ADHD can explain but doesn't excuse: how to take personal responsibility
ADHD is not just for 'naughty little boys'. For adults, it's a diagnosable 'Disorder' because it has to severely mess up 2+ areas of your life for a long time. By this point, we might feel like the adult equivalent of a child stuck in the naughty corner, no matter how hard we try.
ADHD isn't an illness or something to be ‘fixed’, but a part of who we are that can be managed in different ways for different outcomes. Being diagnosed is like being given a guidebook (literally) to your brain – and with knowledge, comes responsibility. It tells us how to get out of the naughty corner, but we still have to make that choice.
The 30% developmental delay in executive functioning skills like self-awareness, memory, emotional regulation, problem-solving, and inhibition meant that my life was a complete mess. I was moving country every month, quitting jobs, arguing with everyone in my life, getting drunk a few times a week, and doing things I simply could not explain, like moving in with strangers.
It was like living in series 9 of a terrible TV show, where I had no idea what I’d do by the end of the day. I felt suffocated by my helplessness and guilt for all of my failings but also unable to do anything about them. I was convinced I was just a fundamentally 'bad' person.
A friend who said she'd been through something similar told me how she managed to stop: 'You just get tired of your own shit'. I couldn’t figure out how to do this until I started accepting that I was responsible for changing what kind of person I was. At that point, this meant getting the professional help I needed – which ultimately, was on me.
As I couldn’t understand my behaviour until I learned about ADHD, I couldn’t take accountability for it, which meant I felt unable to change it.
For example, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is an experience linked to ADHD, where real or perceived rejection can trigger extremely strong emotional mood swings. I've seen this arise as suicidality and self-harm, but also as lying, cheating, shouting, or substance addictions. It doesn't justify it: it just gives a label to something we might not be able to identify otherwise. With the label, comes understanding, which means we can take precautions.
ADHD can explain our behaviour, but it doesn’t excuse it. Knowing we have impaired executive functioning skills means we have a responsibility to manage them. For example, if we kept crashing whilst driving, we might feel like terrible drivers. If we then learned it was because of an undiagnosed eye problem that could be solved with glasses, we’d wear the glasses. This doesn’t cancel out the crashes, but it gives us the tools to manage it.
Incidentally, having ADHD increases our chance of having traffic crashes by almost 50%. With this lens (and a 7-year NHS waiting list for assessments), it’s understandable how 1 in 4 prisoners have ADHD - a rate 5-10 times higher than in the general population.
However, having ADHD doesn't give us a free pass to break the law. If you killed someone whilst drunk, you'd still go to prison. I visited mental health units when I worked in law, meeting people who had committed serious crimes like murder whilst extremely unwell, such as genuinely believing things that weren't true due to psychosis. Some of these situations could have been avoided if they were able to access the healthcare they so desperately needed.
Prisoners with ADHD aren't excused for crimes: but accessing support may have helped them to avoid ending up there in the first place. This is the foundation of being human: we all compromise parts of our individual liberty in return for living in a society.
The same applies to situations like work, where we must take responsibility for managing ourselves. We can't just ignore any work we don't want to do because it doesn't jive with our interest-based nervous system, or never have to use (and probably reset) a password ever again. It's impossible to avoid any rejection if we ever want to grow.
An employer can and should make reasonable adjustments to help a disabled person 'level up' to the same playing field as their peers. For example, providing written instructions is an extremely helpful adjustment to make for ADHD-ers - but we've still got to be able to implement the instructions. This is where coaching comes in.
Environments can be made more accessible, but we've still got to do the work (literally). This comes with strengthening our knowledge and executive functioning skills. The real work is done outside of coaching sessions: it’s the practice in-between that sees us try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, until we get it right.
The same can happen in any environment of psychological safety, where people feel safe to communicate honestly and ask for help without being judged. The results are immense value in having inclusive cultures where we can harness our strengths and reach our full potential.
The real challenge is people who don't care either way. Having ADHD is in no way a justification to act a certain way. If anything, if you know about it, you have a responsibility to do something about the challenges. If you can’t explain why you keep doing things that harm yourself or others, it’s time to get some help – whatever that looks like for you.
Taking personal responsibility is the most empowering thing you will ever do, because you get to take charge of your own life. I see my ADHD as simply part of who I am, and if I mess up, that’s on me. The only person we can control in life is ourselves, and what we put in, we get back out.
If you're not sure where to start, try asking yourself these questions:
Identify your behaviour that you want to change – why is this? What’s at stake? What is the best and worst case scenario for your future either way?
Is there a pattern to this behaviour? Can you understand your deeper motivations behind it? (e.g telling white lies to avoid offending people by saying 'no')
Have you tried to change it before? What has and hasn’t worked? What gets in the way? (e.g object permanence and forgetting our plans! Writing out reminders and sticking them on the wall is helpful for this.)
What steps could you take to pre-emptively change these behaviours? (e.g removing yourself from situations or changing your environment)
How can you make yourself extra-accountable? (e.g find an accountability buddy!)
What can you do if you fall off track? (e.g seek extra support such as coaching or therapy)
The trick is not making your personal responsibility reliant on anybody or anything else, such as needing an ADHD diagnosis before you can change. I wrote ‘ADHD: an A to Z’, because once I’d learned about how it showed up in all areas of my life, like sleep and exercise, I could find what worked for me. You do not need anyone else's permission or validation to stop trying neurotypical solutions (like 'just do it!') for a neurodiverse brain.
For me, taking responsibility for myself looks like exercising, taking medication at the same time every day, eating 3 meals a day, avoiding too much alcohol, asking for help, and setting boundaries. I will often fall off this wagon ('because of my ADHD' - or being human!), but I recognise my responsibility in getting back on it. Managing my challenges allows me to harness them into immense strengths, like pouring my emotions into a third book that ended up with me going to Parliament this week.
I take responsibility when I mess up - and there have been quite a few emotionally-charged decisions I've made in the last few years that I've had to apologise for and commit to learning how to change in the future. This is part of being human: we make mistakes, we learn, and we grow.
People who don't want to take any responsibility for themselves or their actions have nothing to do with ADHD. They've got every right to live however they want, but you don't necessarily have to be around it. Speaking from experience, they just need to get tired of their own shit to get the help they need - whatever that looks like for them.
"However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up." Stephen Hawking
For more, visit ADHD Works, read ADHD: an A to Z, or book a coaching intro call here.