Can a person with ADD/ADHD start a group for ADDers.

[Evelyn]

I haven’t been able to find help with the issues of life that my ADD seems to magnify out of proportion and I can’t imagine that I am the only one.

My largest problem is motivation. Most recently just the motivation to get off the couch and go to my bed. It started kinda slow, I lost motivation for more energetic concerns long ago. But this is getting really ridicules.

I don’t know what to do.

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[MarieAngell]

Evelyn, I don’t have a magic wand, though it would be lovely, wouldn’t it? What does sleeping on the couch mean to you?

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[Patte Rosebank]

@Evelyn, that sounds so familiar to me…

And it may be more than just ADD-related procrastination.

What you’re describing makes me think you might have a bit of depression too.  Did your loss of motivation get worse during your recent difficulties at that driving job?  I know from experience that my own mood is very affected by the situations I’m in.

In the years before I found my current job, there were times when I had such terrible depression that the only thing I had the energy to do, was lie on the couch and eat ice cream and cheezies all day.

Is there a counsellor you could talk to about this?  Even calling a helpline, just to chat for a while, will make you feel better.  And, if you feel you need more than that, don’t hesitate to talk to your doctor about it, or to ask the helpline to refer you to a low/no cost mental health clinic.

Most of all, remember:  You are not alone.  You are a wonderful person, and you deserve to have the help you need to feel better.

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[Evelyn]

MarieAngell, If I knew that I might be able to stop.

But usually people sleep on the couch when they are visiting. Perhaps a temporary place. But this is my house…Almost.

Mostly I think I just don’t want to get up and go to bed.

You do have a good point, and I have been thinking about it, but I keep coming up blank.

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[Evelyn]

Larynxa, No the problems with motivation really started a long time ago, but I remember them as being more manageable.

I started taking care of my father back in 2002, Who had a hernia the size of a basket ball and skin cancer on his forehead that would bleed uncontrollably for seemingly no reason. I decided to take him to the hospital one day instead of taking him home as usual. All while I was working for a small advertising circular (shopping guide). I was also painting signs, and starting my own poetry magazine at the time.

Shortly after I started taking care of my father I lost the job at the shopping guide. My first issue of “The Wee Hours Short Story and Poetry Reader” launched in March of 2003 I had several people lined up to help me get it circulated; delivered house to house. Who did a lot of talking and no walking.

There were so many magazines that I became paralyzed with the overwhelming task of delivering the mag and trying to get the next issue out, sell ad space and do interviews.

By July nothing was done, I lost my job, The magazine, I couldn’t sell a sign to save my soul and I had to move in with my dad because he couldn’t live alone.

I could go on… but to make a very long story short I suppose I could be depressed, on top of loosing my job, and two businesses, I also lost my truck, filed bankruptcy, then lost my father, then my boyfriend was killed at work. Then I lost the house I was living in.

Family swooped in sold the house and we split the money, equally. I wish they would have done equal work so I wouldn’t feel so taken advantage of. I feel I should have gotten at least a little more but they didn’t see it that way.

I had to move home to my Moms, I learned to drive a truck then went on the road. Got sick had to stop driving for a while. Then found out my mother had lung cancer. She died six months later. I had to take care of my stepfather who had Alzheimer for her. which I did up until December 7, 2013.

My sister moved in the house in early November, she is still here and supposed to be helping my pay the bills.

Maybe I am a little depressed.

Those were just the big things.

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[Evelyn]

Larynxa,

Forgive me. I don’t know how I missed this post. Thank you.

I don’t know where to get the help I need. 10 years is a long time. My friends were already a lot younger than me, they passed me by long ago. I don’t fault them for it, they were living their lives, I know that, It does hurt sometimes though, that now that I have time for them they don’t have time for me.

I need to get out and make new friends but I feel vulnerable now and needy. Which my friends may be picking up on. But I’ve set my feelings aside so long they just spill out sometimes. And I’m still stuck.

I’ve been trying to write more. And I’m trying to get my website presentable so I can use it to sell, or at least promote, some of what I produce. Of course some of producing is getting that website going.

“Catch 22 !!!”

If I could just stop feeling like I’m being pushed away and ignored I would probably be ok.

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[Evelyn]

I do go to the Guidance Clinic, it is state funded, for now, but they are not willing to do more than prescribe pills.

