In this vulnerable and eye-opening conversation, ADHD-ish host Diann Wingert sits down with fellow ADHD coach, Brooke Schnittman, to explore the lasting impact of bullying for those of us with ADHD, drawing from her own lived experience and groundbreaking research.
One of the most surprising insights? While bullying trends downward in the general population as we age, it barely drops for those with ADHD, showing up in new and often subtle forms throughout adulthood.
What starts as name-calling and exclusion on the playground can morph into chronic criticism, micromanagement, gaslighting, and professional exclusion in adulthood. This constant “othering” can erode confidence and reinforce masking, people-pleasing, and overachievement as survival strategies.
Here are 4 key takeaways for anyone navigating ADHD (or supporting neurodivergent folks):
What makes it bullying? Repetitive pattern - Power imbalance - Harm
Bullying rarely ends with childhood: For adults with ADHD, bullying simply morphs. Physical teasing and exclusion may become workplace micromanagement, social exclusion, and subtle undermining.
The harm goes beyond “hurt feelings.” Chronic criticism and exclusion keep the brain’s stress system on high alert, triggering anxiety, imposter syndrome, burnout, and even making executive dysfunction worse.
Self-acceptance + community are critical. When we name bullying for what it is and seek out supportive communities, we can start to untangle shame and build resilience. As Brooke notes: “We were never too much. We were exactly who we were meant to be, just waiting for a world that could understand us.”
About Brooke Schnittman, MA, PCC, BCC:
Brooke Schnittman is an ADHD coach, educator, and advocate for adults with ADHD. With years of working directly with individuals and families, she noticed an alarming pattern: bullying is not only common in the lives of people with ADHD but is also a neglected topic in ADHD research and support. Brooke’s recent pioneering survey on adult ADHD and bullying—the first of its kind—has started an essential conversation about the legacy of bullying, how it changes form over time, and how those affected can heal and thrive
Diann Wingert brings decades of experience as a psychotherapist and serial business owner, and is now a sought-after coach to entrepreneurs with ADHD traits. Her style is direct, strategic, and always honest—peppered with the insight of someone who lives and breathes the neurodivergent experience.
If conversations like this one are one of the reasons you keep coming back to ADHD-ish, the best way to let me know is to leave a review on Apple or Spotify. Here’s the link to make it happen.
H: I'm honestly shocked and surprised and more than a little sad about it because based on what we are about to get into, including your own personal lived experience, most kids with ADHD get bullied. And that bullying doesn't go away once they become grownups. It continues in a variety of forms and has a lot of effects on how they feel and how they function. Where shall we start?
G: So in the general population, like 10 to 20% of people are bullied in childhood, and then it's reduced in half when they become adults. The research out there that I had seen before I did my own survey was that 47% of children with ADHD get bullied, so that's more than half, right? So I was curious about adults because my story is very ingrained in this. Unfortunately, I was bullied for almost all of my life.
And from ages 8 to 35, I was bullied. I was spit on, I had, you know, nails dug into me, emotionally abused, physically abused. I assumed I was too sensitive, right? Too intense, too disorganized, too much but I didn't connect it to ADHD because I didn't fully understand my own wiring at the time, and I also didn't know I had ADHD. So not only was I bullied by children, I was bullied by teachers. And then when I moved into the professional realm, I was also bullied professionally.
So to me, I always thought that there was something wrong with me internally like it was a condition of me. I went to therapy on and off my whole life. I got diagnosed with anxiety and I would talk about the anxious thoughts even more, but I didn't really have the tools or know what was going on with my brain. So I further internalized everything.
H: Of course.
G: Yeah. Yeah. So of course, because I further internalized it, then I got more anxious, stressed, and then at one point I was diagnosed with low-grade depression. So yeah, I just didn't have the awareness. So as I began working with adults with ADHD and even within my own ADHD family, I started hearing the same patterns over and over again. Different careers, different family systems, different personalities, but the same thread of chronic criticism, exclusion, being misunderstood or subtly undermined. So it started feeling to me like it was systemic.
