Adult ADD: Making Positive Choices

In our last article in this series, "Adult ADD: Constructive Choices," we discussed the need for some ADD people to make changes in their behavior in order to make relationships work. When your ADD leads to controlling behaviors, then it's time to make positive changes. Trying to control everyone around you just won't work. Or, maybe you have difficulty with sloppiness.

So, what are some positive ways in which you can change?

You can modify your behaviors a bit, if ADD is getting in the way… You’re running around and you’re making a lot of mess and your family members think, “Why do you make such a mess? Why do you leave all the cupboard doors open and why do you throw everything on the floor?”

You have a choice there. You could say, “Well, I have ADD. It’s just the way I am,” you can be frustrated with yourself and feel bad about it, or you can look at the other person’s point of view and say, “They really would prefer that things are cleaned up and in order to keep harmony, maybe I could find a simple system so that I could clean up a little bit better and then we’d have more harmony in the relationship.”

Or, what about delegation? What if you just hired a housekeeper to come in once a week? Delegation is important for people with ADD, and that would definitely work.

If you can’t afford that at this moment, is it possible that maybe instead of throwing your clothes in a pile that you could put a big bucket or a new trash can there instead of the pile, and throw all the clothes into the bucket or can? Or do one pile instead of six piles?

Those are examples of change, and they're not that difficult to achieve, if you find a system to help you. Does it always happen all at once? No. But is it worth it to make effort to change that one thing about yourself in order to have a tremendously wonderful relationship? Absolutely.

If nothing else, it’s because you get good at changing things when you need to. That alone is a skill. Number one is taking a close look at what someone else is doing, thinking, and saying and pretending that you’re that person, or at least pretending that you’re a lot like that person, then figuring out when this person’s upset.

They’re not doing this just to make me mad; they’re doing it because something about the way I do things isn’t working for their non-ADD brain. I sure know that there are ways that they do things that don’t work for my ADD brain and how that feels. How can we find a happy medium here?

Step number two is to stop trying to get somebody else to see it your way. ADD people tend to do that, too. But if somebody has a complaint or conflict—you don’t have to get mad; that’s their opinion. Everyone is entitled to an opinion.

You take it in, you weigh it, you see if there’s a change that can be made to make something simpler, and you can do this at lightning speed. You can control your ADD this way, and in the interest of the bigger picture of having the smoother relationship, solve the problem.

We’re about to jump into more specific tactics here, into the specific things that you can do in order to make an ADD relationship work from your end.

Stay tuned for our next article...