Hi all,

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TL;DR

I have seen lots of anecdotal descriptions from people with ADHD regarding chronic dissociation, numbness, brain fog, etc. (whatever you want to call it). Not caused by medication, but ideally helped from it.

I have severe issues with that and I strongly suspect I have ADHD (I think Primarily Inattentive), but I can't seem to find any good literature, research papers or articles about those symptoms in relation to ADHD.

Does any of you know of any good resources to look at regarding that?

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Okay, my story (for anyone who's interested).

Ever since I was like 16 (mid-thirties now) I've had a chronic sense of detachment from myself. Like I'm not really living my life. I don't feel "connected" to basically anything or anyone, and even in times of life altering events (like the recent birth of my son) I only felt a distant emotional response in my body, but I couldn't immerse myself in it in my mind.

On good days, I'm just not connected. It's similar to when you find yourself staring at a spot on the wall, daydreaming about something but you forgot about what. But instead of waking up from your daydream, you just keep seeing your whole life play out before your eyes, on the wall that you've been looking at the whole time but never really focused on.. You want to "snap out of it" and get back to reality but you don't know how, so your life just continues to feel like a vague daydream. Like you can only experience life at the periphery, never being in the center of it. My sense organs work perfectly fine, and it is not like a hallucination, the world looks very normal and real. But some part is still missing in my brain to make me "feel" it. Like my consciousness is tired, even if I'm fully awake and alert. And on bad days it's the same experience, but also with an almost physical pressing sensation in my brain. As if my brain is clenching like a fist, shutting out any experience of the present moment and the feeling of being alive.

All the while, my body continues to do all the normal things, solves whatever problems need solving, expressing neat words and sentences out of my mouth to make people think I'm smart, but I have no idea from where inside me they originated from and who is in control. I might as well be a robot. Or maybe more like a self-driving car: all sensors and algorithms, and it gets the job done, but you know it's not really "alive". Needless to say, this really sucks.. But in a very insidious and cruel way.

I've now struggled for more than 15 years trying to figure my shit out, but the closest I ever got to any explanation was down the Derealization/Depersonalization rabbit hole. But while DPDR is recognized in DSM-V, it seems to be a fringe disorder that no-one knows anything about.. Especially if you don't have any clear trauma in your past. In the last decade, I've seen about 5-6 psychologists (for numerous sessions each) and a couple of psychiatrists, trying to describe my chronic numbness, but none of them had any idea of what I was talking about or what to do about it. My last psychologist did however in the end recommend me to screen for ADHD. Not sure if she thought that my dissociation was related, or if she just had a "hunch" that she'd been spending the last ten sessions speaking to a rambling ADHD guy.

I was highly sceptical at first, but as soon as I started reading up on ADHD so many pieces of my life started to fit. I am super disorganized, my mind wanders like crazy, I can only focus on tasks that are motivating (and I struggle hard with motivation), I am all about "big picture ideas" but suck at managing day-to-day stuff, I procrastinate all the time, I talk (and write) excessively, I am easily distracted, I have a million started projects (and equally as many unfinished), I am always late to appointments, etc. I always thought that "this is just me" and then worked until 03:00 AM every night to overcompensate for it at work (while messing up all my relationships and my sanity).

In ADHD, I finally found an explanation for both why and how I function like I do. What a relief! But the best thing of all, is that I started seeing signs that my dissociation might actually fit into this as well! After all these years of looking for answers to some vague symptoms, I finally felt like I had a well-established framework through which I could begin to make sense of myself.

On the surface, I guess I am rather high functioning. I always breezed through school with good grades while barely studying, I have a great job, and I am a pretty decent musician. I have an understanding family, and I hope I'm not messing up my kid too much with my disorganized ways. I could certainly need some help to get me better at managing my day-to-day stuff, to nurture my relationships, and to make me take care of my health and wellbeing (I'm pretty stressed-out ATM). So I am sure that some proper treatment would improve my life a lot. But what would really be a game changer for me would be to do something about my dissociation.

So now I will start to seek help again and hopefully get a diagnosis for ADHD to see where that leads me. However.. In my experience, it is not really helpful when talking to psychologists to babble on about how "my perception of the now is in like a bubble, and that I can't really feel connected to myself". Most of them aren't looking to go Dr. House on you and go to any great lengths to find what particular subtype or weird comorbidity combination I happen to have. They just want to see if I tick the boxes written for ADHD in DSM-V. And while I do recognize myself in most of those, particularly for "Primarily Inattentive", they don't say anything about this numbness.

So I guess what I am looking for is anything that can help me get a better understanding of what is going on in my head, so that I can explain myself better on my journey ahead and get more accurate help. I have seen a lot of people talking about this "numbness" or dissociation in relation to ADHD, especially here on Reddit. Here is one thread that inspired me to write my own: https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/ij4ly4/does\_adhd\_ever\_make\_you\_feel\_numb\_to\_reality/ But I haven't found much (if anything) about these symptoms in any formal ADHD description.

Note, so far this is just my hypothesis. I am not yet diagnosed with ADHD, and this numbness may very well not be related to it. But it's the best lead I've gotten in more than a decade! And I am not looking for advice on what to say to get an ADHD diagnosis (I have enough examples to get me talking for days about that). I just want to know if and how this dissociation could fit into it all.

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Maybe you know what I am talking about? Do you have any experience with this yourself? If so, what worked/didn't work for you? I would be very grateful for any insights, tips, research papers, or just your own stories on this topic!

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Thanks!