Living Outside the Box: ADHD, Identity, and Resilience

Discovering the power of stories to transform lives and self-perception...

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
— Henry Miller (1891-1980)

When I was laying in bed all those years ago reading about prehistoric hunters and farmers in Scientific American after my son’s ADHD diagnosis and it occurred to me that ADHD and Hunters may be the same thing, all of this went through my head (in a bit more disorganized way) in one epiphenous moment. It was one of those moments where I really felt like a light bulb had gone off in my head. This was the answer I’d been looking for.

Whether the Hunter/Farmer model as a way of viewing ADHD is ultimately demonstrated to be good science or not, may not be vital. For the moment, it provides us with a way to view this condition that leaves self-esteem intact, accurately mod­els and predicts how and why medications are helpful, and reframes our techniques for working with Hunter-type indi­viduals in schools, the workplace, and in relationships.

The bottom line is nobody knows what ADHD is or where it came from, but we know it’s there.

We don’t know what elec­tricity is either. Just about everybody learned in school that elec­tricity is the motion of electrons in a wire. But what about elec­tricity that moves through space, such as radio waves, where there is no possible flow of electrons? Then electricity is a wave, we’re told. But a wave of what and in what medium? Nobody knows.

The fact is that nobody even knows what electricity is, in wires or in space. It’s definitely not the flow of electrons, even through a wire, and experiments show that in space a single electron will behave like a wave in one circumstance, and then like a particle in another.

Oddly, experiments show that the most important variable that determines whether it’s a particle or wave is if it’s being observed by a human being. Yet we talk about electricity as if we understand it. We create models of it, like Ohm’s Law, which work out most of the time, although they break down when pushed beyond the boundaries of nor­mal temperatures and distances. We can make light bulbs work even though we don’t know what’s going on inside that light bulb. We don’t know how aspirin works, but for a hundred years we’ve been giving it to people.

So, even though we don’t absolutely understand something doesn’t mean it’s not real and doesn’t mean we can’t do something about it. What my son needed was the right story to tell himself that left his self-esteem intact and gave him a map through the territory of living life with ADHD.

What I was looking for was a model for ADHD that would accomplish the good and useful things the diabetes story did, but with­out the stigma of pathology. I wanted to acknowledge for my son that he was different from many of his classmates, that he was going to face challenges in school. He may have to take medi­cation. He may have to learn new skills and new ways of being successful in school that are different from the traditional ways kids learn in school. I was not a parent in denial, but I wanted to keep his self-esteem intact and I wanted him to have hope.

What he needed was the right story.

I discovered the power of stories more than a decade ear­lier, when I ran a program for abused kids. One Fri­day afternoon a social worker dropped by around four in the afternoon. She had a ten-year-old girl in the back seat.

“Her name is Sally,” the social worker said (I’ve changed names here), “and I don’t know her history. Her social worker is on vacation this week, and I just picked her up from the police station, and because of confidentiality laws the only thing my office could tell me was that she can’t go home to her parents. So if you don’t have a bed for the weekend as an emergency placement, I’m going to drop her off at the state mental hospital for the weekend, as I’m on my way home.”

By coincidence, we had an empty bed that day as a child had been discharged to a foster family earlier in the week. So we took in Sally for the weekend, with the agreement that on Monday we’d get together with her regular social worker, find out what the situation was, and decide if she was an appropriate place­ment for our facility or if we should refer her to a foster home or another institution. The social worker left, and Louise assigned Sally to Linda’s house, as that’s where we had the empty bed.

Linda was one of our best-ever childcare workers. She was smart, loving, insightful, and emotionally strong. That Friday night she took Sally up to the empty second-floor bedroom and said, “Here’s your bedroom, there’s your bed, and there’s a nightgown. You get ready for bed and I’ll be back in ten min­utes.” Linda went downstairs and had a cup of herbal tea.

Ten minutes later, Linda returned to Sally’s room to find Sally had changed into her nightshirt, and was laying on top of her bed, facedown. Linda sat on the bed next to her, and reached over to give her a gentle backrub. She was going to say, “I’m really glad you’re here, and we’re going to have a wonderful time this weekend. You’ll have fun, learn a lot, and it’ll be a great experience for us both.”

But Linda never had a chance to say those words, because just as her hand lightly touched Sally’s shoulder, Sally exploded off the bed at her, screaming and clawing and biting, shouting that she was going to kill Linda and slashing for Linda’s face with her nails.

Linda grabbed Sally’s wrists and flipped her over on the bed, face down, and essentially fell on top of her, both of them facedown, holding her so she couldn’t hurt either herself or Linda, as Sally continued to sputter and shriek and scream. Her yells were so loud that Louise and I came over to find out what was going on.

