In my recent YouTube and TikTok videos, I have been talking about trauma and how my practice as an ADHD coach is trauma-informed. But I don’t just bring theoretical learning to the coaching space; I bring my own lived experience of trauma and ADHD.
Without doubt, Western culture has a lot to answer for when it comes to trauma, in that it sets us up for it. We grow up having the idea instilled into us that to be happy and to function as a human being fully, we need:
To be perfect
To have someone to love us
To be liked
To be strong
When I heard these words echoed at a recent Trauma-Informed Practice course I attended, I experienced one of those “wow” moments. It was as if someone were holding up a blueprint of my life, and I felt my whole body relax as I gave a sigh of relief. It was as if they were beaming a roadmap of my existence on the screen and showing me that A+B really does equal C.
For some years, I have known the impact of trauma upon my life. I have known why, and how I have lived with a sense of being broken, unworthy of love, hopeless at relationships, and how I developed Substance Use Disorder as a way to suppress these feelings.
Addiction is a huge thing in the ADHD community, but like all things, it’s a spectrum. We may turn to screen time, fantasy, and entertainment as ways of running from this ache that seems to emanate from what feels like our hollow selves.
None of these things are failures. They’re not character flaws. They are survival mechanisms, and at their root lies fear. Understanding my fear-based responses has helped me take care of them, as a parent cares for a newborn, and see them soften.
My early years taught me the importance of hypervigilance. I paid rapt attention to every environment I was in. I felt the atmosphere of every room as a bodily reaction. I read the face of each person, as life had taught me that my survival depended on it. Whilst I may have appeared the life and soul of the party, in reality, I was masking.
Having undiagnosed ADHD only added to my pain. I didn’t present as a typical male with ADHD as a kid. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have been diagnosed, as ADHD was pretty much unheard of in my day. My conditioning created a well-behaved, polite, quiet, shy version of myself. I hid in the back row or in corners of rooms, leg twitching, rolling my pen between my fingers, never comfortable in my chair, and spending school breaks alone. I had a body that was contracted by fear, but I didn’t know that. My body was in class, but I was elsewhere.
Emotional states are fleeting, transitory reactions to specific stimuli or environments. I was bullied at home and at school, so there was no escape. I experienced violence frequently; therefore, the emotional state solidified into an emotional trait, becoming a stable, long-lasting personality characteristic.
These personality characteristics arise from a subconscious belief that something is wrong with us. I felt broken. I truly believed that something was wrong with me, and I carried this belief well into my adult years.
This belief stopped me from living and enjoying my life. These states become hardwired into our system, leading us to live as false versions of ourselves. We live our lives according to the version of ourselves others have given us. It’s as if we have been plugged into the phone charger of life, and unbeknownst to us, a new operating system has been downloaded and installed, and we live our life according to that programme.
There is a famous quote by Carl Jung that I have loved for years:
“If we do not make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives, and we will call it fate.”
It wasn’t until I understood the trigger for my self-limiting beliefs and the driver it set in motion that I began to live more freely.
If we live our lives according to this unconscious programme, we are not living our lives at all. We are living the life that circumstances, environment, and others have given us. And because this is unknown to us, we live out this life in ignorance. Living this way, it’s impossible for us to connect with our authentic, intrinsic selves.
Someone said to me today that feeling their feelings was too scary. A friend recently said that their relationship had ended in the same way all their other relationships had ended, and in the same way their parents' and siblings' relationships had ended. States are becoming traits, living their lives according to a set of beliefs they have not chosen.
We can take the reins back, and it need not be scary if we do this within a safe, non-judgemental, therapeutic space.
I’ve trained as a coach because I want to support others in stepping into freedom through identifying false narratives and walking away from them.
Traditional coaching tends to focus on behaviour, lopping branches instead of examining the root. You can lop branches, and the tree looks tidy for a year or so, but pretty soon, you have to do the job again. It’s the same with coaching: we can explore behaviours and change them, and for a while we’ll feel better, but pretty soon those old patterns will return because we have not addressed the root cause.
You may be thinking, “I didn’t think coaching was therapy?” And you’d be right, it isn’t. But it is therapeutic. I am not a counsellor. Therapy has played a significant role in helping me move into freedom. Therapy, rightly so, spends time examining the past. Coaching, however, looks at the present and the future. But we were not born today. It’s essential to understand how the past informs the present, but we don’t spend lots of time there. Coaching works with life now, but it works with the whole of you.
I combine several elements into my coaching. I am trained in traditional coaching and ADHD specific coaching. I also hold qualifications as a mindfulness practitioner, and I have studied positive psychology and trauma-informed practice. This unique combination allows me to coach people holistically. I see the whole person, and I work with the entire person. You are not your behaviour. You are you: a wonderful, unique human being.
My practice is all about supporting and empowering you to make the unconscious conscious. To identify the programme you’ve downloaded and to start installing an updated one, one where you have written the programme, and as a result, you can feel your shoulders drop, your abdomen relax, your chest loosen, and your breath travel freely through your body.
