Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Shame and stigma
It usually travels in stages. Something in how attention and planning work becomes a story you tell about yourself, then becomes the story other people tell about you, and by then it is much harder to shift.
Knowing which stage you are at tells you what will help. Early on, practical strategies do most of the work. Later, when a family or a workplace holds a settled view of you, strategies alone will not move it and the work becomes about how you are seen and how you see yourself. Neither stage is more serious than the other. They just need different tools.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Tell My servants to say what is best. Satan sows discord among them (Quran 17:53). Careless speech is tied there to the damage it does between people, which is the stage at which this becomes hardest to undo.
وَقُل لِّعِبَادِي يَقُولُواْ ٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُۚ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنَ يَنزَغُ بَيۡنَهُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنَ كَانَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ عَدُوࣰّ ا مُّبِينࣰ ا
[Prophet], tell My servants to say what is best. Satan sows discord among them: Satan is a sworn enemy of man
Qur’an 17:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A naturalistic evaluation looked at compassion focused therapy for people after acquired brain injury, whose anxiety and depression were underpinned by heavy self criticism and shame. Its aims were feasibility and safety rather than efficacy, so it does not show that the therapy works. It does show clinicians treating the psychological layer that grows on top of a neurological condition as a target in its own right, which is the point here.
Ashworth F, Clarke A, Jones L, Jennings C, Longworth C. (2015). An exploration of compassion focused therapy following acquired brain injury.. Psychology and psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A difficulty picks up a personal story and then a social one, and each layer needs its own kind of repair.
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 same plan works in a calm week and falls apart in a chaotic one. That is not motivation coming and going. You began the chaotic week with less in reserve and spent most of it before the decisions that mattered arrived.
Manuals rename things. Paediatric bipolar became disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, whole categories were reshuffled to line up with the international classification, and none of it changed who anybody was.
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.