Linda was talking Sally down, say­ing, “It’s OK, you’re safe here, everything is going to be fine.” After about four or five minutes (which is an incredibly long time for such behavior to persist), Sally eventually depres­surized and lay quietly on the bed, panting to catch her breath.

Thinking it was now a safe time to sit up, Linda let go of Sally’s wrists and hoisted herself erect. She looked down at the little girl and saw that during the struggle Sally’s night­shirt had worked its way up to the middle of her back. To her horror, Linda saw that Sally’s back was covered with cigarette burns, old and recent.

If you were to ask little Sally at that moment in time who she was, she would have told you her truth. She would have said that she was the little girl who was so bad that the only way you could control her behavior was to put cigarettes out on her. (And, truth be told, she was a master at angering adults.) Sally ab­solutely believed this, and had years of experience to prove it.

What we had to do with Sally was one of the most terrify­ing and difficult things that can be done with a human being under any circumstances I know of, and that is the breaking down of an old personality, the old set of stories about who she was, and the reintegration of a new one.

Our Own Stories

As we go through life — particularly childhood — we collect stories about who we are. They come from our parents, sib­lings, peers, and teachers. We find them in our culture and our media. The stories fall into two basic categories: I am/I can and I’m not/I can’t.

The I am/I can stories form the foundation of our lives. They’re the floor we stand on as we move out into the world. They take many forms: I’m the fat one; I’m the skinny one; I’m the smart one; I’m the dumb one; I’m the cute one; I’m the ugly one; I’m the good one; I’m the bad one, and so on. Most are actually far more elaborate, but all start with these simple building blocks. They are the stories of who we are, and they define our posture and position, our power and our willingness to undertake things.

These stories stick to us as we grow through childhood the way lint sticks to a cheap suit or burrs collect in the fur of dogs in autumn. We test them against the world a few times, and if the response we get validates them, we decide they’re real and they become part of the floor, walls, and ceiling of our lives.

They form the box in which we live, and very, very few people will ever go outside that box or step off that floor. In a very real way, you could say that the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can and can’t do are our fate, our destiny. They determine our future.

Changing these stories is incredibly difficult, once they are accepted. Most people will never change the core stories they develop during their childhood. In psychoanalysis, if even a small shift can be accomplished, it can be life transforming.

Brainwashing and boot camp are other examples of times when people’s stories are intentionally shifted, but, again, these are difficult processes and, in the case of boot camp, only a very small part of the over­all structure of a person’s stories is touched.

By and large, most people will never change the core stories they develop during their childhood. Because this is such a rare event, it may ac­count for our fascination with novels and movies in which the lead character experiences a major personality transformation.

So, understanding as I did the power of the stories we tell ourselves, when our son was diagnosed as having ADHD, I came to an absolute and compete conclusion: I did not want my son to be walking around for the rest of his life saying to others and (most importantly) to himself, “I’m the one with a deficit, I have a brain disorder.”

It may, of course, be true (although the jury is very much out) that ADHD is a brain disorder. But even if that is the case, I thought it was a disempowering story. It wasn’t useful. It didn’t add to my son’s hope, or enhance his resilience.

So, what I was looking for was a different story. I wanted a story which would acknowledge all the realities of ADHD, the learn­ing methods, the indicators, the need to work harder than his peers for the same rewards. But I also wanted him to have hope.

So when this thought of Hunters and Farmers came to me, I sat him down and said:

“We’ll keep that ADHD label, because in the current school system it may get you a better teacher. But don’t take it too seriously. I don’t think you have a deficit or a disorder: I think you’re my son. And I’m the son, on my mother’s side, of the misfits and mal­contents of British society who came to this country in the 1600s and fought a war of independence against the conform­ist British.

“And I’m the son of a father whose parents came to America in 1917 from Norway, who were the descendants of the Vikings - those people who terrified most of western Europe for two thousand years. We’re the descendants of the warriors, buccaneers, pirates, explorers, and . . . well . . . Hunters of Europe. But in the past thousand years, the Farm­ers have taken over. They’ve taken over the schools so com­pletely that they even let out during the summer so the kids can help bring in the crops!

“So, you have two choices. One, you can learn to fake it dur­ing the school hours and behave like a Farmer. We can talk about how you can learn the skill-set to do that. Or, two, you can take these Farmer pills (Ritalin), which will make your brain work just like a Farmer’s brain for about four hours. Or you can do both until you have the Farmer behaviors down pat.”

In this context, my son was able to accept his ADHD with­out putting himself into the category of damaged goods (he made a T-shirt that says: “There’s nothing wrong with me — you just can’t keep up!”), yet was still willing to consider the entire range of “normal interventions” for what we call ADHD.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the self-talk and stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what our role is in the world. And the “broken brain” story about an ADHD diagnosis is, in my opinion, one of the worst things we can inflict on a still-developing child.