How Trauma & AuDHD Led Me to Chronic Negative Thinking & Breakdown

This episode is fully loaded! I talk about how having experienced trauma in childhood (and adulthood) alongside undiagnosed ADHD and ASD, had led me to my recent mental health breakdown. Heavy topics which I have only just touched on in this episode, but give an outline of what (I believe) have caused this life-changing experience. I talk about what I'm learning that I need to change about myself, so that I can live more healthily, authentically, in the world as an unmasked late-diagnosed woman. I am aiming for actualisation - and the first step to that is finding out who I am, how I take care of my emotional and physical needs, and what I need to ultimately survive and thrive!

The Actualising Woman 🌺 is an unfiltered diary of life after a mental breakdown and a late-diagnosis of ASD and ADHD (AuDHD) at age 57 🌼 As a therapist, empty nester, and entrepreneur, I share the raw reality of recovery: grief, regret, overwhelm and confusion, alongside professional insights, research, and coping tools🌸
This channel is about living unmasked 🌷 rebuilding identity 🌻 and finding strength after years of moving through the world undiagnosed. From mental health struggles to self-actualisation 🌸 (inspired by Carl Rogers and Natalie Rogers), I talk honestly about how I experience my own neurodivergence, and how I am motivated to create a life that finally fits ME🌸

If you’re navigating late-diagnosed ADHD, autism, or AuDHD 🌼, or rebuilding after a breakdown, you’ll find community, understanding and hope here 🌺. 

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Contact: clare@theactualisingwoman.co.uk for requests, stories for the show or questions.

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Clare Llewellyn-Bailey: Counselling psychotherapist, podcaster, empty-nester, and AuDHD-er!!

Transcript

Clare: 0:05

Hey, this is Clare. Welcome back. So I'm very much coming out of my breakdown finally. And haven't some significant lessons been learned? Wow, what an experience. Um, it really is priceless, but also, oh my goodness, how bewildering it's been all the way through it. And I suppose I can look back more objectively now to it. It started, I would I think it started the day I was born, to be honest. But when I noticed it was July of this year, so 2025. And uh I think over the last two weeks, I think I've been inching towards inverted commas, normality. I'm still baffled by a lot of it. It was as though somebody had built a brick wall right in front of me saying, Clare, you're going no further until you change your ways. I'm still researching actually a lot of it too, um, why I felt this way, why I lost my voice, for goodness sake. I mean, is that a good thing? Many would say yes, but um there was a point in there where I couldn't I couldn't push the air out of my lungs into my throat so that I could make words there was no energy to push the air up to talk. And and this was quite temporary. It was maybe over one day I noticed that happening. Uh so isn't time a healer, huh? But the thing is, I'm not trying to heal myself back to as I was because I don't want to be as I was. I don't think I can be as I was, to be absolutely frank. Don't know who Frank is, but because V1, Clare, has gone. My daughter Kit was talking about how it's been like I've been a caterpillar before, a bit beaten up, a bit bashed in, a few legs lost, a few scars, a few, you know, tramplings, and just a really rough ride. And I the breakdown I see is the cocoon that I've been within. And Kit said to me, This is the soggy, gooey bit of the cocoon where you are changing from caterpillar to butterfly. And there will be a time when you're coming out of that cocoon and you're developing your wings and you're moving forward, which is exactly where I feel I am today. In essence, I am on that cusp of starting to grow wings again. So I just thought I'd throw that analogy out to you. Because, as you know, I do like an analogy, so there's one for you to chew on. So I've moved from caterpillar, cocoon, and I'm coming into butterfly, and also I see that as V1, V2. I'm entering the world as version two now. It's just that I have no idea how to be version two. I've had 58 years of Virgin 1. Virgin? Of version one. Hmm. Moving on. I'm learning now how to be version two of myself by finding a new way to move around in the world as an unmasked Auder, having learned what I need to change about myself. I need to change myself so I don't feel the need to fit into the world and make sure that I'm acceptable to all the other people in the world. Like I've said many times, I've got RC and I refuse to do that anymore. I'm 50 bloody eight. Oh god, I wish I'd learnt this when I was 28. I really do. Oh, come back 30 years. The