Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Shame and stigma
Achievement does not cancel an old belief that you are a failure. People reach the very thing they were sure would fix it, feel nothing change, and quietly conclude that the problem must be them after all.
The belief was not built out of results, so results do not dismantle it. Anything good gets reattributed on the way in: luck, timing, other people not looking closely enough. If you have been waiting for the next achievement to settle this, the waiting itself is the thing to work on, because the work is on the belief rather than on your CV.
Qur’an and Sunnah
In God's eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him (Quran 49:13). Standing is placed somewhere no achievement can raise it and no failure can lower it.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقۡنَٰكُم مِّن ذَكَرࣲ وَأُنثَىٰ وَجَعَلۡنَٰكُمۡ شُعُوبࣰ ا وَقَبَآئِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ أَكۡرَمَكُمۡ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ أَتۡقَىٰكُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرࣱ
People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another. In God’s eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware
Qur’an 49:13read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of twenty one randomised controlled trials with 1,285 participants assessed what compassion based interventions do across a range of outcomes. Those are direct work on how a person relates to themselves, rather than on their circumstances. The trials vary a good deal and the total number of participants is modest, so read it as a promising direction rather than a settled one.
Kirby JN, Tellegen CL, Steindl SR. (2017). A Meta-Analysis of Compassion-Based Interventions: Current State of Knowledge and Future Directions.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
New evidence gets read through the belief you already hold, so it tends to confirm it instead of shifting it.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
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.
Most of what other people do is about their own day rather than about you. That is easier to hold once you have also admitted that in childhood, sometimes, it genuinely was about you.
The feeling that you were let in by mistake is common among capable people with ADHD, and it has a plain source. A patchy performance history gives you real evidence of inconsistency, and fraud is simply the wrong explanation for it.