Coping Skills for Adults with ADD, ADHD

Written by HealthyPlace.com Staff Writer

Thom Hartmann our guest, is an award winning best-selling author, lecturer and psychotherapist. The discussion centered around healing from the many childhood wounds caused by having ADD, like being told you're stupid and trying to fit in and be accepted by others. Mr. Hartmann addressed the impact that negative self-talk, poor self-esteem have on the ADD adult and different psychological tools that can be used to heal ADD, ADHD (Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

David is the HealthyPlace.com moderator.

The people in blue are audience members.

Conference Transcript

David: Good Evening. I'm David Roberts. I'm the moderator for tonight's conference. I want to welcome everyone to HealthyPlace.com. Our topic tonight is "Coping Skills for Adults with ADD, ADHD." Our guest is psychotherapist, lecturer and best-selling author, Thom Hartmann. You may recognize some of his book titles: Thom Hartmann's Complete Guide To ADD, ADD: A Different Perception, and Healing ADD.

Good evening, Thom and welcome to HealthyPlace.com. We appreciate you being our guest tonight. How did you get into writing about Attention Deficit Disorder?

Thom Hartmann: Thanks, David. I got into writing about this through the confluence of two situations. The first was that 22 years ago, for 5 years, I was the executive director of a residential treatment facility for severely abused children, and virtually all of them came in with labels like "minimal brain damage" and "hyperactive syndrome," which is how ADD and ADHD (Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) were labeled back then. So I got curious and got into the research and Ben Feingold's book Why Your Child Is Hyperactive had just come out and Ted Kennedy was holding hearings on it all in Washington, D.C. I got to know Feingold and we did a clinical trial of his diet at our program (New England Salem Children's Village and Hunter School), and so I wrote that up and in 1980 it was published in The Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, one of the earlier references to this all.

But then it got "really real" for me about 10 years ago when our middle child was 12 and "hit the wall" in school. So we took Justin to be tested for learning disabilities and the fellow told him and us that he had a "brain disease" called ADD. So that's when I really dug into it, and out of that experience I wrote a book to/for Justin, which became Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception, in which I was trying to give him back some small part of his self-esteem, which that doc had totally ripped away from him.

David: We do many conferences here at HealthyPlace.com and the guests usually talk about the importance of medications and therapy. One of the things that struck me in your book, Healing ADD, was this sentence: "The challenge for most ADHD people isn't changing a person from one brain type to another (an impossibility), but, rather, to heal from the many, many woundings that ADHD people experience growing up." What kind of woundings are you referring to?

Thom Hartmann: The woundings of: not fitting in, of being told you're stupid when you know you're not, of not being able to perform things that others do easily. For children, the prime imperative in school is to "fit in" and "be accepted." So it's incredibly wounding for a child when they can't perform, and then, to make it even worse, we slap a label on them that has words in it like "disordered" and "deficient." Tell me, how many children do you know who would ever want to be deficient or disordered? My guess is none. Those are the primary woundings. Then kids try to recover or react to that by blustering their way through things, becoming the class clown or just intellectually dropping out, and then they're called "oppositional" and end up with other labels, and sometimes they commit suicide (the teen suicide rate has tripled in the past 30 years in the USA) and sometimes they seek out friends who will give them back some self-esteem but those are the "bad kids" and this whole spiral sets in that can be so destructive.

David: But, as adults, there are many who are "glad" to find out that there is a label that they can associate with their "difficulties." We get emails all the time from people who say they've been "walking about all these years wondering what was wrong."

Thom Hartmann: Yes - I had a similar response. But as an adult, I'm able to process things differently than children do. Adults know by the time they get at least into their 20s with Attention Deficit Disorder that they're "different" somehow, and many have concluded that their "difference" is that they're bad or morally deficient or cursed or something even worse. And for many, it's a sort of secret. So finding out that there's some rational explanation for it all makes up, in many ways, for the "disordered" and "deficient" label.

Also, adults live in a different world day-to-day from children. Imagine how different you may feel about the "relief of getting the diagnosis and knowing it's ADD, ADHD" if that meant that a couple of times a day your employer would call a meeting and in front of everybody bring you up to the front of the conference room to give you your medication. That's the experience of children. Adults can keep it private.

David: So, as adults, what you are saying is it's important to consider your childhood wounds caused by having ADD, so you can deal effectively with your adult life.

Thom Hartmann: Yes. Every ADD adult I've met carries wounds and pains and misunderstandings from their childhood, and often there's a LOT of negative self-talk around these, and so as adults one of the important things to do about that is to heal it, head on. That's what my book "Healing ADD" is all about. Of course, you can't "heal" ADD - the original title was "Healing from the Pain of Growing Up a Hunter in a Farmer's World," but the publisher said that was too long so I had to write a foreword telling the readers that I wasn't suggesting people could or even needed to be healed from ADD. Good grief. What are some of the other self-destructive patterns resulting from ADD and maybe you could briefly describe what an individual should consider in working towards "healing" them?

The single biggest issue that I almost always see in adults (and teenagers) is poor self-esteem. They had a rough time for years and years, and then to top it off somebody came along and tried to tell them that they have a deficient brain. There are all the social mistakes they've made, the academic problems, and very often, because they come from ADD/ADHD parents, problematic family situations. So the first step is to give them back their self-esteem.

This is done through a process called "reframing," which means seeing something in a new way, bringing a new understanding to it, and finding in it something positive and useful. In this instance, that's the "hunter in a farmer's world" metaphor, which I find personally very healing. There's not anything "wrong" with you, you are just wired differently than what we today choose to call "normal," but at another time and in other circumstances you would be "normal" or even "above normal." And anybody who's ever done a "hunter" job like sales or air traffic control or being in the Army's special forces or being an entrepreneur knows *exactly* what I mean.