breakdown clarified what had been going wrong for me in my, and I'm gonna say it, my previous life, okay, in V1. And I'm not gonna go into too much detail about this, certainly not on this episode, but as a kid there was all sorts of kinds of abuse. I mean, all of the kinds of abuse you could imagine, those were the abuses. Uh plural abuse? I'm not quite sure. Anyway, so childhood was very complicated, and and of course I've reflected on this a hell of a lot recently, certainly in the last three or four months. It's been hard, very hard to untangle it all. Um, let me explain. So there were there was psychological abuse in my childhood, there was physical abuse, and there was sexual abuse in my childhood from different family members. So when I became an adult, I was really quite traumatized. I didn't realise it. I was I think what I've been trying to do this whole time, of course, is survive. Just survive, just do whatever I needed to survive. And I think the the trauma has led to excessive negative thinking without me even realizing it. I just had it in my head that day to day, living day to day, I would experience people in the world and I would be sure that they absolutely didn't like me. I was sure that I'd pee them off at some point, I was sure that I'd done something wrong all the time and I was gonna get caught out. I was a charlatan, I was a fake. They could see right through me, and and I was just such a bad person. That comes from believing that as a child as well, and that being instilled by parent or parents to make me kowtow to their will. And I didn't feel loved at all. I didn't feel they were proud of me, I didn't feel that that anything I did was acceptable or enough. So of course my esteem was particularly low. I I just lived in negative thought the whole time. And I think over the decades that has led actually to the breakdown, that constant self-deprecation, that constant assumption that people think I'm crap in all sorts of ways, and anything I did would probably be crap, and not being able to feel as though I had any worth at all, any value. And there have been traumatic experiences as an adult as well, assault and burglary and homelessness and and then other bits like breakups and divorce and all that kind of stuff as well. But it's quite a lot. And I think that when you've been living with your foundation of your childhood being quite traumatizing and and ungrounded and unsafe, actually really unsafe, then your fight-flight response is just peachy keen, really peachy keen. It's on the go the whole time. I've been living in adrenaline and cortisol, I would say, from the age of about seven or eight. I've been living in that place where I have been trying to survive. I've been living in hypervigilance, moving around in the world, which is my favorite phrase. Moving around in the world, watching for somebody who will hurt me, or assuming anyone I meet will hurt me. I think this is why I don't like the phone as well, because I don't know who they are and I don't know what they want, and I don't know what they need, and I don't know what I've done wrong. So I don't answer the phone. And being fearful of things going wrong all the time. What could go wrong here? What will go wrong? And in fact, I can visualize myself crossing the road and having an accident. I see it in my mind's eye, I can see the accident, which is really quite upsetting to have that, you know, when you're about to leave the house and you can picture yourself tripping over your front doorstep landing, faceplanting the path, and then the townsfolk standing around not helping, laughing, and then it would be on the news, and then everyone would have hysterics and and that's just from opening the front door. That's a flash of a scenario in my head. And because of the hypervigilance and the assumption that something bad will happen, or I will cause something bad to happen, or I'm just bad, has meant that I don't trust anyone. I don't trust, I don't trust the cars outside moving around, I don't trust cyclists, I don't trust um people at the supermarket, I don't trust friends, I don't trust I do trust friends actually, decent ones anyway. I do. I'm just too vigilant and too negative in thinking. And this is all based on that insecure childhood. I didn't have uh a security there, I didn't feel I had a security anyway. I didn't feel grounded, I didn't feel secure in myself, I didn't feel safe at all. And that negative thinking just kept me in fight-flight the whole time. The whole time, the whole time, the whole time. And do you know what else as well? Something that I've learnt that I'm gonna need to change, and that is staying in fight-flight by watching murders on telly. Watching channels on YouTube where they're following, like I follow a civil rights