I Am a Good Listener: On ADHD & Empathy

Folks with ADHD aren't empathy-impaired, we just show it in a different way.

Dec 13, 2023

I Am Chaos is a series of reported essays about the lesser known sides of ADHD. By sharing my own experiences and exploring the science behind the weirdness and beauty of this specific neurology, I hope to bring us all closer to understanding the rich beauty of a neurodivergent mind. And how, despite common perceptions of neurodiversity, we actually make the world a whole lot more interesting. To continue to receive these full reported essays, please upgrade to a paid subscription — just $5 a month or $55 for the year.

I never sit facing the door of a restaurant or café. If there’s a TV mounted on the wall, you won’t catch me facing it. If there’s a cramped seating space or a wobbly table, I try to finagle myself a spot where I won’t be likely to knock things over. I scan the table — Napkins? Sugar packets? Straws? Any of these, in a pinch, can be a fidget toy. Do you know how long it takes to carefully shred a paper napkin? Perhaps the length of a friendly conversation? A one-on-one interaction is stressful and I need all the help I can get.

At a party or gathering, I have a different suite of tactics. When conversing, I try to focus my eyes on a person’s face for as long as I can, which is hard, because there are about 1,000 things happening behind and around that person. If I can just stare at them I am more likely to hear what they’re saying. This, inevitably, fails. Which is why I have a short list of responses in my (metaphorical) back pocket, each just vague enough to pretend I know what someone’s saying while my brain catches up to my ears. “Oh, wow! That must be an incredible experience,” is a good one. Also, “Sounds like you’re really getting into it!” Often, I don’t know what it is that they’re getting into, but I’ve found that folks tend to respond with something clarifying. That buys me enough time to let my brain process what I heard but don’t know I heard. My ears have received the sounds, but my language center is lagging a few crucial seconds behind.

By the time they’re done saying, “Yeah, thanks, I’m really excited about it,” I have some idea of a keyword and can ask something more specific (e.g. “Wait, explain again how you ended up in Poughkeepsie?” or similar, Poughkeepsie being the keyword). They answer something specific, the conversation gets back on track, and I go back to trying to focus.

The whole time, I’m resisting the urge to jump into the person’s sentence, to participate in the conversation to my left, to offer assistance to the person who’s struggling with their coat, to mop up a spill. I can see it all. My sticky neurology makes sure I miss nothing. Except, of course, what I should be focused on — my friendly conversation.

If this sounds exhausting, it’s because it is. But most people don’t understand that having ADHD makes it hard to be in social situations, and I’m determined not to be considered rude or inconsiderate. So, while these rules may appear overwrought for an evening of light snacks and a glass of wine, I’m pretty strict about them. And stressed. After every (and I do mean every) social event, whether it’s a quick dinner with friends or a big party, I ask my wife if I talked too much, cut people off too much, seemed unfocused, made a weird face. Did I look aside too often? Did I smile in a weird way? It’s hard for me to gauge these things, and I count on her to be my compass in the strange waters of neurotypical interactions.

As it turns out, I’m not the only person with ADHD who struggles with social situations. Not even close. And these situations can have real-life implications for the folks who are living with them. When I began researching this essay, my hypothesis was that ADHD-ers are perceived as less empathetic by their peers; a great and persistent fear of mine is that others will decide I’m actually an asshole.

My research bore out this conclusion. In fact, time and again, researchers refer to children and adults with ADHD as the problem, the cause of discomfort and problematic situations with their peers. Far from the observational scientific distance one might hope to find in academic papers, there is a morality ascribed to the behavior of those with ADHD. It’s not that we’re struggling with real neurological differences that make our behaviors different from those of our friends. Goodness, no. We’re just bad.

One 2010 study, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy describes the dynamic between neurotypical children and their peers with ADHD as “lacking in empathy.” The paper examines two potential causes for this. One option is that the typically developing children are mirroring the “negative behaviors” of those with ADHD. Essentially, this means the kids with ADHD are just a bad influence. Alternatively, “[the neurotypical children’s] play behaviors might reflect the known risk of negative behaviors reported amongst siblings and peers of children with ADHD.” This option is hardly better. The authors are saying that neurotypical kids’ just have to be bad enough to keep up with our rudeness. Awesome.

