You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (30 page)

Families who live under the same roof share both
physical and emotional space. If the family is to live peacefully together, each member needs an adequate amount of both. Each of the Bakers has a poor sense of physical and emotional boundaries and impulsively invades each other’s territory. Acting on autopilot most of the time, they bump, jostle and literally step on each other’s toes as they repeatedly miss both obvious and subtle requests for
space.

A closed door or a sign that says Keep Out is a fairly clear statement of a desire for privacy. Most of us understand its obvious significance, but what about the subtle, nonverbal requests for privacy? Many of us with ADD misread these “signs.”

These nonverbal signs are the invisible circles that people draw around their bodies for privacy and protection. The circles define the perimeter
of personal space and convey the message “Don’t come any closer than the circle I have drawn around me.”

These circles aren’t fixed in time and space. The diameter of your own circle constantly changes according to your mood, circumstances and relationship to the other person. The circle narrows to encourage a lover or a beloved child to get close, and widens to keep the stranger or someone you
dislike at a safe distance. If you’re angry or depressed, the circle may become huge even for loved ones as you send out the message Stay Away. For an ADDer, the circle sometimes inexplicably widens when he can’t stand to be touched or to allow anyone in his immediate vicinity.

Synopsis: Act V, Scene 2

Awareness of and respect for these invisible circles requires good nonverbal communication
skills. Lacking these skills, the Bakers impulsively trounce on each other’s feelings and invade personal physical spaces. Since the whole family has ADD, each person has a unique need for space. Each person also has an inability to prevent his needs from colliding with the needs of everybody else. Privacy is as hard to come by in this family as peace and quiet are. The experience of living in this
kind of family is one of feeling intruded upon and overwhelmed.

Most ADD families experience some degree of difficulty in their interactions. What can an ADD family such as the Bakers do to make their home more of a haven for the people who live there? The first order of business is to see a family therapist.

This family has been in trouble for a long time. They need an objective outsider to
analyze and balance the needs of the family as a unit with the individual needs of family members. The therapist’s job is to help the family system become healthier so
it can better meet the needs of each member. Right now, the family is too stressed and chaotic to provide the necessary structure and nurturing.

We can’t emphasize enough that treating a troubled family is not a do-it-yourself
enterprise! A Band-Aid approach may temporarily slow down the bleeding, but it won’t stop the hemorrhage!
If your family is really in trouble, get professional help ASAP!

If your family is basically okay and needs only minor adjustments, that’s wonderful. There are several techniques you can use to support and build your family system. The following discussion includes specific suggestions for
improving communication and managing boundary issues.

Survival Tips: Act V, Scene 2

Creating Living Space Large Enough
for the People Who Share It

When we talk about living space, we’re not suggesting that you increase the square footage of your house or apartment! We’re talking about carefully designing sufficient
emotional
living space so that family members can coexist with relative harmony.

Teach Respect for Boundary Needs:
Suggest that your family visualize a boundary as a Hula Hoop. We know we’re showing our ages—many people under thirty-five have never even played with one! Anyway, if you have a Hula Hoop lying around, put it around you to demonstrate your personal circle. Ask each family member to picture himself surrounded by his own personal hoop.

The room suddenly starts
to shrink in size as people and Hula Hoops begin to take up space. As everyone starts to move around in the space, the inevitable happens. There’s a fair amount of confusion as Hula Hoops start bumping into each other.

Each family member should put this image in his memory bank for future reference. The next time he starts to intrude on someone else, he may be able to call up the Hula Hoop image in his mind. “Seeing” Dad in a Hula Hoop might just be enough to make Junior Stop, Look, Listen … and Laugh!

Design Rest and Relaxation Zones:
In many families, there are unwritten rules regarding private space. The
den may “belong” to the parents—the children understand that this space is Mom and Dad’s retreat. Similarly, the children often use their bedrooms as escapes from the demands of the family.

ADD families need to establish written rules regarding the boundaries of privacy. Each member of the family should have his own designated zone. In a small apartment, this space could be the balcony, the hall
or half of a shared bedroom. Each family member has a right to privacy and needs a private retreat—a place that is off-limits to everyone else. “Out to Lunch” or
“Temporary Shutdown” signs can indicate current occupation of a personal zone.

This provision for
down time
is essential to forestall the negative behaviors of frustration. Each person has a right to state his need for space. When a
family member makes a request for quiet time, for example, the others are to refrain from talking to him.

Designated Quiet Zones:
Designate specific quiet zones in your home as places for reading, studying or resting. Place the television and stereo in an area with a door that can be closed. This area should also be as far away as possible from the quiet zones. A soundproof room for noisy equipment
would be ideal, but most homes don’t have this luxury. One option is to establish a rule that TV or stereo users must use earphones.

Rules for Communication and Respect for Boundaries:
You can’t take anything for granted in an ADD family! You need to design structured rules to protect the emotional and physical circles of family members. Some of these suggestions may be helpful:

• Set Aside Specific Periods for Quiet
  when the TV should be turned off and the answering machine turned on. Develop a family schedule with designated times for studying or other quiet pursuits as well as times to be together as a group.
  
