20,000 Corrections by Age 10: A Origin Story for Your Shame

Remember yesterday when I said you're not responsible for other people's feelings?

Cool. Now let's talk about why that's so hard to believe.

Here's a fun statistic: by age 10, kids with ADHD receive an estimated 20,000 corrective or negative messages.

Twenty. Thousand.

That's roughly seven corrections a day, every day, for ten years. Before you've even hit double digits, you've been told you're wrong more times than most people get told "good morning."

And we wonder why we grow up thinking we're the problem.

This isn't guilt. Guilt is "I did a bad thing." Guilt is specific. You can fix the thing, apologize, move on.

Shame is different. Shame is "I am a bad thing."

Shame doesn't point at your behavior. It points at you. It says: the problem isn't what you did, the problem is what you are. Your fundamental wiring is incorrect. Please return yourself to the manufacturer.

After 20,000 corrections, you stop thinking you made mistakes. You start thinking you are one.

Here's how this plays out:

Option A: Perfectionism. If you can just be perfect, no one can criticize you. So you become a full-time mind reader, constantly scanning for what people want and delivering it before they ask. You forget what you actually want because that question stopped being relevant somewhere around correction #6,000.

Option B: Give up entirely. Why try if you're just going to fail? You only engage with things that guarantee quick, easy success. Video games are perfect—if you fail, only you know. You respawn and pretend it never happened. Real life doesn't have a reset button, so you just... don't play.

Option C: Rage. If you're going to feel bad no matter what, might as well be angry about it. At least anger feels powerful. Shame just feels like shrinking.

Most of us rotate through all three depending on the day.

The worst part is that shame hides. That's literally what the word means—it comes from an old English word meaning "to cover up."

So you're walking around with this massive invisible weight, and you can't even talk about it because talking about it is shameful. It's shame all the way down. Shame-ception.

You won't ask for help because asking for help means admitting you need it, which means admitting you failed, which means exposing the thing you've been hiding since you were seven years old and someone told you to just try harder.

Here's the connection to yesterday's post:

When you've been corrected 20,000 times, you develop a very specific reflex. Something goes wrong? Must be me. Someone's upset? Probably my fault. Weird energy in the room? I caused it somehow.

You become the default suspect in every emotional crime scene because historically, you usually were.

So when I say "you're not responsible for other people's feelings," your brain goes: "But what if I am though? What if this is just another thing I'm doing wrong and I don't even know it?"

That's not logic. That's 20,000 corrections talking.

The article I read about this said humor is one of the best weapons against shame. Makes sense. Hard to feel like a fundamental mistake when you're laughing at the absurdity of it all.

So here's the absurdity: you were a child. You had a brain that worked differently. And instead of anyone figuring that out and adjusting their expectations, you got corrected. Over and over. Until you internalized that you were the problem.

You were literally a kid. You didn't do anything wrong. You just existed with a different operating system in a world that only had one instruction manual.

That's not your shame to carry. That's a system failure. You were just the one who got the error messages.

Self-acceptance sounds like a greeting card, but here's what it actually means: you have to believe you're worth something even when you screw up.

Not "I'm good because I finally got it right." That's just perfectionism in a trench coat.

Actual self-acceptance is "I'm good even though I got it wrong, because my value isn't contingent on my performance."

Wild concept for those of us who've been graded on everything since birth.

You're probably not going to undo 20,000 corrections overnight. That's fine. This isn't a self-help article with five easy steps to heal your inner child by Thursday.

But maybe start here: the next time something goes wrong and your brain immediately says "my fault," ask it for evidence.

Not vibes. Not "it's always me." Actual evidence.

Because sometimes it is you. That's fine. You fix it and move on.

But sometimes it's not. And you've been taking the blame anyway because that's what you were trained to do before you could even do long division.

Twenty thousand corrections built that reflex. It's going to take more than positive thinking to undo it.

But you can start by noticing it. By catching yourself mid-spiral and going "wait, is this actually mine?"

Sometimes the answer is no. And you're allowed to put it down.