That ended with me finally explaining to him how the way he and my mother treated me as a child, with undiagnosed (and really not even conceptually understood at the time) ADHD caused me lasting trauma that persists to this day. I’m a 45 year old man, and I cried.
If you would, could you tell how you initiated that talk? I just turned 40 and I need to have the same talk…
I have started to mentally replace “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” with “every hurt you heal makes you stronger”. I am sorry you got hurt, I wish you the best on your journey to heal.
I’ve just had to explain to the 80yo grandmother that you can’t yell at my 19yo son because his anxiety ticks are annoying you.
She went full send on telling him that no woman or friends would ever want to be around him unless he stopped… She got even angrier because she yelled at him to stop, and the ticking got louder and more frequent… (duh…)
The only way I managed to get even a glimpse of consideration out of her was to leverage her pride in being a “baby whisperer” as a grandmother, and explained that yelling at an anxious ND about their ticks is like yelling at a baby to make them stop crying…
Only then did she stop for even a moment and actually have a thought about what was happening…
She still yells at him, but at least now we have a way to puller her back a little, as this description makes her feel terrible enough about it, that she leaves him alone for a bit out of feeling guilty…
There are likely factors we don’t know about. Not every situation is perfect, but we can only hope to make it better for today or tomorrow. Thank you for your concern.
I feel like I’m having that conversation with my father all the time and he still doesn’t get it.
The icing on that cake is that he totally has undiagnosed ADHD and PTSD, and he’s a rich old white man so he gets to go through life ignoring the consequences (for other people) and saying things like “That’s not my problem,” when anyone calls him out.
Eventually the science will show ADHD and a slew of other ND psychoclassifications are entirely genetic. It’s very likely one of your parents are driving the same brain around as you, with all its faults and strengths. In their childhood psych didn’t have the labels and treatments, you didn’t really want to mess with those abusers. Society also found it ok to beat children that didn’t behave. The parent with the ND brain was probably beat by their parent until they figured out how to wear the right mask. And not just beaten by their parents, but every single authority figure, teachers, pastors, etc. The cycle of physical abuse was only recently broken. We still haven’t broken the cycle of emotional abuse this society forces on ND people. The majority of psych pseudoscience still ongoing considers ND to be subhuman, excluding us from studies, using derogatory language that only serves to dehumanize and not empathize, recognize, and accommodate. They fail to recognize the positive aspects that are unique and common amongst ND, so we end up not even realizing in ourselves. In your parent’s generation they’d treat perfectly capable ND people with a lobotomy. There are probably more psych professionals practicing today that were taught by books written by the same folks who practiced lobotomies, than those that learned the still incorrect (but at least more correct than a fucking lobotomy fixes everything) science from 10 years ago.
Sorry for the rant.