So I launched this survey in:
H: Now, bullying is a term that obviously everyone has heard, but so many of us, because we think we're the problem, don't recognize or label what we're experiencing as bullying either in childhood or adulthood. And for some people listening now, they may think, yeah, I have ADHD. Yeah, I had some challenges in childhood. Was I bullied? I don't know. So let's talk about what kinds of, and obviously the spitting and poking you with nails and name-calling and all that. I think almost anyone can agree, yeah, it sounds like bullying to me. But what are some of the more subtle forms that those of us with ADHD experience starting in childhood that are a direct result of our ADHD traits?
G: Yeah. So you mentioned what happened to me in childhood, which was very overt, so it was obvious, right? Like, that you can't not see someone digging their nails into you, right? That's obviously bullying. But then in childhood, I know you asked me about more covert, but we see more covert-like bullying in adulthood. So you hit the nail on the head, you said bullying still exists, but it changes forms. So it's not as obvious in adulthood in many of the cases. So what is bullying? First of all, ADHD or not, bullying is repeated targeted behavior and it involves a power imbalance and causes harm where the person being targeted has difficulty defending themselves.
So there has to be 3 core elements, there has to be repetition. So it's not a one-time conflict or bad interaction or coercion. It has to happen over time or as a pattern. So examples are ongoing criticism, repeated exclusion, chronic jokes at someone's expense, insistent undermining. And then in adulthood, micromanagement, consistent micromanagement. There's also a power imbalance, that second piece that I mentioned, which is one person or a group where they have more power than the victim so this in either case could be a teacher.
Unfortunately, I've been bullied by my teacher in fourth grade. Happy to share stories, would rather not, but I am happy to. Also by parents, by your boss as an adult. There's social power, which is status, popularity, group dynamics, emotional leverage, dependency, manipulation. We know that that happens very often with ADHD where we become dependent and we get manipulated and gaslighted easily or in a very neurodivergent case, there's systemic advantage.
So the neurotypical norms compared to the neurodivergent traits. So that imbalance makes it really hard for the target to stop the behavior. And then the third thing is harm so the behavior causes emotional, physical, psychological, social, professional harm, and the intent doesn't matter because it's really about the impact.
H: Okay. So I have a follow-up question for that because this is like, okay, then that bullying is the persistence, it is the pattern, it is the power imbalance, and there has to be harm. And the harm is not necessarily intended, although most cases it is. It's harm as experienced by the victim.
G: The victim.
H: Yeah. With respect to the power imbalance, does that mean when there are peers, school-age kids, same grade, same age, there technically isn't a power imbalance there? One's not an adult and the other is a child. So if the kids are in the same age group, is there a power imbalance simply because…
G: Yes, a 100% social, social power.
H: Social power. Okay.
G: So look, we all know who the popular kids were in school, right?
H: Sure did. Everybody knew it.
G: We don't know how they became popular. They just called them popular, and one day they were the popular kids, right? So that is what we're talking about as far as if kids are the same age, status, popularity, even emotional leverage. Like, if someone manipulates you, they you can be manipulated with someone the same age and also, you have your neurotypical friends who don't understand neurodivergent traits because perhaps they weren't informed about it.
We know invisible disabilities, you can't see them most of the time, especially in women when they're masking. And very often as a child with ADHD, we didn't know we had ADHD, so we gaslit ourselves, right? And we tried to fit into the neurotypical ways, but it didn't make sense because that's not who we were to the core.
H: Yeah, I'm thinking back, and we're not gonna go down the rabbit hole of comparing stories, but I'm just thinking, you know, and I've shared this on the podcast before, about being so eager to answer questions in class because things were moving too slow for me and I was bored AF. So as soon as I knew what question the teacher was answering, my hand would shoot up in the air because, you know, that's how I was keeping myself stimulated and interested. And she said to me, Diann, put your hand down, let's give others a chance. And I literally felt, I just felt the rush of blood to my face. I was so ashamed.
G: So you never called out again or raised your hand?
H: Well, I did, unfortunately, you know, kids were laughing and stuff. But I'm just thinking how many people are bullied by teachers, by parents, by babysitters, by grandparents, and sadly, and I'm sure you heard this in your survey by parents who had ADHD as well, whether they knew it or not.
G: Yep. Yep.
H: Just like the irony.
