I Am a Ticking Time-Bomb: On ADHD & Anger

If this is a core symptom of ADHD, why the heck don't we talk about it more?

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. The first one is for everyone, but they’re too labor-intensive to do for free all the time. Thank you!

Photo by Thiago Matos

When I was 20, I broke a glass door. I was at my parents’ house, the home where I’d grown up, and I was arguing with my baby sister. What about? I don’t remember. All at once, a crimson rage overtook my senses. I roared at her, a deep roar, from the bottom of my gut. Then I slammed the door to the patio. It shattered. The glass glittered in the midday Jerusalem sun. Shards everywhere.

I remember my sister’s eyes — wide and white with horror. She was frozen. Something else was in her eyes, too. Heartbreak? Fear? We’ve never talked about it. All I know is she didn’t move and so I did instead. My blood was thundering in my ears as I took a step onto the broken glass, then another, and another. I strode, barefoot, on the crunching pieces. I kept walking, out to the backyard, up the thorn-covered hill behind the yard, all the way to the public park half a mile or so away. Then, shaking, I realized I was bleeding. And in my pajamas. And looking very, very crazy.

“Fuck,” I thought. Or something like that. I’d done it again, you see. I’d let the rage overtake me. Broken something. Hurt someone. Acted unhinged. Lost it. I sat on the limestone steps, the white of them reflecting the burning-hot light of the Mediterranean sun. I tried to figure out my next steps. My feet really hurt now. The adrenaline? Gone. All that was left was shame and humiliation. 

Eventually, I braved the asphalt path and walked on my shredded feet back to my parents’ house. I cleaned up the glass and the bloody footprints before my folks got home. I apologized to my sister. I cleaned the cuts on my feet, tweezed out the tinier bits of glass. I sat alone in my room and tried to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. 

—

I don’t know anyone who gets angry the way I do. Actually, that’s not true. I know two people — my child and my mom. To be fair, my mother never walked through broken glass without noticing the pain. Neither has my son, although she’s been known to throw the occasional chair when things get hairy. Growing up, I was the only person who could match my mom’s energy. 

Fireworks, man. Fireworks. 

We’ve both calmed down with age; no more explosive events these days. I haven’t seen my mom get mad in years, maybe decades. But, on a recent trip, when my child pushed me over the edge and I slammed a door, my mom got a sad look on her face. “Oh, honey,” she said, “I’m sorry I gave you the ability to get mad that way.” 

With that, she affirmed what I’ve long suspected: There is a genetic component to the belly-fire I’ve had my whole life. 

—

Of the three of us, I am the only one with a diagnosis of ADHD. My child is too young and my mom isn’t sure how she feels about it. It took me a long time to really admit it, too. These days, Gen Z is proving how easy it can be to talk about mental health, but us previous generations faced a truckload of stigma about any mental health issues or learning differences. The only kids in my grade with accommodations were self-defined weirdos. One of them (a friend of mine, incidentally) was infamous at school for piling up school chairs on the basketball court, dousing them with Zippo fluid, and lighting those puppies up. 

It took a long time to get the melted plastic off the court. 

So, while I knew I had attention differences and that math made me cry, I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I couldn’t concentrate in class. Instead, I hid my headphones under my long, curly hair and perfected the art of speaking at a normal volume despite Alanis Morissette screaming “You oughta know!” in my ears. I learned to type on my phone without looking at the numbers and texted friends all day. Then I went home and tried to read my textbooks, words swimming in my vision. I read the same sentences over and over, willing them to stay in my mind long enough to take a test.

I thought if I made good grades despite having attention difficulties it would prove to everyone how smart I was. And I didn’t want to be a bad kind of weirdo. So, I paddled along through high-school, confusing my teachers and peers by struggling to focus in class while acing tests (see: adrenaline), drinking more coffee than was wise, and getting mad. Very suddenly and very often. 

I don’t know if I would have sought diagnosis had I known that my emotional dysregulation and rage were part and parcel of my specific neurology. That my brain chemistry makes me more predisposed to outbursts. Being a girl, it probably wouldn’t have mattered — until recently us AFAB folks have mostly been ignored unless our ADHD was incapacitating. But it would have been nice to know I wasn’t broken, just different. Maybe I would have spent less time hating myself so much.

—

Correlation, famously, is not causation. So, armed with the question of whether my rage had anything to do with my ADHD, I went out to look for actual facts. And, wow, did I ever find some. 

