My mother has a partially shame based operating system. She uses self shame as a motivational tool that increases her executive function, e.g. she manages to diet by responding to the part of her that tells her to eat chocolate with shame for wanting chocolate. She avoids the chocolate and goes on with her life.

She tried to install that same operating system in me. Due to my shame sensitivity it paralyzed me and left me unable to function. Instead I would spiral in shame and self hatred for my inability to do what she wanted me to do, even though I wanted to do it too.

My system actually works pretty well with love as motivation instead of shame. It just took me 15 years of intensive commitment to inner work to unravel the shame.

there’s also RSD (rejection sensitivity dysphoria) that can affect some but not all neurodivergent people - it’s an extreme emotional (for some even so bad it feels physical) reactions to real or perceived rejection. if anyone reading ever felt like or been told they are “overtly sensitive” or “overreacting” after something not that bad happened or was said to you - read up on RSD, it sucks hard but it’s comforting to know you’re not alone

Sure. Shame is one of the basic emotions. The emotions are firmware build into the mammalian brain to motivate survival and reproduction. They motivate without deliberate thought by inducing pleasure or pain which the organism either seeks more of or flinches away from. Fear is a flinching away from, whereas anger is a moving towards (with intent to destroy). Shame is a hard stop. it’s function, along with surprise, is to create a hard stop of ongoing behaviors. It is regarded as the most painful of the basic emotions.

The emotions arise from the brainstorm and midbrain/sub-cortical parts of the brain, the brain’s basement if you will. In contrast we also have the cortical part of the brain, living in the attic, and it does a different sort of processing, being the seat of language and symbolic processing.

The cortex is the part of the brain that can represent and model aspects of the world and then run “what-if” scenarios to determine what the best course of action might be. For instance, one might model what will people around me do if I express my feelings in a very loud and obvious way -> they won’t like it!, and from this anticipation they might instruct themselves to inhibit the extent of the emotional expression.

Executive Function refers to exactly that function of the cortex that enables behavioral inhibition to happen, and that is what is impaired in ADHD. People with executive dysfunction have difficulty inhibiting socially inappropriate behaviors like expressing too much emotion, and they also have trouble inhibiting or moderating the strength of the emotional expression in the first place. In a single sentence, ADHD folk are more prone to act on (emotional) impulse.

So when shame is triggered, due to a perception of personal failure or unworthiness, ADHD folk are less able to keep going and more prone to be paralyzed or derailed by the shame emotion itself.