NotitiesScattered Minds
Gabor Mate
"Scattered Minds" van Gabor Mate behandelt aandachtstekortstoornis (ADD) als een complexe aandoening die voortkomt uit zowel genetische als omgevingsfactoren. Het boek benadrukt het belang van emotionele hechting en zelfregulatie in de ontwikkeling van kinderen met ADD, en hoe deze factoren van invloed zijn op hun zelfbeeld en relaties in de volwassenheid. Mate pleit voor een holistische benadering van behandeling, waarbij liefdevolle aandacht en begrip centraal staan.
Attention deficit disorder is usually explained as the result of bad genes by those who “believe” in it, and as the product of bad parenting by those who don’t. (Location 105)
Tags: Geel
As parents who make every effort we can to raise our children in loving security, we do not need to feel more guilt than we already do. (Location 124)
Tags: Geel
Never at rest, the mind of the ADD adult flits about like some deranged bird that can light here or there for a while but is perched nowhere long enough to make a home. (Location 152)
Tags: Geel
I was forever throwing my mind scraps to feed on, as if to a ferocious and malevolent beast that would devour me the moment it was not chewing on something else. All my life I had known no other way to be. The shock of self-recognition many adults experience on learning about ADD is both exhilarating and painful. It gives coherence, for the first time, to humiliations and failures, to plans unfulfilled and promises unkept, to gusts of manic enthusiasm that consume themselves in their own mad dance, leaving emotional debris in their wake, to the seemingly limitless disorganization of activities, of brain, car, desk, room. (Location 156)
Tags: Geel
ADD seemed to explain many of my behavior patterns, thought processes, childish emotional reactions, my workaholism and other addictive tendencies, the sudden eruptions of bad temper and complete irrationality, the conflicts in my marriage and my Jekyll and Hyde ways of relating to my children. And, too, my humor, which can break from any odd angle and leave people laughing or leave them cold, my joke bouncing back at me, as the Hungarians say, like “peas thrown at a wall.” It also explained my propensity to bump into doorways, hit my head on shelves, drop objects and brush close to people before I notice they are there. (Location 161)
Tags: Geel
My life, like that of many an adult with ADD, resembled a juggling act from the old Ed Sullivan show: a man spins plates, each balanced on a stick. He keeps adding more and more sticks and plates, running back and forth frantically between them as each stick, increasingly unsteady, threatens to topple over. He could keep this up only for so long before the sticks tottered and the plates began to shatter, or he himself collapsed. Something has to give, but the ADD personality has trouble letting go of anything. Unlike the juggler, he cannot stop the performance. (Location 178)
Tags: Geel
Even if in many cases medications do help, the healing ADD calls for is not a process of recovery from some illness. It is a process of becoming whole—which, it so happens, is the original sense of the word healing. (Location 201)
Tags: Geel
has much to do with pain, present in every one of the adults and children who have come to me for assessment. The deep emotional hurt they carry is telegraphed by the downcast, averted eyes, the rapid, discontinuous flow of speech, the tense body postures, the tapping feet and fidgety hands and by the nervous, self-deprecating humor. (Location 223)
Tags: Geel
The strangely dissonant imagery tells also of a troubled soul who found reality harsh—so harsh that the mind had to be fragmented in order to fragment the pain. (Location 252)
Tags: Geel
ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER is defined by three major features, any two of which suffice for the diagnosis: poor attention skills, deficient impulse control and hyperactivity. The hallmark of ADD is an automatic, unwilled “tuning-out,” a frustrating nonpresence of mind. (Location 259)
Tags: Geel
There is a sense of being cut off from reality, an almost disembodied separation from the physical present. “I feel like I am a human giraffe” is how one man described it, “as if my head is floating in a different world, way above my body.” This absence of mind is one cause of the distractibility and short attention spans that bedevil the adult or child with ADD, except around activities of high interest and motivation. (Location 265)
Tags: Geel
Completely lacking in the ADD mind is a template for order, a mental model of how order comes about. You may be able to visualize what a tidy and organized room would look like, but the mind-set to do the job is missing. (Location 278)
Tags: Geel
Ashamed to admit his lack of comprehension and knowing the futility of asking for clarifications that he would grasp with no greater success, he gives a masterful impersonation of one who understands. Then he heads off, entrusting himself to good fortune. (Location 293)
Tags: Geel
The distractibility in ADD is not consistent. Many parents and teachers are misled: to some activities a child may be able to devote, if anything, compulsive, hyperconcentrated attention. But hyperfocusing that excludes awareness of the environment also denotes poor attention regulation. Also, hyperfocusing often involves what may be described as passive attention, as in watching television or playing video games. Passive attention permits the mind to cruise on automatic without requiring the brain to expend effortful energy. Active attention, the mind fully engaged and the brain performing work, is mustered only in special circumstances of high motivation. Active attention is a capacity the ADD brain lacks whenever organized work must be done, or when attention needs to be directed toward something of low interest. A facility for focusing when one is interested in something does not rule out ADD, but to be able to focus, the person with ADD needs a much higher level of motivation than do other people. (Location 297)
Tags: Geel
Markeren(Geel) - 2 Many Roads Not Traveled > Locatie 309 (Location 306)
What can be immobilizingly difficult is to arouse the brain’s motivational apparatus in the absence of personal interest. (Location 309)
Tags: Geel
Many children with ADD are subjected to overt disapproval and public shaming in the classroom for behaviors they do not consciously choose. These children are not purposively inattentive or disobedient. There are emotional and neurophysiological forces at play that do the actual deciding for them. (Location 313)
Tags: Geel
The adult or child with ADD can barely restrain himself from interrupting others, finds it a torture waiting his turn in all manner of activities and will often act or speak impulsively as if forethought did not exist. (Location 317)
Tags: Geel
The individual with ADD experiences the mind as a perpetual-motion machine. An intense aversion to boredom, an abhorrence of it, takes hold as soon as there is no ready focus of activity, distraction or attention. (Location 334)
Tags: Geel
I, for one, have rarely had a moment’s relaxation without the immediate and troubling feeling that I ought to be doing something else instead. (Location 338)
Tags: Geel
The restlessness coexists with long periods of procrastination. The threat of failure or the promise of reward has to be immediate for the motivation apparatus to be turned on. Without the rousing adrenaline rush of racing against time, inertia prevails. (Location 342)
Tags: Geel
Frequent and frustrating memory lapses occur every day in the life of the person with ADD. (Location 347)
Tags: Geel
An adult with ADD looks back on his life to see countless plans never fully realized and intentions unfulfilled. “I am a person of permanent potential,” one patient said. Surges of initial enthusiasm quickly ebb. People report unfinished retainer walls begun over a decade ago, partly constructed boats taking up garage space year after year, courses begun and quit, books half read, business ventures forsaken, stories or poetry unwritten—many, many roads not traveled. (Location 368)
Tags: Geel
One type of ADD child is socially adept and wildly popular. In my experience, such success hides a lack of confidence in important areas of functioning and masks a very fragile self-esteem, but this may not emerge until these children grow into their late teens or early twenties. (Location 377)
Tags: Geel
Men and women with ADD have about them an almost palpable intensity that other people respond to with unease and instinctive withdrawal. (Location 383)
Tags: Geel
I believe that ADD can be better understood if we examine people’s lives, not only bits of DNA. (Location 475)
Tags: Geel
Environment does not cause ADD any more than genes cause ADD. What happens is that if certain genetic material meets a certain environment, ADD may result. (Location 500)
Tags: Geel
Children are a great incentive and impetus for parents to learn about themselves, about each other and about life itself. Unfortunately, much of the learning may occur at their expense. (Location 510)
Tags: Geel
I might have felt satisfaction in every one of my activities, but I never felt satisfied with myself or my life. I had great difficulty turning down any new responsibility that came my way—except those at home. It was virtually impossible for me to say no to any request for help, no matter what the cost to my personal life. (Location 520)
Tags: Geel
There was also what I call the “weekend despair” of the driven personality. On Saturday mornings, there would be a crash. I was enveloped in a kind of enervated lethargy, hiding behind a book or a newspaper or staring morosely out the window. I was not only fatigued from the whirlwind week, but I did not know what to do with myself. Without the weekday adrenaline rush, I felt a lack of focus, purpose, energy. I was depleted and irritable, neither active nor able to rest. (Location 540)
Tags: Geel
Young children cannot possibly understand the motives of adults. It means little to a young child that the parent feels love for him if that parent keeps disappearing at almost any time. The child experiences a sense of abandonment, a subliminal knowledge that there are things in the world much more important to the parent than he, the child, that he is not worthy of the parent’s attention. He begins to feel, at first unconsciously, that there must be something wrong with him. He also begins to work too hard to get his needs met: demanding contact, acting out or trying to please the parent to gain approval and attention. (Location 545)
Tags: Geel
The emotional climate was too unpredictable and confusing. Not only was I physically absent much of the time, but there were also my difficulties staying focused in the present. Young children are completely in the right-brain feeling world of the here and now, precisely where I felt most uneasy. (Location 552)
Tags: Geel
Even without such evidence, children can sense this nonpresence of the parent. They suffer from it. (Location 556)
Tags: Geel
There are things I wish I had not done during my children’s early years, but mostly I regret what I did not do: give my children the gift of a mindful, secure and reliable parental presence. (Location 563)
Tags: Geel
ADD is not a problem of knowing what to do; it is a problem of doing what you know.–RUSSELL A. BARKLEY, PH.D., “Improved Delayed Responding” (Location 585)
Tags: Geel
the very young child, any block of time seems infinite. (Location 603)
Tags: Geel
The time sense of the ADD adult or child is warped in other ways. Ask people with ADD how long it will take to perform a particular task, and they will notoriously underestimate. (Location 606)
Tags: Geel
In the moment of action or decision making, ADD adults are no more mindful of consequences than a young child. (Location 623)
Tags: Geel
The major impairments of ADD—the distractibility, the hyperactivity and the poor impulse control—reflect, each in its particular way, a lack of self-regulation. Self-regulation implies that some-one can direct attention where she chooses, can control impulses and can be consciously mindful and in charge of what her body is doing. Like time literacy, self-regulation is also a distinct task of development in human life, achieved gradually from young childhood through adolescence and adulthood. (Location 629)
Tags: Geel
If some deeply unconscious anxiety is triggered, a person may respond with the lack of emotional self-regulation characteristic of an infant. (Location 643)
Tags: Geel
One way to understand ADD neurologically is as a lack of inhibition, a chronic underactivity of the prefrontal cortex. The cerebral cortex in the frontal lobe is not able to perform its job of prioritizing, selection and inhibition. The brain, flooded with multiple bits of sensory data, thoughts, feelings and impulses, cannot focus, and the mind or body cannot be still. In short, the policeman is asleep. If we want the traffic to move, we need to rouse him. (Location 685)
Tags: Geel
If we choose not to see ADD as medical disorder or illness, the question of causation is turned around and examined from the opposite angle. Recognizing that time sense, self-regulation and self-motivation are nature driven and necessary developmental tasks, we ask the following: What conditions are needed for human physiological and psychological maturation? What conditions would inhibit or interfere with that growth process? Instead of asking why a disorder or illness develops, we ask why a fully self-motivated and self-regulated human personality does not. (Location 697)
Tags: Geel
The answer to underdevelopment is development, and for development the appropriate conditions must exist. (Location 718)
Tags: Geel
Genes are codes for the synthesis of the proteins that give a particular cell its characteristic structure and function. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself. It is determined, for the most part, by the environment. To put it differently, genes carry potentials inherent in the cells of a given organism. (Location 748)
Tags: Geel
“Few diseases are purely genetic,” says Michael Hayden, a geneticist at the University of British Columbia and a world-renowned researcher into Huntington’s disease. “The most we can say is that some diseases are strongly genetic.” (Location 754)
Tags: Geel
Genes can be activated or turned off by factors in the environment. (Location 758)
Tags: Geel
The family atmosphere in which the child spends the early formative years has a major impact on brain development. It is obvious that brain/ mind problems such as ADD are far more likely to develop in families where the parents are struggling with dysfunction or psychological problems of their own. It would be astonishing if children growing up in such unsettled environments did not develop some of the same problems. (Location 774)
Tags: Geel
Markeren(Geel) - 6 Different Worlds: Heredity and the Environments of Childhood > Locatie 848 (Location 809)
Even without world wars, revolutions and emigration, siblings growing up in the same home almost never share the same environment. (Location 848)
Tags: Geel
Of all environments, the one that most profoundly shapes the human personality is the invisible one: the emotional atmosphere in which the child lives during the critical early years of brain development. The invisible environment has little to do with parenting philosophies or parenting style. It is a matter of intangibles, foremost among them being the parents’ relationship with each other and their emotional balance as individuals. (Location 851)
Tags: Geel
hidden factor of great importance is a parent’s unconscious attitude toward a child: what, or whom, on the deepest level, the child represents for the parents; the degree to which the parents see themselves in the child; the needs parents may have that they subliminally hope the child will meet. (Location 857)