In 2020, BMC Psychiatry published a meta-analysis of research on emotional dysregulation in adults with ADHD. The paper looked at 13 studies, with a total of 2535 participants, all of which controlled for healthy non-ADHD adults. “Our findings support [emotional dysregulation] symptoms as a core feature of ADHD’s psychopathology,” the authors write, “With respect to dimensions of [emotional dysregulation], emotional lability, and negative emotional responses play a more definitive role in the psychopathology of adults with ADHD [...] Apart from the core symptoms, emotion regulation contributes independently to functional impairments in patients with ADHD.”

They go on to note that, while emotional dysregulation has long been regarded as a defining characteristic of adults with ADHD,  “DSM-5 refrains from including such symptoms as indicative of the disorder. Instead, the DSM-5 recommends considering [emotional dysregulation] as an associated feature of ADHD supporting its diagnosis.” The initial paper which recognized emotional dysregulation as a core feature of ADHD was published by Dr. Paul H Wender (the “Dean of ADHD”) in 1995. In it, Dr. Wender says that “Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is probably the most common chronic undiagnosed psychiatric disorder in adults. It is characterized by inattention and distractibility, restlessness, labile mood, quick temper¹, overactivity, disorganization, and impulsivity.”

In 1995, I was nine years old and had never heard of ADHD. A few years later, when kids were passing around Ritalin in the school bathroom, we all knew it was because they couldn’t sit still. No one mentioned anything about emotional shifts or a quick temper.

“For as long as ADHD has been a known diagnosis, people have focused on the most stereotypical symptoms: hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention,” says Dr. Andrew Kahn, PsyD, an ADHD specialist with Understood.org, “Emotional dysregulation is often seen as one of the ‘naughty behaviors’ we see in kids, and people are not aware that the neurological differences that drive ADHD are central to their problems in understanding and managing their emotions. The behaviors that result are often mischaracterized as “oppositional” or angry, resulting in discipline and negative attention, which can too often blame the dysregulated person for their experiences. Adults with ADHD who struggle with emotional dysregulation may have challenges with a wide variety of their relationships, employers, etc., and rarely is ADHD considered a possible factor. Those life impacts can be catastrophic and, in the absence of treatment support, can derail someone’s entire life.”

 If emotional shifts is one of the core symptoms of the disorder, why the heck doesn’t anyone talk about it?

—

Two years ago, my wife got me a dartboard for my birthday. It was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever gotten me, even though I picked it out myself. To be clear, it’s not a special dartboard in any way. It’s made of cork, I think, and it has pizza-esque wedges with different numbers in red, white and green. I assume the numbers mean something to someone who understands darts. Myself, I have no idea what they signify. And I don’t really care. 

Originally, she’d wanted to get me a punching bag. “Maybe, instead of trying to make your anger disappear, we can find a safe outlet for it,” she told me. I thought about this. It made a lot of sense. I’d been trying to stop getting angry for over 35 years, and it hadn’t worked. All that happened was the same cycle of emotional buildup → anger → outburst → shame. I always ended up feeling pathetic and crying. Again, and again, and again. 

A non-scientific illustration I made on Canva

For the first time, someone was asking me what I needed to get the anger out of my body safely. Not to eliminate this part of myself, but to facilitate it. It was a completely revolutionary idea, one I’d never considered. Wild. I told her I thought a punching bag wasn’t quite the right thing. “I’m a thrower,” I explained, “My instinct is always to throw something. There’s something about the impact of a can of cat food on the wall that just really feels good.” A dart embedding itself in cork makes approximately the same sound as a can of Purina busting open on the wall. And you can throw darts really hard without worrying. What if I found a space for the parts of myself society had always found scary or monstrous?

Buying a dartboard cost $50 on Amazon; a pittance for a miracle. 

I’m not exaggerating when I say it transformed our family life — in more ways than we’d imagined. The first thing that happened was that I had a space for my anger. We called it my throwing wall, and when things got to be too much I’d just go in there and hurl the darts one after the other thunk thunk thunk until I felt space opening up in my chest. I had an acceptable and healthy thing to do when my sensory overload was threatening to drown me, or when I just could not handle one more minute of whining. This was what my wife and I hoped would happen.

The second thing that happened was that our kid got curious about the dartboard. I always explain, “Mama needs a minute to work through some big feelings,” before going, but what does that mean to a toddler, really? So, at three years old, she got her own throwing wall, in the form of some painter’s tape on the wall and juggling balls. For a while, this worked well. Since then, navigating Big Kid’s anger has evolved. But instead of seeing her volcanic eruptions as the thing itself to be managed, we have the mental space to see them as the outcome of a specific set of circumstances. 

