ADHD acceptance and authenticity and improving internal dialogue

In this article, I will be discussing some techniques that can help when struggling with negative internal dialogue and feelings of stuckness. For the purposes of this article, I will use ADHD when referencing but these techniques can also help if you are trying to manage complex trauma, depression and anxiety. And for anyone who uses a lot of negative internal dialogue.

Acceptance may sound easy, but this can be one of the hardest parts of managing ADHD. The internal dialogue of a client living with ADHD can often be very self-critical, negative and damaging. It is my belief that the paralysis and procrastination that are often experienced by people with ADHD usually occur with a constant negative internal dialogue. Having unmanaged ADHD can feel like walking through life with a negative demon sitting on your shoulder whispering in your ear.

If throughout your day-to-day life, it feels like there is this internal observer constantly criticising everything you do – telling you that you are not good enough, chastising you for comments you’ve made in a conversation that happened earlier, pointing out your failings, telling you that you should do more, eat less, talk less, stop being lazy, sort your life out, stop being messy, sort your finances out – a voice that hones in on any areas of your life that you are struggling to juggle, on any area it senses weakness or tells you that you could do better, then acceptance can be a good starting point to help to quieten that voice down.

Understanding acceptance 

Acceptance and self-compassion go hand in hand. Using acceptance allows you to compassionately look at your life and begin to understand how you have got where you are and why. People living with ADHD often use very strict and judgemental language when referring to themselves. There is often a feeling that they are only saying what others are thinking.

Acceptance is about changing that internal dialogue into one which treats you with love, respect and understanding. It’s about learning to self-soothe in a healthy way. It’s about observing yourself from the point of a non-judgemental bystander and most importantly it’s about prioritising yourself in order to become the best version of you.

A person living with ADHD  will often have spent their lives struggling to fit into a neurotypical world. Often they have a very empathic and giving nature. They struggle to make decisions, struggle to say no and engage in people pleasing. The result of these behaviours long term can lead to them not really knowing themselves; their likes and dislikes or their own values.

They have spent so long worrying about how others feel, how they perceive they make others feel, not wanting to rock the boat, going with the flow of other's decisions, making excuses for the people who have treated them badly as they understand why they have done what they have done, staying too long in toxic relationships and struggling to stand up for themselves. And after doing this for their entire adult lives, they are absolutely exhausted. ADHD can feel like being constantly triggered by past trauma and the person triggering them is often themselves by giving themselves such a relentlessly hard time.

People living with ADHD are also more likely to have experienced trauma due to the traits mentioned above.

Acceptance can help to begin to adapt this behaviour and even make ADHD a positive aspect of who you are.

How to implement acceptance 

When starting to implement acceptance, a good starting point can be to spend some time observing your life. Get curious. We have a tendency to race through life and this can mean we aren’t really observing our behaviour. Take time to pause and look at your behaviour, how you interact with others, how you deal with day-to-day life and the stresses involved in it. Acceptance begins with observing without judgement, this can help to gain more understanding of the behaviours that work and the behaviours that no longer work.

If you feel you have tried using acceptance and it’s working ‘but’, then you may still have some way to go to truly be using acceptance. In order to fully embrace acceptance it means no longer using terms like ‘I must’, ‘I need to’, or ‘I just have to’. It’s about reframing that internal dialogue in order to be more productive.

Using harsh and demanding terminology is a big part of what can keep you locked into procrastination and frozen in paralysis. Ask yourself how it would feel to experience someone in their external world talking to you the way they are talking to yourself internally. Or if you have experienced this, how did it make you feel? Does it make you want to do what is being asked in a positive relaxed way? Or does it make you do the task begrudgingly often without even knowing if you wanted to do it in the first place, or do you end up not doing the task at all?

By the use of encouraging dialogue, we can look at altering that negative self-talk. If there is something that you felt you ‘must’ do and didn’t, then it's about learning to accept that and use a replacement dialogue that works for you, using soothing, encouraging language and understanding.

The fear can be that letting go and fully surrendering to acceptance will mean that you won’t get anything done, but these are residual thoughts of a negative dialogue trying to keep a grip on you. It may have felt that the negative self-talk was useful in the past, that it has kept you driven and focussed although on closer inspection you often find the opposite. Letting go and accepting can, in fact, have the opposite effect. You begin to be able to sense what you truly want from life and let go of things that no longer serve you without the oppressive pressure of negative internal dialogue.

Throughout the process of learning acceptance, there will be ups, downs and sideways.  The road to change is never straight and that’s OK, and neither is living with ADHD. This is a chance to use your ADHD traits to your benefit. Unlike the life experiences which have often caused you to push against your authentic self, encourage the parts of you that make you individual and use them to make a life where you can feel like a round peg in a round hole and can make your environment work for you.