Tags: Geel
To the infant and toddler, the world reveals itself in the image of the parent: in eye contact, intensity of glance, body language, tone of voice and, above all, in the day-to-day joy or emotional fatigue exhibited in the presence of the child. Whatever a parent’s intention, these are the means by which the child receives his or her most formative communications. (Location 861)
Tags: Geel
Some of the most sensitive people in terms of how they react may be the least mindful of the feelings of others. (Location 899)
Tags: Geel
People with ADD are hypersensitive. That is not a fault or a weakness of theirs, it is how they were born. It is their inborn temperament. That, primarily, is what is hereditary about ADD. (Location 906)
Tags: Geel
Since emotionally hypersensitive reactions are no less physiological than the body’s allergic responses to physical substances, we may say truthfully that people with ADD have emotional allergies. (Location 917)
Tags: Geel
Of course, I was the short-tempered father in the anecdote. The suppertime set-to used to be familiar in our home. (Location 927)
Tags: Geel
Sensitivity is affected by emotional states. People’s pain tolerance is lower when they feel anxious or depressed, partly because of changes in stress hormone levels and in the levels of endorphins, the body’s innate painkillers. (Location 931)
Tags: Geel
Like hypersensitive instruments, sensitive children register and record even minute changes in their emotional environment. It is not a matter of choice for them; their nervous systems react. (Location 942)
Tags: Geel
My wife and I learned to recognize our daughter’s moods and behaviors as real-time, instantaneous computer printouts of the psychological atmosphere in our home. (Location 946)
Tags: Geel
Abdominal cramps in sensitive children are often clues to unresolved tensions in the family environment. (Location 949)
Tags: Geel
The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. (Location 962)
Tags: Geel
Even though fully half of the roughly hundred thousand genes in the human organism are dedicated to the central nervous system, the genetic code simply cannot carry enough information to predetermine the infinite number of potential brain circuits. (Location 979)
Tags: Geel
Experience in the world determines the fine wiring of the brain. (Location 982)
Tags: Geel
The bargain forced on our evolutionary ancestors was that the tremendously large human brain has to develop outside the relatively safe environment of the womb, highly vulnerable to potentially adverse circumstances. (Location 1008)
Tags: Geel
According to the latest insights of modern neuroscience, brain development in the human infant involves a process of competition that has been described as “neural Darwinism.” 4 Nerve cells, circuits, networks and systems of networks vie with one another for survival. The neurons and connections most useful to the organism’s survival in its given environment are maintained. (Location 1010)
Tags: Geel
The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. (Location 1025)
Tags: Geel
The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body. 5 During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. (Location 1035)
Tags: Geel
For the second nine months of gestation, nature does provide a near-substitute for the direct umbilical connection: breast-feeding. Apart from its irreplaceable nutritional value and the immune protection it gives the infant, breast-feeding serves as a transitional stage from unbroken physical attachment to complete separation from the mother’s body. (Location 1040)
Tags: Geel
No doubt the decline of breast-feeding, particularly accelerated in North America, has contributed to the emotional insecurities so prevalent in industrialized countries. (Location 1044)
Tags: Geel
Even more than breast-feeding, healthy brain development requires emotional security and warmth in the infant’s environment. (Location 1046)
Tags: Geel
A calm and consistent emotional milieu throughout infancy is an essential requirement for the wiring of the neurophysiological circuits of self-regulation. (Location 1048)
Tags: Geel
THE AREAS OF the cortex responsible for attention and self-regulation develop in response to the emotional interaction with the person whom we may call the mothering figure. (Location 1055)
Tags: Geel
Because the formation of the child’s brain circuits is influenced by the mother’s emotional states, I believe that ADD originates in stresses that affect the mothering parent’s emotional interactions with the infant. They cause the disrupted electrical and chemical circuitry of ADD. Attachment and attunement, two crucial aspects of the infant–parent relationship, are the determining factors. (Location 1059)
Tags: Geel
The right hemisphere of the mother’s brain, the side where our unconscious emotions reside, programs the infant’s right hemisphere. In the early months, the most important communications between mother and infant are unconscious ones. (Location 1063)
Tags: Geel
The eyes communicate eloquently the mother’s unconscious emotional states: [O] ne person uses another’s pupil size as a source of information about that person’s feelings or attitudes; this process usually occurs at unconscious levels. (Location 1076)
Tags: Geel
How one person gazes at another can alter the other’s electrical brain patterns, as registered by EEGS, and may also cause physiological changes in the body. The newborn is highly susceptible to such influences, with a direct effect on the maturation of brain structures. (Location 1083)
Tags: Geel
Positive emotions are associated with increased electrical activity in the left hemisphere. It is known that depression in adults is associated with decreased electrical activity in the circuitry of the left hemisphere. With this in mind, the Seattle study compared the EEGS of two groups of infants: one group whose mothers had symptoms of postpartum depression, the other whose mothers did not. “During playful interactions with the mothers designed to elicit positive emotion,” the researchers reported, “infants of non-depressed mothers showed greater left than right frontal brain activation.” The infants of depressed mothers “failed to show differential hemispheric activation,” meaning that the left-side brain activity one would anticipate from positive, joyful infant–mother exchanges did not occur—despite the mothers’ best efforts. (Location 1087)
Tags: Geel
Maternal depression is associated with diminished infant attention spans. Summarizing a number of British studies, Dale F. Hay, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, suggests “that the experience of the mother’s depression in the first months of life may disrupt naturally occurring social processes that entrain and regulate the infant’s developing capacities for attention.” (Location 1095)
Tags: Geel
Why were the infants distressed despite the sight of their mothers’ happy and friendly faces? Because happy and friendly are not enough. What they needed were signals that the mother is aligned with, responsive to and participating in their mental states from moment to moment. (Location 1106)
Tags: Geel
Attunement does not mean mechanically imitating the infant. It cannot be simulated, even with the best of goodwill. As we all know, there are differences between a real smile and a staged smile. (Location 1115)
Tags: Geel
The attunement process is far too subtle to be maintained by a simple act of will on the part of the parent. (Location 1118)
Tags: Geel
A loving parent who is feeling depressed or anxious may try to hide that fact from the infant, but the effort is futile. In fact, it is much easier to fool an adult with forced emotion than a baby. (Location 1120)
Tags: Geel
Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense—rightly or wrongly—that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. 7 Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. (Location 1135)
Tags: Geel
Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. (Location 1148)
Tags: Geel
Each time we scream at someone in traffic, we are telling a story from the earliest part of our life. (Location 1197)
Tags: Geel
Among other ADD-like features, these so-called prefrontal patients often digress and have to be frequently reminded to finish a line of thought; are easily distracted; when listening, will often shift attention to whatever snippet of speech catches their interest; during tasks will often seem to lose track of what the instructions were; will be given to childish emotional outbursts; will have difficulty inhibiting their physical impulses; will find it nearly impossible to learn from experience. (Location 1201)
Tags: Geel
In ADD there is no brain damage, but there is impaired brain development. (Location 1206)
Tags: Geel
Endorphins encourage the growth of nerve cells and of connections between them. Conversely, in animal studies, chronically high levels of stress hormones such as cortisol have been shown to cause important brain centers to shrink. (Location 1212)
Tags: Geel
Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains. (Location 1218)
Tags: Geel
Depression, according to the simple biochemical model, is due to a lack of serotonin—and, it is said, so is excessive aggression. (Location 1222)
Tags: Geel
Almost all the adults minimize the effects of the trauma they had experienced. They have pushed out of conscious awareness the anger and despair of a small child assaulted by the very people he must rely on for support and protection, or they see such experiences as normal life events. (Location 1449)
Tags: Geel
Although the trauma of sexual abuse can reinforce ADD traits such as tuning out, the association between ADD and sexual abuse goes deeper. It predates the abuse. (Location 1463)
Tags: Geel
Only people abused in their youth will go on to abuse their own children—and they will do so almost inevitably unless they have recognized the facts of their own childhood histories and have taken up the task of healing. (Location 1471)
Tags: Geel
Fourteen to 25 percent of ADD children have experienced parental alcoholism. Customarily, even if their drinking does not reach levels that may be called alcohol abuse, the parents of children with ADD still consume more alcohol than the parents of their non-ADD peers. The significance is that these parents are probably using alcohol as a relaxant, as self-medication for stressed, depressed or agitated mind states. (Location 1492)
Tags: Geel
ADD children are far more likely than other children to have parents who have suffered major depression, about 30 percent compared with 6 percent. (Location 1497)
Tags: Geel
Depression, particularly in the mother, also evokes an aggressive response from many a young child, quite probably due to the child’s rage at what she unconsciously interprets as the emotional withdrawal of the mother. (Location 1506)
Tags: Geel
There is a telling bit of research evidence that deserves more attention than it has received: parents of ADD children report fewer contacts with their extended families, “and when such contacts occur, report them to be less helpful.” 4 Parents of ADD children, in other words, seem to be relatively alienated from their own families of origin. (Location 1516)
Tags: Geel
If we want to find the sources of ADD, that is where we need to look—a task we will take up in the next chapter. But the family is the most immediate environment to act on us. We are all part of a multi-generational family system that does not begin or end with our parents. (Location 1530)
Tags: Geel
The greater prevalence of ADD in North America is rooted in something more prosaic and more disturbing than genes from adventuresome forebears: the gradual destruction of the family by economic and social pressures in the past several decades. (Location 1565)
Tags: Geel
If what happens in families affects society, to a far greater extent society shapes the nature of families, its smallest functioning units. (Location 1569)
Tags: Geel
John Bowlby wrote that “the behavioural equipment of a species may be beautifully suited to life within one environment and lead only to sterility and death in another.” (Location 1571)
Tags: Geel
The psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson devoted a chapter in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Childhood and Society, to his reflections on the American identity. (Location 1578)
Tags: Geel
Bly notes in The Sibling Society that “in 1935 the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935 are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband.” These patterns characterize not only the early years of parenting, but entire childhoods. “Family meals, talks, reading together no longer take place,” writes Bly. “What the young need—stability, presence, attention, advice, good psychic food, unpolluted stories—is exactly what the sibling society won’t give them.” (Location 1585)
Tags: Geel
Because caring for young children is undervalued in our society, day care is politically undersupported and underfunded. The most recent insights of developmental psychology and direct research both indicate that even with all the goodwill in the world, it is difficult for a non-relative to meet an individual young child’s attunement needs, especially if several other infants or toddlers are vying for that care-giver’s attention. (Location 1593)
Tags: Geel
There is no getting away from the fact that one-to-one, attuned parenting is the ideal situation for child development in the early years, but this is not a call for women to resume their traditional roles in the home, denied an opportunity for work and career. The natural agenda would seem to put the birth mother in the role of primary caregiver during the “second nine months of gestation”—by and large the breast-feeding period—but it does not follow that women have to be restricted to that role or men excluded from it. A physiological inability to breast-feed does not disqualify one from changing diapers or emotionally nurturing an infant. And there are no biologically based differences when it comes to parenting once breast-feeding is no longer the main source of the infant’s nutrition. (Location 1599)
Tags: Geel
The answer to the need of the young child for close parental contact is not the ghettoization of women in the home. It is the recognition by society at large that there is no more important task in the world than the nurturing of the young during the earliest years. (Location 1610)
Tags: Geel
Current social trends make it more daunting for people with attention deficit disorder to overcome their ADD-related problems. (Location 1635)
Tags: Geel
In the language of psychology, mental absence, tuning out, is an example of a mind state known as dissociation. 1 It is employed in clinical psychiatry to refer to specific syndromes such as multiple personality disorder, but I use the term in its general sense. Dissociation, including the tuning-out of ADD, originates in a defensive need—it is a form of psychological defense. Gloucester’s motive to be “distract,” in the fourth act of King Lear, is very close to the source of the “distractness” of ADD. It is a way of coping with emotional hurt. (Location 1666)
Tags: Geel
For a person with ADD, tuning out is an automatic brain activity that originated during the period of rapid brain development in infancy when there was emotional hurt combined with helplessness. (Location 1688)
Tags: Geel
Because of insufficient self-regulation, children with ADD are often underaroused or overaroused. In the first state, they cannot get going on a task; in the second, they cannot focus on it. “Arousal locks you into the emotional state you are in,” LeDoux points out. “This can be very useful (you don’t want to get distracted when you are in danger), but can also be an annoyance (once the fear system is turned on, it’s hard to turn it off—this is the nature of anxiety).” (Location 1726)
