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

by Gabor Maté

Not only is she the linchpin holding the family’s emotional life together, but she also has the secret and mutually unconscious assignment of absorbing her husband’s anxieties, protecting his fragile ego, enabling him to function in the belief that his strength is purely intrinsic to him.

no ADD relationship will avoid the problems arising from the mutual lack of maturity. By maturity, I mean here the degree of individuation, the capacity of the person to genuinely sustain herself emotionally during difficult times without having to be mothered or fathered by someone else.

But, no matter what their conscious intentions, most people are attracted to mates who have their caretakers’ positive and negative traits, and, typically, the negative traits are more influential.”

The OFC will recognize and hone in on someone who, on the unconscious level, activates its familiar reactions. This person, after all, will most resemble the persons whose love one so desperately craved all one’s life.* We are inexorably drawn to marry the individual who is, of all potential partners, the very one most likely to trigger in us the most painful and confusing of implicit memories—as well as the warmest, happiest ones.

willingness to accept an unfairly heavy share of the burden was, as always, a reenactment of her childhood status in her family of origin. As long as she continued to shoulder those burdens unquestioningly, she could make little headway toward her goal of development and the diminishing of her ADD patterns.

“the ahistorical memory” of the ADD mind. In other words, the ADD adult (and also of course the ADD child) functions at times as if previous events, even the most recent ones, had never taken place.

Your ADD partner may have insulted you the night before but this morning greets you with a warm smile,

Another aspect of ahistorical memory is its either-or nature. When, for example, a person recalls the good times in a relationship, it is almost as if nothing bad had ever happened.

The feeling of the moment dominates the memory. In this regard, the ADD mind is much like a television screen: you can’t have two channels on at the same time; when one has been selected, the other is inaccessible. This trait is characteristic of the all-or-nothing mind states of young children and is another marker of incomplete development in the adult.

What are the conditions necessary for the development of self-regulation, intrinsic motivation and self-esteem in this grown-up man or woman?

An adult faces the daunting responsibility of offering herself the very support and nurturing attention that ADD has always prevented her from being able to summon up.

The ADD adult, like the child, needs more than organizational tools and behavior modification techniques. Although these do have their place, they will not address the fundamental problem, which is not how the person manages this or that duty or self-appointed task but in what relationship he stands vis-à-vis his own self.

first of the self-parenting duties I suggest people engage in is the all-important one of self-understanding and psychological support.

1. Compassionate curiosity in the search for self-insight

An open mind, compassionate curiosity toward the child, letting go of the idea that one “knows” what the child thinks and feels and a striving to accept the child unconditionally will go a long way toward binding wounds inflicted by past mistakes, misjudgments and the parent’s own emotional blockages. Such attitudes are just as important when the ADD adult embarks on the journey of self-healing.

Needed are both a desire to accept the self and the courage to look honestly.

acquire the skills of self-understanding, the first of which is the capacity to notice each time she makes a critical, judgmental comment against herself, to notice whenever she is seized by anxiety, to notice when her behavior docs not jibe with her long-term goal.

She notices, and...

what the meanings are, what is bei...

2. Self-acceptance: tolerating guilt and anxiety

problem is not that we have these shifting and conflicting feelings, the problem is that we take a very conditional attitude toward them. We wish to hold on to some, drive away the others.

aspects of our personalities that did not trigger discomfort for them. So self-acceptance does not mean self-admiration or even self-liking at every moment of our lives, but tolerance for all our emotions, including those that make us feel uncomfortable.

The penalty of not doing so is to suffer the anxiety of disappointing the parent, of feeling cut off from the parent. Guilt comes along as one of these internal mechanisms. It guides the child’s hand away from the onyx stone, her own core impulses, and has her bring to her mouth the coal of fire—feelings acceptable to the parent. The child is hurt, but the indispensable relationship with the parent is preserved.

Guilt does not know the difference. It hurls at you the same epithet for both misdeed and self-expression: selfish.

It also cannot discriminate between past and present. In place of your present-day interactions—with spouse, friend, doctor, butcher, baker, computer maker—it sees only your early relationships with your caregivers.

Guilt cannot grasp that its services are no longer required. It just hangs around, mak...

We would listen to its one-note song of warning, don’t be selfish, but decide for ourselves consciously whether we need to dance to its tune.

if she does not feel guilt, she is probably ignoring her truest self.

It may seem contradictory to acknowledge that in fact many people with ADD do act in selfish ways, particularly when it comes to their addictions and compulsions of various sorts.

in some important aspects of my life—not all—I have always been a people pleaser, suppressing my truest self. I have also often behaved with narcissistic self-regard.

The more the core self—the deepest impulses—is suppressed, the more compulsive are the attempts to compensate by satisfying superficial, infantile, instant-gratification impulses and desires.

3. You don’t punish yourself for where yo...

wishing I had known ten, twenty, thirty years ago what I have learned since—much of it relatively recently. But I didn’t. If I could have, I would have. It’s that simple.

One can make choices when one becomes aware and awake, not before.

4. Choosing a guide: psychotherapy and counseling

person with ADD, whatever her age at diagnosis, has lived with low self-esteem and emotional pain all her life. Many of her behaviors are futile and not very cleverly disguised attempts to kill the pain. But pain cannot be killed; it needs to be listened to. It has a story to tell and lessons to teach.

goal is not to be “cured” but to develop.

“Many of today’s psychiatry residency graduates haven’t a clue about understanding the human organism in the context of environmental and relationship stresses.” The emphasis is, instead, on a narrow understanding of biology and of its manipulation by pharmacological means.

encourages people to take responsibility for their own feelings rather than imagining that these feelings arise from the failures or ill will of their partners, friends, or co-workers—a liberating perspective that allows a client to shed the garb of victimhood.

Family therapy also helps individuals to see the invisible wires that connect their emotional experiences to those of the significant others with whom their lives are intertwined,

Some development of the capacity to be alone is necessary if the brain is to function at its best, and if the individual is to fulfil his highest potential. Human beings easily become alienated from their own deepest needs and feelings. Learning, thinking, innovation and maintaining contact with one’s own inner world are all facilitated by solitude.

Caught up by the swirling currents of her brain, she has coasted on automatic pilot all her life, engaged in the details of daily existence, giving little thought to what her needs would be for a saner, more self-connected existence.

Adults with ADD cannot remember themselves in the future, as John Ratey has said. Usually they have not considered what conditions they need to grow and develop in accordance with their true nature.

No less than for children, conditions in his environment continue to have a direct and major impact on his emotions and thought processes—even

Without the right conditions, the brain cannot develop new circuits or the mind new ways of relating to world and to self. A person cannot become sane in the midst of the chaos she perpetuates around herself. What, then, are the environmental conditions needed for development?

1. The physical space

First, make a conscious choice about how to live. A man may look at the disaster zone in his room and decide consciously to do nothing about it. There is no should here, nor should there be a should. Counterwill, the automatic resistance to pressure, will arise in res...

It is not a duty to clear some physical space so that his mind is not oppressed by the clutter, but it is a sensible thing to do ...

are too sensitive not to be affected by it. Neglecting to honor their physical environment is to neglect themselves.

2. Sleep hygiene