#invalidation

demonsgold:

adhdpie:

adhdpie:

(the majority of this post is pulled from an older reblog I did on my main, @vantasticmess.)

it’s ADHD Awareness Month so here’s a post about it. :D

I’ve gotten sooo many ‘#not adhd but man i feel this’ tags on adhd posts i’ve made, and tbh tags of this type drive me nuts (b/c they make me doubt the validity of my diagnosis.)

but if you, a not-adhd person, see a post about adhd experiences and relate to it, please consider the following: 

• maybe you do have adhd?
  
• maybe it’s because most things that adhd people experience are things that most everyone experiences sometimes, only they experience it all the time.

at its heart, adhd is theinability to pick what your attention is locked onto, sometimes combined with a need to move constantly (hyperactivity).  This manifests as:

• lively internal life + rapid thought & intuitive leaps of cognition - good when being creative, bad when trying to make a logical decision
  
• overthinking things
• impulsive behavior
• short attention span + being easily distracted
• unnaturally long attention span + inability to notice outside stimuli
• short term memory dysfunction
• executive dysfunction
• no sense of priority (everything is equally important)
• no sense of time in relation to self (cannot effectively tell how long an activity will take or develop a sense of urgency based on a deadline until the deadline is perilously close or already passed)
• failure to follow through (leaving work incomplete)
• forgetting to remember/remembering tasks at inappropriate times
• intrusive thoughts

And pretty much everyone experiences one or all of these things at times, and these symptoms can spring from other causes than ADHD (for instance, executive dysfunction accompanies depression and anxiety as well).

But adhd people have this happen so constantlyandso intrusively that we cannot complete basic tasks, even if we want to:

• The only thing consistent about us is inconsistent results: sometimes we’re on time, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re reliable, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re studious, sometimes we’re not … (and trust me we’re not enjoying it any more than you are)
• We fail classes, we drop out of college, we lose jobs, and no matter how much we try, we cannot fix it.
• We can’t just remove distractions - our brains are a distraction.
• We can’t just ‘try harder’ - our wayward mind might be focusing on our studying today, but tomorrow it might not. The same effort level will have wildly different results on different days because our attention cooperated … or didn’t.
  
• it is literally impossible for us to choose our focus. pretty much ever.

it pisses off our friends, it pisses off our bosses, it pisses off our family, and it even pisses off ourselves. it affects every part of our life.

So adhd shitposts can be pretty relateable, even if you don’t have adhd.  But if this list sounds familiar - if the contents of it happen to you to the point that you’re getting in trouble at school or your job and you’re pissing off your friends? might be worth looking into what’s going on with you.

bringing this back b/c at least 1 of every 15 rbs of the 7 ADHD Moods post is tagged ‘#i don’t have adhd but’.

There’s also some overlapping diagnoses that would make you think you may have ADHD, like Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Executive Functioning disorders.

^^^ yep, this! ESPECIALLY Autism/ASD. ADHD & ASD share a lot of symptoms.

& here’s some more stuff that can look like adhd - or that adhd can look like - but aren’t adhd:

• auditory processing disorders
  
• dyslexia
• various learning disabilities
• anxiety
• depression
• obsessive-compulsive disorder
• bipolar disorder
• under-educated/unpracticed in decision-making/critical thinking skills

something I’d like to make clear: 

the OP post is aimed at people who are neurotypical & mentally healthy (or rather, people who believe they are NT & mentally healthy).

It’s a rebuttal to the deeply invalidating claim often thrown at ADHD people by (supposedly) NT people when ADHD people describe their symptoms: ‘I do that too.’ ‘everybody feels that way.’ ‘that’s normal.’

