Ask the Middle Aged Woman with Severe ADHD

[Stoid]

@Living_Well_Is_Best_Revenge

How is the low-carb diet going? Were you able to stick with it?

Yes, because it works along the same vein as the bike does, in that it changes the nature of what I’m trying to do by eliminating the need for me to exercise self-control I don’t have in the first place. It isn’t something I have to grit my teeth and bear or otherwise force myself to do: it is self-reinforcing because it reduces, even eliminates the desire to eat too much and to eat those things which will trigger the desire to eat more, i.e. sugar and other simple carbs.

I’m always looking for ways and means to either impose things on myself in a manner that eliminates the need for self-control, since I have none, or alter my perception and experience of things so that I am more interested in and inclined to do them. Any change that boils down to some version of just having better self-control is guaranteed to fail. I don’t. That’s my reality. Wishing and hoping it would somehow just be different someday is a waste. So I focus on how I can be more successful at doing things I find challenging in other ways.

[Stoid]

By the way, a question for the ADD folks in the house: do you find that you have issues with control? Not SELF-control, control generally? I’ve always been something of a control freak, and I now have a better understanding that it is connected to the fact that I struggle so hard to control myself that I tend to try to control everything else. This has mellowed enormously with the years and wisdom and other things that I’ve grown from, but it was a big "aha!"when I recognized it.

[Tom_Tildrum]

FWIW, the ADD person in my family has recently started on Vyvanse, a relatively new drug, and is responding well so far.

[Geek_Mecha]

@Renton_lvr

Thanks Stoid and Geek Mecha. Much appreciated. Any online resources you can recommend for getting a more in depth understanding? The sheer volume of info out there is slightly overwhelming but a lot of it also seems really vague.

I don’t recall ever seeing anything online that was helpful. The vagueness you mention, I think, is due to the variability of ADD, and unless you’re talking about a specific person, you can’t really give specific information.

I got some education on ADD from college (I was a psychology major). I also read the classic Driven to Distraction by Edward Hallowell, which was very helpful in a clinical, overviewy way, and the follow-up Delivered From Distraction.

I think I still have the books. If you want them, drop me an email and I’ll send them to you gratis.

Aside from those books, I suggest talking in depth to your SO, if they’re willing. They have had a lifetime of experience with ADD. They can tell you exactly his/her history with ADD, how they act or feel under its effects, how you can watch out for undesireable behavior, what behavioral, chemical, or other treatments and techniques work for them, etc. Ask questions about their experiences in school, at the workplace, in high-stress situations, casual, friendly get-togethers, that sort of thing. Since there is a genetic component to ADD, ask about immediate family members who have or may have ADD, how it affected them, what worked and didn’t work for them. Ask how non-ADD family members coped.

As much as their ADD will affect you, it’s important to understand its role in your SO’s life, and to be able to discuss it with them. Not only will it give you greater understanding of them and bring you closer, it helps to be able to discuss it calmly when you can. Conversations that happen later, after ADD-related incidents, may not be as relaxed.

From there, you can discuss if your SO wants you involved in her ADD management, and if so, how exactly to go about doing this. Your goal is to help, not enable, nor should you take on too much of the work. Most of the work should be theirs to do. Your role is primarily guidance, supervision, feedback, encouragement.

One last thing: when talking to your SO, keep in mind that it can be a deeply personal and very delicate subject. We’re talking about effects that can make a person feel like a totally incompetent failure for their entire life. It can be difficult to understand, much less relate to that.

Kudos to you for trying to understand ADD, by the way. I think both you and your SO will benefit from this attitude.

[Stoid]

@Geek_Mecha

We’re talking about effects that can make a person feel like a totally incompetent failure for their entire life. It can be difficult to understand, much less relate to that.

Yep.

[elfkin477]

@Stoid

By the way, a question for the ADD folks in the house: do you find that you have issues with control? Not SELF-control, control generally? I’ve always been something of a control freak, and I now have a better understanding that it is connected to the fact that I struggle so hard to control myself that I tend to try to control everything else. This has mellowed enormously with the years and wisdom and other things that I’ve grown from, but it was a big "aha!"when I recognized it.

Nope. Or maybe…I’m definitely one of those people who does not seek to be in charge of, well, anything. I’m far happier following others’ orders as long as my impute is listened to. I find the idea of someone making me be in control of X anxiety-provoking, honestly.

@Nava

For people whose kids have it with the hyperactive component, another page from the Jesuits’ Big Book Of Teaching Children: some of the kids in my HS would be sent to run a couple of times around the yard “and come back immediately, you’re sent off to let steam out, not kicked out of class and most definitely not being let out.” This would let them burn off the top of their excess energy and rejoin us with the bounciness toned down.

