Just Another Kid To Take Care Of

Often in marriages where one person has ADHD and the other has a "normal" brain a dynamic gets created that looks a whole lot like a critical parent with a rebellious teenager.  The husband or wife with ADHD gets lumped in with any other kids as a liability, a nuisance, or at the very least incapable of responsibility which might be fine but the expectation is usually that they grow up and start thinking differently at some point when they really never will - http://pilferedwisdom.blogspot.com/2011/08/being-married-to-rainman.html.  The other problem I will discuss today is when we, with ADHD, demand to be respected and assert we are normal and really just aren't. I believe the key to success with ADHD is to really look hard and honest at ourselves and see what really is there, rather than what we wish was there, or what we have been lectured by parents, teachers, and spouses to believe should be there.  When we realize we are great at some things and inept at others we spend less time making grandiose promises to ourselves and our spouses about how we will never make that mistake again and just learn to compensate so we don't have to.

Two things people with ADHD have in common; we are all convinced we are awesome at multitasking, and we really suck at multitasking.  We confuse constantly being distracted and flitting from one task to another out of boredom as effective multitasking when our brains are wired to obsessively focus in on one thing of passion at a time with a hyperfocus.  Being fully present wherever we are is very difficult for us, even if we aren't the hyperactive kind that is physically on the move our brain always is.  So can we really watch TV while chatting with our wife - nope we will do one or the other effectively but not both so choose one.  Can we really check out Facebook real quick while we play with the kids, nope we can do one or the other with no concept of time elapsed either way.  This helps if we can accept it because we can stop getting defensive when our spouse asks us to put away the smartphone at the dinner table because we will become engrossed with it and ignore everyone else not because we are crappy parents, but that is just how our brains work.  We can stop getting defensive when our spouse reminds us to take the next exit; even if we remembered it this time our spouse remembers the forty times we drove right past it because we were caught up in a conversation.  You have to drop your shame and stop interpreting your spouse's suggestions as critical attacks reminiscent of a bad third grade teacher - but rather reminders that your brain don't work like that.  Just shut up and do it and you'll be glad later that you were actually able to connect with your spouse, be there for your child, or not have to figure out how to make a U-turn on 485, all for the cost of a little bit of defensive pride.

The second way we can improve ourselves to better accommodate marriage is to be a little less non-compliant and non-conformist.  Part of it is just part and parcel with the deficit as we have higher impulsivity which results in creativity, so we dress like Lady Gaga and expect everyone else to think outside of the box like us.  Creative is fine, but sometimes our impulsivity can make us embarrassing to our spouses by saying or doing inappropriate things at inappropriate times as we kind of ignore social graces.  The part we can work on is the "I'm not going to be told what to do" rugged independence that usually comes from insecurity for having never lived up to your potential as a kid.  Whether authority figures busted on you for being spacey, forgetful, or inattentive, other kids picked on you for being different, or you were just always haunted by a feeling that hard as you try you just can't quite accomplish what you feel you are capable of, we don't like being told we are wrong.  So accepting that our brains are wired to help us do amazing, wonderful things, but are also pretty inept at other things means we can just be unique individuals getting help with our weak spots rather than the stupid kid who will never do right or the sour grapes kid that says, "That's fine, I'm better than them anyways..."  Get an organized secretary, hire someone to do your taxes or housekeeping, and let your "normal" brained spouse help you in your other weak areas - like being fully present, eliminating distractions, establishing work boundaries to get a certain amount done and come home, remembering events and tasks, and following through on promises.  Once again, just shut up and do it - you'll find when you comply without resentment you end up accomplishing more, enjoying more, and disappointing yourself and others less.  I'd say the same for teens or kids with ADHD but they probably aren't reading my blog.

Previous post on ADHD here - http://pilferedwisdom.blogspot.com/2011/08/driving-ferrari-with-bicycle-brakes.html

Being Married to Rainman

Well, since I managed to lose my compiled master list of over fifty blog post ideas I will write today once again about living with ADHD, but as requested from a marriage perspective.  I will probably have to break this up into two posts and even then won't be able to fully address the impact the deficit has on marriage.  I believe it has the ability to greatly enhance or destroy marriages depending on whether both partners can fully embrace the enhancements ADHD provides while understanding and compensating for the deficits.  First post will mainly focus on the "normal" spouse as it can be very irritating living with someone like Rainman who is phenomenal at counting cards but doesn't seem able to dress themselves in the morning.

