You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (54 page)

“I Am Irresponsible”

Has anyone ever told you this? Ever uttered these words in the privacy of your own mind? How many times a day? An hour? Per minute? If someone offered you a dollar for each time you invoked this statement, would you be fabulously wealthy?

If this little phrase is an all-too-familiar litany in your everyday life, read on.

Okay, the number one step involved in good mental hygiene is to examine your language, your self-talk. At first, the goal is awareness—to simply notice what you are saying to yourself. Pretend that your job is to be an impartial witness. A witness notes and reports only the facts, without interpreting or judging.
So the only thing you need to do is notice that you told yourself “I am irresponsible.” If you find yourself going off on a tangent such as “I can’t believe I said that … I am so negative … I am my own worst enemy,” remind yourself to “be The Witness.” Essentially, this is a practice that will reduce your judgment about the things you say to yourself. It is one layer of brain crud.

Next, set
aside some time to dissect “I am irresponsible.” Have a notebook handy to assist you in the process. What do these words mean to you? Where did the idea that you were irresponsible come from?

Being ADDers, we will take the backwards approach and address the second question first. Reach into your memory banks and pull out your earliest memory of hearing the words “you are irresponsible.” Even
if you can’t retrieve a specific memory, chances are good that either a teacher or family member labeled you in that way.

Go back into those memory banks again to answer the question: What were you doing or not doing when they called you “irresponsible”? Since we are not currently standing at your shoulder, we don’t know the answer to that question, but we can offer a few possibilities based
on experience.

• You did not do your chores
  
• You did not have your assignment in on time
  
• You were playing when you were supposed to be working
  

Looking at these possibilities through the lens of our awareness of ADD (reframing them), we can provide an explanation for those behaviors that had nothing to do with a “moral” choice to be responsible or irresponsible. You did not do your chores because
you forgot or got distracted by something else. You did not have your assignment completed because you were overwhelmed by the task and ashamed to ask for help. You were playing when you were supposed to be cleaning your room because you were overwhelmed by the job and didn’t know where to start. Now you know how ADD works, but back then you didn’t have a clue and neither did the people who were
judging your behavior.

Let’s get back to the first question: What do these words mean to you? Of course, we learned that the word “irresponsible” meant “bad” long before we knew anything else about what it meant. Let’s see what the dictionary (in Appleworks) says about the word.

Irresponsible
: (1) Not having or showing any care for the consequences of personal actions. (2) Not capable of assuming responsibility. (3) Not answerable to a higher authority.

A statement that you don’t care about the consequences of your actions can be seen in more than one way. It could mean all of the following:

• You don’t care about the consequences of your actions, because you don’t care about anybody else.
  
• You don’t care about the consequences of your actions, because you are too overwhelmed to even consider thinking about one more thing.
  
• You don’t care about the consequences of your actions, because you are convinced that your course of action is correct.
  

Let’s take an eraser to this series of statements so we can begin to take the punch out of them. Just erase the first one—unless you are a sociopath, it is not true that you don’t care about others. We can keep the second one—it is a simple statement
of “what’s so.” At least some of the time, we aren’t thinking about others because we can’t think—period. The last statement requires a bit more analysis.

In this case, you have decided that your actions are correct based on your value system—never mind the personal values of someone who is standing on the outside judging your behavior. For example, you may have been taught that it is irresponsible
to leave a mess in the kitchen when you go to bed. Just before bedtime, your child comes to you wanting to talk about the friend who was mean to him on the playground. You decide that it is more important to nurture your child than it is to clean up the kitchen. Your mom might have lived by the rule
“cleanliness is next to godliness,” but you live by “kindness is more important than order.”

In our second book,
The ADDed Dimension
, there are many more examples of how the “symptoms” of ADD can work for us or against us. This is an excellent resource for reframing the experience of ADD.

More on Thoughts, Feelings and Beliefs

Thoughts are just one component of mental hygiene. We also need to grapple with feelings and beliefs. Feelings emerge as a result of the stories we tell ourselves.
They are triggered by the interpretations we make about events that happen to us. For example, let’s go back to the story at the beginning of this chapter. Karen is upset because her boyfriend broke up with her. She took the fact of his desire to end the relationship and added her own interpretation. She could have just said to herself, “This relationship is not a good fit for either of us; he
just recognized it before I did.” Instead, she told herself, “I am not good enough for him.” She then expanded her story to include all past and possible future rejections until she was telling herself she was just no good. Her intense feelings of grief and despair are based upon a faulty interpretation of events. At some point she needs to go back and correct the faulty logic.

Feelings, however,
do not operate on the basis of logic. When you have just taken a big hit to your self-esteem, it does not help to have someone point out your errors in thinking. Or for you to point them out to yourself. Your need at this point is to experience your feelings, to get them up and out, so to speak. And you hope that you don’t do any damage during the emotional storm. As ADDers, our feelings can
be a big, scary monster. For one thing, we often feel things very intensely. For another, our ability to inhibit ourselves is erratic. Many of us have problems with rage. In
Emotional Intelligence
, Daniel Goleman coined the phrase “amygdala hijacking.” This refers to the ability of the primitive parts of the brain to overwhelm the cortex,
or thinking brain. When powerful emotions take over, there
is no thinking going on. Trying to hold it all in or stuff the feelings back down does not work.