G: Yeah. And going back to your teacher's story, I guess I'll share mine while we're at it. In 4th grade, I was new to the public school system, and I was in private school. My dad owned a school growing up, so I went to his school, and then my neighborhood friends went to the public school. So for so long, I wanted to be in with them because I only saw them during camp or, you know, on the weekends, whatever. So I begged him to go to public school. Finally, he said, okay, let's do it. Fourth grade, middle of elementary school. So first day, they all hid at the bus stop. He told me this, I don't even remember this part. So none of them…
H: The other kids hid from you at the bus stop?
G: Correct. First day, fourth grade school, they hid at the bus stop so I couldn't see them. But in 4th grade, fast forward to the teacher situation, I tried so hard to fit in to the point where I just shrunk because I would call out or I'd raise my hand or I'd go up to the desk because that's what I thought you could do. I did it in private school, but I also didn't realize it was a part of my impulsivity. And I remember doing everything I could to keep up academically, socially, emotionally.
And one time, this is just an example I studied so hard for a spelling test. I was the only one who got a perfect score on the spelling test, but she decided on that day that she was going to take 20 points off my test, and it's a new rule because I didn't put my name on it. So I got an 80 on the test. New rule, and she announced it to the class, Brooke didn't put her name on the test.
H: Oh, God help me.
G: Yep. And now if you moving forward don't put your name on the test, on the spelling test, you are going to get your but new rule. Again, it wasn't the beginning of fourth grade.
H: They all got warned.
G: Correct.
H: You had it applied retroactively.
G: Correct, correct. There were many more incidents of this, and she knew who the popular kids were. Yeah, so I didn't have that support in 4th grade. So I will always remember her. I won't mention her name, but her name is ingrained in me.
H: No doubt. You know what I'm reminded of, Brooke, is that you've probably had people tell you, wow, I admire you so much. You're so resilient and I've heard that plenty too. And I think, oh honey, if you had any idea how I earned that. I mean, you earn your resilience by getting knocked down 100 times and getting up 101. And it's, I don't recommend it, it's nice to be resilient. It sucks ass that you have to be bullied to get there.
G: It sucks ass and also, your nervous system still suffers the consequences. So I know you know this, you know, your past career was psychology, and I dissociated for so long, just tried to move forward in whatever life period I was to just keep up and try to fit in. And none of my friends as adults knew that I was bullied for the majority of my life because I never spoke about it.
H: Yeah.
G: Now that I'm opening the wounds again to the world about this story, it is equally as raw. I've done EMDR, IFS, all of the things. So like, resiliency is still there, but it doesn't mean it hurts any less.
H: I think that's a really important point to make because as two ADHD coaches who also have ADHD and are managing our nervous systems at all times while helping other people do the same, you get better at these things, but they never go away. And if your life gets suddenly disrupted, you can very easily lose temporarily the skill that you've developed in managing all these things and literally feel like you're resetting the clock back to when you had no knowledge and no skills.
G: Yeah, the biggest lie that I used to tell myself, I definitely gaslit myself but the biggest lie I used to tell myself was that if I didn't feel then I'm okay. If I didn't feel upset, if I didn't feel hurt, then I was fixed.
H: Yes.
G: So then once I started feeling again, I was like, oh my God, I've regressed. Like, what the heck? Like, I just would rather dissociate. But no, you cannot heal, you cannot work on yourself unless you feel.
H: You cannot heal what you cannot feel. I'm really glad that you brought up the dissociation, Brooke, because we're gonna unpack some other things that folks talk about quite a bit: the masking, the hiding, the shrinking, the fading, the rejection sensitivity, all the ways we try to make ourselves more tolerable, more acceptable, or at least a little bit less annoying and obnoxious so that people don't target us. But disassociation is probably on the menu for quite a few people who are experiencing such acute emotional pain that that's their most potent survival strategy. You just literally opt out and go to your safe place in your head while appearing to be present to everyone else because it's the safest and sanest thing you could possibly do in the moment.
G: Yep, yep. And it worked, yeah, it had to work. So, it's not necessarily like dissociation definitely has its place and its time, and I still dissociate now. Like you said, it's a survival mechanism, luckily I dissociate less, but yes, what else is there when you are constantly bombarded by trauma?
H: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people talk about dissociation as dysfunctional. Oh, I think it's incredibly functional. Now, when it becomes dysfunctional is when we become overly reliant on it so that nothing else helps.
G: Yeah.
