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I believe that I
may have Attention Deficit Disorder and am wondering what your thoughts are on this. I
couldn’t find any mention of it on your website unlike other mental disorders. I have been
previously diagnosed as having Bipolar II and clinical depression, though I never followed
up with my doctors or medications because I did not believe these diagnoses to be accurate.
Although, I do feel something is amiss with me and I feel that ADD most accurately describes
my experiences.
I will briefly explain why. Starting in childhood my mother would often comment
that I needed to “pay attention/be more aware of my surroundings.” I never understood what she
meant, but I have gotten similar comments from others as an adult amounting to me being forgetful,
not paying attention, “in my own world” etc. I also often had the problem of misplacing/forgetting
my house keys as a child and adult. Locking myself out of my apartment quite frequently when I
lived by myself for a year. Which I remember my father would also do consistently. In fact, I
think if ADD is real that I would have “inherited it” from him. He is similarly forgetful, has
chronically changed jobs/occupations, and generally been very unstable most of his life.
The most concerning thing is not being able to stay at any job / build
occupational stability. I have had 20+ jobs and am only just approaching the age of 29. Essentially
I would feel like I was going to have a heart attack almost everyday when I was going to work. I
thought it was maybe just that job/work environment in particular, but I seem to reach that point
of intense anxiety at every job and eventually I can’t muster up the energy anymore to push myself
through it and so I give up.
I always seem to reach a point where I feel trapped at any given job and it
is like my brain shuts down. I start to make little mistakes. I get in trouble. I can’t seem to
force myself to continue with the work. I start to feel like the stress and anxiety is no longer
worth the money. But why can’t I just suck it up since I need money to survive? I end up quitting
anyway. Other people can suck it up at their crappy jobs but I can’t seem to. I just become
overwhelmed and pretty much reach a point where I figure I have to leave and can never return to
whatever job it is. . . . I feel I am not living up to my potential.
The only thing I have been able to maintain pretty consistently was being in
school. I believe the reason I was successful in school and specifically in college is because I
enjoy learning, researching, thinking. Unfortunately, my school was heavily steeped in Marxism as
it was a private, very liberal arts school. So I have been having to unlearn a lot of things I learned
there. I converted to Catholicism in 2018, thanks be to God. Since then I have been trying to discern
how to live rightly and what is God’s will for me.
I guess I am wondering, do you believe that ADD is a real disorder? Might I have
it or something else? Or am I simply just lazy/disorganized/inattentive? I don’t think that I am lazy.
I live with my sister and a roommate and I do pretty much all of the house hold cleaning and maintenance.
I don’t mind doing housework, dishes, etc. If someone asks for my help I will help them. I just can’t
seem to stick to a job though. I feel i can’t quite get a proper grasp on adult life because of this.
I feel embarrassed and I feel like a failure.
I hope that by returning to education I will have a better vision for my life.
But if I do have ADD or something else, I want to get that under control and stop causing myself such
problems.
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 s ADD real? Well Attention Deficit
Disorder (ADD) and the related Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are
a collection of psychological symptoms that in themselves are actual (i.e., “real”).
But neither of these collections of symptoms (which can be called a “disorder”) is
real in the way that cancer, for example, is a real illness that results in real biological
damage. In contrast, the symptoms of ADD (such as difficulty concentrating, difficulty paying
attention, and difficulty learning) and ADHD (essentially ADD with added hyperactivity) cause
psychological distress rather than physical damage.
Consequently, the causes of ADD and ADHD are
psychological—and when looking for psychological causes the first place to look is at a
person’s childhood.
A Preliminary Note
As a preliminary note, let’s be honest here and admit
that the childhood causes of any disorder cannot be easily established with scientific
research. Most parents not only are loath to admit any responsibility
for their children’s dysfunctions, but they also tend to be ignorant of such
responsibility. Thus a researcher cannot determine the truth just by asking about it.
Nevertheless, when talking to individuals in psychotherapy, their memories of their childhood
experiences and their parents’ behavior can be discovered. Hence the evidence is there,
even if it cannot be established through controlled scientific experimentation and
observation.
