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Episode 25 · 29 min · Jul 14, 2026

Is Your ADHD Actually Rooted in Trauma? | Michael Drag, LPC

with Michael Drag, LPC

Michael Drag spent years asking clients whether their racing thoughts and forgotten deadlines might be ADHD, long before he considered the same question about himself. The realization landed later in life, and once it did, he started noticing symptoms that never once appeared in a diagnostic manual: limerence, the obsessive infatuation that can hijack attention for weeks, and rejection sensitive dysphoria, the flash of shame that follows the smallest perceived criticism. Those are the moments Jessica and Michael use to open this conversation, and they set the tone for an episode that keeps circling back to one question. Where does neurodivergence end and trauma begin?

Michael Drag, LPC, founded Space Between the Words, a group practice in Pennsylvania, and has practiced since 2014. His path ran through community mental health and drug and alcohol rehab settings before he moved into private practice, and that range shows in how he talks about his specialties: trauma, addiction, and neurodivergence, treated as threads of the same rope rather than separate boxes to check. His own adult ADHD diagnosis did not close a question for him. It opened dozens, and working through them is what eventually produced his book, Heir of Narcissism: Exploring ADHD in the Context of Complex Trauma.

The book grew out of a pattern Michael kept seeing across his caseload: clients who had grown up with a narcissistic parent and who, as adults, presented with ADHD-like symptoms that did not fully fit the standard profile. Poor focus, emotional volatility, and chronic self-doubt showed up not as a wiring difference from birth but as an adaptation to a home where a child's needs were routinely overridden by a parent's. Michael describes the internal result as a kind of narcissistic inner voice, a critical, comparison-obsessed narrator that clients inherit rather than invent, and that voice becomes a recurring character throughout the episode.

From there the conversation widens into the messiness of real diagnosis. Michael and Jessica talk through where OCD overlaps with neurodivergence, why the question of undiagnosed autism keeps surfacing in his intake sessions, and how the isolation of the COVID years seemed to sharpen narcissistic traits in people who were already prone to them. Michael also turns the lens on himself, describing his own trauma history and how it shaped both his clinical instincts and his decision to specialize in the areas he now treats. None of it is presented as a tidy checklist. It is presented as the slow, occasionally uncomfortable work of recognizing a pattern in your clients because you first had to recognize it in yourself.

The second half of the episode moves from diagnosis into practice, literally. Michael talks about how family patterns repeat not just in relationships but in career choices, and how naming that repetition is often the first real step in therapy. He also describes building an affordable group therapy option at Space Between the Words, a deliberate choice to make care accessible to clients who could not otherwise pay for weekly individual sessions. Jessica and Michael close out the conversation on the practical realities of running a growing practice while parenting a new baby, including the honest tradeoffs of maintaining a waitlist, and on the genuineness Michael is trying to protect as he works on his next book.

What makes this episode land is Michael's refusal to pick a single lane. He does not argue that ADHD is really always trauma, or that neurodivergence is really always misdiagnosed. He argues that clinicians and clients alike do better work when they are willing to hold both possibilities open at once, long enough to actually find out which one, or which combination, is true for the person in front of them. For anyone who has ever been handed a diagnosis that explained some of their life but not all of it, that willingness to keep asking is the whole point.

In this episode, you will learn:

  • How rejection sensitive dysphoria and limerence show up as ADHD symptoms the DSM never names.
  • What client pattern led Michael Drag to write Heir of Narcissism.
  • How narcissistic parenting can produce ADHD-like symptoms in adulthood.
  • Why OCD and neurodivergence often get tangled together in diagnosis.
  • How repeating family patterns shape both relationships and career choices.
  • Practical ways Michael Drag makes group therapy financially accessible.
  • Why an undiagnosed autism question can complicate an ADHD diagnosis.
  • How Michael balances a growing private practice with new parenthood.
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