Trauma and Identity
Growing up surrounded by art, creative expression has always been an outlet for my authentic voice. From musings in photography, filmmaking, and creative and non-fiction writing, to academic pursuits in clinical psychology and graphic design — I’ve learned how to communicate my beliefs and ideas through the unique lens of my lived experiences. But then there is the desire to share sides of myself that some would argue should be kept private — like what it feels like to be a human dealing with mental health issues, or to identify outside of society’s norms of sexuality and gender. As the phrase often goes, I had to figure out the hard way where the line is between sharing insights and stories with others and creating a digital trail of my life.
A little over two years ago, my therapist explained to me that a lot of the negative experiences I endured since childhood could be considered traumatic and that I had in fact been subject to emotional abuse. But most surprisingly, that adoption is also inherently traumatic. Raised with the belief that adoption is something to be celebrated in light of the adversity of the alternative life, the juxtaposition of reality is that it is still an incredibly significant act of neglect to a young child even if for the best reason. My story began when someone found me wrapped in a yellow blanket on the steps of a local Chinese government building.
In school, I was lucky to be one of several Asian adoptees in my grade and never felt the need to hide my identity as an adoptee. Brought up in predominantly white spaces, I only started to feel out of place as I grew more aware of race relations around the 2016 presidential election. Flash-forward to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as the #StopAsianHate movement grew in prominence, and I was able to truly look at how my identities intertwined. Only through self-selecting a sociology class in college called ‘Race and American Society’ did I even learn that Chinese immigrants have been targets of systemic racism in the United States. Passed in 1882 and repealed in 1943, the Chinese Exclusionary Act barred Chinese citizens, especially women, from entering the country and denied them the right to gain U.S. citizenship. Thankfully, the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act effectively re-opened U.S. borders to immigrants from formerly barred countries as a pivotal moment for immigration rights.
But my identity as an Asian-American adoptee only scratches the surface. Trauma is defined as “any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning”(American Psychological Association). As I previously wrote, I am a survivor of childhood emotional abuse. Covert in nature, it was unsurprising that many years of mental health treatment resulted in many different diagnoses trying to explain why I behaved the way I did. December 2021 changed that. After neuropsychological testing, it was revealed to me that I have Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and not in-fact co-occurring Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder as I had begun questioning. The simple answer? Both PTSD and ADHD affect the same areas of the brain.
According to an article by ADDitude — “Once traumatized, a person may eventually meet the criteria for ADHD, even though ADHD was not present in his or her early development. This is because PTSD rewires and affects the development of a growing brain, stunting the growth of areas that deal with emotional regulation, impulse control, and self-awareness. This is also how ADHD develops but for different reasons”(Crenshaw and Mayfield, 2022). The article then further clarifies that the experience of these conditions can change with time but are likely to have a life-long impact. For example, new situations or periods of high stress can exacerbate symptoms or cause new symptoms to develop, “leaving many trauma survivors struggling beyond childhood with symptoms that look like ADHD and vice versa”(Crenshaw and Mayfield, 2022). Furthermore, researchers in a 2021 joint study conducted by Boston University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs even found preliminary evidence to support the existence of a ‘neurocognitive’ subtype of PTSD identified by a pattern of issues with executive functioning and emotion regulation (Boston University School of Medicine, 2021).
So while I don’t have ADHD, executive dysfunction plays a large enough role in my everyday life that it seems accurate to say I struggle with similar tendencies and argue neurodivergence can be acquired.
Originally coined in 1977 by Judy Singer, a sociologist with autism, the term neurodiversity started as a paradigm shift toward viewing autism as a natural variation of how the brain works instead of a medical issue needing to be fixed. Years later, there is an increasing push for neurodivergence to encompass all mental health conditions irrespective of etiology (Resnick, 2023). But regardless of the perspective, the best way to learn about neurodiversity is to listen to neurodivergent voices and their experiences.
