Trauma Expert: 3 Oddly Specific ADHD Trauma Issues

0:00From athletic stuff like a full court pickup game, swish, to athletic-ish stuff like a half mile stroll. Get those steps in. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it. A lot of high functioning women with ADHD that are late diagnosed spend their lives masking from the outside. It doesn't look like there's much wrong. So as soon as you stop masking, uh-oh, the real me is going to be revealed. and the real me was the one that was told, you're too lazy, too noisy, too late. You stop trusting yourself. So you're more likely to be able to be vulnerable to manipulation, abuse and coercion.

0:37Do you think if you experience the horrific abuse that you went through, do you think that makes a very nasty version of RSD? If I feel like I'm not pleasing somebody, they're going to be unhappy with me and there's a consequence to that. It's not just about rejection, interestingly enough. It's about being perceived as a problem. How do you separate who you are from who you've had to become to survive? So... Can I have just a second of your time? If this podcast has helped you understand your brain or made you feel less alone, can you do me one favour? Can you hit the follow button? And I'll repay the favour by continuing to book the best and most exclusive conversations on this topic.

1:16Please enjoy the episode and always remember, you're not broken, just different, and you have always been enough.

1:25I recently met an ADHD woman at an event and she asked me a question that I can't stop thinking about. She said, how do you separate who you are from who you've had to become to survive? When you hear that question, what comes up for you and how does that relate to your personal experience with ADHD and trauma? That's a very good one. It's a great one to start with as well. So I'm going to try and answer this without complicating it, which will be very difficult. when you're born you're born without an identity obviously there's genetic expression and all of that stuff but you're pretty much this core self a being of light and you're shaped by your environment your relationships what you see what you experience so your identity is largely based on who you're around social circles etc etc as we're forming our sense of self and we're developing our neurons are firing and wiring together and they join through an electrical pulse and with every thought we have there's like a chemical cascade in the body that we call the emotion and then that gets stored as a cellular software and it starts to operate the mind so we become bottom up instead of top down eventually and so the unconscious or the soma the brain body system is now working on this cellular software that's been given to us by our experiences, our relational experiences, our environment.

2:55But just like a computer, as soon as we realise that we're in this programming, we can start to understand that we can change it. So our identity is based on that chemical experience, that cellular software, and that's the energy that we put out into the world so it's the feedback loop that we get as well so we kind of get stuck in this repetition compulsion both from a sort of psychological point of view and an energetic point of view as well so to separate it is to understand that we all start off as this being of light and it's simply the i guess you could call it the simulation where we get this feedback from everything around us and we are a product of that so you separate it by understanding it first and then you start to design what you would like to be.

3:43And I said on a podcast once before, and a girl that became a client of mine after I did this podcast last time, and I'd said it in that podcast that if you're going to live in the matrix, you may as well design it. And I believe that firmly, that once you understand what your identity is and why it's there in the first place, and that it's really not who you are, it's what you've experienced, you can start to work on designing a new identity. And that's the bit that takes time. It's not overnight. but it's important that you know that it's possible. So you're born and you've got a certain amount of light to you.

4:17Yes. What experiences could a typical ADHD child experience that might dim that light? Again, I mean, this is true in both trauma and ADHD, that there's a sense of hypervigilance when you're constantly made to feel that you're too too lazy, you're not paying attention enough, you're too hyperactive, you know, all of these things that people are told over and over again when they're undiagnosed, they learn to see themselves as too much or too little. So abuse, bullying, not being understood, the way that that affects your relationships with your parents, with your friends, with your teachers, it will start to chip away at that light and you know eventually you'll start to believe it because especially up until the age of seven when you've got no fusion of the prefrontal cortex you absorb everything as though it's fact there's no filter you can't filter that out so all of those neurons that are wiring together are wiring together around what you're told about yourself so you only have to think about the girl that's maybe a bit of a dreamer and you know jumping around and dressing up and perhaps she struggles to get her shoes on in time to go to school and she's told off every day because she's holding everybody else up over time that wires in as you're the problem so that takes away some of that light and it makes that child feel responsible for everybody else and there the problem begins so there's one example of how it can dim your light and you're clearly hugely passionate about this topic and that comes across straight away when you just listen to you speaking about it for five or ten minutes.

