You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (53 page)

“Two years later I ran into the same man, only this time he was with his girlfriend. To my utter astonishment, I found that she was bigger than me! Of course, I rationalized; she was taller, more statuesque. She carried the weight better than I did. Still, I could not deny that the stories I told myself had been called into question.
Maybe my appearance was not the problem I thought it was.

“I came to see that it’s not the weight but the way you carry it that counts. I began to notice that I didn’t feel heavy at all on those days when I felt good about myself. Like my beloved aunt Mary, who carried a lot of pounds but was light on her feet, I could dance through life. On days when I was riddled with self-doubt, it was as
if someone had drastically turned up the ‘G factor’ in gravity.

“Recently, I was chatting with a group of friends and found myself patting my five months’ gestation stomach (not pregnant—I am past that stage of life) and making a crack about getting in touch with my inner whale. In that moment, I realized I was home free. I could talk about my weight openly. I no longer felt ashamed.

“You may
be wondering why I included this fairly long dissertation on weight problems in a book on ADD. This is not merely a useless tangent. Problems with poundage are a pretty good metaphor for all the heavy, useless, negative thoughts we allow to
reside in our brains, rent free. If we can visualize those poisonous clumps of ‘stinkin’ thinkin” as physical mass dragging us down, we might be more likely
to pay attention to their presence. It doesn’t help to chant positive affirmations all day long, trying to slap up a paint job over mildewed walls. We need to do the cleaning and prep work before laying on a shiny new surface.”

In this chapter, we will share some mental hygiene techniques designed to help you begin the process of cleansing your brain of the negative thoughts you accumulated before you knew about ADD. This book, of course, is a self-help book. But we don’t recommend that your process of recovery be a do-it-yourself operation. A coach, a counselor or both can be the charge-neutral people on your team
who reach in to offer a way out when you are swimming around in the nasty waters of a mental cesspool. You are worth whatever it takes to feel better about yourself.

In Times of Crisis … All Bets Are Off

Before giving you some helpful tools—the things that serve as soft cloths, scrub brushes and mild-but-effective “brain soap” in our mental hygiene toolkit—we suggest checking in with yourself
a bit. Look at what is going on in your life right now. Has something got your situation spinning out of control so fast that you will need help in taming it first? In that case, “all bets are off.” You need to have a nonslippery surface to stand on before you can tackle the mental hygiene tasks on your own. What sorts of things do we mean?

You have lost your job, your spouse, your home or custody
of your kids. You have a DUI, other legal trouble or have been expelled from school. Maybe you have been hit by more than one disaster at once. Sometimes the trouble may seem milder, such as missing a deadline or bouncing a series of checks. You feel that you are at the end of your rope. The specifics don’t matter. If it is a crisis for you, it is a genuine crisis. You are overwhelmed by emotions.
Perhaps there is a barrage of nasty self-talk coming from a judgmental voice in your head, drowning out everything else much of the time. You can’t function. We are not talking about the standard ADD baseline level of dysfunction that you have learned to live with, after a fashion.

This is not the time to go it alone
. If you have a therapist, call for assistance in dealing with the crisis. A
trip to the hospital may be in order if you are severely depressed or have other serious psychiatric symptoms. Many communities have psychiatric emergency rooms or crisis intervention teams that may even come to your home. In most cases, people in crisis do not need hospitalization. Emergency or crisis intervention personnel will make a plan to help you recover from the immediate crisis.

Staying
with a supportive friend or family member can be very helpful. They can act as temporary caretakers. There is nothing wrong with letting someone else take charge for a while, until your ability to address problems resurfaces.

Something that we have probably all experienced at one time or another is a state of “emotional boggle,” a difficult situation where we are overwhelmed by our emotions,
unable to think clearly or act decisively. We can tend to forget that the emotional overwhelm leads to mental overwhelm. Quite simply, strong emotions can really mess with cognitive functioning; the problem-solving functions can even shut down entirely in such a situation, leaving us temporarily “boggled.” If you could borrow another brain just long enough for you to move around or through the difficulty,
things might look more doable. When you find yourself boggled, we recommend seeking out such a brain to borrow. This brain could belong to your coach, or even a trusted friend in a pinch (but take care you don’t get into the habit of using friends for counseling—the friendship could really suffer!).

So, what do we do when an attack of self-loathing hits? How do we talk to ourselves differently
so we don’t accumulate more mental sewage? We will get to the answers to those questions, but first we need a brief vocabulary lesson.

Definitions

The following are terms that we will be using in this chapter.

The Witness
—This is the part of us that watches and observes our thoughts, experiences and activities. It merely notes and records experiential data; it does not categorize, comment or judge. It is an aspect of our higher selves (we all have one).

The Judge
—We know you are all too familiar with this character. The Judge is the aspect of yourself that makes judgments about the desirability of your thoughts, feelings, beliefs and actions. Most ADDers get a heavy dose of negative evaluations from their Judge.

