so there's something that's been bothering me about the ADHD discourse for a while now

so let me tell you the adventure of how i got diagnosed with C-PTSD

don't worry it'll make sense in the end

(a thread)

it's the fall of 2018 and i'm breaking up with my therapist

he was the one to say we need to end it but i was already going back and forth about it for months by then

he was not a bad therapist but not the best one either

anyways, we're having our final session

we're down to the final 20 minutes when he says

"i know this is terrible timing but i really feel like i should say this"

o....okay

"you think most of your issues are because of your adhd but i strongly feel like that's not the root of them"

huh?

"it's not an exact match but you exhibit a quite a few of symptoms of Borderline"

and then he starts listing things

and he's, well, not wrong

i'm gobsmacked of course

"the biggest thing missing is self-harm"

and he's right, i don't do that, at all

anyways i'm not gonna list all the things, that's not exactly the point

his point is that i have a lot of things going on that does not seem to stem from ADHD and he strongly thinks those things are the real source of, well, all the things we talked about in therapy

now, again, this is horrible timing

like what the fuck dude

dumping this on me in the last 20 minutes of our final session?

i leave, confused

so ok what the fuck, i have Borderline? ish?

anyways, for a few weeks, i ruminate over this

i also talk to friends and an aside i was incredibly oblivious to the stigma Borderline has vis-a-vis ADHD

like i won't forget how the faces of the few friends i told about it suddenly changed when i uttered the word "Borderline"

turns out they both had people in their lives who were diagnosed with it

so i don't blame them but wow

anyways, after a few weeks i have my regularly scheduled session with my psychiatrist

and we talk as we always do and i tell him what my therapists said

and he thinks about it and he asks me

"do you feel like you're angry all the time?"

and i'm like, well, now that you're asking me, yeah, i do

"i think you have C-PTSD"

and i'm like, okay?

so i go home and start looking into it

and it's starting to make a lot of sense

and over the next, eh, months, it clicks

and i end up getting a therapist who specializes in trauma because yeah, most of my problems stem from what you can call C-PTSD

the ADHD stuff is there, sure, but it's more surface-level

and so, this is what bothers me about the ADHD discourse

i am aware that i'm trying to generalize my experience but

i strongly feel that most people don't "just" have ADHD

and that there may be much deeper things at work in their lives

other sources of issues

i'm not saying everyone who has ADHD also has C-PTSD

some, sure

others, i don't know

but i really feel like people would benefit from digging a bit deeper

and not stopping at just ADHD

is i guess where i'm getting at?

and like, i know this sounds like "HEY THERE IS MORE THAT IS WRONG WITH YOU"

but no, this is not about what's wrong with anyone, there isn't anything "wrong with you" if you have ADHD

this is about digging deeper

and i don't see this nearly enough

and let that be said that ADHD advocacy is good and spreading the word about it is good because so many people *still* don't know they have ADHD and just suffer needlessly

but once you got diagnosed, and you got your footing

consider looking a bit under it

-FIN-

p.s. there is a theory that's getting popular on twitter that ADHD is just yet another way of being on the spectrum

i have mixed feelings about this

p.p.s. Borderline and C-PTSD have a lot of overlap so i don't blame my therapist for approaching me from that angle