There does not have to be severe trauma for neurological circuits to be encoded with emotions of exclusion, injustice and humiliation. It can happen in loving families, if a sensitive child has unconscious or even preverbal experiences of feeling alone and cut off, misunderstood and shamed. From that arises a close identification with the powerless, with the underdog—the people Dostoevsky called “the insulted and the injured.” The goal for the ADD adult is to move from the helplessness of identification to the empowered state of empathy.
