Adjusting To Understanding Why, How, and What
With education comes knowledge. With knowledge comes understanding. So the more I read the more I learn, the more I understand. Sometimes I don’t like what I understand.
How about this for understanding, I learned that increased sensitivity is a somewhat common symptom for people with AD/HD. Now I understand why I can be so highly irritable when I have 3 little boys screaming and running around like madmen when I walk in the door. Why I have never enjoyed putting them to bed as they scream and cry to stay up. For some people they can shut it out, it seems I can’t and even though we go through it every night it pushes a trigger that brings out my highly irritated side.
Now imagine that you didn’t understand that you had been like this and that was one of the reasons your spouse usually put them to bed so that they got the nice warm and fuzzy feeling that their parents liked them before they went to sleep. All of a sudden you see a cause and effect scenario and it’s perfectly clear and that for the last 5 years you’ve been an ogre to your children at bedtime. That just makes me feel great.
I learned that despite my best efforts on controlling spending and cutting back on impulses for the last 8 years I’ve failed miserably. I could never figure out why. I knew that I had made my fair share of mistakes with different things, but we had been blessed with decent jobs and decent pay. Now I understand it. I understand that the chemical that is released into your brain when you become excited releases extra dopamine that helps to balance out thinking. Especially for the person who’s brain might be running a little low on it.
So every time I made an acquisition, started something new, or found something I couldn’t live without I would rationalize my reasoning and buy it. Once in a while that’s ok, but for someone with the impulse control of an AD/HD adult - that’s a recipe for disaster. Now I see the difference. It’s frustrating to see the trail of worthless things I’ve purchased or spent time on that really weren’t necessary.
How about this I learned. People with AD/HD are very good at seeing patterns and having an intuitive sense for different things. Growing up I could look at puzzle and see the pieces even though my mother or others couldn’t. It was literally like my brain was processing the randomness into shape without forcing it to. As an adult I found patterns existed in the riverboat casinos on the slot machines. It was only years later that I discovered the pattern the casinos were hiding in the randomness wasn’t random at all. Seeing this helped me to win a lot of money on the one thing you’re odds are the worst at - slot machines.
What’s scarier is that now that I’m falling into my routines I see the why, how, and the what of my actions. And for the bad, the medication is making a huge improvement. I don’t feel the need to acquire, acquire, acquire. It doesn’t change my ability to hyper-focus or multi-task but it takes the urge for the crutches I used to use to manage my brain chemistry. Just ask my wife, she’ll vouch for it.
It’s not alway pleasant to look back and see your past in a different light, but as I keep saying it’s not the past I have to repair - it’s the future I have to keep from getting broken.
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Diagnosis Week 4
Today starts the 4th week of being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. I’ve devoured all the information I can. I have read two of Dr. Halloway’s books and all of the posts and articles I can pertaining to adult AD/HD.
The good news is that I am learning, but even better is that many of the coping methods for surviving at work, finding work, excelling at work are processes and tactics I’ve developed over the years.
With the addition of medication it has enabled me to excel in ways I didn’t think possible. I’m moving faster, more efficiently, clearer, and best of all smarter. It has put me on a ground that I was stumbling as I moved but now am running. I’m so excited for the coming year. It’s going to be a busy year as I’ve just taken on one of, if not the largest project in my group that will last the entire year with a combined team of over 20 people. I’m actually working on a development plan and going to begin working with a mentor to help me refine the skills I’ve always been a little short on. Namely diplomacy.
The bad news is that as my wife and I are talking about it I’ve discovered how completely impossible I’ve been to live with. How I’ve neglected my kids, or been absent in my own world except when dragged kicking and screaming into the family’s existence. How irritable I’ve been towards my family. How selfish and distant I’ve been. It’s affected our finances, not to destruction but I see where I could have been. The only thing to do is to look forward and get moving. I see how I’ve been missing out on things and how it’s affected my children.
In the weeks since starting on the medication I’ve seen them, and they see me. The road to repairing the distance will take time. Especially building trust with my wife, but at least we understand why. My friends and extended family have been great, for those that I’ve told. Some of them are already seeing a difference.
Today was an interesting day. I woke up at my usual time and started my day out in a typical way. Today I resolved to forgo medication to see how I handled the day and what it brought. Being a Saturday there was low risk of screwing things up. That is until my wife walks in and confides that I’ve been an irritable grump the whole morning and that this is what I’ve been like for the last 8 years. I knew I was grumpy but didn’t know I had been that irritable. I promptly went downstairs and took a half of the dosage the doctor prescribed. I hate to say it but within an hour I felt a differnce as well. My whole demeanor changed.
If this is what I’m going to be like then I need to adjust and retry later. After I get some exercise built back into the routine. So much for controlling without medication.
Anger On Thanksgiving
Yesterday was Thanksgiving. The day we get together and have fun. Eat, watch a little football, talk to family, your mom critiques something about your life, you get to listen to other family members drone on and on and on…..
Today was a good day for me because I didn’t have to cook. Well actually I forgot to make my dish so my wife got to make it instead. So I didn’t do anything other than bathe the three monkey’s, get them dressed and load up the van to go to Mom’s. Almost my entire family was there with their family so it was a packed house. There was a lot of good food and the kids were having fun.
