Living with ADHD by Thom Hartmann

Author:Thom Hartmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology/Health
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

11

Reconstructing the Past

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

MARCEL PROUST (1871–1922), FRENCH WRITER, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

DIFFERENT TYPES OF MEMORIES—regardless of how anchored in reality or fantasy they may be—are stored in our brains in different ways. These forms of storage involve the five sensory modalities (sight, smell, hearing, taste, feeling) and the subtle gradations of each sense (such as color, brightness, or contrast for the visual modality). These gradations are referred to as submodalities. This method of storage is true for both adults and children, and this NLP concept can be used to heal the sometimes painful memories brought about by a lifetime of ADHD.

One of the ways our brain organizes information is according to the way it’s stored. Our senses pick up something in the outside world—say we see an insect fly by. That’s an objective “thing” that we’ve “seen.” However, before that image makes its way to our conscious brain, it’s processed by other parts of the mind and tweaked and tuned. If it’s a bug that frightens us, perhaps a wasp, then the mind sees it as being bigger and in sharper contrast than it really is. Other objects in the picture—the background, buildings, grass, whatever—become more distant, dull, and perhaps less colorful. The mind may increase the volume of the sound associated with the wasp and also attach a feeling to the image—probably a variation on what we interpret as fear or panic, a feeling felt, perhaps, in the pit of the stomach or a trembling of the hands.

Some of the submodalities that we commonly use to experience reality and store memory include:

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