Something that pisses me off to no end is the commonly accepted idea that confidence is a momentary emotion you can conjure in yourself like a joyful laugh at a memory. Sure, for people who have had a life that structurally empowered them and rewarded them for having the brain they did maybe it is…
For someone with ADHD who has been told they aren’t enough and are also too much their whole life and never had the diagnosis? You can’t just make that go away with telling them they have ADHD and giving them a hug. Lasting damage has been done to that child and they may never recover their confidence in adulthood the way other people do.
I wish we would stop treating confidence like it is child’s play, it isn’t. If you undermine a child’s confidence you have hurt that child at a more permanent level than almost any other way you can non-physically hurt them.
Especially for someone who is very sensitive about what other people think of them, which a lot of ADHD people tend to be (a lot of us rely on it to motivate us to get things done!), you can’t just think better about yourself. Your confidence is like an instinct that has been learned through the summation and culmination of your experiences. If those experiences are people shitting on you for things you can’t help, you won’t be a confident person, period. That is how that works and I wish people would stop pretending it is all just wishy washy perspective taking that can be undone by simply thinking harder. Maybe for a very narrow range of people in a much larger subset this is possible, but beyond that? No
And it doesn’t just go away if the parents/guardians just decide to stop treating it entirely for arbitrary reasons.
I know i have ADHD, i know i was treated for ADHD until like 10 years old (and symptoms never went away) but because my parents “didn’t like how i was when i was on medication”, i had no treatment at all through middle school and high school, and they long since destroyed my childhood medical records so i have nothing to show for it. Frankly I feel like i should be more angry at them than I am. I probably shouldn’t have graduated high school.
Something that pisses me off to no end is the commonly accepted idea that confidence is a momentary emotion you can conjure in yourself like a joyful laugh at a memory. Sure, for people who have had a life that structurally empowered them and rewarded them for having the brain they did maybe it is…
For someone with ADHD who has been told they aren’t enough and are also too much their whole life and never had the diagnosis? You can’t just make that go away with telling them they have ADHD and giving them a hug. Lasting damage has been done to that child and they may never recover their confidence in adulthood the way other people do.
I wish we would stop treating confidence like it is child’s play, it isn’t. If you undermine a child’s confidence you have hurt that child at a more permanent level than almost any other way you can non-physically hurt them.
Especially for someone who is very sensitive about what other people think of them, which a lot of ADHD people tend to be (a lot of us rely on it to motivate us to get things done!), you can’t just think better about yourself. Your confidence is like an instinct that has been learned through the summation and culmination of your experiences. If those experiences are people shitting on you for things you can’t help, you won’t be a confident person, period. That is how that works and I wish people would stop pretending it is all just wishy washy perspective taking that can be undone by simply thinking harder. Maybe for a very narrow range of people in a much larger subset this is possible, but beyond that? No
And it doesn’t just go away if the parents/guardians just decide to stop treating it entirely for arbitrary reasons.
I know i have ADHD, i know i was treated for ADHD until like 10 years old (and symptoms never went away) but because my parents “didn’t like how i was when i was on medication”, i had no treatment at all through middle school and high school, and they long since destroyed my childhood medical records so i have nothing to show for it. Frankly I feel like i should be more angry at them than I am. I probably shouldn’t have graduated high school.