You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (12 page)

Unfortunately, Scarlett overused the defense. She used it not only to cope with extreme circumstances but also to insulate herself from ever thinking about the possible consequences of her actions. Because she didn’t allow herself to consider the impact of her behavior, she realized too late that she was destroying her marriage. Even in the final scene when Rhett Butler leaves with his declaration
that their relationship is over, Scarlett refuses to confront reality. Again she invokes her standard refrain, “I won’t think about that now, I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

The defense mechanisms that ADDers use are sometimes helpful and sometimes harmful, creating more problems than they solve. It’s important for each of us to recognize the maladaptive behaviors that get us in trouble. In later
chapters about recovery, we’ll examine some adaptive coping strategies we can substitute for the harmful ones.

We’ve compiled some character sketches of real people struggling to cope with their differences. Each uses a maladaptive coping strategy. If you recognize yourself in any of their descriptions, you will already have taken an important step in your recovery. If you can analyze your maladaptive
defenses, you can begin to substitute emotionally healthier ones.

Bad Is Better than Stupid

Susan is fifteen years old. Just a few years ago her classmates thought she was weird. They teased her for being in the “ozone” during class. She was puzzled and hurt that no one wanted to befriend her. Now at long last she has found a group of kids who embrace her.

Susan and her new friends wear extreme
hairstyles and clothing. They have a doomsday mentality. Since they’re sure the world is going to hell no matter what they do, they think it’s useless to work hard at school or try to excel at anything. They are smart kids. They use their collective intelligence to write nihilistic poetry and make darkly humorous jokes. They flirt with death as they take drugs and have sex without safeguards.

Although the group isn’t overtly violent, each of the kids has a hostile, sarcastic and tough manner. Their peers are afraid of them. Sometimes Susan is scared too by the talk of suicide and the use of IV drugs. But at least she feels accepted by a group of her peers. The other kids don’t dare make fun of her now, and she is off the hook as far as schoolwork goes.

Elementary school was always
difficult for Susan, but junior high and high school have been nightmares. Many ADDers can empathize with her. She has always felt incompetent, stupid and rejected. Slow and awkward in learning new sports and mastering the art of conversation, she hasn’t fared any better in physical prowess or in her social life.

She has, however, learned one thing very well: Adolescents admire kids who are cool
and in control. Driven by the adolescent’s intense need to fit in, Susan has learned that rebellious behavior is more acceptable than the uncertain fumblings of someone struggling with disabilities. She has decided that Being Bad is better than Being Stupid.

Faced with reality as she experiences it, Susan chooses inclusion in the gang over humiliation and alienation. She has a third choice. She
can learn new ways of dealing with her differences. She doesn’t consider this option because she is driven to save face. She’s always in trouble with her parents and teachers but is willing to pay this high price for acceptance.

The defense mechanism Susan has learned is common in adolescence. A defiant and
smart
reply to a teacher’s questions can get a few laughs and perhaps some admiration
from other kids. It’s a way to avoid answering a question without looking stupid. The stint in detention hall that follows can be a reasonable price to pay for maintaining one’s image. And anyway, getting plenty of detentions is cool.

TOUGHNESS creates a smoke screen
to mask VULNERABILITY.

If you separate Susan and her friends from their group and manage to dig beneath the tough shells, you
find troubled, uncertain kids. Many vulnerable ADD adolescents continue to wear their shields of toughness into adulthood. They usually manage to keep themselves and their tough facades within the bounds of society’s rules and don’t become major-league criminals or radicals. A hostile attitude, however, intimidates other people and prevents anyone from getting too close. This defense mechanism does
double duty as a cover for problems and an insulator from other people. Unfortunately, Susan and her counterparts may pay a high price, indeed.

The Perfectionist

Unlike Susan, who protects herself by rebelling against society’s rules, Debra has taken the opposite tack. She has decided that being the best, regardless of the cost, is the only way to hide her deficits. Debra is a perfectionist.

She has ADD, but those who know her would never believe it. Although her poor-conduct grades reflected her restlessness, her behavior wasn’t disruptive enough to cause serious discipline problems in school. In general, she followed the rules and did what was asked of her. Before she graduated—in the top 3 percent of her high school class of one thousand—she took part in many extracurricular activities.
Everyone counted on her to volunteer for any task that needed to be done.

You might be asking how someone with ADD could function so well. Actually, Debra wasn’t really functioning very well despite her carefully constructed facade. She rarely slept more than four or five hours each night. This had nothing to do with insomnia. She didn’t sleep much because she didn’t have time—she had to study
twice as long as everybody else to learn the material. She regularly pulled all-nighters and never had time to relax or hang out.

Sometimes she desperately longed to get off her treadmill but didn’t dare risk disclosure. If she failed to do everything, her secret would be out. Everyone would know she wasn’t normal.
The hitch was that Debra didn’t have a clue about what “normal” was. She had kept
her secret so long that she had inflated ideas about what other people could accomplish. She thought that if she said “No” to anything, she would be found out.

Her inability to say “No” got her into serious trouble in all areas of life. Beginning in seventh grade, she had sex with any boy who asked, and pushed the bad feelings about herself to the back of her mind. Even a pregnancy and an abortion
didn’t change her sexual behavior. Her impaired sense of self, distorted by differences she didn’t understand, caused her to do anything that would bring acceptance.

