I know this is going to sound glib, but I’m being 100% honest. Whenever I’m PMSing, it sure seems like I’ve got ADD. It makes me think the only thing keeping me from being a hot mess is estrogen.
Not glib at all. I have PMDD which basically means I’m a crazy fucking loon whenever I have my period. PTSD, anxiety, depression all go into overdrive. i have to take continuous birth control to manage it, meaning the same dose of hormone every day, and no periods. (In theory. My own hormones are occasionally stronger than the pills.)
I’m in the same situation. I’ve been on birth control for more than a year now, and I have to say that it has changed my life.
Here it is. To shorten the length, I won’t use hedging terms like “seem” or “likely to” so take that into account when reading it. I admit that I am adventuring forward when talking about Spice’s specific case.
When talking about physical phenomena, it’s usually easy to give precise, denotative descriptions. If I want you to understand what a chair is, I can show you several pictures of chairs and you’ll get it. But when it comes to psychological phenomena, it’s a lot more difficult. Thus, I’ll be taking some circuitous and figurative routes. If I thought I could be a more effective job otherwise, I would.
I wasn’t able to find all the documents and presentations which gave me data to make inferences on. However, if you liked my previous links, you should really like these:
My own speculations, spoilered for length so that the uninterested don’t have to scroll much:
PROBLEM
In general terms
Think of how, when you’re hungry, it’s difficult to focus on tasks which require complex thinking. Further, if you lack water, the thirst sensation will overtake the hunger sensation. If you lack air, that will overtake thirst. The more primal, simple and immediately critical parts of the brain overtake the parts which deal with less immediate concerns and which tend to be more complex. If you put a gun to a physicist’s head and tell him to do physics problems, you will be dealing with the brain of a scared animal more than with the brain of a physicist.
When buffaloes were hunted, it was easy to make them go off a cliff. They perceived some scary stimuli made by humans and then rushed in the opposite direction. They never said to themselves: “Wait a minute, let’s pull back and think about this. The scary noises over there may be a threat but isn’t there a cliff in the direction we’re running? Surely our odds are better if we try our luck by rushing the humans than by going over the cliff.” Buffaloes don’t do that. The brain circuits do not have the complexity, flexibility and meta-cognitive ability to do that. They inhabit their thoughts and emotions instinctively and automatically rather than reflect on them mindfully and deliberately. Their neural circuits are simple and static. Humans can adapt much better because in addition to simple and static neural circuits, we have neural circuits with much greater complexity, flexibilty and neuroplasticity.
Halfway between plastic neural circuits and static are lie those which make up semi-permanent psychological traits. They have enough complexity, flexibility and plasticity to learn lessons, make associations and inferences but not enough to make finer distinctions and ensure that those associations and inferences are logical and proportional. The more sophisticated parts of the brain are like thinking in 4K resolution whereas the more primal parts are like thinking in 240p resolution. Their utility lies largely in handling potential emergency situations (like lethal threats) where acting quickly and forcefully is more important than acting in a well-considered, nuanced and proportional way. It is the non-rational, largely automatic, subconscious part of your mind. You have some access to it if you meditate and listen to what bubbles up or engage in introspection and catch the non-logical (not that I didn’t say “illogical” but “non-logical”) inferences you make and the basic presumptions you make about yourself, others and the world.
For example, someone who was traumatized by a sudden attack might have internalized: “I can be harmed at any time and I’ll never see it coming.” even if they’re not consciously aware of it. A person who was harmed by someone who was supposed to love and care for them might internalize: “You can’t trust anyone not to turn on you.” Someone who was bitten by a dog might learn: “a dog will bite you.” and they will be convinced of it at a deeper level than the rational, high resolution, complex and plastic parts of the brain. Even if they have seen a dog be nothing but friendly, even if they see the rationality of logical arguments which demonstrate that the dog in front of them will not bite them, the primal parts of their brain keeps thinking: “a dog will bite you.”
