Authors: Kate Kelly,Peggy Ramundo
Tags: #Health & Fitness, #Diseases, #Nervous System (Incl. Brain), #Self-Help, #Personal Growth, #General, #Psychology, #Mental Health
visual perceptual disabilities auditory perceptual disabilities smell, taste and touch disabilities
Integration:
An inability to understand the information
registered by the brain
visual sequencing disability auditory sequencing disability visual abstraction disabilities auditory abstraction disabilities
Memory:
visual short-term memory disability auditory short-term memory disability visual long-term memory disability auditory long-term memory disability
Output:
An inability to get information back out of the brain
spontaneous language disability
demand language disability gross motor disability fine motor disability
The following was written by a learning-disabled nineteen-year-old and illustrates written expression/output disabilities:
Dear Mother—Started the Store several weeks, I have growed considerably I don’t liik much like a Boy now—Hows all the folk did you receive a Box of Books from Memphis that he promised to send them—languages. Your son Al.
Al was Thomas Alva Edison. He certainly went on to prove his teachers wrong about how
slow
he was!
Since this book is about ADD in adults, you may wonder why we’re including this discussion. The primary reason is that some ADDers also have associated specific learning disabilities. In fact, some experts believe that the
majority
of ADDers have associated learning disabilities.
Probably the most common is a receptive or expressive language disability. In simple terms, this is an impaired ability to receive oral or written language and/or to process language for oral or written expression. A difficulty with written language may in fact result from an associated learning disability.
Attentional problems can mimic learning disabilities and learning disabilities can mimic
ADD. It isn’t easy to tease out the reasons for an individual’s learning problems. Is it a specific learning disability, ADD or both? One could argue against the sometimes arbitrary divisions of ADD and learning disabilities because there are many overlapping symptoms. Despite the overlap, having a learning disability is different from having ADD.
Having ADD means having trouble initially getting
information into the brain because of attention problems. If you are present in body only, with your brain out on the golf course, you won’t process incoming information very well.
Having a learning disability means having trouble processing information because of a specific impairment in the components
of learning: input, integration, memory and output. A learning-disabled brain flips letters
and numbers around, puts data in the wrong order and confuses the meaning of incoming sounds, among other things. Medicine is useless for treating learning disabilities because it can’t correct errors in the brain’s interpretation and output of data.
The issue of ADD versus learning disabilities comes down to definitions and descriptions. At this point in research and understanding, the two are
considered separate entities. Although we don’t want to get hung up on labels, we think it’s important for you to consider the possibility that you are also learning disabled. It may be the missing puzzle piece in your recovery. If your medicine is working and you’re making progress with your ADD issues but still have inexplicable problems, you may have an undiagnosed learning disability.
This
possibility underscores the importance of having a complete psychoeducational evaluation. We encourage you to have additional testing if your diagnosis was based solely on history and observable symptoms. Unless you were in school after the 1975 passage of Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, it is unlikely that your learning disabilities were diagnosed.
If your
evaluation uncovers a learning disability, seek help for your LD as well as your ADD. Don’t assume that educational remediation is just for children. There are tutors who work exclusively with adults. The Orton Dyslexia Society and the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities are two resources you can contact for a referral in your area. Both are national organizations with branches all
over the United States. The Orton Dyslexia Society in Cincinnati, for example, has support groups specifically for adults with LD and uses local tutors who specialize in working with adults.
Paralleling the current interest in adulthood ADD, learning specialists are increasingly focusing on LD in adults. Special tutoring
in the areas of specific learning disabilities can reap wonderful rewards.
Whether you’re twenty or fifty, it’s never too late to learn strategies for dealing with learning disabilities.
Many colleges and vocational schools are developing programs specifically for learning-disabled students. In fact, these programs are often found in institutions for graduate education. The University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, for instance, has an excellent support service
for LD medical students. Discovering an underlying learning disability can help you reevaluate educational goals you’ve been unable to attain. With your newfound knowledge of your ADD and LD, you may decide to try the higher education route again. Chances are, with some research and planning, you’ll find a college that can meet your needs.
We hope you don’t feel overwhelmed at the prospect of
another problem to deal with! But
not
dealing with it is the worst thing you can do. Accepting the reality of your ADD opens doors to understanding and gaining control. Dealing with the possibility of your LD can accomplish the same thing.
