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February 20, 2010 at 11:00 pm in reply to: Who is going to the ADHD Workshop in Toronto on February 27th? #92344
Hi Abslt0
Yeah, you may be able to buy them if there are any left. Right now it’s approaching half way sold out, and there’s a whole bunch of newspaper and radio stuff coming this week, so it may in fact sell out. (Wouldn’t that be lovely!) Dunno.
By the way, if you get there early your ticket to the Workshop gets you into the Science Centre. So you can spend a few hours with all the stuff in the halls downstairs. (The Body Worlds show and all the extra stuff is, alas, still an extra admission.)
My daughter saw the Body Worlds show. It’s human bodies preserved in plastic,a nd displayed in cross section or whatever. She said that there was one body with the penis basically splayed open, like Elmer Fudd’s shotgun after Bugs Bunny sticks his finger in the end and Elmer fires it. I don’t know why my daughter told me this, because now I can’t get that horrifying image out of the my head.
Oh, now you’ve got it in your head.
Sorry.
REPORT ABUSEHi All,
First of all, I think the video may be confusing people. I wasn’t speaking as me, Rick. I was kind of playing a character–the ADHD everyman. I have some of those symptoms, but certainly not all of them. For one thing, I’m only on my second marriage. (And trust me, this is it) And gambling in casinos and poker, never really thrilled me. I have the worst poker face and I forget what beats what.
So I was trying to show the spectrum of symptoms, impairments and behaviours that Adults who have Undiagnosed and Untreated ADHD can experience. On the other hand, yes, a lot of it is stuff I know first hand.
That said, thanks for the kudos about the courage it took to make the videos. It was actually not that hard. Once I got present to the costs of not speaking up it was kind of easy. I’ll write a Blog about it.
Looking forward to seeing people! Yes, the listing has disappeared from the Events section of the website a number of times. We call the service provider and they put it back up. And the whole site has gone down a couple of times this year. Frustrating. People who know about this stuff are working on it. I’m not one of them. Thank God!
REPORT ABUSEI’m not a doctor, but I know sometimes a ‘symptom’ can actually just be a kind of secondary result. So, for example, you may take a medication and find you are more social. But the medication didn’t make you m ore social or boost your confidence.
What is actually happening is that your brain doesn’t filter sound as well. It can’t focus on one voice in a crowded room. And you may not have noticed, you just assume everyone has trouble in a noisy room. (And they do if it’s too noisy, but you have a lower threshold.) With the medication, suddenly your brain is better at filtering sound, so you don’t find being in noisy restaurants quite so stressful, you can follow conversations more easily, and so you have a better time, and you’re smiling so people are smiling back…
What I’m getting at is that some symptoms or what seem like side effects may be one or two steps removed from what’s actually happening.
But the change, ‘better at filtering sound’ is not at all an obvious one, right? It’s complex and subtle. You’re so busy following the interesting conversation, you don’t notice the difference.
One of the Doctors we interviewed told the joke about the patient who took their ADHD medication and reported, “Doc, it didn’t do a thing for me, but it sure made everyone else less of an a**hole.
REPORT ABUSEYeah, my son took driving lessons, and they were horrible. The instructor was telling him to speed, saying he didn’t need to signal to change lanes, and even saying, “Pass that guy who’s speeding. It’ll be fun.”
Of course he only told me about this later.
Recently I heard a statistic that young drivers who learn from their parents have LOWER accident rates. The opposite of what it used to be.
REPORT ABUSECan’t wait to hear how it goes.
It’s a fun ride. If you can keep from judging or making yourself wrong when you go ‘off topic’ or ‘into overwhelm’ you will save yourself a lot of mental angst and frustration. If you’re in the middle of a roller coaster ride it goes a lot better to just accept that it’s gonna go up and down rather than stand up and start screaming, “This is wrong! Too many curves! I want off! Why is that hill there?”
WEEEEeeeeEEEE!
REPORT ABUSEOne of the things Doctor Jain talks about in the workshops we do is about the spectrum of Impulsive and Compulsive. Emotional vs. Logical. The HEART people vs. the HEAD people. Heart people do think, and Head people have deep feelings, but when it comes to a decision, heart people trust their feelings and head people trust logic, reasons, arguments. If you think about what car you bought and why, it’s a good place to figure out where you lay on the scale.
ADDers fall at the Impulsive end of the scale. In fact, Impulsivity is one of three key areas of impairment, right? So I would think on the Myers Briggs we would tend to be more intuitive.
The introverted and extroverted I would guess has more to do with whether you fall into the purely Inattentive subtype of ADHD or the Combined Subtype which also includes Impulsivity and Hyperactivity with the Inattention. Boys have a higher rate of the combined subtype, which is why, for a long time, girls weren’t diagnosed nearly as frequency. That girl in the corner, quietly day dreaming, doesn’t disrupt the class and demand the teacher’s attention.
