Learning You Have Adult ADHD Can Bring Grief, Relief, and Other Emotions
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Noor Pannu couldnât believe it. Her psychiatrist had just diagnosed her with ADHD. But she didnât trust him. Sheâd read that people with the disorder did things like get into fights and have trouble with the law, and that wasnât her at all.
âIt took me a long time to accept it,â she says. âIt was a lot of confusion, honestly.â
Pannu is a high-energy 30-year-old full of ideas and enthusiasm. She leads digital strategy for an e-commerce company in Winnipeg, Canada. Sheâs had multiple promotions and good relationships with her co-workers. Still, she has a hard time staying productive, focusing, and managing anxiety about deadlines. After years of those symptoms and some troubling memory lapses, she decided to get help at 29.
âI went to my family doctor and I told him, âI think Iâm going crazy. Something is seriously wrong with me.ââ He referred her to the psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with ADHD.
âIt took me almost 6 months to come to terms with it and start taking medication,â she says. She feared the stigmas around both mental health problems and ADHD. âHow people view it is: âPeople with ADHD just arenât productive. Theyâre not great to work with. They donât deliver well. They canât be trusted.â And those are really bad things to say about other people.â
The disbelief and denial that Pannu felt are just a few of the outsized emotions that you may feel after you learn as an adult that you have ADHD. First, there are all the feelings that come with getting a diagnosis of a condition you have dealt with all your life. You may feel grief, relief, or both. Then, thereâs the fact that people with ADHD often feel emotions more strongly than other people.
âThe ADHD brain experiences emotions in a magnified way,â says Amy Moore, PhD, a cognitive psychologist with LearningRx in Colorado Springs, CO, and vice president of research at the Gibson Institute of Cognitive Research. âEvery emotion is bigger and greater and magnified. That grief can feel absolutely overwhelming. And that relief can be almost a sense of exhilaration.â
Coming to Terms
An ADHD support group helped Pannu gradually accept her diagnosis. She met people with similar symptoms, asked them questions, and shared her experiences. âIf it wasnât for them,â she says, âI may not have started my medication and I probably would be confused even now.â
Once she started taking stimulant medication, she felt like sheâd begun tapping into her mindâs full potential. She now plans to pursue a masterâs degree in business. Sheâs studying for the GMAT business school entrance exam and aiming for a high score.
Despite her high hopes for the future, Pannu is disappointed that she didnât learn she had ADHD earlier. She grew up in India, where she says a lack of awareness about the disorder, along with stigma about womenâs mental health, kept her from getting diagnosed earlier in life.
âI wish I knew about this diagnosis sooner. I would have performed way better in my academics and accomplished a lot more,â she says. âI feel like there was so much in my life that I could have done.â
Grief is one of the main emotions you might feel when you learn you have ADHD in your late teens or adulthood, psychologist Moore says.
âYou grieve the realization that your life could have been so much easier, if you had just known. You grieve the loss of the life that you could have had that whole time. And you grieve the loss of the ideal adulthood that you pictured for yourself,â she says.
Some people feel anger along with sadness: âAnger that nobody recognized [your ADHD] before, or that nobody did anything about it before — and that you have suffered so long without an explanation or without help.â
Pannu didnât find the help she needed until she was almost 30. But now that sheâs accepted her diagnosis, she understands herself better. And she has a healthy sense of humor about who she is.
âI always thought that I was weird. I didnât know what kind of weird,â she laughs. âBut I know now.â
Relieved to Learn the Truth
When Melissa Carrollâs doctor diagnosed her with ADHD last year, the 34-year-old credit analyst in Nashville was grateful to learn the news. After years of struggling to finish tasks, advance her education, and hold together various relationships, she felt at peace with the diagnosis.