In the next four chapters, you may notice a shift in style as compared with the rest of the book. With the exception of the gender and sexuality chapter, the
earlier part of this book was written thirteen or more years ago, when we were newly diagnosed. From this point forward you will find that we put our coaching hats on, speaking as professionals with more than ten years of ADD coaching experience.
The cornerstones of ADD recovery are summed up in the next four chapters. We call them the
M ’ M’s—short for meditation, medication, mental hygiene and moving forward. In the first of these chapters, “Meditations on Meditation,” we will explore ADD-friendly ways to calm and soothe your adrenalized system.
Chapter 13
Meditations on Meditation
Meditation? You Must Be Kidding …
I
f you came to us as a coaching client, sooner or later we would start mentioning the “M” word. Meditation. Most ADDers we have encountered are allergic to that word, to a greater or lesser extent. So were we, until we had calmed down enough with the aid of medication and other self-care techniques. When you have spent an entire
lifetime feeling as if there were a pinball machine in your brain, it is hard to imagine yourself peacefully sitting in the lotus position. The big secret that nobody seems to clue us in on, is that you don’t have to sit in the lotus position at all … you don’t even have to sit down or (thank God!) stop moving. You don’t have to have a fancy mantra, a guru or extensive notes from your trek to
India in order to do this meditation thing correctly. There is no one true path to calming down the mind.
As ADDers, we have extensive experience with “failure,” or what we think is failure. Often, we never get far enough along in a particular direction to actually fail. We don’t even make it out of the starting gate. We get distracted by something that seems more interesting or more important
or glittery than the thing we are supposed to be engaged in. Or, we might push the start button on that old familiar tape—you know, it’s the “I f—ed up, I always f—k up, it will never be any different—I might as well quit right now” self-flagellation tape.
We submit that the problem with meditation is our image, our belief that it is a hairy scary thing that no ordinary human being could possibly
accomplish. It’s hard to begin if we hold in our minds that picture of some accomplished Tibetan monk who sits in absolute stillness and who, by the way, has been practicing meditation an entire lifetime (or many lifetimes). We don’t see his learning curve or any struggle on the way to mastery. So we think we can’t measure up.
You Can Do It … Really!
The key is to allow yourself to take those
baby steps, to make “mistakes” and make room for a certain amount of fumbling around. No one ever learned anything without missing the mark quite a bit at the beginning. Did you know that the ancient definition of “sin” is simply “missing the mark”? Oh boy, and all along we thought it meant bad-bad, punishable by death or something. It’s possible to take meditation a bit at a time and get more comfortable
with it, just as we might do when learning to dance, play tennis, draw sketches or write poetry.
We promise you that it’s not possible to “fail” at meditation. It is astonishing how many of our clients have told us that they tried meditation and found it an exercise in frustration. The problem was that nobody told them a critical piece of informa-tion: how it actually works. These clients thought
that if there was a lot of activity going on in their brains, they were just not doing this meditation thing right. In fact, everybody has a lot of stuff going on in their brain most of the time. The Buddhists refer to this as “monkey chatter.” If you are anxious about all the noise in your brain, there is a tendency to try to get rid of the chatter, to literally push it out of your mind somehow.
In fact, pushing, pulling, talking back to or otherwise engaging with the contents of your mind keeps the whole show going. Meditation begins by just observing. Then we can practice detaching from that jumble of thoughts—to let the mind do its thing without interfering. Eventually those thoughts get tired of trying to push your buttons. They get bored and go away … find
something more exciting
to do. Well, we don’t really know if thoughts actually have a mind of their own, but we both have had the experience of the noise fading to the background. And sometimes, when we remember to keep meditation at the center of our lives, as a daily practice, the noise gives up the ghost and goes away.
It is possible to have a peaceful, still mind. We have been there and are taking steps to spend
more and more of our time in that pleasant place of being. You can go there too, and we will give you a road map and tools for the journey.
The following is a list of helpful guidelines for meditation. Please, please don’t think of them as rules. The “R” word is an automatic signal to our inner adolescent, which is committed to breaking, ignoring or otherwise circumventing anything that smacks
of authority. Also, we know from experience that our creative ADDult readers will come up with new, improved versions of our ideas, tailored to their unique brain style.
An ADD-Friendly Guide to Meditation