First off we are absolute slaves to the present, who rarely focus on anything from the past or anything in the future.  We have low frustration tolerances so it is easy to get defensive really quick in the moment but the good part is it is really hard for us to hold grudges.  Living in the present means we are likely to frustrate our spouses with our lack of preparation for the future, but also make it easier for them when we are able to drop offenses from the past.  As with most things within marriage we can focus on the negative or positive, and here is the first opportunity.  The ADHD wife could be berated by her husband for not thinking through the steps required to plan a birthday party or for not having sent the invitations out in time, or she could be celebrated for spending an entire afternoon completely absorbed with her children without a care in the world for how they kept her up too late the night before or all the things still to be done on the to do list.  The ability to be completely absorbed in the present means the ADHD husband can be absorbed in getting three stars on every level of Angry Birds while the kids he is supposed to be watching light themselves on fire, or he can stare into his wife's eyes on a date night completely in the moment when a normal husband would be worrying about his performance review the next day at work.  Living in the present can be great or frustrating, depending on what the hyperfocus is narrowed in on.

Hyperfocus is the blessing/curse where we are able to narrow in on one thing like a laser, completely oblivious to the rest of the world.  This can make us have an encyclopedic knowledge of every sports stat ever created, be uncanny at recalling crucial information regarding our jobs, hobbies, or passions, and allow us to work 12 hours straight on a creative project without eating or hardly blinking.  But it can also mean we can step right over a mound of laundry on the way out the door, wait until the last possible second to get the kids ready for school, or get caught up at work and not realize it until we are already two hours late.  Brain scans show a little dead spot in our brain that in a normal person would stay awake and regulate attention and impulsivity, but is gray and dead in us until something that ignites our passion lights it up from time to time.  It would be nice if we could quickly and easily program our brains or our spouse's brain to hyperfocus just on things of great worth and value but that isn't the case - it is determined by things mostly unknown to us currently but involving the release of pleasurable and painful chemicals within the brain.  Shaming your spouse about failures, criticizing them for forgetting things, and showing them contempt for not following through like a normal person would are unlikely to produce pleasurable chemicals and train their brain to see you as a worthy target of their hyperfocus.  It's about their focus, not your value.

If you look at your spouse with ADHD as in control of their brain and just lazy, selfish, or uncaring then you see them as a horrible person, if you see them as in control of their brains and not horrible then you have to see yourself as just not that important to them, but if you see them as not really in control of their brains you can feel empathy.  Most common complaint I hear about ADHD spouses is their lack of follow through and how that breaks their spouse's trust and I often wonder why this really has never been a huge complaint of my wife about me.  Is it because I remember important things and follow through, heavens no!  I believe my wife realized early on into marriage the key to putting up with someone like me - realistic expectations and tons of grace.  Two recent examples show off the awesomeness of my wife:  First is the other day she had a list of four items that needed to be done around the house while she was at work and as she began spouting them off I cut her off mid-sentence and said "Do you mind writing those things down and leaving them on the counter for me somewhere I will be forced to see them?"  She could have responded with one of many replies I have heard in counseling ranging from "I want a man who is grown up and responsible enough to know these things need to be done, I don't need lists to get things done around here" to "My dad never needed lists and he went to work every day at the 8 am on the dot at the salt mines, because he actually cared about his family" to "You know what?  Forget it, I'll just do it myself since you can't be bothered with adult responsibilities, I have three children including you!"  Instead she said, "Sure, here it is," because she recognizes that I truly love her and want to get it all done but for either of us to trust my verbal memory would be silly.  The second was the other week when she was getting ready to head to work and handed me my new iPhone that came in the mail, still in it's box and said, "I know you are very excited about this and you could easily spend all day hyperfocused on it, but this is your day with the kids so I don't want you missing out on time with them.  Do you mind just focusing on them and leaving this til tonight when you can play with it after they are in bed?"  That is a woman who knows me, knows ADHD, doesn't vilify either one, and has the ability to tell me what I need to hear when I need to hear it.

So if this is the first half of how to put up with us then tomorrow will be how to succeed in marriage when you have ADHD.  The key to both - recognize that this isn't laziness, selfishness, or a lack of value given to the "normal" spouse, but rather a hyperfocus and impulsivity that will never ever change.  Each partner must use their strengths most effectively while compensating for weaknesses rather than making grand promises and getting upset when they are not followed through on.  Tomorrow's key for people with ADHD?  Learning to be humble and accept influence rather than getting defensive, allow the person with the fully functional brain to use it by helping us.

Driving a Ferrari with Bicycle Brakes

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder may be the most poorly named condition in the DSM-IV - it's neither a deficit of attention nor always accompanied by hyperactivity. It also may be one of the most vilified and least understood learning disabilities in our culture causing just as many people to go undiagnosed as those hyper kids who get drugged up to get off their parents nerves. My goal with this blog entry would be to briefly go through what ADHD is and is not, help people better understand it and in the process better understand me. I have ADHD - Inattentive form, have had it my entire life and will always have it yet didn't manage to figure this out until this last year. How is it that I could make it to 33, be a counselor who can diagnose and treat ADHD, wrote a thirty page paper on ADHD in grad school, and have never figured this out - because even I had a host of misperceptions about the disorder and myself. There are two types and those kids, more common in boys, who have the hyperactive variation they are usually spotted and singled out for being a disturbance, while the inattentive variation is largely undiagnosed, or more accurately misdiagnosed as lazy.