Think of what might happen if someone were presented with the color red before getting a painful electrical shock. If the shocks were of high enough strength, it was done enough times or early enough, when the shocks stopped and they saw red, they’d flinch. When they caught a glimpse of something reddish orange or reddish purple, their brain would err on the side of interpreting it as red. It would be like their brain suffered a frostbite and is now hypersensitive to cold and more likely to develop another frostbite.
Those primal parts of the brain largely lie in the DMN which includes the hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus handles salient memories. Since very good things don’t tend to have to be immediately responded to whereas very bad things (like a deadly threat) often have to be immediately responded to, the most salient memories tend to be negative. This then activates the amygdala which handles the fight/flight response.
The amygdala is overactive in people with depression, anxiety or PTSD. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is hypoactive in the same people. To make an analogy, the amygdala (and the DMN it’s part of) are like the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas whereas the PFC (and the task-positive network (TPN)) is like the Robert De Niro character.
When the amygdala/DMN overtake the PFC/TPN, it is the primal parts of the brain overtaking the more sophisticated, plastic parts which evolved more recently. It is characterized by self-absorption/being in your head a lot, forgetfulness, decreased focus, ease of distraction, rigid thinking based on previously establish habits or instincts (because the neural circuits lack plasticity and flexibility), perseverative thinking (repeating a response despite absence or cessation of stimuli). They will become either more impulsive or avoidant behavior depending on the habits they’ve established and the lessons the primal parts of their brain learned.
Think of very unpleasant people you’ve met or know about, they tend to act in rigid ways. Their DMN (which is tied to the sense of self) is overactive. Instead of looking at the situation in front of them and adapting their actions to it, they tend to just keep doing the same thing even if pulling back a little and having some cognitive flexibility would show them that other actions are preferable.
The more sad/anxious/angry someone is, the more the amygdala will be active in making decisions and the less the PFC will be. This results in people falling back on habits linked to their internalized lessons rather than pulling back and interacting with the situation in front of them. E.g.: Someone who is trying to nail two pieces of wood together. If hitting with a hammer doesn’t work, he’ll hit twice as hard and if that doesn’t work, he’ll twice as hard as last time and he’ll just keep doubling down. It will not occur to him to pull back, see that it’s a screw, check what kind of screw it is and use the appropriate screwdriver. He will act like a buffalo.
Specific to you
You mention that your care a lot what people think of you and your performance. You also mention catching a lot of shit from your mother on the apparent basis of you making mistakes. I say “apparent” because she was just looking for someone to take out her aggression on. Whenever you made a mistake, however slight or even a purely imagined, she saw an opportunity to take out her anger on you.
The lesson the primal part of you learned is that any slight or even merely perceived mistake can result in someone falling on you like a ton of bricks.
In that situation, a juvenile animal would seek safety with its parent but in this case, the parent was the threat. What does a juvenile animal brain learn about the self, others, the world and safety in that situation?
To adapt to your hostile environment, you had to constantly be on guard against setting off your mother. You integrated that and now the primal part of your brain is constantly trying to avoid even slight or perceived mistakes because it has learned that when you make even slight or perceived mistakes, unpleasant things happen. Because of the severity, the length of time over which it occurred and how early it happened, those circuits are deep within the primal parts of your brain.
You have difficulty doing things without a deadline/someone breathing down your neck because you have an aversion to having to do something. You associate having to do something with your mother. For you, having to do something is like someone who caught electric shocks while looking at the color red being asked to pick strawberries.
It’s only when the noxious stimuli of having to do something is counteracted by the greater noxious stimuli of expected punishment for failing to do it that you have enough impetus.
Trauma-related neural circuits are hardened like scars. Like scars, there is a compulsion to keep picking at them which ends up making them worse. Self-reinforcing loops of anxiety further orient your worldview and consciousness towards seeing through a lens of you making mistakes and others punishing you for them.
