The voice in my head said “You’re stupid”: ADHD and negative self-talk (Carla Ciccone’s story)

Carla Ciccone, author of Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD’s Lost Generation, shares what it’s like to grow up thinking you’re the problem. She talks about learning to mask when she was just 6 years old and living with constant negative self-talk. Like many girls with ADHD, Carla hid her struggles and felt like a lost cause.

Carla opens up about her inner voice — the one that says “you’re stupid” — and how fear, failure, and pressure from others can build deep self-doubt. Motherhood became a turning point, pushing her to change the way she spoke to herself so her daughter wouldn’t continue the cycle. Also in this episode: Carla draws parallels between her experiences with asthma and ADHD.

• Listen: ADHD and self-medicating

• Read: 3 things I’m learning as a new mom with ADHD

• Watch: How to combat negative self-talk with ADHD

Carla Ciccone: I learned early on that these quick little jabs that I made at myself — if I keep doing this, this is what my daughter is going to learn. If I talk to myself this way, I am probably going to speak to her this way, or she is going to notice me speaking to myself this way, and then it is going to become her inner monologue.

Laura Key: Hi everyone, and welcome back to "ADHD Aha!", the show where people share the moment when it finally clicked that they have ADHD. My guest today is writer and mom Carla Ciccone, who recently published a memoir called "Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD's Lost Generation."

I have it right here and I thought that I would kick it off by reading the first sentence of the intro of the book, which caught my attention and then I could not put it down after that. "The way I spoke to myself in early motherhood was diabolical, but I had been perfecting the art of motivational meanness for decades." Carla, welcome to the show! How are you today?

Carla: I am good, thank you. How are you?

Laura: I am great. I love this book so much, and I have to tell you that I do not say that a lot. I do not really read that much anymore. I just do not really have time to read, but I read that line and that word "diabolical" hit me to my core and I just could not put it down. So, first of all, thank you for writing this beautiful piece of work.

Carla: Thank you for saying that. That is so nice.

Laura: I think a nice framing for your story is if you could explain what the title "Nowhere Girl" — where does that come from?

Carla: A few places. One is just the feeling of growing up with a disorder and feeling different, and feeling like I did not really belong in any place. I always felt like the odd one out. When I found out I have ADHD and I started looking into it and realizing that women and girls were just nowhere in the research. And so we are seeing this generation of women who were overlooked now figuring out more about their brains. I thought it was an appropriate title for us.

Laura: I agree with you. I think there was something else that you mentioned in your book too about thinking about boys and how so often they externalize their ADHD, and as girls and women, we bury ours.

Carla: And that works for a while — until it doesn't.

03:00 The intense pressure for perfection that many women feel when they first become mothers.

Laura: This idea of burying your ADHD was really prominent in your early motherhood, which is what that quote was referencing. I was wondering if you could start there and talk about your experience as a new mom, which eventually led you to get diagnosed with ADHD.

Carla: I mean, obviously it is a stressful time for anybody and a transitional time where you are going from being one person to being responsible for another human being. The pressure to appear perfect at it was something I never thought about before I had the baby. It was like a switch went off and I was like, oh my god.

There was this real fear that if I was not perfect, that I would get in trouble. I do not know who was going to — someone was watching me. I think some of that is just the demands that society puts on women when they become mothers. You feel it immediately and I felt it very strongly.

Laura: I had to chuckle — this book, everybody, is pretty funny too, I have to say. I think that you have a nice sense of humor in the writing. At one point, I remember you were talking about your closet as a "fancy garbage can," which I laughed out loud. But I think that was the part of the story where you found your go — bag to go to the hospital for childbirth.

Carla: Yeah, I had red lipstick and lip liner and jewelry and just things that I literally hadn't looked at for years after because it was immediate how fast your whole identity just shifts so completely. I do not know if this happened to anybody else, but I forgot who I was. And not just lost touch with who I was, but she was gone.

She was gone so fast, and I think a lot of moms struggle with that after. You do not know what about your former self to bring into motherhood or even how it fits or if you are allowed to. My daughter just turned seven and I feel like I still haven't incorporated some of who I used to be — the fun and nice aspects of who I used to be — into me as a mother, which sucks. But you never really get the time to sit down and do that.