5:59I mean, where does that passion come from? Certainly from being undiagnosed myself for the majority of my life. It was only a few years ago, I'm 47, to give time reference that I got diagnosed. But also having that history of, which I talked about on your last podcast, of being sexually abused by my dad and, you know, having my family sort of create the narrative to protect him. he for those that didn't watch that last one he was in prison for a period of time after admitting guilt which is extremely rare by the way when someone sexually abuses a child they very rarely admit guilt but he did he went to prison and then mum moved him back into the home afterwards and I think being ADHD as well I know that I cried a lot and I know that I was very repetitive so if I wanted to do something I wanted to do it again and again and again if I wanted to watch something I wanted to watch it again and again and again I was highly emotional and highly obsessive and I think I was too much for my mum even before she realized what was going on with my dad I think she found me to be too much in fact I spoke about this to one of my mum's friend after I did this podcast and she'd watched the podcast and she said do you know what I think if your mum had known that you had ADHD, it would have made so much difference to how she treated you.

7:19And I don't think it would have done. I don't think my mum was equipped to deal with me. I think I was too much for her. I don't blame myself for that. I just don't think she had the skill set to manage a child that was so... I lived in dreamland. I was like a little... I believed in fairies and all the things that little girls should be allowed to believe in. But I think Like that alongside not being able to regulate emotion, crying every five minutes and then being obsessed with things and needing the same thing over and over again. And then on top of that, finding out that my dad had been sexually abusing me and I was the one to reveal that.

7:59I think that was way too much for her. And she just made me the scapegoat in the family. so it was very much and I know a lot of people that haven't had that type of trauma that are ADHD and are very hyper with it or very perceived as difficult with it they are made the scapegoat and they become the receptive container for everybody else's frustrations that in itself is a trauma because you will self-abandon and you will feel like nobody understands you and you will go into the world carrying that and that's why we see all the sort of habits of masking and being the chameleon and all those things which can be gifts as well as a curse start to come into play you said you thought you that you were too much for your for your mother yeah and that you referenced maybe the crying was there any other behavior that made you think that you thought you were too much for your mom i think just um i'm probably quite relentless which has served me well in my career um i think i mean she used to do this thing where she was it was quite fun I liked it anyway where she'd do magic tricks but I think the fact that I needed her to do that 150 times before I was satisfied might have been too much for her so I think I just couldn't leave it in in the way that my brother and sister could probably you know have it done five or six times however I do actually think they're both on the spectrum my brother definitely is dyslexic and ADHD I'm sure of it just undiagnosed and I think my sister is more what would have been ADD.

9:33Yes. And probably not as overtly hyperactive as me. So I think that was the problem. I think it was just my relentlessness. And I used to steal a lot. If anyone was going to steal money out of my mum's purse, it was me. Right. So that was probably quite annoying as well. And, you know, if I wanted the extra biscuit that I wasn't supposed to have, I'd do it because I was a risk taker. And I got very good at lying. There was two reasons for that. One, I'm highly imaginative. And if I don't want to get into trouble, I would very quickly work my way out of that situation. But equally, because my dad was telling me not to tell anybody what was going on, he was sort of conditioning that further into me as well.

10:17So I think this is where sometimes it's hard to separate the trauma from ADHD because you're being told on one hand not to tell the truth. This is a secret you must never tell anybody. And on the other hand, you've got this wild imagination and creativity and the impulse control issue with ADHD. So it's very difficult sometimes to work out which is which is. And I know most people I know with ADHD do question whether they have ADHD. They'll sort of say, oh, have I got ADHD? I don't feel like I have got ADHD. I do that all the time because of the trauma aspect. I'm like, well, was it just trauma?

10:56Is it ADHD? But if I look back to all of the behaviors, say before five, I think it was clear that ADHD was very present. Yeah. Oh, so interesting. You mentioned that you did very bravely share the story of how your father abused you. in the last episode when you came on here and you summarized it beautifully there you said that you revealed that to your mother yeah what did that look like well it was actually um i revealed it at school and i shared a journal and um i didn't personally reveal it to my mom she found out because the police got involved okay and my dad was arrested and then taken away but when i got home, her first response really was to tell me that she was going to stay married to him.

11:44Right. So I think she went into sort of defensive action. Got to keep the family together. This isn't going to break us. The first response wasn't, you know, to keep me safe. The first response was, we've got to keep the family together and we're going to make this work. Obviously, that's not what I wanted to hear at the time. at the time I wanted to hear that my feelings mattered and that I was going to be kept safe so that was hard for me to wrestle with because I think alongside being seen as a bit of a difficult child in in in many ways you know like I said the hyperactivity the relentlessness the obsessions the stealing all that kind of stuff I was now being told that basically this thing that's happened to you it doesn't matter because what does matter is that the family stayed together Yes.

