“Is It ADHD, Autism, Trauma, or Capitalism?” Yes!

I'm going to get started by painting a picture of what this week's topic is addressing, because I know the title is a little confusing — you know, like life is. Follow me through this moment: It's a regular day. You're not sick. You slept as much and as well as you typically do. The hot water worked just fine this morning. Your car started. The internet didn't go out. Starbucks got your order right. So why are you still trying to finish that email? Why haven't you done the thing you needed to do yesterday and now today's slipping away? Why did you just snap at someone who asked you a question? Why is that sound outside making you want to have your ears surgically removed? Why do you feel like everyone's watching the way you put your Costco purchases into reusable bags with Tetris-level precision before you put them into your trunk? Why did your best friend's text with pictures from the amazing day she just had in Paris flood you with regret about every life choice you've ever made? Why are you on the couch watching the news on your phone when you haven't eaten all day?

When nothing in particular happened, we expect ourselves to have it together, to be able to "adult," to be productive, and clear-headed, and efficient. Falling short in those areas leads many of us to a familiar question: "What the hell is wrong with me?" But we don't usually stop there. Next, we spiral into a mental scavenger hunt of trying to answer that question, to figure out why our lives feel like a dumpster fire, even if no one around us sees it that way. It goes something like this: "Is my ADHD getting worse? Maybe I'm also autistic." Or "Is it possible I'm getting more autistic? Can an autistic person develop ADHD as an adult?" And to that way might add, "Is this because I never told anyone about that thing that happened to me?" "What if I'm not neurodivergent and all of this is because of my trauma?" "What if it's just impossible to get ahead and I should just stop trying?" "Does everyone in America feel like this right now?" "Do I need meds or therapy or rest or revolution?" "Should I just push harder or burn it all down?"

Somewhere along the line, most of us picked up the belief that if we can just identify the source of our difficulties, we can fix ourselves, or at least we could explain to everyone we fear we're letting down why we're so tragically messed up. Those principles apply to a lot of things in life, don't they? If your car isn't running right, someone does need to identify the specific mechanical issue in order to resolve it, and it's better to tell your boss you're an hour late for work because your car broke down than to just show up an hour late and say nothing. If your partner doesn't feel good and keeps blowing off your plans to start watching the new season of The Last of Us together, it's easier to accept when a trip to the emergency room reveals a burst appendix, which they correct with surgery immediately after a CT scan confirms it.

But those are very clear examples of distinct issues, which isn't at all what is happening on those "What the hell is wrong with me?" days. Here's why: When nothing specific occurred to disrupt our regular life, and we're losing our footing anyway, we end up in a place of feeling that we need to justify the fact that we're struggling while we're suffering. That's not how it goes in the other areas of life. If your car is idling rough and stalling, you and everyone else understand why that's stressful. If your partner is doubled over in pain from appendicitis, you and everyone else understand why they can't watch a TV show. And in both of those cases, even if you know very little about cars or internal medicine, there's still far more clarity in both the cause of, and the solution to, the problem. There's clearly a mechanical issue with the car, which an automotive mechanic can figure out and fix, and your partner is obviously experiencing a medical emergency, so off to the hospital you go, and a physician can diagnose and treat it.

"What the hell is wrong with me?" times are far more complicated, and yet we tend to feel even greater pressure to name the problems so we can eliminate them. Because there has to be a reason everything is so hard for us, right? Hmm, sort of... But most of what underlies "What the hell is wrong with me?" days is outside of our control, and not something that can be repaired like a car engine or removed like a burst appendix. Except for the very few of us who've been able to craft lives that allow us to be fully authentic all the time while our needs are met in all the important areas — physical, mental, emotional, financial, and in terms of meaning and connection — being neurodivergent is harder than being neurotypical, because the world, by and large, was made by and for the neurotypical majority. On top of that — and in some cases, because of that — many neurodivergent people have experienced chronic stress or trauma, have other diagnoses, struggle with substance misuse or problems related to eating or sleep. We may have difficulty maintaining work, under-earn in our careers, or are professionally successful, but unfulfilled, isolated, or meaningful connections with others are absent.