âIâm a little bit all over the place, and not everyone can keep up with that,â Carroll says, describing what it may be like for others to have a conversation with her. She says that her ideas make sense in her head, âbut trying to hold that conversation or to make it make sense in a professional setting is sometimes difficult.â She also struggles with follow-through, she says. âBeing driven enough in one direction for long enough to get to the next stage is difficult.â
Treatment changed that. She started taking stimulant medication, which improved her ADHD symptoms. It also eased her severe depression, which she believes stemmed partly from decades of untreated ADHD. Sheâd had a tough childhood without a very stable home life. Adults tended to dismiss her symptoms as Carroll just âacting out.â
âYou adapt to life so much that you get used to spinning your wheels, but at some point you just get burned out on spinning your wheels, and you give up,â she says.
Medication and therapy helped Carroll get traction. It all started with the ADHD diagnosis that gave her hope that life could get better.
Itâs common to feel some comfort when you learn you have adult ADHD, says cognitive psychologist Moore. âThat initial feeling of relief comes from the fact that you finally have this explanation for your deficits. A reason why you struggled in school and in relationships. Relief that thereâs an actual name for why you struggle with time management and organization.â
After she got the diagnosis, Carroll took steps to get better-organized. âIf I need lists or I need an app to remind me what rooms I need to clean, or what order I need to do things in, then itâs OK for me to do that,â she says.
She told everyone she knew that she had ADHD. Many werenât surprised. âI was blown away. I didnât realize it was so evident to some people — because it wasnât to me,â she laughs. âI was excited to be able to say, âI found this out about myself, and it makes sense.â I think itâs the key to what Iâve been missing.â
An Emotional âTug of Warâ
Moore can relate to Carrollâs excitement. She felt the same way when she learned that she had ADHD at 20 years old.
âI was so excited that I had a name for what was going on with me that I wanted everybody in the world to know,â she says. âI sang it from the rooftops.â
Moore learned she had ADHD during college in the late â80s. âBefore then, the only people that got diagnosed were hyperactive little boys. So for a girl with predominantly inattentive ADHD, I was one of those that fell through the cracks.â
When she was a child, her parents gave her a highly structured home life. Once she went away to college, though, she struggled to stay organized and manage her time. But her mother, a child development specialist, worked with children in the era when they were starting to get diagnoses of ADHD. When she recognized the signs in her own daughter, she urged Moore to see a doctor about it.
After Moore found out she had the disorder, she went on stimulant medication and proceeded to sail through college, graduate school, and a doctoral program.
âI did not grieve as much as I felt relieved,â she says. âIt may be because in the â80s, this was not a diagnosis that was widespread. Maybe if I were going through the same situation two decades later, I would have known that they couldâve done something and didnât.â
Moore sees many people who get a later diagnosis go through a âtug of warâ between grief and relief.
Managing Big Emotions
Treatments like medication and cognitive behavioral therapy help many adults with ADHD take charge of their lives and their emotions. Moore says itâs also important to understand the key reason for these big emotions. ADHD affects thinking skills called executive functions. These include organizational skills, working memory, focus, and the ability to control your emotions. A treatment called cognitive training, or brain training, can boost these skills, Moore says.
âCognitive training is participation in intense repetitive mental tasks that directly target those skills. Once you strengthen those, youâll get the benefits of emotional regulation, since thatâs an executive function skill as well.â
It can also help to set boundaries in your life, she says. If you work in an office, for example, you could stick a do-not-disturb sign on your door or cubicle when you need extra quiet to focus. Or you could have a candid talk with your boss about your ADHD and ask them to move you to a less-busy part of the office, so you can be as productive as possible.
Meeting other people with ADHD can be a big pick-me-up, too. âSomething amazing happens in support groups,â Moore says. âJust the idea that youâre not experiencing something alone has a powerful therapeutic aspect.â
If youâre newly diagnosed with adult ADHD, consider talking to your close family and friends about it. âIf you educate your loved ones, and theyâre able to look at your reactions and say, âHey, is this because they have ADHD that theyâre responding to me this way?â they might show you a little more grace,â Moore says.
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