You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (16 page)

After the Diagnosis—Your Role in Treatment

The homework you did in locating your mental health professional will pay dividends as you begin treatment. It is important to become an active participant in your treatment, working with the professionals on your team to problem-solve. Since information about adult ADD is limited, a flexible, experimental approach to treatment is usually necessary.

If you’re
going to use medicine in your treatment, it’s essential that you establish a partnership with your physician. Finding the right medication and dosage is generally a trial-and-error process. There isn’t any magic formula the physician can use to determine in advance the medicine that will work best for you.

If your mental health professional becomes defensive or pats you on the head when you ask
questions or offer ideas, find a new one! We’ve been contacted by adults who can’t find informed professionals in their area. Should you end up in a similar situation, you may have to seek out someone who is willing to learn!

The Practical Side of Evaluation and Treatment—
What’s It Going to Cost?

This discussion wouldn’t be complete without a word about cost. The testing process is time-consuming
and can rapidly run up a large bill. Before committing to testing or treatment, ask about approximate costs and ways to cut corners if you are uninsured or on a tight budget. You may be able to work out a payment schedule in advance if the bill for testing is too large to pay at one time.

Carefully scrutinize your insurance policy. Some policies don’t cover or only partially cover psychological
services. Some specifically exclude ADD from coverage. We don’t want to discourage you from seeking a diagnosis and treatment.
You are worth the price
even if it means skipping your summer vacation this year. We just want you to be prepared so you can plan and avoid rude financial shocks.

In a later section we’ll talk specifically about various treatment options for ADD adults. Although professional
help will likely be an important part of your treatment, we want to focus primarily on self-help, which is the guiding principle of this book. We firmly believe that you are capable of helping yourself, and we want to help you learn how to do it.

Getting Down to Work

Okay, so you know, or feel fairly certain, that an Attention Deficit Disorder is at the root of your problems. You know you
were born with the deficits and grew up with them. You know you’re different from someone without ADD. You know you’ve learned various not-so-great ways of coping with them. SO WHAT DO YOU DO NOW?

What you do now is take a deep breath, find some time
for yourself and look squarely at your ADD. It is inseparable from who you are. What you do now is decide that
you are worth all the work it will take to recover
.

Recover:

1. a. to get back (something lost, stolen, etc.)
   b. to regain (health, consciousness, etc.)
   
2. to compensate for; make up for (to recover losses)
   
3. 3. a. to get (oneself) back to a state of control, balance, composure, etc.
   b. to catch or save (oneself) from a slip, stumble, betrayal of feeling, etc.
   

New World Dictionary of the American Language
, Simon and Schuster, 1980

To regain, compensate, get back control and balance, save oneself
—this is what you do now. The remainder of this book is about this process of recovery. We’ll move from the theoretical to the practical and offer specific guidelines and suggestions that
can make recovery possible.

We can’t emphasize enough that recovery is a process that requires a lot of work. It isn’t something that will magically happen after you read this book. You must commit yourself to believing that you are worth all the work it will take to recover.

If you’re still reading, we can assume that you’ve made this important commitment to yourself. You won’t be sorry. You
have so much to offer and so many talents to discover! Let’s get
started and take a look at some important issues you’ll need to consider.

ADD is inseparable from who you are. We made this observation at the outset, but what does it really mean? ADD is an acronym for Attention Deficit Disorder.
Deficit …? Disorder …?
If ADD is inseparable from who you are, does this mean that disability is your
only dimension? Absolutely not!

Your differences are only one part of you. If society has learned anything from the efforts of the physically disabled to gain equal access, it’s that we are all people first. If more time and energy were spent developing the unique abilities of all people, we would have a more productive society.

As you learn to help yourself, you must never focus more on your
disabilities than the total person you are. It’s a mistake, however, to totally ignore your differences. The tricky thing for ADD adults is that many of us grew up never knowing we had a disability. ADD is inseparable from who we are because we forged our senses of self around it, never knowing it was there. Most of us haven’t grown up with the benefit of knowing we had a handicap. We grew up thinking
we just weren’t as smart, competent or valuable as other people.

Now that you know you have ADD, it should be easy to make a recipe to turn out a great person, right? Well, it doesn’t quite work that way. You may know intellectually that you have ADD. Grappling with that knowledge on an emotional level, however, is a very different proposition:

It is a task of truly accepting that you aren’t perfect.

You must say good-bye to your old self-image, whatever that may have been, and admit that your problems won’t go away by changing your job, your friends or your spouse. The vague feeling you’ve always had that something was wrong has been confirmed
and given a name. What a scary place to be—in adulthood, trying to figure out who you’ll be when you grow up.

Your newly acquired self-knowledge
may be scary but it’s also liberating. It offers a wonderful opportunity to take control of your life by looking squarely at your limits and growing beyond them. This requires courage and time. It requires working through a process of self-acceptance that begins with grieving.