And neurodivergence is only one aspect of our identities. We may face other forms of marginalization as members of the LGBTQIA+ community, as people of color, because we're disabled, or because we're seen as too old or too young for the problems we have. And if that was the hot fudge on the sundae, and being neurodivergent was the ice cream, the cherry on top is more like a watermelon dropped from a roof of a 20 story building, because we have very little control over the societal parameters around how any of us get what we need to survive. So it often feels like we're on a treadmill we can't control or get off of. And that is why today's episode is called, "'Is it ADHD, Autism, Trauma, or Capitalism?' Yes!" Yes, for some of us things are hard — literally — because we have ADHD, and are autistic, and have had traumatic experiences, and are trying to get what we want and need in a capitalistic, individualistic society. But for others of us, struggles arise from some, but not all, of those influences, and for most of us, "What the hell is wrong with me?" times result from the interconnection of how our neurodivergent brains work, our automated responses to the experiences we've had, and whether the rules of the systems we're in tend to give us advantages and support our success and wellness, or tend to disadvantage us, make success more difficult to achieve, and diminish our wellness.

Let's start by getting a little deeper into how so many of us got to this point. First of all, it's totally natural to want to identify the cause of a problem. That's a primary function of the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that is much larger and more intricately developed in humans than in other animals. Nearly all animals will try to move away from something that is hurting their bodies. Some animals, like my cats and dogs, will also try to get away from something that is hurting their feelings. Humans are wired to move away from anything that hurts us. But we understand hurt and harm far more broadly than other animals. And we also have the cognitive ability to try to figure out what is hurting us, how it's hurting us, and what could be changed, besides just moving our bodies away from the source of the pain, so it doesn't hurt us anymore. So whenever you've felt like there was no reason for your life to be as messy as you felt it was, if you asked yourself every question, Googled everything you could think of, sought all the best advice, read all the books, and saw all the specialists, that was your human brain doing the human brain thing of trying to identify the cause of a problem so you could solve it, which is the fancy human way of moving away from pain. But remember that part of the brain comes from the sense that we don't have any reason to be struggling. As far as we know, that's uniquely human, and we definitely know that not all people grapple with that.

In fact, most people don't. Most neurotypical adults generally accept that they're struggling. Probably because if they're struggling in systems created by and for neurotypical people, other neurotypical people are also struggling, and that has been their experience essentially all their lives. When most of the people around you are having a hard time with the same thing that's giving you a hard time, your brain deduces that the thing is hard, and so do the brains of all the other people struggling, and usually the difficulty of the thing will be discussed, which reinforces your understanding of the situation being caused by the hard thing.

I will give you a couple of simple examples. Every professional sprinter wants to be fastest in the world, but in 16 years, no one has beaten Usain Bolt's time for the a hundred meter dash — not because they aren't all trying, but because it's really hard. And during the Great Famine, essentially everyone who grew potatoes in Ireland produced spoiled crops, and essentially everyone who relied on potatoes as their main — and in many cases, only — food source, left Ireland if they could, or died — not because any of the farmers or people who were starving did anything wrong, but because the potato crops were infected and there was no alternative. In contrast, neurodivergent people in neurotypical societies generally have many experiences of struggling with things it seems no one else is struggling with, or at least not as much.

When that happens repeatedly, in multiple settings, over the course of years, our brains deduce that the things are not hard, since only we have a hard time with them, so we must be flawed. Seeing ourselves as responsible for our struggling causes most of us to feel shame, which prevents us from talking about our struggles, because that amounts to announcing our defectiveness. Every bit of that is painful, so of course we want to know why we're flawed in the ways that make things so hard, and many of us also want to be able to give other people a reason for our failures and difficulties.

Part of that is because neurodivergence is so misunderstood that the majority of people truly don't understand why we struggle, and we feel that, even when we don't understand why we struggle either. Being able to name a cause is a way to level the playing field by demonstrating a reason that our performance doesn't meet the established standards in whatever capacity applies to us. The other reason many of us want to identify causes, and tell others, is that we've been taught that support and even compassion are conditional in that they're only given to those who can prove they're struggling badly enough.