lawyer, he's brilliant, but I notice that when I'm watching it and I'm seeing the original crime that the police have done against these civilians, I am I feel really like, oh get them, get 'em, oh, how dare they? And I notice that therefore my my psyche and my uh nervous system is alerted again. And watching murders, in in fact, fiction or non-fiction crime, it would still trigger my fight flight. Kicking out the adrenaline again. So I must stop watching those or just watch fewer of them. So the negative thoughts that I'm having, even subliminally, are that people are scary. People are people can hurt. I must be prepared for them to hurt me, and I must prepare for any badness anything that will suddenly happen, anything that will be a crime or will be unfair or unjust. Always distrusting, and seeing the worst in people too, and expecting the worst. But but also wanting to trust and and to feel safe more than anything, to have that peace of mind that you are safe, Clare, you're alright. You're alright as a person, and people care, people love you, and you're accepted, and they're not thinking all those things that you're thinking they're thinking, because I'm responding from a place of hurt child all the time. That hurt child that's within me, I'm living through her eyes all the all the time. That's how I've got around in the world and survived the world. And also the get them before they get you thing. I mean, I've done that in relationships as well. I will burn some bridges. Oh my goodness. One whiff of something where I've perceived them to not like me or be irritated by me or not enough. Get rid. Get rid. Find a way, find a way, Clare. Hmm I remember I I chuckle at it now because I'm past it all and I'm interested in looking back at what the heck that was. So when I was a kid, as a maybe an older child, so maybe early teens, so after I was abused, um I was a different kid moving into my teenage years. The world felt much more shaky, much more unpredictable. So those years from about 12 to oh goodness me, um, 12 to let's say 35, maybe. I would invent scenarios in my head. I would make a story. So I'm lying in bed and I'm thinking this um it's almost like I wanted to cry, I wanted to feel the rejection. Uh I don't know what this was, and I would be interested to see if anybody else had ever done this. I would invent scenarios where I was victimized. I would invent scenarios where, for example, if my boyfriend, if I had one at the time, would run off with my best friend, and all of the friends in that friendship group all blamed me for it, and then I would cry, and they would bully me when they saw me, and they would chastise me in public and da-da-da-da-da, and then I would end up crying, and then there would be this uh moment where they realized that they were wrong and Clare's fine, Clare's all right, it wasn't her fault, but I wouldn't let them apologize to me, and then I would just cry myself to sleep. Oh my goodness, the times I did that in different scenarios, don't think I did the same one twice. I mean, talk about almost too much imagination and too much self-pity and too much um low esteem to to even create more of those scenarios in my head. And they wouldn't have to be real people, you know, actual people that I knew in those scenarios, those stories. They could be anyone. It could be anyone, it could be well, absolutely anyone. I uh I don't know why I wanted to cry, I don't know why I wanted to express that, and you know, I felt that that was going on enough in my life anyway, let alone make up more stories. Yeah, uh don't know. I mean, where's Freud when you need him? Hmm. I think growing up and moving into adulthood and until this breakdown, I've I've been subconsciously consumed with people being mean and how I would be victimized. It's very much I have been definitely in a place of victimization. I don't know whether, and I s I am still unclear about whether it's a valid victimization or whether I've turned it in some way into a victimization. I have assumed or presumed, you tell me the difference. Answers on a postcard. I've presumed I'm gonna use that one, that they have been nasty to me or they've been unfair to me. And I don't know, I've not had because I've mostly most of my adulthood I've lived on my own with my kids. So I have no one here to help me gauge how valid these real life events or experiences with other people or interactions with others are, where it feels like they've been not nice to me and unfair, whether it's actually true or not, or whether it's me. Is it me or is it them? I have no idea. To me, it feels like it's them. But who is the common denominator here? It's me. So is it my perception of it? Probably. I've learned this. Otherwise, the alternative was, and I've lived with the thought of this, that