12:31So there was a lot of crossovers there as well with my developmental experience. So, you know, I think, to be honest, the trauma in most people that go through trauma as children that also have ADHD, sadly, it kind of sort of elevates all of the negative traits that you have with ADHD. so you know I think the problem is with a lot of high functioning women with ADHD that are late diagnosed as well they're highly resilient they're very high functioning often very successful spend their lives masking so from the outside it doesn't look like there's much wrong and they spend a great deal of time feeling quite isolated and lonely as a result of it so I'm sure a lot of the female listeners will relate to that trauma really does elevate a lot of the negative sides of of adhd and i've met very few people that have got adhd or autism actually that don't have some level of trauma with it i've always wrestled with the question ella like do the traits of adhd or autism or both or dhd like do they make you more vulnerable to trauma or in particularly abuse yes And do you think your early traits might have played a part or made you vulnerable or susceptible to what happened to you?

13:53Yes, not so much with my dad. So I'm going to answer that in two sections. The first is, does it make people more vulnerable? That's a definite yes, and I'll tell you why in a moment. The second is, has it made me more vulnerable? I think ADHD, yes. Again, going back to the sexual trauma with my dad, that elevated those ADHD vulnerabilities as well. because I was later raped on two different occasions. One when I was 13 by a 20-year-old and one when I was 17 by two men at the same time, which I've spoken about a lot. The reason I share those bits is because that is separate from being sexually abused in the home.

14:31And so I can sort of explain how that makes women and men more vulnerable. So if you think about it from, especially undiagnosed, because a lot of us have been late diagnosed. So from the age of maybe four, five, maybe even younger, you're told you're a problem. And you're told that you have a problem relating to your brothers and sisters or the people in the class. In fact, you may be taken out of the classroom a lot because you're too much for the teacher or you're too distracting for the other students. So your self-perception is greatly altered from a really early age. you see yourself as less than and you stop trusting yourself as well because obviously you know if you're five six seven maybe even a bit older and you're constantly told that you're too lazy you're too noisy you're too late or you know you're too uh obsessed whatever it is you stop trusting yourself so when other people are manipulating you or telling you things about yourself, particularly if we look at things like coercive abuse or manipulation, you don't trust yourself anymore.

15:41So you're more likely to be able to be vulnerable to manipulation, abuse and coercion. And one of the things that I think when you've got the trauma of being abused, neglected, bullied on top of being ADHD as a child is that you have poor boundaries because you can't, I think with the executive function issues, you can't always read boundaries well anyway. And also the emotional dysregulation is sometimes confused for intuition. So you're never trusting your system to be able to read the room properly. So for example, when I was raped at 13, I was at a friend's house, it was an older brother. I didn't read any signals.

16:25Maybe because I'd been sexually abused by my dad, I didn't know what safety looked like anyway. but also with executive dysfunction and emotional dysregulation, was I able to read signals well anyway? Being later, you know, being raped at 17 by two men, I was walking home with someone I considered to be safe. Turns out I didn't read the, I'm not saying this is my fault either, by the way, but I didn't understand the red flags. I didn't notice them. And I don't know if that's because I didn't trust myself. and I always assumed responsibility for, you know, again, some of those things I've spoken about.

17:02Maybe I'm too much. Maybe I'm too noisy. Maybe I'm too loud. Maybe it's my fault. Maybe I, maybe I was too flirty. Maybe I didn't, didn't understand that he was dangerous because I'm an idiot. And I know I'm an idiot because I've been told my whole entire life that, you know, I'm, bad or I'm naughty or I'm too much. So I think those things make you more vulnerable. Do you think if you experience the horrific abuse that you went through, and top of that, you are exposed to many of those corrective messages you've just said as well, you're too much, you're not enough, all of that horrendous stuff.

