Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

by Gabor Maté

memory happens when the circuits that participated in the original encoding are simultaneously reactivated by some stimulus in the present.

The implicit memory circuits carry the neurological traces of infancy and of childhood experiences. Encoded in them is the emotional content of those experiences, but not necessarily the details of the events themselves that gave rise to the emotions.

“[The] implicit effects of past experiences shape our emotional reactions, preferences, and dispositions—key elements of what we call personality,”

There does not have to be severe trauma for neurological circuits to be encoded with emotions of exclusion, injustice and humiliation.

move from the helplessness of identification to the empowered state of empathy.

trouble with authority figures reported by most ADD adults. This trouble can present itself in three ways: fear, rebelliousness or a combination of both.

This is simply the implicit memory of the adult who, as a sensitive child, saw through the pretensions and weaknesses of the adult world.

Sometimes they come from counterwill, which, as we have seen, is a sign of an underdeveloped sense of self.

automatic resistance to rules, regulations and authority simply means that the adult is not yet an adult.

Counterwill coupled with implicit memory can deeply affect someone’s relationship to society and politics.

Sharing the perspective of the downtrodden may originate in implicit memory, but to say so is not to invalidate the truth thereby

The implicit memory of early fear conditioning probably contributes to the specific neurophysiological impairments of ADD. An example would be the loss of mental clarity, to the point of mental paralysis, experienced during situations of emotional stress.

implicit memory circuits imprinted with fear overwhelming explicit memory.

reduced to the helpless inarticulateness of a semiverbal toddler in other situations, superficially trivial, if anxieties imprinted in their implicit memory system long ago are triggered.

Fear of intimacy is universal among ADD adults. It coexists with what superficially would seem to be its opposites—a desperate craving for affection and a dread of being rejected.

There are memories, the psychiatrist Mark Epstein explains, “that are not so much about something terrible happening, but,

about ‘nothing happening when something might profitably have happened.’

present-day troubles arose not from what had happened in his family, but from what had not happened.

His fear of intimacy was itself a reliving of long-ago events, a precise marker of what had never occurred. It was a function of implicit memory.

a portion of the frontal gray matter on the right side of the brain—the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC—is dominant in processing emotions and interpreting emotional stimuli. It responds to tone and body language rather than to the specific meanings of words. Its interpretation of the present is heavily influenced by the past—by

stresses in his parents’ lives that prevented his needs for attunement and attachment from being met.

emotion a sensitive infant would experience when he feels cut off from his primary caregivers would be a deep anxiety of being abandoned,

fear of rejection is not unique to the ADD personality—no single psychological feature of attention deficit disorder is unique.

In the ADD adult, as in the child, this hypersensitivity magnifies the impact of every emotional stimulus.

People with ADD are exquisitely sensitive to the merest hint of

It is triggered by any stimulus that ever so vaguely resembles rejection, even if ...

Poor self-regulation also disables him from responding like an adult,

orbitofrontal cortex is also thought to play a major role in emotional self-regulation. It helps to inhibit the powerful emotions, like fear—and fear’s offspring, anxiety—that are generated in the amygdala and other brain centers below the level of the cortex.3 As we have seen, in ADD the ability to inhibit powerful emotions is impaired because the connections of the OFC with the lower brain centers did not develop optimally.

children in residential nurseries were reunited with their mothers after separations lasting from twelve days to twenty-one weeks.

“On meeting mother for the first time after the days or weeks away every one of the ten children showed some degree of detachment.

Most of them either cried or came close to tears; a number alternated between a tearful and an expressionless face.”4 After periods of briefer separation the infant around one year of age will exhibit rage.

the parent can be physically present but emotionally absent due to stress, anxiety, depression or preoccupation with other matters. From the point ...

withdrawal dynamic has been called defensive detachment

absence that I will encase myself in a shell of hard emotion, impervious to love—and therefore to pain. I never want to feel that hurt again.

ADD adults find it difficult to trust in ...

Many adults with ADD report that they quickly become bored with relationships, as with much else in life. They imagine this boredom of theirs to mean that something is lacking in their partner: the reality is that they are bored with themselves.

believing that fulfillment can come only from someone else.

This is the implicitly remembered state of the infant hungry for emotional nourishment, lacking the capacity to satisfy his own needs and having to look to the parent.

The demand placed on the partner in the love relationship is that he or she—the other—fills the emptiness within oneself. But such nourishment is found only through psychologic...

fear of intimacy is also a fear of the loss of self.

the person with ADD craves real human contact, feels like an outsider and wishes to belong—but at the same time is reclusive, often preferring his own company to that of others.

The unsolved problem is how to be oneself in contact with other people.

People desperate for a relationship will surrender their sense of self, their true feelings, for fear of being rejected; when they have gained the relationship they may pull back, as Trevor repeatedly has, in order to reconnect with that precarious sense of self.

One may be in a long-term relationship, lasting even decades, without ever feeling completely committed to it.

One gauge of persistent problems with intimacy in an ADD relationship is the couple’s sexual life—or the lack of it.

The lack of sexual intimacy is in most cases an unmistakable sign of mutual emotional shutdown.

Counterwill, described in chapter 20, mostly in regard to children and teenagers, is also a major dynamic shaping the responses of the ADD adult.

The couple find themselves chronically caught in the dense shrubbery of anxiety, control, resistance and oppositionality.

“People gravitate toward their emotional mirror images,” Michael Kerr points out.5 It is well recognized now that people will form relationships with others exactly at the same level of psychological development and self-acceptance as their own.

When such a relationship is examined, it becomes apparent that though the financially rewarding work is being done by the husband, the invisible division of labor charges the wife with all the emotional responsibility.