ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER: WORKING WITH IT IN MY LIFE
by Madelyn Griffith-Haynie

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) has been in the news quite a lot lately. It is what they call a "hot diagnosis". It was once a label reserved for certain hyperactive children. We now know that it can present itself without hyperactivity and persist into adulthood, often unrecognized. We are looking for a way to define it, identify it reliably, and set systems in place to learn to live with it successfully. It may seem as if it is almost over-diagnosed, as often happens when a new disorder comes to media attention. To the people who have to live with it undiagnosed, it is not diagnosed often enough.

I have ADD. I want to share with you the things I have experienced in my personal journey toward sanity, for before diagnosis one feels with certainty that one is crazy.

My own personal moment of truth came at 39, on October 11, 1987. I was absolutely terrified that I was losing my mind. Until this day, my high IQ and level of perceptiveness, paired with the habits developed during a very strict and demanding upbringing helped me to convincingly mask all of the symptoms that could have had led to an earlier diagnosis.

I was a fairly good student. Many people with ADD are not. I channeled my hyperactivity internally -- the only give-aways were the constant foot jiggling and nail tapping, lighting-fast response time, verbal "diarrhea", and the tendency (need, really) to do many things simultaneously. I read while I stretched, studied while I paced, exercised in the shower. My total lack of a sense of time (a minute and an hour *feel* the same to me) was perceived as willfulness or selfishness.

My Herculean efforts at managing went unrewarded. If a particular appointment was essential I learned I could do absolutely NOTHING but watch the clock, completely ready to walk out the door or I stood a good chance of looking up a "minute" later and finding that I had missed it again. "See," my parents argued, "You can be on time when it's something you really want to do. Now why can't you do that all the time?" That was never put to me as a real question. "I don't know," was met with murmers about resistance, or worse, "You just don't want to badly enough." Is that how other people did it? Wanting to? How much was "badly enough?".

Things disappeared and reappeared magically. I was unable to locate any item on a messy desk. "Bring me the scissors on my sewing table" was a task I could never do. I would swear they weren't there. My mind was unable to pick them out from the chaos that surrounded them. "They're right here, what's wrong with you?" was another question nobody but me took seriously. I was always "losing" keys, pens, notebooks, files. I came to believe my brothers were taking things just to bug me. They could always find them. I never could.

I couldn't study in what other people labeled total quiet, nor could I follow a train of thought with background music. "Madelyn is the only teenager I know who doesn't like music." I figured out that the only way I could "get" the information in a lecture or a class was to simultaneously listen, read the teacher's lips, and write down every word. I take verbatim notes. "Don't write, listen!" was a death sentence.I couldn't hear if I couldn't write.

It was a mystery to me why the other students weren't bothered by all the noises that abound in the average school: the conversation outside in the hall, the giggling on the back row, the kids in the playground, the ringing telephone in the teachers lounge. The only way I could drown them out was to sub-vocally repeat every word the teacher said one word behind her, write them down and interact verbally as much as the class would allow. It got me by.

I have trouble with directionality. I was constantly late for classes because I would go the wrong way and have to figure out where I was and how to get back to where I meant to be, no matter how many times I had been there before. "The other students manage to make it to class on time. Why can't you?" I once got a standing ovation for making it to class before the bell rang.

I still can't read a road map very well. My mind can't solve the two dimension to three dimensional leap intact, and all those lines and colors and squiggles make finding where to even start a laboriously long process. When I began dating, no matter how fascinating my escort, I was constantly drawn into the conversations of diners at other tables, distracted by passers by, or unable to contain my enthusiasm for a point of conversation long enough to keep from interrupting. You can imagine the accusations that made me prey to!

My love of cooking became an exercise in frustration. I was a wonderful cook but sometimes I would burn food black looking for an ingredient. "The curry was right on the shelf - where did it go? OK, cinnamon, oregano, parsley, rosemary, thyme -- oh, I have to remember to buy more sage, where did I put that list?"

I never could get the timing right on breakfast. I stopped eating breakfast.

None of these "symptoms" are earth-shattering. The demands of childhood and early adulthood are relatively simple. I developed a reputation for ditziness, chronic lateness, erratic culinary skills and a penchant for eavesdropping, rather than the label of dysfunction. I would probably still be plodding through my life under- achieving without anyone else being aware of it were it not for the publicity about calcium and osteoporosis and my desire to make sure I got enough milk.

Many ADD sufferers notice a worsening of symptoms with some foods. Mine, I now know, is milk. The more I made sure I got my three glasses a day, the "crazier" I got. My Christmas tree stayed up for a year because I just couldn't organize taking it down. "Aah, must be resistance to change." I started missing appointments altogether because I couldn't find my keys to lock my apartment behind me. I became extremely inventive with the excuses I came up with to explain my absences. "Passive aggression?" Once I was house bound for three days. I began to seriously consider agoraphobia as a potential source of my problems.

I was nearly suicidal over my lack of any ability to solve systems problems that everyone else took in stride. "Chronic depression." I spent a small fortune in therapy, blindly accepting any diagnosis that seemed to offer hope of a solution. None of them felt right, but what did I know? I was the crazy one.

The day I discovered the article that changed my life forever I had spent the morning on the telephone with my best friend, a therapist, crying hysterically because my attempt at organizing my office created such chaos that I was left in the middle of the room holding a sheet of paper with literally no clear space to put it down. I had, as I described it, "boggled". Action was impossible. My whole being was on "TILT", to use an old pinball term, and I was desperate enough to tell somebody the truth.

