Especially when you don’t have the hyperactivity part (used to be ADD, now it’s ADHD - inattentive type), this makes so much sense as to why I was just called lazy and sensitive as a kid and teenager. Getting diagnosed in my late 20s made so many things make sense in hindsight.
A better name for the syndrome would be Executive Function Disorder. Executive Function is the term used to describe the ability to exercise agency and rational judgement when making decisions. Disorders of executive function leave a person having difficulty not responding impulsively. This affects attention; what I decide to pay attention to, and how long I hold my attention there, and it also affects emotional expression, how well I maintain an even keel and exercise control over how strongly my emotions become and how they influence my behavior. In ADHD people have difficulty deciding where their attention will go and also tend to be more emotionally labile. Shame sensitivity is frequently reported.
Sure. Shame is one of the basic emotions. The emotions are firmware build into the mammalian brain to motivate survival and reproduction. They motivate without deliberate thought by inducing pleasure or pain which the organism either seeks more of or flinches away from. Fear is a flinching away from, whereas anger is a moving towards (with intent to destroy). Shame is a hard stop. it’s function, along with surprise, is to create a hard stop of ongoing behaviors. It is regarded as the most painful of the basic emotions.
The emotions arise from the brainstorm and midbrain/sub-cortical parts of the brain, the brain’s basement if you will. In contrast we also have the cortical part of the brain, living in the attic, and it does a different sort of processing, being the seat of language and symbolic processing.
The cortex is the part of the brain that can represent and model aspects of the world and then run “what-if” scenarios to determine what the best course of action might be. For instance, one might model what will people around me do if I express my feelings in a very loud and obvious way -> they won’t like it!, and from this anticipation they might instruct themselves to inhibit the extent of the emotional expression.
Executive Function refers to exactly that function of the cortex that enables behavioral inhibition to happen, and that is what is impaired in ADHD. People with executive dysfunction have difficulty inhibiting socially inappropriate behaviors like expressing too much emotion, and they also have trouble inhibiting or moderating the strength of the emotional expression in the first place. In a single sentence, ADHD folk are more prone to act on (emotional) impulse.
So when shame is triggered, due to a perception of personal failure or unworthiness, ADHD folk are less able to keep going and more prone to be paralyzed or derailed by the shame emotion itself.
Especially when you don’t have the hyperactivity part (used to be ADD, now it’s ADHD - inattentive type), this makes so much sense as to why I was just called lazy and sensitive as a kid and teenager. Getting diagnosed in my late 20s made so many things make sense in hindsight.
Can you expand on the lazy and sensitive parts? :)
A better name for the syndrome would be Executive Function Disorder. Executive Function is the term used to describe the ability to exercise agency and rational judgement when making decisions. Disorders of executive function leave a person having difficulty not responding impulsively. This affects attention; what I decide to pay attention to, and how long I hold my attention there, and it also affects emotional expression, how well I maintain an even keel and exercise control over how strongly my emotions become and how they influence my behavior. In ADHD people have difficulty deciding where their attention will go and also tend to be more emotionally labile. Shame sensitivity is frequently reported.
Can you expand on “shame sensitivity”?
Sure. Shame is one of the basic emotions. The emotions are firmware build into the mammalian brain to motivate survival and reproduction. They motivate without deliberate thought by inducing pleasure or pain which the organism either seeks more of or flinches away from. Fear is a flinching away from, whereas anger is a moving towards (with intent to destroy). Shame is a hard stop. it’s function, along with surprise, is to create a hard stop of ongoing behaviors. It is regarded as the most painful of the basic emotions.
The emotions arise from the brainstorm and midbrain/sub-cortical parts of the brain, the brain’s basement if you will. In contrast we also have the cortical part of the brain, living in the attic, and it does a different sort of processing, being the seat of language and symbolic processing.
The cortex is the part of the brain that can represent and model aspects of the world and then run “what-if” scenarios to determine what the best course of action might be. For instance, one might model what will people around me do if I express my feelings in a very loud and obvious way -> they won’t like it!, and from this anticipation they might instruct themselves to inhibit the extent of the emotional expression.
Executive Function refers to exactly that function of the cortex that enables behavioral inhibition to happen, and that is what is impaired in ADHD. People with executive dysfunction have difficulty inhibiting socially inappropriate behaviors like expressing too much emotion, and they also have trouble inhibiting or moderating the strength of the emotional expression in the first place. In a single sentence, ADHD folk are more prone to act on (emotional) impulse.
So when shame is triggered, due to a perception of personal failure or unworthiness, ADHD folk are less able to keep going and more prone to be paralyzed or derailed by the shame emotion itself.