Most adults with ADHD or autistic nervous systems were taught to see themselves through a moral lens. Lazy. Inconsistent. Unreliable. At first those judgments came from outside, from teachers, managers, or family. Over time they moved inward and became a private voice that kept score. Every unfinished task felt like evidence of character failure.
But there’s a more accurate frame, and once you encounter it, the old story starts to loosen. You weren’t unmotivated. You were dysregulated.
This isn’t an excuse. It’s a correction. Motivation doesn’t disappear at random. It collapses under specific conditions: threat, overload, ambiguity, shame, loss of agency. For many neurodivergent adults, those conditions aren’t occasional. They form the background atmosphere of daily life.
Executive function isn’t a moral faculty. It isn’t proof of virtue or discipline. It’s a biological capacity that depends on nervous system safety. When the system is braced or flooded, the brain prioritizes survival, not planning or follow-through. From the outside this looks like procrastination or avoidance. From the inside it feels like friction, fog, a drag against intention.
This is where so many explanations fall short. Pop neuroscience offers hacks. Moral frameworks apply pressure. Medicalized language sometimes strips agency entirely. None of these reach the center.
The truth is narrower and more demanding. You are responsible for your life, and your nervous system sets the conditions under which responsibility becomes possible.For many ADHD and autistic adults, dysregulation doesn’t arrive as panic. It arrives as something ordinary. You know what needs to be done. You want to do it. And your body doesn’t come with you. So you compensate. You mask competence. You borrow energy from tomorrow. Sometimes it works. Often it collapses. And when it does, the old verdict returns.
Nervous system literacy is the crossing point. Not self-attack disguised as discipline, and not self-forgiveness as abdication, but precise understanding. What states shut you down? What mobilizes you? What happens to your thinking under evaluation or urgency? What does safety actually feel like in your body?
These aren’t therapeutic indulgences. They’re operational questions. Once you can name dysregulation, responsibility doesn’t disappear. It sharpens. You stop designing your life around standards built for other nervous systems and then punishing yourself for failing them.
The fantasy was that shame would motivate you. The reality is that shame constricts access to action. This frame matters because it tells the truth without letting anyone off the hook.
At The Listening Field, we work with this crossing point every day, where moral language meets nervous system reality and responsibility becomes possible again. Threshold Notes from the Art Research Institute are a monthly series for people working at this edge, leaders, clinicians, artists, and thinkers who need a field strong enough to hold complexity without collapse.If this resonates, you’re already standing near the threshold.
More Soon.
Christopher Lee Chang
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