I am purely a victim. I've been put on this earth for everyone to be bloody nasty to. How can that be so? Why can't everybody else have their share? Why is it just me? Now you add in RSD, rejection sensitivity disorder or dysphoria, whichever you know it by. No wonder is what I want to say. No bloody wonder. The RSD has meant that it's been hard for me to express myself and stand up for myself for fear of being rejected or too too aggressive or too uh, yeah, something one of my parents said I was too aggressive. So to attain their love, I would need to not be aggressive. So don't stand up for yourself, Clare, or it will be seen as aggressive, whatever. So that's how I've lived. In case I was rejected, I would play down myself, but I would agree with everybody and just go along with it. And so the RSD it's that get them before they get you thing. It's a sensitivity, you're being rejected. So I'm hyper vigilant on anything on somebody's face, somebody's body, language, someone's behaviour, someone's words, someone's email, someone's text, whatever. Always looking for a rejection of some kind or a a slight against me. And therefore, if I feel that's happened, then that adds to the belief that I am a piece of crap. Yeah. Just adds to it. So therefore, my esteem has got lower and lower. And then add autism to it, where I find it hard to read people, um, and not being good at understanding why people do what they do and what they say and how they behave as they do. I can see why I've just got two friends and never go out. I mean, the whole world is big and scary, and it's almost like I've been groomed into thinking, from my childhood, groomed into thinking the world is a bad place and you're just shit, Clare. Oh God, is there any wonder I moved into breakdown? I mean, I did pretty well. It's 57, 58 years. I had a birthday right in the middle of it. So 57, 8 years of always thinking the worst of people and believing it. And believing I'm a victim of them. With that foundation of, yeah, Clare, you are a piece of crap, actually. Yeah. Even we think so. Don't worry, I don't speak to them anymore. We're decades away from speaking to one another. So uh yeah, it will never happen again. Never happen again. So, yeah. What a bloody pickle. Bound to have ended up under a blanket, rocking myself in the corner of a darkened room. Bound to have. And that's what kind of happened. Actually, yeah, that is what happened. Oh, I can laugh at it now, but hey, great to learn lessons from it all though, isn't it? Really good. So I need to be aware of this now. The first step that anyone can take to change is to acknowledge what's been going wrong. And I think I've got it. By Jove! I think I've worked it out. Yeah, so like I say, I have to become aware of this and watch myself as I move around in the world, noticing how I am perceiving people, noticing myself almost as a um again, back to the breakdown thing, dissociated states, kind of just watch myself moving around in the world, seeing how I interact with other people, what thoughts are going through my head, what assumptions I'm making. The other thing I must learn as well is to not play small, to stand in my space, to stand in who Clare is now, and it feels so much more possible since I've had this breakdown. Just so much more possible. I I don't feel as though I'm ungrounded. I feel grounded. I feel slightly angry that I've wasted her bunny ears, wasted all those years being a a bloody wuss and a mug and a pushover and a people pleaser. I'm a bit angry about that, but that's okay, because you know I've learnt this now. Uh yeah, I feel more grounded. I feel like I've grown a pair of balls. Why you'd need balls, I don't know, Clare, but and and now I don't feel scared of losing people. You know, if if somebody can't accept me as I am and know my intentions if I say something and understand that I come from a place of kindness, actually, and love, despite my tone of voice and my banter, if they don't get that, then I can't change and I will not change myself so that they are happy with me. Because that means I've got a fake, I've got to fake the rest of my life to that person. Not happening. This will give me a chance to build my self-esteem up and change my locus of evaluation, locus of evaluation, um, being internal rather than external. So I am standing in my beliefs about myself and who I am, that I give myself value from my own point of view, from my own gut feelings and my own intentions and my own soul, rather than try and work out who I am and whether I have value from what other people think of me. Because that's bullshit. Not doing that anymore. No, no, I'm 58. No, not happening. Like I say, I've got RC. I've also got to learn how to unmask safely. I have to unmask safely, maturely. I have to be