And that’s because of the third thing that happened. Once I stopped expending so much energy on groveling for forgiveness and hating myself, I began to notice the anger creeping in before the eruption. I began to notice that if I didn’t stay on top of my sensory needs, I’d be more likely to get mad. I noticed how I was more sensitive when I hadn’t exercised in a while, how I got more angry when I didn’t have a chance to eat regularly during the day, how crucial sensory breaks are to my overall mental health. And all of this applies to Big Kid, too. 

Big Kid still gets mad, and so do I. Just yesterday she screamed ‘til her face went red and threw a (small) chair. But we’re making advances in helping her (and me) move through the anger. And we’re doing this by seeing where it comes from. You can’t put out the coals, it seems, but maybe you can avoid fanning them.

Photo by Jan Van Bizar

—

In 1990, Dr. Russell A Barkley (regarded widely as the Godfather of ADHD diagnosis) published the first edition of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment. It has since been updated and reprinted many times. In the fourth edition, published in 2015, he writes “As noted in DSM-5, the essential feature of ADHD is a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity impulsivity that is more frequent and severe than is typically observed in individuals at a comparable level of development. Such official descriptions concerning the core nature of the disorder and the related symptom lists focus exclusively on a two-dimensional structure as being the central features of the disorder.²”

Essentially, there’s more to ADHD than just inattention or hyperactivity. Dr. Barkley suggests that, as a society, we may be more interested in hyperactivity and inattention because these symptoms are “the most observable and objectively measurable features of the disorder.”  They are, however, hardly the least important or challenging. He goes on to say that he believes we must also pay close to attention to two further features: impulsivity and “top-down self-control of emotions in general and particularly those pertaining to the self-regulation of frustration, impatience, and anger.”

According to this analysis, there is an actual neurological difference that’s making us more quick to anger. Which means there’s a physiological reason I have a hot temper. It’s part of my actual brain chemistry. 

When I asked Dr. Kahn what strategies have helped his patients with their outbursts, he said there were two main categories of activities that are constructive. “Learn improved ways to regulate your body’s reactions to sensations and stressors. Meditation, deep breathing, intense but brief exercise, yoga, etc., are all great ways to help you become more aware of your body and how it reacts to your environment and circumstances,” he told me, “Once you have the ability to activate your parasympathetic nervous system by doing self-guided calming tasks, you can slow down your processing and thinking to manage your emotions.” Other helpful ways to bring yourself back into your body include holding something cold — an ice pack, for example — or describing things in the room you can feel, smell, or hear. When we’re having an out-of-body rage experience, having a strong sensory experience can help folks come back from fight-flight-freeze-fawn mode into their logical selves. 

Dr. Khan also emphasized the importance of communicating emotions to others “We [at Understood.org] teach children and tweens how to use a Feelings Wheel to identify what they’re going through in the moment. Communicating about feelings accurately and understandably can help manage behavior during big feelings.” Language is something more advanced; we need our prefrontal cortex to communicate. That’s why a Feelings Wheel, that only requires pointing, can be so powerful.

One huge thing I recognized in Big Kid, for example, is that she’s not going to explain how she feels when she’s in it. She can’t. But my wife or I can ask her if she’s mad and frustrated, or state it for her, and just acknowledging it makes a difference. It brings her closer to her logical state. We also, sometimes, try to make her laugh. Both laughing and crying release endorphins, which can provide relief in a major way and substitute the adrenaline that comes from being in fight mode (which, we recognize, is what’s happening when he throws). 

–

Since we moved to New Jersey in July, the dartboard has been leaning against the wall of my office, waiting to be hung. I haven’t used it. I will, I’m sure — I still get mad. Heck, I got cranky just this morning. But, so long as I look after myself, I don’t get as mad. If I do? I know I have options. I can take deep breaths, I can punch a pillow, I can take a sensory break in a dark room. These past years have changed how I conceive of my anger.

My rage is not a malfunction of my brain — it’s a feature. One that can be a powerful driver of my work in the world. I do some great writing when I’m in my passionate place. As we always say to Big Kid, though, “Everyone gets mad, and that’s fine. It’s about being safe when you get angry.” Now I know how to do that. And that, friends, has made all the difference. 

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Welcome to the Chaos Palace is about coloring outside society's boring ol' lines. More specifically, it's about ADHD, parenting, queerness, and Judaism. Subscribe to get new ideas (big and small) about how to expand the boundaries of societal rules. Paying subscribers get updates from my own Chaos Palace, as well as conversations with folks who are whistling their own quirky tune for just $5 a month or $55 for the year. Let’s get messy (and chaotic) together!

1. Italics and bold text mine

2. Italics and bold text mine