While most of us Hunters are (painfully) aware of our limitations (and our skills), the most pernicious of all the stories we sometimes tell ourselves about our ADHD is that it means we can’t really count on ourselves when the going gets tough. It’s one of the most common concerns that pop up in therapists’ offices, and the least often publicly discussed.
Last month, an article by J. Russell Ramnsy, a recently retired psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, caught my eye. He calls this “self-mistrust.”
Ordinary mistrust, he notes, points outward; we don’t trust others because they’ve lied to us, abandoned us, or somehow otherwise given us a reason not to trust them. But with self-mistrust, the person we’ve stopped believing is ourselves.
The mechanism Ramsay is talking about was first written about in detail in Albert Bandura’s seminal book Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control: it’s a small idea with enormous consequences.
Most of us think that self-confidence is a question of our capability to do something. But Bandura separated out a second and much sneakier question, which is whether you can get yourself to stick with the thing once all the boring, irritating, unrewarding parts of it show up.
Ramsay’s argument is that the challenge of being a Hunter is never the “knowledge problem” that so many in the “ADHD is a crippling disability” crowd promote. Rather, he says, it’s a “performance problem.”
We can do a job, and know deep down that we can do it, but we tell ourselves the story — reinforced by people like Russel Barkley who insist that Hunters are damaged goods — that we’ll inevitably fail or give up because of our ADHD.
We’ve stopped believing in ourselves, in other words.
Instead, he notes, we should be looking to our successes, and understand the mechanisms in our life that help promote them, ADHD or not.
For example, for the past 23 years I’ve hosted a daily radio program that’s live three hours a day five days a week. In all those years, I’ve never once procrastinated about going on the air.
Meanwhile, I have a stack of papers on my desk at home that go back to the Carter administration and every time I try to dig into them I get distracted and am off to something else within minutes.
Same brain. Same guy. Same day, sometimes. What changed wasn’t my willpower or my character: it was whether the external conditions of the radio show were doing the starting for me.
That’s the Hunter’s ignition system: our nervous systems were built to be summoned by the world rather than commanded from within.
In a hunting and foraging world, we didn’t just one day sit down and decide to be alert. Instead, something moved in the brush and we’re alert, instantly and completely, without any act of will required.
Novelty, urgency, and interest fire us up: the engine was always ready, and the ancient hunting-gathering environment was always full of ignition sources, and so nobody in that world ever needed to develop the peculiar skill of talking themselves into jumping into a task that really didn’t much matter to them.
Then agriculture came, and later the classroom and the office, and every ignition source got removed by the Farmers. We found ourselves in quiet rooms with predictable tasks, no urgency or novelty, and deferred rewards (typically a paycheck).
Farmers can deal with that without a problem. It’s the whole Farmer skill set, the ability to keep going through the long unglamorous middle of a task because the harvest is four months out and somebody has get out there and weed those rows that will one day be dinner.
So we Hunters tend to fail that Farmer’s test, from kindergarten to college and into the world of work. And not just once, which anybody could shrug off, but over and over again, thousands of times throughout our lives. And throughout it all, the Farmers are telling us:
“Careless. Lazy. Not applying himself. Doesn’t try. Can’t focus.”
Eventually, we’ve heard that story so many times that we start telling it to ourselves. That’s where self-mistrust comes from. It isn’t a symptom of ADHD: it’s scar tissue on the wound this Farmer’s world has inflicted on us.
I saw it constantly in the years Louise and I helped run a residential treatment program for children in New England. Those kids came to us already fluent in their own internal self-indictment. They could recite it, and would if you just asked them. At twelve years old most had a fully developed theory of their own worthlessness; overcoming that was consistently our biggest challenge.
And we can’t just talk ourselves out of this; self-trust is the result of our having developed a track record that we can trust. And that’s often the result of our reorganizing our lives so we live in a world filled with novelty and fascination, and our time-related issues have external cues like that red light that goes on in my studio every day at noon ET.
For me that has meant setting deadlines that are tangible and finding work that I actually care about. It has also meant partnering with Louise — who’s a Farmer in a Hunter’s family — and who’s spent decades running each of the five businesses we’ve built (including the radio show) while I did the sales and performance parts of the work that matched my neurochemistry.
If this article hit close to home, please send it to someone else who needs to read it. And if you’re new around here, subscribe and I’ll keep bringing you what the research actually says, week after week, from the Hunter’s side of the fence.