to clarify or to get a better sense about what's kind of going on and often a trauma survivor might not pick up on or notice that i'm trying to ask those questions or clarify because they're just really struggling creating a chain of events and telling me and by the end they might have tangentially like taken that exchange with their partner onto a new subject which so in other words as the therapist sometimes you can kind of really lose somebody when they have that problem of communication and i might step out of all that and ask them like what it feels like trying to tell me something and ask what it was like growing up around talking to their parents or trying to communicate something to their parents when i see those problems in the here and now in the moment in the session i'm wondering or i'm sensing the overwhelm that the client's inner child might be anticipating that i'm going to criticize them or i might not think well of them and i sense there but they're anxious and they're scattered and i'll try to bring it into the room what would happen when they try to tell their parents something important if they can remember from childhood they might say there was a jump down your throat kind of criticism that happened by the parent or the parent was disinterested or the parent might hit them for telling them something like if they lost something so there's great anxiety about talking about something emotional and i also have clients that will quickly go to shame and start apologizing for not using the right words and that trigger is consistent and happens on its own and it tells me that the client was just simply again like never safe when it came to telling the parent or was never safe with how the parent received them or experienced them so there's that so let's do another one you probably noticed how i highlighted the word dissociation and the overlapping symptoms in that in that diagram let's look at that dissociation to me is simply not being grounded in our bodies comfortably in the present moment there can be a range of dissociation with the mildest form when like a musician or an athlete or an artist is in the zone and they are in a place of say something like sort of flow or grace that's like the mildest over here on the left inside of the spectrum of um well maybe you're right of dissociation the other extreme is struggling with say things like disassociative identity disorder depersonalization derealization and being fragmented consciously which is really scary and really hard so where does adhd come into all of that and clinically adhd can you can certainly go into mild association by having it things like breaking out spacing out losing your train of thought and it's certainly less than the extreme versions that i gave you but i think it's actually the most important helpful thing to look at i find that the dissociation issue is determining whether it's adhd or childhood trauma for adults looking at it is really helpful from the childhood trauma lens dissociation is the story of surviving uh our upbringing by not being fully present for the abuse and it's in actually an amazing survival instinct and a natural tool that happens in humans what sucks about it is is that we stay in it in various ways until we do our trauma work which is the return to being safely in our bodies having a new healthy belief system about ourselves as well as releasing a lot of what happened to us and that prior example about the communication that client with the client struggling with to tell me a chain of events no matter how gentle or how chill i ask about it like if i said i wonder what happens for your inner child when when you were telling me what happened the client might emotionally leave the room a little bit they might get quiet they might their affect might kind of change and feeling like i get a sense that they're worried i've caught them in something you know they might be saying oh f like what did i do now like how do i respond and that's a version of dissociation they might go blank or they might say i don't know what happened and they really might mean that and then i work on even being more chill and educating in them in a way just like i'm doing in this video about how that happens from childhood trauma and i would really normalize the problem um in a like of course you get keyed up about what what i'm thinking about as you're discussing because that was what it was like for you growing up the checking out for that client is run by their trauma beliefs stuff like i'm an f up at any given moment i'm going to get clobbered and i deserve it and nobody's actually safe those can be looked at core trauma beliefs like in cognitive behavioral therapy that come from the abusive childhood conditioning and not just in the communication issue my clients including myself at the time live in their heads which means which means to be dissociated overly thinking overly worrying being hyper vigilant about mistakes emotions and problems and that's where and that's the kind of stuff where we leave the house going like do i have my glasses and my keys and the glasses are on the face or you leave from fear you're like oh did i not turn the iron off and you haven't used the iron in six months i think that all of that can be looked at as scattered adhd stuff but i see it as being dissociative and dissociation can be weaved with anything else any of those other symptoms on that graphic here's what i mean stay with me on this because this is this this might seem out there um you're sitting on a zoom call that you got to like 10 or 15 minutes late and you're scattered the zoom calls about doesn't matter but your kids work school doesn't matter you're scattered and you're struggling to focus and you're anxious because of what other people might think of you and that might be due to any of or all of the following you had some forgetness about the zoom call due to not getting enough sleep having poor sleep the night before due to being hyper vigilant about job security so you like impulsively and reactively started looking for jobs at like 1am which is an example of your inner child self-sabotaging your day due to shame or guilt or intense low self-esteem all while hoping your partner maybe doesn't notice you be doing all that stuff for fear that you might lose them because of attachment problems that's what i mean about a weaving of stuff which is a mess but i hope that makes a little bit more of a picture of what i mean about the dissociation issue that's what it's like to be in our heads and unconsciously sitting on all of our trauma story and the beliefs that run all that mess all of that disorganization and yes it's possible that that can happen with just sort of standard non-trauma-based adhd if a client told me about such a zoom call we'd be working with how all of that is related to childhood trauma beliefs and what happened that nothing was good enough growing up that they had to make everything happen on their own at a really young age and they were abandoned and had security problems because