The ADHD Shame Spiral Is Real (and It’s Not Your Fault)

There are tons of symptoms with ADHD, and if you're anything like us then you'll keep finding out "new" ones each day. We all know and love the cliches: losing your keys, forgetting birthdays, missing appointments and such. There are the by-symptoms that abound such as finding those lost items in your hand after tearing your house apart, remembering birthdays but procrastinating on the message until it's too late, paying late fees rather than taking the 30 minutes out for whatever appointment you have. Yeah, they suck and they make our lives difficult. But we can all live with a bit of wasted time, right?

Sure we can, but there's one byproduct of these symptoms that is perhaps the most destructive for us all, yet one of the least addressed. It's invisible, and it’s designed to undermine your self-worth, confidence and sense of dignity over the course of your life. Just like a playground bully living in your head for years after you left school. It’s called shame.

This article will identify and define shame, before looking at different methods for recognizing, and ultimately eradicating it.

Before looking into how to recognize and eradicate it though, it's important to announce something loud and clear: YOU ARE NOT BROKEN AND THERE IS NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF. YOU DESERVE A BREAK, JUST LIKE ANY OTHER BULLYING VICTIM. 

The hard part is working out how to do that for yourself, how to support yourself like you'd support your best friend. 

The Cycle of Self-Blame: How the Shame Spiral Begins

The first step to eradicating shame is being able to recognise and label it. So let’s take a look at how it manifests itself in the above examples.

Lost keys

SHAME: “You lost your keys AGAIN? That’s 4 times today and you haven’t even left the house yet. That’s almost as bad as yesterday, when are you going to stop? Can’t you just put them on the key hook like everyone else?”

Forgotten birthdays

SHAME: “You forgot Aunty Gertrude’s birthday? How could you? She hasn’t forgotten yours in 30 years. How ungrateful is that? Do you appreciate anything or anyone? You’re so self-absorbed.”

Missed Appointments

SHAME: “That’s the 4th time in a row you’ve cancelled a dentist appointment with late fees. No wonder you don’t have any money. You did pretty well with money this month until this, what’s the point in ever trying to save really?”

What’s the shame done in the above examples? 

• You lost your keys a few times before leaving the house, taking up a few extra minutes. No big deal, right? Not until the shame has compared you to every other person on the planet, placing you below them. What a great way to start the day!

• You forgot Aunty Gertrude’s birthday, but she’s so nice and loves you so much she doesn’t care. The fact you belatedly remember she exists is enough to make her year, and that’s more than your cousins ever do. They don’t care, but your shame doesn’t care about your cousins, it cares about letting YOU know how selfish and ungrateful you are.

• You missed 4 dental appointments. Okay, it’s difficult to look at this one from a neutral or positive point of view. Your teeth might turn brown and rot, and once the infections and blinding toothaches subside, you’ll have to pay someone your monthly salary to put a drill inside your head if you don’t want to die. But isn’t that enough to deal with without the shame telling you how dumb you are, simultaneously telling you to scrap any attempts to regulate this?

There are lots of reasons we end up like this, one is being fed this narrative during our younger years. Ever been told you’re lazy, you don’t try hard enough, while everybody else manages just fine? This, combined with the frustration of the moment, feels awful. Everyone disapproves of you, and due to your shame you now disapprove of yourself.

A common defence mechanism for this is to avoid situations in future. You feel exposed in social situations, so your confidence plummets. You feel like you’re getting dumber, so you won’t try new things for fear of failure. You feel too selfish to foster healthy relationships, so you stay within your immediate circle. And so the cycle, and resultant shame, compounds.

Reframe the Shame: Your Brain Isn’t Flawed, It’s Mismatched

Before looking at exactly how to beat shame, you need to accept and understand that you don’t deserve it. To do that, let’s go back to our pre-agricultural ancestors, before the first farm.

Our pre-agricultural ancestors had quite the different life, and their bodies and brains were designed for this life. Farming didn’t exist yet, they were hunter-gathering foragers. Which means they never stopped in one place for long, so they could find the next woolly mammoth to eat or the next juniper bush to forage, whilst escaping Sabre-toothed tigers.

And guess which type of brains are really good at getting distracted by colorful things like berries, or staying calm in the face of mortal danger from Sabre-toothed tigers et al.?

That’s right. ADHD brains. 

Who’s feeling shame in the tribe 12,000 years ago? Certainly not OUR ancestors. They’re too busy feeding the others and throttling Sabre-toothed tigers after supper.

