You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (14 page)

Learned Helplessness

Tracy is a modern-day Prissy, the flaky servant girl in the
movie
Gone With the Wind
who didn’t “know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies.” Played by Butterfly McQueen, Prissy affected a simpleminded air that helped her avoid responsibilities.

In the era of slavery this defense was useful. “Stupid like a fox” Prissy used her helplessness as a mechanism for control without risking the severe consequences of outright rebellion. Tracy has learned that helplessness
works as effectively for her as it did for Prissy. Approaching her fiftieth birthday, she has spent years learning to play the role to the hilt.

Tracy never worries about failure. Similar to the manipulator, she avoids her responsibilities at work and in her social life by getting others to do everything for her. She smiles charmingly as she appeals to others for help. Her method differs from
Todd’s. She openly uses helplessness as her ploy. She flatters and boosts the egos of her rescuers, contrasting her poor,
dumb little me
act with their competence.

Women have been frequently characterized as incompetent and helpless. We aren’t trying to perpetuate an unfortunate stereotype by casting Tracy in her maladaptive feminine role. Her helplessness is a coping strategy used by many members
of
oppressed groups such as minorities and women. If you are otherwise powerless as Prissy was, you can use helplessness to survive and exercise some control. Few men use this coping strategy because playing helpless isn’t an acceptable male role in our society. Men can’t get away with it!

Although Tracy is bright and personable, her ADD has always made her feel unable to cope with the realities
of her life. Learned helplessness makes her life easier to handle. She manages to remain unstressed, but also unchallenged. Tracy needs help in affirming her abilities so she can feel comfortable enough to risk failure and find success.

Controlling

You probably know Jack or someone similar. At sixty-two years old, he lives by the adage “He who has the gold, rules.” He establishes himself as
the undisputed ruler of his kingdoms at home and at work. He has used his intelligence, creativity and high energy level to rise to a high-powered position in a large corporation. Jack has aggressively and relentlessly climbed high on the ladder of success. He seems to have used the symptoms of his ADD to his advantage and should be congratulated for his efforts … or should he?

Jack measures
his success against external rewards of financial gain. Unfortunately, he has orchestrated his success through his domination of the people in his life. He monopolizes conversations and insists on having the last word. He makes all decisions at home and on the job. He regards his beautiful wife as an earned bonus and treats her as a subject in his kingdom. At work, he always sets the agenda at meetings
even when it isn’t his responsibility. If someone else chairs a meeting, he subtly undermines the agenda, steering it in a direction that suits his needs.

He makes unilateral decisions, often incurring the wrath of his peers for his failure to consult with them. His resentful colleagues and employees are ready to lynch him. His wife is fed up and is thinking about leaving him. He has made an
impressive
array of enemies who would like nothing more than to overthrow the king.

While it isn’t readily apparent from his behavior, King Jack lives in perpetual terror of looking stupid. At home, he controls his family’s agenda to avoid the risk that his wife will choose an activity that will expose his weaknesses. At work, he commands all discussions because he knows he’s effective only when he follows his own train of thought. By not letting anyone else contribute, he avoids
the confusion and embarrassment he feels when questions and comments derail him.

Jack’s controlling defense mechanism may backfire. One false move and he may maneuver himself out of a job and a family.

Character Sketches of People You May Know

The ADDers you’ve met use acquired defense mechanisms to protect themselves from public exposure of their deficits. We’ve examined the rationale for their
choices and the ways in which their coping strategies are maladaptive.

Human behavior is too complex to explain within the context of defense mechanisms alone. Beneath the defenses are the individual characteristics we are born with. Maladaptive ADD behaviors are a combination of various learned defensive maneuvers and specific deficits.

In this section, we’ll look more closely at behavioral
manifestations of specific deficits. These vignettes aren’t condemnations of ADDers—we get plenty of them! Rather, we have designed them to illustrate what can happen if ADD symptoms flourish without control or intervention.

The Peter Pan Syndrome:
Forty-Eight Going on Twelve

You may be familiar with the Peter Pan syndrome, popularized in a book on the subject. People in our society normally
experience some regret at leaving childhood and taking on adult responsibilities. Most of us, however, manage to bite the bullet and make the transition into adulthood. Chris is a Peter Pan who has decided that growing up is simply not worth it.

As Chris approaches his forty-ninth birthday, he continues to live in a state of perpetual childhood. He has a personality that attracts people. Energetic
optimism, a wacky sense of humor and a warm acceptance of others make the people around him feel good.

He always has more invitations than he can accept. The ease with which he connects with people promises an intimacy that never materializes. After an initial period of intense connection, would-be lovers and close friends find him an elusive man,
impossible to pin down. He refuses to make plans,
preferring to live from moment to moment. The notion of commitment to goals or a relationship is incomprehensible to Chris. He just wants to have fun and is mystified when other people feel betrayed by his broken promises.

