Responsibility and Self-Blame Are Not the Same Thing
You realise you've forgotten something that mattered to someone else.
Maybe you said you'd take care of it and they were relying on you. Perhaps it isn't even the first time something like this has happened, and you can hear the frustration in their voice when they ask about it.
You understand why they're annoyed.
And then, almost before you've had time to think about what actually happened, you're somewhere much bigger. You should have remembered. You knew it mattered. You need to be more organised. Other people seem to manage these things, so why can't you?
Eventually the forgotten thing becomes evidence. You're unreliable. Thoughtless. Selfish. Perhaps this is just what you're like.
For adults who have spent years trying to make sense of ADHD-related difficulties without knowing ADHD was part of the picture, that journey from something went wrong to there is something wrong with me can be incredibly familiar.
Diagnosis can complicate it further. You now have information that might explain why certain things have been difficult, but using that information can feel uncomfortable when somebody else has been affected. You don't want ADHD to become an excuse. You don't want understanding yourself better to mean taking your impact on other people less seriously.
It doesn't have to.
Responsibility and self-blame can feel very similar because both can arise when we know something hasn't gone well. But they take us in quite different directions. Responsibility keeps us close to what happened, who was affected and what needs to happen now. Self-blame has a tendency to turn the same event into a much broader judgement about who we are.
Being hard on yourself can feel like proof that you care
There can be something almost reassuring about feeling terrible after you've made a mistake.
If you've hurt somebody, being angry with yourself can feel like evidence that you understand the seriousness of it. If you've forgotten something important, perhaps you feel you should be ashamed. Anything less might seem as though you're letting yourself off too easily.
This is one reason the idea of becoming less self-critical can be surprisingly uncomfortable. If shame has always accompanied responsibility, removing the shame can feel as though you're removing the responsibility with it.
But imagine you've forgotten to make a booking you promised to organise. The other person has been relying on you, and now the booking may be harder to get.
You can acknowledge that you forgot. You can apologise. You can find out whether the situation can still be fixed and, if this is something that happens regularly, think seriously about how you're going to handle similar commitments in future.
None of that requires you to decide that you're an unreliable person.
In fact, deciding you're unreliable doesn't actually do much for the booking. It hurts, certainly, and because it hurts it can feel appropriately serious. But pain isn't the same thing as accountability.
The useful part is much more specific: I said I would do this, I didn't do it, somebody else was affected, and I need to deal with that.
There is plenty of responsibility in that sentence without adding a verdict on your character.
ADHD can explain part of what happened without making the impact disappear
This can be particularly difficult to navigate after diagnosis because you're suddenly being given explanations for things you may have spent years treating as personal failings.
Perhaps you've learned more about working memory and begun to understand why an intention can feel completely secure one moment and disappear when your attention moves elsewhere. You may recognise the role of impulsivity in conversations you've regretted, or see why time, task initiation and transitions have caused difficulties that never made sense when the only explanation available was that you needed to try harder.
Then something goes wrong and you hesitate to use any of that information.
You don't want to become someone who says, “It's my ADHD,” every time another person is upset. You may not even allow yourself to consider ADHD privately because you're worried that understanding the difficulty will somehow soften your responsibility for it.
But explanation and excuse aren't interchangeable.
If working-memory difficulties contributed to you forgetting a commitment, the commitment still mattered. The person waiting for you to do something still had to deal with the consequences when you didn't. What the ADHD explanation changes is not whether there was an impact, but what you understand about how the problem occurred.
That matters if you want to do something differently next time.
Telling yourself that you need to care more won't necessarily help if caring wasn't the problem. If you cared very much and the intention still disappeared, you probably need something more reliable than another promise to yourself that you'll remember.
The same applies when impulsivity or emotional regulation is involved. Understanding why a response came quickly doesn't undo what was said. It may, however, help you recognise the circumstances in which this tends to happen and what might give you a better chance of responding differently.
Used this way, ADHD isn't getting you out of responsibility. It's giving you better information with which to take it.
Responsibility gets much clearer when we stay with the actual event
Self-blame has a habit of gathering history.
You arrive late to something important and within minutes you're thinking about every other time you've been late. The morning becomes evidence that you always do this, that you never learn and that everybody else must be tired of putting up with you.
The actual lateness is almost lost underneath everything it has come to represent.
Responsibility asks you to stay with this morning for a little longer.
What happened? Did you underestimate how long getting ready would take? Lose track of time? Try to fit one more thing in before leaving? Was there far too much to organise on the way out? Or did you simply make a choice that, looking back, wasn't a particularly good one?
The answer matters because different problems need different responses.
If you consistently underestimate how long it takes to leave the house, there may be something practical you can change. If mornings are overloaded with too many competing tasks, that tells you something else. If somebody was affected by your lateness, there may be an apology or conversation that has nothing to do with whichever strategy you decide to try next.
And sometimes there won't be an especially interesting ADHD explanation. You made a mistake. You handled something badly. You knew better and, on that occasion, didn't do better.
That still doesn't require the conclusion that you are the problem.
It means there is something specific to own.
Other people's experience still belongs in the story
I think this is where conversations about self-understanding can become uncomfortable, because understanding yourself better doesn't guarantee that somebody else will experience the past differently.
Perhaps your partner spent years carrying responsibilities that repeatedly slipped from your attention. A friend may have experienced unanswered messages as lack of interest. Someone you love might remember arguments in which your reaction felt completely disproportionate to what they had said.
Learning about ADHD may change the meaning of those experiences for you. It may finally make sense that you weren't forgetting because you didn't care, or that what looked like a lack of effort from the outside felt very different from where you were standing.
The other person's experience can still be true.