Tags: Geel
Many people with ADD have noticed that a strange drowsiness may come over them in the midst of some emotionally charged situations, as, for example, during a conflict with a spouse. All of a sudden, they start yawning and their eyelids grow heavy. Their partners naturally believe that the drowsiness is a sign of boredom and a lack of caring. Or the emotionally stressed ADD child may suddenly—and genuinely—complain of being “tired,” only to regain energy a few minutes later if the source of anxiety, which may be some homework she feels beyond her capacities to do, is removed. (Location 1731)
Tags: Geel
The nagging hunger for emotional contact explains the oft-observed “paradox” that many children with ADD are capable of focused work in the presence of an adult who is keeping them company and paying attention to them. This is no paradox at all, if we see the opposing roles of anxiety and attachment in influencing attention: attachment promotes attention, anxiety undermines it. When the child is not concerned with seeking emotional contact, his prefrontal cortex is freed to allocate attention to the task at hand, illustrating that what we call attention deficit disorder is not a fixed, unalterable physiological state; it’s a physiological state, yes, but not fixed and unalterable. The warmth and satisfaction of positive contact with the adult is often just as good as a psychostimulant in supplying the child’s prefrontal cortex with dopamine. Greater security means less anxiety and more focused attention. (Location 1795)
Tags: Geel
Markeren(Geel) - 15 The Pendulum Swings: Hyperactivity, Lethargy and Shame > Locatie 1831 (Location 1816)
Hyperactivity, like other traits associated with ADD, is a normal stage in the maturation of a child. In attention deficit disorder, stages becomes states: the individual’s psychological development remains static. Behaviors and emotional patterns remain at a level characteristic of the toddler. Hyperactivity and its counterpart, the lethargy of many children and adults with ADD, are both exaggerations of body states first experienced during toddlerhood, from about the end of “the second nine months of gestation” to about the age of eighteen months. (Location 1831)
Tags: Geel
During this phase of prolonged excitement, neural pathways are established that enable the cortex to inhibit the sympathetic nervous system—if the necessary circumstances are present. During stress, these circuits do not develop properly, and hyperactivity persists. The stage, meant to last only a few months, becomes a state that the child remains stuck in. (Location 1860)
Tags: Geel
There is another component to hyperactivity: throughout life, it continues to be a human response during times of high anxiety. (Location 1863)
Tags: Geel
The “trying to catch something that isn’t there” is a neural memory of the way, as an anxious infant, Derek scanned his surroundings, looking for comfort, for an untroubled connection with someone. (Location 1875)
Tags: Geel
My eyes, like the eyes of almost everyone with attention deficit disorder, sweep across faces I meet as if of their own volition, seeking everyone’s eyes, looking for signs of contact. 1 Strangers will suddenly catch me staring at them intently. This automatic scanning happens even when I am engaged in conversation with someone, perhaps creating the impression that I am not interested in the interaction with that particular individual. I know it now for what it is: the activation of the brain circuitry created when I scanned my mother’s withdrawn or depressed features constantly, seeking contact, and even more, when I sought her very presence during the period of our separation toward the end of my first year of life. (Location 1877)
Tags: Geel
If hyperactivity expresses anxiety, lethargy and underarousal express shame. (Location 1888)
Tags: Geel
The origin of shame is the feeling of having been cut off from the parent, of having lost the connection, if only momentarily. It cannot be helped, it occurs unavoidably as part of maturing. (Location 1891)
Tags: Geel
The child who does not learn boundaries is in danger. There are limits not to be crossed, and the mode of learning is the attachment relationship. (Location 1894)
Tags: Geel
We do not find out about the boundaries of acceptable behavior by reading a manual or even by being told. The setting of limits has to begin long before we understand why those limits must be respected. We find out by the reactions of our parents, the most important of which are nonverbal. The word no by itself would mean nothing to the toddler unless it was said in a stern voice and with a disapproving look, along with other evidence of disapproval, such as shaking the head. Throughout life, the nonverbal messages we read between the lines of verbal communication—far more than the words themselves—define our relationships with others, either inviting us in or keeping us out. (Location 1896)
Tags: Geel
At the beginning of the stage of mobile, restless exploration, 90 percent of maternal behavior consists of affection, play and caregiving, with only 5 percent involved in prohibiting the junior toddler from ongoing activity, according to one study. In the following months, there is a radical shift. The aroused toddler’s curiosity and impulsiveness lead him into many situations where the parent must express disapproval. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen months, the average toddler experiences a prohibition every nine minutes. In response to the words, vocal tone and body language of disapproval, the toddler goes into the physiological shame state: from activity to inactivity, from expending energy to conserving energy, from a high-arousal state to a low-arousal state. This achieves exactly what nature would intend—stopping a possibly dangerous activity, at a signal from the parent. (Location 1902)
Tags: Geel
Shame becomes excessive if the parent’s signaling of disapproval is overly strong, or if the parent does not move to reestablish warm emotional contact with the child immediately—what Gershen Kaufman calls “restoring the interpersonal bridge.” Chronic stress experienced by the parent has the effect of breaking that bridge. The small child does not have a large store of insight for interpreting the parent’s moods and facial expressions: they either invite contact or forbid it. When the parent is distracted or withdrawn, the older infant or toddler experiences shame. Shame postures are observed in infants in response to nothing more than the parent breaking eye contact. The demeanor of the infants of depressed mothers is one of inactivity and the averted gaze. (Location 1911)
Tags: Geel
Some parents are able to express anger without making the child feel cut off emotionally. They convey disapproval without rejection. (Location 1917)
Tags: Geel
The deep feelings of shame associated with attention deficit disorder are usually explained by the obvious fact that the ADD individual gets many things wrong. On the face of it, this makes sense. The adult or child with attention deficit disorder may frequently offend people or break a promise or be late somewhere. Given his inattentiveness and difficulties reading nonverbal social messages, he treads on toes—in both senses of that phrase. He carries memories of having failed at many tasks, of being deservedly criticized—so he thinks—for many shortcomings. (Location 1922)
Tags: Geel
A requirement of healing, becoming whole, is circuitry in the brain that can carry different messages and a different, nonhelpless image of the self. There is strong evidence that such circuits can develop at any time in life, as can neural pathways to help the cortex to do its job of inhibition and regulation. (Location 1946)
Tags: Geel
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK if one can “grow out” of attention deficit disorder—a good question, for healing is a matter of growth. And the answer is yes. It is not curing that ADD children need: they need to be helped to grow. (Location 1956)
Tags: Geel
We have seen that experience has great influence on the circuitry of the brain, and also that chemical changes—for better or worse—are affected by the environment. If the wiring and chemistry of the brain are not rigidly set by heredity, neither are they unalterably fixed in early childhood. (Location 1963)
Tags: Geel
This situationality of ADD reflects the input of emotions, which play a powerful role in attention. As we know, in ADD the cortex does not exercise firm enough control over the arousal and emotion-generating centers in the lower brain areas. (Location 1999)
Tags: Geel
Integration of cognition with emotion—the melding of what we know with what we feel—is the very integration the healing process in ADD requires. Lack of it underlies the fragmentation of the ADD mind. (Location 2004)
Tags: Geel
In human brains, the circuitry of reason and emotion are closely connected, which is why troubled relationships lead directly to difficulties in brain processing. (Location 2031)
Tags: Geel
The relationship with the parents is the earth, the rain, the sun and the shade in which the child’s mental development must blossom. (Location 2035)
Tags: Geel
In his book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers described a warm, caring attitude, for which he adopted the phrase unconditional positive regard because, he said, “It has no conditions of worth attached to it.” This is a caring, wrote Rogers, “which is not possessive, which demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere which simply demonstrates I care; not I care for you if you behave thus and so.” 8 So the first thing is to create some space in the child’s heart of hearts for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. (Location 2037)
Tags: Geel
Parents need to keep asking themselves which goal they think is more important: a desired short-term outcome, or long-term development. (Location 2047)
Tags: Geel
Time out requires raising as a threat the worst nightmare a young child can have—being cut off from the parent. (Location 2056)
Tags: Geel
Anxiety will diminish the child’s capacity to develop self-regulation. (Location 2060)
Tags: Geel
What the parents are teaching the child is that her well-being and security are more important to them than behavioral goals, and that conflicts between people do not have to end in emotional estrangement. They also demonstrate their basic faith that the child is okay and has the capacity to deal with her problems. Nor do they need to fear that they are facing years of agonizing tardiness. A few weeks, perhaps longer, but once the attachment relationship does become consistently fixed as the fundamental value, parents will be amazed and gratified how rapidly their child responds with cooperative behavior. Even more surprising to them will be that their rigid rules and their expectations become less important as they learn to place their emotional bonds with their child above everything else. (Location 2094)
Tags: Geel
It is often not our children’s behavior but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates the greatest difficulties. We ourselves may need to get to work on time, but there is no earthly reason why our anxious and sensitive child should take on that priority. School, in fact, may represent a separation from the parent that the child does not at all want. (Location 2101)
Tags: Geel
The kind of hostility Brian was exhibiting has one source: an unconscious sense of being cut off from the parents, of having been abandoned. (Location 2117)
Tags: Geel
The long-term project of promoting healthy development in a child with attention deficit disorder becomes next to hopeless without a consistent attempt to apply these principles. 1. The parent takes active responsibility for the relationship Technique: Invite the child Goal: Fostering the child’s self-acceptance The parents enthusiastically and genuinely invite the child into relationship. They do not issue declarations of love; they demonstrate day by day that they want the child’s company. They think of things to do together, or they just “hang out” with the child, with an attitude of active attention. When they are with the child, they are fully there, not just being dutiful, putting in time. They have active energy that radiates toward the child. They make sure they have space in their lives for the child. (Location 2146)
Tags: Geel
Being wanted and enjoyed is the greatest gift the child can receive. It is the basis of self-acceptance. (Location 2154)
Tags: Geel
Whenever possible, the parent does the inviting. That may be a chore. A highly insecure child can be exhaustingly demanding of time and attention. Understandably, the parent may long for respite, not more engagement. The conundrum is that attention given at the request of the child is never satisfactory: it leaves an uncertainty that the parent is only responding to demands, not voluntarily giving of himself, or herself, to the child. The demands only escalate, without the emotional need underlying them ever being filled. The solution is to seize the moment, to invite contact exactly when the child is not demanding it. (Location 2157)
Tags: Geel
Markeren(Geel) - 17 Wooing the Child > Locatie 2165 (Location 2160)
2. The parent does not judge the child Technique: Avoid pointing out faults, mistakes, shortcomings Goal: To increase security, reduce shame Shame, as we have seen, is the physiological-emotional state resulting from the sense of being isolated, cut off. (Location 2165)
Tags: Geel
When someone’s shame is deep, he may defend himself by rejecting even the slightest suggestion of wrongdoing on his own part. (Location 2171)
Tags: Geel
Markeren(Geel) - 17 Wooing the Child > Locatie 2174 (Location 2173)
Criticism from the parent is devastating to a sensitive child with low self-esteem. As parents, we sometimes do not hear the critical tone in our words. The child, on the other hand, hears only the tone, not the words. (Location 2174)
Tags: Geel
At all times, the child must sense that the parent’s acceptance of him does not depend on how well he does something. It is not threatened by poor performance. It is unconditional. As a child develops a stronger self-concept, she becomes more and more open to help or correction in areas of difficulty. Acknowledging that she may have shortcomings is no longer so scary if she feels that these do not threaten her relationship with the parent. (Location 2179)
Tags: Geel
3. The parent does not overpraise the child Technique: Give praise in measured terms; reflect back the child’s feelings Goal: Reinforcing the child’s confidence that achievements are not needed to earn the parent’s acceptance and respect Too much praise can be almost as harmful as too much criticism. They seem opposite, but the underlying message is the same: the parent puts a high value not on who the child is, but on what he does. This is why many ADD children, no matter how much they crave and court attention, are uncomfortable with praise. Nature’s own agenda is hindered when parents foster what the developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld calls acquired self-esteem, that based on external evaluations. “We don’t want to build a child’s self-esteem on how pretty they are, how popular they are, how smart they are, how good they are in baseball, how well they do in school,” he says. “There is a much, much truer, more solid type of self-esteem we can provide for our children than something that just follows cultural trends and approximates cultural norms. We should avoid making children believe that these things influence how we feel about them.” (Location 2182)
Tags: Geel