NT & mentally-healthy ppl adding/tagging posts about the experience of having ADHD by ADHD people with ‘I don’t have ADHD but I do this/I feel this’ is … very adjacent to the experience of being told ‘I do that too’/’that’s normal’/’everyone feels that way’ by NT & mentally well people IRL.

it’s often well-meaning, but it feels like ‘your diagnosis is BS’.

but of course, plenty of people who don’t have ADHD DO find ADHD symptoms relatable because of some other neurodiverse state or a mental illness. And they have absolutely no obligation to divulge that information in their tags/reblogs! 

also: frankly, it’s wrong of me to assume that everyone who tags my ADHD posts ‘I don’t have ADHD but’ is NT &/or mentally healthy!

the takeaway I would like people to have from this post is:

• if you think you are NT &/or mentally healthy but you strongly relate to significant numbers of posts made by neurodiverse &/or mentally ill ppl about their experiences: consider that you might not be as NT/mentally healthy as you believe.
• if you think you are NT &/or mentally healthy but you strongly relate to and reblog posts made by nd &/or mentally ill ppl about their experiences: is it really so important to make sure everyone knows you’re not nd/mi? (besides, it’s not anybody’s business why you relate to/reblog a post if you don’t want to explain yourself. I’m not judging you - I promise!)

this is WAY LONG so I’ll probably make this addition into its own post later.

tl;dr: do what you want & like your own status :P

I really hate the rhetoric of people saying “it’s not men that do that, it’s boys”. If a man abuses someone, they’re called a boy, like they lost their “man card” for doing something heinous. This doesn’t break them down because you took their “man card”, all it does is inadvertently say “men can do no wrong”.

Mencan do wrong. Men do wrong a lot. You aren’t breaking an abusers ego by calling them a boy; you’re invalidating the victim by saying that an entire demographic is incapable of wrongdoing, even though the victim was wronged by that demographic.

Stop making comments like “men don’t do that, only boys do that” or “real men respect women, only boys cause harm”.

Just a little life tip if you’re working on your shit:

Being allergic to unpleasant feelings is a problem with a lot of us because we weren’t taught how to sit with someone else’s pain (much less our own) and be there for them without trying to fix, minimize, or ignore them and withdraw so we don’t get icky feelings on us.

Those are all forms of invalidation, which can turn into emotional abuse if we’re not careful. How you feel when confronted with someone else’s pain is not the problem, it’s how you treat people who are going through something hard in order to protect yourself from feeling discomfort.

Most of us have done it with good intentions because again, weren’t really taught how to process emotions as kids. If that’s the case, notice when you have the urge to bypass emotions and say things like, “Look on the bright side!” to someone who is still processing the dark.

This has the potential to be become disordered, and very, very harmful to the person you’re trying to “cheer up” for your own comfort. It only causes harm. Never has a person been struggling with depression and suddenly found themselves cured because you emotionally abused them into a traumatized nervous system that isn’t allowed to process things.

Selective empathy is why entire friend groups will stop talking to their bestie who suddenly became disabled. Sounds too awful to be true, I mean, who would do that?! But life is not a movie. The friends don’t always rally around their sick one in their time of need. It’s very, very common for the newly chronically ill/disabled to lose almost all their friends. That’s why they say “being sick shows you who your real friends are.”

It also reveals the true nature of your family members. Again, life is not a movie. For a lot of us, the person we thought we could always rely on, the person we love the most… is the one who abandoned us when we got sick. The one who ignores us during flare ups. The one who harasses at us when we’re trying to rest. The one who almost made us end it all.

A spouse will leave their partner who has cancer because they aren’t emotionally equipped/mature enough to be there for someone who is sick. So they’d rather start over and find a not-sick wife. Life is not a movie.

If you find that no matter how much you try to be mindful, you can’t help but resort to emotionally abusing someone to make them stop having Feelings You Dislike, then–and I say this with love: please seek help because that’s actually not normal or okay. Repeatedly hurting other people because you can’t control your reactions might indicate something disordered is going on.

Your friend is allowed to be devastated that her aunt died. Your child is allowed to be sad that their best friend is moving away. Your partner is allowed to enter a grief period because their chronic illness is taking away the things that give them purpose.

Any attempt to change their emotions or fix the problem so their emotions will change is not going to work, it will only hurt them and make them feel unsafe around you because their reality is being repeatedly invalidated. It’s not sustainable in any relationship to expect the other person to never experience the hard things in life.

Just because you may be able to shut off and not “let it affect” you doesn’t mean other people process life that way.

The world isn’t your dollhouse. Other people’s personhood is separate from yours.

We all have to know this if anything is to change.