REPORT ABUSE“Whatever” made me smile.
It is wild to find out you’re not alone, and all the stuff you thought made you so unique and so ‘weird and different’ is not quite so unique.
I can’t imagine life without ADHD either. Other people seem so boring sometimes. So Literal. Like they are waiting for life to happen. Cautious. And I think, “They’re missing out on a lot of fun.”
Of course it could be that I can’t imagine what I don’t have.
And sure, it would be nice to have calmness now and then.
But mostly, I like this. And I like it more the more I learn how to manage it and use it to my advantage. It becomes a weapon in my arsenal. Rather than a mysterious form of self sabotage.
REPORT ABUSEI always struggle with time management. It has to do with the four different aspects of ‘Focusing and Attention’ that Patrick talked about in the documentary, ADD & Loving It?!. The four aspects are: Focusing & Distractibility, over focussing or Hyper-focusing at the exclusion of other things that may be more urgent, Selecting the right thing to focus on, and Switching Focus from one thing to another (Which is why it’s frustrating to be interrupted.) For me the Selecting is a problem. I can walk into a room full of stuff I wanna do and think, “Oh I could work on that. Oh, and I want to get that done. And that thing there is fun, I can’t wait to get to it.” I end up looking at everything I want to do, getting a bit started on one then getting distracted by something else… and I’ve done nothing. Or I end up doing something that’s easy and fun and tactile and dramatic, like emptying out a whole cabinet of old paint cans and sorting them by colour and type and getting rid of the bad cans. A great job. Meanwhile I was supposed to be online moving money into my credit card account to avoid an overdue charge! Or whatever.
There’s a couple of things I do to deal with this. They may sound kind of dumb.
One is I actually say aloud what I need to do. I repeat it. “Pay off my Visa. Pay off my Visa.” Then on the way to get my laptop and log online, if I notice a bunch of DVD’s that I wanted to put away but didn’t, a job that will only take a second… Okay, thirty seconds… I remind myself, “Pay off my Visa.”
For the more creative stuff, like writing, the best solution I’ve found is to sit down and just write something. Anything.
So let’s say I have a 700 word article to write. Rather than wait for inspiration and a two hour gap to sit down and write it, I can convince myself to at least create a Word document on my computer. “I’ll just open a document, and write the title. And throw down three ideas.” I won’t spend more than five minutes. (And by the way, i don’t do this if I really only have five minutes. I do this when I have all day but can’t get started.) Three minutes later I’ve got the document, a title, and a couple of ideas… Then another idea, perhaps one that makes me smile, so I expand that with a couple of more thoughts… and that often triggers something… And I’m writing. Sometimes I’m not, but most times I find myself doing way more than five minutes. Even if I go 20 minutes rather than 2 hours, I’ve now done more than I thought. And the amazing thing for me is when I come back later in the day to add a couple of more ideas (Cause our minds solve problems while we work on other stuff. Read The Breakout Principle by Dr. Herbert Benson & William Proctor) I’m always surprised at how much I’ve done. Ideas I wrote down earlier in the day, or even months ago, spark me and immediately get me thinking again.
There’s a great quote we have in the TotallyADD.com office. I put it over a picture of my wife’s charity group, Malamulele Onward.
And the quote is: “We should be taught NOT to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Actions ALWAYS generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom does.”
Or as Nike put it, “Just do it.”
If you are dealing with ADHD, then “Just do a bit of it and see what happens.”
REPORT ABUSEThere’s good stuff in what you say, Fearwidg. It’s a challenge to change lifelong habits, and to realize those habits and behaviours are not you, just stuff you’ve done.
The diagnosis is difficult and tricky. So you need a reliable doctor. But doing a lot of reading ahead of time is good. The videos on the symptoms and diagnosis get into some of that.
One of the issues I still struggle with, and I’m wondering if this is common with other ADDers, is that I have this need to control everything. I like things planned. I’m not big on surprise parties. I want to know where the kids are. It shows up in a lot of little ways, worrying about things or events before they happen, making sure everything is ‘covered’ and everything that could go wrong has been anticipated.
And when I have people working for me, I often give them a job, then end up taking it back when they do one aspect of it wrong. Rather than make sure I explain it well, checking often to see how they’re doing and giving them feedback I go to, “It’s just easier if I do it.” And so I end up stuck doing the stuff I want to pass off. I think this lack of trust in others is partly a result of stuff going wrong in the past and me having no idea why.
I wonder could it also be, since there are things I’m not good at, and struggle with, I can’t imagine someone else can breeze through it, and could actually come up with better results, or at least different but equally good results, if they took it on.