These days they call this a “sensory diet.” It’s big in special ed circles for kids with autism and ADHD both. It’s good for adults who have hyper-activity to get a chance to move during the work day too, and most of us will find reasons to get up even if we don’t have a chance to take a walk during break or something. Go to the copier for you? Drop that in the mail box? Go grab those folders someone forgot? Yeah. People can easily tell when I’ve sat in meetings the whole day: I think the phrase “like being attacked by puppies” has been used to explain how keyed up I am when I get home on days like that.

@Renton_lvr

What advice can you give to someone who is starting out what looks to be a long-term relationship with someone diagnosed with ADD? What are the best ways to be supportive, understanding, and tolerant?

The advice to not take it personal is good. And I want to offer another: you can ask someone with ADHD to do something well in advance. But you can’t expect them to always remember you asked. So reminders are good if you actually expect them to follow through. We mean well, but part of ADHD is having short term memory deficits, so things that don’t get written down may well leave our brains as soon as we walk out of the room.

[RTFirefly]

@phouka

a lot of ADD kids (myself included) often do some sort of fast, repetitive movement - like drumming fingers or buzzing lips or playing drums with their pencils. There’s a method behind this madness. Repetitive motion revs up the neo-cortex, making it active enough to allow the person to focus. It’s just that it drives other people crazy.

The Firebug, to a T. And he’s just been diagnosed with ADHD.

[Stoid]

@elfkin477

, so things that don’t get written down may well leave our brains as soon as we walk out of the room.

Or even turn our heads. True story.

[tenacious_j]

Thanks for all this, Stoid! So many of your comments are like I wrote them myself and it’s good to be validated. I’m about your age, so I heard a lot of “If she only applied herself” and “you need to focus.” As an otherwise smart cookie in the gifted program, it was really hard to understand why I couldn’t learn like the other kids. My ADD is abundantly clear but never formally diagnosed, since I’m a little afraid of it going on my permanent record.
Can’t wait to ask my Dad about the nicotine factor- he started having issues around the time he quit smoking, which was also when they started recognizing that this thing was a thing.

[elfkin477]

@Stoid

Or even turn our heads. True story.

Or apparently even if we do write it down. Oh, 2, 3 weeks ago my boss told me that her boss also made a car reservation for herself and I should cancel the one I made for that day (I handle travel arrangements for people in my org once in a while, more rarely they forget and make their own arrangements). I carefully noted this on a bright orange sticky. Which I discovered stuck to a page of a notepad today. Fortunately the day is still 3 weeks off and I was able to cancel it…

tenacious j, I hate the label, but do look into what’s called “twice exceptional” now and I bet you’ll see a lot of yourself as a child in the descriptions too. While being in the pullout gifted program was in my records, I was diagnosed as hyperactive as a preschooler and I don’t think it’s in any of my school records because I was definitely guilted by some teachers for not trying hard “enough” in some academic areas. I found out recently that folks with ADHD complete college degrees at 1/7th the rate of neurotypical people, and it’s rare to before age 26. I got my BA less than six weeks after I turned 22, so I think I was trying pretty damn hard!

[tenacious_j]

@elfkin477

tenacious j, I hate the label, but do look into what’s called “twice exceptional” now and I bet you’ll see a lot of yourself as a child in the descriptions too. While being in the pullout gifted program was in my records, I was diagnosed as hyperactive as a preschooler and I don’t think it’s in any of my school records because I was definitely guilted by some teachers for not trying hard “enough” in some academic areas. I found out recently that folks with ADHD complete college degrees at 1/7th the rate of neurotypical people, and it’s rare to before age 26. I got my BA less than six weeks after I turned 22, so I think I was trying pretty damn hard!

interesting! Did not know that. I went back for round 2 at 26, once I figured out I wasn’t going anywhere without a degree, but before I figured out where I wanted to go.
Even at that age I felt obligated to prove to everyone else that I could do it.:rolleyes:

I’ll look into your suggestion.

[Saintly_Loser]

@phouka

Wow, Stoid, you sound like my twin, except I was diagnosed at the age of 34 (and when I told my friends, every single damn one of them said “you didn’t know?”), and I’m 41 now.

Let’s see: straight A student until middle school, check. Constantly told by parents and teachers that I wasn’t “living up to my potential”, check. Failing or almost failing any class which required rote memorization or repetitive detail work, check. Leaving things to the last minute and then finishing them in a blind panic, check. Becoming an honor student when I got to college, check. Having constant problems with money management as an adult, check. Co-morbid diagnosis of depression, check. Carrying around buckets of shame, self-hate, and resentment, check.

