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People with ADD are exquisitely sensitive to the merest hint of it, even if the hint is only a figment of their fearful imagination. It is triggered by any stimulus that ever so vaguely resembles rejection, even if no rejection is intended.
The trigger can be a wife declining to have sexual intercourse with her husband on a given night, but it can also be as minor as a glance, an inadvertent comment or an averted look.
to feel anything other than rejection. Poor self-regulation also disables him from responding like an adult, no matter whether his partner feels rejecting or only uninterested.
The husband’s response is that of the sensitive infant when the parent is emotionally unavailable, because for the infant life truly seems impossible without contact with the nurturing parent. The other, the one who did the “rejecting,” is seen and thought of as all-powerful and cruel; the self is experienced as isolated and helpless, utterly unable to escape from emotional pain.
Ditto
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. Just as hypersensitivity magnifies the sense of being rejected, so deficient self-regulation due to impaired inhibition by the cortex exaggerates the response to rejection.
Especially men with ADD will, entering deeper into a relationship, keep half an eye on possible exits.
Jobs also?
There is the well-known paradox that 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.
Also dampening sexual ardor is the propensity of the ADD adult, the male especially, to behave like an irresponsible child. This may lead his spouse to act like his mother—organizing his life, taking care of his emotional needs. Many a wife of an ADD husband has complained to me of feeling as if she has an extra child in the house—five foot ten, perhaps, balding and with a graying beard.
“Many people have a hard time accepting the idea that they have searched for partners who resembled their caretakers,” writes the family therapist and educator Harville Hendrix. “On a conscious level, they were looking for people with only positive traits—people who were, among other things, kind, loving, good looking, intelligent, and creative… 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.”
Your ADD partner may have insulted you the night before but this morning greets you with a warm smile, the offer of a hug and the expectation of warm reciprocal contact. You are in absolutely no mood, the wounds of the previous night still being fresh. You refuse, predictably stimulating in your partner the rage-or-withdrawal response to feeling rejected.
requires the shedding, gradually, of defenses constructed long ago out of sheer necessity, defenses maintained out of the anxieties embedded in implicit memory.
Beyond that, the ADD adult also has to 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 does not jibe with her long-term goal.
It is sometimes difficult for people to understand that their psychological safety does not lie in avoiding the feeling of guilt at all costs but in learning to live with it.
When I ask adults to rate themselves according to a simple scale gauging the parenting skills and attention they devote to themselves, the scores tend to be low—so scandalously low that I have advised many of my clients that if they truly were the unfortunate child being parented by them, I would have had little choice but to alert the child protection authorities. (Restraining me was only that first I would have had to blow the whistle on myself.)
If necessary, she may set herself small, incremental goals. It is discouraging to try to accomplish something that may be beyond present capacities. The ADD brain is overwhelmed by a multipartite task. She does not know where to turn, and the all-or-nothing mind-set demands that everything be done at once. Nothing needs to be done at once.
The best plan, I find, is not to insist that any one task be finished but to impose a strict time limit in which to work. When the appointed time period is over, stop. This will eventually lead to a better appreciation of what one actually does with time when carrying out strange and unnatural rituals like picking clothes off the floor or sorting out dusty magazines in a corner.
Highly relevant
A child with attention deficit disorder may be difficult to rouse in the morning, but in the evening there is no getting him off to bed. I believe the problem is separation anxiety, because I have seen the same child be much more cooperative about bedtime when he feels more secure emotionally.
The ADD child completely falls apart when his blood sugar is too low, becomes hyper when it is too high, showing how directly nutritional states affect the brain. Once more, it is a matter of what the goals are. If the long-term development of mental balance is to supersede charging through the day as the objective, the internal environment cannot be ignored.
I do not believe ADD leads to creativity any more than creativity causes ADD. Rather, they both originate in the same inborn trait: sensitivity.
Nietzsche called Buddha “that profoundest physiologist.” He may well have said neurophysiologist.
of endorphins at this stage of life.) This combination of arousal and soothing enables the nicotine addict, like the caffeine addict, to be an alert sleepwalker. By contrast, the alcoholic lurches about in a state of stupor, his nerve endings deadened. He, as they say, is feeling no pain.
Narcotic addicts, for example, are thought to suffer from a relative undersupply of endorphins, the brain’s indigenous narcotics. People with ADD seem to be short on dopamine, the reward chemical.
with the problem the drug use creates,” write Drs. Hallowell and Ratey in Driven to Distraction, “that we fail to consider what purpose the drug must be serving for the user.”
Professor Paradis points out that the increased use of Ritalin has paralleled reductions in the number of special education teachers, psychologists and social workers in the educational system—results of the cutbacks in funding that throughout North America are considered to be among the duties of “responsible” governments.
Although as a class, stimulants have been used clinically since 1937 and are about as safe and well understood as any drugs used anywhere in medicine, each person taking them for the first time is being, in a sense, his own guinea pig.