He disappoints bosses and coworkers as well as friends. His high energy level and intelligence generate expectations for superior job performance. After an initial burst of energy, Chris typically becomes bored with a project and loses motivation. His work becomes sloppy and careless. When a job becomes boring or a boss begins pressuring him to get serious, Chris switches to another one.

Lovers
get similar treatment. When they begin to make demands for a more committed relationship, they find that Chris
has moved on. The women hurt by his “love ’em and leave ’em” lifestyle feel used and abused. Chris believes, however, that he’s just operating under a different set of rules. He lives according to the pleasure principle and its primary goal of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.

All of us operate on the pleasure principle to a certain extent. When we’re born, we’re virtual bundles of wants and needs without any sense of people outside ourselves. As we grow and are socialized by family and society, we gain awareness of our responsibilities to others. The psychologically healthy adult learns to strike a balance between her needs and the needs of the people in her world.

Chris is an adult by virtue of his chronological age, but he hasn’t developed psychologically or emotionally beyond the age of twelve. Similar to Peter Pan, he just
don’t wanna grow up
.

The Space Cadet

It isn’t uncommon for ADD adults to say they are spacey. When the mental fog descends, they can become disoriented and forgetful. Some of us, however, settle too comfortably into waking dream states,
becoming lifers in the Academy for Space Cadets!

Sean is thirty-seven years old and has joined the academy. He is a gentle soul with a fanciful imagination and a gift for poetry. He spends his days daydreaming, writing and having long philosophical conversations with his cronies. Sean takes little notice of practicalities. He earns meager wages as a writer but doesn’t worry because material things
are of no consequence to him.

He does his own thing, oblivious of the world around him. When he was single, his lifestyle wasn’t a problem. But now he’s married and has four children. Sean’s wife is exhausted and at her wit’s end trying to cope single-handedly with the large family. Sean is always pleasant and soft-spoken with his spouse and children. He tries to do whatever they ask of him—that
is, when they manage to capture his attention!

Sadly, Sean makes little effort to tune in to the world around him. Unless someone demands his attention, he’s content to spend time drifting on his own mental clouds. He never set out to dump all the responsibility in his wife’s lap, but that’s effectively what has happened. He plays with the kids when he wakes up long enough to notice them, but
his wife rarely leaves him alone with them. She’s terrified that the toddler would poison herself right under her daddy’s less than watchful eye. Sean isn’t callously allowing his wife to work like a dog while he sits and daydreams.
He doesn’t even notice
. The varied duties and details of family life totally escape him.

Emotional Incontinence

This behavior doesn’t have anything to do with bodily
functions! Rather, it is rampant, uncontrolled emotional output. As ADDers, we have a hard time modulating our erratic moods. Staying reasonably calm can be a full-time job! Unless we want other people to write us off as immature or crazy, we have to expend the effort.

At twenty-seven years old, Jeff has a serious case of emotional incontinence. He doesn’t make any effort to control his extreme
ups and downs. The atmosphere in his house is always thick with the fallout from his latest mood. His family rides the roller coaster along with him, cowering from his rages, sinking into gloom or becoming infected with unreasonable giddiness. The members of his household feel exhausted and tense. They deplete their energy reserves as they try to cope with his moodiness. He has lost more than one
job because of his temper and is close to losing his second wife, as well.

Sadly, in social situations beyond his home, Jeff doesn’t have any impact at all. Other people size him up quickly and decide not to take him seriously. They view his rages as the pathetic tantrums of a young child.

In Jeff’s case,
more is definitely less
. Emotional expression has greater impact as it becomes more intense,
but only to a point!
Drama can quickly deteriorate into melodrama, evoking laughter rather than empathy. People like Jeff who don’t control their emotional output run the risk of becoming caricatures of themselves.

The Blabber

Mary is Jeff’s close relative. She also has a bad case of incontinence, but hers is verbal incontinence. Although her official title is manager of order processing her
colleagues have dubbed her Typhoid Mary, Rumor Distribution Manager. They can count on hearing the latest office dirt from Mary, who has assumed responsibility for broadcasting everyone’s confidential information.

With her warmth, good listening skills and grandmotherly manner, sixty-year-old Mary easily made friends with coworkers. Her new friends, however, quickly learned to keep their distance
when they discovered that Mary talked as much as she listened! Now everyone fears the effects of her loose tongue.

She isn’t a vicious backstabber. She truly cares about her colleagues and wants to lend an ear when they have problems. But she fails to reflect on the confidentiality of shared information and indiscriminately and inappropriately distributes rumors.

The angry reactions that greet
her news continually surprise her. Since she has no qualms about sharing her own deepest secrets with total strangers, she can’t understand why others are upset when she shares their secrets. To Mary, the human race is just one big happy family, and families don’t keep secrets from one another, do they?

The Bulldozer

A bulldozer is a well-designed piece of machinery. In short order, it can transform
an acre of tree-covered land to a flattened, barren landscape. In similar fashion, some ADDers bulldoze their way through their lives, leaving little untouched or unharmed. This is Richard’s style, and it has left him with an empty life.