3 Ways ADHD Makes You Think About Yourself

Hi I'm Dr. Tracey Marks a psychiatrist and I make mental health education videos. Today I'm talking about how ADHD can affect how you think about yourself. What you think about yourself affects how you relate to others and shapes the decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis. What I'm talking about is based on schema therapy. Think of schema therapy as a framework for how you see yourself and this framework is built by your early life experiences but it also adjusts over time as you have new experiences. There are 18 schemas or core beliefs that's another way of thinking about it that have been identified but I'm going to talk about three that have been identified to be common in adults who have ADHD even if you were never diagnosed as a child. The first schema is feeling defective. You feel inadequate at all levels. This can make you hypersensitive to criticism and rejection. You can also feel insecure around people and always feel in a state of comparing yourself to others. The second schema is a basic sense of failure. Essentially you feel you haven't met your potential. With this schema people often feel inept, stupid, lacking talent or just doomed to be less successful than everyone else. And this can cause you to give up easily on things or not even try because after all you're not going to be good at it. The third schema is insufficient self-control. You can't rely on yourself to accomplish the things that you need to. You can't tolerate the frustration that comes with waiting for a desired outcome. Also through this schema you avoid certain responsibilities or duties that are uncomfortable even if it means missing out on something that could advance you. Let's look at how these core beliefs develop and what the downstream effect is. You start having early experiences of failure and underachievement which can be shaming. Maybe your impulsivity or hyperactivity lead to disciplinary problems. You could have been considered a bad kid because you can't settle down and you're always tearing things up. Your tendency to interrupt people makes people criticize and reject you and maybe even think that you're selfish. Your difficulty staying interested in something makes you look uninvested, unreliable, and flaky. And your poor time management makes you miss opportunities and also makes people angry. Your peers seem to get things right the first time but for you, you have to do things over and over and still may not get what you want. So imagine years of getting this negative appraisal from others and living with your own negative appraisal because you compare your inner world and life circumstances to what you see around you. This negative appraisal then results in pessimism, self-doubt, low self-esteem, and ineffectiveness. In your head, you say to yourself, I'm incapable, I'm unlovable, I'll never be able to do this, or I'll never get to where I want to be. That leads to maladaptive coping strategies like procrastinating or avoiding things altogether. You engage in more impulsive behavior as you crisis manage instead of preparing and planning. These behaviors create negative emotions of depression, anxiety, guilt, anger, and frustration. Then these coping strategies and negative emotions confirm your core beliefs that you're defective, you're a failure, and you have insufficient self-control. So it's a cycle that perpetuates itself. What do we do about it? One goal is to change your core beliefs about yourself because those beliefs perpetuate the dysfunctional behavior like avoidance and procrastination which creates more problems for you. A second goal is to change your coping strategies in a way that modifies your schema or core beliefs because now the feedback that you're getting from others and yourself is more positive. Because remember, schema are formed from your experiences and how you respond to the input you get externally. Meaning losing multiple jobs and being told that you're a screw-up results in one kind of schema. Then remaining in a job and being promoted because you're doing great work forms a different kind of schema. Schema therapy is less than 20 years old and similar to cognitive behavior therapy. However, it's more work identifying and changing your schema than it is to identify distorted thoughts and change them. Schema therapy combines aspects of cognitive behavior and some other styles of therapy as well. It's not something that you can do on a self-help basis. You really need a therapist trained in schema therapy. However, I do think there's value in recognizing these common ways that you can think because of your ADHD and how these beliefs hold you back from progress. The experiences that come with ADHD can really take a hit to your self-esteem. It's like you're limping along emotionally. But some people don't realize they're limping. They just think that this is how they are and that nothing goes well for them because of their inadequacy. But you have to come to terms with the idea that the way you think is based on your experiences. But the conclusions that you draw about what those experiences say about you is not fully accurate. Let me put it a different way. Yes, the deficits that come along with ADHD create problems for you. But it's a disorder that creates negative consequences. You can manage the negative consequences, but you are not the negative consequences. You're separate from them and have the ability to take control and manage them. So that's a different way of looking at how your ADHD has affected you. It's a disorder that has created consequences. But when it affects so many aspects of your life, which it does, it's easy to get lost in the consequences and not see the difference between you and the consequences. I'll have a follow-up video addressing some of the dysfunctional behaviors that perpetuate the negative core beliefs. Stay tuned. Thanks for watching.