ADHD: Can You Find Your Positivity Patterns?
We find in these success memories a power which will infuse the rest of our daily life.
Rob Kall is a psychotherapist in Pennsylvania who put on an annual EEG Neurofeedback conference. At one of his conferences in Key West, I had breakfast with Rob and he shared what he considers to be one of his most powerful techniques for helping ADHD people become successful.
Rob told me that we all have a lifetime of experiences and memories which can either strengthen or weaken us. We’ve had times when we failed, when we did things about which we feel guilty, and which we wish we could do over or avoid. We’ve been hurt, we’ve hurt others, and we all carry a little child’s voice inside us which repeats the words of parents and others about how weak, small, powerless, and incompetent we are.
“We all also have had positive experiences throughout our lives, successes ranging from sparkling moments to major life events,” Kall said. These are the times when we’ve accomplished our goals, done things we’re proud of, reached beyond what we thought were our limits, and experienced our own strength and resiliencies.
Rob told me that in his early therapy practice, he often did as he’d been trained in school: look for people’s areas of weakness, their wound- ings, their repressed traumas. But the problem, he found, was that when he explored these experiences with people they became weakened, disempowered, and leaned even more on him to help them process and integrate the information contained in those memories.
So, instead, he started looking for what he calls people’s “Positive experience resources.”
He’d ask people to remember the times in their lives when they were unusually strong, when they were outstandingly capable, when they rose above adversity, and when they were genuinely happy. These positive experience resources can be a wellspring of strength for people, he told me, and they’re often totally overlooked in many traditional pathology-based therapeutic models.
“Even when you’re dealing with people’s weaknesses and pains,” he said, “if you’ve helped them re-connect with their internal strengths then they can bring those strengths to the job of resolving the pain and pushing through the weakness. People can improve many of the skills related to positive experience behaviors, ranging from experiencing good feelings and the sensations of the moment more deeply, to learning to stay with a positive experience flow state for a longer more concentrated period of time.”
Many of the ADHD adults I’ve interviewed in writing for my books and this Hunter in a Farmer’s World website have told me stories of a particular teacher, person, mentor, coach, peer, or parent who was significant in their lives.
When I ask for details, more often than not, what I hear is that that significant person helped the ADHD adult — as a child-to discover or nurture an inner strength or positive experience resource.
Whether it was praising them for how well they could paint, or play the flute, or play baseball, that experience of success — and the grounding of the experience in their lives by having it validated by another person — became the basis for other future successes.
Kall recommends that instead of bemoaning our ADD fate and complaining about our weaknesses, we should instead look back into our lives and try to find those patterns of positive experience of which our inner strengths are composed.
Remember the times when we could do something well, and revisit those memories often. Dwell on accomplishments, rather than failures; on strengths rather than weaknesses; on the times we took control of our lives rather than the times we were victims.
“Learn your patterns of positive experience and duplicate the successes,” he said. “Be brave. It takes courage to be happy. There are countless things you can do which you haven’t done yet. Gently, realistically, challenge your resources and start moving forward.”
This isn’t just happy-talk, Kall insists, pointing to dozens of similar examples from Charles Darwin’s less famous book Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, to Bill Moyers’ PBS series Healing and the Mind. It is, instead, a powerful technique to build our internal and emotional strength.
We find in these success memories a power which will infuse the rest of our daily life.
Our willingness to undertake new projects and efforts, our belief in our ability to accomplish things, and even the speed with which we heal emotionally (and physically, according to Moyers and others) from traumatic events in contemporary life, are determined by the strength of our emotional underpinnings.
And those underpinnings are found in our memories of our times of greatest strength and competence.