Trauma
ADHD and Shame: The Invisible Architecture of Self-Destruction
I. Shame Is Not Guilt Guilt tells us that we have done something wrong. Shame tells us that there is something wrong with who we are. That distinction is fundamental to understanding the emotional lives of many people with ADHD, particularly those who have spent years struggling to meet expectations that their neurological differences make […]
I Knew the Rule
Two Predators, an ADHD Brain, and the Question I Asked Before the Research Did “Didn't your mom teach you not to talk to strangers?” Of course she did. I could have been told a thousand times not to talk to strangers. I knew the rule, understood the rule, and if you had asked me to repeat it, I could have given it back to you perfectly. That wasn't the problem. The problem was what happened when someone gave me positive attention. I could blow straight through the rule. For most of my life, I didn't understand that distinction. What happened to me as a child became entangled with a question about what I had done. I had talked to a stranger. I had violated the rule. An adult immediately reminded me that I had violated the rule. Somewhere inside that sequence, responsibility migrated from the predator to the child. It stayed there for decades. Two Predators, Two Different Doorways I was sexually assaulted by two different predators as a child, and looking backward, I can see that they did not reach me through the same doorway. The first was grooming. The abuse occurred over three separate, non-consecutive weekends. This wasn't a single impulsive encounter with a stranger. There was repeated access, familiarity, attention and time for boundaries to move. I didn't have the language for grooming then, but I can recognize the architecture now. The second predator reached me differently. That experience went straight through impulsivity. I knew not to talk to strangers. The information was sitting right there in my brain. But knowing a rule and reliably deploying that rule when an immediate reward appears in front of you are not the same neurological task. Give me positive attention in the moment and I could blow straight through it. Rule learned >> positive attention arrives >> immediate reward captures behavior >> rule fails to govern behavior >> predator gains access For years, I interpreted that sequence as something the child had done wrong. Decades later, a couple of ADHD kids doing animal impressions would change that. The Waiting Room Around 2013, I was sitting in the waiting room of Dr. Joseph Llinas watching a couple of ADHD kids doing what ADHD kids do. They were moving, improvising, bouncing from one thing to another. At some point they started doing animal impressions. Instead of telling them to settle down, I entered their world. I recognized what they were doing, gave them positive attention, and soon we had a competition going over who could do the best animal impressions. They clung to me. That got my attention. When I went into Dr. Llinas's office, I said: “I know that ADHD kids are more prone to physical abuse in the home. What about sexual abuse? Is there any research on sexual abuse in ADHD kids?” Dr. Llinas raised his eyes skyward and scanned his memory. “No, I don't think there's any research on that.” I responded: “I believe that ADHD kids, because of impulsivity, are easier targets for pedophiles.” Dr. Llinas looked at me. “It's amazing how you make all these connections.” And then another connection happened—not between ADHD and a research question, but between ADHD and me. I thought about the second predator who sexually assaulted me as a child. I thought about what happened when I came home afterward and my mother's best friend asked me: “Didn't your mom teach you not to talk to strangers?” Of course she had. I could have been told a thousand times not to talk to strangers. I knew the rule. But positive attention arrived, impulsivity took over, and I blew straight through something I absolutely knew I wasn't supposed to do. For decades, that distinction had escaped me. Sitting in Dr. Llinas's office, it suddenly didn't. “It wasn't my fault.” And I bawled. A research question I had arrived at by watching ADHD children in his waiting room had reached backward through decades of my own life and changed the meaning of something I had carried since childhood. My mother had taught me the rule. I knew the rule. The failure to deploy it in that moment did not transfer responsibility from the predator to the child. That was the moment the shame finally landed where it belonged: not on the little boy who talked to a stranger, but on the adult who sexually assaulted him. The Soccer Team In 2013, I had only part of the mechanism. I understood impulsivity, but I didn't yet understand the extraordinary power of being seen. That came years later. In 2019 and early 2020, before COVID shut everything down, I found myself mentoring a couple of ADHD middle-school kids who had essentially been thrown onto my soccer team as behavior problems. One of them was particularly