By Edward Hallowell — 2020
A stigma is unjust and evil. But stewing about it won’t help. Banding together with other moms and families will.
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CLEAR ALL
Transgender or gender-fluid people are more likely to be neurodivergent, and vice versa. Here’s what that’s like.
When you let yourself settle into the totality of who you are, when you stop trying to find a replacement for yourself, when you push back against the familiar tangles of shame, you will find that managing your challenges becomes much more simple.
The path to self-acceptance is long and treacherous for adults with ADHD, many of whom mistake their symptoms for personal faults. Here, ADDitude readers share the moments they realized that they weren’t broken at all—and that their wild, wonderful ADHD brains didn’t need fixing.
“My work never adequately represented my effort or my intelligence. No one saw how often I stayed up late to finish projects or how many used sticky notes were pasted all over my room and planner to remind myself of tasks.”
Sheila Rubin writes about transformance, a term used to describe “the force in the psyche that’s moving towards growth and expansion and transformation,” and the idea that healing is “not just an outcome but a process that exists within each person that emerges in conditions of safety.”
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There’s an expectation of what is supposed to happen during the holidays: images of a family gathered around a tree, presents, food, love and connection as people smile at each other. But if your family is different, there sometimes can be shame.
One of the hardest aspects of being human is moving past shame. Those feelings of deep regret—and the lingering insecurity and unworthiness that most likely accompany them—stick with us in a way that can be profound.
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Many equate self-discipline with living a good, moral life, which ends up creating a lot of shame when we fail. There’s a better way to build lasting, solid self-discipline in your life.