Statement: My intent in this newsletter is to express as quickly as possible my own beliefs and opinions on matters. I have no problems with people who disagree with my opinion and have even been swayed to rethink my position from time to time.
We are still taking book orders for my new book "ADHD and The Criminal Justice System" and you can get my author's discount from the AMAZON.COM price...
Patrick Hurley was recently appointed to the Professional Advisory Board of the Attention Deficit Disorder Association. For more information you can go to www.add.org
Patrick also spoke on October 15, 2007 at the National Conference on Correctional Health Care
in Nashville, TN on his book. The Conference is sponsored by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC), which has an impressive membership.
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Many persons with ADHD have had months, or years, of counseling in the past, either before or after their diagnosis. We have been provided with many techniques, coping skills and other behavior modification tools.
As an analogy, I think most of us have accumulated, over the years, this really nice, fully equipped shop with the best hand and power tools available. The trouble is that we have trouble utilizing them properly to construct a better life. Also, due to disorganization, we often misplace the tool we need the most, at the time we need it. Maybe in the mess of things we get frustrated in our search and end up doing something else, rather than work on the project.
I do some very amateur woodworking and subscribe to several monthly woodworking magazines with wonderful projects in them. I always felt that if I had all of the great tools that Bob Villa, the T. V. woodworker idol, had that I could do work as well as he does. Unfortunately, having the best tools in the world doesn't make you a great woodworker.
With ADHD, I have found that I often know exactly what I need to do to improve a bad situation. So I have the tool somewhere. But then I procrastinate, or can't use the tool correctly in order to make the project....in this case, the project being "daily life go as planned".
So we are left with many projects that never get started - like the ones in my magazines, or we have partially finished projects, too numerous to mention, that further clutter or complicate our lives. I have something I call being a Ninety Five Percenter...I get projects 95% done, and then struggle finishing them up. I have mentioned this to others with ADHD, who said they could relate to this too. My hypothesis is that as long as we are working on the project, we have that project to fall back on, we can tell others and ourselves that we are still working on the project. If we finish it, we might get a short term sense of gratification, but this seems to quickly turn to dread, as we realize that we have all these other unfinished projects, or a whole new one that needs to be started. This makes no sense to those closest to us, and it doesn't make any sense to us. We start hearing the voices in our heads saying - "look you finished this, it looks pretty good, why can't you always finish things up?" We answer with "I am so disorganized, I just procrastinate too much, I am just lazy, etc. etc. etc".
So even in our short lived moment of triumph, we seemingly turn a positive into a negative, and beat ourselves up over it. So if the project stays uncompleted, we don't have to go through this negative process. I always say to people with ADHD, who beat themselves up mentally, that if we beat ourselves up physically as much as we did mentally, we would probably be dead from trauma injuries by now.
Maybe you can't relate to the above scenarios. If so, you are one of the lucky ones. We all have ADHD differently, and what may be a problem for one of us, may be no problem at all for someone else. I do know that many of the people I work with, talk to, and help, have expressed similar problems to those I described.
When I have a problem in my life, I often know that I possess the tools needed to cope with it, and sometimes I am successful locating them and using them correctly. Other times, I have the tool, but can't seem to find it, or if I do, to use it properly.
If you are like me and read a lot about ADHD, sometimes just knowing that others have these kinds of struggles can be comforting. It can help us think the situation over, and perhaps, if it reoccurs, we can utilize the tools we have more effectively. Finally, knowing others are struggling with the same issues may help us be happier by just accepting things, even if they persist.
I would appreciate any feedback you may have on this newsletter or helpful suggestions.
Thanks and talk to you next month.
Patrick Hurley
addcorridorcoach@aol.com
If you know on anyone who might like this newsletter, please forward it to them, and tell them to go to my web site at www.addcorridorcoaching.com and sign up.
