Imposter Syndrome

So when I first got my ADHD diagnosis there were various reactions from my friends and partner. My family members were mixed, with me knowing those closest tried hard to understand but when it came to mental health they felt out of their depth. One of the hardest things about getting diagnosed later in life is where you just feel fake. You still feel like you are making it up. This is down to the fact that throughout your life you were told that what you were doing was wrong, how your were was odd and you shouldn’t feel the way you did, you shouldn’t take things to heart and be so oversensitive. You get to a point, where because you’ve compensated so long for living up to societal norms and standards and believed all the ‘wrongness’ you were told you had, the validation from a diagnosis doesn’t seem real. I almost felt like questioning the psychiatrist and saying “Are you sure, definitely sure, that I have got this? Are you positive from all the things I’ve told you? Are you sure I’ve got this, as other people just don’t think I have? The people that are close to me think I am making it up and say that obviously I’m not that bad because I’ve coped well enough so far”

This is something that’s very toxic. It’s quite hard to start dragging yourself out of the kind of place where you’ve always hidden parts of yourself because they were laughed at or they were ‘odd’ and you were told off for them. It’s like when you’re a child and you bump your head and your parents say “oh don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt that much”. Well actually it really fucking does! People are telling you things as you are growing up, as you are developing, that go against what you feel, what you see and what you experience. And you come to be very untrustworthy of the world and a lot of the people in it. You are in constant fight and flight, to you this is the norm because shifting into this gear is the by-product of how you have been taught not to trust yourself. It can be damaging in the fact you are constantly seeking validation and can attract relationships with people who take advantage of what is perceived as a ‘naive nature’ pre -diagnosis. Narcissists and co-dependency are a biggie.

Life dictates you have to join in with functioning in a working environment. It can be quite the struggle to be able to be earning a good wage when the way that you are, the way that you learn, the way that you present yourself, is very different compared to Neurotypicals. So there’s this underlying impostor syndrome. I had it recently as I literally, literally got my Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis this week and I had this dire sinking feeling in my stomach. My head was firing off all kinds of negativity going, ‘is it true? How do you know I’m not lying. Did I lie to be able to get this diagnosis? Have I managed to fool the Psychiatrist and set everything up for them to give me this diagnosis?’. Seriously, my head dialogue can be the biggest twat out sometimes.