REPORT ABUSEOn behalf of the entire community, you’re welcome! Tell us more about what you’ve been through. It sounds like quite a story.
It’s so important to have support. And it’s so rewarding to be able to provide support.
R
REPORT ABUSEI love reading your stuff ‘fearwidg’
Tics are interesting. Apparently a lot of people have them but they are suppressed. So when they take medication it can actually start to show up. The meds aren’t causing the tic, they are revealing it. One of the most common tics is clearing the throat.
Me? I sniff.
REPORT ABUSEIt may sound trite, but when I’m down or ‘suffering,’ I remind myself I live in the best country in the world, in one of the safest societies in history, with the best medical care, grocery stores full of foods that the richest Kings and Queens could not have imagined even a century ago, with a home full of conveniences that would have seemed like science fiction to my grandfather. It’s everywhere. I look at the traffic lights on the way home and imagine all the work it took to design and build and install them. All the people who did their part to make the drive safe. Heck, look at all the people on this website sharing and supporting each other.
If your partner is trying to transform themselves and has setbacks, you can pat them on the back for taking it on in the first place, and for sticking with it going forward. Some of this stuff is like learning to walk. It can take years. You have to learn a whole new way of doing things. And forget a lifetime of doing them the other way. Making habits means breaking old habits. Anyone who takes that on deserves a pat on the back.
REPORT ABUSEJanuary 27, 2010 at 11:18 pm in reply to: How to succeed in a marriage when one spouse has ADD #91925The thing that’s often missing for the spouse, or partner or boss or whatever of an ADHD person is having a powerful context for trying out new things.
I mean, it’s probably not hard to convince a husband to try out a new position in bed. Cause he figures there’s going to be a payoff. In fact, there’s no convincing needed at all, right?
Have you ever wanted something, a car, or an outfit, or a Blackberry or a trip somewhere. You wanted that thing, badly. You read all about it. You looked at it. You asked people who had one. By time you got to the car deal or computer store or travel agency, the sales person didn’t have to ‘convince you’ of everything. You were sold. You might even have had to hide your enthusiasm, cause they might overcharge you. I mean, if it’s a car, you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars. And you don’t need to be convinced. You know how great the car is gonna be, how much you’ll love it, how much fun it will be to drive…. and so on.
So why do you have to convince your partner to do something?
Obviously there’s something missing for them. They don’t think they’ll love it, or it will be fun, or helpful or worth the effort.
So convincing a partner to take on some of the great suggestions here may be hard or impossible because the reasons you have aren’t good enough for them. Or they’ve never really had the possible benefits explained to them. Or they may have all kinds of beliefs that since stuff hasn’t worked in the past, why should this be different? The question to ask is “What would they want? What would my partner want? What would make them excited?” What’s in it for them? Sure, they want you to be happy. But there has to be more than that. I mean they could give you a billion dollars and that might make you happy, but that’s not likely enough motivation to rush out and try and become a billionaire.
My wife likes spending time with her family. So if I suggest that working late tonight means we can have more time on the weekend to see her family, well, then she’s totally onboard working late.
Does that make sense? The thing is that when we want something fro our spouse, we focus on what we want. What is it your spouse wants? I’ve found I’m way more effective when I start there.
REPORT ABUSEI started on a very low dose of Ritalin when I first got the diagnosis. It was subtle, cause unlike stuff like Valium or whatever, it doesn’t dull the senses, it actually just sharpened them. I always say it was like the best cup of coffee ever. Without the tremor from the caffeine! Ha ha!
I kept waiting for my creativity to drop, (A big fear for a writer) but it never did. Or not that anyone around me noticed. I did however get more done.
What was cool, was that my Doctor said right at the start that I would be more productive, but that he wasn’t interested in simply making me an even more productive and busy worker bee. He wanted me to use the medication to be productive with my time at work so I would actually have more time with my kids, and friends and so on.
REPORT ABUSEManny, I shared your issues about being on meds. I had never even smoked a joint in my life. (I think perhaps I instinctively knew I would like it waaaaay too much. As well as being scared by those ads, “This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs.” The ads were capturing exactly what was happening to some of my high school friends who were heavily into drugs. Sorry, I digress)
The thing that I feel about meds is that it may not be forever, especially if I use the medication as a stepping stone, and take the calmness and focus it provides to now get in shape, start meditating, organize my house and office and finances and so on. (Most of which I’m actually doing!)
I don’t know if I’ll be on medication forever. But then I used to use a lot of caffeine, and how many coffee drinkers will be on caffeine for the rest of their lives? (Caffeine actually being harder on your body than most ADHD meds from what I’ve read.)
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