Reframing
—Or viewing within a different frame. Just as a painting can
look very different if we change its frame, our experiences can look different if reframed.

Emotional release
—A conscious, intentional release of emotions.

Let’s take a moment to talk about The Witness and The Judge in a bit more detail, since working with them will be a major key to your mental hygiene program. If you skipped the meditation chapter you might want to go back and read it at this
point. A main purpose of meditation is to practice being The Witness—the observer that doesn’t make negative or positive comments about your thoughts, feelings, beliefs or actions. When we meditate, we take a step back from all the mental chatter and let it go on without our involvement or interference.

The goal is to operate as much as possible as The Witness, to separate ourselves from The
Judge. Aside from meditation, how do we practice being The Witness? Well, one trick is to visualize yourself as an alien, a visitor from outer space. This one may come naturally to many ADDults—after all, we have felt like aliens for most of our lives. As an alien you are observing the behaviors of the people you meet—the customs on this new planet are so strange, you have no way of judging them.
You could also imagine that you are a scientist and your job is to collect data without forming an opinion about what you are observing. Another scenario is to picture yourself as a witness in court where you are supposed to report the facts, without adding any guesswork or your interpretation of what happened. An extreme version of witnessing is found in Robert Heinlein’s novel
Stranger in a Strange Land
. In this science fiction tale there is a new group of professionals called Fair Witnesses. When Fair Witnesses are asked to describe the color of a barn, for example, they say, “It is red—on this side.”

Of course, what you are witnessing in this case is not alien planet customs, experimental data or the scene of a crime. You are witnessing your own internal landscape, your self-talk.
The first step is awareness.

For the purposes of good mental hygiene, the goal is to be The Witness and separate from The Judge. The Judge is a part of
ourselves that is not our friend. It hurls nasty criticisms that get in the way of our progress. When we suggest that you separate yourself from The Judge, we are not recommending that you throw out the concept of “good judgment.” Good judgment
is making a choice that serves you and is in alignment with your personal value system. We will talk about personal value systems a bit later, but we want to emphasize here that it is important to examine your beliefs and take out the components that are an unwanted legacy from your mom or your uncle Charlie.

It helps to visualize The Judge as a separate entity. Yours could be a person, an animal
that talks, an animated figure or a monster of some kind. For example, Peggy imagines her critical Judge as a sardonic guy who sits in a lawn chair smoking cigarettes and commenting on her behavior.

The Judge is never right. He/she/it offers a nasty dose of negative criticism designed to keep you in your place—whatever that is. Don’t let anyone try to convince you that there is a certain kind of “constructive” criticism that is helpful. We never learned anything from criticism except to avoid it at all costs. Rather than a steady dose of criticism, we need an enthusiastic cheerleader in
our corner who praises every baby step on the way to change. The better we feel, the more likely we are to make changes that serve us and those around us.

So Just What DO You Mean by “Mental Hygiene”?
Mental hygiene consists of examining your thoughts and beliefs and eliminating those that don’t serve you. The self-talk we keep going on about is where the most damaging of these thoughts and beliefs
reside. Also, finding and using safe ways of releasing emotion is another important part of mental hygiene.

Initially, most of your efforts will go toward clearing the backlog of mental debris that was built up before you knew about ADD. But after much of that has been “washed away,” the attention shifts to maintaining what you have gained.

So, we are not talking about a once-and-for-all binge
of spring brain cleaning, but a program of regular maintenance.

In the next section, we will explore more about what the mental hygiene techniques are designed to address.

Recognizable Bits of Mental Debris

What are the common bits of mental debris that float around in the brains of ADDers? Everyone is unique and will have their own particular way of languaging their self-talk, but there are
common themes and threads that most of our clients express. Some of these were mentioned in earlier sections of this book; we bring them up again in order to work with them in more depth. The following is a list of phrases we have heard over and over again.

I want to do (fill in the blank), but …

I never follow through with anything

I am afraid to have anyone come over to my house … it is such
a mess

I am weird

I will never get it right

I’m ditsy

I am hopeless with money

I have no discipline

I did it again

I can’t screw up one more time

I am so thoughtless and insensitive

I never get anything done on time

I will never grow up

I am irresponsible

I am a lousy husband (or wife)

I can’t control myself

I am too slow

I am too fast

I have to do it all by myself

If either of
us got up in the morning to face a list like that one, we would go promptly back to bed. In fact, we have done just that on more than one occasion. We are not the all-powerful and perfect experts, making pronouncements from on high. We have been working on our own mental hygiene for a long time.

Now, let’s go back to that list of negative self-talk for a closer look. Generally, we don’t say just
one mean thing to ourselves, but a whole string of them. In fact, we can construct such a string from that list of phrases. Let’s start with