Summary of the article:

Trying to avoid social pain will ruin your life, instead risk going into situations and remove yourself when it doesn’t work. Seeking validation will never fill you, experiences will.

ADHDers and fear have a complicated relationship. As intimate as the one they have with self-esteem.

This manifests in a couple ways:

  • People Pleasing: Desperately making sure everyone else is happy at the risk of throwing themselves under the bus.
  • Anger: Lashing out at people when they feel like they’ve wronged you.
  • Perfectionism: Thinking that if you only knew all the social rules you won’t be hurt. Or that if you prepare enough for a job you won’t be rejected.

Through it all, they feel like if only they had enough validation, enough self-esteem that someday it will be enough and they won’t be people pleasers anymore and won’t let small things upset their day.

This is a lie.

Everything you do to focus on your self-esteem or pleasing people better will never be enough because the problem isn’t that don’t you have enough validation.

It’s that growing up without it warped your relationship with confidence to the point it became a destructive hyper focus.

Every time you have a conversation with someone, if you’re focusing on everything they do that shows disapproval, you will find many. This doesn’t mean that overall people don’t like you, though many may indeed not like you. The problem is that you run into a lot of false postives this way with the people who do actually like you.

How many times have you been having a conversation, someone does something to trigger your rejection and now you can’t hear what they’re saying anymore and you’ve disconnected from the conversation to engage in some destructive self-hate hyperfocus? Or a destructive lashing out for the perceived slight?

Again you think someday you might be confident enough to not scan their faces and voices continuously for any hint of disapproval. But haven’t you still done this in relationships where people show you over and over again that they do care?

The scanning is the problem. The checking is eroding your self confidence. And validation won’t fix it. Stopping the scan will.

The animal part of your brain has become convinced that there’s a threat to your life if you don’t keep everyone around you happy. It’s seeing threats that don’t exist and exaggerating ignorable ones into immediate crises.

You can’t make an environment safe enough for that primal part of you that wasn’t loved enough as a kid. And the attempt is killing you.

What you seek instead of confidence

Trust that your life is not at stake with every social encounter. You will continue to run into invalidating experiences. People will genuinely not like you. You will be rejected for jobs and none of it matters.

Trying to avoid the pain of these experiences will ensure that you have none at all. Go into them, experience them, try and get hurt and remove yourself from the situations when they don’t feel right.

It’s time to close the chapter on seeking validation and open yourself up to seeking experiences and trusting that you will remove yourself from places that hurt so that you can find places that you feel more loved than hurt.