How the child feels about what he does is far more important than what the parent thinks about it. A positive evaluation by the parent is still an evaluation, a judgment. (Location 2195)
Tags: Geel
One does not parent from anger Technique: When the parent feels anger, he refrains from criticizing, giving orders, expressing opinions Goal: To avoid faulting the child for even a momentary break in the relationship with the parent The shame bound into the personality of any child (or adult) with ADD is easily activated. When the child is confronted by a parent’s anger—face tight, voice harsh, words cutting—he immediately experiences a loss of contact with the loving mother or father. (Location 2197)
Tags: Geel
But the most defiant behavior is nothing more than a defense against overwhelming shame. (Location 2206)
Tags: Geel
The parent may himself have a volatile personality. It is unrealistic to expect to be able to remain calm all the time, but when a parent feels the anger rising, he may disqualify himself from parenting for as long as it takes to cool down and regain some balance: “I’m feeling too upset right now. It’s not your fault. I’m not feeling in control. I can handle it, but I need time out.” Gordon Neufeld likens this to throwing the clutch into neutral when the motor starts racing too fast. It is of great help if one is able to call on a spouse or some other trusted adult to take the steering wheel at such moments. (Location 2211)
Tags: Geel
To try to teach a child any useful lessons when cold anger seizes hold is self-defeating. In the biochemical soup of stress and shame, no learning can take place. (Location 2215)
Tags: Geel
There is a type of anger that we may call warm anger, which is not damaging. This is anger under control. It addresses the deed without attacking the child, and it does not carry the threat of parental withdrawal. Children can handle this type of anger and can learn from it, especially if in general they feel secure in the relationship with the parent. (Location 2217)
Tags: Geel
5. The parent takes responsibility for restoring the relationship Technique: Do not wait for the child to reestablish contact after a fight Goal: Allowing the child to feel that the attachment relationship is greater than whatever argument or disagreement may come between him and the parent (Location 2220)
Tags: Geel
The real harm is inflicted when the parent makes the child work at reestablishing contact, as in forcing a child to apologize before granting “forgiveness.” (Location 2225)
Tags: Geel
So, if the parent has lost it, it is his responsibility to restore the interpersonal bridge. This should not take the form of abject apologies, and promises not to be “mean” any more. Assuredly, we will lose it again—no point pledging not to. Restoring the bridge simply means acknowledging that we see what has happened and understand how the child might feel about it and hearing nondefensively what the child has to say. When she expresses her feelings about the negative interaction—and even if she does so in a form difficult for the parent to take—the parent does not explain himself or try to justify his behavior. He just listens with empathy. (Location 2228)
Tags: Geel
Parents who are faced with the development of children must constantly live up to a challenge. They must develop with them.–ERIK H. ERIKSON, Childhood and Society (Location 2238)
Tags: Geel
IN ANY COMMUNITY of beings living in close contact with each other, the behavior of individuals can be understood only in the context of their relationship to the group as a whole. (Location 2240)
Tags: Geel
We think that children act, whereas what they mostly do is react. Parents who realize this acquire a powerful tool. By noticing their own responses to the child, rather than fixating on the child’s responses to them, they free up tremendous energy for growth. (Location 2247)
Tags: Geel
As we have said, self-regulation is the goal of development; the lack of it is the fundamental impairment in ADD. One way of describing self-regulation is to say that it is the ability to maintain the internal environment within a functional and safe range, regardless of external circumstance. (Location 2254)
Tags: Geel
An indispensable condition for the evolution of self-regulation in children is its presence in the nurturing adults. In families where one child or another has ADD, the parents often lack this capacity. Their moods are not independent of the child. Almost all parents with an ADD child report that their son or daughter has an uncanny power to dictate what the emotional atmosphere of the family will be. (Location 2270)
Tags: Geel
In some of the families I have seen, I’ve sensed an invisible umbilical cord that still connected a parent to the child. “It is true,” one mother said. “If my son is happy, I am happy. If he is doing poorly, I am devastated.” Not only the parents but other siblings as well seem to revolve in emotional orbits around the child with ADD. They naturally come to resent the control he or she appears to wield over the family. (Location 2276)
Tags: Geel
Parents of an ADD child will often say that their son or daughter has a “powerful” personality. Far from being powerful, the child is weak and vulnerable. It’s not his “power” but the inefficiency of the parents’ own emotional thermostat that enables the fluctuations in the child’s moods to set the emotional tone of the whole household. (Location 2279)
Tags: Geel
What matters above all is not the technique, but the degree of parental self-regulation. The fundamental issue is not how to parent, but who is parenting? By this I don’t mean which parent, the mother or the father, but the state of mind of the adults as they respond to the child. (Location 2303)
Tags: Geel
Anxious parents revert to behaviors characteristic of young children without self-regulation: impulsiveness, rage, physical acting-out or helplessness. (Location 2309)
Tags: Geel
Self-regulation is not the absence of anxiety, at least not in the very beginning, but a person’s ability to tolerate her own anxiety. (Location 2315)
Tags: Geel
The parent who can tolerate her anxiety does not need to respond to the child with anger, emotional coldness or pleading. The child is not under pressure to change his behavior immediately in order for the parent to feel comfortable. If the parents do not react with their usual anxious manner and their voices do not convey anger or despair, the child himself will not feel further anxiety. If the child knows that the parent is okay even if the child is not okay, he feels safer. (Location 2318)
Tags: Geel
The passing on of psychological burdens from one generation to the next occurs around those issues that the parents are least aware of in themselves, and it occurs precisely when the child pushes the parent’s unconscious emotional buttons. (Location 2328)
Tags: Geel
Unresolved psychological conflicts between the parents, and within each parent individually, are a major source of unrest for the hypersensitive ADD child. (Location 2337)
Tags: Geel
Only superficially are dysfunctional responses the results of her “disorder.” They do not originate purely from within herself. The child is manifesting what the noted family therapist and author David Freeman calls the parents’ “unfinished business.” (Location 2342)
Tags: Geel
Self-regulation is intimately connected with a process developmental psychology has called individuation, or differentiation. Individuation—becoming a self-motivating, self-accepting person, a true individual—is the ultimate goal of development. As individuation unfolds, children are able to move more and more independently into the world, impelled by their own interests and needs. Less and less do they require that another person see exactly what they see in order to feel validated, or that another person feel exactly what they feel. (Location 2352)
Tags: Geel
As long as parents are willing to look into themselves, they will stay on a learning curve, and their child will have the safety that encourages development. (Location 2390)
Tags: Geel
To maintain compassion toward their children, parents have to be compassionate toward themselves as well and spare themselves their own harsh self-judgments. (Location 2395)
Tags: Geel
Myth 1: The child is just looking for attention (Location 2411)
Tags: Geel
It may seem paradoxical, but many children will go for negative attention rather than for no attention at all. (Location 2421)
Tags: Geel
The child acts out, partly to gain attention. The adult responds with a punishing look, act, or statement that the child’s brain interprets as rejection. Her anxiety about being cut off from the adult is magnified, as is her desperation for attention. Only the adult can break this cycle. The key to doing so is learning to give the child not the attention he is asking for, but the attention he needs. (Location 2422)
Tags: Geel
The hunger is eased by the parent’s seizing every possible opportunity to devote positive attention to the child precisely when the child has not demanded it. “We have to satiate the child with attention, stuff her full of it until it’s coming out her ears,” says the developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld. Once the attention hunger is alleviated, the “just-looking-for-attention” behaviors will lessen. (Location 2441)
Tags: Geel
The problem is often not the parent’s legitimate refusal per se but the punishing irritability with which the message is delivered. (Location 2448)
Tags: Geel
If the parent allows his reaction to the child’s reaction to become cold and punishing, the child’s anxiety will have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In many situations it is fit and proper for the parent not to give in to the child’s demands. The main thing is to refuse without blaming or humiliating the child for the attention seeking or for the demanding behavior. (Location 2453)
Tags: Geel
When we endure children’s anger or frustration with compassion, they will often move on to the sadness of not having what they wish for, of having to give up what they think they need just then. At such moments, a parent can move in and witness that sadness with an empathy that will make the child feel understood and supported, despite the refusal. (Location 2456)
Tags: Geel
Research shows that many parents spend virtually no more than five minutes, if that, of meaningful contact with their child each day. (Location 2466)
Tags: Geel
Parents may need to change their lifestyles, sacrificing whatever activities can be eliminated if these diminish their availability to their ADD child. (Location 2472)
Tags: Geel
Narrowing the range of activities is wrenching for many of us, but in terms of our children’s development, the rewards far outweigh the cost. (Location 2476)
Tags: Geel
Myth 2: The child is deliberately trying to annoy the adult (Location 2478)
Tags: Geel
The family therapist David Freeman once concluded a public lecture on intimacy and relationships by saying that if there was any one thing he hoped his audience would remember from his talk, it was the awareness that one does not know his or her spouse, his or her children. We may believe we have a perfect idea of why they act as they do, when in reality our beliefs reflect no more than our own anxieties. Whenever we ascribe a motive to the other person, as in “you are doing this because...,” we discard curiosity and immobilize compassion. The person who knows has nothing to learn, has given up on learning. (Location 2485)
Tags: Geel
Myth 3: The child purposefully manipulates the parent (Location 2500)
Tags: Geel
No child is by nature manipulative, no child by nature controlling. A child who does develop a propensity to manipulate or to control others is doing so out of weakness, not strength. Manipulation and the drive to control are fear responses based on unconscious anxieties. (Location 2503)
Tags: Geel
Myth 4: The ADD child’s behavior causes the adult’s tension or anger (Location 2520)
Tags: Geel
In reality, the child cannot cause the parent’s rage. She may have inadvertently triggered it, but she is responsible neither for the capacity for rage in the parent nor for the existence of the trigger. The parent acquired them before the child was born. The uncooperative behavior may belong to the child, but the rage belongs to the parent. (Location 2526)
Tags: Geel
An enormous emotional burden is lifted off the child’s shoulders once the parent learns to acknowledge within himself the sources of his reactions to the child. (Location 2533)
Tags: Geel
We cannot blame the trigger for the shotgun blast. A person can squeeze the trigger all he wants, but if there is no bullet, the gun will not fire. (Location 2541)
Tags: Geel
The parent who learns to observe herself carefully will soon recognize that greatly complicating many situations is not what the child is doing as such but the degree of anxiety that the child’s actions set off in the parent. (Location 2542)
Tags: Geel
Myth 5: Children with ADD are lazy (Location 2546)
Tags: Geel
Beneath the surface of the so-called laziness ADD children are often berated for is also emotional pain. (Location 2547)
Tags: Geel
The solution came not from the parents trying to coerce their son into doing his share, or to bribe him, but from their work on reconnecting with him emotionally. As they did so, he spontaneously became more ready to help out. (Location 2557)
Tags: Geel
Another aspect of what is seen as laziness is the child’s automatic resistance. Probably the most frustrating and dispiriting aspect of dealing with ADD children is their virtually routine negative and defiant refusal of almost any demand, expectation or suggestion the parent puts forward. This resistance serves an important purpose and tells an important story. It, too, has meaning. (Location 2561)
Tags: Geel
Distinguishing will from counterwill is important for any successful parenting. Understanding counterwill is particularly crucial for the parenting of the ADD child and for the self-understanding of the ADD adult. (Location 2596)
Tags: Geel
The child’s oppositionality is not an expression of will. What it denotes is the absence of will, which—like Steven’s abandonment of music—only allows a person to react but not to act from a free and conscious process of decision making. Counterwill is an automatic resistance put up by a human being with an incompletely developed sense of self, a reflexive and unthinking opposition to the will of the other. It is a natural but immature resistance arising from the fear of being controlled. Counterwill arises in anyone who has not yet developed a mature and conscious will of her own. Although it can remain active throughout life, normally it makes its most dramatic appearance during the toddler phase and again in adolescence. In many people, and in the vast majority of children with ADD, it becomes entrenched as an ever-present force and may remain powerfully active well into adulthood. It immensely complicates personal relationships, school performance and job or career success. (Location 2608)
Tags: Geel
Like a psychological immune system, counterwill functions to keep out anything that does not originate within the child herself. (Location 2618)
Tags: Geel
Counterwill is a natural inclination and does not mean there is anything intrinsically wrong with the child. It is not as if the individual does it; it happens to the child rather than being instigated by him. It may take the child as much by surprise as the parent. “It really is simply a counterforce,” says Dr. Neufeld. “The counterwill dynamic is simply a manifestation of a universal principle. The same principle is seen in physics, where it is considered fundamental to keeping the universe together: for every centripetal force there has to be a centrifugal one; for every force, a counterforce.” (Location 2627)
Tags: Geel