They may have felt forgotten. They may have been exhausted by taking over things that weren't getting done. They may have been hurt by something you said even though hurting them wasn't your intention.
You don't have to choose which account gets to survive.
Sometimes responsibility means being able to say, in whatever words make sense for the relationship, that you understand more now about why something kept happening and you also understand that living on the other side of it was difficult.
That can be harder than self-blame because self-blame tends to pull the attention back towards you. Once you're overwhelmed by what a terrible partner, parent, friend or colleague you think you are, the conversation can quietly become about whether you're a bad person rather than about what the other person experienced.
Staying with the specific impact gives both people more room.
You can listen without needing them to reassure you. You can explain ADHD where it genuinely adds understanding without requiring the explanation to remove their frustration. You can apologise for something without taking responsibility for parts of the situation that weren't yours.
There may even be occasions when the other person remains angry after you've done all of that.
Responsibility doesn't guarantee resolution.
Understanding what happened also helps you see what was actually yours
Years of self-blame can make it very easy to assume responsibility before you've worked out whether all of it belongs to you.
Perhaps expectations weren't clear. Maybe somebody assumed you understood something that was never actually explained. An environment may have been poorly structured, a workload genuinely unreasonable or a relationship may have developed a pattern in which you automatically became responsible for repairing every disagreement.
ADHD doesn't mean none of that was your responsibility either. It just gives us another reason to be precise.
There will be situations where you contributed significantly to what went wrong. Others will involve several people, circumstances nobody controlled or expectations that weren't reasonable in the first place. Often it will be some untidy combination of all of these.
Self-blame doesn't handle that complexity particularly well because it offers such a simple explanation: I am the problem.
Responsibility asks for more detail. What did I actually do? What was happening around me? What did I understand at the time? What do I understand now? What belongs to me to repair or manage differently, and what doesn't?
Those questions aren't designed to produce the most forgiving version of events. They're an attempt to produce a more accurate one.
What you know now becomes part of responsibility too
There is one important difference between looking back at something that happened before diagnosis and thinking about how you approach the same difficulty now.
You have more information.
Perhaps you now know that important intentions are surprisingly unreliable unless you capture them somewhere as soon as they arise. You may have recognised that you're much more likely to react impulsively when you're overloaded, or that certain tasks repeatedly become stuck when the first step isn't clear.
Knowing those things won't make every difficulty disappear. You will still forget things. Systems will fail. There will be days when you know perfectly well what usually helps and don't do it anyway.
But understanding your patterns gives you options that weren't available when your entire strategy was I really need to stop doing this.
This is where responsibility can become much more practical after diagnosis. Instead of measuring how badly you should feel about having a difficulty, you can start deciding what you're going to do with what you know about it.
Sometimes that will mean a reminder, a shared calendar, a clearer agreement or fewer things being held in your head. Sometimes it will mean recognising that you've agreed to something you aren't realistically able to manage and having an awkward conversation about it. Perhaps you'll need support with something you wish you could simply handle yourself.
None of those responses is as emotionally dramatic as telling yourself you've failed again.
They may be considerably more useful.
Responsibility can ask more of us than self-blame
There is a strange finality to self-blame.
If the answer is I'm hopeless, the investigation is essentially over. You already know what caused the problem: you did.
Responsibility is less tidy. You may need to understand a pattern that doesn't have an easy fix, apologise without knowing whether the apology will be accepted or put support around something you wish didn't require support. Sometimes you have to accept that another person has a legitimate frustration with you without turning their frustration into proof that you're fundamentally flawed.
You may also have to recognise that trying harder isn't going to make every ADHD-related difficulty disappear, which means responsibility sometimes involves managing something repeatedly rather than finally overcoming it.
I think that can be much more demanding than blame.
It also leaves you with somewhere to go.
You can regret something without making regret the punishment. You can understand why something happened without pretending it didn't matter. You can take another person's experience seriously without using their hurt to decide who you are.
And when something goes wrong again, as things inevitably will, you can come back to the particular problem in front of you and work out what belongs to you now.
A moment to wonder
You realise halfway through the afternoon that you never made the call you promised to make that morning.
Your first thought arrives quickly. Of course I forgot.
For a moment, several other forgotten things seem to arrive with it.
Then you open your phone, look at the clinic's closing time and see that there are still forty minutes left.
You make the call.
Keep exploring
There’s more to explore across Through the Disconnect, from understanding ADHD and life after diagnosis to masking and making sense of your experience.
References
Australian ADHD Professionals Association. (2022). Australian evidence-based clinical practice guideline for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Faraone, S. V., Bellgrove, M. A., Brikell, I., et al. (2024). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Nature Reviews Disease Primers, 10, 11.
Cook, J., Knight, E., Hume, I., & Qureshi, A. (2014). The self-esteem of adults diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A systematic review of the literature. Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders, 6(4), 249–268.
Newark, P. E., Elsässer, M., & Stieglitz, R.-D. (2016). Self-esteem, self-efficacy, and resources in adults with ADHD. Journal of Attention Disorders, 20(3), 279–290.
Long, N., & Coats, H. (2022). The need for earlier recognition of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in primary care: A qualitative meta-synthesis of the experience of receiving and living with a diagnosis of ADHD in adulthood. Family Practice, 39(6), 1144–1155.
Hansson Halleröd, S. L., Anckarsäter, H., Råstam, M., & Hansson Scherman, M. (2015). Experienced consequences of being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult: A qualitative study. BMC Psychiatry, 15, 31.
Knouse, L. E., Zvorsky, I., & Safren, S. A. (2013). Depression in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): The mediating role of cognitive-behavioral factors. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 37, 1220–1232.