ADHD is a neurological disorder affecting the executive functioning area of the prefrontal cortex responsible for regulating attention and impulsivity. In brain scans the rest of the brain is lit up with activity while one small spot shows gray and dead when completing regular tasks - but it isn't dead, it's just sleeping because when the subject engages in an activity that is exciting, taps into a passion, offers an interesting challenge, or if the fight-or-flight response is engaged it lights up bright. What this results in is a kid who can play Call of Duty for 12 hours straight without blinking but can't stay focused long enough to complete their homework or an adult like me who has a ridiculous ability to photographically recall enough information to fill up libraries but will take two hours to do fifteen minutes of paperwork. This is where our society and especially the Christian subculture will often just say this is a heart problem, we are just lazy and irresponsible. Problem is that when you look at us in an area that is of passion and interest to us we are more responsible and hard working than anyone on the planet. The frustrating part not just for you guys putting up with us but for us as well is that it isn't that we have no focus, we just have a hyperfocus, but only on the things that wake up our brain. If your normal brain is like a shotgun, we have lasers - you can spread your attention between several things at once and can decide which activity deserves your best attention, we are like Cyclops from the X-men without his fancy glasses. So if we are doing monotonous tasks, busy work, or anything that doesn't wake up our brain then anything out there in the background that could be more interesting will forcibly grab our attention - email, a bird flying by, a conversation across the office. If we are engaged in a task that ignites our passion then nothing else exists, our hyperfocus gives us the brain raw horsepower of a Ferrari engine without power steering and bicycle brakes - full throttle intensity with very poor handling.

The other hallmark of ADHD is little to no impulsivity control, if it pops in our head we just run with it. Therefore we are horrible with time management, financial restraint, and we are far more likely to develop addictions. We are prisoners of the now, able to immediately get over being hurt and very unlikely to plan ahead. If something is not directly within our field of vision then it doesn't exist, and even if it is right in front of our eyes but isn't our focus then it doesn't exist. We're the person who says the wacky thing that pops into our head which half the time makes everyone crack up laughing and the other half of the time gets nothing but blank stares and uncomfortable silence. Impulsivity is fantastic when it results in creativity as a brain without caps can create art or music that a normal brain would never come up with. It isn't so great when our emotions don't have the normal cap that other people's have - we feel the same emotions as others but with more intensity. When we are sad or hurt we feel it stronger than others often looking like depression, when we are anxious our mind can race faster than someone with real anxiety, when we are irritated and angry we can snap at people before we even register what happened. A low frustration tolerance, moodiness, and a hard time forcing ourselves to just snap out of how we are feeling are almost always there, even if we have developed a personality that wants to make people happy and so would never express these things on the outside.

In addition to the attention and impulsivity problems that are biological we usually end up developing secondary problems as a result. We feel weird and different so often become loners or even embrace weirdness as our identity. We don't always track with people because our attention wanders so we feel like we are socially awkward when usually others don't even notice. We become procrastinators because if mundane tasks don't wake our brain up then we come to rely on last minute anxiety to give us a shot of adrenaline to get the task done. We often become very driven and self-critical because we end up believing that we really are just lazy and need to try harder, but even when we try our potential never matches our productivity. When we can finally accept that our brain works differently, not better or worse we can do what it takes to succeed - medication can keep that part of your brain woke up increasing attentiveness and impulse-control - counseling or psychoeducation can help us develop skills in things like time management, responsibility follow through, and budgeting - and just becoming more informed means we don't just see it as a curse, but actually quite a gift.

So why did it take so long for me to get diagnosed? Well I believed a lot of the myths floating around that lazy hyperactive kids must just have bad parents, that if this was ADHD then everyone must have it - they don't, and I had figured out all sorts of ways around it. My hyperfocus growing up was always school which really doesn't often get you in trouble, and being naturally intelligent meant I could still get good grades even when I forgot my homework, spaced out for half the lecture, or forgot there was going to be a test. My personality has always been one that wouldn't allow me to have a temper problem, and so my low frustration tolerance never became much of a problem until I had kids.  I assumed the meds were just to tranquilize unruly kids into zombies rather than tools that can wake up the brain so that I can better direct my own attention and resist impulsive drives.  There is no miracle pill but it definitely helps better than my previous medication - caffeine.  I really believe the key to success, however, is mostly within accepting that if you have ADHD then you will be really bad at some things and really good at other things and that whether you like it or not that is OK.

At some point I'd like to throw in some of my adult ways of compensating that may help others as well as how best to parent a child with ADHD, maybe something on how ADHD affects marriages, or how to succeed in your career with it, but those are for another blog.