Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It

by Gabor Maté

We are all part of a multigenerational family system that does not begin or end with our parents. When we consider our childhoods, we are in many ways considering the effect that our grandparents’ attitudes, unconscious processes and behaviors had on our parents during the latter’s formative years. To understand ourselves, we need to understand the concentric “stories within stories,” in Lance Morrow’s phrase, which place us at the central point—and the resting point, until we have children ourselves. Marilyn was right. The seeds of her own troubled childhood were sown long before she was born, in her mother’s troubled childhood, and even long before her mother was born. We bequeath to our children not only what we honor in ourselves and in our parents; each generation also passes much of its own negative experiences on to the next, quite without wishing to do so. We need not be helpless in deciding how the story of our families will continue in the future, but first we have to recognize the themes and events that have shaped our present. Blame becomes a meaningless concept if one understands how family history stretches back through the generations. “Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as villain,” wrote John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who showed the decisive importance of attachment in infancy and childhood.5 Who should we end up pointing the accusing finger at? At Adam and Eve, or perhaps at some poor anthropoid ape ancestor diggi...