Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

by Gabor Maté MD

Craving the good opinion of others. Frustration with failure. A tendency to blame oneself excessively when things go wrong,

Trying to impose one’s opinion on others or, on the contrary, being afraid to say what one thinks for fear of being judged.

The need to achieve in order to feel good about oneself. How one treats one’s body and psyche speaks volumes about one’s self-esteem:

work overload, lack of personal time and space all denote poor self-regard.

reveal a fundament...

to...

the self that is conditional and devoid of tr...

They feel safer not trying, because their poor self-regard is terrified at the risk of failure.

Absolutely universal in the stories of all adults with ADD is the memory of never being comfortable about expressing their emotions.

many recall being hyperaware of the parents’ difficulties and struggles in the world, of not wanting to trouble them with their own petty and childish problems.

In the majority of adults I have interviewed, it was evident that the inability to accept themselves was heavily reinforced throughout childhood by their parents’ expectations of better performance, and by their disappointment and disapproval at the absence of it. Superimposed on the parents’ anxieties

were the contemptuous judgments and

sh...

they were working to convince themselves of their own self-worth by striving to achieve something completely contrary to their nature.

Women with ADD are especially prone to give a higher priority to protecting the needs of others than to respecting their own.

When we forget how to say no, we surrender self-esteem.

was willing to sacrifice his personal life.

And a person who felt so alienated from his own self that he had to keep running away from any awareness of it.

a truly important person is one who considers himself worthy enough to grant himself at least one hour each day that he can call his own.

I have heard from many others with ADD: a painful hyperconsciousness of injustice,

there is a celebration of attention deficit disorder as a condition that bestows a special kind of human empathy on individuals affected by it. “The world needs us people with ADD,”

“when people are influenced by a past experience without any awareness that they are remembering.”[2] Unconscious emotions and conscious feelings, rapid shifts in mood and dramatic physiological changes in the body can occur under the impact of implicit memory.

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

humanity does need people capable of seeing

what is wrong in the world.

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

matters.

ADD adults find it difficult to trust in relationships,

So long as I expect another person to provide what I am lacking in myself, I am bound to be disappointed.

the financially rewarding work is being done by the husband, the invisible division of labor charges the wife with all the emotional responsibility. 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

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.”[7] In neurophysiological terms, our choice of mate reflects the early relationship patterns stamped in the neural circuits of the right prefrontal cortex, especially its orbitofrontal portion. The OFC will recognize and hone in on someone who, on the unconscious level, activates its familiar reactions.

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 ADD mind is much like a television screen: you can’t have two channel...

shedding, gradually, of defenses constructed long ago out of sheer necessity, defenses maintained out of the anxieties embedded in implicit memory.

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,

“Why do I care so much what others think”

“I would very much like to understand why I feel so much anxiety about displeasing others.”

“I’m a people pleaser”

me. I feel guilty if I disappoint someone.

Guilt

hurls

at you the same epithet for both misdeed and self-exp...

“I never used to think about what I wanted to do,”

To paraphrase Nietzsche, even the wrong turns and side roads have meaning and purpose,

if only to teach us which way the path to oneself does not lie.

“Many of today’s psychiatry residency graduates haven’t a clue

The emphasis is,

on a narrow understanding of biology and of its manipulation by pharmacological means.