When a loved one dies we can’t move on with our lives until we have grieved and moved through the stages of shock, anger,
denial, bargaining and depression. Similarly, when we lose a part of our psychological selves, including an alteration in our self-concept, we must grieve the lost sense of self before we can work on building a new one. You may not have thought of your ADD in this way, but:

Grieving is the beginning of your self-discovery.

Let’s take a look at how the process works. You may already have moved
through some of the stages.

Grief—The Shock of Recognition

The diagnosis is often both a punch in the stomach and a vindication of years of struggle and feelings of inadequacy. We knew something was wrong and now we have the test results to prove it. We don’t have to feel like impostors anymore, living in fear of being found out. What a relief!

KK:
“ When I went through psychotherapy in my twenties,
my constant theme was that I felt different. I always struggled with comparing myself to other people, unable to figure out how they could so easily manage the things I sweated over. I wondered if they had some secret to which I wasn’t privy or if they managed to accomplish a lot at the expense of their families.

“Since I couldn’t go to college and do much of anything else at the same time, I
assumed that being a student meant giving up everything outside school. I didn’t know that it was just easier
for other people. I assumed that I was too self-indulgent to accept the challenges.

“When I was diagnosed with ADD, the relief was enormous—I was finally able to make sense of my struggles. Having ADD meant that I wasn’t bad, lazy, unmotivated or stubborn. It meant that I could look at
my life through different-colored lenses. I could stop filtering my accomplishments through the expectations I based on comparisons to others. I began to marvel at all I had managed to do in spite of a significant disability.

“The midlife crisis I had been working on resolved itself when I shed a positive light on the life I had lived up to that point. Although I had gained positive self-esteem
as a result of psychotherapy, it was nothing compared to the boost of my changing view of myself as a heroically struggling adult.

“I began to feel less apologetic for my shortcomings and more deserving of help and understanding. Accompanying the relief was the hope that I could be fixed now that I finally understood the basis for my problems.”

PR:
“I always struggled silently with my deficits.
Neither my grades in school nor any of my relationships ever suffered outwardly. The only person who knew I was a failure was me. It was an incredible burden.

“The people in my life didn’t destroy me. I destroyed myself with intense feelings of inadequacy. Perhaps the worst period in my life was when my little brother died. I was fourteen years old and into driving my parents crazy with my adolescent
stuff. Roger hit a tree when he was sledding and died the next morning. He was only ten years old and indisputably the perfect child in my family. He was so perfect. I was so imperfect. And he had to die! I knew that it should have been me.

“No one ever knew how I felt. I agonized over screwing this one up by not being the one who died. Learning at thirty-nine
that I had ADD didn’t miraculously
free me from my impaired sense of self, but it offered a peace I had never known before. It was a relief to know, at least in my intellectual self, that my feelings had a basis. My struggles came from deficits over which I had no control. The diagnosis alone didn’t undo years of silent pain but gave me a reality I could use to work on readjusting my self-image.

“I wish my brother hadn’t died,
but I’ve been able to alter my perspectives of his life and mine. Neither of us had more value than the other. His death just happened, and I finally believe that it’s okay that it wasn’t me instead.”

Grief: Anger—“Why Me?”

The initial stage of relief and euphoria often gives way to a period of anger. The diagnosis that frees us from faulty assumptions begins to feel like an unbearable burden.
Facts don’t lie. We are imperfect and it just isn’t fair!

“Why me? Why did I have to be born this way?”

“Why did everyone—parents, teachers, therapists—blame my difficulties on depression, lack of motivation or poor character?”

“Why didn’t somebody believe in me?”

“Why did everybody assume the worst—that I just wasn’t trying hard enough?”

“Why was I misunderstood and reprimanded when I was trying my heart out?”

“Why did all those mental health professionals pretend to know more than they really did?”

We may feel furious at the people in our lives who failed to recognize our deficits. We understand that no one knew much about ADD ten or twenty years ago. But somehow we still feel that if
only our parents had loved and respected us enough, they would have figured it out. They should
have known our problems were real. We often begin to feel helpless and victimized.

Grief: Denial—Not Me!

Remember Donna? She struggles with her inability to move beyond the
intellectual
knowledge of her ADD to the
emotional
knowledge. It’s not that she rejects the reality of her disorder. She simply denies its impact on her life.

Denial can take several forms. After an initial sense of anger,
we might decide to reject the diagnosis, wondering why we ever wasted our money on the evaluation. We might, as Donna does, announce to friends that we have ADD but then not seek treatment. We might pick up our prescription but never use it. We might take the medication with the mistaken belief that we have found the cure for our problems. We move into this new phase of our lives with rosy fantasies
of how, with the help of our local pharmacy, we can conquer the world.