Figuring out what we want has to begin with having the freedom to not want. “Far from being depraved, counterwill is bequeathed by nature, to serve the ultimate purpose of becoming a separate being,” says Dr. Neufeld. “Counterwill, the dynamic, should not be identified with the child’s self. This is really important. It is not the person that we are getting to know when we get to know the resistance. Nature designed the child that way. It is really Nature that has a purpose, not the child.” (Location 2639)
Tags: Geel
Any force or pressure of whichever sort, no matter how good the intention, will be experienced by the ADD toddler, child or teenager to a highly magnified degree, and will generate counterwill of greatly heightened intensity. (Location 2644)
Tags: Geel
A strong unconscious defense indicates a weak, undeveloped will, which is what is reflected in the oppositionality that seems intrinsic—but only seems that way—to the ADD personality. A strong defense is there only because there is threat, and the child is threatened only because a strong sense of his own self has not developed sufficiently. (Location 2650)
Tags: Geel
An emotionally self-confident person does not have to adopt an oppositional stance automatically. She may resist others’ attempts to control her, but she will not do so rigidly and defensively. If she opposes something, it is from a strong sense of what her true preferences are, not a knee-jerk reflex. (Location 2655)
Tags: Geel
For ADD children (and for ADD adults), it’s all or nothing. When anger arises, all feelings of attachment and love are banished. (Location 2672)
Tags: Geel
Counterwill becomes maladjusted, as it does in ADD, only when adults do not understand it and try to overcome it by some sort of pressure, be it physical or emotional, be it inducement or threat. Counterwill is triggered whenever the child senses that the parent wants him to do something more than she, the child, wants to do it. (Location 2679)
Tags: Geel
The use of rewards—what might be called positive coercion—does not work in the long run any better than threat and punishment, or negative coercion. In the reward, the child senses the parent’s desire to control no less than in the punishment. (Location 2684)
Tags: Geel
Even though you try to put people under some control, it is impossible. You cannot do it. The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in its wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.–SHUNRYU SUZUKI ROSHI, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Location 2703)
Tags: Geel
Chronic counterwill will complicate and negate many of his relationships with other people, as will the rebellious stance against all authority and all rules reported by many adults with ADD. (Location 2711)
Tags: Geel
1. Keep attachment foremost (Location 2714)
Tags: Geel
2. Do not mistake acquiescence for voluntary “good behavior” (Location 2717)
Tags: Geel
This psychologist seemed not to have understood that the child’s supposed bad behavior with the mother really represented a sense of greater security. (Location 2725)
Tags: Geel
The children most at risk for problems later in life are those who feel so threatened that their counterwill falls completely silent. Many a good little boy or good little girl grows up to be a depressed and troubled adult. (Location 2729)
Tags: Geel
3. Do not take the child’s recalcitrance personally (Location 2731)
Tags: Geel
4. Make room for some resistance in the relationship (Location 2735)
Tags: Geel
5. Engage only in those fights that parents must win (Location 2741)
Tags: Geel
6. Encourage verbal expression (Location 2746)
Tags: Geel
Say a child responds to a parental command with rude, unacceptable language. Instead of punishing the expression, the wise parent shows some empathy for the resistance. “You didn’t feel like being bossed around today. It made you want to do the opposite of what I said. I can see that. But next time, I want you to tell me without using those insulting words.” In this way, parents invite the child’s expression of resistance in forms that are socially appropriate. They do so by helping the child symbolize feelings by putting them into words. (Location 2748)
Tags: Geel
Feelings that are expressed directly do not need to be acted out in destructive physical behaviors. As children start to use words, they become less victims of their own impulses. (Location 2752)
Tags: Geel
7. Parents recognize that they, too, can be recalcitrant at times (Location 2756)
Tags: Geel
Very often when my children have asked me for this or that small favor or privilege, my answer has been an automatic no. For many years now, I have had immediate second thoughts. Why exactly am I saying no, when there is nothing really wrong with what’s being asked of me? I see now that my own counterwill reaction was engaged, a sign that my own sense of self was not completely developed. When a parent feels controlled by a child, it’s her own automatic resistance she is experiencing instead of conscious choice. (Location 2757)
Tags: Geel
8. Mend fences after the fact (Location 2763)
Tags: Geel
“We can debrief,” Dr. Neufeld advises. “Even after situations, even long after situations, but preferably right after, when things have cooled down.” The parent can state what happened, draw out the child’s fears, show we understand how she would have felt, saying what happened to us, acknowledging that it was we, the parent, who lost control. (Location 2768)
Tags: Geel
One fence-mending tactic I have developed is to promise my daughter as an absolute rule that no punishment I pronounce in a state of anger will ever be carried out. (Location 2774)
Tags: Geel
9. Encourage self-discipline instead of controlling the child (Location 2777)
Tags: Geel
The issue is not how to control the child but how best to promote the child’s development. (Location 2782)
Tags: Geel
One prevents having to control by maintaining the relationship and defusing counterwill. (Location 2784)
Tags: Geel
The truth is that there are no techniques that will motivate people or make them autonomous. Motivation must come from within, not from techniques. It comes from their deciding they are ready to take responsibility for managing themselves.–EDWARD L. DECI, PH.D., Why We Do What We Do (Location 2793)
Tags: Geel
Although not all unmotivated children have ADD, all ADD children are unmotivated. Their absence of motivation is evident not only when it comes to activities and tasks expected of children their age but even in their approach to projects and plans that originally aroused their interest and enthusiasm. A lack of inner-directed purpose also typifies a large number of ADD adults. (Location 2805)
Tags: Geel
The more helpful long-term goal is to foster the development of motivation that arises intrinsically from the child’s own nature. This truer form of motivation reflects the genuine inclinations of the individual, not the values and expectations of significant figures in her life. Trying to motivate a child by coaxing or pressuring her to accept what the parents want of her is worlds away from promoting the growth of her natural, self-generated motivation. The first is done to the child. The second happens within the child and is a process she actively participates in. There are, as Edward Deci points out, universal human needs for self-determination, to feel competent and to be genuinely connected with others. These needs and the drive to satisfy them do not have to be instilled in people: they exist, even if in undeveloped form. Allowed to unfold, they will motivate. The problem is not that parents and other important adults, such as teachers, do not know how to motivate children. The problem is that our parenting styles and teaching methods in many cases fail to support the child’s natural drive for discovery and mastery. (Location 2812)
Tags: Geel
Attempting to motivate from the outside betrays a lack of faith in the child and in nature. It reflects the anxiety of the parent, not the limitations of the child. (Location 2821)
Tags: Geel
True motivation is knowing that I do what I do not because someone else wants me to do it, or because I believe someone will respect or like me for doing it, not because some inner voice tells me I “should” do it, and not because I am asserting my independence by defying someone who forbade me to do it. What I do satisfies me, regardless of what others may think. As long as I am not deliberately injuring someone else, knowingly causing them harm, I will honor my preferences and inclinations, even if others will feel disappointed in me. (Location 2828)
Tags: Geel
As with every aspect of the development of the ADD child, the growth of true, internal motivation requires a secure attachment relationship with the parent. Without the safety of the attachment relationship, the small child will be too anxious to focus his attention on a meaningful exploration of the world around him. (Location 2832)
Tags: Geel
Parents are often baffled by the apparent paradox of seeing their rebellious and fiercely contrary child submit to various humiliations in school or on the playground, continuing to seek favor with his tormentors. It is not a paradox. At home his counterwill is being manifested, while with peers he openly displays his lack of self-esteem and need for inclusion at any cost. Both behaviors bespeak an underdeveloped autonomous will. He cannot develop his own true motivation when he is too busy fending off the pressures coming from his parents and, simultaneously, working overtime to gain the acceptance of his peers. (Location 2839)
Tags: Geel
Along with attachment, the other necessary condition for the development of motivation is autonomy. “People need to feel that their behavior is truly chosen by them rather than imposed by some external source,” writes Edward Deci, “that the locus of initiation of their behavior is within themselves rather than in some external control.” (Location 2844)
Tags: Geel
Accepting the child’s reference point, the parent gives her as much choice as possible. Without some choice, autonomy is not possible. “You don’t feel like doing your homework now. When would be a better time?” The choices offered have to be realistically on par with the child’s maturity, and within boundaries the child can handle. It is unrealistic to expect, for example, that the ADD child will sit for a long time by herself, immersed in mathematics problems, even if she is free to decide when to begin her homework. Recognizing this, parents need to structure their time so that they can be present when homework is being done. This does not mean hovering over the child and correcting her every mistake, but simply being around so that the child’s attachment anxiety does not interfere with her motivation to do the work. (Location 2855)
Tags: Geel
One family I know has approached this problem by having the child do his homework in the kitchen, with one of the parents always around, engaged in kitchen work, available to help when the child asks for it. (Location 2862)
Tags: Geel
True autonomy allows the child to make choices the parent may not like. With the middle-grade child, and especially with teenagers, the option must be left open, for example, not to complete homework. It is for the school to decide what the consequences of homework left undone will be, not for the parents to impose arbitrary outcomes. If the parents put the emphasis on attachment and autonomy, the child will eventually be able to learn from the natural consequences of his actions. Schools on occasion will contact parents, trying to recruit them to pressure the child. As much as parents may share the school’s objective that their children become productive, they should resist adopting the role of enforcer. They can communicate their concern to the child as their own concern, not as an ultimatum. (Location 2864)
Tags: Geel
True autonomy requires that the parents provide a supportive structure. It is futile to expect a child to do self-motivated and organized work if the parents’ lives express a near-desperate frenzy to keep up with their own responsibilities, which is what I often see in the families of ADD children. (Location 2870)
Tags: Geel
Without structure that involves the whole family and is not just forced on the child alone, there cannot be autonomy. For the child’s choices to mean anything, he has to know that the atmosphere in the family will be calm and supportive, that meals and other group activities will be at regular times so that schedules can be adhered to, and that the parents will be available and present both in body and spirit. (Location 2872)
Tags: Geel
A supportive structure must include the setting of limits, boundaries demarcating where the autonomy of one person ends and that of another begins. Supporting autonomy, therefore, is not the same as permissiveness, which, by definition, allows children to infringe on the rights of others or leaves in their hands decisions and choices they are not equipped to handle. (Location 2875)
Tags: Geel
The setting of limits works much better if the boundaries are defined as generously as possible, allowing maximum reasonable scope for individual choice. The rationale for the rule needs to be clearly articulated, so that the rule itself rather than the parent’s will is seen as authoritative. (Location 2880)
Tags: Geel
As always, attachment needs to be attended to, especially when we have to impose limits the child will not like and may resist. “Keep in mind that rapport and limit setting go hand in hand,” Stanley Greenspan advises. “As you increase limit setting, you need to increase empathy.” (Location 2882)
Tags: Geel
“The key is to empathize with the child’s feeling even if it is a feeling you don’t like,” writes Dr. Greenspan. “Often parents think that if they empathize with the child’s feeling, they will somehow encourage that feeling in the child’s mind or intensify it. But recognizing what a child is feeling will help her recognize and label that feeling rather than experience it as a vague sensation.” (Location 2888)
Tags: Geel
Helping the child to label her feelings in words is what was referred to as symbolization when we discussed counterwill. It is also an important step in promoting autonomy. Words are symbols. They stand for feelings and actions. Without the capacity to put things into symbols, children are driven to act out every strong feeling and every urge—it is the only way they can express themselves. They are thus unable to take charge of themselves, impelled as they are to act by emotions they cannot identify. (Location 2891)
Tags: Geel
Markeren(Geel) - 22 My Marshmallow Caught Fire: Motivation and Autonomy > Locatie 2898 (Location 2896)
Language supports freedom, including freedom from one’s own impulses. (Location 2898)
Tags: Geel
Finally, in supporting autonomy, we address the child, not the deed. A parent can get angry at a four-year-old who spills some milk, or she can say, “You were trying to do it yourself. That’s great, but this bottle is just too heavy and big.” Especially with ADD children, not a few of whom have problems with motor control, parents can avoid painful scenes if they learn to respect the motive instead of fixating on the outcome. (Location 2899)
Tags: Geel
Actions have their own consequences in the world; we don’t need to create them. (Location 2902)
Tags: Geel
Artificial consequences devised by parents intensify resistance and reinforce the child’s already negative view of herself. (Location 2913)
Tags: Geel
Socialization is at the apex of a pyramid. The base is formed by secure attachment and autonomy. (Location 2926)
Tags: Geel
now see that I instinctively resonated with the suppressed energy of these kids, recognized that it needed expression. Moreover, I liked them, enjoyed them and did not feel threatened by them. (Location 2966)
Tags: Geel