instructive. In another environment, this kid could look anxious, oppositional and difficult. Conflict with a Karen mom was producing anxiety and something that looked a hell of a lot like ODD. That wasn't the kid I got. Once I connected with him, I got something almost comically different: a “coach-pleasing, stalking puppy who will run through a wall for you.” Same kid. Same ADHD. Different relationship. I hadn't medicated him, repaired an executive function, frightened him into compliance or finally discovered the perfect consequence. I had connected with him. He believed I liked him. He believed I understood him. He knew I was interested in what he could do instead of constantly waiting for what he would do wrong. And his behavior pivoted. Then my brain did what Dr. Llinas had commented on years earlier. It started making connections. What If the Adult Isn't Me? I knew what I was doing with that connection. I cared about the kid and wanted him to succeed. His attachment to me created an opportunity to coach him, encourage him and give him experiences of competence. Then I inverted the equation: What happens if the adult who discovers that doorway isn't me? What happens if he's a predator? That was when the question I had asked Dr. Llinas years earlier acquired another mechanism. Impulsivity could create vulnerability in the moment. But now I was seeing something else: the extraordinary motivational power an adult can acquire when an ADHD child who has spent years being criticized, rejected or misunderstood finally encounters somebody who appears to genuinely see him. A safe adult can use that connection to help. A predator can weaponize it. […]
ADHD, Trauma, Shame, Hyperfocus—and the Difference Between Having Intelligence and Being Able to Reach It
One of the strangest things about ADHD is watching intelligence appear and disappear without the intelligence itself changing. A person can demonstrate extraordinary pattern recognition, creativity, mechanical reasoning, verbal ability, or abstract thinking in one environment, then seem unable to summon those same resources somewhere else. From the outside, the easiest explanation is effort: if […]
The Mechanical Blind Spot: ADHD and Trauma
The Executive-Function Architecture For decades, one of the dominant academic narratives of ADHD has been anchored to a mechanical premise: ADHD is fundamentally a disorder of behavioral inhibition and executive control. Few researchers did more to establish and defend that framework than Dr. Russell Barkley. His landmark 1997 theory was remarkably explicit. ADHD, Barkley wrote, […]
Violent Discipline, Culture, and Neurodiversity in Latin America and the Caribbean
Disclaimer: While the research highlighted in this article illustrates systemic trends and the disproportionately high rates of harsh discipline in these regions, these data points reflect regional averages—not the reality of every home. Countless parents and caregivers across Latin America, the Caribbean, and around the world reject physical and verbal abuse, navigate parenting with deep empathy, […]
Compounding Crisis: ADHD, Violent Discipline, and the Global Reality of Child Protection
The global reality of childhood discipline revealed by UNICEF's long-term research reveals a staggering baseline: roughly 1.6 billion children aged 2–14 (2 in 3 worldwide) regularly endure violent discipline, including psychological aggression and physical punishment, at the hands of their primary caregivers. Nearly 400 million children under age 5face violent discipline globally, underpinned by deep-seated social norms where more […]
Shattered Trust, Reactive Systems: The Intersection of ADHD, RSD, and Trauma in Young Adulthood
When ADHD, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), and unresolved childhood trauma from a significant event like a sexual assault intersect in a young adult, they don't just exist side-by-side—they actively amplify one another. ADHD brings a naturally intense, highly reactive nervous system and executive dysfunction. RSD adds an agonizing vulnerability to perceived criticism or abandonment. Childhood […]
The Layered Vulnerability: Why ADHD, RSD, and “Not Being Seen” Create the Ideal Target for Predator Priests
When the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team broke the story of systemic clergy sexual abuse in 2002, the reporters exposed a chillingly calculated modus operandi. The perpetrators did not choose their victims at random. As real-life Spotlight journalist Michael Rezendes later noted, these predators were highly opportunistic: "They looked on the margins. They were like a wolf waiting for […]
The Anatomy of an Edge: Kurt Cobain, ADHD, and the Physics of Rejection
Kurt Cobain remembered the dividing line. There was the childhood before his parents divorced, and there was everything that came after it. “I had a really good childhood, until the divorce,” he recalled as an adult. Afterward, his “whole world” changed. He remembered the shame of coming from a broken family and desperately wanting the […]