Before I started driving truck, I was seeing a therapist, but they canceled the therapist program at the Guidance Clinic except for children. I didn’t feel like it helped much either but that was before I was diagnosed, as an adult, with ADD. I don’t know why they just prescribe drugs but I think it might be easier to make money on drugs than it is to listen to people sort out their problems.

In another forum, I’ve forgotten which one, someone made reference to a program for building 3 tiny habits, I is a good program. I found it helpful and motivation isn’t really necessary, I am still doing the habits I started with that program. I will eventually be able to build on them and perhaps form a structure that will help me stay on track.

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[Evelyn]

The link to the tiny habits is:
tinyhabits.com

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[Evelyn]

Oh sorry they don’t allow links. I tried to put a link in a post, oops. Look up 3 tiny habits in your browser, BJ Fogg is the guy’s name. He doesn’t charge and the program is five days.

He tells you how to keep it simple too. I read everything I could find on the website before I submitted the habits I wanted to start.

Mine were:
After I get up, I will turn on the shower.
After I pour my coffee in the morning, I will take out my notebook.
After the 11:00 news, I will turn off the TV.

The beauty is that I didn’t have to take the shower, just turn it on, it reminded me to take my shower early enough that I would have it done so it didn’t interfere with plans for later that day. But for the sake of the habit you release yourself from the responsibility of actually taking the shower.

My notebook had been neglected a lot. I just kept forgetting til it was so late at night that I couldn’t write even if I felt like it. So getting it off the shelf with my morning coffee gave me the opportunity to write if I wanted to.

And last, to turn off the TV after the 11:00 news was… to turn off the TV. I was also hoping it would help me get off the couch at night to go to bed. This one I had to reinforce with an alarm set for 11:30 to wake me up to turn off the TV which helped, at least I’m not wasting electricity while I sleep on the couch.

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[Patte Rosebank]

@Hey, Evelyn!  Great to see you back here!

It’s interesting that most of your friends were a lot younger than you, and have surpassed you in life accomplishments.

ADD’ers often have friends who are either much younger or much older than they are, because our socio-emotional ages are about 30% lower than our physical ages.  This makes it very difficult for us to connect socially with our peers.  And we often underachieve, compared to them, because of that social impairment.

Most people who meet me think that I’m about 27 or 28.  In fact, I just turned 43.  But I feel, think, and act like I’m 27 or 28, and I look like I’m 27 or 28 (partly due to the great complexion I inherited), so people are convinced that I’m lying when I say I’m 43.  So, I just say I’m 28.

The bonus of this “30% factor” is that my brother is actually 3 years younger than I am, but everyone is convinced he’s at least 5 or 10 years OLDER than I am.  He has an MBA, a solid career, and his annual income tax bill is several times my annual salary.  He also started getting a light frosting of grey hair, when he was 27.  I, however, only discovered my first (and still my ONLY) two grey hairs, last year:  two tiny “witch whiskers” under my chin!

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Bottling up our own feelings, to avoid possibly (which we’re sure is “certainly”) disappointing or upsetting other people, is a really big ADHD thing.

We feel so worthless that it makes us convinced that we have no right to disagree with, or to refuse anyone.  So, we take on way too much, desperately trying to prove our own worth, by doing whatever we’re asked to…but then going far, far beyond what was asked, and failing at that impossible task.

We feel so put-upon, but we just bottle up all that resentment, and get angrier and angrier, until, all of a sudden, we explode with rage…which makes us feel so horribly guilty, that we feel much worse than if we’d just expressed our true feelings from the start!

But, despite all that, we tend to still have this faint, lurking hope that someone’s going to rescue us from it and/or that next time, we’ll get that happy ending we crave.

Kind of like the “Bill” character on “The Red Green Show”.  After even the most spectacularly painful “Adventure”, he beams at the camera, gives a big thumbs-up, and confidently carries on to the next one.  (Or faints.)  Bill is our poster child.  And in the final episode of the show, he gets his happy ending.  It’s beautiful.

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It’s a big project to overhaul a website.  I’ve just been poking around my own, and I’ve noticed quite a few things I need to tweak…someday…when I get around to it.  And I’m working on a writing project, with a whole bunch of new ideas that I have to hammer into shape.

So many things I need to do…   So, of course, I want to keep reading this fascinating book about arsenic poisoning in Victorian England, because it always feels like procrastination is easier than actually tackling the job at hand.

The first part of the “Start Now” webinar (about procrastination) is now in the archives, and it’s free to view, as long as you’re a *registered* (not necessarily Premium) member.

And you are!