Similarly, a 2019 study published by the Journal of Attention Disorders, explored whether children with ADHD were as empathetic as “healthy controls.” The methodology? The ADHD-ers had to fill out a questionnaire and answer a series of “faux-pas” related questions known as a “faux-pas” recognition task (FPR). For what it’s worth, I took a look at some of these questions and found them pretty vague and hard to answer. Nonetheless, the findings were similar to those described by the 2010 study — “Children with ADHD showed significantly lower levels of self-reported empathy.”

These are just two of many, many studies describing how folks with ADHD are less empathetic than neurotypical folks. As I read more of these, I found myself wanting to shake all of the researchers by their shoulders. Because, you see, there is one very basic problem with all of this. It is all based upon a neurotypical understanding of which behaviors express empathy.

In my understanding, empathy is an emotional experience. Psychology Today describes it as “the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person, animal, or fictional character.” To be sure, empathy is a crucial building block of a healthy society. But the methodologies being used by these researchers to see whether neurodivergent people experience empathy are, frankly, a bunch of hooey. They’re not measuring whether people with ADHD are experiencing empathy; they’re measuring whether we know how to show empathy according to the narrow societal ground rules built and maintained by neurotypical folk.

Isn’t it possible to feel empathetic and still get so excited about what someone is saying that you cut them off mid-sentence? Can we not feel for someone and still be distractible?

“ADHD behaviors are easy to interpret as intentional since non-ADHD people tend to have more control over those behaviors (but no one is perfect). Therefore, if you interrupt someone, it's easy for them to assume that you did it on purpose and don't care about what they have to say or their feelings,” says Dr. Ari Tuckman, PsyD, ADHD specialist and author of More Attention, Less Deficit: Success Strategies for Adults with ADHD, “This is especially true if it's part of a larger pattern. Folks with ADHD use up their free passes too quickly. This is why it's important to make it clear that you do care about others, both by showing in your actions when you can and by using your words to re-interpret your behaviors. For example, after interrupting, it’s helpful to explain, ‘Sorry, I'm really bad at interrupting, even though I try. It's just that I get so excited about what you're saying that I can't stop from jumping in. Just put up your hand if I do that again.’ The problem isn't the interrupting itself — it's the hurt feelings.”

I wonder if I, and others like me, would be able to enjoy social situations more if we weren’t constantly afraid of breaking a social contract we never signed on to.

Part of the problem is executive function, described by CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) as “brain functions that activate, organize, integrate and manage other functions. [This] enables individuals to account for short and long-term consequences of their actions and to plan for those results [and] to make real-time evaluations of their actions and make necessary adjustments if those actions are not achieving the desired result.” Our brains do not have the same types of connectivity that neurotypical brains do; we’re connecting or prioritizing certain ideas and forgetting about others. This can look like short-term memory loss, or emotional dysregulation, or impulsive (sometimes dangerous) behavior, or misunderstanding how to prioritize tasks. It’s what makes us creative, and messy, and spacey, and fun.

When it comes to social settings, it means our brains may not stop us before we blurt out something dumb or insensitive1. It means we may notice four conversations at once but can’t process the information all at once. It means we may get overwhelmed by the sensory environment, resulting in frustration. It means we may do something totally wild without understanding it was inappropriate or strange.

“This can have significant social impacts if the person with ADHD is seen as selfish or uncaring,” says Dr. Tuckman, “They aren't given the regular benefit of the doubt because they've already used it up. Ambiguous actions are then interpreted more negatively and the social impacts just get worse. This can create a lot of distance in your relationships and lost opportunities. We look at what people do to infer their intentions, and we look at the pattern of what they do to infer their character. [The problem is that] ADHD makes it harder to consistently convert intentions into actions, so it's easy to misinterpret both. If a person with ADHD missed an empathic moment, talk to them about it. Check in to see if this is what they meant.”

I want to lay down my guidebook for social interactions, but in order to do that I need to know those I come into contact with will give me the benefit of the doubt. I don’t trust society to do that quite yet. Maybe it’s all the research I just read that describes people like me as negative or lacking in empathy. Maybe it’s the experience of being told to wait my turn to talk as a kid. I fear if I loosen the reins on my mind I will prove them all right. How can I possibly participate in a game that was built for people with a brain that’s deeply different from mine? If I stop trying to be like you, will you still believe I experience emotional resonance?

I Am a Good Listener: On ADHD & Empathy

Folks with ADHD aren't empathy-impaired, we just show it in a different way.

Discussion about this post