One of the great things I’ve found about spending time working with men who have ADHD is that it fits so well with my overall approach to therapy. Of course, I’ve learned a lot of very specific information about the particular ways in which ADHD can impact every aspect of a person’s life, and about diagnosis and treatment, including the use of medication. But I’ve also found that things that help people with ADHD are often the same things that help anyone else. This is perhaps not surprising. After all, as Ari Tuckman* often puts it, “ADHD doesn’t invent new problems, it just exacerbates universal ones.”
One expression of a universal problem, and promise, is summed up in a famous quotation from Viktor Frankl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning):
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Much of my work revolves around helping people slow down and understand their automatic reactions enough to identify that space between stimulus and response where we have a choice. This can be especially helpful in the day-to-day lives of people with ADHD, who are inclined to react impulsively in all sorts of situations. If despite your best efforts you’ve struggled to get a task at work or school or home done because your attention keeps getting dragged away by messages popping up on your phone, or by the thoughts popping up in your own head, that may be because you haven’t found enough time between stimulus and response to really choose where to focus your attention. If you’ve blurted out a reaction to something your partner or your boss says to you and regretted it afterward, that too may demonstrate how stimulus and response are so often “velcroed” together, automatic, with insufficient space between them to really exercise a choice. Likewise if you’ve ever put off an important task for days because every time you think of it you get a sick feeling in your stomach, and that feeling has directed your behaviour.
Everybody does this kind of thing. If you have ADHD you probably do it more often, and it’s having a considerable negative impact on your life. (Of course there are other reasons why we might automatically react to particular “triggers,” including trauma, and these are important to understand in therapy.) If you have ADHD, medication can really help slow down that automaticity, giving you a much better chance of making a more considered choice. And all of us, ADHD or not, can learn to understand our automatic reactions and exert more choice in our lives; and, as Frankl said, therein lies our growth and freedom. Ari Tuckman argues that ADHD medication can increase a person’s “free will.” It can certainly increase a person’s sense of their own agency, and help you feel more in charge of your own life. I think the same is true of all good therapy, whether you have ADHD or not. If you’d like more of that sense of agency in your life, whatever your history, get in touch.
*Ari Tuckman PsyD is an ADHD expert, writer and teacher. I’m currently involved in a training course with him, and am drawing on that material to write some regular ADHD-related blogs over the next few months. His books include The ADHD Productivity Manual and ADHD After Dark: Better Sex Life, Better Relationship.