• Observe a Period of Silence
  when the noise level is too high or emotions are getting out of control.
  
• Require Each Family Member, Including Parents, to Ask Permission
  before borrowing anything from someone else.
  
• Impose a Stop—Look
  /
  Listen—Speak
  procedure for all communication between family members. When a conversation is in progress, the person entering the room is expected to wait until he’s invited to join in. If someone is doing something that requires concentration, such as reading or paying bills, he shouldn’t be interrupted except for an emergency.
  
• Determine What Constitutes an Emergency.
  An untied shoelace can be an emergency for an ADD child. You may need to discuss and make a list of real and perceived emergency situations. Insist that everyone refer to the list before interrupting a conversation in progress. If an interruption is necessary, establish the following rule: Get the person’s attention by gently tapping him on the shoulder, wait for a response and then excuse yourself before you begin to talk.
  
• Prohibit All Long-Distance Conversations
  except for announcements that the house is burning down! Yelling up the stairs or shouting from another room to find someone is a no-no. There are two reasons for this. First, if family members have to strain to hear, they will frequently misinterpret the message. An ADDer can have enough trouble sending and receiving messages without the added burden of trying to talk to someone in another room. Second, it’s not the most respectful means of communication. Yelling upstairs to get someone to come down is a lot like calling the dog—and it feels like it too!
  
• Use Intercoms.
  You might want to invest in some intercoms to communicate with people in other parts of the house. Be careful not to overdo it. A buzzing intercom every five minutes can be as annoying as a bellowing voice!
  
• Prohibit All “On the Run” Conversations.
  Talking to someone while you rush to finish a task isn’t conducive to effective communication. The intended recipient of this one-way conversation has to listen to a program that fades in and out or follow the speaker around on his travels. On-the-run conversations contribute to miscommunication.
  
• Enforce a Rule to Prohibit Unwanted Teasing or Joking
  about individual family members. ADDers often read the literal meaning of messages and miss the intended meaning. Since impulsive ADD family members often fail to notice the discomfort of others, their teasing can quickly escalate into perceived full-scale attacks. All requests to stop teasing are to be respected. If a joke hurts someone, it’s not funny.
  
• Set Up a Message Center
  in a prominent place. The kitchen may be a good place for this as it’s often the center of family activities. The best location is near a phone with an answering machine. Preferably, the space will have a counter or desk for a writing surface. The center should include a bulletin board, a method for filing mail and important papers, a large calendar and an ample supply of paper and pens.
  

The bulletin board needs to be sufficiently large to provide a specific section for each family member and one for the whole family. Keep extra colored paper tacked in each section or use color Post-it pads. Each family member can have a personalized color that makes it easy to post and retrieve messages. A white board may be a good backdrop for the colored notes. Be
sure that everyone, including small children, can reach the bulletin board.

The
General Messages
area is for anything the whole family needs to read. The rest of the board can be divided into sections for individual family members. Each message is to include the signature of the person who posted it, the date and the time. Whenever possible, telephone calls should be handled at or switched to
the message center phone.

Encourage family members to make a habit of checking the message center several times a day and every time they come home. As soon as someone reads a message, he removes it from the board. This will reduce visual clutter and improve the odds that the family won’t overlook posted messages. If someone adds a general message to the board, he should initial it at the bottom.
As each person in turn reads the message, he adds his initials. The last reader will know that everyone else has seen the note and that he should remove it from the board.

Besides looking for posted messages, each person needs to check his mail slot and listen to the answering machine or voice mail. Phone calls can be added to the board and the tape rewound. Before making any plans, everyone
should check the message center’s master calendar for important family dates.

We’re not suggesting that families do all their communicating by way of the message center! Putting things in writing can be a big help, however. Otherwise, an ADD child might forget to mention that Dad is stranded with a flat tire and sister is in the emergency room with a broken arm! A disorganized ADD family can
truly benefit from a structured system that tracks family messages and appointments.

·
Monitor Your Family’s Emotional Temperature:
Monitoring your personal stress level is important, but in your excitable, roller-coaster ADD family, the effect of workload or stress snowballs. It’s similar to what happens to the number of relationships when you add new family members: 2 + 1 is greater than 3.

This is how it happens. One of the children comes home after a bad day at school and is bouncing off the walls. Mom arrives an hour later in a bad mood after a difficult day at work. In a matter of minutes, Mom and the hyperactive child are at each other’s throats as the child’s noise and activity irritate a mother who has no reserves of patience. The fight that erupts puts everyone in the family
on edge, and before long the house feels like a war zone.

Because the stress level of each person has such a profound effect on the family, it’s important to monitor the demands on the family as a whole. If an individual family member is pushing himself too hard and feels irritable as a consequence, it isn’t just an individual matter. If the family as a whole is trying to do too much, the stress
makes relaxation and downtime impossible.