ADHD: A Path to Success
Chapter 3 of
first 6 Chapters
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A Personal Experience of ADHD
Understanding ADHD Thought Process
In order to better understand ADHD, it is imperative to see the ways in which our common, daily experiences are similar to the thinking, feeling, and behavior of an ADHD child. This is important for two reasons.
First, regardless of whether you are a teacher, parent, or
researcher, little can be gained until you begin to see the world through the
eyes of an ADHD child. Invaluable insights are acquired by mapping the
experience of a child through our own personal experience. Formal research
experiments can only validate, not originate, these insights.
Secondly, by personalizing the experiences of the ADHD child, we make an
important discovery. This discovery flies in the face of traditional medicine,
which wants to identify something as broken and fix it, i.e., medicate it.
This discovery, which supports one of my major tenets, is inescapable. This discovery is that ADHD children think the same way we do. Their situation has just trained them to emphasize certain thought patterns more than others. And we use exactly those same thought patterns on a regular basis, just not as often as the ADHD child. In fact, most of us would resort to the same strategies if we were put in the same situation as the ADHD child.
But because we think of ADHD children as being different, because we think they have a "disability," we refuse to give ourselves the same disability label — despite the exact same thinking style.
Yet, ADHD children think no differently than we do.
We Think Like ADHD Children All the Time
Let me illustrate by citing a personal experience. While engaged in the relentless drudgery of writing the computer program logic and voice prompts for CAER, I was having trouble concentrating. My attention constantly drifted off after I wrote each sentence. I continually caught myself looking out the window, going to the bathroom, making a telephone call, or looking at a magazine.
