Just a follow up to the last post.
Here’s a particularly appropriate article from Lew Mills’s website. Lew is a licensed marriage and family therapist in San Francisco and he has ADD. He also created and launched CHADD of Northern California’s website, CHADD Norcal has 21 chapters, if you have ADD and you live in that area, check out their website.
He’s on the same wavelength as me in so far as I believe it can be a ADD is a gift if properly managed and a lot of pain and problems if not. He also has a sense of humour, “ADHD is God’s way of teaching you humility.” here are some excerpts from the article.
I suspect that virtually always, the person with ADHD has experienced significant shame in their life, about things that they were not able to do, and which came easily to others. One part of the difficulty is that the disorder is largely “hidden.” ADHD adults say things like, “If I were in a wheelchair, people would understand how hard I have to try, but nobody gets it with ADHD.” Furthermore, the debilitating aspects of ADHD are hidden from the person that has it also. As children, we cannot figure out on our own that we are disabled by ADHD. Instead, We erroneously attribute our own behavior to “bad character”, lack of motivation, or worse.
Because of this, a central experience of ADHD is humiliation and shame. That sounds harsh, but it is crueler to ignore that, to date, this experience is nearly inevitable. The depth to which our culture condemns the incapacities ADHD brings remains largely unfathomed.
It does bring gifts. I have frequently heard ADHD people say that they know they see something in the world that nearly everyone else is missing. I don’t think this is just a cheap self-aggrandizement, to make up for their pain. I think it is often true. There are two more bits of good news here. I don’t think that treating the ADHD makes these go away. And second, these really are the gifts that we find idealized in children like Huck Finn, or maybe like Harry Potter. They are hard to explain to the “muggles” who don’t live in this wizard’s world, but they are intuited and revered there, even as the wizards of ADHD suffer them like a secret scar.