17:39Do you think that makes a very nasty version of RSD? Because I suppose you've been criticized so many times, but also your physical boundaries have been rejected in that moment of trauma? Yeah. I often say, specifically with my dad, I felt responsible for him. I might have said this on the last episode, I'm not sure. I felt responsible for him because as a child, when you're being sexually abused, you can't use rational thinking and analysis which again often goes offline with ADHD anyway in an emotional situation and so if my dad would say to me you know no one can hear about this because they wouldn't understand and then I would be able to pick up even quite early on I think I was able to pick up that he felt guilty about what he was doing he wouldn't necessarily say that and without being too graphic in the in the actual physical abuse going on I wouldn't have said that guilt was there but immediately afterwards I would sense his guilt and shame and I felt that I had to make him feel better so that became my job to make sure he was okay so in terms of rejection sensitivity for me personally and I'm sure for many other people if I feel like I'm not pleasing somebody or doing the best that I can do I feel a great deal of responsibility for how they feel and if they don't feel good they're going to be unhappy with me and there's a consequence to that which is they're going to judge me and I'm going to be pushed out I'm going to be the problem which is what I think a lot of people with rejection sensitivity feel they feel like it's not just about rejection interestingly enough it's about being perceived as a problem being perceived as less than being perceived as being the responsible one being perceived as the cause of chaos and therefore primitively I think we all assume that if we're perceived that way we're going to be pushed out of the clan or of the pack or of the family or of the group and then we're on our own again and because we feel like you know we're probably different anyway because we don't know we've got ADHD or autism at the time, to be pushed out would be even worse.

20:02So I do think it heightens that sense of responsibility because, you know, especially if you're abused as a child, but even as an adult, if you're raped as an adult, you go through, which at 17, I guess I was more towards the adult end of my life, but you go through all of the things that you did that created the problem. It's just a natural response. For me, it was, and I know for many others, was it because of what I wore? Was it because of how I behaved? And so you're constantly second guessing yourself. And with rejection sensitivity, anyone that's had it, it is just an overwhelming physical response in the body.

20:39It feels like a sucker punch. It feels like this emotional fire. And I always say it's like, you know, when a smoke alarm goes off, I don't know if you've used this metaphor, but it makes sense for me. When the smoke alarm goes off because there's a fire, it's great because everyone's aware that there's a fire. But if it's burnt toast, and the smoke alarm goes off. It's just annoying. And I feel like that's what RSD is. You're constantly like the burnt toast instead of the fire, but the alarm's going off anyway. And you're flooded completely with this sense of, I've got to fix this, I've got to make this right.

21:12And it's panic. It's panic stations immediately and it's engulfing and overwhelming. And I do think that the combination of abuse or bullying, as well as ADHD and autism, creates a super duper alarm where the toast isn't even in the toaster and the alarm's going off you know so i think there's levels of it sure i had somebody write in a listener to the podcast describing rsd and they said it's not just hearing no it feels like you've been told you're unlovable unwanted and fundamentally not enough yeah does rejection hit people with adhd harder than than a typical person i think the problem is that you have with the adhd so if you think of the brain in two halves, so right side being more emotional, creative, imaginative, and the left side being all the sort of more analysis, logic, organization.

22:03When the executive function isn't working as efficiently as we would like anyway, and then there's this emotional flooding, well, let's say it's hard to remain rational and analytical at the best of times with ADHD. If you're emotionally flooded on the right side and the amygdala is going wild your left side's completely offline so when you hear no you literally cannot rationalize that no when you feel like you're not pleasing somebody and you sense that they're going to reject you you literally can't rationalize it you immediately go into this sense of i'm going to it's self-annihilation really i'm going to be disintegrated I cannot remain intact and it does genuinely feel like the world is going to end and it could be the simplest of things but it's the sense that it's you that's dysfunctional it's you that's the problem it's you that's caused all of this and and you can end up hating yourself and then um what happens is because you believe you're going to be abandoned and rejected you start unconsciously creating it that's that's the thing where you start to see people becoming more and more they test people and the way that that affects relationships colleague relationships work or intimate relationships can be catastrophic and you see so many people with such severe rsd that end up on their own because what they're doing is they're unconsciously pushing people away because they already predict that that's going to be the case.

23:43So I wrote a book about rejection sensitivity and I've spoken to many people who have experienced it and understand it but I've yet to find a solution or a practical advice that actually soothes it in the moment. Like there's quite a lot of long-term strategies after the trigger, after the event, after the deep emotional rage and sadness where you can name it and hold it out in front of you and depower it. but have you got any practical tips for actually soothing it in the moment when rsd is triggered yeah i mean i personally use this one and i do try to get other people to use it as well so there's four steps to it one is the first point is to pause because everyone knows that it's not brand new information but if you feel in the moment that you're being rejected and it feels like that smoke alarm's going off.

