You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (33 page)

The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

The most obvious challenge for ADD women is that it is harder to recognize the syndrome when it is more subtle. That sweet little girl in the back of the classroom doesn’t bother anyone.
No one notices that she isn’t really tracking what the teacher is saying. She is lost in daydreams or her mind has flown out the window to play with the birds. The boy across the aisle from her is a different story. He is loud, easily angered and always in hot water for getting out of his seat to stir up some excitement. Yes, he gets in a lot of trouble, but he also gets some help in the form
of a diagnosis and treatment.

The little girl gets passed on in school with mediocre grades. She grows up thinking she is just not very smart. Or maybe she is another type of girl with ADD, very bright and very motivated to please others. She manages to get good grades, but at great cost to herself. She borrows heavily from sleep and play time to carve out the long hours she needs to keep up
with classmates who do the work in half the time. This little girl feels like a failure too … she must be stupid if it takes her so long to get things done.

Little ADD girls who are unrecognized and untreated grow up to become women who never feel “good enough” no matter what they do. The legacy of struggle without an explanation takes a huge toll on their confidence and self-esteem.

Self-Esteem

Research tells us that ADD women have more problems with self-esteem than ADD men. Why would this be so? The following is a list of possible (or likely) suspects:

1. One piece of the puzzle, as we just mentioned, is that women with ADD are less likely to be diagnosed and treated.
   
2. Men are encouraged to focus on areas of strength at an early age, while women are expected to be generalists. We know that when you have ADD it is important to focus on areas of strength and spend less time in areas of weakness.
   
3. There is more tolerance for males with ADD behavior—the “boys will be boys” attitude.
   
4. Relationships are the coin of the realm for females—they are “expected” to be social experts. The impact of ADD on relating skills is huge … and women take it to heart much more than men do.
   
5. Do men lie on those questionnaires? Well, “lying” is a pretty strong word. Men are not as likely to
   admit
   to problems … even to themselves. We know that women are much more likely to seek therapy than men.
   
6. Mothers are more critical of their ADD daughters than their ADD sons. To our knowledge, no one has yet published research on the “why” of this finding, but we have a hunch that it has to do with the mirroring effect. Your ADD son or daughter is a mirror held up to you, demonstrating your own ADD behaviors that you are less than proud of. When the child is your own gender, it is much closer to home and thus harder to deal with.
   
7. Girls with ADD experience more peer rejection than do boys with ADD. This may be the result of higher expectations for females in the social realm.
   
8. Impulsive risk-taking behavior is less acceptable in girls. We will elaborate on this in the next section.
   

The Impact of Sexual Risk Taking

In 1994, at the second ADD adult conference, we cooked up a happening that was entitled “The Bad Girls’ Break-Out Session.” There was a lot of speculation and rumor buzzing around the event, especially among men, who were not invited. Years later,
we are finally ready to reveal what went on behind those closed doors. To the accompaniment of a jazz pianist playing
“The Strip-per” and other related tunes, women told their stories of the “wickedest” thing they had ever done or thought about doing. Well, they didn’t tell them personally. The women wrote them on a piece of paper and put them into a hat. The bolder, more “stagey” personalities in the group volunteered to read the stories to the group anonymously in a dramatic fashion. As I am sure you have already
guessed, most of the tales were about sexual activities. We laughed, hooted and even shed a few tears. After the conference we received a number of letters from people who thanked us for providing the most healing experience of their lives to date. We all left a ton of shame behind in that conference room.

ADD women often struggle with baggage about their sexuality. We all know that one of the
cardinal symptoms of ADD is impulsivity. Sexuality, of course, is a common arena for impulsive behavior. Research tells us that adolescent girls with ADD are sexually active at an earlier age, have more risk of pregnancy and more partners than girls without ADD. They are also at greater risk for STDs. Studies also reveal that, once the impulse-ridden teen years are past, women are more likely than
men to feel shame or humiliation when they look back on their behavior.

In spite of the great advances made by women in the past few decades, the double standard lives on in the minds of midlife and older folks, who absorbed it in their formative years. The impulsive girl who has many partners is stamped with the proverbial scarlet “A.” At best she is considered misguided, at worst she is a worthless
slut. Many of the formerly “loose” ADD women we have coached now live responsible mainstream lives. They have husbands, jobs, children and mortgages. You would be hard-pressed to guess their history of a “misspent” youth. Some of them remember those days rather fondly, wistfully longing for a sense of freedom and adventure that is now missing in their lives. Others struggle with a profound
sense of shame. If you are one of
those who are troubled by their sexual past, don’t let it hide in the dark corners of your mind. A good therapist can help you become more comfortable with yourself and your sexuality.

Housekeeping Is the Job Description
from Hell for ADDers

This phrase was coined by Sari Solden, in her groundbreaking book
Women with Attention Deficit Disorder
. Of course, she
was right on target. Think about it. What do ADDers hate but need desperately? Structure. What is completely lacking in the job of household manager? You guessed it, structure—unless you make it up yourself and then follow the blasted plan. As we all know, follow-through is not high on the list of ADD strengths.

