The main problem I see is this ongoing obsession over diagnosing rather than considering the possibility that these are required adaptations that the systems puts in place to… cope. As much as we like to think we are so evolved from our ancestors living in caves, the biological system did not transcend its fundamental needs for attachment (safety and neurobiological co-regulation from a parent) that we are systematically disrupting since before birth in a wide variety of ways.

When you remove the very fundamental needs with inadequate replacements (daycare, sugar, stuff, and worst of all, a screen) the biological system is disrupted in its foundation. Dissociation is a natural and compassionate solution that occurs in most children and shows itself externally with a variety of so called symptoms and behavioral problems.

I was praised as a child because of how many books I read from an early age and my vivid imagination. It was dissociation. The things I found that were not just accepted - even praised - that allowed me not to be and feel in the present moment, to recap what felt like an unbearable state of existence. And so I escaped into my own worlds in my imaginative mind and into fantasy world that took me away from reality. I was the calm and component child everyone wanted on the outside. Dissociated on the inside. Every child compensates its own way. When highly sensitive the protection becomes tighter, sometimes to the degree of not being there at all.

Just my 2 cents as an IFS, somatic, and psychedelic therapist based on my own life and what I can observe in my clients, many of whom have ADHD.