Shame, Guilt, and Self-Loathing in ADHD
My sister recently found some of my old school reports. My mum had always told me they were fine, with the odd “could try harder.” That is not what I saw when my sister showed me the real deal.
Science:
“Easily led astray and allows his concentration to wander far too readily. He lacks maturity at times. All this is reflected in his work and attitude.” — marked as average/below average.
Another, Craft & Design, written at the same time, said:
“Only ever does enough to avoid comment. He is not a very interested pupil and as a consequence of this his progress has been less than satisfactory.” — marked as below average.
And a third, French:
“A bit untidy and forgetful, fairly able orally. Really needs a good chivvying in little things to make his true potential flower.” — marked as below average.
I was twelve years old.
At the time, they were just words in reports, maybe forgotten within days. But reading them back now, I can see how easily they stacked up. They turned attention, organisation, and memory struggles into character flaws: lazy, careless, disinterested, immature. These judgements were written into me at the same age I was sent to a boarding school hundreds of miles from home while my dad was on an RAF posting in Germany.
Boarding school was wild. We were let loose most weekends, left to our own devices. One time we got lost for 14 hours, wandering across German farmland.
A farmer caught us in his fields and shot at us with a gun filled with salt pellets. They broke skin and stung as we ran through the turnips towards a main road in the distance, lost and fearful.
Another time we stumbled into a swamp before trespassing onto an RAF airfield. At twelve, it felt like adventure. Looking back now, it feels like Lord of the Flies.
It was not just the chaos of the countryside. Inside the boarding house, the older boys would patrol after nights out, brandishing baseball bats and threatening the younger ones to prove their superiority.
In a dorm of six boys, showing emotion was weakness, and weakness was preyed upon. We were punished by housemasters, being made to stand in cold corridors for hours in the night after being too noisy, too late.
The boarding house was even caught in the blast of a massive car bomb targeting the officers’ mess across the road, showering us in glass and furniture and throwing my friends across our room.
That time taught me resilience. I learned to look after myself in ways that shaped me for life. But it also taught me to hide. Survival meant keeping it all in. That was the start of my mask.
Shame does not arrive all at once. It builds slowly, through a steady drip of correction and criticism that children internalise until it becomes who they believe they are. There is a line often quoted that children with ADHD hear 20,000 more negative comments than their peers by the age of twelve. The exact number might be questionable, but the truth of it is not. Reports like mine show how it happens.
At university I carried on the same way. I lived in constant chaos. I crammed for exams on Red Bull and Pro-Plus, wired for a couple of days’ revision, then wiped out for days afterwards. I skipped classes, pulled all-nighters, and DJed most nights until three in the morning. I worked two jobs in the holidays to keep the cycle going.
I survived, just like I had always done, leaving everything to the last minute and relying on adrenaline. To others it looked like fun. To me it was survival.
The pattern followed me into adulthood. I earned good money but it slipped away as fast as it came in. I lived on credit cards, always on the brink of financial collapse.
I had plenty of relationships, but none lasted. I was bored, flaky, restless. It was not them, it was me. I used people to fuel my need for excitement and novelty. That is a hard truth to face.
When I finally landed in the corporate world in London, I was taught how to mask. I joined a graduate scheme with a large IT consultancy. We were drilled in how to project our voices, told how to dress, how to cut our hair, even how to stand. We were literally taught how to fit in so the firm could charge the highest rates for us.
It worked. The mask fit well. By day I was a consultant in a dark blue double-breasted suit, white shirt, plain tie, polished black shoes (never brogues). By night I was drinking with colleagues and clients because that was what was expected. Work hard party hard.
Inside, I was still living on the edge. I met someone who took control of everything - my money, my choices, my life. It saved me for a time. Handing over control felt safer than admitting I could not manage it myself. Fourteen years passed that way, until the day it ended. That breakup was the start of my life.
Looking back now, I feel grief for the way I behaved. I see how careless and restless I was, how often I used people to feed my hunger for novelty. I feel guilt for the whirlwind I created. But I also see how much I was struggling.
The alcohol was to sleep, the cigarettes to escape, the caffeine to stimulate, the mask to cover it all up. On the outside I thought I looked smart, capable, successful. On the inside, I was always close to losing everything.
No one knew about the panic attacks. I would wake in the middle of the night gripped by fear about something looming that I could not face. The fear would hold me for hours. By morning it would loosen, and I would carry on as if nothing was wrong, never dealing with the problem beneath.
What I did not know then is that intense, hard-to-shake emotions are not a character flaw in ADHD. Emotional dysregulation is one of the most common and impairing features in adulthood and is present in as many as 30–70 percent of adults with ADHD, and it is a major driver of poor outcomes. Research shows that when your brain cannot regulate feelings, shame spirals hit harder, last longer, and can feel impossible to escape.
The burnout and low mood that chased me through my twenties and thirties were not random either. Reviews show that around 80 percent of adults with ADHD experience another psychiatric condition at some point in their lives, most often anxiety or depression. The shame and guilt are not just about late assignments or failed finances, they seep into mental health until you live with a constant undertow of fear and inadequacy.
Self-esteem takes the hit too. A recent systematic review confirmed that adults with ADHD often report significantly lower self-esteem, and that self-esteem mediates everything from emotional regulation to relationship stress. That makes sense to me. The more years the shame sat inside me, the smaller I felt.
This is what shame looks like in ADHD. It is not a passing feeling. It is the inheritance of a lifetime spent being told and feeling like you are not good enough, while learning to hide how close you are to breaking. Diagnosis does not erase it. But it gives me a way to understand it, to name it, and to begin loosening its grip.
The shame can be crushing. It forced me even further behind the mask, until I no longer knew what was the mask and what was me. After diagnosis I began to realise that the outgoing, party-loving, kind, caring, generous version of me was often a cover.
Behind it all was chaos, fear, and self-loathing hidden under an incredibly well-constructed mask. So much of my life had been about hiding away, covering up, and trying to pass as “enough,” when inside I felt anything but. The question “who am I?”only really surfaced after diagnosis, as I began to unpick all of this and search for the truth.
I am starting to figure out who I am. Still generous, fun-loving, caring and outgoing, but no longer at the expense of my health. I no longer need to drink or smoke or live on caffeine after learning to live with my own thoughts. I no longer feel the need to pretend that I am “fine.”
Sharing these struggles has helped me come to terms with them, and it has helped some of the people I have shared with feel like they are not alone either. Helping them understand that what they have been through is not their guilt and shame to bear.
For years, the only way I knew how to quiet those voices was to cope. Alcohol to sleep. Cigarettes to escape. Caffeine to spark some life into mornings after nights of panic. Endless busyness to prove I was enough.
Coping kept me alive, but it also kept me from myself. That is where the story continues.
For those who want to explore the research behind these themes more deeply:
Bunford, N., Evans, S. W., & Wymbs, F. (2015). ADHD and emotion dysregulation among children and adolescents. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 18(3), 185–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-015-0187-5
Choi, W.-S., Woo, Y. S., Wang, S.-M., Lim, H.-K., & Bahk, W.-M. (2022). The prevalence of psychiatric comorbidities in adults with ADHD: A systematic review. PLOS ONE, 17(11), e0277175. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277175
Pedersen, A. B., Edvardsen, B. V., Messina, S. M., Volden, M. R., Weyandt, L. L., & Lundervold, A. J. (2024). Self-esteem in adults with ADHD using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale: A systematic review. Journal of Attention Disorders, 28(7), 1124–1138. https://doi.org/10.1177/10870547241237245