Now thirty-two years old, Debra is married and has a set of twins and a successful business. She still works herself to death, compelled to
do it all.
It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to do it all with so many conflicting
demands on her time. Children, husband, volunteer work and clients all vie for her attention. Lately she feels that she’s losing control and that at any moment something horrible is going to happen. She can’t keep all the pieces together anymore.

While Debra may look good to outsiders, she feels terrible inside. She has to spend all her energy running and hiding behind her facade of perfection.
Knowing that she has just about pushed herself beyond her limits, she wonders when she’ll totally self-destruct.

There are many Debras around. It’s interesting to speculate on the number of
super
men and women who struggle with disability beneath their
in control
exteriors. Readers who are familiar with codependency may recognize similar traits in Debra. She’s trying to gain control of her life
by taking care of everything and everybody. Recovering codependents could tell her that it doesn’t work.

The Blamer

Steve never admits he’s made a mistake. When he can’t find important papers in the black hole that constitutes his office,
he accuses his secretary of losing them. He terrorizes his wife, kids and employees by flying off the handle and accusing them when anything goes wrong.

At fifty-four years old, Steve is a chronic blamer. If food falls out when he jerks the refrigerator door open, he yells at his wife for putting the groceries away incorrectly. If his kids don’t understand his instructions, he blames it on their stupidity or inattention. It’s an impossibility that his instructions were unclear. Enduring his daily accusations and anger, his family begins to believe
they are at fault.

Most people who know Steve characterize him as an arrogant SOB. What they don’t realize is that beneath his blustery, aggressive exterior is a scared, rejected kid. Steve is shielding himself against feelings of inadequacy by shifting the blame to others. This keeps everyone from looking too closely at his performance.
He’s terrified that he’ll be exposed for the bumbling idiot
he thinks he is. Although he’s a successful businessman, he still feels like the kid who was regularly ridiculed and punished. Tapes from the past keep playing in his head: “How could you be so stupid! You’ll never be worth anything!”

The defense mechanism of Blaming is similar to Being Bad except that the blamer fends off people by actively accusing them of stupidity or wrongdoing. The Bad person
keeps others off balance with anger and hostility but not necessarily with criticism. Blamers can never let anything go. To maintain their fragile emotional equilibrium, they must have a scapegoat to blame for everything that happens. For the blamer, accidents don’t exist.

“Who Cares?”

Jim is thirty years old and has worked as a waiter or cabdriver most of his adult life. He is intelligent and
well-informed. He loves to engage in lively discussions about current events with his friends and anyone else who will listen. He has a good sense of humor about things in general and himself in particular. At his legendary high school graduation (his friends were amazed he ever managed to graduate), he joined in the laughter as his buddies carried him down the aisle on their shoulders.

People
enjoy being around Jim because he’s likable and easygoing. Nothing seems to bother him, even when bosses and coworkers ask him to work unpopular or extra hours. They know he won’t complain.

Jim makes excuses for the people who do him wrong or maintains that the things they do don’t bother him. He professes to be content with his life the way it is. Secretly he feels bad that he didn’t go to college
as his brothers and sisters did. He isn’t at peace with himself and has many physical symptoms to prove it: tension headaches, high blood pressure and an ulcer that regularly flares up.

Jim feels he’s a failure and masks his feelings of inadequacy with his Who Cares persona. His wide circle of friends and broad
knowledge base don’t make up for his academic shortcomings. The defense mechanism
he uses to protect himself is similar to Susan’s. Borrowing from the fox-in-the-sour-grapes fable, both pretend that things out of reach aren’t worthwhile, anyway. Susan’s arrogance and Jim’s indifference are shields of armor to prevent anyone from seeing their disabilities.

Jane presents a slightly different version of the Who Cares defense. Jane, a forty-two-year-old mother of two, is intelligent
and creative and has impressive artistic talents. Despite her gifts, Jane’s ADD made school a monumental struggle. It took twice the customary time for her to complete college. Before choosing to stay home with her children, she had always held jobs well below her educational level.

Jane is outspoken about the excessive competition and materialism in today’s society. She is proud of her skill
at budgeting money and has learned to live without the many consumer goods others consider necessities. She doesn’t own a VCR or clothes dryer.

Jane’s wise use of resources enables her to devote time to her family and have enough left over to pursue her own interests. Her choice of saying “No” to the rat race to live by her own values is admirable. The problem is, Jane isn’t entirely comfortable
with her decision. She “doth protest too much” when she scoffs at academic and career achievement. There is a distinctively angry, defensive edge to her voice when she rationalizes her life choices. She spends much time explaining herself.

Jim’s indifference is passive and Jane’s is assertive, but both are carefully designed masks. Jane doesn’t feel successful. She uses so much energy on defense
that she can’t accept herself or honestly evaluate her choices. Perhaps beneath the bristly Who Cares defense is a real desire to accomplish some of the things she rejects. Perhaps the choices she has made are right for her. Regrettably, she works so hard at protecting her fragile sense of self that she has little energy left for living the life she has chosen.