In my last article, I ended on a hopeful note about discovering your resilience as a late-diagnosed ADHDer. You may be wondering what that means or how it applies to your school experience while undiagnosed. According to the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, resilience is “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences (APA, 2018)”.
In layman’s terms, it’s a person’s ability to “bounce back” after something hard. Chumbawamba said it best in their iconic song Tubthumping- “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down (Chumbawamba, 1997).” With this definition in mind, children are incredibly resilient by nature for several reasons:
- Wider window of tolerances and less exposure to traumatic, high cortisol levels for extended periods of time simply due to age
- More protective factors and built in social support in community, immediate and extended family, school and extracurricular activities with friends, peers, teachers, and coaches.
- Developmentally, learning is easier for children than adults. This includes school subjects, languages, and coping skills.
- Children are naturally intuitive in all areas- they won’t do things that don’t serve them. This is later programmed out of us through systemic pressures to conform.
Undiagnosed/late diagnosed ADHDers are some of the most resilient people- they had to be, often because the broken school system failed them. The US school system is largely a reactionary, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” kind of system, ignoring anyone who quietly struggles and assumes they are okay until otherwise specified. They were left to figure out ways to survive and succeed on their own, because they weren’t struggling “badly enough” to warrant systemic intervention. But they struggled nonetheless, and their struggles are real, valid, and not because of “laziness” or a character flaw.
By the time a late-diagnosed ADHDer receives their diagnosis, they’ve been making it work for years, if not decades, usually chaotically flying by the seat of their pants and holding things together with sheer determination, spite, or luck. Struggles with managing social relationships, employment, higher education, and/or home maintenance tasks and chores are common breaking points that can lead to a late ADHD diagnosis. Some common school-age coping skills include (but are not limited to):
- Doing homework at school instead of at home
- Setting reminders using planners, notes, calendars, etc.
- Underachievement- intentionally taking courses below your potential because of the reduced workload, and then succeeding and even excelling with ease.
- Overachievement- the need to constantly be busy and in a flow state, cannot stop because they cannot start again.
- Using deadlines to overcome procrastination
- A therapist specializing in late-diagnosed ADHD will help explore your childhood, identify the coping skills you figured out intuitively, and examine which still serve you and which no longer serve you in adulthood.
References:
American Psychological Association. (2018, April 19). APA Dictionary of Psychology. Retrieved July 18, 2024, from https://dictionary.apa.org/resilience Chumbawamba. (1997). Tubthumping [I get knocked down but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down]. Retrieved from https://lyrics.lyricfind.com/lyrics/chumbawamba-tubthumping