H: Let's talk about some of the things that are much more frequently discussed, the masking and the rejection sensitivity and burnout because it, all you're going to have to do, and people with ADHD are really good at recognizing patterns and connecting dots. To me, it's like you start with bullying, you learn to mask, your rejection sensitivity is evidence that your nervous system still operates and it's often on high alert and the inevitable result in addition to acquiring those extra diagnoses of anxiety and depression on your way to finding out you have ADHD. My story as well. There's no way you're not going to eventually burn out oh, it's inevitable.
G: Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, okay so that's an amazing question and it hits nervous system, my nervous system right now as well. But chronic bullying keeps our brain in threat mode, right? Freeze, fight, fight, fawn, fib so when our nervous system…
H: Wait a minute, hold on, hold on, hold on. there's another F, girl, I collect Fs, okay? I love that. I love me some F,
G: But you don't give an F.
H: So, well, that's true.
G: You just collect them, you don't give them.
H: No, no, no, I have a whole jar of Fs, in case I run out. No, it's like trauma response is it used to be originally back in the day, fight or flight. Then some folks realized, oh, that's not neither one is an option so I'll freeze. And when that's not an option, fawn can at least help me stay safe. But girl, you just added a fifth and you said fib, which so many of ADHD kids especially do.
H: And young adults. Come on now.
G: And adults, of course but as a parent and as a former special ed teacher, right, you know, like people I used to take offense to lying, but I do know where it comes from. That was sometimes my trauma response, but mostly it was freeze or fawn or flight. When I had a car, my friends called me MIA all the time. But anyway, seriously, I would just like jump from group to group. Oh my gosh, I couldn't get too close with anyone. I was just playing tennis with my tennis friends, basketball with my basketball friends, and they were all surface-level relationships. And I had my core friends, and I had a group of friends who ditched me and excluded me because they wanted to become friends with my ex-boyfriend, who was the popular kid.
And right, so I just jumped from group to group, that was my life. But back to your question, when your nervous system is scanning all the time for criticism, rejection, we know that we don't feel safe and our executive function suffers. And when that happens, you can't learn in school and then think about what happens from an adult perspective too. If you're in the workplace and you don't feel safe, and then your boss is talking to you and, you know, you already are having your executive function issues of working memory or sustained attention.
And then you don't feel safe, so your executive function's literally shut down. Well, then your motivation drops, then your confidence erodes, and then follow-through becomes so much harder and that's because your system is completely overloaded. So you talk about hypervigilance with ADHD and noticing everything. Well, it's because we're so freaking hypervigilant.
H: Yeah, you're right. We do notice everything because we live deathly afraid that we're going to forget something, or at least we're going to forget the most important thing, or who said it to us, or what we promised to do and it's honestly, we're terrorizing ourselves. And always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
G: Always. It's exhausting.
H: Really, really exhausting. But I have a really important question for you. Because you've studied this, you, you didn't just do the survey and when I say just, I'm not minimizing it. I think it was fucking awesome that you did, especially when I'm like, why hasn't anyone else done this for God's sake? But you also did the deep dive face plant follow your curiosity, classic ADHD of studying all the research on bullying apart from ADHD. What I find myself wondering, Brooke, is a lot of the things you've been talking about, like the superficial friend groups and moving from one group to the other, and me, absolutely true of me, and living in fear of making a mistake, doing the wrong thing, forgetting the thing, all those things.
How much of those do you think are experiences of people with ADHD who weren't bullied? Like, I want to get to the, like, the nuance, the extra layer of struggle. Is it simply that not simply is it that people who grow up with ADHD have all of these overactive nervous system, impaired executive functioning, intensity, forgetfulness, all the those things do damage to how we feel and how we function, period. Help me understand the nuance of what bullying adds to the mix. Does it make masking more permanent? Does it make rejection sensitivity more intense? Does it have a bigger impact on our ability to be employed? Like, help me understand that.
G: Yeah, so let's start at childhood. So when ADHD children are corrected by adults, for instance, they might hear things like, stop talking, pay attention, why can't you sit still, right? Like, raise your hand, the peers then absorb that messaging right? And if a teacher constantly singles out a child, then the other kids may see that child as the problem child. And then that label can legitimize not really, but it legitimizes the bullying to the other children. So now you're not only walking around with a label of ADHD if you happen to know you have ADHD, but now you're walking around as I'm the problem.
