Justice Sensitivity:

People with ADHD may feel more intense emotions toward injustice or betrayal than a neurotypical person feels. This effect is called “Justice Sensitivity”. This article tells the story of my own justice sensitivity, explains why justice sensitivity occurs in people ADHD, and outlines what to do about it.

“Justice sensitivity is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a heightened awareness that an injustice is occurring coupled with a heightened sensitivity toward that injustice, especially in the heart of an artist.”

I’m an artist. I write and record songs. I also dabble in audio mixing and visual art. I do it for the fun. But these days I feel like I don’t fit in with the community of artists that I once immersed myself in. This feeling is especially strong when I’m around younger artists and the new trends they bring. This growing sense of rejection by my art community feels like a betrayal. I used to feel accepted for participating in my most impassioned art, and now I don’t. (Note: This feeling is heavier than typical Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.)

For the longest time, I had no idea why I had been side-lined! I just knew that the art community that used to know and love me no longer did. It hurt. Bad. Then I heard a concept from a documentary that shed some much needed light on my pain.

Country Music: A Microcosm of the Problem

In 2019, I saw a film from renowned historian Ken Burns called “Country Music”. It tells the story of American country music, which it calls “the story of the fiddle and the banjo”. Country music started in the rolling hills of the Appalachian Mountains and on the farms of the rural South, perhaps in a mining town or on a ranch or even a plantation.

Early country songs told stories of impoverished, working people from many backgrounds just trying to get by, or even find joy, as they pressed on through their hardscrabble lives. The tradition was also heavily influenced by folk tunes and spirituals sung by all types of farm workers, including many slaves, servants, disenfranchised people, and people of color.

But today, as comedian Bo Burnham describes in his NSFW song, “Pandering”, country music is created mostly by pretty, white people pretending to be farm people, flying on private jets, and wearing $3000 cowboy boots. Burnham says “It’s the exact opposite of honest.” So, how did we get to this point? Well, money, of course!

Hey, Gurrrlll:

Somewhere along the way, Nashville music executives figured out that there was a way to make money off of what began as an authentic, organic, raw musical tradition. The accents are still there (sorta), but the pain isn’t. Today, it’s “Twang Pop”. It’s “Bro Country” full of “Hey gurrrlls”, cornfield parties, jacked-up pickup trucks, and many other themes my homesteading family would have just rolled our eyes at down in the swamps of South Georgia. The music is just awful, absent of it’s former heart. There’s no presence. There’s no earnestness. (Note: Yes, there are a select few artists still holding the line, but they’ve been few and far between with little presence on the charts.)

Somewhere, somehow, the expectation for what was “good” or “excellent” or “acceptable” shifted from what was truly authentic, genuine, and real to what was perfectly mastered and auto-tuned. Looks became more important than relevance. Portraying the glamorized, paper-thin image of a lifestyle became more appealing than actually representing that lifestyle authentically and with nuance. How did we get from Hank Williams to Morgan Wallen? From Townes Van Zandt to Luke Bryan?

And it’s not just country music, of course! What do country music, church music, college sports, and politics all have in common? They’ve all been hijacked! And so have many more parts of our culture.

ADHD and Justice Sensitivity:

The attuned ADHDer knows this kind of injustice all too well, and we’re left asking “How far down does the rabbit hole go?” Economists have developed terms like “Wal-Mart-ization” to identify woes such as how once-quality products get degraded as their prices are driven down and production is outsourced overseas by giant retailers. Maybe we also need more words to describe the unseen, extensive, pervasive, erosion of society that is even more far-reaching.

Justice sensitivity is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a heightened awareness that an injustice is occurring coupled with a heightened sensitivity toward that injustice, especially in the heart of an artist. Justice sensitivity can cause heavy distress and make us feel distant from those we love. To be blunt, it was probably justice sensitivity that left Van Gogh’s ear in the dirt.

In my work as a therapist, I’ve seen justice sensitivity paralyze several of my clients who have ADHD. “It’s just not fair” can become our battle cry for change, but it can also be a brick wall or a metaphorical millstone around someone’s neck. My own justice sensitivity was enough for me to pull away from an art form entirely. And I sometimes wish I hadn’t.

My Story:

I led church music from the time I was 18 until I was 36. I literally learned to play guitar just so I could lead church music in 1997. A certain leader told me I needed to learn it, so I did. I never learned to sing super well, though. I just knew that in the late 90’s there was this super cool, new movement called “praise and worship music” that was sorta beginning to take hold. It was spontaneous, spirit-led, and so very highly collaborative. Everyone seemed to have a voice, and each voice was important. I wanted to be a part of it, even though I was the only person in my rural county my age who wanted to do this. I also felt a strong spiritual calling to do so.

