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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