24:35The toast isn't even in the toaster. The alarm's gone off. And you feel reactive or just deeply wounded. Pause. Next step is to concentrate on the breathing. Everybody knows that step, nothing new. But I love the parasympathetic sigh, which came from the first time I heard about it was Huberman. The two breaths in through the nose, the first being slightly shorter than the second, and then out. The next step, though, and I try and do this with the breathing, is bilateral tapping. So the bilateral tapping is really useful because it brings in the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain and it integrates the two hemispheres, which really helps with the conscious critical faculty.

25:17So in other words, you stop overthinking. So if you're breathing, doing the two in and the one out, bilaterally tapping. The other thing is after maybe 30 seconds of that is to do forwards backwards counting. Now this is to confuse your brain and to give your brain a gap because remember i said a minute ago when the right side is flooded with emotion yes the left side goes off okay so we've lost wi-fi on the left side so the breath helps because it brings the oxygen back to the prefrontal cortex so it allows time for clarity the bilateral tapping helps because you're bypassing critical faculty but then the forward backward counting helps because you're giving your brain a real break and you're forcing it to think about something else.

26:01So it goes like this. Instead of going one, two, three, four, you go two, one, three, two, four, three, five, four, all the way up to 100. So you literally, you have to think about it. It's even difficult for me, and I've done it so many times. You have to concentrate on this forward, backward counting. By the time you get to 100, the nervous system has had a time to settle a bit and like i said that conscious part of your analysis logic organization can come back online and it will give you that little bit of space to now think more clearly about what's happened so four steps pause breathe bilaterally tap if you're on a train or something you can always tap your legs so you can do it so you're not being seen but i like the butterfly eye hole because it feels a bit more self-soothing and then the forward backward counting up to 100 so you could be sort of taking at least three to four minutes break that is just enough time to allow you to bring clarity back wow i mean that's incredible i feel like so much damage is done with an adhd person like immediately in that red zone immediately after the trigger yes like in my history that's that's when i've relapsed you know that trigger that that deep emotional pain that rage in response to a real or perceived criticism could be so intense and actually that's when i've reached for a drink after years of sobriety or that's when somebody has stormed out of the office and said i quit yeah they've you know said i want a divorce in front of their kids yeah and you can't come back with from a lot of the stuff you do or say in these moments no i mean if you're going to walk out on a job or a relationship or push your best friend away or say something that you can't take back because of course i mentioned this to you earlier off camera um you know I personally during times of rage which may have been triggered by RSD have said some horrendous things and behaved in a really narcissistic way at times and I can never take those things back I can never change those decisions where I've hurt somebody else through being hurt there's no excuse by the way but I have to admit that and I don't know if I said this last time as well but one of the things that I think is really important is if you've been a victim of bullying or abuse and you've got ADHD and autism the chances are you've probably been reactive at times and you've probably become abusive at times I certainly have and it's all very well talking about the pain of being neglected, abused, treated badly but too many times we don't talk about the fact that we've done it back or we've upset somebody deeply by making the decision to drink again or by being reactive and saying horrible things we can't take back, too often we won't admit that side of it.

28:47So you're right. I'm not saying it will work perfectly every time and it will take practice. And I always say these little techniques that I offer, you kind of have to practice them when you're not in the red zone. Yes. So as a daily little practice, so that when it does come to the red zone, your brain is so rehearsed at doing it that it's second nature. So you do have to put the time in to practice these things. Soma control, brain-body system control, is very much about practice. It doesn't just happen overnight. So people might say, well, I've tried breathing, it doesn't work. But do you try it on a daily basis?

29:21Do you put the effort in it for training your whole system? Because if you're not, probably you're going to have to give it a few goes before it starts to work. I feel like people with ADHD, they're so terrified of entering that red zone. They're so scared of criticism or rejection because it's A, so painful and B, they don't trust themselves. How are they going to react? What might they do, like storm out of the office or leave that relationship? And that's going to cause huge anxiety and shame after the event. And it feels like the biggest protector or the biggest mechanism to protect yourself from that experience is to hide who you are and change who you are.

30:00So because you've been told so many times that who you actually are is defective, often like 20 ,000 more times than a typical child. I had a listener of the podcast write in and they said, I learned to mask because every glimpse of the real me felt too vulnerable to risk another rejection. Do you think masking is often a response to feeling unsafe or misunderstood? So sorry to interrupt your hyperfocus, but I promise it's worth it. Our sponsor is Timo, the best organizational tool for neurodivergent people. Timo wasn't named iPhone App of the Year in 2025 by Apple for no reason. It's the ultimate planning partner gently helping you turn the chaos in your head into a day that actually feels doable, a day you might even look forward to.

