ADHD: Don’t be a “blamer”

One of the real challenges for people with ADHD is dealing with the constant stream of criticism and blame from teachers, parents, and society in general.

Image by ambermb from Pixabay

One of the real challenges for people with ADHD is dealing with the constant stream of criticism and blame from teachers, parents, and society in general. Many of us internalize it: I remember incidents from middle school (when I hit the ADHD wall) that still sting all these years later.

Annie in Louisiana has some insights about this that are really worth reading…

From Annie in Louisiana:

All my life I’ve felt like I was under siege. I’d daydream in class, and the teachers would yell at me for it. I remember one teacher who actually threw a book at me. I ran out of the room crying and begged my mom to take me out of school, but it was only fourth grade and she just made me go back the next day.

My father was very critical of me, although I suppose that’s probably true for lots of children. But, for whatever reason, I became very good at pointing the finger of blame at other people. I blamed that teacher for throwing that book at me.

I blamed other teachers for not being able t keep my interest in class. I blamed my mom for not loving and supporting me enough, and blamed my dad for being too critical of me. blamed my little brother for everything that went wrong in the house and usually my parents believed me.

When I hit college, I found all sorts of new people to blame. There were incompetent teachers, professors who were more interested in hitting on me than teaching me, and even the cops who had a speed trap that I hit three times in one year. I blamed them for having the speed trap.

In my relationships, when things went wrong it was always his fault and never mine. When I got a job and things went wrong, I even went to the length of writing down things other people did wrong so I could prove that I wasn’t the one to blame. I’d carefully word memos and correspondence so if somebody else looked at it they’d know that the blame was with somebody other than me.

I was an expert blamer.

It took me two divorces, a major estrangement from my parents, and being fired three times, before I finally got it.

I’d read this article in Cosmopolitan about ADHD and really identified with the woman they described in the article. Wow, what a revelation — and something new to blame! I had ADHD and everybody had failed to diagnose it. It was all their fault.

So I went to see this psychologist a friend of mine recommended, who does something she calls “Ericksonian Therapy.” I don’t know exactly what that is, but after she listened to me for a half hour describe all the people who were to blame for my life being in shambles and my being unhappy, she asked me a really odd question: “What’s your favorite thing to do?” (She never once mentioned anything about my habit of blaming other people: I’ll get to that in a minute.)

I’d been a tomboy all my life, and I told her that my favorite thing to do was to go to baseball games. Any sort of sporting event, really, but I love baseball, even the minor leagues. (It’s a great place to meet guys, too.)

She said, “Who’s your favorite ball player?”

“Will Clark,” I said, who plays for the Texas Rangers and was with San Francisco last year. He’s a good player, a good person, and, in my opinion, very cute.

“What’s his batting average?”

“It was .283, last season.”

“Which means what?”

“That he hit the ball 283 times out of a thousand at-bats.” I explained to her about how batting averages are calculated, and how they change during the season.

She seemed real interested in this, and we talked about it for about ten minutes. Then she said, “When Will strikes out, whose fault is it?”

“His, of course,” I said.

“It wouldn’t be the pitcher’s fault, for throwing a good ball?”

“No, a good hitter should be able to hit just about any ball that’s thrown into the strike zone. It’s his fault when he strikes out."

“Isn’t it interesting," she said, “that he strikes out more than he hits the ball, and he’s still your favorite player?”

“Everybody strikes out more than they get a base!” I said, thinking that this woman must be really dumb about baseball.

“Yeah,” she said, “I guess that’s true.”

We talked a little more about baseball, and then got back to me, and she listened to me complain some more, and then I paid her and left, with an appointment for two weeks later. I felt that maybe she wasn’t a good therapist, because she didn’t have me lay on a couch and didn’t ask much about my parents and all that stuff. But I figured I’d give her a month or two before I’d start blaming her for being a lousy shrink.

But the weirdest thing happened. The next day at the office, at my new job where I was a writer for a small PR agency, my boss came in with a news release I’d written. He pointed out three mistakes in it. He wasn’t angry or anything, just pointing them out, but in the past I always would have figured out an excuse, and found somebody to blame. In fact, one of the mistakes was because the client had given me the wrong informa­tion: I could have legitimately blamed them.

Instead, though, as if in a dream, I heard myself say, “Well, nobody bats a thousand. I’ll get this fixed right away.”

He smiled, thanked me, and left the office.

During the next two weeks, I don’t think I blamed anybody for anything; I took responsibility for my mistakes, helped other people correct theirs, and must have said at least a hundred times, “Well, nobody bats a thousand.”

What’s really funny, though, is that I didn’t realize at the time that I was doing that. What I did notice, though, is that all of a sudden everybody at work liked me. My boyfriend became a different person, much more approachable and affectionate. And I even had a nice conversation on the phone with my mother.

So, two weeks later, there I am again in this shrink’s office. And she asked me how the past two weeks have gone, and I tell her that people around me are all changing I’m wondering if they’ve all started taking Prozac or something. And she laughed and said that it seemed that probably I didn’t need to see her much any more, and maybe we should just get together in six months to touch base.

At that moment, it all suddenly fell into place for me. I realized that in some sort of sneaky way, she’d made me realize that it’s OK sometimes to be wrong, and to accept the blame for it. I’d started doing that, and the world hadn’t ended. God, what a revelation that was.

“Did you hypnotize me?” I asked her.

She laughed again and said no, that she’d just helped me get a new frame of reference. (Although I later learned that Milton Erickson was one of the most famous psychiatric hypnotists in history: he loved to “tell stories” to embed hypnotic commands in his patients.)

So my success story is to stop blaming. I don’t blame other people any more, don’t blame life’s circumstances, and don’t even blame my ADHD. I’ll never bat a thousand, and that’s OK: even Babe Ruth couldn’t do that, in baseball or in life.