H: Yes.
G: And so when we outwardly maybe took up more space than our peers because maybe we were louder, more impulsive, or, you know, raising our hands more than other kids, now we're shrinking. We have the biggest fear of taking up space. I know that that was very much a part of my story like, I did not even want to be named. I didn't want to be I didn't want to be noticed. If I just did that, then there would be no problem.
H: Yes.
G: So because of that, in childhood, you get socially stunted. Because if you don't communicate and have friends, then how do you learn social skills? You don't, right? We and you mentioned nuances, right? We already miss social cues in the neurodivergent population, and now we have no practice. And then we have the rejection sensitivity that comes into play where after we say one thing I know I still do it to this day, we're replaying the conversation over months later. Why the heck did I say that, right? So in childhood it looks like shrinking. In adulthood it could look like shrinking, but it also looks like overworking as adults. Trying to hide any bit of not being equal playing field or being different.
So for me, it looked like showing up when the assistant principal came in in the morning and leaving with the custodians every day so I could take that extra time and get my lesson plans in and be creative and be the best teacher, because that's all I was able to identify with. And if people gave me positive reinforcement for how hard I worked, then that just fueled the fire even more. Like, okay, this is how I identify, this is the one good thing I have going on. That's what I am. I am an overachiever and I'm a hard worker. I can't lose that.
H: At least I can do that. Now, I may not have friends.
G: Right, I don't have a dating life. I don't have substantial relationships, but I can outwork anyone. Yeah.
H: I don't think I've ever heard anybody make that connection before, Brooke, and the connection between being othered with or without bullying, but absolutely with bullying, we are desperately searching for something that we can be good at that is obvious to everyone around us. And in the overworking, overcompensating scenario you've just described, it's not necessarily that we're better at the job than anyone else. It's that no one works harder to be good enough at it. And no one can take that from you because they all see that when they come in, you were already there on your third cup of coffee. And when they leave, you're still there, burdened like a tick and yeah, then they talk shit about you.
G: Oh, hey, brown-noser, people-pleaser. I don't remember when.
H: Oh, I bet you spent it here, you know.
G: But meanwhile, they all took my lesson plans, right because why not, right? Here, here you go, here's like the people-pleasing. Oh, you, you're rolling in at the time school starts, here's the lesson plan for you today. I remember when I left a school district that I really liked to get an assistant director of special education job in a different district. My boss congratulated me at the final meeting and said, I emailed Brooke at 2:00 AM and she emailed me back at 2:03 AM. That's how hard of a worker she is, it was because I couldn't sleep.
H: But damn, you know what you're reminding me is that in all the ways that we learn to mask and hide and shrink, that's on the minimizing side. On the maximizing side, the overworking, the overcompensating, the people pleasing, the doing things for other people that they could just as well for themselves, but at least they can't hate on us because we've ingratiated ourselves to them to some degree. All of that stuff is very, I don't want to say addicting, very habit-forming.
G: Yes.
H: And really hard once you realize, well, this is dysfunctional and I don't have a life. And so what if I'm the best person here, I'm getting paid exactly the same as the rest of these losers. I mean, I imagine it's really, really hard to what do you mean? What am I saying? Imagine? I know. I know how hard it is to wean yourself off of this. Even when you get your ADHD diagnosis, you understand the origin of these traits, you understand the connection with the bullying, and you're like, oh, no fucking wonder I'm this overachiever, overcompensating, but to be able to then start to dismantle that and unlearn that, I mean, that is, that's some serious work.
G: It is serious work and, you know, I thought I had it all together when I was single and I first became an ADHD coach and had my structure, had my tennis, had my scheduled clients, built a team, right? I was like, yep, I got this ADHD thing figured out. But just kidding, met my husband, met my two stepsons who all got diagnosed with ADHD, had a toddler. Now I have I'm almost 42, so you can imagine what's going on in my body. Lack of sleep, hormones, right?
So it's like, oh, just kidding, you think you have this figured out, but now you need to relearn everything or do it differently. So, with the changes of ADHD progress, you can see the maladaptive behaviors coming out again, and you can catch yourself and be like, oh, wait a second, I'm unmasking, but this behavior isn't serving me. But you can only do that, and we can only grow and evolve in our ADHD if we reflect which is, you know, something that we typically aren't ingrained in doing so.