Think of how, when you a learn new skill, it flows with difficulty. The more you activate the neural circuits involved in that skill, the more they develop and soon enough it flows easily. It’s like pouring water into a river; It deepens, widens and lengthens it. I believe you once mentioned an interest in BDSM. Although it may be unrelated, it is likely part of picking at the scar and making it worse. BDSM increases activity in the primal part of the brain that handles fight/flight/feed/fuck. It reactivates and reinforces the neural circuits involved in the trauma.
SOLUTION
One hand clapping
Think of how a nuclear reactor work at a basic level. Neutrons collide with atoms which releases more neutrons which collide with more atoms. When a reactor is subcritical, this loop is not strong enough to maintain itself and gradually fades away. When it can maintain itself in equilibrium, it is said to be critical. When the atoms collisions and neutrons releases are frequent enough to form an upward self-reinforcing loop, the reactor is supercritical.
Have you ever seen someone have a meltdown, a panic attack or a tantrum? It’s quite similar to a supercritical reaction. The sensations, perceptions, cognitions and emotions form a self-reinforcing loop of sadness/fear/anger. Slower, less acute versions of those can develop over months/years/decades and lead to depression, anxiety and anger issues.
When the person having a negative thought/emotion responds with another negative thought/emotion, the original negative thought/emotion is strengthened by increasing the activation of the relevant neural circuits and reinforcing them.
Imagine your mind as two hands. One hand is your subconscious, the primal parts of your brain. You can’t decide what it does directly and immediately, only indirectly and over time. The other hand is the conscious part of your mind and the more flexibility & complex parts of your brain. You have direct and immediate control over that hand. Your subconscious hand makes a clapping motion. Everytime the conscious part of your mind reacts negatively to that, lets itself get pulled into that negative thought/emotions, inhabit it, become it, it’s like your conscious hand is also making a clapping motion and thus the clap occurs. This is the loop which reinforces the ingrained habits & thoughts of your subconscious.
If you don’t respond to what bubbles up from your subconscious, the loop is disrupted and will weaken. If your conscious mind doesn’t respond to your subconscious mind having a negative thought/emotion, it will be like the unconscious hand making a clapping motion but the conscious hand not doing so and it will make the sound of one hand clapping; nothing.
However, anyone who has tried meditation knows that it is as difficult as it is simple. The more mental noise and noxious subconscious thoughts one has, the more difficult and unpleasant it is. Further, if the deeply buried neural circuits are too strong because of the severity of the trauma, the length of time over which it occurred or its earliness, one may have to boost the neuroplasticity of the brain and its ability to ignore negative stimuli and focus on positive stimuli.
Better living through chemistry
There are two main technologies which are available. The first category works chiefly by activating the 5HT2A serotonin receptor (I’ll call that tech “5A” for “5HT2A receptor activator”). Then there are serotonin and oxytocin releasing agents (hereby “SORA”). There are legal ways to use both 5As and SORAs although I won’t go on about any way to obtain them. If you want to know precisely what I mean, PM me.
Serotonin is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter linked to trust, bonding and compassion.
A 5A can have the following effects:
- A 5A will reduce activity in the DMN which reduces mental defenses. It opens you up.
It also helps to generalize the lessons you’ll learn when it’s active. Remember the hippocampus, the part of the DMN that handles salient memories? It seems to act as a memory filter and how much a lesson is generalized. For example, the primal part of the brain may be convinced that “The dog will bite me.”. The hippocampus serves as a narrowing filter on what lessons are learned so that, unless its activity is decreased, exposure therapy with dogs will not result in the brain learning the lesson that “The dog will not bite me” but rather “The dog will bite me except in the context of exposure therapy”; The more emotionally salient, general lesson prevails, the hardened neural circuits do not change much and the trauma remains.
2) Since the DMN is the main connection hub of the brain, reducing DMN activity reduces the connectivity between the different parts of the brain. It acts much like a scramming procedure in a nuclear reactor; It disrupts the self-reinforcing loop by cutting off the main paths through which different parts of the brain arouse each other. Imagine dogs in a neighborhood. When one of them barks, it increases the chance that another dog will bark in response. After a while, all the dogs are constantly barking loudly. A 5A is like putting earmuffs on their ears so that they gradually stop egging each other on.
