ADHD and Stress Repression

Lately, I find myself cursed with a variety of stress-related physical ailments. The worst of these is muscle tension, a problem that almost every person with ADHD can relate to.

I do a lot to keep it under control. Yoga, exercise, hot and cold compresses, massage, meditation...but I recently found myself spending about two weeks battling a bout of tension so severe, all my best coping skills, plus regular doses of ibuprofen, were only enough to take the edge off (and even then, only sometimes).

What's been really interesting to me about this event (albeit, also harrowing) is that it was quite clearly a physical outcropping of long-repressed emotional distress. I say this because I soon discovered how readily an honest, raw expression of emotion - of the type I've learned to avoid - would give me some relief from the pain. Sometimes it was crying, sometimes just talking through something with someone, and sometimes it required a good bout of yelling.


The crying thing, in particular, gave me pause because I found myself, on several occasions, feeling that I quite desperately wanted and needed to cry, but couldn't do it, even with the physical pain spurring me on. This serves as a pretty sharp contrast to my memories of childhood and adolescence, when I was stuck with nicknames like "drama queen" and "crybaby" for my propensity to weep at the drop of a hat.

Certainly, it's nothing surprising for someone with ADHD; the executive functions we lack in our brains are what regulate emotions in healthy adults and older children. Regulation, however, is a very different thing from repression. An emotion regulated by the prefrontal cortex (as best I understand it) is an emotional reaction that is, essentially, dismissed by the brain as unnecessary, overblown or otherwise unneeded. It doesn't hang around and your mind/body system waiting for you to deal with it.

Repressed emotion, however, does. If you don't let yourself feel it, don't listen to the emotion and deal with what it's trying to tell you about what you want and need, it will manifest in the body in some physical manner.

The question of why those of us with ADHD might repress our emotions shouldn't be too difficult to answer: we get told from a very young age that our emotions are unacceptable. As soon as our emotional regulation displays itself to be behind the standard for our age level, we receive shame, admonishments, judgments and invalidation from parents and teachers and teasing from peers. It's not easy to learn to repress emotions in order to avoid displaying them (it took me until my early 20s to fully master it), but for many of us, it's the best survival technique we have.

So...here I am, sitting in the wake of the wreckage brought on by damming up my emotions for far too long. The flood has largely ebbed, now, and it's time to build up some better habits. I find that I'm feeling somewhat tired from the whole thing, yet more relaxed than I have in a long time. The once-constant physical sensation of anxiety in my gut is nearly gone, and I find I feel more freedom than I think I ever have.

And yet...I'm aware that building new, better habits will not be easy. I have to be better about communicating my emotions in words and making the distinction between feeling something authentically (good thing!) and expressing it impulsively (bad thing!).

How does this affect my ADHD? Hard to say, at this point. I do feel less avoidance about certain things I mean to get done, and I'm starting to recover a feeling of motivation about personal projects and "wants" that I'd repressed along with the negative emotions. In other words, pushing away passions of both kinds. All I was left with was the anxious feeling.