At my friend's suggestion, I took my two little dogs for a walk to try to put some physical distance between myself and my problem. I got distracted and left behind the paper to clean up after them. Out of the trash I picked up some pages from the New York Times Magazine section. Distracted again, I started to read rather than clean. The article was Frank Wolkenberg's "Out of a Darkness." The tears of recognition began to fall almost immediately. I was openly sobbing when I got to the list of symptoms. "I know what's wrong with me! And there's a drug!" I studied that article as if my life depended on it. I can still recite parts of it verbatim. I took it with me to my therapist the next day, barely intelligible as I blubbered my way through it with her. I began to put my list of symptoms together and bawled with every new discovery. And I began the long process of recovery.

So what is ADD? Sounds like everybody fits into that category. Everybody does. We all have a little bit of "absent minded professor" about us. Any of us can get so absorbed in what we are doing that hours pass like minutes. And who doesn't get lost, burn things, forget appointments and have trouble concentrating sometimes?

An ADD diagnosis is one of degree, and determining where to put that line of demarcation is the subject of heated debate. My personal definition is easy. If it is an ongoing problem for you or for your client, try on the diagnosis and start to utilize a few of the techniques that have been found to work. Keep going as long as it helps.

Getting other people to agree with your self- diagnosis is a long, frustrating process. Well over half of the people in the ADD support group I attend are self-diagnosed. Some have never been able to get a professional to agree with them. All of them find life more manageable through identification of the problem and consistent application of systems to bypass the functions that aren't working correctly. The lucky ones, the ones with symptoms definitive enough to come up with a medical diagnosis, receive pharmaceutical help.

Aye, there's the rub. Ritilin, dexedrine, and Adderall, stimulants often prescribed for ADD, are controlled substances. And the medical profession is justifiably cautious in prescribing controlled substances. To make matters worse for those of us who could benefit from the drug, the "control" of the substance is actual. There are limits to the amount that can be produced annually. Many ADD sufferers on Ritalin face what we call "October panic". Given the increasing popularity of the diagnosis, will the limited drug supply last through the year? Some of us manage to come across a trial supply of a drug and now can't get the official prescription. Some of us never even get to try medication.

Some of us are put through a "phased drug trial" by well meaning and poorly informed physicians that sometimes starts with anti-anxiety medication (Librium, Xanax, Elavil, Ativan -- not particulary effective with ADD), moves through anti-depressives (Norpramin, Tofranil, Wellbutrin, Prozak, Zoloft, Paxil, etc.), and stops at the lessening of symptoms that the prescribing physician deems adequate. As one ADDer wrote in an article, "The State Board of Pharmacy keeps a close watch on doctors who prescribe Ritalin and Dexedrine to adults -- and ass covering is the sport of the '90s." Sadly, optimal functioning is a goal that resides solely with the individual sufferer in far too many cases.

The good news is that there is much you can do to improve your life without medication at all, and there is a positive, measurable correlation between the degree to which you are willing to take responsibility for your own well-being and other successes in life. There are increasingly wider support systems available outside the conventional medical establishment, and more and more doctors are becoming ADD aware.

In ADD support groups we learn that our symptoms are not unique and that others have found ways of coping with them. Many of us learn to recognize the advantages ADD gives us. Nobody sneaks up on me in the street. Very little escapes my observation. There is an attendant ability to hyper-focus once the distractibility is handled that gives me an edge in a competitive world. My mind is greased lightning. I have become a champion organizer. I have periods of boundless energy. I am a very creative problem solver. My sense of empathy is legion.

I know in my bones that solutions are individual and that what is growth inducing for one person could be contra- indicated in another, no matter how many other people embrace it. I have developed a keen listening for the clues that tell me when a client is agreeing to some solution rather than the right one for her and I am very slow to label anything mere resistance.

Is there a valid role a coach could have played in my process and can play in the process for other people? Absolutely. It might be slightly different from the way that coach might work with a client without the disorder. A coach who doesn't understand ADD might find herself oddly annoyed at some of the peculiarities of the client with ADD, and find herself asking that question that's really an indictment, "My other clients manage to . . . why can't she?" But in the same way you would never expect the color blind client to sort socks the same way other people do, there are predictable behaviors that are going to be problems for the person with ADD. The standards may have to be different for some areas. Not lower (remember the socks); different.

The coaching challenge is to develop solutions together without making the client feel disabled and disempowered in the process. We have had a lifetime of negative comments and are hypersensitive to them, responding best to unmitigated positive reinforcement. We are much too hard on ourselves. We don't need that from a coach. The best coaches know this instinctively.

The rewards for working with a coach are many, for both client and coach. The unusually rapid strides these clients can make when you identify the problem and come up with some solutions, and their excitement and gratitude when they are finally able to be on time, navigate their world without wasted hours of backtracking, or make a relationship work by changing some basic patterns of communication, are as much fun as being there when a child rides a bicycle for the first time. The feeling of making a difference in somebody's life is palpable. From the client side, having a committed listener and a structured time to work on ADD issues in a non-judgmental arena becomes the model for a new way of relating to the world. Life gets measurably better week by week. Some go on to become coaches to others.

As Frank Walkenberg notes in his article, "'The personality develops around this disability.' Undoing the damage of a lifetime is work for a psychotherapist." And a coach, I would add. Just don't confuse the two.

All rights reserved © Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, 1994

MADELYN GRIFFITH-HAYNIE is an ADD Coach who had been living in New York City at the time of this article, but who has since relocated to Knoxville, TN. She is the Founder and CEO of Optimal Functioning Institute™