You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (18 page)

Balance may be something you think about only at the
end of the month when your bank statement comes. One of life’s little joys is a balanced checkbook. This doesn’t happen nearly often enough. How many times do you decide that it isn’t worth trying to figure out the discrepancy, that it’s easier to accept the balance your bank says you have?

“The ADDer’s Precarious High-Wire Act”

As ADDers, achieving balance in our lives is critical and considerably more difficult to achieve than balance in our checkbooks. What is balance? It’s a general concept, similar to freedom or success, that each of us defines individually. Let’s find out how balance issues have an impact on the lives of ADD adults.

Warning—It’s Very Easy for
an ADDer to Lose Her Balance!

ADD folk have nervous systems that are erratic and poorly regulated. Rapid thoughts and an excitable nature are at odds with a central nervous system that can’t handle too much input. The paradox is of an enthusiastic, creative and impulsive ADD adult who is often driven to get involved in more than she can handle. Since having ADD means that her basic nature is at war with
itself, her life can indeed be a high-wire act!

Achievement and Less Tangible Goals:
There are many ways for an ADDer to lose the balance in her life. The delicate balance between achievement and other, less tangible goals is a critical balancing act. These days it seems that many people feel they live on fast-moving treadmills that lack Off switches. Careers eat up family time, and escalating
demands create pressure-cooker environments.

Unlike people who react to this pressure with mild stress symptoms, ADDers can fall apart completely. Of course, this is often a first, essential step toward recovery. Falling apart can be the equivalent of an alcoholic’s hitting “rock bottom.” For some alcoholics, rock bottom is getting a DUI citation. For others, it is a string of DUIs, a divorce,
unemployment and hitting skid row. As awful as rock bottom may seem at the time for an alcoholic or an ADDer, it’s often the starting point for a new and better life. It begins the recovery process because its awfulness forces the person to make some changes.

Structure and Freedom:
To keep ourselves from falling off our high wire, many of us also need a proper balance of structure
and freedom.
We ADDers often balk at the structure we desperately need. A tendency to become easily overstimulated means that chaotic lifestyles can get us into trouble. On the other hand, lives routinized into dullness by too much regimentation don’t provide sufficient challenge.

We know that an ADD child needs externally imposed structure to thrive. When she becomes an adult, she continues to need limits
but has to provide them for herself. Adults are expected to manage their own lives. The challenge is to establish a balance that offers order without stifling creativity, one of many ADD adults’ best attributes.

Ways of Thinking, Activity Levels, Emotions and Needs:
ADD brains and nervous systems are often out of balance, with behavior swinging rapidly from one extreme to the other. An ADDer
tends to excesses, alternating between bouts of workaholism and sluggish inactivity. Her moods swing up and down and her performance is erratic. The following list outlines some of these balance issues that can cause you to lose your footing on the high wire:

Work vs. Play

Do you tend to get overinvolved in one or the other and have trouble shifting gears?

Your Needs vs. Others’

Are you oblivious
to the feelings and points of view of others, or do you always put yourself dead last?

Over- vs. Understimulation

What is your optimal level of stress, noise, work and challenges?

Hyperactivity vs. Hypoactivity

Are you so active that you drive others crazy, or do you vegetate most of the time? This includes sleep and rest patterns as well as daily activity levels.

Detailed vs. Global Thinking

Do you get caught up in too much detail, unable to see the forest for the trees, or do you tend to focus on the gestalt or whole picture? If you focus on big pictures, do you have trouble keeping track of details?

Depression vs. Euphoria

Are your moods out of balance, with too much sadness or excessive happiness? Do you swing between these two extremes?

The Value of Examining Balance Issues

It’s easy for your balance in each of these areas to become skewed in either direction at different times. Alternately, you may find yourself regularly swinging erratically from one extreme to the other. The point of examining each of these areas is that imbalance in any of them can cause problems for your mental health or family life.

What’s the connection we mentioned between balance, Toyotas
and Porsches? In some respects, the ADD adult is designed like a Porsche. She is spirited, dynamic, powerful, exciting and ready to go with the rapid acceleration of an expensive sports car. Her non-ADD peers are more like the family Toyota. Equally well engineered, this Toyota has a more “even temperament.” It is designed for comfort, reliability and fuel efficiency. If the ADD adult is to maintain
and maximize the high performance of her Porsche, she has to take especially good care of herself.

One of the best ways you can do this is to work on achieving balance in your life. Having a well-balanced lifestyle is akin to taking good care of your car. It subjects the system to less wear and tear. To use the metaphor again, working on balance is similar to continually tinkering with and tuning
up your car. If you want to keep your whole system in working order, you’ll have to make ongoing adjustments.