There are a few men out there who have taken on the househusband role, but most household
managers are still women. Women with ADD may initially welcome the opportunity to leave the stresses of the workplace behind to be a stay-at-home mother. Often, however, they find they have simply exchanged the frying pan for the fire. The following is a Help Wanted ad for a household manager. Does this sound like a good job fit for your ADD self?

Wanted: Full-Time Household Manager
for Busy Executive

This position requires endless handling of boring details. You will be constantly interrupted by phone calls, delivery people and the whiny demands of small children. Lunch hours and coffee breaks not guaranteed—in fact, it is doubtful there will be time for such frivolous activity. You will be expected to cook meals, clean a four-bedroom house and manage the lives of one adult and three children. Two of the children have special needs and thus will require extra help with homework, structuring daily activities and driving to various appointments with specialists. There will be daily crises, involving trips to the emergency room with the accident-prone children and calls from the school demanding that you pick up the suspended child
this instant!
This is a 24/7 job, but excellent performance will not earn you any time off. In fact, no one will notice your performance unless you screw up. In that case, you are unlikely to be fired outright, but you will be subjected to endless recrimination. You are expected to take care of your own needs in your (ahem) spare time, and to do so without complaint. In addition to your basic responsibilities, you will be expected to organize events for extended family members and the executive’s work colleagues. Your job description can expand at any time without prior notice. Compensation for this sought-after position is hardly necessary—after all, it is not a real job and you will be receiving room and board in a lovely home, not to mention basic expenses. Only the seriously masochistic need apply.

Oops, got a tad sarcastic there.
Makes it hard to find any reason to get out of bed, or do anything but sit in front of the soaps eating bonbons. Still, it is a pretty accurate description of the household managing experience of many women. Most of the traditional women’s jobs have a lot in common with the household manager role. Consider the working conditions for nurses, teachers and administrators. You have a lot of responsibility
and very little control, which translates to “anything that happens is your fault” even if there is nothing you could have done to avert the disaster. You are expected to process an incredible number of details, and you are on call for your entire workday. Hiding in an office to take a breather or some quiet time is not permitted. You don’t even have an office … the best you can get is a
little cube, in the case of administrators. Noise levels are high and the pay is not that great. We could go on and on. If you are the proud possessor of one of these ADD-unfriendly positions, we are not advocating that you hand in your notice immediately. We all have to eat. At the very least, stop beating yourself up because you struggle in your job. It is a lousy fit,
with working conditions
that are unfriendly to human beings, let alone ADDers. In addition, give some consideration to developing a plan to transition into a work life that serves you.

Women with ADD Are Likely to Have Children
with ADD
and
Be the Primary Parent

We touched on this one in the last section. The job description from hell includes a mention of those special needs children. If you have children, we bet at
least one of them has an ADD diagnosis, not to mention some of the other differences that often travel along with ADD. Your child may also be dyslexic, have Aspergers Syndrome, a language disability or a number of other challenges. Special needs are expensive, in terms of time and energy as well as dollars. As an ADDer you have limitations on the amount of energy in your mental fuel tank. The demands
of your special needs children can quickly burn through the reserves in your personal fuel supply.

The biggest trap in this situation is guilt. You have an ocean of compassion for your struggling children, especially since they are faced with many of the same stresses you experienced as a child. Watching your kid being teased and rejected by peers feels like someone just slammed a sledgehammer
into your heart. As a mom, your greatest desire is to eliminate all pain and suffering from your children’s lives. It doesn’t matter that you’re a wise woman who knows she needs to master challenges in order to grow and evolve—it still hurts to watch the process. So you go overboard in your attempts to nurture and protect your fragile offspring. You burn yourself out—after all, you can’t possibly
do enough for them. Taking time for self-renewal is just not an option.

We are here to tell you that it is likely your quirky children will survive … and even thrive. Between us, we have three children, all of whom are now adults. Each of them has ADD and a number of other disabilities. We are still stunned by the miracle of transformation we have witnessed in these children. Someone
somewhere
waved a magic wand and turned our hopeless kids into mature, loving people who actually take responsibility for themselves. Kate’s daughter Tyrell has even shared with her mother (on more than one occasion, so it wasn’t just a fluke) that Kate was the perfect parent for her. She said something to the effect that “you hugged me when I needed it, and you kicked my behind when I needed that too.” Both
of us felt guilty when we were not able to be there 100 percent of the time for our children—when we were so burned out that we had no choice about taking personal time. Later we learned to take breathers before reaching the point of no return. The times we had to check out due to overload turned out to be growth opportunities for our kids. They learned to be more self-reliant. The very best thing
you can do for your children is to make sure you take care of yourself.

Women Want to Know
Why Do Women with ADD Have a Greater Tendency to
Believe That Events Happening to Them Are Their Fault?

A research study tells us that women with ADD
do
tend to blame themselves more than women without the disorder. This research did not compare ADD women and men, but we do know from other studies that
men with ADD have more externalizing symptoms, while women with ADD have more internalizing symptoms. In plain English, this means that men are more likely to blast out their distress so that the rest of the world can see it. Women have depression and anxiety, but they take it out on themselves. Men often struggle with rage, for example, while women take their anger and frustration and turn it inward.