Why Taking Care of Yourself Feels Wrong When You’ve Always Been “Too Much”
Shame Free Self Care
Taking care of ourselves is supposed to feel good, refreshing even.
But in reality, you’ve likely had an experience where you are finally resting, drew a boundary, or did something only for yourself and then immediately felt guilty and the need to explain yourself. Then you might even feel shame because you can’t even “do self-care right.”
This is a very common experience for ADHD folks and other neurodivergent brains. It’s your nervous system responding exactly the way someone does after years of being told, directly or indirectly, that their needs were too much, or a burden.
After years of being chronically misunderstood, self care doesn’t always make us feel good – instead, it brings up old messages about being too needy, too intense, too inconvenient, etc. Your nervous system is protecting yourself.
This blog isn’t about convincing you to love yourself more. It’s about understanding where those uncomfortable feelings are coming from and how to begin being kind to yourself without shame, pressure, or guilt.
How “Too Much” Becomes A Core Belief
You didn’t wake up one day and decide you were “too much.”
Believing this is formed slowly, through repetition. By the time we reach adulthood, we have been told exponentially more often than our neurotypical peers how “wrong” we are. It looks like eye rolls when we are curious.
It looks like being told that you are talking too much, feeling too deeply, or “over-reacting.” Years of being told that needing support or flexibility is a burden. It looks like being compared to siblings, friends, other students in school.
Over time, those moments become tapes that we play over and over in our heads until they feel like fact. So you learn to mask. You learn to moderate your responses, minimizing your needs, shrink your voice, and managing how much of yourself you allow to show to others.
What If…..the problem isn’t that you are too much, but that your needs weren’t consistently met with safety or care. Your nervous system learns a veary particular lesson – taking up space isn’t always safe.
It’s a lesson that gets reinforced as we go through elementary school, middle school, high school, and into adulthood. We bring the feeling of being too much into relationships, our work places, and yes – even into our own self-care.
Because self-care asks you to notice and respond to your needs with safety and care. That can feel deeply wrong when you’ve spent years learning that you are the problem.
The Lie That Care Has To Be Earned
Many of us learned along the way that care is conditional. Rest is earned after you’ve been productive enough. Compassion is earned if you’re not asking too much, too often, or at the right time.
What an exhausting loop.
Our executive function is already impaired and causes struggles. This can cause emotions to be louder, or energy to be inconsistent. It can feel like you are constantly falling short of some invisible bar qualifies you to basic care.
Because of this we learn that care is something we should delay, deny, or bargain for. This is a belief that is reinforced by school systems, work culture, and even our parents. It gets reinforced when support is offered reluctantly.
Our brains learn that it’s up to us to earn being “okay.” But – care is not a reward for functioning well. It is necessary to be able to function at all, or at least at our best. We don’t need to earn rest or justify our needs. When “care” is treated as something you have to earn – it arrives too late. Usually after burnout or shutdown have already begun to take hold.
Shame-free self care starts with believing that you are allowed to receive support BEFORE things fall apart.
What Shame-Free Self Care Actually Looks Like
Here are a few other challenges that your teen with ADHD may have when it comes to career exploration.For most of us, shame-free self care doesn’t look like bubble baths, extensive skin care routines, or spa dates. Instead, it can look quiet, ordinary, human.
It might look like
- saying no without guilt
- picking the easier option without explanation
- canceling plans and not making up a story
- letting something be “good enough” without having the urge to fix it
- picking comfort over style
It isn’t about doing more for yourself more often. It’s about doing less harm to yourself in moments when you are already stretched thin.
It’s about notcing what’s going on in your body and brain and what will help your nervous system settle. It’s not about what makes you more palatable to others.
It’s not about making yourself more impressive or productive. And you definitely don’t have to earn it.
You were never, ever too much. Not when you were six, and not today.
The “problem” was never about your needs. It was about getting safe support around them consistently.
Instead of asking yourself what you can or should do for self care, try asking something more like, “What support do I need right now without making myself smaller?”
Because self-care doesn’t have to be earned and your needs do not have to be minimized to be valid.