When ADHD and trauma overlap: emotional overwhelm and criticism

ADHD and trauma can both, individually, be challenging and impact our ability to regulate our emotions and engage in life in a way that aligns with how we want to be in the world. When we find ourselves managing both of these at the same time, it can make the experience even more challenging.

ADHD often makes managing emotions difficult. Experiencing intense emotions, including anger, sadness or distress, can often contribute to feelings of overwhelm, or of numbness and withdrawal. This can make returning to a sense of safety challenging, or unachievable.

When challenges that can stem from experiences of ADHD meet with experiences of trauma and challenging relationship dynamics, things can start to feel even more complicated.

Living through traumatic experiences can, amongst many other symptoms, leave us feeling disconnected, overwhelmed, and on constant high alert. For someone already experiencing emotional overwhelm associated with ADHD, these trauma-related responses can add another layer of difficulty. You may find yourself reacting strongly to situations, struggling to understand why certain things feel so triggering, or feeling exhausted by the effort of managing your emotions.

Understanding your responses

You might find yourself overly critical of yourself or intensely frustrated by responses to things that, when you are away from the moment, may not seem so overwhelming. You may find yourself replaying what happened afterwards, wondering why you reacted so strongly, or telling yourself that you should have handled it differently. Over time, this self-criticism can affect your self-confidence, your relationships, and the overall way you feel and think about yourself.

Understanding how trauma and ADHD experiences interact for you individually does not mean simply labelling each experience as either a trauma response or a symptom of ADHD. And understanding whether a challenge stems from traumatic experiences or ADHD isn't the same as repeatedly analysing and categorising the experience while you're emotionally activated.

However, understanding how both ADHD and trauma impact you can help to make sense of your experiences and help to identify what support, or way of coping, might be helpful for you in your individual experience and individual situation.

Is it ADHD or trauma?

Something that often becomes apparent is this pull to identify what is trauma and what is ADHD. In my professional experience, I find that this is not always an overly helpful question. The interpretations and messages we give ourselves around labelling experiences can lead us to fixate on this process and heighten emotional dysregulation.

Let’s say something happens that triggers a heightened emotional response. You then move into a space of intense emotional experience, perhaps overwhelm, and self-critical thoughts often creep in: “Why am I reacting like this?” And then the pull to label: “This must be my ADHD” or “This must be because of my experiences”. These thoughts can intensify the overwhelm. Thoughts stemming from the first experience can cause additional distress and even worsen it.

What I’m writing about here is self-criticism. These questions can shift the focus from the experience to who you are as a whole, with shoulds and should nots flying around: "I shouldn’t be acting like this", "I should be able to cope with this". Therapy can address these directly by working with levels of self-compassion.

The challenge of being compassionate towards oneself

Self-compassion is challenging for most of the general population, but the experiences I've outlined so far can make the challenge even harder for those individuals who are managing ADHD and the impact of traumatic experiences.

ADHD and trauma do not necessarily cause a reduction in self-compassion; it is the lived experiences that are often shared by people who live with the impact of ADHD and trauma that often create challenges with self-compassion. 

When self-criticism becomes part of your identity

There is also a difference between the odd self-critical thought and self-criticism becoming a habitual response to challenges. When critical thinking about the self becomes a pattern of engaging with the world. When it becomes part of your identity. When these thoughts turn into a way of seeing yourself; perhaps as someone who can’t cope, perhaps as someone who is emotionally fragile, or as someone who is less than others.

For some people, repeated experiences of criticism, misunderstanding, relational difficulty and perceived failure may contribute to an increasingly critical relationship with themselves. Developing self-compassion may therefore interrupt the additional layer of distress created by judging your own emotional experiences.

How therapy can help

Therapy can help you develop new ways of relating to yourself, responding to challenges, and engaging with the world around you. The coping skills and self-compassion you can learn and develop in therapy can create enough space in your daily life for you to relate differently to how you see yourself and act on this new knowledge.

You can carry forward the new, or reinforced, knowledge that you can tolerate your emotions to improve your daily life. Not all therapy will focus on self-compassion for people experiencing the overlap of ADHD and trauma; this is one of many therapeutic considerations that may be helpful.

Therapy can help you to understand where these self-critical thoughts come from. They often come from more than one place, and more than one experience. When we recognise what has shaped these thought patterns, we can separate the thoughts from ourselves; we can create space to challenge these responses and offer alternatives. 

Therapy can help you create a structured way to challenge self-critical thoughts. Therapy might include focusing on how you might respond if someone you love or care for shared that they felt or thought what you feel or think. 

Therapy, with someone holding space for you and offering compassion, can, on its own, create space for self-compassion to develop and change how you think and feel about yourself.