- Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist
and I make mental health education videos.
Today, I'm talking about how ADHD
can affect how you think about yourself.
What you think about yourself
affects how you relate to others
and shapes the decisions that you make
on a day to day basis.
What I'm talking about is based on schema therapy.
Think of schema therapy as a framework
for how you see yourself
and this framework is built by your early life experiences
but it also adjusts over time as you have new experiences.
There are 18 schemas or core beliefs,
that's another way of thinking about it,
that have been identified
but I'm gonna talk about three that have been identified
to be common in adults who have ADHD
even if you were never diagnosed as a child.
The first schema is feeling defective.
You feel inadequate at all levels.
This can make you hypersensitive to criticism and rejection.
You can also feel insecure around people
and always feel in a state of comparing yourself to others.
The second schema is a basic sense of failure.
Essentially, you feel you haven't met your potential.
With this schema, people often feel inept,
stupid, lacking talent
or just doomed to be less successful than everyone else
and this can cause you to give up easily on things
or not even try because after all,
you're not gonna be good at it.
The third schema is insufficient self-control.
You can't rely on yourself
to accomplish the things that you need to.
You can't tolerate the frustration
that comes with waiting for a desired outcome.
Also, through this schema,
you 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 what the downstream effect is.
You start having early experiences of failure
and underachievement which can be shaming.
Maybe your impulsivity or hyperactivity
lead to disciplinary problems.
You could have been considered a bad kid
because you can't settle down
and you're always tearing things up.
Your tendency to interrupt people
makes people criticize and reject you
and maybe even think that you're selfish.
Your difficulty staying interested in something
makes you look uninvested, unreliable and flaky
and your poor time management makes you miss opportunities
and also makes people angry.
Your peers seem to get things right the first time
but for you, you have to do things over and over
and still may not get what you want.
So imagine years of getting this negative appraisal
from others and living with your own negative appraisal
because you compare your inner world and life circumstances
to what you see around you.
This negative appraisal then results in pessimism,
self-doubt, low self-esteem and ineffectiveness.
In your head, you 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.
That leads to maladaptive coping strategies
like procrastinating or avoiding things altogether.
You engage in more impulsive behavior
as you crisis manage instead of preparing and planning.
These behaviors create negative emotions
of depression, anxiety, guilt, anger and frustration
then these coping strategies and negative emotions
confirm your core beliefs that you're defective,
you're a failure and you have insufficient self-control.
So it's a cycle that perpetuates itself.
What do we do about it?
One goal is to change your core beliefs about yourself
because those beliefs perpetuate the dysfunctional behavior
like avoidance and procrastination
which creates more problems for you.
A second goal is to change your coping strategies
in a way that modifies your schema or core beliefs
because now the feedback that you're getting from others
and yourself is more positive
because remember, schema are formed from your experiences
and how you respond to the input you get externally
meaning losing multiple jobs
and being told that you're a screw-up
results in one kind of schema
then remaining in a job and being promoted
because you're doing great work
forms a different kind of schema.
Schema therapy is less than 20 years old
and similar to cognitive behavior therapy.
However, it's more work identifying and changing your schema
than it is to identify distorted thoughts and change them.
Schema therapy combines aspects of cognitive behavior
and some other styles of therapy as well.
It's not something that you can do on a self-help basis.
You really need a therapist trained in schema therapy.
However, I do think there's value in recognizing
these common ways that you can think because of your ADHD
and how these beliefs hold you back from progress.
The experiences that come with ADHD
can really take a hit to your self-esteem.
It's like you're limping along emotionally
but some people don't realize they're limping.
They just think that this is how they are
and that nothing goes well for them
because of their inadequacy
but you have to come to terms with the idea
that the way you think is based on your experiences
but the conclusions that you draw
about what those experiences say about you
is not fully accurate.
Let me put it a different way.
Yes, the deficits that come along with ADHD
create problems for you but it's a disorder
that creates negative consequences.
You can manage the negative consequences
but you are not the negative consequences.
You're separate from them
and have the ability to take control and manage them.
So that's a different way of looking
at how your ADHD has affected you.
It's a disorder that has created consequences
but when it affects so many aspects of your life
which it does, it's easy to get lost in the consequences
and not see the difference between you and the consequences.
I'll have a followup video
addressing some of the dysfunctional behaviors
that perpetuate the negative core beliefs.
Stay tuned.
Thanks for watching.