3) Glutamate is released. Glutamate is involved in neuroplasticity by creating new neural pathways. This can be useful to rewire the brain and form alternative neural circuits to the scar-like trauma-based neural circuits.
4) Glutamate is also an excitatory neurotransmitter. It amplifies sensations, perceptions, cognitions and emotions. This makes them produces a bigger, deeper impact than they otherwise would.
In short, taking a 5A is akin to heating up a piece of steel to make it more malleable, reshaping it then letting it cool back down into a solid form.
While a 5A increases neuroplasticity and amplifies psychological phenomena, a SORA will help make that reshaping emotionally positive or at least less emotionally negative (some things just suck). A SORA will quiet the amygdala. My first experience having an easy time meditating was with a SORA. It was the first time I could remember feeling mental quiet and stillness.
Done correctly, one can get mild SORA-like effects in the following days.
As a diagnostic tool, a 5A can enable one to see and hear, directly or metaphorically, the wounds the mind has, what bites created them, the pus that is spreading through them and how one is picking at the scars. It can like opening up a wound to inspect it without anesthetic while you’re conscious throughout. If you want to have an idea of what a very high dose of 5A combined with negative thoughts is like, watch the 1990 movie Jacob’s Ladder and imagine a more intense, more surreal, individualized, sadistic version of that about yourself and what most saddens & scares you. It was the most unpleasant experience of my life but I came out with basic idea that although the world would throw shit at me and it was going to be painful, I could handle this.
Both 5A and SORAs pair up well with meditation for 4 reasons:
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Additive: If you can get to a particular depth with a 5A/SORA on its own or with meditation on its own, you can get deeper by combining them.
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Trailblazing: Once you’ve reached a place using a 5A/SORA, it’s easier to get back there without it.
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Opportunity cost: The more one can benefit from meditation, the more difficult, unpleasant and futile it seems. It can take 10s or 100s of hours to start paying off. Not only will a lot of people give up, those are hours which could have been dedicated to something else that was beneficial.
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Flexibility of use: Doing something other than meditating while meditating is akin to a diver trying to both fix something on the sea floor while having to constantly counter his own buoyancy. A 5A/SORA is like putting on a weight belt which maintains one on the sea floor and enables one to focus on the work to be done.
5 minutes were passed:
You also likely have an aversion to doing tasks because doing them opens up the possibility of making a real/imagined mistake.
I’ve suspected that I have many ADD traits for a while now. I’ve always been a daydreamer. In school I paid no attention when I wasn’t interested (which was probably most of the time) and scanned for main points when I was. Staying on one task for an extended period of time? Forget it. It serves me well as an elementary school librarian, since I may have twenty kids working on twenty things at the same time. It’s easy for me to jump from one thing to another. Ms. P says she feels like I get the gist of what she is saying even if I don’t hear every word (not surprising, since she’s from the “never say in 10 words what you can say in 100” school.
A great many people with ADHD, especially adults with it, do wonderfully with deadlines. Deadlines let you know what people expect from you (and therefore you don’t disappoint them), how long you have before you have to worry about something, and so on. I’ve always done much better with deadlines than without because one of the weaknesses of ADHD is a poor ability to prioritize things. It’s not that we don’t try to, but somehow we very often end up thinking that completely different things are the most important than what our supervisors would want.
Well, that’s good to hear, because I have no deadlines at work this week (though I do have work that is nebulously due “this month”) and I am all over the place today.
Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk
Speaking of which, did you do your homework, young lady?
One thing that takes many conscientious people a long time to understand is that if you bring up something which you see as an issue and people above your paygrade say “it’s ok”, then hey - it’s ok! That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bring things up, but it does mean that you need to learn to say “that particular monkey is sooooo totally not mine.”
Ah yes. Ever since I hit menopause I feel like I developed ADD. Can’t take hormones, so I’m doomed to be a hot mess forever. My teens like it, though, because I’m easily distracted by anything shiny now. On the other hand, I never get anything done anymore.