H: Well, we would much prefer to be looking at the windshield and the road ahead rather than the rearview mirror and the road behind, because usually thinking back in the past, it's not like, oh, I did all these amazing things. It's like, oh, it would have been nice to have known I had ADHD before I made that decision, or, oh, if only I hadn't said, did, whatever. So I think that's why I feel so strongly about embracing radical self-acceptance before you start digging into your self-awareness, because that can be quite treacherous. And you have to know going in, it has to be safe to learn more about yourself through the ADHD lens.
Or you just won't do it. It's one of the reasons why a lot of people, they know they're ADHD, but they're not going to get diagnosed because they don't want it to be official because then it's, they're going to live up or down to whatever preconceived notions they have that are associated with the condition. And if they've been bullied, can you really blame them for wanting to avoid anything that is going to trigger old trauma.
G: Oh a 100%. For me, and I see that this a lot with my clients too, the talk therapy didn't work. It made me more anxious, we already talked about that. When I got coached, I didn't even know I had ADHD, but I was getting coaching tools to help me execute things over a long period of time. I had community. I did have some level of self-awareness. I was able to separate facts from stories.
So I learned all the basic tools. And that was the first time that I had a bit of confidence that, oh my God, I can do this. There are people who like me. I can move forward. I can see a path. I can execute things over a long period of time. And it wasn't until that and then I could go back and do the deeper work, to your point, of doing IFS, EMDR, and going deep. And I would definitely agree, when someone's in chaos or survival mode, don't ask why you're doing something. Just do micro actions, do 1% action, get yourself moving forward, start building momentum, start feeling confident, and then go back and do the deeper work.
H: Absolutely. I want to know from your survey, was there anything that the people who filled it out shared with you that surprised you? Because you have, by that time, you'd done a lot of your own research, you have all your lived experience to inform you. What was surprising about the results of the research? What did people share with you that you were like, huh, I didn't expect that?
G: Okay, so what surprised me the most was that in the general and I think I said this before but that in the general population, bullying decreases by 50%. So it goes from 20% to 10% and in the ADHD population, I saw that it went from 90% to 82%. And out of the people who filled out this survey, there were 162 people, there were 70% who were bullied both in childhood and adulthood. And on top of so bullying did not go away, it just changed forms again.
But also on top of that, 63% of the adults who got bullied in this survey were seeing this in the workplace, and then 54% was in relationships. So I've had people ask me like, oh, there's bullying, cyberbullying everywhere, right? Like, you know, I'm sure that's the highest number that you see, no, it wasn't. The people who filled out this survey were getting bullied in other places, and that is what they identify their bullying in. So again, 63% in the workplace, 54% in relationships, and only 14.2% online as adults.
H: This resonates with my lived experience and with the lived experience of the clients I've worked with over many, many years. Initially as a psychotherapist working with adults with ADHD, and in the last decade as a business coach working with entrepreneurs with ADHD. I think it's frankly one of the reasons why, one of the many reasons why folks with ADHD tend to become self-employed because the workplace is inhospitable for folks who are neurodivergent.
G: Yep. So the data out there, I don't know if it's changed, but the latest that I heard was 30% of percent of entrepreneurs have ADHD, but I would assume it's over 50% because every time I go into a room of entrepreneurs and I say what I do, more than half of them raise their hands saying, "Oh, I have ADHD.", yeah.
H: Yep. There are a lot of different research reports some say as low as 30%, I've seen as high as 60%. But since the pandemic in particular, and the fact that people can work exclusively online, they don't have to have a brick and mortar. I definitely think the number's trending up. I would agree with you.
G: Yeah. You feel in the workplace, you had mentioned the fact that we become entrepreneurs so much because it's literally suffocating sometimes to be in the workplace, especially in a workplace where A, you don't understand you have ADHD, so other people don't, or B, you do understand you have ADHD, but other people don't understand ADHD or don't care to really treat you the way that you should be treated. So then, you know, in the workplace, we're looking at micromanagement, being labeled too much, gaslighting, social exclusion. I heard from several people in the survey that they were not invited to gatherings in the workplace.