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Note carefully that when ADD
or ADHD occur in childhood, the treatment for children should not be
medication; instead, the parents must do
psychotherapy to overcome their own
anxieties so that they can demonstrate to their children a life
of quiet, attentive, prayerful trust in God. |
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Two Themes from
Childhood
Anger
Now, in your case, I perceive two themes related
to your childhood. First is the theme of anger at your father. As
I have explained on my webpage about The Role of a Father, a father’s
failures in his responsibility as a father often leads to problems in learning and in failures
to achieve life success. With the pain of a failed father working in them, many children
learn nothing, engage with nothing, and accomplish nothing—just as you
have described about yourself. Here, then, the issue in not about some disorder called ADD but
about unconscious anger at your father.
Ignoring the Truth
The second theme is your lack of attention to
what is occurring around you in the present. Locking yourself out of your home is a good
example. In this case, while you are locking the door you are not focused directly on the task
of locking the door; instead you are preoccupied with thinking about something else. This
illustrates that the problem is not about “ADD” as a disorder but with the psychological
tendency to do one thing while thinking of something else. This points to the likelihood that
your childhood lacked a calm atmosphere of peace and security necessary to develop clear, focused
thinking; that is, your parents must have had their own disturbing “nervous” issues (i.e., anxiety
about their own unresolved childhood emotional traumas) such that you suffered the emotional
pain of being ignored and misunderstood by your parents. Thus, to survive emotionally, you learned
to ignore the truth of your painful and frightening experiences in the moment. In essence,
you learned to ignore the truth of your emotional pain in order to hide the truth that your
parents failed to live honest, spiritual lives.
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Why would any child be disposed
to “ignoring the truth”? Well, in the most basic sense, the truth about the parents of an
ADD child is that the parents have failed the child somehow. But with ADD the truth goes
deeper than ordinary parental failure. For example, it can be asked
why a child of an alcoholic parent does not develop ADD issues. The answer is that an alcoholic
parent is simply and clearly dysfunctional, whereas the parents of an ADD child
appear to be normal but are really driven by irrational behavior. Thus the ADD child gets caught
in the distress of a pretense; that is, the child wants to put trust in the parents but
at the same time knows that the parents who pretend to be so normal are really so irrational
that they cannot be trusted. Consequently, the child, in encountering the pretense of the family
environment, finds it too terrifying to accept that the parents cannot be trusted, and so the
child learns to ignore the truth of the environment altogether. From then on, the child
fails to pay attention to most everything—and there the ADD begins. |
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So What Can You Do?
1. |
In regard to your anger at your father, it will
be necessary to use psychotherapy or deep spiritual
scrutiny to work through and heal the emotional pain of your parents’ failures. You will know
that you have healed when you can state the facts of your childhood emotional wounds and yet
not get angry about it all. For more explanation, see my webpage
Healing. |
2. |
In regard to your lack of attention, it will
be necessary to train yourself to focus on what you are doing while you are doing it. The
best and most simple Catholic technique to use here is to train yourself to say the
Jesus Prayer constantly: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,
have mercy on me. It may sound odd, but when you do anything while praying the Jesus
Prayer “in the background,” the prayer will assist you in maintaining clear focus on whatever
task you are doing. Two reasons can explain this. First, the prayer will protect your mind
from wandering into extraneous and unnecessary distractions
(especially thoughts of resentment and anger), and second, the prayer will help to keep
thoughts of God in your mind and on your lips so that you will be gracefully attuned to
the presence of God in your life. Learning this process is not difficult; it just takes
resolute determination and perseverance to stay with it, even though the beginning of the
learning will be filled with inevitable lapses.
Another technique for acquiring mental focus
is called Autogenics. This technique requires some
specialized self-training practices, but I have described it all very clearly on that
webpage. |
3. |
In regard to your mental paralysis (e.g.,
inability to continue with the work to be done), it will be necessary to use constant prayer
to call upon divine help when you feel stuck. Use short prayers such as, Lord, I’m stuck and
don’t know what to do. Help me find my way through this task. This type of prayer can
counteract the helplessness you felt as a child when you “knew,” but were too terrified to admit,
that your parents were of no help in guiding you. |
Summary
In summary, then, your problems are not really
about ADD as a disorder but about the emotional wounds from your parents’ failures in your
childhood. The cure is not medical, and it’s not about medications; the cure is about working
psychologically through the emotional pain of your childhood wounds.
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