I don’t really want to admit a weakness at work, as insecure as I’m feeling right now. They think I’m great, even after the epilepsy madness and not being able to drive and generally being a PITA. AND I’m now broaching the issue of maternity leave for when we adopt. I don’t want to add another thing they have to work around on my behalf.
Today I’m left to my own devices at home, supposed to focus on household chores and errands and novel-writing. I’m trying a couple of things. There’s the Cold Turkey app, which blocks websites and your chosen applications across browsers, either by schedule or on demand, and it can’t be worked around. There’s also a companion app to lock you out of your phone, and another called Cold Turkey Writer that locks you out of everything but its word processor until you write for a specified amount of time or a specified number of words.
Then I’m just trying to write a list of three things at a time. It’s pathetic how simple the things on my list are, but so far I’ve done six things. 1. Shower 2. Breakfast 3. Get mail 4. Ten minutes doing dishes 5. Scoop Cat Litter 6. Remove garbage from car (step 1 in a process of cleaning it out since I haven’t driven it in 6 months.)
I followed that with a small reward - Halloween candy.
I will read through your thoughts later, but as someone who also grew up in a severely abusive environment and also suffers from complex-PTSD, the symptoms can be extremely difficult to sort out.
People who grew up in families where the parents weren’t likely to kill them just do not understand. Period. Even therapist and especially therapists (although not all of them).
The problem with most counseling is that it’s designed for people with less severe problems. Unfortunately, many counselors have bought into the idea that counseling will solve most problems and so when they can’t fix something they come up with names such as “treatment-resistant” depression and such.
My current therapist has pointed out that the fear overrides so much that classical CBT just doesn’t cut it for me.
Yes, CBT is helpful, just like going for a massage helps you feel better for a while, but it doesn’t stick and if you’ve got a broken arm then getting a massage doesn’t fix you.
I’m trying somatic experiencing. We’ll see how it goes.
Spice, I can totally relate. I’m glad that you aren’t going to try drugs for ADD, it doesn’t sound like it would be the right thing.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. The trauma caused actual changes which you are struggling with and people who have not had that will not understand.
I didn’t understand how different it was for “normal” people until I had children with parent who love and protect them. They don’t have to sit around trying to guess the mode of the room before deciding if it’s OK to laugh or not.
At times Mommy or Daddy gets angry with them, but then it’s all over and they aren’t paralyzed with fear for their life or being abandoned. They get and give hugs. They know they are valued.
All of these things which ninety some-odd percent of the people reading this will shrug their shoulders and say it’s expected, but this is something which I never, ever imagined.
When you grow up in houses like yours and mine, you don’t get these things. Life just isn’t normal and you can’t measure yourself against normal.
Hang in there.
It is NOT something to work around! It’s “oh, and speaking of orange things - Donald Trump.” (I may have been watching too much Stephen Colbert)
You know, I hate it when I go to visit my mother and one of the first things I do is ask her for the honeydos, and 99.99% of the time she comes up with yet another one just as I’m about to leave. And that’s after improvement: it used to be, and sometimes she still does it but now we “punish” her*, that she’d dole out the tasks one after another. I much prefer to get the whole list so I can distribute everything the way it’s convenient for me; perhaps your coworkers would like to get the whole picture. There’s a big, huge, enormous difference between “since we’re taking into account a bunch of stuff that’s going on with my life and my work situation, let’s look at everything” and “being a bother”. Your bosses having to either tell you that you’re actually doing ok with the rolling grants (which you could be! Seriously!) or going eenie, minie to decide who’s going to come up with deadlines for those tasks that don’t have a built-in one? That’s not a workaround! That’s, that’s, God, as someone who actually creates workarounds, that’s almost the opposite of a workaround! It’s an accomodation at most, but it’s not a workaround. That’s taking into account who you are, what you are like. You are a person who needs deadlines. And that’s fine! It’s not even a weakness, it’s just the way you are. “I’m a woman, you’re a child, Grandma’s old (Grandma: ‘hey! :mad:’) and that gentleman’s black. People are just different.”
