ADHD and Emotional Permanence: What’s Really Going On?

As an ADHD expert, a licensed therapist and a person with ADHD, I’ve heard so much buzz around the concept of emotional permanence. While emotional permanence is not an official ADHD symptom or clinical diagnosis it’s become a popular term online, especially in ADHD communities, to describe a common relational problem. Emotional permanence has been described as the inability to maintain a stable sense that someone loves, cares about, values, or is emotionally connected. Especially, when the partner isn’t physically present or expressing affection.

I want to clarify that experiences of folks with ADHD are on a spectrum. Nobody completely lacks emotional permanence or has perfect functioning emotional permanence. The feelings around connection can really change for people with ADHD depending on the amount of stress they have, attachment trauma, relationship conflict, or sensory overload. We can think about emotional permanence more as a combination of working memory challenges, emotional dysregulation, and a heightened sensitive to rejection.

Challenges with emotional permanent may feel like: someone doesn’t love you if they haven’t texted; if they aren’t being as emotionally expressive, they’re no longer interested in you; if they go on a way on the vacation, they must not be thinking about you.

To ground this working theory into current terms of cognitive impairment, we can break it down into issue issues with working memory, emotional dysregulation, time blindness, and rejection sensitivity. With working memory, folks with ADHD often struggle to retaining and recalling information. In other words, they can forget what happened just yesterday.

Yesterday, my partner told me they were going be busy and unable to text me. Yesterday, they actually were giving me tons of love and affection. When they’re on vacation. It’s hard for them to contact me because they’re actually in time zone 10 hours difference. With this lack of recall, changes in a partner’s behavior can cause confusion and insecurity.

Another feature of ADHD can be emotional dysregulation. Emotional dysregulation is due to executive function disorder. The part of the brain that analyzes, plans and manages information, including emotions may go up and down in functioning. A thought that normally floats by somebody more Neurotypical, may lead down a rabbit hole of fear for someone at the ADHD.

Folks with ADHD can have feelings that are bigger, more intense and for a longer duration when the executive functioning isn’t doing its job in managing thoughts and feelings. The ADHD brain and body go into a fighter flight response, making it harder to be more rational and recall events more clearly.

Time blindness is another factor. In the ADHD body, time doesn’t pass or flow the same consistent way, making it unclear that connection has happened more recently.

Finally, rejection sensitivity is not an official diagnosis but rather a term use describe an intense emotional response to a heightened perception of rejection, failure, or criticism. Some experts say RSD is a structural feature, experienced by some people with ADHD, and some other experts, disagree, and say this relational trauma due to experiencing more criticism and rejection while suffering from the socially limiting factors of ADHD.

How somebody can help with emotional impermanence is first of all learning about their ADHD and learning about what may be affecting them. They can learn about their level of executive functioning or process their history with being rejected or criticized. They can use the CBT interventions like reality testing where they look for facts both for and against, without mind reading. Next, they can simply reach out to their partner and own their sensitivity and fear. They can learn what their nervous system needs to have more regulation like grounding, mindfulness, and sensory accommodations.

Their partner can be supportive by having consistent check-ins, having rituals of saying goodbye and reuniting. Sending voice memos or videos to demonstrate more emotional connection. They can both have a shared folder of photos or loving messages as a reference. Their partner can learn to accept that they’re not being told they’re not enough or their partner doesn’t think badly of them. Yes, having a partner that has this higher needs may be more work AND it can be a great opportunity of more mindful and consistent connection.