Maybe it’ll help give us the push we need.

http://totallyadd.adobeconnect.com/p2ot60fyu4j/

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Hey, I’ve been doing “Tiny Habits” without even knowing about it!  Cool!

 

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[Evelyn]

Larynxa,

Is that the only one? I couldn’t find a list. they also didn’t say which day the next one will be. They didn’t have a date for that one either, that I noticed.

But you are right it was an interesting discussion.

——————) The trick is to tack it to the habit before it.

The “After I ____________________________, I will ____________________________.

I have so few habits, that I can count on that I found it hard to find something to attach my new habit to. That is also why I have to build the structure. I will have more good habits to tack other tiny habits to.

They only seem insignificant, but in reality it’s just that little boost, that nudge, toward something positive.

It gives me something to celebrate about myself!

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[Patte Rosebank]

@Evelyn, we’ve only had the one “Start Now” webinar so far.  The next is coming up on Thursday (March 14th), and the last is two weeks after that (March 28th).

Those little steps really add up.  I guess each little success made the next one easier, because I didn’t notice how far I’d come until someone else pointed it out to me.

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[Evelyn]

That is what I am looking forward too.

I don’t know if I will always be a little out of sync with everything around me but I will keep going anyway. Maybe I’ll wake up one day and find myself in sync with something…

I was trying to think of something to be in sync with it just wasn’t coming to mind, OK I think I’ll just sign off for now.

This website, and you, are a lot more helpful than I first thought possible. I don’t mean to sound sappy, but thank you.

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[Patte Rosebank]

You’re very welcome, @Evelyn.  And it’s not sappy at all.  It’s lovely.

I always felt out of sync with the world too.  Never seemed to fit in with my peers.  Always experienced things in extremes.  And never knew why I was so different.

My first epiphany was when I realized that laughter would save my life.  I was truly at the precipice between life and death (where no 10-year-old child should ever be), and I saw, with crystal clarity, that there was so much happiness and laughter waiting for me that I simply couldn’t miss out on it.

So, I embraced laughter as the driving force in my life.  I discovered it was easy to make people laugh, and that if I could to find something to laugh at (even cynically) when things went wrong for me, I’d be okay.

Being different led me to laughter, so I made the most of being different.  While still wondering why I felt so different.

But after high school, things went downhill fast.  And I lost my laughter, as I bounced from failure to failure, totally rudderless.

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My second epiphany came on February 26, 2010, when my brother sent me this article (http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/diseases_cures/2010/02/26/comic_rick_green_talks_about_his_adhd_seriously.html), with the note, “This sounds just like you!”

We’d enjoyed Rick’s comedy work, since we were kids, going to tapings of the radio comedy show he was a part of.  But this was something new.

As I read the article, I began to realize that this could be why *I’d* always felt so different.  And why I’d felt so UNdifferent when I was immersed in that comedy world.  Could this person who’d made me laugh so much, have the answer?

I went to the TotallyADD website, did the diagnostic tests, and scored very high.

I printed out the results and discussed them with the psychiatrist who had been treating me for Bipolar II.  He read them and began asking me a lot of questions, including about my childhood.  Then, he thought for a moment and said, “Based on all of this, I think that it’s highly likely you do indeed have ADHD – Combined Subtype, and NOT Bipolar II.”

Unfortunately, he’d taken on way too many patients, and the hospital soon ordered him to drop half of them, including me.

Stuck in limbo, I turned to TotallyADD, to learn as much as I could.  I found answers and encouragement and such a wonderful sense of community, with everyone helping everyone else.  I was inspired to keep learning and keep trying and keep sharing.  Without realizing it, I was taking tiny steps to change my life.

When I finally had my first appointment at a proper ADHD clinic (just over 4 months ago), the doctor and the coach were amazed at how far I’d come, all on my own.  They weren’t half as amazed as I was!

But I was quick to point out that I *hadn’t* done it “all on my own”.  I’d had so much help and inspiration from everyone here in the TotallyADD community!

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Isn’t it nice to have this place where we’re actually in sync?

So, I guess I’ve just answered the question in the title of this Topic:  “Can a person with ADD/ADHD start a group for ADDers?”  Absolutely!  And we’re so lucky he did!

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[Evelyn]

I really do want to do something to help people in this area because I’m sure I’m not the only one. But how do I help people with problems that I haven’t solved for myself yet.

My thinking is that a group of people could help each other, but don’t they need some type of structure to build upon?

Where do I begin? The only group I’ve ever done was a poetry group.

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