I need to be honest about something I don’t see talked about enough. The rage.

Not frustration. Not irritation. Rage. The white-hot, sudden, completely disproportionate kind that comes out of nowhere on a Tuesday evening because the TV is too loud and someone is pulling on your sleeve and the pasta is boiling over and there’s a toy on the floor that plays a song and you step on something wet in your socks and your 3-year-old screams because his brother looked at him and your whole body just… clenches.

And you yell. Or you slam something down. Or you say something sharp to your kid, something you hear coming out of your mouth and can’t stop, and their face changes, and then it’s quiet, and then comes the part that’s worse than the rage.

The shame.

I want to talk about this because I think a lot of ADHD parents carry this quietly and don’t know what to do with it. It’s not something you bring up at the school gate. “Hey, I completely lost it last night because my senses overloaded and I yelled at my five-year-old for asking me a question.” You just… carry it.

I’ve been trying to understand it. I’m still in the middle of it, but I can tell you what I think is happening.

The rage, for me, isn’t really anger. It doesn’t come from the same place as being properly annoyed about something. It’s sensory. It’s what happens when my nervous system gets flooded with too much input and the only output it can find is explosive. Like a circuit breaker tripping, except instead of shutting down quietly it takes out a wall.

There’s usually a buildup. I can sometimes see it in hindsight, even if I can’t see it in the moment. It starts in the late afternoon. The day has been long. I’ve been managing my brain all day at work, masking, organising, trying to stay on top of things. By 5pm the tank is empty. And then I walk through the door into the loudest, most chaotic, most sensorily demanding environment imaginable: my house with two small children in it.

They’re excited to see me. They want to show me things. They want to talk and climb on me and be loud and be close. And I love them so much it physically hurts. But my body is telling me I need quiet. I need space. I need fifteen minutes of nothing. And I don’t get that, because that’s not how it works when you have young kids, so instead the input just keeps coming and coming and coming until something gives.

The worst part isn’t the yelling itself. It’s the look on my daughter’s face afterwards. She goes quiet. She doesn’t cry, which is almost worse. She just looks at me like she’s trying to figure out if I’m safe. And that, right there, that look, is the thing that haunts me at 11pm when I’m lying in bed staring at the ceiling.

I apologise. Every time. I get down on her level and I say “I’m sorry I yelled. That wasn’t okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. My brain got too full and I handled it badly.” And she forgives me immediately, because she’s five and her capacity for forgiveness is so much bigger than mine, and that makes me feel worse somehow.

My partner and I have talked about it a lot. She sees the pattern more clearly than I do, because she’s outside it. She’ll say “you need to go sit in the car for five minutes when you get home” and she’s right, but doing that feels like failing. Like I can’t handle my own family. Like other parents walk through the door and just… cope.

I’ve been trying things. Some of them help, sometimes. Noise-reducing earbuds when I’m cooking dinner (takes the edge off). Sitting in the car for a few minutes before I come inside (she was right about that one). Being honest with my daughter: “My ears are feeling really full right now, can we use quiet voices for a bit?” She’s surprisingly good at this. Better than me, probably.

I also went and talked to someone about it. A psychologist. Which I should have done sooner but kept putting off. He said something that stuck with me, which was that the rage response is essentially a fight-or-flight reaction triggered by sensory overload, and that it’s significantly more common in people with ADHD because our nervous systems don’t regulate input the same way. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a wiring issue.

That helps to know, intellectually. It doesn’t help at 5:47pm when the Bluey theme song is playing for the third consecutive time and someone has just wiped yoghurt on my shirt and I can feel the heat rising behind my eyes.

But it helps afterwards. It helps in the gap between the rage and the shame, where I used to just spiral into self-hatred. Now there’s a small space there where I can say “that was dysregulation, not you being a bad parent.” The shame still comes. But it’s a bit smaller than it used to be. A bit less total.

I had a night last week where I felt it coming and I caught it. The buildup, the tightness in my chest, the way the sounds start to feel like they’re inside my skull. And instead of erupting I said, out loud, “I need a minute” and I walked to the bedroom and I closed the door and I sat on the floor and breathed until it passed. My daughter knocked after about two minutes and said “are you okay, Daddy?” through the door.

“Yeah mate,” I said. “Just recharging.”

It’s not always going to work. I know that. I’ll lose it again. Probably soon. But that one time, I didn’t. And she didn’t get that look on her face. And when I came back out we read a book together on the couch and she leaned into me and it was quiet and I could hear myself think.

I’m not writing this because I’ve figured it out. I’m writing it because I spent years thinking I was just an angry person. That something was fundamentally wrong with me. And it turns out it’s more complicated than that, and simpler at the same time. My brain gets overwhelmed. The overwhelm comes out as rage. The rage hurts the people I love most. And the only way through it is to take it seriously, not as a personality trait but as a thing that needs managing, every day, probably forever.

That’s not a hopeful ending, I know. But it’s an honest one. And I think honesty is more useful here than hope.