Between the ADD (which I prefer as a name to ADHD, because most people don’t understand that ADHD can present without the hyperactive component. It’s called ADHD - Primarily Inattentive) and the depression, just keeping up with the basic demands of life becomes an Olympic event.

On my really good days, I can get so much accomplished, it leaves regular people with their jaws hanging open. I don’t get really good days very often anymore. In a good month, I can handle job duties, social life, finances, and get a major creative project in. I haven’t had a really good month in several years.

I think what’s probably the most frustrating of all this is that I know it’s due to a difference in how my brain is wired. Yet, because of this, even my friends and family think I’m a flake, a spendthrift, I’m lazy, and I’m “wasting my potential”. What they don’t see is that every day is a struggle - a struggle to remember details, a struggle to prioritize, a struggle to stay focused.

I do so much better in jobs which have immediate tasks, especially when they’re people oriented. But there’s only so much tech support you can do before you burn out. I love teaching, but the amount of sustained, focused effort necessary to get a job is simply beyond me - even though the job isn’t. Some times, I think I should go back to school and get a master’s, but I suspect it would only exchange the troubles of work for the troubles of school, and after I was done, I’d just have to go out, get another job, and relearn how to deal with all the stressors of that position.

Holy shit, this could be me. I never thought of anything like ADD/ADHD. Maybe I should see some kind of doctor. This is freaking me out.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@phouka

Let’s see: straight A student until middle school, check. Constantly told by parents and teachers that I wasn’t “living up to my potential”, check. Failing or almost failing any class which required rote memorization or repetitive detail work, check. Leaving things to the last minute and then finishing them in a blind panic, check. Becoming an honor student when I got to college, check. Having constant problems with money management as an adult, check. Co-morbid diagnosis of depression, check. Carrying around buckets of shame, self-hate, and resentment, check.

This may be a dumb question… but isn’t this everybody these days? I mean, take an average person. Actually, nobody is average anymore, it’s Lake Woebegon and everyone is above average. Then raise them in an environment of high expectations. You can be president or a CEO if you want it and try hard enough! And of course everyone wants that, so you must not be trying hard enough. Oh, but I am trying, and darn it, I’m not president or CEO. So I must be a failure. But nobody’s really a failure anymore, so it must be the case that I’m broken.

Or maybe we’re not broken. Maybe we’re fine, and our expectations are broken.

[Stoid]

HMS: Yes and no. First, that paragraph is not the whole of it, obviously. Second, with rare exceptions (perhaps), virtually everything considered “disordered” is just a matter of degree. There’s the depression that normal people feel from time to time and from situations, then there’s the depression that paralyzes some people and destroys their lives. There’s being forgetful and scattered, having problems with impulse control, then there’s watching your whole life implode because of it. When otherwise normal fluctuations in human emotions and behaviors become so severe that they have a profound impact on one’s quality of life, we have arrived at “disorder”.

It’s also necessary to be more specific about “trying” and failing in these circumstances. Trying is a nebulous concept as you use it.

The dividing line I draw for myself, all miscellaneous details aside, is the pervasive, sometimes terrifying feeling that I genuinely cannot control myself, that something else takes over, no matter how passionately I intend to do A, I end up doing B instead.

Which is why I think Barkley is the man, because he focuses on it as an issue of self-regulation - not being able to control yourself. So there’s “trying” in the sense of actually doing the things you want to do, should do, need to do, but still not getting wherever you think you should be because you did those things poorly… then there’s “trying” to* simply get yourself to do them in the first place* and finding it overwhelmingly, terrifyingly difficult to do. All the time, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, you head out to go to the city and just keep finding yourself at the beach… I’m sure you’ve had dreams where you are desperately trying to get somewhere and find yourself constantly sidetracked and slowed down and frantic and slogging through molasses feeling like no matter what you’re never going to make it? Well, that’s kinda what my real life is like.

[monstro]

Often you’ll hear people with neurological conditions like Tourette’s Syndrome say that even though it makes their lives harder in some ways, they wouldn’t have it any other way. I guess the disorder is such an intrinsic part of who they are that they can’t imagine living without it. Also, people tend to see upsides to everything…perhaps as a coping mechanism? People with TS, for instance, often attribute their creativity to their condition.

Do you have the same attitude towards ADHD? If someone were to give you a drug that would cure it completely, would you take it?

[tenacious_j]

@monstro

Often you’ll hear people with neurological conditions like Tourette’s Syndrome say that even though it makes their lives harder in some ways, they wouldn’t have it any other way. I guess the disorder is such an intrinsic part of who they are that they can’t imagine living without it. Also, people tend to see upsides to everything…perhaps as a coping mechanism? People with TS, for instance, often attribute their creativity to their condition.