In school, jobs, relationships, finances, really every area of our lives, it's not enough to feel overwhelmed; someone else has to recognize that the demand on us is too great for one person. It's not enough to be physically exhausted; we need documentation from a doctor. It's not enough to say we can't afford what we need; we have to demonstrate our income and justify our expenses. So we come to believe, we have to prove we need help, support, empathy, acknowledgement, compromise, kindness. And since it must be our fault, we also think we need to prove we are worthy of any of those things, which almost always means showing that something beyond our control is causing us to be the way we are. Not everyone, but some people really do treat others differently when they see them as sick, or a victim, or both. Especially if that was the case in your family of origin, you may have deeply ingrained beliefs that the more diagnoses you have, and hardships you've endured, and systems that have failed you, the more love you'll receive — because that's been your actual experience.

Even when that's not the case, or it's less evident, there's a pervasive implication in the U.S. and other societies that support is only really needed and deserved by — and only given to — people who have sufficient reason for their struggling. This is something I see in my work as a psychological evaluator. Though many people come to me because they think lots of the diagnoses they've been given are wrong, I also have evaluated plenty of people who are desperate for a way to understand and justify how hard things have been for them, and they can't see how that could happen without a diagnosis or several diagnoses. I've evaluated people who are certain they have 10 or more very serious and technically quite rare diagnoses. When evaluations and diagnosing are done correctly, that is really never going to be the case. Sometimes people do have multiple diagnoses, but a lot of the time what people really need to hear is that what they're feeling isn't proof that something is wrong with them; it's proof that they're human, because a person is impacted and needs support when a lot of things are hard, regardless of why things are hard.

What's missing from most neurodivergent people's understanding — because it's not in the way neurodivergence is taught, treated, accommodated, or discussed in general — is that, really at any given time, a lot of things are harder for neurodivergent people than for neurotypical people. And again, that's not because we're broken or inadequate, but because of the interplay between the ways we're wired, how we're impacted by our experiences, and how compatible or incompatible we are with the environments and institutions we operate in. Let's break that down.

The first part of that interacting triad is neurodivergence. There's no single definition of neurodivergence, so people see it differently and that's fine, but for the purposes of our discussion, I'm referring to what are classified as Neurodevelopmental Disorders, which are widely accepted as being innate — so present from birth, even if the differences in a person's neurocognitive functioning aren't evident until a later stage of the developmental period, and even if those differences aren't identified for years, or at all. ADHD, autism, and learning differences are the most common, though we know the numbers are inaccurate because so many people are missed. At any rate, you don't suddenly get any of them. There is robust scientific evidence that neurodivergence is genetic and is part of the wide range of perfectly normal human variability. Just like we are different heights and have different eye colors, differences in sensory processing, attention, memory, communication, activity level, social motivation, preference for routine or novelty, and self-regulation are just differences.

On the one hand, they're no big deal. On the other hand, they're outside of the norm, so it matters that we're different in those ways because it makes our experiences different. And unlike height or eye color, our differences aren't yet understood as normal variations. So we learn that we have to abandon what works best for us and relentlessly hold ourselves to what we are told works best for everyone. For some of us, that brings us to "What the hell is wrong with me?" very early in our lives. For others, it's later in life, when we're trying to meet neurotypical standards in multiple areas of our lives, simultaneously, and with increasingly high stakes. It can feel like you're falling apart out of nowhere, but you're not; you're hitting a wall that was always there.

The second of the three interacting factors is the human brain's normal, natural ways of responding to important experiences. The most impactful of those is our trauma response. Trauma isn't the event or experience that occurred; it's how our brains and bodies change in response to an event or experience, and we don't have any control over those responses. The changes are hardwired for our survival, which means we don't choose them, and also that they're very difficult to change. The part of our brains with the job of keeping us alive is understandably very powerful. It can override other parts even long after the experience has ended, even if we've tried to process what we endured, and can think rationally about and understand trauma responses. That really should not be considered pathology, because the problem isn't the person; it's what they went through. It's not malfunction; it's adaptation that served an important purpose at the time and may still: to protect them. In most cases, the person's brain has done what anyone's brain would do if they had the same experiences. But trauma responses often result from experiences others don't know about entirely, or at all, and people don't understand them out of context.

