3 Ways ADHD Makes You Think About Yourself
Today, We are trying to understand how ADHD can affect how you think about yourself. What you think about yourself affects how you relate to others andshapes the decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis. What I’m talking about is based on schema therapy.
Understanding Schema and Core Beliefs
Think of schema as a framework for how you see yourself, and this framework is built by your early life experiences but also adjusts over time as you have new experiences. There are 18 schemas, or core beliefs, that have been identified, but I’m going to talk about three that are common in adults with ADHD.
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The first schema is feeling defective: You feel inadequate at all levels. This can make you hypersensitive to criticism and rejection. You may feel insecure around people and always compare yourself to others.
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The second schema is a basic sense of failure: You feel you haven’t met your potential. With this schema, people often feel inept, stupid, lacking talent, or doomed to be less successful than everyone else, which can cause you to give up easily on things or not even try because, after all, you think you’re not going to be good at it.
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The third schema is insufficient self-control: You can’t rely on yourself to accomplish the things you need to. You can’t tolerate the frustration that comes with waiting for a desired outcome. Through this schema, you may 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 their downstream effects.
Development of Negative Core Beliefs and Their Effects
You start having early experiences of failure and underachievement, which can be shaming. Maybe your impulsivity or hyperactivity leads to disciplinary problems. You might have been considered a bad kid because you couldn’t settle down and were always tearing things up. Your tendency to interrupt people may lead to criticism and rejection and perhaps even makes others think you’re selfish.
Difficulty staying interested in something makes you look uninvested, unreliable, and flaky, and poor time management makes you miss opportunities and also frustrates others. Your peers seem to get things right the first time, but for you, you have to do things repeatedly and still may not achieve what you want.
Impact of Repeated Negative Feedback on Self-Perception
Imagine years of receiving negative appraisals from others and living with your own negative self-appraisal because you compare your inner world and life circumstances to what you see around you. This negative appraisal can lead to pessimism, self-doubt, low self-esteem, and a sense of ineffectiveness. In your mind, you may 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.”
Maladaptive Coping Strategies and the Self-Perpetuating Cycle
This leads to maladaptive coping strategies like procrastination or avoidance. You may engage in more impulsive behavior as you crisis-manage instead of preparing and planning. These behaviors create negative emotions such as depression, anxiety, guilt, anger, and frustration, which then confirm your core beliefs that you’re defective, a failure, and lacking in self-control.
Goals for Changing Core Beliefs and Coping Strategies
So, it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. What can be done about it? One goal is to change your core beliefs about yourself because these beliefs perpetuate dysfunctional behaviors like avoidance and procrastination, which create more problems.
A second goal is to change your coping strategies to modify your schema or core beliefs. This way, the feedback you receive from others and yourself becomes more positive. Remember, schemas are formed from your experiences and how you respond to external input. For example, losing multiple jobs and being labeled a screw-up forms one kind of schema, while remaining in a job and being promoted for excellent work forms a different kind of schema.
Schema Therapy as a Solution
Schema therapy, which is less than 20 years old, is similar to cognitive behavior therapy. However, it involves more work identifying and changing your schema than identifying and changing distorted thoughts.
Schema therapy combines aspects of cognitive behavior and other styles of therapy. It’s not something that can be done on a self-help basis; you really need a therapist trained in schema therapy. However, recognizing these common ways of thinking associated with ADHD can help you understand how these beliefs hold you back from progress.
ADHD and the Impact on Self-Esteem
The experiences associated with ADHD can significantly impact your self-esteem. It’s like you’re emotionally limping along, but some people don’t realize they’re limping; they just think that’s how they are and that nothing goes well for them because of inadequacy. However, it’s essential to understand that your thinking is based on your experiences, but the conclusions you draw about what those experiences say about you are not fully accurate.
Separating ADHD’s Consequences from Your Identity
To put it differently, the deficits that come with ADHD create problems, but ADHD is a disorder that creates negative consequences. You can manage those consequences, but you are not defined by them. You are separate from these consequences and have the power to take control and manage them.
Conclusion and Next Steps
This is a different way of understanding how ADHD has affected you. It’s a disorder that has created consequences, but when it affects so many aspects of your life, it’s easy to get lost in those consequences and lose sight of the difference between you and the consequences. There will be a follow-up discussing some of the dysfunctional behaviors that perpetuate these negative core beliefs.
Stay tuned…