I’ve had subordinates who needed me to be as hands-off as possible. I’ve had others who needed me to be hands-off at the beginning of a project and ride them hard enough for rodeos near the end. I’ve had some who, when faced with a deadline and a reward of “anybody who finishes early can leave early”, would turn it into a contest to see who could finish earliest, and others who couldn’t reach a deadline if you carved it on their ass. And managing ones wasn’t any more work than managing the others - it was just different work, it wasn’t more.
- “What did we say about giving us the whole list? I’m now on a break. I’ll do that other thing once I’m done with my break”, instead of jumping off the chair on which we’ve just sat down.
This is what I wonder sometimes. How does one know the difference between ADD and simply setting their goals too high? Take myself for example… I withdrew from medical school in the first year because I couldn’t pay attention to the lectures and couldn’t stick to studying the material. Some it was interesting, and some of it was mind-numbingly dull rote memorization (who really needs to know from memory the difference between ribose and arabinose?).
Anyhow, I always wondered if an ADD diagnosis would help me, or I just keep setting goals that are way too high.
Add trauma into the mix and it doesn’t help answer that question. My mother treated me like I was the most problematic child in existence, she even attended a support group once for ‘difficult children’ and got laughed out of the room. I don’t know if there was any truth to her frustrations that other people couldn’t see, or if she just had wildly unrealistic standards, or both. I remember saying to her once, ‘‘You know other people who know me don’t seem to think I’m as awful as you say,’’ and she replied, ‘‘That’s because they don’t have to live with you.’’
How do you argue with that? Plenty of the things that frustrated my mother now frustrate my husband, though he is not an insane person and has pretty much accepted a certain degree of spaceyness from me.
I know my entire life I’ve felt like I’ve been achieving below my potential, even though in some cases my achievement has been objectively high. Is that because I actually am achieving below my potential, or is it because I have a massive inferiority complex as the result of how I was raised, or both? It’s so hard to know what’s realistic.
Spice, have you tried to consciously take a timed break from asking yourself if you’re achieving below your potential, if you’re problematic, if you’re doing it wrong?
As in, whenever a thought related to that bubbles up, tell yourself “I will entertain that thought on November 1st” (or just “November 1st” for short) and actively focus on something else which is task-related (could be as simple as your breath). Repeat every single time such a thought bubbles up until you get to November 1st.
On November 1st, assess your mood and ability to focus. You will likely find that you are still spacey but less than you currently are. Then, you can choose if you want to go back to your previous way of thinking or determine alternatives.
If November 1st is too far away, wait until you have a free day and try it on that day. Try to have no internal voice monologue and no discussion related to you or your family for 1 day. You’ve tried worrying as a strategy for many years, temporarily trying a different strategy for 1 day/week/month is worth it. You can always go back to your previous strategy once the timed period is over.
This reminds me of the technique to schedule ‘‘worry breaks’’ into your day.
Or that lady who was almost entirely destroyed by severe burns all over her body who said, ‘‘I only allow myself to feel sorry for myself ten minutes a day.’’
Yes, it’s a common technique. What I’ve found is that it can be even more useful if one spends several days turning one’s consciousness away from sadness/anxiety/anger and toward something neutral or positive. So, instead of having 1 hour per day, one may prefer one day per week or to have a moratorium of a predetermined length.
It seems that having at least one worry break each day is enough to get negative thought loops going again during the rest of the day and often unto the next day. Think of how, if you wanted to extinguish sugar cravings, you’d have to go several days without sugar. If you tried to extinguish sugar cravings by indulging them 1 hour per day, they’d never go away.
That makes sense. The problem is that suppressing thought leads to more of the same thoughts. So it would have to be something that is not suppressive, but a gentle refocusing, as in meditation.
Yes, neither hit back nor flee from them but reorient your consciousness to something positive. Have you tried dedicating a full weekend where you always have the option to gently refocus on activities you like whether it’s gardening, movies, games, instrumental music, being in nature, anything that is pleasant and in the present?