Teachers sometimes forget their immense power to wound. How deep classroom-inflicted emotional hurts can go, how long-lasting their sting potentially is, may be gleaned from the histories ADD adults give of their school years. Many still cringe as they recall humiliations, the cutting and sarcastic remarks of their teachers, the punishments for misbehavior they did not deliberately initiate and for inabilities they did not know how to overcome. (Location 2974)
Tags: Geel
Sometimes our own responses to an individual may give us important clues about the other person. (Location 2992)
Tags: Geel
Who are we trying to teach must precede what are we trying to teach as a fundamental consideration. (Location 3006)
Tags: Geel
As my experience with the Grade 9 class of “school rejects” demonstrated, ADD students have a volcanic amount of pent-up kinetic energy. Allowed some creative outlet, even if at first without a specific outcome in mind, much of this energy can be channeled constructively. The problem, again, is not so much how to motivate the child as to find the way to unlock his intrinsic motivation. To foster creativity, the main thing is to honor the intention and the effort rather than to evaluate the result. The student encouraged in following her own creative inclination and secure in her relationship with the teacher will, sooner or later, want direction and correction, will want to learn how to improve her work by means of disciplined effort. (Location 3035)
Tags: Geel
An ADD student being examined under time pressure is not necessarily being tested on knowledge as much as on his ability to write examinations. A poor mark may reflect not a lack of knowledge, only a prefrontal cortex malfunction under conditions of examination stress.fn1 (Location 3049)
Tags: Geel
The apparent rejection that teenagers exhibit toward their parents is deceptive. Underneath their defiant demeanor is a desire and need for love and acceptance from their mothers and fathers. If this is offered with no strings attached, it is a far more powerful attraction than the siren song of the peer culture. (Location 3098)
Tags: Geel
First and foremost, teenagers with ADD have an immense need to be heard. Until they feel that their point of view has been listened to and that the legitimacy of their feelings has been accepted, they will simply not move toward any examination of themselves. (Location 3148)
Tags: Geel
Having more power, the parents also have more responsibility. If anything is to shift, they have to make the first move, which means hearing not just the words their son or daughter throws at them but grasping their meaning, recognizing the mind-set and the feelings behind them. If they can do that nondefensively, the emotional deadlock is broken. Parents need not fear that they are enabling or rewarding unacceptable behavior. To hear someone’s point of view and to recognize the legitimacy of his feelings is not the same as necessarily agreeing with everything he says or approving of everything he does. (Location 3160)
Tags: Geel
My first interview with the parents of ADD teenagers almost always ends with advice that they relax the rules and regulations they have imposed in the hope of inducing better work habits and behaviors in their child. When it comes to rules and regulations, less is more. (Location 3168)
Tags: Geel
As long as she is not inconveniencing others, it is up to the older teenager to decide how long and with whom she talks on the phone, or what time she goes to bed. A distinction needs to be made between what is simply personal to her, affecting only her, and what affects others as well. Her own room is strictly her business, but participation in housekeeping chores is a family affair, and a mess in the kitchen inconveniences everyone. If we want the adolescent to see such distinctions, we as parents must be able to see them first. A person becomes open to respecting the boundaries of others when her own rights and boundaries are respected. (Location 3174)
Tags: Geel
My advice is that parents back right off the homework issue if there are more important problems to be tackled. Nobody ever dies of failing Grade 10. It’s not a disease. “That may be true,” some parents have said, “but what about the blow to the teen’s self-esteem that would cause?” I can only respond that such a teen already has low self-esteem. If self-esteem is to grow in the long term, the individual has to heal psychologically, has to feel accepted unconditionally, has to be able to make his own choices. (Location 3184)
Tags: Geel
Failing school is not a desired outcome, but the emotional ties within the family and the teen’s sense of autonomy are more important than short-term academic setbacks. (Location 3187)
Tags: Geel
A younger child can take more direction than an older one, but no child, teen or pre-teen, will take direction without coercion when the attachment relationship with the parent is shaky. (Location 3191)
Tags: Geel
The repetition of injunctions and warnings that many of us as parents tend to deliver day after day in tones of criticism and exasperation become tiresome even to ourselves. They only frustrate and alienate the teenager even further. (Location 3194)
Tags: Geel
When the relationship is trusting and the motivation is there, the input and support of the parent are invaluable. (Location 3201)
Tags: Geel
Guilt, shame and self-judgment are commonly heard in interviews of adults with attention deficit disorder. While features of many other chronic and troubled psychological states, such as depression, for example, low self-esteem and merciless self-criticism are so much part of the ADD personality that it would be difficult to know where ADD ends and low self-esteem begins. Many of the traits thought to be caused by attention deficit disorder are, I am convinced, not the expressions of the specific neurophysiological impairments associated with ADD but of low self-esteem. (Location 3247)
Tags: Geel
The fragile and self-rejecting ego is unable to endure any reminders of its fallibility. (Location 3255)
Tags: Geel
That people do judge themselves so harshly reflects low self-esteem, not low achievement. Self-esteem, we must realize, is the quality of self-respect that is evident in a person’s emotional life and behavior. A superficially positive self-image and true self-esteem are by no means necessarily identical. In some cases, they are not even compatible. People who have a grandiose and inflated view of themselves on the conscious level are lacking true self-esteem at the core of their psyche. Their exaggerated self-evaluation is a defense against their deepest feelings of worthlessness. The professionally successful workaholic suffers from low self-esteem, no matter what his conscious and projected self-image may be. (Location 3260)
Tags: Geel
How one treats one’s body and psyche speaks volumes about one’s self-esteem: abusing body or soul with harmful chemicals, behaviors, work overload, lack of personal time and space all denote poor self-regard. (Location 3290)
Tags: Geel
Self-esteem based on achievement has been called contingent self-esteem or acquired self-esteem. Unlike contingent self-esteem, true self-esteem has nothing to do with a self-evaluation on the basis of achievement or the lack of it. A person truly comfortable in his own skin doesn’t say, “I am a worthy human being because I can do such and such,” but says, “I am a worthy human being whether or not I can do such and such.” (Location 3292)
Tags: Geel
Acquired self-esteem is a false imitation of true self-esteem: however good it makes one feel in the moment, it does not esteem the self. (Location 3298)
Tags: Geel
ADD adults don’t have low self-esteem because they are poor achievers, but it is due to their low self-esteem that they judge themselves and their achievements harshly. It is also, in part, due to low self-esteem that people do not reach their full potential, do not strive to locate within themselves fonts of creativity and self-expression, do not venture to embark on activities and projects where success is in doubt. They feel safer not trying, because their poor self-regard is terrified of the risk of failure. (Location 3301)
Tags: Geel
The deep shame of adults with attention deficit predates any recollections of poor achievement. The association between low self-esteem and attention deficit disorder is not that the first arises from the second, but that they both arise from the same sources: stress in the parenting environment and disrupted attunement/ attachment. (Location 3307)
Tags: Geel
A child taught to disregard or mistrust her innermost feelings and thoughts assumes automatically that there is something shameful about them, and therefore about her very self. (Location 3312)
Tags: Geel
Absolutely universal in the stories of all adults with ADD is the memory of never being comfortable about expressing their emotions. (Location 3313)
Tags: Geel
In my undergraduate years and even beyond, I had little respect for my ability to write. I could use it to advantage—for example, my capacity for relatively elegant verbal flourishes inflated the value of some pretty thin essays—but I had little regard for it precisely because I felt it came naturally to me. “I don’t trust my words,” I would say. “They come too easily.” It never occurred to me that possessing a vein of talent did not mean that one could not work diligently at mining it. (Location 3335)
Tags: Geel
One of the barriers faced by adults with attention deficit disorder in their quest for self-esteem is that they do not really know who exactly that self to be esteemed is. “It drives me nuts when someone asks me what my feelings are,” a student in his midtwenties said. “I have no idea what my feelings are. I’m lucky if I figure out what my feelings were hours or days after something happens, but I never know what they are.” Since having a strong core self relies on acceptance of feelings, being out of touch with the emotional side puts a person out of touch with herself. (Location 3349)
Tags: Geel
Markeren(Geel) - 25 Justifying One’s Existence: Self-Esteem > Locatie 3354 (Location 3354)
Sooner or later, people come to realize that this false self—wanting what they think they should want, feeling what they think they should feel—does not work for them. (Location 3354)
Tags: Geel
When we forget how to say no, we surrender self-esteem. The adult with ADD is buried under a mound of yeses, many of which are not true yeses at all, only no’s he dared not say. (Location 3366)
Tags: Geel
With the addict’s typical shiftiness, I had not told her what I had taken on. She just noticed me disappearing day in, day out. I was dutiful when at home, as dutiful as a person could be whose mind was buzzing with the self-imposed duties and responsibilities that kept me endlessly busy. I could feel myself becoming more and more hollow, a nonpresence for my family. (Location 3372)
Tags: Geel
The need to be needed at all costs comes from one’s earliest experiences. If the child does not feel accepted unconditionally, he learns to work for acceptance and attention. When he is not doing this work, he feels anxious, owing to an unconscious fear of being cut off from the parent. Later—as an adult—when not doing something specific, he has a vague unease, the feeling that he should somehow be working. The adult has no psychological rest because the infant and child had never known psychological rest. He has a dread of rejection and an insatiable need to have his desirability and value affirmed by others. Being wanted becomes a drug. Self-esteem is preempted by its false shadow, contingent self-esteem. What one does and what others think of it take precedence over who one is. (Location 3377)
Tags: Geel
It is the relative consistency of the repetitious neurological activities of the brain that convinces us there is a solid self. (Location 3395)
Tags: Geel
The stories of Elsa and David speak of something more painful than empathy and something less effective, too: they speak of identification. When a person empathizes, he can understand another’s feelings and even share them, but he is conscious of himself as a separate individual, capable of taking independent and useful action. When he becomes identified, that boundary disappears. He reacts as if he was himself the victim. He feels the victim’s humiliation, his helpless rage, his shame. This is not a state of adult human fellow feeling from which he can act effectively: it is a state of memory. He is gripped by the past. (Location 3426)
Tags: Geel
As the Harvard psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman has pointed out, “To some degree everyone is a prisoner of the past.” 1 Without knowing it, we often relive the past. What we take for present-day reality represents, in many situations, reactivated early memories stored in the implicit memory system, a vast and infallibly accurate record of past experiences. Implicit memory happens, according to the psychologist and memory researcher Daniel Schacter, “when people are influenced by a past experience without any awareness that they are remembering.” (Location 3431)
Tags: Geel
It is now known that memory does not function like a video camera, storing all the information from an experience on a single, previously blank tape. Retrieving memories is not like searching a file to locate some desired item. Not only are there many components to the recording, storage and reactivation of each memory, but also scientists and psychologists who study the subject speak these days of more than one type of memory process. “The brain clearly has multiple memory systems, each devoted to different kinds of learning and memory functions,” writes the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. (Location 3437)
Tags: Geel
For short-term memories to fix in the brain for storage in long-term memory, they have to be encoded. There are many components to any experience, Daniel Schacter points out, physical and emotional: sights, sounds, words, actions, feelings. Each of these is analyzed by different sets of circuits in the brain. Encoding occurs as the connections between the various circuits involved in the experience are strengthened. (We can recall here the principle that “neurons that fire together, wire together.”) These circuits are located in many separate parts of the brain, which is why there is no single neurological filing cabinet for memory storage. Each new memory is a new pattern of strengthened connections between widely distributed brain circuits. A memory happens when the circuits that participated in the original encoding are simultaneously reactivated by some stimulus in the present. (Location 3444)
Tags: Geel
The implicit memory circuits carry the neurological traces of infancy and of childhood experiences. Encoded in them is the emotional content of those experiences, but not necessarily the details of the events themselves that gave rise to the emotions. (Location 3452)
Tags: Geel
There may be at least three reasons for this. First, as we saw in the chapters on brain development, the infant’s initial interactions with people are based more on feelings than on conscious awareness of the environment. Second, the brain structures that encode explicit memory, or recall, develop later than those involved in implicit memory. Third, emotions may have been disassociated or repressed even as the events that first caused them were unfolding. No conscious awareness is necessary for the encoding of implicit memory, or for its being triggered. (Location 3453)
Tags: Geel
Whenever we experience ourselves caught up in feelings that seem to overwhelm us, we are likely in the realm of implicit memory—as we also are when we find ourselves quite cut off from feelings. “[ The] implicit effects of past experiences shape our emotional reactions, preferences, and dispositions—key elements of what we call personality,” writes Daniel Schacter. “... While our sense of self and identity is highly dependent on explicit memory for past episodes and autobiographical facts, our personalities may be more closely tied to implicit memory processes.” (Location 3460)