And let's be real: People don't understand them in context either. There's some acceptance after experiences that are widely regarded to be traumatic, but eventually most people, including ourselves, become uncomfortable with our trauma responses — usually far sooner than our brains think It's safe to stop protecting us from danger. For most people, this has to do with the responses being largely outside of our control. We don't like that, of course, and it makes other people uncomfortable, probably because it's reminiscent of the nature of traumatic experiences themselves. People don't like to think about negative, painful, devastating, or terrifying things happening, and that's understandable, but it's also why our brains work so hard to keep reminding us of what happened so we don't forget how important it is to prevent it from happening again — even when that's entirely illogical.

Neurodivergence interacts with normal, natural, automated posttraumatic brain responses in two ways. First, neurodivergent brains process information differently, and newer research is demonstrating that those differences make it even more difficult to undo trauma responses. And second, neurodivergent people are significantly more likely to be involved in accidents, and to be victimized in ways, that produce trauma responses. There's a lot to unpack in both of those areas, so I'm going to cover them in their own episode. For now, just keep in mind that neurodivergence is part of who we are at our cores, and that our experiences can fundamentally change the ways we relate to ourselves, other people, and the world. Even through extensive, in-depth psychological testing, it's not always possible to tease neurodivergence out from trauma responses, so it's completely understandable if you don't know if the breakdown you're having at work is trauma-based or a meltdown from neurodivergent overstimulation,. Ultimately, it's probably more in their overlap.

Lastly in our interactive triad are the cultures, institutions, and systems that structure our lives. Culture has to do with shared beliefs, values, and practices, which can be fairly broad and flexible. Institutions are based on culture, but are intended to create and maintain structure through laws, regulations, and other types of enforceable rules. Systems are defined by the combined processes that operate to uphold institutions according to cultural standards. In that way, systems tend to have the greatest impact on our lives, though we may not often think about them that way. Capitalism is an economic system. It's not technically a political or social system, though it involves legislation and informs and is informed by people's beliefs about resources, wealth, ownership, competition, labor, and merit. Capitalism is what underlies the rules and social expectations around how we get what we need to survive and what we want. It also determines what we don't have, and implies what we do or do not deserve.

We are impacted by capitalism long before we directly contribute to the economy, since we have needs from birth, and wants soon after, and those are met or unmet in part through capitalism. Some economic and sociological theorists see the American educational system's primary purpose as preparing children to enter the capitalist labor market. To whatever extent that's accurate, it's certainly true that most educational experiences have capitalistic-aligned rules and social expectations about how we get what we need and want, and what we do or do not deserve. That's not to say that capitalism is inherently bad. In its ideal form, capitalism incentivizes innovation and, in some situations, going against the grain. It also gives people the most choices, in theory, which would allow people to create lives based on their individual values and talents. In reality, the foundation of capitalism is an imbalance between a relatively small number of people who innovate, and a relatively large number of people who make up the workforce — with wealth, security, and opportunity being unevenly distributed in favor of the few, while the many are less able to create lives based on their individual values and talents. And in a purely capitalist society with no socialist policies at all, the majority working class may also have limited access to education, healthcare, food, housing, and safety.

So let's pan out and look again at the interconnectedness of neurodivergence, trauma and other normal, natural automated responses to experiences, and the system of capitalism. Neurodivergent children are more likely to struggle in school — academically in some cases, but also socially, behaviorally, and emotionally. Education extends capitalism's emphasis on both compliance and competition — both of which can be extremely challenging for neurodivergent kids. Some neurodivergent children also need more support from their family members than typical, school-age kids do, which can impact their parents' and other family members' capacity to participate in capitalistic systems in the ways that are most likely to ensure security and lead to prosperity — especially since the 1970s when capitalism shifted toward the current expectation of dual-income families. Conversely, the pressures of capitalism can mean parents or other family members are not available to meet, or even be aware of, a neurodivergent child's increased needs. Many neurodivergent children also have more conflict with their parents, which can exacerbate school problems for children and cause or exacerbate career and other problems for parents.