Do you have the same attitude towards ADHD? If someone were to give you a drug that would cure it completely, would you take it?

I’ve spent more than 40 years being me, and I can’t imagine how else I could be. I have considered getting officially diagnosed, getting medicated, but it’s terrifying to think I could wake up as a different person tomorrow. I worked hard on becoming who I am, and I think I like it. I’ve gotten good at it. Now, if I was 17? Maybe I’d consider it.

[Sunspace]

I wouldn’t wish being me on my worst enemy, and if there’s a thing that can change some of the bad points and make it easier for me to cope, I’m definitely going to take a look at it.

[phouka]

@HMS_Irruncible

This may be a dumb question… but isn’t this everybody these days? I mean, take an average person. Actually, nobody is average anymore, it’s Lake Woebegon and everyone is above average. Then raise them in an environment of high expectations. You can be president or a CEO if you want it and try hard enough! And of course everyone wants that, so you must not be trying hard enough. Oh, but I am trying, and darn it, I’m not president or CEO. So I must be a failure. But nobody’s really a failure anymore, so it must be the case that I’m broken.

Or maybe we’re not broken. Maybe we’re fine, and our expectations are broken.

There’s certainly a pervasive issue with our society’s definition of success and unwillingness to admit that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you don’t get what you want.

However, when everyone around you tells you that you’re not even trying, and all you want to do is please them, and you still can’t do it, then something’s off. When you grow up with all your teachers and parents shaking their heads saying “but she’s so smart, why doesn’t she just try,” it’s different. When you sit down to study your notes or read your homework, and no matter how hard you try, you literally cannot keep your eyes on your page, it’s different. When you’re supposed to be an adult and carry out the responsibilities of an adult - like paying bills on time - and you know your friends and family look down on you because you can’t ever quite get it together, it’s different.

[Nava]

@phouka

There’s certainly a pervasive issue with our society’s definition of success and unwillingness to admit that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you don’t get what you want.

Or that not everybody wants the same things. Thankfully it hasn’t happened recently, but I can’t count how many times I’ve had parents complaining that their old-enough-to-make-that-choice child didn’t want to study what the parent wished he’d been able to study “he wants to be a mechanic, I think he should be a lawyer!” “your son who’s always fiddling with something? The one that would crack open any music boxes, watches or wind-up toys since he was 5? Here, let me give you the address of the Vocational School with a Mechanic’s program closest to your house.”
What Stoid said: the characteristics of AD(H)D are personality traits. If they’re not a problem for the person who has them and for those around them, they’re not a Disorder. Presenting them to a small degree is not a Disorder; presenting them to a larger degree, but having the mechanisms to cope with them - is a disorder, small d, because it’s under control. It’s like the difference between someone who can’t find anything on his desk because he’s got no idea where in all those piles it may be, and someone who can’t find anything if his piles get disturbed: the first one has a disorderly desk, the second one has a desk that follows his rules of order.

[monstro]

@tenacious_j

I’ve spent more than 40 years being me, and I can’t imagine how else I could be. I have considered getting officially diagnosed, getting medicated, but it’s terrifying to think I could wake up as a different person tomorrow. I worked hard on becoming who I am, and I think I like it. I’ve gotten good at it. Now, if I was 17? Maybe I’d consider it.

@Sunspace

I wouldn’t wish being me on my worst enemy, and if there’s a thing that can change some of the bad points and make it easier for me to cope, I’m definitely going to take a look at it.

Wow. Two different responses.

I’m interested in this question because I think it complicates the whole “Is it a disorder?” issue. If it’s a disorder wouldn’t one NOT want it, by definition? And if a person is so embracing of their disorder such that their identity is wrapped up in it and they reject medication because of it, how should other people react/respond to pleas for understanding and compassion?

I don’t have ADHD, but I have Tourette’s. Because I remember how life was without tics, I don’t consider it a big part of my identity. And yet when my tics are very mild or dormant, I do feel a loss of something that’s not altogether bad. I was on a drug that helped with the mental tics for a few months. I liked the quiet in my head, but I kinda missed the craziness too. Sometimes it was pleasant in a way I have never been able to adequately articulate. But I don’t bother telling anyone this because I don’t want to be misunderstood. I don’t like the tics. I don’t make the tics come voluntarily. And I’d continue taking meds if they weren’t so damned scary at high doses. But I guess they HAVE become a part of who I am. I’d be lying if I said I’d be overjoyed if I was cured overnight.