With limitations they can’t ignore, ADDers who recover may well lead the rest of society to a saner way of life. Competence and levels of achievement have become the societal standard that measures a person’s worth and success in life. Those who are “unproductive” owing to age, health
or disability have been devalued because they don’t “measure up.” Society no longer values children or the aged as it previously did. A shocking number of children sink into poverty, while stressed caregivers abuse many senior citizens.

This philosophizing isn’t just the wandering of creative minds but relates directly to achieving balanced lives. You have a unique opportunity to redesign your
success model and get off the crazy treadmill everyone else is on.

If you pay attention to the messages of your body and soul, you’ll realize that you can’t be all or do it all. If you work at your recovery, you can use your new self-knowledge to design a life that really works for you. You can be at peace with yourself and your environment while the rest of the world skyrockets out of control.

We’ve already talked about the connection between balance, cars and high-wire acts. Now let’s consider the last part of this chapter’s title—Alcoholics Anonymous—as we move from general concepts to practical applications for achieving balance in your life.

How-To’s of Achieving Balance

To help you get started, we’re going to borrow the invaluable framework of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Although this program specifically refers to alcohol and alcoholics, it’s possible to substitute virtually any chronic problem or disability. A variety of support groups have adopted this framework, which is a sound program for creating a balanced life.

Briefly, the program is a systematic plan for acknowledging limitations to oneself and others, making amends to others whenever possible and
coming to a greater self-acceptance.
Working the program
means making a commitment to follow the steps in daily life.

The Twelve Steps of A.A.

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
   
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
   
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
   
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
   
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to other human beings the exact nature of our wrongs.
   
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
   
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
   
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
   
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
   
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
    
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
    
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
    

Using the Twelve Steps for Your Personal
Recovery from ADD

The steps are framed around a central concept of spiritual awareness that has relevance for ADDers. It’s the glue that holds all the steps of the program together so that peace and self-acceptance can be achieved.

Spiritual awareness isn’t specific
to organized religion. The Twelve Steps carefully talk about “
God as we understand him
,” leaving the specifics to the individual. The word “God” can be replaced with a more generalized “higher power” that has meaning for each individual. The higher power could be the fellowship of other alcoholics (or, in our case, other ADDers) or the whole of mankind. The idea is to focus on something greater
than ourselves and realize that
we can’t go it totally alone
. The Serenity Prayer sums up this philosophy:

GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY
TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,
TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,
AND THE WISDOM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE.

Closely related to spiritual awareness and integral to the program is the issue of morality and wrongdoing. For the alcoholic, this is a critical part of her
recovery. Typically, the alcoholism has caused havoc in the lives of her friends and family, and she must assume responsibility for her actions. This includes making amends to each of the people she has directly hurt.

These issues aren’t relevant to your recovery from ADD except as they relate to those aspects of self you can change. For instance,
if you’ve learned to use some maladaptive coping
mechanisms that have hurt other people, it is healing to take responsibility for your behaviors and make appropriate amends.

The issue of
powerlessness
detailed in the first three steps, however, has a direct implication for you as an adult with ADD. It means that you are powerless over your ADD in that it isn’t anyone’s fault and can’t be cured.

Applying these steps in your own life means that
you need to stop blaming your parents, spouse, children and yourself for the problems caused by your ADD. This doesn’t mean that you absolve yourself from all responsibility for your behavior. It means that you acknowledge the reality of your imperfect self. Confronting your powerlessness includes an admission that you can’t do it all—you are human and have unique limitations. If you have begun
your process of grief, you may already be confronting and working at accepting your limitations.

The fourth principle also has significance for you as an ADD adult. This step instructs the individual to take an inventory. This should be similar to the one you develop for your homeowner’s or renter’s insurance. Rather than noting the condition and value of possessions you should examine and list
your assets, abilities, liabilities or disabilities.

Your inventory is central to your recovery. Since your ADD can’t be cured, your goal shouldn’t be to
eliminate
your deficits. Instead it should be to
identify, accept
and
manage
them. A failure to confront your limitations can result in damaged emotional and spiritual health and a diminished sense of self. Later in this discussion we’ll offer
some suggestions about how to compile this important inventory.

Evaluating Balance Issues in Your Life

We talked earlier in this chapter about general balance issues that can be important for you as an ADD adult. Now it’s time
for you to think about the balance in your own life. The following is a list of questions you can use to get started. You may never have really thought about some of them
and may not be able to answer all of them right now. But keep them in mind throughout the discussion in this chapter. If you try some of the things we suggest, you may be able to answer them later.