Help Understanding ADHD Brains - Handling Shame and Regret After Acting Impulsively
Today has been really hard and I can really use support from this group. My son is almost 14 with inattentive/impulsive ADHD and also some social anxiety and depression.
The social anxiety is 75% better with medication. The depression is new within the last year and oddly not helped by his SSRI, so we added a second medication which has helped him feel much better. He still has days he feels sad, but most days goes through the motions of daily life and says he’s fine and feels good. I challenge him on that sometimes and he really means it when he says he’s good.
The trouble is that he makes stupid, impulsive decisions and then goes into a very intense spiral of shame, regret and self hatred. It’s scary and when this has happened, he’s hurt himself a handful of times. The harm has been minor (compared to what a lot of other struggling teens self-inflict. Nothing about this is at all ok and we know that). Mainly scratching his arm with a sharp object, but not ever actually cutting himself. He admitted doing this back in the fall and it has improved a lot, only happening twice since then.
He got in trouble at school today for stealing something from another students locker. We are of course unbelievably upset he did this, but first and foremost knew we needed to support his safety and put our anger to the side. He told us he didn’t know why he did it, he did it without thinking and that he was feeling sad yesterday. When school confronted him about it, he completely fell apart and asked to go to the bathroom where he texted me saying he didn’t feel safe with himself. I told him to go to the nurse right away (in his safety plan) and we called school to make sure they could find him so he’s not left alone and got there as fast as we could. He had scratched him arm up with a pencil while he was writing the apology letter they asked him to write to the other student in the principals office. School did a safety evaluation and let him come home with us.
Now we’re home and while what happened is new and obviously extremely upsetting, I’m just trying to figure out where to go from here and if anyone else’s ADHD child gets completely buried in a shame spiral after making a really bad decision. How do you help them move past the worst of it and once they are stable, help them realize how wrong the action was? We can’t do that right now as he comes out of this terrible place. In that moment he felt he ruined everything forever for himself. The school counselor talked to him about how this one mistake doesn’t define who he is but I don’t think he can see that when he spirals.
How do we help him navigate this and do our job as parents to make sure he knows what he did was very wrong? Thank you for any thoughts you can offer.