In all of that swirling mess, neurodivergent children have more experiences that produce trauma responses and other types of adaptations that are, at their core, survival-based. As we reach adulthood, some of us don't have the skills, resources, motivation, or confidence to transition easily or successfully into post-secondary education or the workforce — often in part because of those trauma responses and adaptations that protected us at one point, but don't serve us at all well now. And of course, most of us dove, or were thrown headfirst, into the adult system of capitalism with no idea that our differences are just differences, like height or eye color. Most of us also don't know that our differences stack the capitalism deck against us unless we can somehow be one of the very few at the top of the food chain. And few of us have been told that trauma responses are normal and natural, so we try and try and try and try and try to do what it seems like everyone else is doing, what people expect us to do, what we think we should do, and what we think we should be able to do, usually without the support or compassion we need.

And when we struggle, even if nothing specific occurred to explain our stumbles, we end up not having done the thing we needed to do yesterday, snapping at people who ask us questions, regretting every life choice we've ever made when our best friend is vacationing in Paris, and asking, "What the hell is wrong with me?" We want to know, "Is it ADHD or autism or trauma or capitalism?", and the answer is, "Yes!" All of those things, and the broader categories they comprise, overlap and intersect and impact each other to make things really hard for us. That doesn't mean we can't be successful or happy or well, but most of us can't reach the levels of success, happiness, or wellness we'd like until we understand that our struggles are not caused by our flaws. You may have ADHD. You may be autistic. You may be experiencing trauma responses. You're almost certainly impacted by the rigid and inequitable system of capitalism. But none of those things is THE cause of your problems, so solving any one of them won't "fix" you, which is why nothing you've tried so far has.

The good news is you don't need to be fixed. You don't need to figure out what to blame — what part of your brain, what part of your past, what part of society — so you can maybe get ahead of it next time and avoid the pain, because the pain isn't caused by any one aspect of you, your experiences, or your life. The best way to understand the pain, and move away from it, is to see that it makes sense given what you've been through — and what you're still going through — because your brain is wired a certain way, because your nervous system has adapted to keep you alive, and because you live in a society that taught you you don't deserve peace, rest, support, security, or even freedom because you still haven't justified your struggling.

You don't need to prioritize confirming, finally and conclusively, "what the hell is wrong with you," because the actual answer is that you're a human being, and you weren't meant to function on high alert, constant hustle, emotional scarcity, and fragmented identity, while desperately dodging failure. You were meant to belong — exactly as you are. You were meant to be safe — exactly as you are. You were meant to have opportunities to contribute and succeed — exactly as you are. You were meant to be cared for — exactly as you are. You were meant to pursue what makes you happy — exactly as you are. But that's not how our system works, which is why asking the question, "Is it ADHD or autism or trauma or capitalism?" doesn't bring you the clarity you want, because the answer is: "Yes!" Yes, your brain works differently. Yes, your past left marks. Yes, the system is rigged. And no, you are not broken. No, you don't need to fix yourself. No, you are not the problem.

So when you find yourself in a "What the hell is wrong with me?" day, or caught in the spiral of trying to identify the cause of whatever you feel you're falling short of doing, try to pause, take a deep breath as an act of compassion for your very tired nervous system, and ask yourself instead, "What do I need in this moment, regardless of why I feel this way?" It may take time for you to be able to answer that question clearly, but you'll get better at it. You might think, "I need to eat something and sleep," " I need someone to help me work out what to prioritize," or "I need to stop forcing myself to act normal when I'm in sensory hell." Shifting from "What the hell is wrong with me?" to "What do I need?" won't solve everything, but it's the very best place you can start, because it has the power to shift your perspective from self-blame to self-trust, which is really at the core of what many of us never had a chance to develop, and at the heart of what makes things so fucking hard. You CAN trust yourself. You CAN be who you are. You CAN take up space. You CAN give yourself a break. You CAN give yourself what you need.

Until next time, remember: You don't have to change yourself to deserve happiness or success. Being who you are isn't the problem; it's the solution. I'm rooting for you — exactly as you are.