reclaiming safety

we were never the dangerous ones

If there was one thing that I heard over and over again from listening to the neurodivergent adults that I worked with in my counselling practice, it was the ways that they were never seen in schools.

Or how incredibly inaccurate their actions were interpreted if they were.

“It didn’t matter if I was good at any school subject. I was East Asian. It was expected. We were a dime a dozen in that class.”

“All I wanted to know was why? But they acted like I was a problem for even asking it. Being Black and male was one thing. But being highly intelligent too? That was a whole other threat altogether.”

“The middle rows of the classroom… that’s where you hide in plain sight.”

“All I wanted was help. But they just asked why was I even there in the first place because my parents were just going to pay for me when I was done school anyway.”

“Even now as an adult, I know as a Black woman I’m not supposed to be successful. They still look at me as if I’m not allowed to have what they think should be theirs.”

We hear a lot of stories about ADHD from the lens of growing up as the talkative, fidgety white boy or the undiagnosed quiet, daydreamy white girl. We might even hear about the chatty white kids who were just seen as being outgoing or a bit annoying and who later were told they had ADHD too.

I wanted my book It’s Never Just ADHD to be different.

So I included stories of Black, Brown, Indigenous, East Asian and other melanated students who were seen and dismissed, or not seen at all. There’s something that hits differently when you’re struggling with learning while still having to navigate oppression and all the expectations on you to be successful (or a complete failure), to be perfect (but never perfect enough), or never to cause a scene (when one should definitely be caused).

noise

We went to school stuck between a rock and a hard place; to be seen often meant punishment, ridicule or diagnosis for neurodivergence that labelled us characteristically aggressive or emotionally unstable (which often translated to some sort of conduct disorder). To be looked over often equated to neglect and having to fend for ourselves for any kind of support (that’s if we were believed in the first place). There’s something that is inherently unsafe about this kind of existence - we’re never truly seen for who we are and we learn to consider this disconnected, made-up version of ourselves as if it’s our truth.

No wonder we feel unsafe in our bodies.

We learn to see ourselves as the unruly ones, the problem ones, the dangerous ones. That leads us to believe we are bad. When we believe that we are bad, we see our needs as bad too and undeserving of being met.

How do you learn to thrive in a world that is inherently dangerous to you because of what you look like while also having learned that you are the bad one and therefore unsafe? How do you hold the tension that comes from logically knowing that you deserve to have needs, to express them and have them met, while simultaneously feeling and experiencing a lack of safety nearly everywhere you go?

How do you learn to feel safe enough to be yourself again?

Throughout all my research and lived experience on ADHD, somatics, trauma and learning, one thing became crystal clear. A dysregulated body feels unsafe and a body that feels unsafe is not available for effective learning. Period. So we might’ve learned to guilt, shame, blame, threaten, and ignore dysregulated children who aren’t behaving in ways that we think they should, but know that they aren’t learning new responses in a dysregulated state either. Instead, these tactics work best to ensure that they grow up to be traumatised adults.

And it is very difficult to mend the pieces of broken adults.

That trauma starts or continues with us as educators too. We pass down what we know unless we’re actively working to break these cycles of intergenerational trauma and reacting from that place of anti-Blackness inside us. Schools are not free of trauma or being traumatising. They’re often key places that cause it.

I build the capacity to be with myself when I’m in nature, but this too, I realised, was a practice in cultivating bravery.

As a kid who grew up frequently traumatised by the education system, I now ask myself every day about how I can reclaim my sense of safety in my body. I’ve explored this same question with the teens and adults I work with in my counselling practice too. But it was also a guiding question for me in the writing of my book. Is there a way that schools could help neurodivergent students foster a sense of safety? Could they support learners in understanding that what they sensed in their bodies spoke to a need rather than teaching them, (particularly those from historically marginalised backgrounds), that they’re wrong for feeling unsafe in the first place? Could they help students learn how to meet their needs with compassion for themselves and others?

One reason my book is called It’s Never Just ADHD is because I believe that what we all needed as school children was to be seen beyond the behaviours we might have exhibited. We needed to learn that there were ways that we could express and meet our needs that didn’t constantly lead to self-suppression or threaten to isolate us from our peers altogether. We desperately needed to learn that we could bring our skin, our cultures, our language, our traditions - our whole selves - to our classrooms and still be considered a valuable, worthy part of the community too - exactly as we were.

But hiding those aspects of ourselves effectively came with learning to shame, blame and guilt them into disappearance. And every time we did, we became a little more disconnected from what we loved about ourselves and a little more terrified of what it meant about us in the process. Reclaiming our sense of safety takes a lot of courage because we must start to believe that we deserve love - every part of us. Then we have to be the ones brave enough to be with the discomfort and love those parts of us we learned to hate, fiercely enough to give it the nurturing and care that it desperately needs.

We must constantly challenge the narratives we learned about ourselves that told us we were bad, unruly, or dangerous. We must slowly lean into the discomfort and get grounded in the present to remind us that we are not small children anymore. We are strong enough to take back the safety that was stolen from us because now we are the adults we’ve always needed.

Slowly we’ll rediscover that safety comes from inside ourselves and we can reclaim more of it every time we stay with the discomfort to offer ourselves the soothing and nurturing we need. Then we’ll be able to go into spaces that we know are inherently unsafe and have prepared by connecting to the pockets of safety we’ve built in ourselves. We’ll remember to retreat to spaces and opportunities that allow us time to replenish when we feel spent.

When our children, niblings or the other kids we love react in ways that aren’t easy to respond to, we’ll be able to ground ourselves in our sense of safety first so that they can come to understand they are safe with us - exactly as they are. Then we can be the guides they need in learning how to meet or express their needs in ways that connect them with themselves and with those around them too.

It’s Never Just ADHD explores how we can reconnect to the safety in ourselves so we can support our ADHD children on their learning journey. Maybe then they’ll never have to reclaim something that should never have been taken from any of us in the first place.

Welcome to the world, It’s Never Just ADHD. I’m so glad you’re here.

Yay! My book is now available! Use the discount code CORAL25 until Feb 25th, 2024 for 25% off if you buy it from the Sage Publishing website (also in the US!)

Have you bought your copy of It’s Never Just ADHD yet?