There’s much to cover in the pages ahead, and it all hangs together around some common truths. So it’s best to put the biggest of those common truths out on the table right up front.
Very early in life – as early as grade school – an ADHD child will realize s/he is different from her peers. This realization can occur at the worst possible time in a child’s development, at that delicate moment when s/he is beginning to learn social connection.
This delicate phase in the child’s life is usually a haven of adult support and encouragement, a time of happy exploration and experimentation with making friends and developing bonds. Most kids learn how to connect, how to reveal and share themselves. They experience inclusion and the joy of tribe. They have successes, they make mistakes, they learn, they grow.
That’s most kids. For the ADHD child, it’s very different.
For the ADHD child, this delicate phase is a protracted disaster. It is a cauldron of disapproval from adults, rejection from other children, exclusion from the group. Being labeled. Feeling unwanted.
So we learn to hide it. We mimic behaviors that we know will make us acceptable and suppress our natural voice. We develop strategies for presenting ourselves in ways that will lead to inclusion; we become, to some degree, someone else – or, at best, a watered-down version of our real selves.
ADHD coach June Silny frames it like this:
“Beneath my bubbly, exuberant exterior I hide a lifetime of anxiety, but people see a neatly-made bed, a promotion at work, dinner on the table, and children who make it to school (just barely) on time. They see a competent, highly-functioning superwoman with a smile on her face. But behind that smile, I’m holding my breath or gritting my teeth almost all of the time – sure that my house of cards will fall at any moment. Thanks in large part to my ADHD, every task takes longer, feels harder, and wears me down in a way I could never explain. It’s lonely, perplexing, and exhausting. This is what it’s like to have ADHD.”
This smiling façade takes its place alongside the other strategies, and ultimately it adds up to a life in hiding. The ADHD child grows up to be the woman June describes above, never quite free to be herself; the hiding becomes just a part of living. Failure in friendships, relationships, career, achieving personal goals – it all culminates in a message to self: you aren’t worthy.
Or capable.
Or lovable.
...unless you present yourself as someone you really aren’t. Someone more generally acceptable.
And so we fake it. We reveal only that part of ourselves we come to believe others will want around, and push down those feelings and expressions of ourselves that might not be understood or accepted.
And we become so used to this that we just come to accept it without thinking. We enable, and even approve of, our own emotional amputation. We become culpable.
This truncation of our real selves even extends to those we love the most – our best friends, our immediate family. They may know about our ADD, our impulsivity, our brownouts, our excesses – but that doesn’t stop us from scrambling to hide them, just so we don’t lose their love.
That’s no way to live.
The problem becomes, how do we come out of the shadows and into more authentic relationships without alienating those we love?
There are two major components to solving that problem. The first is the management of expectations, which is the entire point of this book: if we want richer, more authentic relationships with those we care about, we must help them expect what will happen, rather than to be surprised by it – to make clear the differences between us up front, so they can gradually come to be treasured, rather than becoming burdensome.
The second problem is tougher. We, the ADD friend/partner, must do something that doesn’t come easily at all: we must place our trust in the other, realizing that our trust may or may not be rewarded in the end. We must do what we’ve spent a lifetime avoiding – take a risk.
We have to let go of our façade, opening up about who we are, and presenting those parts of us that are different without shame or embarrassment. We have to say this is who I really am, and move through those disclosures about ourselves that follow in these pages. And we must do all of this within a framework of what may be unprecedented honesty and vulnerability.
If we undertake this difficult and frightening course, we will be rewarded in an important way, even if our efforts don’t succeed, in the end, with a particular person: we will have presented ourselves in earnest, and the usual response is respect.
Respect for the ADD adult we actually are – that's worth embracing, no matter the outcome.
Here’s a start...
“My ADD makes me different, and sometimes it’s hard to feel different. To be honest, I’ve probably gone overboard, trying to fit in, most of my life. But I don’t want to go overboard with you; I want to be myself, so that the things we do together and the conversations we have can be more real. I’m not always as authentic as I want to be – and I want to be, with you. If you’ll let me share some things about myself, maybe it will help us enjoy our time together more deeply. Is that okay?”
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