of the parenting that achieved or that achieving was the only way to survive or that hiding problems and hiding emotions kept you safe or that the parents were abusive or substance addicted or had severe mental health issues and that would all that would rattle any any child and affect their nervous system to being into like a hyper-vigilant state also attributing to dissociation that person on the zoom call might be sitting on all of that trauma and what happened to them and the unfinished and unprocessed abused and not be conscious of it it's what i'm trying to say this makes us disorganized dissociated anxious depressed and difficult to focus or being super reactive or way too sensitive so here are some final thoughts i think it's fine and good if a person does not have those explicit trauma symptoms along with reporting a good enough and safe childhood with emotionally healthy parents it just means it's probably just sort of non-trauma-based adhd and that's what the treatment should be targeted for and it's also finding good for a childhood trauma survivor to be working on their adhd symptoms with adhd treatment but also at some point hopefully receiving good childhood trauma treatment which might greatly expedite and reduce a lot of the shared overlapping symptoms it all comes down to the person having an abuse story or not really you know although just doing adhd treatment won't hit or address childhood trauma if the person does want to pursue that kind of work about their family system of origin adhd can be an issue that doesn't have to come with a childhood trauma story i know i'm being super repetitive about that it's about if the person has that story or not however i can see children with adhd who are who are not being traumatized at home they might experience a lot of stress and trauma in school systems if they're not getting the help which i think should also come from parents as well there's a little bit of a paradox there most childhood trauma survivors i think are going to have ballpark adhd issues like from these infographics you could see that they just look like night and day and as a side note about overlap i ask every client when i start with them if they were an idling parked car would their motor run high medium or low and most ants are high meaning that when they're resting they're still keyed up and often that hyperactivity piece of adhd of adult base adhd is described as having an ongoing internal motor with some busy energy so i'd also like to note severity all these symptoms for both issues exist on a scale of intensity and i think no two clients or no two sort of presentations are exactly alike i've had many high functioning trauma survivors who are like ninjas at achieving income and completing complex tax but they but they are not emotionally connected to themselves at all really being in their head and to contrast that i've had many childhood trauma clients who have huge functioning deficits and they're too overwhelmed or too much in the emotional raw mind um and it's also that's also kind of a version of being in their heads believe it or not so for adhd there are also subsets you know some are more aligned with the the attention deficit some are more aligned with the hyperactivity deficits and some are combinations of both my main message about these two issues is the overlap is so much that it's hard to discern between the two and adhd can happen for kids in good homes with safety and resources and good enough parents adhd can also be related to childhood trauma and the difference is about really nailing whether or not there was abuse in that child's life and now as an adult they're struggling with symptoms in their adulthood and the presence of the abuse in childhood is really the deciding factor about what to call it here are some recommendations given the commonality types of adhd therapy is probably helpful anyway about the symptoms regardless of whether it's trauma or not however if there is an abuse story good childhood trauma work with a trauma therapist would be the thing that i would explore if the person feels ready as a side note like you can do different types of therapies at different stages in your life and that's a really great way to do it in many ways it's beneficial for clients to come to me and in my work having already done something like cbt or whatever it's very very helpful for trauma treatments like emdr processes the story and works on new beliefs and i describe good trauma work as something that releases and drains all that noise that causes the adhd like symptoms and i do that work by doing inner child work and experiential work and usually in a group setting and really processing and getting to our stories at the age of 19 i started doing individual and group work for my childhood trauma and i'm not saying everyone will have this experience but i went from being that somewhat feral mess in in daily struggling and treading water to starting college around that time and getting 4.0 gpa in my first semester having almost not graduated from high school two or three years earlier that's what childhood trauma work that's how it affected me really good childhood trauma work while i still struggled i had such a greater capacity to show up and function and complete things because i was actively processing my childhood with really good safe people and i was also sober but again like the the symptoms kept on even though i got sort of sober for a long time as well so and i have a recommendation for therapists not only to be more trauma informed but to also be trained into better honoring someone's story i think the worst thing that we can do as therapists is to just treat symptoms in a vacuum without knowing what fully happened to the person or explore that in context of their symptoms and i get it that some clients don't want that at all i can very much get that but too many people also hear but that's the parent you got what are you gonna do and i think that that's just coming from the therapist not knowing how to work with childhood trauma or worse that they believe in the old you gotta get over it standpoint but they're just trying to say it in a nicer way i would love to hear um your your thoughts on that in the comments in this video so i hope this video was helpful to you and provided some thoughts about where these symptoms might come from um i hope it provided some clarity hope or at least didn't confuse you further and as always may you be filled with loving kindness may you be well may you be peaceful and at ease may you be joyous [Music] take care and i'll see you next time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Patrick Teahan LICSW

Views: 850,679

Keywords: psychology, health and wellness, childhood, family, ptsd, childhood trauma, emotional abuse, abusive parents, childhood ptsd, narcissistic mother, narcissistic father, narcissistic parents, repressed memories, emotionally abusive parents, abuse

Id: lYD0Q4oMYXw

Length: 35min 23sec (2123 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 16 2022