mature, I have to be all grown up and not not respond from hurt child all the time. I have to unmask carefully. Uh, because I don't want to upset people, but I also feel that I can't hide myself, and I have to be very aware of myself. I have to be introspective. Ooh, never used that word before. Introspective. I hope it's the right meaning. Biggest one of all, I have to self-parent. I had shit parents. I have to say, I just did. They were so self-absorbed, pair of narcissists, awful. And I've seen some really nice parents online, parents that have their TikTok space or their Instagram space or they have um their YouTube channels of space. And I see these mums and dads loving their kids so much, and I don't know really what that feels like as a recipient, to be fair. And I I mean it was a different generation, but I see these parents working with their child's autism or their child's or ADHD. I see that and the accommodations and the love and the determination to support and oh make the world a better place for them. I love that, that warms my heart so much as I'm sure it does everyone else. It's just beautiful, but I didn't have that, and and I know, like I say, it's a generational thing. But I have to learn to be a brilliant parent to myself. Adopt the nature and the love and the drive that these other parents have for their children with neurodiversity, adopt those traits and bring them back to myself. For example, if I see myself upset or I've noticed that I'm triggered, or I notice that I'm feeling overwhelmed, or I need to stop, or want to cry, that I create in my my own head, it's a bit a parent who will soothe me, who will talk to me, say it's okay, Clare, it's alright. Let's get a cup of tea and let's work out what that overwhelm was caused by. I also have to remember as I move forward now into V2 properly, fully into V2, I have to consider my mantra as well that I made for myself during my breakdown, which is no fear, no faking, no fawning. So while I'm moving around in the world, here we go again, moving around in the world, I am thinking, ah, do you have fear right now, Clare? What are you fearful of? What's going on? What could you do now to overcome that fear that you have? No faking, yeah. Be yourself, Clare. And no fawning, yeah. No, no, sorry, I was gonna say like not blowing smoke up people's asses and just go, oh, please like me. Oh, I'm I'm nice, really. Yeah, I know my parents didn't think so, but I I am, I am really, really, please love me. Oh, good grief. So I'm gonna look after myself as I move into the new chapter now. I'm gonna put myself first now, actually. I'm an empty nester. My two babies have flown the nest, they're doing it, they're they're getting on. Can't believe it. No one's gone to prison yet. Um no one's murdered anyone. Uh, it's all good. So I've got two decent babies that are out in the world now, which is awesome. And they're quite functional as well. They've got jobs and everything. I'm so proud, considering they had a mother who was a bit of a mess while they were growing up. Yeah, so that's good about the kids. Box ticked. This new chapter for me is about getting to a place of or closer to actualization. And I'm going to talk more about that as the episodes go on. And Being a Carl Rogers fan, um I'm not gonna be able to help myself to be honest. I will explain all, but just to say for now that really this whole journey for me is about building a lifestyle for myself, a way of living, and building an environment that I need, not just what I should have or other people have or other people might want. It's what I need. And that's about feeling peaceful at home, really feeling as though where I am in the world geographically and where I am in my brain is a safe and comfortable place for me. And in that environment that I've made for myself is an opportunity for me to really thrive. And I don't mean gain wealth and things, I mean to thrive as a person, uh thrive as my soul, I suppose. I don't know how deep to get here really. I don't know, I'm not actualized. I don't know that many people achieve actualization, but I think it's important to try to attain the best from oneself and be able to breathe, you know, and look at the sunset and feel at peace and feel happy. Yeah, I know life still goes on, all that, but I for me it's about getting to a place where I'm at the the best I can be. That's in a nutshell. So, yeah, next episode I'm gonna talk about more about actualization and what it means. I mean the bare bones of what Carl Rogers means by actualizing and his actualization theory, and I'm gonna talk about how this applies so well to somebody who's come out of breakdown and has had a life changing diagnosis. Yeah, so I'm gonna shut up now and I'm going to say I'll see you in the next one. Ta da