A coworker sends the wrong file for the third time. A contractor misses something obvious. A customer service rep reads you a script that has nothing to do with your question. And something in you goes white-hot, fast, out of all proportion to the stakes.
Afterward you might feel justified. More often you feel embarrassed, then tired, then ashamed. Why does this get to me so much? Other people just shrug.
There’s a theory going around that this kind of anger is a trauma response rooted in childhood emotional neglect. I think there’s something in it. But if you’re autistic, ADHD, gifted, or some layered combination, that story leaves out half of what’s happening. For a lot of us, the anger sits right where wiring and history meet. So let’s look at both, and at how they shape each other.
Two Threads That are Often One
Childhood emotional neglect (CEN) describes what was missing. Nobody noticed when you were overwhelmed. Nobody helped you name a feeling or sat with you in it. Clinicians don’t diagnose it, and research on it is still limited.
Here’s the part that matters for neurocomplex readers: being undiagnosed can produce something that looks a lot like CEN, even in a loving home. If no one knew you were autistic or ADHD, no one knew what you needed. Your meltdowns read as bad behavior. Your shutdowns read as fine. Your exhaustion read as laziness, or didn’t register at all. Often your parents were navigating their own unrecognized wiring, too.
So for many of us, neglect and neurotype are tangled together. The neurotype is why our inner life went unseen.
Out of that, a few patterns may form. I offer these as possibilities to test against your own experience:
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