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Self-Help And Support Group Information

The Long Haul

Many people have the mistaken view that Attention Deficit can be fixed by a pill or technique that will instantly "fix us.". This is simply not true. We need to carefully consider all the "side effects" of ADD in our lives and carefully, rebuild these damaged emotional areas inside ourselves.

One thing to consider is our self-esteem. Self-esteem is built on our history of success. This is reinforced by ourselves, and more importantly others in our lives. Our life experience is more often one of failure, and not one of success.

In our lives now, we need to learn those patterns that will build our success, not the ones that reinforce failure. If you do not know how to be successful at a task, then ask someone you trust who is successful, to help you and show you how to do it.

Another area is our difficulty viewing the actual "reality" in a given situation. To clearly see and understand a given situation, we must be able to take in and process all the information necessary to make a "reasonable" decision.

With ADD we often miss critical information and are seemingly unaware of it. We have learned "substitution" or "next best guess" techniques to compensate for this. The sad news is this approach most often causes us to make decisions based on what we would like to see, and not what really is. As this pattern continues we often create a history based on falsehoods and misrepresentation which gets us into deeper and deeper trouble. Again, ask the opinion of someone you trust, paraphrase the situation to them, and ask what they think.

Adult self-help groups can be a big help in learning what patterns you have in common with other adults, as well as compensation techniques that others use successfully to compensate for ADD behaviors.

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