Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Shame and stigma
Two things feed it. Reading faces accurately is genuinely harder for some people with ADHD, and if you grew up being told off a great deal, expecting disapproval is a reasonable thing to have learned. A test for the moment it happens: what exactly is this face telling me, and what else might it be saying? Then, where you can, ask.
Avoid making too many assumptions (Quran 49:12). The instruction covers what we conclude about other people, including what we conclude from a face.
الحجرات
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱجۡتَنِبُواْ كَثِيرࣰ ا مِّنَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِنَّ بَعۡضَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِثۡمࣱۖ وَلَا تَجَسَّسُواْ وَلَا يَغۡتَب بَّعۡضُكُم بَعۡضًاۚ أَيُحِبُّ أَحَدُكُمۡ أَن يَأۡكُلَ لَحۡمَ أَخِيهِ مَيۡتࣰ ا فَكَرِهۡتُمُوهُۚ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ تَوَّابࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
Believers, avoid making too many assumptions- some assumptions are sinful- and do not spy on one another or speak ill of people behind their backs: would any of you like to eat the flesh of your dead brother? No, you would hate it. So be mindful of God: God is ever relenting, most merciful
Qur’an 49:12read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A protocol for a randomised study of compassion focused therapy for the self stigma of mental disorders rests on the rationale that shame is the emotional core of self stigma. A protocol sets out a planned trial rather than reporting results, so it carries no finding yet. It is cited here only for the idea underneath it: that in these moments shame, rather than information, is doing much of the work.
Riebel M, Rohmer O, Charles E, Lefebvre F, Weibel S, Weiner L. (2023). Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) for the reduction of the self-stigma of mental disorders: the COMpassion for Psychiatric disorders, Autism and Self-Stigma (COMPASS) study protocol for a randomized controlled study.. Trials doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Checking the guess against what the person actually says stops one reading turning into the fact.
Rejection sensitivity is something clinicians see often in ADHD, and it is not a diagnosis in any manual. It can describe what happens to you accurately without being a label anyone can write in your notes.
The disbelief that hurts most rarely comes from strangers. It comes from a parent, a sibling or a cousin who calls the whole thing an excuse.
ADHD now sits with the neurodevelopmental conditions in the diagnostic manual rather than under disorders that begin in childhood. That move carries a claim worth hearing: this is about how a brain is built, and it does not stop at eighteen.