Laura: That idea of putting on lipstick after you have a baby so that you look good for the pictures and whatnot — yeah, these high expectations that we put on ourselves.

Carla: Well, yeah, because I remember my mom had these pictures with me and she was all done up. It was a different time. It was a different era where you spent a full week in the hospital after you had a baby and they taught you how to care for the baby and you had time to shower and put on makeup. That wasn't the case for me at all, but I had that in my mind as "this is what a mother does." If I want to be like my mom, I am going to need to look good. That was my first failure point because I definitely did not look good.

Laura: How did this experience of being a mother lead you to the path of ADHD evaluation?

Carla: I was really struggling with anxiety — or what I thought was anxiety. And so I decided to try therapy, like online therapy, and it was my therapist who was like, "Oh, I think what you are describing could be ADHD."

Laura: Were you surprised?

Carla: Yes. It was just around the time where I just started seeing a little bit more about women with ADHD. But what I kept seeing when I would look into it was very type A women who had gone to Ivy League universities who were very surprised, like "I have been perfect my whole life, how could I have ADHD?"

For me, my life wasn't really like that. I wasn't exactly a super high achiever — I was at certain points. Interestingly, that kind of threw me off because I was like, oh, in women this is what it looks like, this type A personality. So I had that in mind or the image of the hyperactive little boy that I went to school with. I felt like I did not fit into either of those, and so it was surprising to try to wrap my head around that at first.

Laura: I want to go back to that word "diabolical," and that is how you described your self-talk. First, I just need to say that this book was very nostalgic for me, and not just because you are doing a lot of reflecting back. It feels like a journal. There are moments of it where you have in italics the types of things that you would say to yourself.

It is on the very first page when the nurse asks you if you are doing okay after you give birth and you say, "I am fine," and then in italics you say, "you stupid liar." That is the way that so many of us speak to ourselves and that just shows that perfectionism of the expectations. How do you think your ADHD played into that?

Carla: I think it played into it pretty hugely because it was one of my tools of motivating myself. My parents were kind of hard on me and that is kind of how they spoke to me when I was younger too, because that is probably how they motivated themselves to do stuff.

Laura: It is hereditary.

Carla: So it just came very naturally. This is what you do when you want to achieve anything — you beat yourself up until you are able to show up.

Laura: Do you feel like the idea of motherhood being the thing that leads you ultimately to getting diagnosed with ADHD is that the things that you are beating yourself up about, you cannot just automatically change? You cannot pull an all — nighter and then the paper is done.

Carla: Exactly. I think at one point you were talking about breastfeeding and you were like, "stupid boobs" to yourself. But it just doesn't work for everybody. You cannot be mean to yourself forever about everything. Realizing that and also realizing if I keep doing this, this is what my daughter is going to learn.

If I talk to myself this way, I am probably going to speak to her this way, or she is going to notice me speaking to myself this way, and then it is going to become her inner monologue. It was one thing knowing that I had ADHD and that was my own personal journey, but then knowing what I was going to pass on if I did not get help and if I did not work on myself — it was really scary, but also motivating in its own way.

Laura: It is a different kind of motivation. It is a motivation that comes from love and care.

Carla: And also fear.

Laura: We accept that. Being a parent is one of the most terrifying things in the world.

Carla: It is very scary.

Laura: I think I saw that you use the term "Girl, Interrupted." I have to ask, was that a reference to the film?

Carla: Yes. When I was growing up, that was the mental health film. There were a few mental health issues going on in that movie, but none of them were ADHD.

Laura: I love that expression, and that movie changed my life. I saw it when I was seventeen. It was a very important movie to me with a good soundtrack too.

Carla: It was very important and I do think that it really shaped my idea of what mental health looked like. Honestly, to bring it back to the whole motherhood thing, I was still afraid if I let myself crack, I would end up in some sort of institution or something like that. I never really was aware of that fear until I had a kid and I was like, well, I could be taken away from her for being crazy. I must keep this to myself.

I think that it just really intensified that, but I do think that movie was one of the places where I formed my idea of what they do to women who do not fit the mold.

Laura: And also just think about the things that ADHD can do to your brain. If you are a woman who is trying to live up to expectations in the world, it is not a far-fetched idea.

Carla: No, it is not.