And this is not just like going to the bar, this is like professional gatherings they were not invited. So this exclusion continued in the workplace and again, if you don't feel safe, well, okay, you're not going to perform and then your ADHD symptoms are just going to be exacerbated and there really is no hope, right? You could have all of the tools and coaching in the world, but there are just some environments that you literally need to exit because you are driving yourself into the wall. And then, you know, there's workplaces where they undermine credibility. It's subtle, it's professional, it's intimate. So when the difference very often isn't understood, then it gets corrected and when it doesn't change, then it gets punished.
H: Oh. That's heavy. We can't end this interview on a heavy note.
G: No, no, no, no, no, no.
H: We have to have some good news because you are a success story in turning, not maybe not turning around your bullying, but like eventually coming to the point where you realized, oh yes, I am different. And that attracted the wrong kind of attention to me and the adults in the environment did not address it in a responsible way and it continued. And I internalized it and it led to anxiety, depression, dissociation, and so on and so forth. Your ADHD diagnosis obviously had a domino effect. Talking to other people about their experience of bullying, doing the survey, doing the research.
Where do we take all of this and go from here to, for our own personal healing, for our own personal understanding, and maybe some thoughts about because this is not just an individual problem or even a problem for neurodivergent people. It is this, we're talking about the educational system. We are talking about the modern workplace and we are talking about the behavior that is tolerated by far too many people when it's directed towards someone who is not like them.
G: Yeah, well, so of course there's lots of tools, but awareness, truly awareness, transforms everything. So when we name what happens, the shame loosens its grip, and then when we find community the isolation fades. Dr. Dodson at the ADHD conference talked about third-grade ADHD-ers, that 70% of them don't have a reciprocal friend. Well, community is everything, Dr. Hallowell says it himself, right?
We know that trauma survivors or people in war, as long as they have a community not as long, but when they have a community, it can change everything. So when we see ADHD not only as a flaw but as a framework, we can really reclaim our dignity. So healing or work doesn't and you and I have spoken about this it doesn't erase the past, but at least it reframes it. And for some, that means revisiting painful memories but with new understanding. And for others, it's meant learning to set boundaries and saying no, which is so hard with ADHD, I know.
H: Yes.
G: But setting those boundaries and saying no without guilt can change everything. It can feel really uncomfortable at first, but when we get uncomfortable or comfortable with uncomfortable, things can change. So for all, it meant realizing that they were never the problem.
H: Yes, realizing that you were never the problem. Is probably the first most important realization to beginning to change things and beginning to realize that, yes, even though you may be able to have tools, you may be able to heal, you may be able to create boundaries and push back and all that. But what's also true is when we know better, we can do better. And sometimes that doing better means removing ourselves from a situation that we could cope with, but choose not to as an act of honoring our self-acceptance. I cannot thrive here, therefore I will remove myself from the situation.
G: Yeah, that's okay, it's not a sign of failure. It's a sign of strength because if you can calm your nervous system and be in a place that honors your strengths and honors your passions and honors your values, you can thrive. And to your point, we're always waiting for the shoe to drop. But if we can stop trying to push through our weaknesses and start living in our strengths, our whole life can change. And I just want to share one quote from the survey that really speaks to what we were just saying, if that's okay.
H: I'd love that. Yes, of course.
G: Okay. So one participant wrote, we were never too much. We were exactly who we were meant to be. Just waiting for a world that could understand us.
H: I want to make that into a poster and a t-shirt and have it printed on my toilet paper so I can see it again and again and again.
G: Write it on your forehead.
H: I love that. Oh, maybe a tattoo. Yes.
G: Yeah. Yeah. It gives you the chills, right?
H: Yeah.
G: I don't even remember what I was going to say because to your point, this really does hit a nerve and like disrupts my nervous system slightly. But the reason why I did this survey is because even though it's painful to talk about what happened and continue to rip off the Band-Aid, I know, and the survey results showed it, that so many of us, even in adulthood, are dealing with bullying and victimization today. So I hope that this lands with you. You can recognize if you are being bullied by some of the examples that we shared. And if you are and you just know that this environment is not going to work with all the help and all the tools, it's okay if you can exit.
H: Yeah. I think sometimes we just need that permission. It's okay to be different and it's okay to do different things. And if what you're doing now is not working for your nervous system, maybe coping is not the solution. Maybe honoring your need to thrive is.