Tags: Geel
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. (Location 3478)
Tags: Geel
Other well-known features of attention deficit disorder can be understood when interpreted in the light of implicit memory, notably the trouble with authority figures reported by most ADD adults. This trouble can present itself in three ways: fear, rebelliousness or a combination of both. There is always at least an inner rejection of authority, a perhaps unspoken sense that people with power are unseeing, unknowing and unfair. This is simply the implicit memory of the adult who, as a sensitive child, saw through the pretensions and weaknesses of the adult world. Around authority figures such as employers, doctors, teachers and policemen, the ADD adult will experience a nervousness and lack of confidence that cannot be explained by the actual power relationship that exists in the present. (Location 3482)
Tags: Geel
Note: Nervous
I have always felt, in almost any situation, a compulsive urge to expose the feet of clay, the chink in the armor, the flaws of those in charge. It is only too true that often authority does totter along on feet of clay. But one always has much to gain from an open mind, much to learn if one parks automatic oppositionality at the door. (Location 3494)
Tags: Geel
In this sense, the conference speaker was right: humanity does need people capable of seeing past the official line, unwilling or unable to obliterate their conscious awareness of what is wrong in the world. (Location 3507)
Tags: Geel
While explicit memories are being retrieved—when we recall something—there appears to be increased blood flow to the frontal lobe of the brain. Radioactive brain scans, by contrast, have shown in some ADD brains slowed frontal lobe activity and diminished blood flow to this part of the cortex during stressful mental effort. What we may be seeing here are implicit memory circuits imprinted with fear overwhelming explicit memory.fn1 (Location 3514)
Tags: Geel
I believe what happens is that the experience of having to prove one’s worthiness and the fear of failure give a strong emotional shock to the ADD mind’s ability to activate recall memory. The circuits are sabotaged by the neurophysiological and neurochemical effects of anxiety. A massive shutdown occurs. Having to prove herself in the examination setting, within a restricted time, would trigger in the mind of the sensitive student—adult or child—deep fears of rejection buried in the unconscious. (Location 3519)
Tags: Geel
To give a personal example, my voice quickly falters when someone as much as averts his eyes from me while I am speaking with him. My words lose connection and dry up, like water trickling into sand. (Location 3527)
Tags: Geel
Sick and weak are not useful entries in the dictionary of self-understanding. (Location 3556)
Tags: Geel
Fear of intimacy is universal among ADD adults. It coexists with what superficially would seem to be its opposites—a desperate craving for affection and a dread of being rejected. The reflexive shrinking away from intimacy undermines the ability of the ADD adult to find what he would find most healing: mutually committed loving contact with another human being. (Location 3558)
Tags: Geel
There are memories, the psychiatrist Mark Epstein explains, “that are not so much about something terrible happening, but, in the words of D. W. Winnicott [the great British children’s psychoanalyst] about ‘nothing happening when something might profitably have happened.’ These events are more often recorded in the soma, or body, than in the verbal memory, and they can be integrated only by subsequently experiencing and making sense of them.” (Location 3567)
Tags: Geel
The fear of rejection is not unique to the ADD personality—no single psychological feature of attention deficit disorder is unique. Its importance in attention deficit disorder comes from the hyperreactivity of temperament everyone with ADD was born with. In the ADD adult, as in the child, this hypersensitivity magnifies the impact of every emotional stimulus. The fear of rejection is never far below the surface. People with ADD are exquisitely sensitive to the merest hint of it, even if the hint is only a figment of their fearful imagination. (Location 3594)
Tags: Geel
The ADD adult does not know the difference between refusal and rejection. (Location 3601)
Tags: Geel
The response of the infant to the fathomless anxiety of physical or emotional separation from the parent is either rage or withdrawal, or a combination of both in sequence. (Location 3617)
Tags: Geel
Bowlby also points out that the parent can be physically present but emotionally absent due to stress, anxiety, depression or preoccupation with other matters. From the point of view of the infant, it hardly matters. His encoded reactions will be the same, because for him the real issue is not the parent’s physical presence but her emotional accessibility. The withdrawal dynamic has been called defensive detachment by Bowlby. It has one meaning: so hurtful was it for me to experience your absence that I will encase myself in a shell of hard emotion, impervious to love—and therefore to pain. I never want to feel that hurt again. As a result, ADD adults find it difficult to trust in relationships, to make themselves truly open and vulnerable. (Location 3627)
Tags: Geel
The other aspect of Trevor’s criticality arises from boredom. Many adults with ADD report that they quickly become bored with relationships, as with much else in life. They imagine this boredom of theirs to mean that something is lacking in their partner: the reality is that they are bored with themselves. A person not in contact with internal sources of energy and interest in the world has to search for outside sources, believing that fulfillment can come only from someone else. This is the implicitly remembered state of the infant hungry for emotional nourishment, lacking the capacity to satisfy his own needs and having to look to the parent. The demand placed on the partner in the love relationship is that he or she—the other—fills the emptiness within oneself. But such nourishment is found only through psychological and spiritual growth, through self-discovery. (Location 3637)
Tags: Geel
The fear of intimacy is also a fear of the loss of self. 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. (Location 3646)
Tags: Geel
People desperate for a relationship will surrender their sense of self, their true feelings, for fear of being rejected; when they have gained the relationship they may pull back, as Trevor repeatedly has, in order to reconnect with that precarious sense of self. This dynamic is often seen after the most intimate act of all, sexual intercourse, when following deep attraction and union, there is an alienation and a drive to separate which men, particularly, may experience. One may be in a long-term relationship, lasting even decades, without ever feeling completely committed to it. The ambivalence is an intrinsic memory of childhood emotions when a choice had to be made between staying with oneself, with one’s real feelings, and thereby jeopardizing the relationship with one’s parent, or going for the relationship, at the cost of suppressing parts of oneself. (Location 3654)
Tags: Geel
By maturity, I mean here the degree of individuation, the capacity of the person to genuinely sustain herself emotionally during difficult times without having to be mothered or fathered by someone else. I interpose genuinely because many people pretend to themselves and to others that they are capable of taking care of themselves emotionally, but they do so only at the cost of suppressing their anxiety. The buried anxiety will not be denied but will assert itself in the form of psychological symptoms or direct physical illness. (Location 3695)
Tags: Geel
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 some-one who, on the unconscious level, activates its familiar reactions. This person, after all, will most resemble the persons whose love one so desperately craved all one’s life.fn3 (Location 3705)
Tags: Geel
Strength is an inner quality; power is a matter of relationship. I may have strength, yet at the same time I may be powerful in one relationship and utterly powerless in another. (Location 3717)
Tags: Geel
One of the most perplexing problems for the non-ADD partner is what John Ratey has called “the ahistorical memory” of the ADD mind. In other words, the ADD adult (and also of course the ADD child) functions at times as if previous events, even the most recent ones, had never taken place. 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. Another aspect of ahistorical memory is its eitheror 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. (Location 3721)
Tags: Geel
An adult faces the daunting responsibility of offering herself the very support and nurturing attention that ADD has always prevented her from being able to summon up. (Location 3746)
Tags: Geel
The first of the self-parenting duties I suggest people engage in is the all-important one of self-understanding and psychological support. (Location 3752)
Tags: Geel
An open mind, compassionate curiosity toward the child, letting go of the idea that one “knows” what the child thinks and feels and a striving to accept the child unconditionally will go a long way toward binding wounds inflicted by past mistakes, misjudgments and the parent’s own emotional blockages. Such attitudes are just as important when the ADD adult embarks on the journey of self-healing. Developing a new view toward oneself is no easy task, for it goes against the grain of a lifetime of conditioning. It is not a matter of so-called positive thinking or the naive affirmations exemplified by vows like “Today I will be kinder to myself.” It requires the shedding, gradually, of defenses constructed long ago out of sheer necessity, defenses maintained out of the anxieties embedded in implicit memory. 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. (Location 3758)
Tags: Geel
One notices, and gradually learns not to judge the behavior but to accept the feelings that drive it. (Location 3769)
Tags: Geel
Asked in a tone of compassionate curiosity, such questions can help to illuminate much that has been murky and dark. (Location 3770)
Tags: Geel
Self-acceptance is not a pie-in-the sky abstract concept, because there is no abstract self floating around, begging to be accepted. The self is as we experience ourselves: happy one moment, anxious the next; confident in the morning, guilty and ashamed in the afternoon; giving now, needy then. The problem is not that we have these shifting and conflicting feelings, the problem is that we take a very conditional attitude toward them. We wish to hold on to some, drive away the others. In this we mirror perfectly the way, when we were children, the adults in our world preferred to see only those aspects of our personalities that did not trigger discomfort for them. So self-acceptance does not mean self-admiration or even self-liking at every moment of our lives, but tolerance for all our emotions, including those that make us feel uncomfortable. (Location 3782)
Tags: Geel
Note: Trigger
Guilt is a prime example of an emotion ADD adults would crawl through jungles to escape. 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. (Location 3788)
Tags: Geel
Guilt is obsessively single-minded, knowing only one stimulus and only one response. The stimulus is this: you, child or adult, wish to do something for yourself that may disappoint someone else. This could be a true misdeed, such as stealing, or a human desire to act in accordance with your core impulses, perhaps by expressing a genuine feeling the parent cannot tolerate in you. Guilt does not know the difference. It hurls at you the same epithet for both misdeed and self-expression: selfish. It also cannot discriminate between past and present. In place of your present-day interactions—with spouse, friend, doctor, butcher, baker, computer maker—it sees only your early relationships with your caregivers. (Location 3809)
Tags: Geel
Guilt cannot grasp that its services are no longer required. It just hangs around, making us feel uncomfortable. Our problem is that we fear it. We want to get rid of it. I will obey. Anything to make you disappear. Just get out. If we saw in guilt the well-meaning friend it was—doggedly faithful, to a fault—we would make room for it. (Location 3814)
Tags: Geel
At least in the beginning of growth, if she does not feel guilt, she is probably ignoring her truest self. (Location 3821)
Tags: Geel
His anxiety, an automatic consequence of self-assertion, marked a giant stride forward in his efforts to discover himself. If he can endure being with his anxious feelings, fn2 welcoming them instead of fleeing them, John will continue to grow. (Location 3828)
Tags: Geel
The more the core self—the deepest impulses—is suppressed, the more compulsive are the attempts to compensate by satisfying superficial, infantile, instant-gratification impulses and desires. (Location 3834)
Tags: Geel
3. You don’t punish yourself for where you find yourself (Location 3836)
Tags: Geel
I have no reason to see myself as a victim, but I did not choose the circumstances that shaped my neurophysiology or my personality, which are one and the same thing. One can make choices when one becomes aware and awake, not before. (Location 3842)
Tags: Geel
The awakening is not sudden. It is gradual and occurs in stages. Someone may have meandered down side paths, sleepwalked into many dead-end corridors. He pays for each mistake and, unfortunately, so do others. None of that could have been avoided, all of it had to happen not only for him to find the right direction, but to know that he has found it. (Location 3843)
Tags: Geel
Note: Know
The person with ADD, whatever her age at diagnosis, has lived with low self-esteem and emotional pain all her life. Many of her behaviors are futile and not very cleverly disguised attempts to kill the pain. But pain cannot be killed; it needs to be listened to. It has a story to tell and lessons to teach. (Location 3849)
Tags: Geel
Adults who hope their ADD-related problems can be addressed without psychological work under the guidance of a professional are, in most cases, setting themselves up for failure. (Location 3854)
Tags: Geel
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. (Location 3855)
Tags: Geel
Except when dealing with severe depressions needing hospitalization or other complex mental disorders, I am reluctant to refer my patients to psychiatrists. It is not the abilities or intentions of individual psychiatrists that are in question but the very nature of what psychiatry has become and the type of training psychiatric residency provides to future practitioners. (Location 3875)
Tags: Geel
In the medical model, the patient presents the doctor with the symptoms; having elicited the necessary information, the doctor makes the diagnosis and prescribes, administers or performs the cure. This approach works for a broken bone but not for a wounded psyche, for an inflamed appendix but not for inflamed emotions. (Location 3884)
Tags: Geel
Note: Ontstoken Emoties
The most well-accredited academic learning remains dangerous nonsense issued from the mouths of mental health professionals who have not dealt with their own unfinished psychological business. Worse yet if they deny to themselves that they have any. No one does not have any. Certainly no one who enters the mental health field as his or her chosen area of work is free of emotional problems. (Location 3896)
Tags: Geel
Of all types of professional training, the one I consider most likely to be of benefit in ADD is family therapy. The skilled family therapist is not fixated on people’s dysfunctions and their difficult feelings. (Location 3899)
