The ADHD Triangle of Tangled Emotions
Emotional dysregulation, rejection sensitivity and attachment dysfunction
Nature designed humans and other animals to seek pleasure and flee pain; it’s part of our survival instinct. But problems occur when we can’t distinguish between healthy or unhealthy pleasure or actual or imagined danger or pain. Living in today’s world with constant ‘artificial’ stimulation and distractions does not help. Things like processed food, being ‘crazy-busy’, office working, living with habitual anxiety and trauma disrupt our innate bio-feedback loops, resulting in mixed-up signals.
On top of this, people with high vata or ADHD often experience emotions with much more intensity than neuro-typical people. ADHDers often feel emotions in a way that is not proportional to the situation. Crazy things happen when you cannot manage or stabilize your emotional state.
I can experience emotions as an overwhelming and intense wave that hijacks my entire being and has logic flying out of the window. Dysregulated emotions can either be excruciatingly painful or exquisitely pleasurable. Either way, runaway emotions will end up steering the ship unless you rein them in. It’s easy to see why people with ADHD are often called oversensitive, insensitive or over-reactionary.
Emotional Dysregulation
Emotional dysregulation refers to fast-building, high-intensity emotions that seem to come out of nowhere and cause a storm in a teacup. Many people struggle to understand, recognize or process these big feelings. Emotional dysregulation is just as frustrating to the people who experience it as it is to people who are on the receiving end.
Many people with ADHD eventually give up and reject the idea of intimate relationships because it is just too painful to keep repeating unwanted patterns.
Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria or RSD
Sensitivity is a big issue for people with ADHD or high vata. You can either be highly sensitive or highly insensitive, or both, making it difficult to read social situations.
Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria is the fear of actual or perceived rejection, abandonment, criticism, or failure. RSD can be extreme and crippling, having us flee or avoid situations, ruminating about experiences or playing small. It explains (in part) why many people with ADHD end up in jobs that are far below their capabilities or pay grade.
RSD can lead to an emotional shutdown because it feels impossible to make sense of a tornado of feelings, spinning out of control. It takes a long time to process emotions, and even longer to articulate them. The result is confusion and misunderstanding about why things are as they are. It can feel safer to avoid relationships and shut down.
Anxious, Avoidant or Fearful Attachments
Those with ADHD often experience relationship problems because they can’t form or maintain secure attachments with others. We develop our attachment styles in childhood through the interactions with significant others. Since ADHD runs in families, it’s likely that we’ve grown up around other people with emotional dysregulation. If that included trauma, neglect, abuse, criticism, smothering, inconsistency, or intrusiveness, bonding with and trusting others is hard. People generally repeat familiar patterns because they know how to play the role. This means that they (often unconsciously) recreate the same patterns that they experienced in childhood.
Until we see them.
People with anxious attachment styles often have low self-esteem, need constant reassurance, care more about their partner’s needs than their own and can be jealous, clingy or suspicious.
People develop avoidant styles of attaching if they experienced caregivers who were emotionally cold, did not tolerate the expression of feelings, or were neglectful. People with avoidant attachment styles find intimacy difficult and can take on the role of the lone wolf. The slightest hint of someone expressing feelings can have them pushing the eject button.
People form disorganized or fearful attachment styles if they grew up with trauma, neglect, or abuse. This shows up as aggression, bizarre behaviour, and chaos.
In my clinical and personal experience, people with ADHD are more likely to have experienced criticism, abuse and/or bullying than compassion at home, school, playtime, and work. Therefore, having issues with attachment is not unusual, making it one of the many factors that can contribute to relationship difficulties.
The ADHD Triangle of Tangled Emotions
When you put these three things together: emotional dysregulation, rejection-sensitivity, and disorganized attachment, the result is what I call the triangle of tangled emotions. I see this in practice so often and have experienced it myself. It goes like this:
Emotional dysregulation ignites rejection sensitivity, which fans the flames of insecure, avoidant or chaotic attachments in relationships. And then we keep running around the triangle.
With each trip around the triangle, the emotions get bigger; the mental narratives get louder, and the samskaras or patterns become more entrenched.
Once you gain a clear understanding of the triangle, you can disentangle yourself from your emotions and stories. With some work, you can find solutions to emotional dysregulation, RSD, and difficulty with attachments.
Radical self-acceptance (RSA) is the key to resolving RSD. Mindfulness and contemplative practices can dissolve emotional dysregulation. We can form secure attachments with awareness and learning emotional maturity. These things take work, for sure, but the good news is you don’t have to suffer in silence.
There is a way out.