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31:22Teemo offers a visual way to plan your day without relying on willpower, memory, or a million sticky notes, helping you break down your daily agenda into something clear, calm, and actually possible. Give it a go and use the link in my bio for 30 % off. Just a note though, the code only works in the web browser, not in the smartphone app. Back to the episode. Do you think masking is often a response to feeling unsafe or misunderstood? I think it's always a response to that. Again, it can become a useful skill. I think people that mask can be really good salespeople. I think people that mask can be really good therapists, actually, because you can mould yourself around each person.

32:03But I think you have to address the root of that. So for me, I would say that I'm really, really bad at admitting when I'm not okay. And I almost don't feel like there's a space in the world for me to be not. I can talk about it retrospectively, but in the moment, I find it really hard to be vulnerable. Because again, to your point, being vulnerable has led me into some really catastrophic events in my life. And I've been criticized highly for being an attention seeker. And I mean, I used to self-harm when I was younger. So when you're told that you're an attention seeker, when you're told that you're too distracting, when you're told that you're too much.

32:49I don't know if I shared this before, but when I was a kid, because I was so desperate for people to like me, I used to give away loads of stuff. So I'd give away toys or gifts that people had given to me or jewelry that I really loved to secure a friendship and you know through through the fear that I wasn't enough so there's and I know everyone's had that experience with ADHD and autism you're either too much or you're not enough you know there's somewhere on that spectrum you sit often you're going between the two so in terms of masking you learn that you're not you learn that you're not worthy so the only way that you're going to survive in this world is to create characters and you end up sometimes so fragmented with so many different characters that you lose sight of that core self that we spoke about right at the beginning.

33:39You know, if your identity is split in three ways, fine, but if your identity is split into 20 different parts, it's really hard to remember who you are. So the masking then goes up a gear and it's such a hard thing to come out of. And I think that's where people start to really struggle with mental health. from athletic stuff like a full court pickup game swish to athletic stuff like a half mile stroll get those steps in head to sierra or sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all from athletic to athletic sierra's got it so do you think childhood trauma trains people to mask to survive yes i think because you have to be so hyper aware and hyper tuned and hyper vigilant um you know like for me slight noises of maybe my dad coming up the stairs or thinking he was walking past a door so you'd hear the tiniest little movement and wonder if this is going to happen again kind of thing you become so tuned into somebody else that masking is a way of kind of avoiding the truth of how you really feel.

34:51So I remember being a child and if someone was horrible to me, I used to be fat when I was a kid and I mean fat. You know, when some people say they were fat as a kid and they actually weren't, they were just a little bit chubby, I was obese. So when I was a child and people picked on me for being fat or obviously at home when I'm being abused, I learned how to behave to avoid the shame or the fear that I was experiencing. So if someone said, I remember one boy said that I wouldn't be able to go to his birthday party because I wouldn't fit through the door. Now, now that's quite funny. But at the time, he meant it.

35:28They don't want the fat, ugly kid coming to his party. That's going to spoil his day. so that level of rejection so I just became a bit of a nutter I sort of like went around beating up all the boys that was my way but actually I was deeply deeply hurt I was massively affected so the mask that I wore there was that I'm going to bully the boys before they've got a chance to bully me and I'm going to be protector of the girls so that they liked me and then at home the mask was just that I guess I became a bit moody and a bit difficult. So instead of being vulnerable, I became somebody, again, I probably created the mask of moodiness so that that became the problem rather than being abused.

36:17So there was these adaptions that you make, which make you, again, very, very vulnerable going into adulthood because if they're the adaptions that you make as a child and they're the defence mechanisms that you have as a child, you're definitely going to ruin some of your relationships. And what tends to happen when somebody finally stops masking? They feel extremely exposed and vulnerable because that's been their defence. Like I say, it's a defence mechanism. It's an armour that you wear and it saves you from being hurt. It saves you from looking foolish. It saves you from humiliation. So as soon as you stop masking, uh-oh, the real me is going to be revealed and the real me was the one that was told that you're too much or not enough or that you're naughty or that you're horrible or that you're selfish that's a big one actually selfish so to remove the mask is to reveal the real you and the real you has been told that you're a problem your entire life however the road to authenticity although it is difficult and it takes a while once you're free to be yourself and admit that you are flawed as well as hurt.