Tags: Geel
People with ADD tend to have trouble recognizing, let alone respecting, their gut feelings. And yet, gut instincts are the best guides. (Location 3910)
Tags: Geel
Some development of the capacity to be alone is necessary if the brain is to function at its best, and if the individual is to fulfil his highest potential. Human beings easily become alienated from their own deepest needs and feelings. Learning, thinking, innovation and maintaining contact with one’s own inner world are all facilitated by solitude.–ANTHONY STORR, Solitude (Location 3916)
Tags: Geel
Without the right conditions, the brain cannot develop new circuits or the mind new ways of relating to world and to self. A person cannot become sane in the midst of the chaos she perpetuates around herself. (Location 3935)
Tags: Geel
The adult with attention deficit disorder needs to know that the physical space she occupies can help to either harmonize or disorganize her mind. Although many ADD adults assert that they function well in the midst of the physical chaos around them, the fact is that they are too sensitive not to be affected by it. (Location 3942)
Tags: Geel
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. (Location 3946)
Tags: Geel
The many setbacks of the ADD adult have not necessarily taught him to endure failure but only to be permanently frustrated by it. (Location 3951)
Tags: Geel
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. I noted curiously my own experience over the years that at the times when I felt less tension and anxiety about my relationship with my wife, I had less tendency to stay up late. (Location 3957)
Tags: Geel
Something in the ADD adult dreads going to bed and turning the light off. The fear is of being alone with one’s urgent mind for even a few short minutes. I used to read until the book would drop from my hands and would wake hours later, still wearing my glasses and the lamp still burning. (Location 3961)
Tags: Geel
The fear of being alone with the mind is, I believe, an implicit memory of finding oneself, in infancy, cut off from contact with the parent. An infant in that situation would feel intense distress and would cast about for some other mental or physical object to relate to so as not to feel that distress. (Location 3964)
Tags: Geel
A contributing factor is that the distractible ADD mind does find it easier to focus when the noises and intrusions of the day have abated, and everyone else has gone to bed. Many adults have told me this is when they get their best work done, or when they feel at peace enough to read or to rest. The problem, of course, is that sleep is essential for the brain to regenerate the sensitive neurological apparatus of alertness and attention. During sleep also, the mind integrates events from the waking hours. (Location 3968)
Tags: Geel
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. (Location 3982)
Tags: Geel
Lack of exercise leads to an internal sluggishness that undermines alertness and attention. Exercise releases substances in the brain that are necessary for mood stability, motivation and attention and, in the long term, makes the chemical apparatus that manufactures these substances more efficient. I recommend that people set a goal of vigorous exercise every day. To balance the muscle-contracting effect of physical activity, some time must be devoted to stretching exercises before and after the workout. Stretching is important even for someone unable to do cardiovascular exercise. People with ADD, habituated lifelong to self-generated tension, tend to have tight muscles and stiff joints and ligaments. Simple stretching exercises done for a few minutes daily are tremendously freeing physically and psychologically. (Location 3987)
Tags: Geel
There is matchless unity, harmony and peace in nature—all that is lacking, in other words, in the ADD mind. (Location 3996)
Tags: Geel
“Nature,” writes the reclusive and hypersensitive author Marcel Proust, “by virtue of all the feelings that it aroused in me, seemed to me the thing most diametrically opposed to the mechanical inventions of mankind. (Location 3999)
Tags: Geel
The ADD adult’s workaholism and dread of the word “no” leads her to overextend herself. A large proportion of the ADD clients I have seen are juggling too many projects, commitments that leave them with nary a moment to finish a thought. We engulf ourselves in hubbub, chase our minds in ten directions at once and then wonder why we cannot stand still long enough to notice anything. This “symptom” of ADD, too, is self-perpetuating. It creates itself. If a mind in a different relationship to itself is a goal, we need to clear some ground for its development. We may need to let some activities go. (Location 4007)
Tags: Geel
Recreation 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. Re-creation needs activities that nourish the mind or liberate the body. (Location 4013)
Tags: Geel
8. Creative expression 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. Essential to finding meaning and purpose in life is the liberation of one’s creative instincts. (Location 4017)
Tags: Geel
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. (Location 4030)
Tags: Geel
Part of my treatment approach is to explore with people their creative natures, to urge them to do some self-inquiry why this side of the personality may have been disregarded. If self-esteem means esteeming the self, the individual’s deepest creative urges must be honored. The self-parenting part of healing ADD must, I am convinced, involve paying attention to one’s need to create. (Location 4037)
Tags: Geel
Not everyone would be able to earn a living in his chosen field of creative expression, but I always urge people to identify the direction in which their creative energies would naturally flow, and to allow them expression. Many ADD adults don’t have to search for anything new in following this advice; they just have to reconnect with something they had lost contact with long ago. (Location 4044)
Tags: Geel
The third pillar of a balanced human existence is spiritual work. This could take place in a religious context, but not necessarily. Spiritual work is the cultivation of a mindful solitude. All traditional meditative and contemplative practices, including many types of prayer, have as their purpose helping us to disengage for a time from our concerns with people, objects, desires, thoughts and fears, to actively strive for connection between ourselves and the rest of creation. Enormously beneficial to everyone, spiritual work is essential in the self-treatment of ADD. (Location 4050)
Tags: Geel
The age-old wisdom of traditions from all continents and cultures tells us that reality has aspects more profound and more universal than we tend to imagine in our harried and isolated workaday lives. The person who feels that he is not being “himself” recognizes this implicitly. Without being able to explain why, he senses there is a truer self he does not experience directly but which exists nonetheless—otherwise how would he know that he is not being that self? Intimations of the true self, a vague awareness, seeps into our consciousness, if only in the form of the dissatisfaction we feel at not being able to contact it. We sense somehow that in many of our pursuits we are chasing shadows, but the very existence of shadows implies the existence also of the real objects, beings, or entities represented by them. 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. (Location 4055)
Tags: Geel
You do not need to synthesize that which is already a unity. (Location 4075)
Tags: Geel
The ADD mind is most uncomfortable with meditation, is intensely bored with it. It’s all the more amazing to me that recently I have actually come to enjoy and look forward to it. It becomes fun, after a while, to watch the fretful and anxious mind do its backwards flips, somersaults, and disappearing tricks—to observe it all, and work at not being identified with it, not mistaking it for me. (Location 4078)
Tags: Geel
Adults with ADD should at least consider giving themselves some daily opportunity for contemplative solitude. Contemplative solitude is different from being alone in a room, reading, listening to music or being lost in reverie. It means putting some attention on one’s life, one’s thoughts and feelings. Like nature, it has an integrating and harmonizing effect. (Location 4089)
Tags: Geel
A brain used to decades of inattention and disorganization will not overnight reorganize itself. (Location 4094)
Tags: Geel
With all these self-parenting tasks, the catch-22 for the ADD adult is that the very state he is wanting to grow out of hinders his capacity to create the conditions required for growth. (Location 4097)
Tags: Geel
The best attitude to adopt is one of compassionate patience, which has to include a tolerance for failure. (Location 4104)
Tags: Geel
ALL ADDICTIONS ARE anesthetics. They separate us from the distress in our consciousness. (Location 4113)
Tags: Geel
This combination of arousal and soothing enables the nicotine addict, like the caffeine addict, to be an alert sleepwalker. (Location 4126)
Tags: Geel
Those of us with attention deficit disorder love dopamine and endorphins. (Location 4130)
Tags: Geel
existence. I have treated heroin addicts, and I recognized in myself the same vacant and driven look I saw in their eyes. (Location 4137)
Tags: Geel
It was easy for me to justify all the spending as compensation for all my hard work: one addiction provided an alibi for the other. (Location 4141)
Tags: Geel
It’s possible, I suppose, that a man could love music and reading so fervently that he decides, with due consideration, to devote much of his income and life energy to these activities. The truth was that for me, as for all addicts, the excitement was not in the ostensible goal—listening to the music—but in the process of acquiring. (Location 4147)
Tags: Geel
Passion loves the goal or process that is its object (the painting one buys or the painting one does), but the real object of addiction is the thrill of plunging into the behavior, not the love of it. (The objective of the gambler is not winning, but the thrill of gambling.) The effects on my family life were devastating, not because of financial privation or even primarily because of the time I spent away from home while haunting the stores. The major effect was that I could not be present—in both senses of being at home or attentive to my family—whenever I was in the grip of the fever. For an addict, morality, truth, devotion to a partner and children can pale into abstraction. I would keep my children waiting or hurry them along to suit my purposes. I lied to my wife, daily, for weeks and months at a time. When the reckoning came, as it always did, I made guilty confessions and soon-to-be-broken promises. (Location 4153)
Tags: Geel
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. (Location 4162)
Tags: Geel
The addiction, in a strange way, makes the addict feel more connected to life. The downside is that it separates him further and further from himself. He is feeding only his appetite, not his hunger. (Location 4170)
Tags: Geel
In biochemical terms, any addictive substance or behavior is self-medication, self-administered emotional pain relief. But the ADD person is also treating herself for a condition she is not even aware of having. Whatever behavior or substance one is addicted to, the treatment of attention deficit disorder cannot make headway until one accepts the fact of the addiction and takes steps to end it. It is not possible to lull feelings to sleep and hope to be truly awake. When the addiction dominates, the true self—how one really is in the world—slumbers. To own the addiction is to begin to take ownership of the pain. Until that happens, the pain owns the addict and the addiction rules him. (Location 4171)
Tags: Geel
We see, then, that the pain the substance abuser does not want to feel has as its original source the same experiences that deprived her of the chemical she is trying to replenish by means of her habit. The emotions the behavioral addict is running to escape were imprinted in his implicit memory circuits at the same time as the dopamine circuits were stunted, which now, by his thrill-seeking behaviors, he is trying to stimulate. The harder these people work to compensate for their deficient biochemistry through their respective addictions, the more they perpetuate the emotional emptiness that only the ownership of their problem and the recognition of its causes in past and present will begin to fill. (Location 4202)
Tags: Geel
There is no path toward oneself that leads away from the pain. (Location 4221)
Tags: Geel
The main drugs in ADD treatment are the psychostimulants, the most familiar being methylphenidate, known by its trade name Ritalin, and dextroamphetamine sulfate, commonly referred to as Dexedrine. Although they have different modes of action, they both stimulate the activity of the cerebral cortex by balancing the levels of the neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) in the frontal lobe of the brain and in other centers concerned with arousal and attention. (Location 4267)
Tags: Geel
Only one person has the right to decide whether a medication is taken: the one about to be treated For adults, this is self-evident, but in the treatment of children, this principle is often not recognized. It is essential that the child not perceive that she is sick, that something is wrong with her. She does not have a disease and does not have to be cured. The medication may improve functioning, if that is her own chosen goal, but no one should impose on her the demands of the adult world. (Location 4278)
Tags: Geel
Far better for the parents to work on the attachment relationship with their child and on their own parenting approaches than to worry about his passing a grade. Children who feel good about themselves and secure in their bonding with their parents are unlikely to refuse the help of medications, if such help is truly needed. (Location 4300)
Tags: Geel
Medications should never be the only treatment, or even the first treatment The most serious problem with the widespread use of medications in the treatment of attention deficit disorder is that very often—probably in the vast majority of cases—they are the only form of intervention consistently pursued. (Location 4328)
Tags: Geel
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. (Location 4424)
Tags: Geel
We don’t do our children any favors when we try to protect them from experiencing sadness or failure. What we really for want them when they feel sad is to be able to endure disappointment and hurt feelings, not to hide behind defenses, angry acting-out and driven behavior in order to avoid emotional distress. (Location 4429)
Tags: Geel
Love, it turns out, is intimately related to attention. In The Road Less Traveled Scott Peck brilliantly defines love as action, as the willingness to extend oneself in order to nurture another person’s spiritual and psychological growth, or one’s own. (Location 4433)
Tags: Geel
Adults with ADD face the most difficult task of all: learning how to be loving toward themselves. This is the greatest struggle because it requires that we gradually shed the defenses we have come to identify as the self and venture into new territory. (Location 4438)
Tags: Geel
To love is to extend oneself toward another or toward oneself, says Dr. Peck. It so happens that this is also the precise meaning of giving attention to another person or to oneself. The origin of the word attend is the Latin tendere, “to stretch.” Attend means to extend, to stretch toward. If we can actively love, there will be no attention deficit and no disorder. (Location 4440)
Tags: Geel