Innate ADHD Traits Can Intensify as We Heal Trauma
Part 1. Autistic and ADHD nervous systems are hyper-connected.
Autistic and ADHD people have denser neural connections (or more synapses) in our entire body and more electrical activity in our brains (compared to what is societally normative).
Keywords to Google for this research are: “synaptic pruning in autism” Also see, “Intense World Theory”
Explanation:
Everyone is born with super dense neural connections in their whole body/nervous system. Infants have thousands more neural connections than adults have. As we age, a process called synaptic pruning gradually shuts down the lesser used or redundant parts of those connections.
People whose synaptic pruning process follows a particular culturally accepted pattern are neurotypical. We can also think of neurotypicals as anyone whose synaptic pruning process allows them to follow normative or standard developmental sequences.
Anyone who has more or less pruning than the normative pruning rate is neurodivergent. One of the most clear signs of neurodivergence is “spiky” development - we tend to reach developmental milestones much faster AND much slower than our peers across different categories (for example we might speak earlier and walk later than our neurotypical peers or vice versa)
Autistic & ADHD brains in particular have less synaptic pruning, so we retain more of our neural synapses from birth than neurotypicals do. The med paradigm says this is pathology (less pruning = bad) but that is culturally arbitrary.
For Autistic, ADHD, AuDHD folks, synaptic pruning differences are the biological reason for our bottom-up processing, sensory sensitivity, increased risk of trauma, and non-normative ways of thinking and feeling and being including synesthesia, giftedness, and motor disabilities like dyspraxia.
These pruning pattern differences in neurodivergent people are hereditary, and most likely genetic, rather than epigenetic. There have been around 200 different genes associated with Autism and ADHD. We only need a few genes to express these phenotypes, not all 200, which is one reason the presentation of these neurotypes has a lot of variety.
In general, most Autistic people have an Autistic parent, at least one Autistic grandparent, and possibly a few other Autistics in the family. Most ADHD people have an ADHD parent, at least one ADHD grandparent, and possibly a few other ADHD people in the family. An exception to this is that two ADHD parents can have an Autistic child because of the way the genes for the two different genetic presentations of ADHD combine.
In many cases, the parents and grandparents in our families are unrecognized neurodivergents who were never were able to access any kind of diagnosis or formal support for their neurotype. A number of us have lived in family systems that revolve around taking care of an older Autistic or ADHD person’s needs without ever identifying them as such. (My own grandmother didn’t drive and got headaches from being inside stores. Her family compensated for this.)
Part 2: The impact of trauma on hyper-connected nervous systems.
While people with Autistic and ADHD neurotypes have genes that code for hyper-connection or less synaptic pruning, trauma can change that baseline in two directions.
Trauma can cause more pruning or less pruning depending on a number of factors including when the trauma happened and how long it lasted. Trauma can increase our genetic hyper-connection or decrease it. Often it does BOTH in different parts of the bodymind, for example amplifying connections in the amygdala while decreasing numbed or dissociated sensory connections.
This is one reason it’s so hard to unwind Autistic and ADHD traits from trauma symptoms and co-occurring conditions. Our neurology is influenced by opposing mechanisms - genetics gives us hyper-connection from birth and then our environment prunes away connections, AND neuroplasticity also means we can regrow connections lost to trauma.
Outside of pruning differences, a number of processing difficulties or lower reactions to stimulus come from super sensitive highly connected neurons that are “offline” because of traumatic overwhelm. Whole sensory systems can shutdown or be under-responsive because of overload. As we heal from trauma, these dormant neural systems can wake up and become highly sensitive again.
These “sleeping” nerves along with co-occurring genetic conditions and complex ptsd are another reasons Autistic and ADHD people have widely varying presentations.
Part 3. Innate ADHD traits do not disappear as we heal from trauma.
Suppression of innate ADHD traits is evidence of trauma. Intensification of innate ADHD traits is evidence of nervous system healing.
Mental health professionals should not expect ADHD to be reversible with trauma interventions. It’s not. Distress symptoms can be reversed through nervous system support and trauma interventions, but the innate traits of ADHD are DNA encoded.
If you’d like clarification on ADHD traits vs distress symptoms, check out my other essay here: https://www.traumageek.com/blog/innate-adhd-vs-distress-symptoms
If people think their ADHD is trauma symptoms, and if their goal is to remove unmoveable parts of their internal wiring, they wont recognize healing when it’s actually happening.
Dr. Maté seems to be one of the primary sources of the myth that ADHD is caused by trauma. Maté goes as far as to say that ADHD can be cured with trauma interventions, but lived experience of the ADHD community proves otherwise.
