If you're anything like me, CPTSD and ADHD were closely related growing up. I inherited generational trauma on top of my own that started being collected since childhood, like my little kid body was already carrying stuff that wasn't even mine.
I began watching my family struggle with severe ADHD. I didn't have the words at the time since I was just a kid, but I knew something was up and it didn't sit well with me.
As a millennial growing up pre-internet, people didn't know shit about mental health. My family was no different. Emotions throughout my home were extreme highs and extreme lows, but that was just our norm. Nobody was using the words "generational trauma," "domestic violence," or "ADHD." Things were what they were and you dealt with it or you didn't.
That's probably why I fell in love with psychology in high school, honestly. I was so desperately trying to make sense of the chaos going on around me that I made it my whole personality, and eventually my whole career. Turns out that's a very ADHD way to cope with a very CPTSD childhood, but we'll get there.
IF I COULD GO BACK IN TIME
Now I've been a trauma therapist for 10 years, working closely with ADHD and CPTSD every single day. And if I could go back in time and tell my family what the fuck was actually happening, I know some things could have changed.
I could have saved my brother from spending hours at the dining room table doing homework that never got finished, if I could have told everyone he was struggling with ADHD and it was never about being lazy or defiant. It was a brain working exactly the way that brain works, in a house that had zero patience for it.
I could have supported my mom, who was chronically late to everything including getting us to school, if I'd known she had time blindness from ADHD. We could have set a whole lot more alarms and kept it moving. Instead she got labeled as flaky, unreliable, careless, all the words that slowly teach a woman to shrink.
I could have stuck up for my best friend and myself, who struggled in school and made wild impulsive decisions, if I could have explained that ADHD literally gets you stuck in the present. Your future self feels like a stranger, so decisions that protect her? Not happening. It's not recklessness, it's a time perception thing, and nobody in the '90s knew what to call it besides "bad choices."
And I could have said out loud that the out of body experiences, the night terrors, the nausea I carried around every single day was trauma, and that I needed real professional help, not a "calm down."
Here's what haunts me a little, and I know it haunts my clients too. If everyone around me had known more about mental health, there could have been so much more compassion and help, and a lot less criticism from being misunderstood. The cruelty wasn't even the worst part. The worst part is that all of it was preventable with information.
THE PATTERN I SEE IN MY OFFICE NOW
The funny part, and by funny I mean devastating, is that I see the same exact patterns in so many of my clients. The self criticism and shame that comes with not understanding your own CPTSD and ADHD. The loud inner critic that runs all day: "just try harder," "stop being lazy," "you shouldn't struggle, other people have it worse."
I KNOW you've got that voice. Every high achiever I work with has that voice on loop, because most of us learned early that being praised for managing everything was the closest thing we'd get to being loved for being ourselves.
And here's what that looks like in real life: you're spinning all day and can't get your head straight. You run in circles and never complete anything, then hate yourself at 11pm for "wasting the day." You're the most capable person at work and you can't get out of bed on a Saturday. You hyperfocus for six hours straight on a project that lights you up, but one email sits unanswered for a week. That's not a character flaw, that's a nervous system running two operating systems at once, one that's trying to build a life and one that's still scanning for danger.
WHAT NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT ADHD AND CPTSD
Here's the part I need you to actually absorb: ADHD and CPTSD share so much overlap. The overlap is wild: Emotional dysregulation, rejection sensitivity, executive dysfunction the second you get stressed, hypervigilance that just looks like distraction, plus the chronic exhaustion from masking both all day.
And they don't just sit side by side, they feed each other. Trauma and stress make ADHD symptoms worse, and untreated ADHD makes you more vulnerable to stress, which makes the trauma louder. It's a loop, and nobody hands you the manual.
As a therapist, I've watched clients come in with an "ADHD diagnosis" that was really their nervous system still scanning for danger, and I've watched people carry a "treatment resistant depression" label for years that was actually undiagnosed ADHD colliding with childhood trauma. That one breaks my heart the most, because it's so common, especially in women and queer folks who were never the poster children for what ADHD "looks like."
Because here's the other wild part: so many of my clients grew up with ADHD and didn't know it. They grew up in homes where paying attention to everything at once was how you stayed safe. Reading the room wasn't a fun party trick, it was survival. Masking started so early that by adulthood it just feels like your personality. And on top of that, trauma survivors tend to become high achievers as a way to escape the chaos, so clinicians rule out ADHD because you look "successful" on the outside. That's the tricky part of mental health. It's invisible until you learn what to look out for, which took me a decade of training to be able to see.
THE HIGH ACHIEVER TRAP
The real kicker for us high achievers is this: CPTSD makes you blend in so nobody ever sees you struggle, and ADHD makes that performance cost 10 times more energy than it should. So you look like the most capable person in the room while feeling like you're one email away from collapse. You're applauded for the exact thing that's exhausting you to death.
If you're reading this at work, pretending to be fine, I KNOW. I see you. That's why I wrote this.
SO WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY DO ABOUT IT
I'm not going to leave you in the spiral, so here are three things I actually work on with my clients, in this order:
Treat the nervous system first. Regulation before productivity, always. Your brain cannot organize a to-do list while it thinks a bear is in the room. Calm the bear stuff first, then the lists get easier. I promise.
Grieve the diagnosis timeline. Whatever age you figured this out, it wasn't too late, you're not behind, AND it's completely fair to be angry it took this long. Both are true. The anger is part of the healing, not a detour from it.
Build systems for YOUR brain, not a neurotypical's. Body doubling, timers, external accountability, alarms for your time blindness, breaks that actually break. Not because you're broken, but because your brain runs differently and deserves tools that actually fit it. Would you shame a fish for needing water?
YOU'RE NOT TOO MUCH
If this is you, I want you to hear it clearly, from a therapist who lived it first and studied it second: you're not too much, you're not lazy, and you're not behind. You've been surviving with a brain that was never given the manual, in a family that didn't have the words, in a world that still barely does.
Compassion was the thing my family was missing. Not information, not discipline, not one more disappointed sigh at the dinner table. Compassion. And that's the thing I watch transform my clients too, the moment someone finally gets what's actually been happening in their head, the shame starts loosening its grip, and the real work can begin.