15:00 Feeling like a failure in school

Laura: So when you were growing up, Carla, you struggled with asthma. Is that right?

Carla: I did, yeah. I had really bad asthma as a kid.

Laura: Can you share that part of the story and if there is a connection to your ADHD?

Carla: Well, asthma is more common in people with ADHD, which is something I learned when I was researching the book. But I also compare it to ADHD because when you are small, before girls really learn how to mask, they do have more hyperactive tendencies where your body is kind of moving all the time and you do not have control over it.

It was kind of a similar sensation to having an asthma attack come out of nowhere and all of a sudden your body is taken over by asthma and I couldn't breathe. It kind of sometimes feels like sensory overwhelm that I get with ADHD. It just got internalized into my lungs with asthma. That was kind of what it felt like.

But I had it really bad as a kid and I had to live in a hospital when I was six for a while, which was a hospital for kids with asthma and they would try to get you to exercise and do things. It was a whole team of people observing us all the time. So I mean, that is kind of weird. That is something that I have never really shared about myself up until writing this book because it is an odd experience. Also probably why I am scared to get taken away and put in an institution.

Laura: And also expectations of people watching you all the time.

Carla: Right. But that was where I remember learning how to mask when I was living in that hospital at six years old. Because there were people watching me all the time and not just doctors, but the other kids. We ranged from like six years old to fifteen. So you are aware when you are six that older kids are cool and you want to impress them or be like them. And so it was really my first training ground for how to fit in with different kinds of people and different ages of people.

Laura: Learning to mask at six years old.

Carla: I think it is a lot of dissociation at that point for me, a lot of just sort of blending in and not causing a fuss.

Laura: How would you mask?

Carla: Well, the story I tell in the book is one of my first nights there, I got really sick and I had to run to the bathroom to puke. Someone was in the bathroom. Instead of puking on the ground, I puked into my little hands and then just waited till the door opened and then went inside and puke.

Oh my gosh, because I knew at that age if I puke on the ground, I am going to disturb everybody, I am going to get in trouble. It was this putting yourself last so that everybody else is more comfortable kind of thing, which I think is a particularly female response to discomfort. And yeah, that is the first time I remember it happening in my life. I know that is early, but I think a lot of times people with ADHD are very sensitive from when we are small and we are very hyper-aware of what is going on around us on some level. Sometimes that sensitivity hurts and so you do what you have to do to make it a bit more comfortable for yourself.

Laura: How did you do in school as a kid?

Carla: I did well very early, and then my family moved across the country when I was around seven.

Laura: You had a lot going on at that age. It was a lot of change. That was a tough age for you.

Carla: It was really hard. I struggled to fit in in my new school. I think because I was working so hard to fit in and mask, I did not do as well as I was doing before. And then math came along and I have dyscalculia, which I did not know about at the time, but I was just bad at it. There was nothing I could do. There was no tutor who could fix me. No matter how many times my dad explained something to me at the dinner table, it was just, "Oh my god, this is so hard for me."

And I just kind of checked out. I was kind of like, "Well, if I decide not to care about school, then I can have less shame about not doing well about it." By high school, I was skipping a lot of school. I barely went to my classes. I barely graduated high school because I was smoking weed in the parking lot or going off with kids to go to different parking lots and smoke weed.

This was my journey. It did not make me feel good. I had an awareness when I was a teenager that I was actively choosing to check out. I needed to get stoned to allow me to do that. I could hear my mother's voice in my head being like, "What are you doing?" and my grandmother's voice. There were a lot of people that I was actively disappointing.

I think that was kind of part of me just pulling back from even trying to be a good student because it was kind of a lost cause for some of the subjects. I had a few good teachers, but mostly teachers that just thought I was unserious or something, and I kind of let that in.

Laura: And then you are like, "I will be what you are saying that I am."

Carla: Exactly. It is like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Laura: Do you think those teachers thought that you were a perfectionist?

Carla: Absolutely not. But you know, I do not think the teachers really thought about me at all. I had one teacher, a religion teacher in high school, who actually cared about me. I had not had that experience before then. So this was twelve years of schooling and that is the first one that I can remember who actually liked me or cared what I was going to do with my life. It was a strange and inspiring feeling. That is why it is the good teachers out there, I am so grateful for them because he helped change my life just by being nice to me and saying "I believe in you and I think you can do better."