The result was the formation of a weekly worship service that grew to over 200 weekly high-school aged attendees over the next 2 years. (This occurred in a county with only 500 high schoolers total.) Over the next 2 decades, I wound up leading music regularly in 4 different churches and for multiple special events, often for hundreds of people at a time. I invested thousands of hours of my life into developing team members, teaching them about this new tradition of exploring the spirit in the moment, and encouraging them that they could also be part of this movement. I loved these parts of leading music then, and I still do! But somewhere…somehow…that all changed.

The Hard Reality:

At some point, I was faced with the hard reality that what the church wanted was no longer what I was wanting. The church now wanted a “worship experience”. They wanted what they saw in videos from Hillsong, Elevation, Bethel, and other mega-church music producers. They wanted stellar vocals, perfect tempos, attractive and charismatic leaders, loud sound systems, lots of pad from the keys, LED screens, smoke machines… And this became the social norm. These factors became what people expected when they came to church. But these factors weren’t what I was capable of. But, more importantly, I did not feel spiritually comfortable trying to emulate them. To me, it all felt…wrong. And wrong for lots of reasons.

And let me tell ya, I was hurt! I was so confused why I was no longer “good enough” to lead after being “good enough” for 18 years. It sucked. It felt like everyone around me knew some secret that I had yet to figure out about myself or about the church world. I felt lost and disoriented. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t justice. This was injustice.

My Choices:

I engaged in all sorts of finger-pointing about how this new expectation is the result of monopolized Wal-Mart-ization (and it is), about how scripture doesn’t support this level of isolated control by just a few contributors during the assembly (and it doesn’t), about how idolizing an “experience” sacrifices the entire point of spontaneous worship for a pre-engineered feeling (and it does), and about how the songs are poorly written (and they are).  But I eventually had to accept that the injustice I was feeling was also greatly heightened by my ADHD justice sensitivity. I wasn’t wrong for feeling the injustice, but I was making too big of a deal about it.

Content creators like Beyond Sunday Worship, Red Letter Christians, and The Holy Post helped pull me out of a dark hole by normalizing and validating what I was feeling. The words of The Holy Post’s Skye Jethani were especially powerful: “This isn’t church. This is theatre.”

“Comes a time to let the whole thing go
Comes a time when you realize we’ve all been bought and sold
Yeah, beat up, pushed down, turned out of your game
When money moves the lips where once the Spirit was untamed”
– Bill Mallonee (Doin’ Time)

What to Do:

The ADHD-type brain has to learn to mitigate the feelings it has toward certain triggers. This process starts with realizing that our brains are always seeking stimulation. Stimulation doesn’t have to be good or healthy for our brains to crave it, it just has to be literally stimulating. Injustice is highly stimulating.

Self-managing justice sensitivity means realizing when “I’m doing it again” and choosing to correct it. With practice, I learned to lessen the amount of attention I was giving to a particular thought. I call this skill “cognitive whack-a-mole”, meaning that I am identifying thoughts that aren’t helpful and then choosing to “whack” each by removing my attention from them when they occur. Sometimes it helps to distract myself, but the goal is to manually reduce the attention flowing to the thought until it dissipates. Engaging in exercise, creative outlets, and helpful social interactions can help when distraction is needed.

The Mental Manager:

I like to imagine that I am the metaphorical executive that just bought the business that is my mind. I have to examine and evaluate my mental processes and actively manage them. As the owner and CEO, I have the power to redistribute or even withdraw funding to the various departments of the business if there is an imbalance or a threat to overall performance. In this metaphor, the attention is the funding – the power!  If logical thinking isn’t getting enough of my attention because justice sensitivity is soaking it all up, then I need to actively re-distribute my attention to logical thinking.

Dr Ed Hallowell says that the ADHD brain is like “a Ferrari engine with bicycle brakes.” When I practice actively withdrawing attention from a distracting or unhelpful thought, I am putting on the “brakes”. I am literally learning to govern my thinking by regulating attention itself. This is different from just telling myself to “stop thinking about it”. It is giving myself “permission to not attend” a certain line of thinking that emerges. It is shutting it down by detaching from it. And it works! It requires me to not entertain the future thoughts that emerge by applying the same attitude of disengaging toward them.

But, It’s Still Wrong, Right?

Dr. Hallowell says in ADHD 2.0 that the most important part of managing ADHD is learning to “take back control” over one’s thoughts. But he never said that we should try to take back control over other people. I can’t control other people. I can only control how I respond to them. That kind of thinking is the essence of good boundaries. Yes, the injustice is still wrong (or inaccurate, misinformed, unfortunate, etc), but that doesn’t make it mine to change. It just is. I can accept that once I deal with my own justice sensitivity.

Your ADHD Therapist – Justice Sensitivity Specialist

I work with creative professionals across Georgia who deal with Anxiety, ADHD, or Autism (Level 1). If you’d like help with these or related issues, give me a call at 770-615-6300.

You can also schedule a session here. We offer both telehealth and in-person sessions, and I’m in-network with Aetna and United Healthcare insurances and Lyra EAP. We provide paperwork if you want to file with your out-of-network insurance.