Week One of the Weekly Feature Series
Companion to: “The Lies We Believe”
A Warrior in a Winepress
There is a story in the book of Judges about a man named Gideon.
When we first meet him, he is hiding. Threshing wheat in a winepress — a space too small for the work, chosen precisely because it keeps him out of sight. He is afraid. He is invisible. He is trying to survive.
And an angel appears to him and says: “The LORD is with you, mighty warrior.”
Gideon’s response is not gratitude. It is argument. “If the LORD is with us, why has all this happened? And where are all his miracles? The LORD has abandoned us.” (Judges 6:13)
He does not yet know what he is. He only knows what he has been told — or more accurately, what the circumstances have led him to conclude.
He believes he is small. Forgettable. From the weakest clan. The least of his family. He will say so himself in a few verses: “How can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” (Judges 6:15)
He is wrong about almost everything.
He will go on to lead a small, poorly equipped force to a victory that historians still study. But first — he has to stop believing the lies.
The List
Almost everybody knows this list. You may not have written it down, but you have heard it. Possibly from a teacher. A parent. A coach. A classmate. A spouse. Possibly from the inside of your own head.
You can’t.
You won’t.
You’ll never.
You don’t deserve it.
You’re not good enough.
If you have ADHD, or if you love someone who does, you have encountered this list. It arrives in different forms. Sometimes as direct statements. Sometimes as the look on someone’s face when you turn in late work again. Sometimes as the gnawing internal monologue that starts up whenever you’re about to try something hard.
It has been said enough times, and confirmed by enough failed attempts, that it no longer sounds like someone else’s opinion. It sounds like truth.
It isn’t.
Where the Lies Come From
In 1967, psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier conducted a series of experiments that would redefine how we think about motivation and failure. They were studying dogs placed in situations where they received mild shocks — and they discovered something that changed the field.
When animals cannot control what happens to them — when their actions have no effect on outcomes — they eventually stop trying. Not just in the original situation. They stop trying in new situations too. Even when the path out is right in front of them. Even when escape is possible.
They called it learned helplessness.
In a 2016 paper revisiting their original findings, Seligman and Maier reframed the mechanism: the brain’s default state is not to try. The default is conservation. Persistence in the face of difficulty is something the brain learns — through repeated experience that effort leads to outcomes. When that experience is absent, or when it produces the opposite lesson, the brain learns to stop.
This is not weakness. It is the nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: adapt to the environment it lives in.
For a child with ADHD who has tried and failed in front of peers, who has been publicly corrected, who has been told in a hundred explicit and implicit ways that they are not keeping up — the nervous system learns something. It learns that effort leads to failure. It learns that starting leads to embarrassment. It learns that trying, in certain contexts, is the most reliable path to pain.
And so it stops trying.
The lies are not invented. They are constructed from evidence — incomplete, misread evidence — but evidence nonetheless.
The Five Categories
In thirty-nine years of clinical work, I have found that the lies we believe tend to cluster around five categories. We believe things about ourselves. We believe things about other people. We believe things about the world. We believe things about God. We believe things about our future.
The child with ADHD who has been repeatedly corrected in class believes something about herself. She is not smart. She is a burden. She is different in ways that matter and that won’t change.
She may also believe something about others. That they see her failures. That they expect her to fail. That their patience is running out and their opinion of her is already set.
She may believe something about the world. That it is designed for people who are not her. That the rules exist for other people. That the accommodations she needs are signs of weakness rather than tools.
She may believe something about God — that she is overlooked, that she is not the kind of person whose prayers get answered, that her worth is conditional on performance she cannot reliably deliver.
And she may believe something about her future. That it looks like her past. That the pattern will continue. That there is no version of this story where things get genuinely better.
These beliefs are the real disability. Not the ADHD itself — the overlay of lies that accumulates around it.
The truth that John 8:32 promises — “the truth will set you free” — is not primarily about theological propositions. It is about the liberation that comes from replacing the lies we have been handed with accurate information about who we are and what is possible.
The Five-Step Drill
Lies can be unlearned. The process is not fast, but it is straightforward.
1. Name it. Most lies operate below the level of language. They present as feelings — dread, avoidance, shutdown — before they present as thoughts. The first move is to surface the belief in words. “I believe I am not smart enough to do this.” Say it out loud. Write it down. Give the lie a form so it can be examined.
2. Place it. Every lie was learned somewhere. Who taught you this? Was it a teacher who said something she didn’t intend for you to carry forever? A parent who was frustrated and spoke from frustration rather than truth? A series of experiences that taught the wrong lesson? Tracing the lie back to its origin does two things: it shows you the lie came from somewhere outside you, and it makes the source’s authority smaller.
3. Test it. Is it actually true? Not “does it feel true” — but what does the evidence say? The child who believes she is not smart has a list of evidence on one side. She also has evidence she has never added to the ledger. Things she has figured out. Problems she has solved. Creative approaches she found that others missed. Run the experiment. Collect the counterevidence.
4. Replace it. An examined lie doesn’t automatically become a truth. It leaves a gap that something must fill. The replacement needs to be specific and accurate — not generic positive thinking, but a statement that the evidence actually supports. “I learn differently than some people, and I have found ways to learn well.” That is not wishful thinking. That is what the evidence supports, stated plainly.
5. Act on it. The proof of a replaced belief is behavior. Not the feeling of believing differently — the choice to act as if the replacement is true. Gideon was still afraid when he followed the instruction. He acted anyway. The courage preceded the confidence.
What You Were Made For
There is a verse I return to regularly, with clients and in my own life. Ephesians 2:10: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
The word handiwork — in the Greek, poiema, from which we get “poem” — suggests craftsmanship. Something made with intention and skill. Not mass-produced. Not identical to everything else. Made with specific purposes in mind.
The Gideon principle is this: what God says about you is more accurate than what the circumstances have taught you to say about yourself. The angel did not call Gideon a mighty warrior because of his track record. He called him that because of what was already in him, waiting for the right moment and the right tools.
ADHD is not evidence of what you can’t do. It is a different kind of wiring — one that comes with real challenges and, often, real gifts that conventional systems have never bothered to measure.
The lies say you can’t, you won’t, you’ll never, you don’t deserve it, you’re not good enough.
The truth says you were created with intention, for purposes that have not yet been fully revealed, by someone who knew what he was doing when he made you.
The door out of the prison cell has been open for a long time.
The question, as always, is whether you will walk through it.
References
Hofmann, S. G., Asnaani, A., Vonk, I. J. J., Sawyer, A. T., & Fang, A. (2012). The efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy: a review of meta-analyses. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 36(5), 427–440. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-012-9476-1
Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000033
Scripture quotations (NIV): Judges 6:11-15; John 8:32; Ephesians 2:10