One of our most powerful life lessons came in the person of an ADDer (Ursula) who was off the charts when it came to “disinhibition.” Everything that goes on in Ursula’s head comes directly out of her mouth. She, however, has an interesting combination of high intelligence and high self-awareness,
along with the lack of censorship. When Ursula takes a hit to her self-esteem, which she does often because she is so sensitive, she blasts her feelings out in a childish temper tantrum. However, she also has the capacity to observe herself and comment on the action in the moment. In the middle of cussing up a blue streak, Ursula makes a side comment like “this isn’t personal—it has nothing to do
with you. It’s just my lower selves speaking. I can’t work up to my higher selves unless I deal with the lower ones.”

Hmmm. Makes you wonder about the “ADD as disorder” theory. We firmly believe that everything we humans experience is useful, and that even disorders have something to teach us, on a higher level. Ursula just can’t be appropriate because of her neurological makeup. As a result,
people who come in contact with her get to see her emotional process in its raw form. Her process is no different from that of people with a prettier social mask. Those of us who can manage to appear together have primitive feelings too. Her task is to manage those feelings so she doesn’t attack others. She does this by narrating her rants. Those of us who are able to paste an adult mask over feelings
we consider inappropriate have a different task. We need to find some way to acknowledge, express and process our feelings—without judging them.

Emotional Release

Most ADDults have some difficulty with emotional expression. Some of us have learned to stuff our feelings down, because we think they are unacceptable. Unexpressed emotion, however, always finds
a way to let us know it is there. Sometimes
it comes out as physical symptoms, like a headache or an upset stomach. In other cases, it manifests as a mental health problem, such as depression.

Other folks with ADD (like Ursula) don’t seem to have a problem with emotional expression at all. They are unable to inhibit themselves, and so the anger blasts out or the tears come without regard for the situation. The problem in this case is not a lack of emotional expression but the inability to manage feelings in a way that doesn’t create more problems than it solves. It is not a good idea,
for example, to make a regular habit of blasting your boss.

The remedy for both stuffers and blasters is essentially the same. You need to set aside time and space for regular emotional expression. We do not recommend that you take a do-it-yourself approach to managing powerful feelings. Find a therapist or counselor to help you. Your therapist, however, will not be with you 24/7, coaching you
through the inevitable life
situations you will encounter. Our mental hygiene tips are practical solutions to help you deal with troublesome thoughts and feelings in everyday life.

Let’s take a page out of Ursula’s book to begin constructing the “feelings” aspect of our mental hygiene toolkit. Ursula has learned that it is important to let herself have her feelings, no matter how childish or
inappropriate. She had no choice, but the value in her situation is that she has learned that expressing them helps her make a faster recovery. When you take a hit to your “sense of self,” you can do the following:

1. Find a way to be alone. If you are at work, take a break and go sit in your car. If that is not possible, scope out a private place nearby—it could be the broom closet.
   
2. Allow yourself to cry, rant, rave, cuss people out.
   
3. Do not make yourself the target of your rant—find another focus and someone else to blame. It doesn’t matter that your adult self knows this other person is not really the villain. The purpose here is to flush out those emotions.
   

Here are some tips for how to get the most out of your emotional release:

• You may need to give yourself permission to express your feelings. Remind yourself that it’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be afraid.
  
• Do not censor yourself. We all have a part of ourselves—The Judge—that delights in criticizing. You can talk back to that Judge or even make it one of the targets for your rant.
  
• You may be aware, in the moment, that what you are feeling or ranting about is ridiculous, from a mature perspective. Remember that your job right now is not to be mature, it is to allow that unhealed part of yourself to have its say.
  
• You can be as mean, nasty or unfair as you want to be—the sky is the limit. Nobody is listening except The Judge, the part of you that is self-critical.
  
• If you really allow yourself to have a tantrum, you will naturally wind down in a fairly short amount of time. If you are concerned that you will go on and on and never stop, set a timer.
  
• Take a brief period of meditation before you reenter the world of other people.
  
• Try this at home first. You will feel more secure once you have done it a time or two and have found that it works.
  

But what if you can’t find a way to be alone? You can rant on paper or in your own mind. Some people write raving e-mails and then never send them. Also, is
it really true that you can’t find a way to be alone? It may be that you don’t know how to excuse yourself, or feel embarrassed that you require ranting space. One of Kate’s clients has struggled with an anger management problem and has used her need for time-outs as a teachable moment for her family. She explains why she needs to go to her room now, and assures her husband and children that she will
be in a better mood when she comes out. They get to see that her program actually works, and also get a lesson in how to deal with their own emotions.

Productivity, or “What Am I Here for Anyway?”

Did you know that in the United States people work longer hours than people in most other developed countries in the world? Something to be proud of … or is it? Sometimes it seems that we worship the
god of productivity above all other gods. The workplace is leaner and meaner, with a “take no prisoners” attitude. Downsizing results in fewer people working much harder to get the job done. If you can’t keep up, they downsize your sense of self by firing you. Nice.