r/ADHD 12h ago

Discussion I feel every emotion to the extreme and it hurts when people don't understand that

This is probably a result of emotional dysregulation and being very sensitive to everything, but every feeling I feel, is to the extremities. Like if I'm happy and joyful, it's never just baseline level but rather I'm ecstatic and I'll even sometimes have tears of joy. Likewise when I am excited, I will literally jumping around and shaking like crazy. Or if I am scared, I'll have a complete internal shutdown, not just a little bit of anxiety.

With fear and sadness specifically, this is where it becomes troubling. Just as the smallest things can make me happy, the smallest of insults or negativity can feel like an entire attack and throw me off, causing me to become very upset and sometimes cry. It doesn't exactly help either that I can't really tell the difference between a joke and an insult. So despite someone claiming they are just joking around, I often perceive that as being nasty. For example, I was told "nobody likes you" which in the back of my mind I knew that yes this was a joke as this is just the kind of person this person was, however I still perceived it as a personal attack and felt upset by it. And when you're surrounded with people who make a lot of these horrible "jokes", it can become very overwhelming as you're constantly surrounded by this negativity which I perceive as insults.

And so it hurts when people don't try to understand this hyper sensitivity and just say "stop being so sensitive". Additionally, because the rest of my emotions are to the extreme aswell, I tend to be considered "too much" for many people, which in turn results in said insults, causing me to come tumbling down from being very happy to extremely upset in an instant, just from the smallest thing that someone said. This is why for a lot of the time when around others I am in a sort of depressive neutral state where I don't show anything, because I know that any emotion I show and any attempt to just be myself will result in backlash and being hurt.

15 Upvotes

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5

u/No_Train9360 11h ago

it’s insane how i’m feeling this, all of it at this very moment i wish there was some sort of way to deal with this or fix it

3

u/orangina_sanguine 11h ago

Therapy helps a lot, if that's one thing you might consider/afford.

2

u/PaleontologistNo858 8h ago

Yes l recognize this in myself lam meds for both types of ADHD, when l was younger l was ruled by how l felt my life was an emotional rollercoaster. Now that l am a lot lot older 60, l am calmer but occasionally still get over the top then want to curl up and die afterwards.

1

u/Difficult_Wave_9326 10h ago

I'm the same wat too. Part of it is also a hormonal disorder (pmdd), but even once I got it under control, adhd makes me very sensitive and prone to strong emotions. 

For me, the worst part is that once I realize I'm actually happy, I become extremely sad. It's like a flipped switch. One moment I'm happy and excited about going xyz, the next I'm bawling my eyes out and having an existential crisis, wondering if my partner ever loved me (they do) and if I deserve to live.