The perils & pitfalls of meditation for ADHDers, CPTSD dissociaters, & BPD-like intense feelers
How meditation can be more harmful than helpful for neurodivergent peeps
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If you want to slap someone when they tell you to meditate, you’re not alone. When I first dipped my toe into meditation 20 years ago, I started with mindful breathing. “Use your breath as an anchor. Your breath is always with you. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.”
I fucking hated it.
I’d survived years of complex trauma by ignoring my breath and leaving my body. Dissociation was my safe space. It did NOT feel wise to descend into my body, the home of all my unsolvable pain & grief.
I’d achieved a measure of success & functionality by living in my head, over-intellectualizing, cycles of dieting & binge eating, and rumination. I often disappeared into limerence, obsessive crushes, fantasies & romance novels - anything to escape my present, embodied experience. A body scan?! Gross. No thank you.
Over the years, I dropped every intense feeling & overwhelming sensation I couldn’t handle into the depths of my gut. An existential Void formed at the center of my being. In DSM language, I experienced “chronic feelings of emptiness, a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships, & identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.”
Over time, the swallowed emotions - grief, loneliness, terror, rage - piled up into a screaming, writhing mass, straining to escape the existential Void.
I avoided entering the Void at all costs. Every time I slipped in, I almost drowned in the vortex of despair. I once described the energy of this pain to a friend, V. They said, “The way you describe it, it sounds like La Llorona is living inside if you.”
The mythical La Llorona, a vengeful ghost from Mexican folklore who drowned her children in a jealous rage and was cursed to mourn for eternity by haunting bodies of water. The minute I saw the picture, it resonated - she clawed at my belly, wailed in my blood stream, gnashed her teeth on my nerves.
Breath based, mindfulness meditation reintroduced me to my body and to the presence of “La Llorona” within me. I’ve come to realize that La Llorona symbolized all the ancestral grief I was carrying in my body through my mother’s lineage - from my mother, to my grandmother, to my great grandmother. But at the time, it just seemed like a demonic entity that resisted all exorcism (I’d tried exorcism MULTIPLE TIMES when I was in church lol. It didn’t work).
If meditation’s purpose was to quiet the distractions of my mind, notice my thoughts, & connect with sensations in my body, then meditation felt terrifying and dangerous. Why the fuck would I want to quiet my mind? The busyness of my mind is what kept me safe from the hellscape within me. Why would I want to connect with my body’s sensations?! Bitch, do YOU want to connect with the sensations of a grieving demon?! LOOK AT THAT PICTURE. WHO WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH HER?
No meditation teacher prepared me to deal with what came up when I “sat with myself” and “allowed myself to feel my feelings”. I had no tools to work with the loneliness, anxiety, & emptiness that threatened to swallow me whole. Just “being” with them felt like getting sucked into nothingness. The more “capable” parts of me felt trampled by their frantic neediness and insatiable sadness.
When I’d stop and feel the breath in my torso I felt stubborn, anxious resistance. An immediate pull to leave the experience through the chatter of my mind. It would have been easy to conclude that meditation just wasn’t for me, or that I was doing it all wrong.
But I wasn’t doing meditation “wrong”. My subconscious was protecting me from retraumatizing myself through meditation.
Sitting perfectly still, neutrally observing my inner torment, & treating each thought as a passing cloud would have been a stupidly shitty thing to do. It’s not that simple to just “sit and be with” pain, ancestral grief or anxiety when you’ve spent your entire life dissociating & repressing. It’s actually incredibly difficult to “detach from” repressed feelings when they’re given the chance to claw to the surface and you have zero skills or internal capacity for working with them. There are many steps to take before most trauma survivors can simply (and beautifully) “sit with” their feelings.
And yet.
I now have a meditation practice that has been nothing short of life changing. I have been meditating regularly for the last 20 years. I know, that number blows my mind too! And I’ve done it in a way that meets my ADHD, traumatized ass with compassion & gentle discipline.
Meditation HAS done all the things it promised. It’s helped me:
rewire my nervous system,
develop a loving connection with my body,
develop a compassionate detachment from my thoughts and feelings,
improve my executive functioning,
enjoy the present more often,
and heal ancestral trauma + grief.
But a one-size-fits-all meditation didn’t work for me. I had to scratch out my own practice through years of trial and error.
I’m so grateful my younger self gave up quickly on any sort of strict “shoulds” when it came to meditation, but persevered in figuring out a meditation practice that would serve her needs. She had the wisdom to NOT force breath based, seated meditation. She wasn’t committed to “emptying the mind.” She knew it wouldn’t serve her to sit still and focus on the sensations in her body. She knew meditation needed to include physical movement because La Llorona needed to dance and stretch and sweat.
I’m so grateful my younger self had the wisdom to continue to pursue meditation, even though it looked messy & imperfect. She found a sweet practice that simply felt good. She let go of the “right” or “wrong” way to meditate & allowed herself to get curious about different ways to explore the practice.
In Part 2, I share some of the things that helped me create and sustain a committed, relatively consistent meditation practice. Let me know what your experiences with meditation have been like - and what’s helped (or hurt) you.