ADHD is a tough neurological difference.
We live in a world where, historically, we call neurological differences or behaviors that are hard to manage ‘problems’, or mental health issues.
We have a book, in the mental health field, called the DSM, which is the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual. It’s currently being updated and will be out in a new version in the next year or so.
I started to write this article about neurodivergencies including ADHD and academic strength. Academic strength is not technically a neurological difference, but is something which can affect our social abilities, may have some differences in neuro-typicality, and goes along with some skills which may have crossover.
Neurological differences in the form of academic strength is probably related to a neuro-atypicality about memorizing, utilizing abstract thoughts and reasoning, and having an amount of wishing to please to learn and have success when information is presented.
As I’ve lived, worked, and parented with my neurodifferences, I’ve had a lot of life stages and developmental ties to ADHD.
I am a person who is physically active. I have a need to make, create, listen to, and think about music; a need to move my body physically more than some and less than others; I’m fairly impulsive during times of stress or excitement; and I like to communicate with others. I have some neurological differences that help me with being creative, writing things down, and relating with feelings.
Back when I was deciding how I’d like to earn a living as it relates to school, I determined that I would attend a different school than my parents had wanted me to attend. I did not want to go along with the family plan of attending the local, private university my parents attended. I wanted to be ‘a number’. I wanted to go to a large research based institution, which was in my home state of Indiana.
I wanted to go to Indiana University.
I wanted to go to a large school, and I made friends with several people during that time period. Some of my friends were female, and many were not. The friend group I was a part of had mostly boys in it, and included a good friend from my hometown of Tipton. We’re friends to this day, despite her consistently living pretty far away for many of our adult years.
I have a really quick, able to function panic response which I really don’t enjoy. I have had panic attacks, and would not wish them on anyone.
I’m learning about autonomic responses and am hoping to communicate better how I demonstrate my own, and how others may utilize theirs
I’m also working on settling down when I get stressed, using music as a therapeutic tool in my practice, and working to increase some of the consulting non-profit stuff that I do and create in the field of mental health. I’m continuing to work on being more cognizant of my needs and getting them met prior to experiencing a panic response.
Historically, attentional differences (or intentional differences, as some people may feel about them) wasn’t discovered or identified until right about 1994.
Oppositional defiance, or the ability to be defiant when told what to do, has been a behavior in kids and adults for my lifetime.
Sometimes prisons and jails are full of people who break rules.
Sometimes there are those who struggle in times of stress, and sometimes there are those who defy differently, or pay attention differently, or utilize tools to help pay attention to tasks at hand in different ways like calendars, post-it notes, writing things in a journal, and electronic devices.
The electronic devices really evened out the playing field in some ways for people with differences in attention, and it has created its own set of restrictions to utilizing them as well.
ADHD can be defined as a set of behaviors that affect the amount of focus or attention which someone is able to give to things. It also includes struggles with or the ability to tune out distractions, tune into what would be helpful to learn about, or differences in the ability to stay still.
Some attention differences may include coping skills as a way of setting rules and boundaries, and has some similar characteristics to keeping a calendar that one adheres too. It might involve dinner out on Friday nights, a song to listen to on the way to an exam, Starbucks before work, or only doing laundry on the weekends.
All of these rules or manners of behaviors are things that both help and hurt, which is the way all of our characteristics work for and against us.
A type of behavior that responds well to increasing motivation is stimulant types of medications. They can help with focus to sleep, focus to work, and focus to relax.
FOCUS!
A word I have heard said many times. Sometimes with love, sometimes with impatience, sometimes with a little frustration, but it is a word that can help someone re-focus their attention.
‘Did you take your medicine?’
Now that’s a phrase that may give someone frustration at times. I would encourage anyone who says it to be an amount gentle if possible.
For me, it is a question I heard a lot as a child, with a sister diagnosed with T1D as a 10 year old, and me, being the sister of her, starting as an 8 year old child.
I spent 2 weeks living with my grandma, and the second week of that I went to school with my cousin Brenda. We walked to School 54 in Indianapolis where she and my grandma lived about 2-3 blocks from each other.
I really remember those days in school, because urban living was really, really different for me, and I tend to like change and learning, so I’m sure I was begging to go to school.
That first day at School 54, a school that has a different name now, was hard. Hard for my grandma to let me walk to school, hard for me to figure out which classroom to go to, and easier for Brenda because she had a cousin coming to school with her. They went ahead and let me stay with her for the school day, since she was in 3rd grade and I was in second. We were learning almost identical things at that point, and I really liked some parts of being in a new school.
I was also really anxious, as I was a really anxious kid and a really anxious adult, who thrives on routine, likes familiarity, and tends to learn fairly quickly. That one is about pace, and I have a pretty quick pace at most things inclulding typing and writing, figuring out the melody to a song, and remembering the differences between notes, which for non-music fans is called relative pitch.
Neurodifferences are neither good nor bad.
They are hard for the NT, or neurotypical, to understand at times, but I would venture to guess we all have some differences. An NT or nearly NT, and an ND, or neurodifferent or nearly neurodifferent, tend to work together fairly well.
It is a neurological difference, or attentional difference, that affects how we pay attention.
It is an ability or inability, however you feel about attention or the importance you put on being quiet, that is a difference in thinking that can be helped by difference types of stimulants.
Stimulation is our ability to stop being bored, or not paying attention to, or inattentive with our words, our abilities to focus on tasks or music, our ability to pay attention to or tune out music or words that we can hear, or our ability to create music or word
As you think about neurological differences in yourself or people in your life, what do you think about?
How are your coping skills as it relates to remembering what you need to take with you, knowing what time it is, and getting along with others when you are frustrated?
As you begin to learn about your own neurological differences and understand neurological differences in our brains, I hope you give grace to those who may be different from you. I also hope you give grace to yourself.
Parke Therapy and Artistry 