Laura: Did that help turn things around for you or just something that you look back on fondly?

Carla: Yeah, no, it did. So he actually he wrote me a letter. He gave it to me at the prom. Prom was an emotional thing for me because I kind of got there and then I lost my friends and they were all off taking pictures without me. I just kind of felt like "This is what happens to you. People forget about you." This is high school in a nutshell — it has just been a shitty experience.

And so then he gives me this letter and basically says, "I see what has been going on with you and I would ache to see you hurt in life. You need to make some changes and live up to your potential and I believe in you." He said, "You deserve a good life," which I hadn't ever really realized that what I was doing was putting me on a path to not a good life.

It landed. Of course it wasn't like an overnight thing for me, but it was enough to give me the strength to sort of stop putting hanging out with friends and doing drugs and partying at the top of my priority list. I started thinking about what I was going to do after graduation and I ended up upgrading all my classes so that I could go to university. He did kind of light a flame for me.

Laura: And I was one of those kids, Carla, who was the perfectionist on paper. But I did have a teacher when I was a senior in high school who saw that I was struggling with some things and saw that I was masking a lot. I did not think that anybody saw that, but she did. So I never forget that. And they do not even have to do anything but just be noticed.

21:00 Reflecting on the need for self-forgiveness.

Laura: You talk a lot about Dr. Stephen Hinshaw in your book. He is fantastic. He did an episode on another Understood.org podcast called "Hyperfocus." But he said something to you about how you probably felt that you deserved this. He made me cry. Can you share?

Carla: He is amazing. He was one of the first researchers to start studying ADHD in girls. So he was an invaluable resource for me and very generous. But I was talking about how I think that at first I did not feel worthy of having ADHD. And he said, "Yeah, like you probably feel like on some level all the things that you have gone through, all the trauma, that you deserve to have a hard life. You didn't deserve to have a reason for that hard life."

Laura: Why did that resonate?

Carla: Because I did. I did feel like I deserved a hard life. I was very used to having a hard life and making choices that made my life harder — impulsive choices or just not well thought — out choices. I think at that point I was just starting to heal that and to convince myself that something else could be possible and I did not have to keep going like that.

Also just the fact that he saw it so clearly and so quickly meant that he had seen this in a lot of other women and a lot of other girls. So that kind of made me feel connected to the sisterhood of women with ADHD and that we really, a lot of us, struggle with this. We struggle with feeling this deep shame, and then a product of that is "Yeah, we deserve the bad things that have happened to us because of this."

Laura: What is it about us women with ADHD, like treating our own ADHD as if it is a bottom-of-the-barrel diagnosis and doesn't really matter, it is not real?

Carla: I think we have been trained to do that. I think a lot of us have our self-image tangled up with our output. When you are a woman and when you start having kids and things, your output is "How nice does your life look? How organized is your life? How well are you setting up your life so that your kids have a fun time?" And when you are not doing that well, I think you take on a lot of shame. I do not think it is something even a diagnosis can scrub away.

Even I wrote this whole book and one of the main takeaways is we all need to be gentler with ourselves. We need to find forgiveness and we need to just when we start being mean to ourselves, stop that. But even I struggle with it still. It is not like it erased it for me. It is just something I am much more aware of now so I can kind of stop the spirals before they get out of hand.

Laura: I could talk to you for hours. This book is so — I am going to show the book again for those who are watching on video. It is "Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD's Lost Generation," by Carla Ciccone. Everybody, check it out. I am grateful to be with you today.

Carla: I am grateful to be here and thank you for having me on.

Laura: Thanks for listening today. As always, if you want to share your own aha moment, email us at ADHDaha@understood.org or send a message to our voicemail inbox. You will find a link in the show notes along with resources and links to anything we mentioned in the episode.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.

"ADHD Aha!" is produced and edited by Jessamine Molli. Say hi, Jessamine.

Jessamine Molli: Hi everyone.

Laura: Edited by Alyssa Shea. Video is produced by Calvin Knie. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright. Production support provided by Andrew Richter. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. From Understood.org, our executive producers are Scott Cocchiere and Jordan Davidson. And I am your host, Laura Key. Thanks so much for listening.