The list of distress symptoms often mistaken for ADHD (hyperactivity, mood swings, etc) are indeed a result of overwhelm or unmet needs in early childhood, but healing trauma doesn’t change the underlying ADHD neurotype. If someone is able to reverse their ADHD with trauma treatment, the ADHD was a misdiagnosis.
Here’s why this is a really big deal: Healing trauma makes innate ADHD traits even more noticeable and the neurotypical world more difficult to navigate. And a lot of us get to this stage and think we aren’t healing when we are.
Most ADHDers cope with demands of society by disconnecting and masking. When we heal trauma, we become more connected to ourselves and we mask less, making the underlying hereditary ADHD wiring differences much more obvious.
Part 4. Supressed innate ADHD traits increase as dissociation and disconnection decreases.
Which of my own ADHD traits are increasing with trauma healing?
- Ability to mask is lessened.
- Can’t run on adrenaline to cope as much.
- Less ability to force myself to focus at someone else’s direction.
- Much more need for “flow” time (completely unstructured/unscheduled).
- Needing more help to navigate the intense world.
- "Time blindness" - more difficulty keeping track of time
- More reliance on reminders, notes, visual schedules, alarms, etc to do tasks.
- Lots more hyperfocus (which can lead to neglect of physical needs until they become incredibly loud)
- Loss of trauma-based coping skills like numbing addictions
- More of some types of stimming and less of others
- Can’t use shame to motivate actions
- Less productive (by societal standards)
- Less able to meet external demands
- Rest and play become more important
Here are some other traits and behaviors the ADHD community has reported increasing as we heal from trauma:
- More movement
- Less using anxiety to push through or avoid small mistakes
- More talking, humming, singing
- More emotional, acknowledging feelings instead of dissociating from them
- More difficulty switching tasks, more inertia
- More taking up space
- More sensitive in some ways (parts of self that were numb are now "online")
- More executive dysfunction
Part 5. We need so much more than individual healing.
People have asked me, Why would you want to heal if healing makes you more disabled?
Healing to me is about returning to my Self. Healing allows me to stop compensating for my neurotype as much and allow myself to be how I am wired to be. The fact that this makes life harder is a society problem, not a me problem, and I want to be part of changing society so that everyone can be how they are wired to be.
A lot of ADHD trauma is a product of ableism in our environment. Suppressing our innate/genetic/heritable ADHD traits through trauma-based coping skills is how we have survived in an ableist world. Suppressing our True Self is an amazing coping skill AND it has a huge cost to our physical bodies. Masking (whether through fawning, through running on adrenaline, or through dissociation from parts of ourselves) leads to multisystemic mind-body illnesses.
The list of traits that increase as we heal may seem negative and not neutral because of the fact that support for these traits aren’t common in our world yet. And in some settings these traits do feel very negative. If our immediate environment (home, work, school, etc) is ableist, then we actually still need our masks and our trauma-based coping skills. If we try to unmask or allow more of our True Self to take up space when our immediate environment does not support that, the result is going to be re-traumatization and eventual burnout.
Here’s an example from my life. I had a big burnout in 2020 because of trauma work. Through some powerful trauma interventions, a part of myself that longs for connection “woke up” after being numb for years. But it was the pandemic-lockdown environment, and there was no way for me to meet that need for connection. The pain of that part of myself waking up to full sensation only to have the same experience of unmet need again was devastating and retraumatizing. I was in burnout for months. As part of my recovery from that burnout episode, I stopped doing trauma work and focused on stabilization until my environment could support more connection.
Choosing our own pace for trauma healing is something we’re all entitled to. We’re not obligated to heal trauma, despite what social media says, and we can pause the process at any time. Sometimes it’s safer to avoid trauma work for a while and just focus on using our coping strategies.
For individual trauma healing to be possible, we really need collective healing. We need environments that are aware of systemic ableism and seeking to counter it. We need homes, workplaces, schools, and communities where its okay to have all of the traits I listed before, where support and affirmation is offered. I am lucky to be in community with neurodivergent humans who have no problems with me being my unmasked “more” ADHD self. I know it’s a far off dream for some, but I wish that for everyone.
Everyone deserves the safety to be able to drop their trauma defenses and be supported as their True Self. If you don’t have that yet, I pray you do someday.
(and by pray I mean a completely non-religious wish thrown out to the universe)
Want to learn more about this neuro-affirming perspective? Janae Elisabeth, Autistic researcher and educator, is hosting an 8 week course focused on Neurodiversity in the Summer of 2024, beginning June 12. More info at: TraumaGeek.Thinkific.com
