Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

by Gabor Maté

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. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: when one is remembering the bad, the good may as well not have occurred. 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.

It is difficult to live with a partner who may be messy and disorganized, does not remember promises, tunes out in the middle of conversations, forgets events and anniversaries, has a short fuse and in moments of crisis may lack self-insight.

To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value—the occasional side and wrong roads, the delays, “modesties,” seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, “Ecce Homo”

Needed are both a desire to accept the self and the courage to look honestly. 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. She notices, and asks—as parents need to ask regarding their child—what the meanings are, what is being acted out, what messages the Morse code of her behavior is trying to convey.

The purpose of psychotherapy and counseling is not that the therapist either heals the “patient” or advises him what to do with his life. The goal is to mature and to individuate, to become a self-respecting person in his own right. In other words, the goal is not to be “cured” but to develop.

Certainly no one who enters the mental health field as his or her chosen area of work is free of emotional problems.

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. Time is scattered like sunlight through a sieve.

The parent wishes to provide the child with nutritious and attractive meals, served in an atmosphere free of tension and meant to be consumed in a leisurely fashion. Challenged on this point of self-parenting, most ADD adults throw up their hands in exasperation. Meals are not regular, not planned with nutrition in mind and tend to be wolfed down rather than eaten.

There is matchless unity, harmony and peace in nature—all that is lacking, in other words, in the ADD mind.

There is a difference between entertaining diversions and recreation. Watching television may be entertaining but it is not a process that re-creates. One does not flick off the set feeling refreshed.

It is unusual for me to meet an ADD adult who does not have some secret longing for artistic expression, and almost as unusual to find one actively doing something about it.

I do not believe ADD leads to creativity any more than creativity causes ADD. Rather, they both originate in the same inborn trait: sensitivity. For creativity, a temperamental sensitivity is indispensable. The sensitive individual, as we have seen, draws into herself the unseen emotional and psychic communications of her environment.

“There is only one thing I feel bad about,” he says. “I am working with all these people who knew what they wanted. They are twenty years ahead of me. I have a lot of catching up to do.” “It’s a loss,” I agreed. “But first you had to catch up to yourself.”

When a human being says that she does not know who she is, she is communicating her conviction that what she does know of herself is only a partial reflection of the completeness which is her true self.

A brain used to decades of inattention and disorganization will not overnight reorganize itself.

Those of us with attention deficit disorder love dopamine and endorphins.

We cannot endure seeing the needs of other people, least of all those of our children, when we are preoccupied with serving our own false needs.

When people are response-able and not in denial, they are aware…of what they feel and they know…what has gone on inside them to generate those feelings. It is a three-part chain connected by awareness: awareness of events, awareness of interpretation of those events, and awareness of the emotional reaction following those interpretations. If the chain is broken, ownership of the feeling is lost. When the task of ownership is being performed, the chain is solid.

As Grass writes, we are far away from our griefs, which are the truest parts of ourselves. There is no path toward oneself that leads away from the pain.

The world is much more ready to accept someone who is different and comfortable with it than someone desperately seeking to conform by denying himself. It’s the self-rejection others react against, much more than the differentness. So the solution for the adult is not to “fit in,” but to accept his inability to conform. The child’s uniqueness has to first find a welcome in the heart of the parent.

have learned through my own process that a goal in life cannot be the avoidance of painful feelings. For people like me with ADD, and for everyone else, emotional pain is a reality. It does not have to exclude joy and a capacity to experience the beauty of life. We each for ourselves have to discover the age-old wisdom that the thing is not to struggle against pain, but to be able to endure it when it is unavoidable.