My mother made a great meal. Everyone brought additional food and there was a great spread. Departing from the traditions of her mother, Mom used paper plates instead of the good silver and China. Very wise on her part with the number of smaller children that have a tendency to drop things. Well the older ones do to. The food was great. I ate a whole plate. I think my family was surprised I didn’t go back for seconds but that’s a side effect of the meds. I haven’t told my family about being diagnosed with AD/HD because I don’t know how they’ll react. It’s met with a lot of doubts.
After the meal we dive into the pie and enjoy homemade apple and pumpkin pie. The kids finish and they’re off. Playing in the yard, running off the calories they just consumed. My wife, brother, sister in law, Mom and step-father are sitting there talking pleasantly and my 2 year old son comes in and climbs onto our laps. It was really nice. It seemed like we were getting along so nicely. (can you sense the but coming?)
My brother gets up and brings back a piece of pecan pie. Then my sister in law gets one. The second they sit down my mother very nicely says explains that we weren’t going to eat that until after my family left. My son is allergic to all nuts. DEATHLY allergic to them. The same son that is sitting across the table from them. My wife, mother, and I try to be very polite about explaining it’s not a good idea to eat that right now. They keep eating.
My wife gets up with our son and storms out. My brother asks me if she left because they are eating that pie. I explain again it’s a life threatening allergy for my son and go find my wife. She and my 2 year old are locked in a bathroom and she’s so angry she’s practically in tears.
This is where my itch kicks in. I call it an itch because I know there’s a right and a wrong way to handle this but the closer I get to the table the less I see the right and my itch is an inflammation and I’m wondering how I’m going to scratch this so it’s not bad. Then I’m thinking how am I going to keep myself from walking into the room and not rip my brother and sister-in-law’s head off. I wasn’t but that’s what it felt like. This entire conversation happened in my head in the space of 1.5 seconds.
I walk in the room and sit down. That’s good. I didn’t do explode. I start out calm, but I think they could see I was upset. I explained that my wife and son were in the bathroom because they can’t be around it. My brother and sister in law at this time start to denounce the reality of the allergy and that it wasn’t anything. ”There’s no way it can be that bad. Do you know how many things are made on equipment that is processed on peanuts.” That’s what he says. I am trying to explain rationally that for every package of food we buy that comes in a bag, box, container, wrapper, we read the labels. They have to print if it was processed on equipment that was processed on nuts.
For the uninitiated nut allergies account for approximately 80% of all food allergy deaths in the world. My son has a reaction if he breathes dust from a grinder. At this point I make a motion with my hand as if I was laying something down on the table and yell “You eating that pie is like putting a loaded gun on the table and point it at my son.” I am enraged. I am thinking that if this goes on I’m going to beat him. He still denies anything is going to happen. That there’s nothing to worry about. How can someone not see that all it takes is for him to pick up his plate put it with the rest of the pie and eat it when we leave in 15 minutes.
I am screaming that if he touches my son, or if the kids pick up the crumbs, or he picks up the crumbs and is exposed it could kill my son. Would you want me doing something around your children that would kill them? My sister in law at this point says “Come on. We don’t have to take this.” They get up and leave.
WOW.
I am so full of rage and anger that I am shaking. I can taste the bitterness in my mouth. I am looking around trying to understand how they didn’t get it. How they couldn’t just show some courtesy for someone other than themselves and put it away. As he’s denying anything is going to happen there were crumbs falling off his plate onto the floor and he didn’t see them.
My poor mother is beside herself. She doesn’t know what to say. I immediately apologize. I ask if what we originally said and asked them was unreasonable. It wasn’t. Now I’ve ruined Thanksgiving. Now it’s my fault. They left because of me. I’m in the family counselor office as a teenager being blamed for all of the problems my siblings have all over again. Why does this always land on me? I’m not the one arguing that nuts aren’t life threatening. I know they are. We’ve already been to the ER once. But it’s still my fault.
I can’t breathe and I all I can feel is rage. After a few minutes I get up and walk outside to smoke. I can’t taste it and it does nothing to calm me down. But my mind is racing. Did I overreact? Was this a by product of my ADD?
In some ways it was. The frustration had been building all day with the kids and the chaos at home. My oldest has ad/hd and in the mornings he’s all go. I was reading the book “Delivered from Distraction” by Ned Halloway and John Ratey. It’s an updated version of their first book “Driven to Distraction”. It’s a good book but it was not as encouraging as their first one. So now I’m a loaded shotgun with no way to unload that is not going to cause damage. Sitting there with my brother every word that came out of his mouth was one more bullet in the chamber and it just blew.
Eventually we made it home and I was still loaded. I tried to relax but I couldn’t get this out of my system. Finally I said I need to do something to channel this energy positively. So I sat down and wrote a post on one of my other blogs, then on a forum I belong to. I needed to feel connected. I needed validation that I wasn’t going off the deep end. Finally after getting it all out I felt so much better. I felt relieved. I could breathe. Now I’m here. It’s 1:20 in the morning and I think I can go to bed.
Funny thing is the people on the forum couldn’t understand their behavior either.