Smart but Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults With ADHD by Thomas E. Brown

Author:Thomas E. Brown [Brown, Thomas E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Biography, Self-Help, Mental Health, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781118279281
Amazon: 1501221604
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

conflicting hopes and fears

I asked Mike to tell me how he was thinking about the decision he was trying to make. He said he was going back and forth between two different pictures of how things could turn out. In one picture, he imagined himself as someone who would return to college while taking the ADHD medicine, be able to do the work consistently, and emerge as a successful graduate who had experienced a difficult, frustrating start, but who eventually was able to put on a cap and gown and walk up to collect his diploma. In this picture, he envisioned belatedly fulfilling his parents' and his long-held dreams as a very bright young man who was simply a late bloomer.

Psychologists have demonstrated that most of us carry within us a variety of possible selves, a wardrobe of fantasies about what we might become, pictures both of who and what we hope to be and of who and what we are afraid we might become.

Yet Mike said that he hesitated even to start trying the medication and going back to school, even at the lower-priced local community college, because he also had in his mind a picture of himself as a loser who keeps on losing, a gambler who keeps feeding money into the slot machine until he has spent his last dollar, one who just doesn't know when to cut his losses, call it quits, and move on to something else.

Mike said that he kept thinking he might end up as what his parents had repeatedly warned him he was becoming: a lazy loser with great potential who just never got it together. Mike told me about an uncle on his father's side who tried college several times, but never finished his degree. This very bright uncle ended up working as a janitor in an elementary school rather than as the successful professional his teachers and family had expected him to become. This uncle was Mike's alternative possible self.

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