What they weren’t doing is trying to remember 6 different items to put in their pocket, or being on time to sit in a room for 8 hours a day filing paper and listening to meaningless drivel in meetings. You are though (or your closest equivalent), and our brains haven’t had time to adapt yet in evolutionary terms. Maybe some have, but for some reason ours are resistant. Resilience is nothing to be ashamed of, you’ve just been plonked into a mismatch between society and your brain. You’re running on Linux in a world full of Windows. So rather than beat yourself up, try to adapt your operating system and galvanise the environment to give it an easier time. It’s much easier to do that when you aren’t busy hurling abuse at yourself in your mind.

Breaking The Cycle

There are different methods to breaking the cycle, both in the moment and longer term. I’m not a psychologist, but one thing I’ve heard a lot of psychologists, counsellors, and pretty much everyone online say is about positive affirmations. Creating some and saying them to yourself with intent every day can slowly change the language your brain naturally jumps to. Long term practices such as this help to reframe your mind to a more positive natural state, but to get there you’ll also want a way to catch yourself in the moment as well.

1. Recognize the voice
   
   The first step to fixing a behavior is to recognize it. One way you can do this is to actually LISTEN to your inner voice. Can you detect negativity? Comparison to others? Questioning your behaviour/symptoms? This language is the foundation of criticism. Unconstructive criticism. Every time you start to spiral, or if you’re in a bad or burnt out mood, really observe to see if it’s there.

2. Pause & Rephrase
   
   How can you shift this inner monologue to something more positive? Sometimes it will be obvious.
   

   SHAME: “You missed the gym again. Why can't you can’t commit to anything?”

   In this example, you’re highlighting past failures with “again” and the lack of something – the failure to go – with “can’t.” You’ve questioned your behaviour in an accusatory tone, whereas you could rephrase this simply by removing the criticism, or giving it a positive spin.

   NEUTRALITY: “You missed the gym until next time. What will you do instead?”

   You’ve still identified the fact you’ve missed the gym, you just haven’t questioned it, painted it negatively, or rubbed your own face in it.

   POSITIVITY/COMPASSION: “You missed the gym, but you’ve already been twice this week & you deserve a rest. Once more and that’ll be a great week too.”

   Highlighting past achievements rather than failures. Justifying your choice today & highlighting a positive moving forward.

   Doing this once will help you prevent an immediate spiral. The more you do it, the more it becomes natural, and those small-blocks of positivity become the foundations of more confidence, self-belief and positive action. 

3. Redefine a win, write a “done” list

A more extreme example touches upon redefining a win by noting the past achievements rather than failures. Instead of dwelling on the last missed appointment or junk food meal, dwell on the last few healthy meals you’ve eaten, or the fact you actually flossed your teeth for once. Some people argue that these are so basic, how can you be proud of them? Well — who cares? The only person who knows what’s going through your head is you, so you might as well dress yourself in medals and garlands for flossing your teeth instead of giving yourself another urgent treatment for eating some fried chicken. You can take this one step further and write yourself a “done” list instead of another “to-do” list. Take a look at everything you’ve done and see how much there is to highlight. 

Looking Ahead: What’s Next?

The final segment touches on the more medium to long-term, and this would be employing systems and tools to help manage the different areas of your life. We will explore different systems and tools in other future builds, but the important thing to note here is that eradicating your inner shame will help you succeed at the systems you build around you. Your confidence and self-belief will grow, making it easier to repeat and improve your wins. You’ll also find that you feel like you have more time. When your mind is running healthily, it doesn’t dwell. A harsh inner critic is not healthy, and I’m sure we can all relate to dwelling on negatives. These spirals take up actual time. With a healthy inner voice, your mind literally has more time to spend thinking about other things, be they distractions or otherwise.

Moving forward with compassion

Moving forward, it’s important to know that you don’t need to “fix” your brain. As discussed above, you’d be a hero in prehistoric days. You just need to stop treating it like it’s some sort of enemy. A very easy way to illustrate this is to identify one of your critical inner monologues. Either catch one as it happens or write one down now. Now ask yourself, would I be this harsh to a friend? Or someone who’s made a mistake? Would you even be criticizing somebody else for such a thing? I’m willing to bet the answer is no, or certainly not to the same degree.

Because this is the thing, it’s like that old cliché, “nobody’s perfect.” “Everybody makes mistakes.” And you still will, but to shatter your shame you don’t need perfection, you need to be comfortable with “failure,” and reframe it from the start. Play the game by your own rules.

After Chaos is a new writing project focussing on overcoming shame with ADHD. You can find more of my articles at https://afterchaos.substack.com, or at my X account of the same name.