ADHD assessment - Part II
Nov. 5th, 2005 02:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beandelphiki*cracks knuckles* Assessment, part deux.
One of the themes that came up when I was talking with Dr. Y is the sort of underlying person I am. She said that what she was hearing from me - over and over - as I described my symptoms, my childhood and my coping strategies was that I'm quite the anal, perfectionistic, slightly-OCD, "IF IT'S NOT PERFECT, I REFUSE TO DO IT, RAAAWR!" kind of person. (She noted how often I recheck, to the point that it nearly obscures some of my less troublesome symptoms.)
Which is true, I am that sort of person. Although I've managed to hide my perfectionism well, obviously. While my old preschool report cards note how quickly I got frustrated and started tantruming if something wasn't exactly right, by third grade I was "careless" and simply "resistant" to doing work. Not anal, and not concerned about getting it right.
(Despite the fact that I was generally a kid who wanted to be liked, not a kid who wanted to piss people off, my report cards sound more like I was bratty and defiant than inattentive. CAN do the work, but WON'T, willful, stubborn, resistant, avoidant "despite ability," refuses, tiresome...struggle, battle, fight, etc.)
I once joked to my mother that I am a "closet perfectionist." Her response was to say, "WAY deep in the closet!" She knows perfectly well, of course, how I reacted to failure as a kid (the tantruming continued longer at home, I think). But I long ago perfected my, "What, me, worry?"
All of this, Dr. Y says, is ANXIETY based. I don't really have OCD, or an anxiety disorder, but I'm an ANXIOUS person.
Anxiety issues, the hell?
Now, I know I'm a perfectionist, but the LAST thing I would have called myself is anxious. The very last. A little depressed sometimes, maybe...
Anxiety, to me, means exactly one thing - feeling stressed or worried. Anxious people just feel worried or stressed a LOT. I don't feel that way, therefore I am not anxious. It's really not complicated.
This is the thing about ADD in adults that has thrown me for months - the repeated references to anxiety being so common, almost universal among ADDers. I went to a CHADD conference for my practicum on Wednesday, and the psychologist giving her talk stated that anxiety - not necessarily anxiety disorders, just large amounts of anxiety - are so common that they top any other co-morbidity.
I'm not anxious, does this mean I can't have it?
I've been saying to myself for months that my biggest problem is not that I'm worried or stressed, it's that I'm not worried or stressed ENOUGH. I seem unable to be concerned about something until it's right under my nose. Earlier, I then used to panic, thinking that if I didn't do a perfect job, everyone would KNOW that I was actually stupid, lazy and a big fake...so I would get things done. At this point, I don't even hit that point, ever. It's all one big, "Is something important? I didn't notice."
I told Dr. Y how my best coping strategies have failed me. How I used to jump in the shower to relax and brainstorm, and get excited about projects that I had to do, so that when I got out, I was hyperfocused and moving fast. That doesn't work anymore - I try to do directed brainstorming on any one of the 5 million things I need to work on, and my brain's all over the place, refusing to do what I want it to. It's not unusual to me to not be able to focus when I'm not excited. It IS unusual for me to have lost the ability to free-think and GET excited.
Her interpretation of this is that school has hit the point where the work is mostly exceeding my abilities, and so I'm stressed. This is why my brain's all over. I can't keep pulling rabbits out of the hat with the increased workload.
Welll, I say...I don't feel stressed.
Of course not, she replies. You can't feel your stress. You can't stay with it. It's too overwhelming.
!
I am, she says, someone who feels anxiety deeply enough that I am not currently capable of facing it enough to allow myself to feel it. My brain sees the anxiety coming and dives off into the bushes.
Unfortunately, she says, this just reinforces it. I haven't faced it squarely, so it gets stronger. This makes sense, yes? She says I have to learn to stay with the emotion in order to get control of it. (How, we haven't covered yet. I'm uh, hoping we do.)
This idea is a COMPLETE turn around from what I was previously thinking (I don't worry enough, I'm lazy and don't care) but it makes sense because it wraps some things up that I was aware of, but didn't add together:
-I've said (to myself) that I'm highly escapist. I estimate I spend about 80-90% of my free time now doing something escapist. But what am I escaping, exactly?
Work! sez I.
Maybe that is still true, but work I can do without disproportionate struggle is something I never avoid. People have called me "hard-working" enough that I can almost believe it...
-Somatic expression of stress: I have stress-induced eczema (diagnosed as an infant, when I broke out during my family's first move across the country) that I battle every school year. I spent all of high school violently grinding my teeth in my sleep. I stopped tooth-grinding and started hair-pulling shortly after high-school graduation. (Luckily, my hair grows thick and fast enough that it's not usually apparent, but I have been known to freak my mother out by appearing at the dinner table sans eyebrows.)
I KNOW I don't feel my stress because all of these things have always been perplexing, and seemed spontaneous and unconnected to my life, somehow. My mother has pointed out that I get eczema when I'm stressed, but my entire family seems to experience stress only as physical complaints (inherited temperament thing?), so no one really knew how to help me connect rashes, pains and other physical symptoms to an emotion.
As far as I'm concerned, actually, stress is not an emotion. Panic is an emotion, but stress is something that appears on or in my body.
Don't exactly know where this'll go. Dr. Y says that since depression and anxiety are two sides of the same coin, my "anxiety" might actually be depression, but at this point, I don't think so.
Internal paradigm shift!
One more section of this to go. But right now, my shoulders are killing me from sitting here typing this all out.
One of the themes that came up when I was talking with Dr. Y is the sort of underlying person I am. She said that what she was hearing from me - over and over - as I described my symptoms, my childhood and my coping strategies was that I'm quite the anal, perfectionistic, slightly-OCD, "IF IT'S NOT PERFECT, I REFUSE TO DO IT, RAAAWR!" kind of person. (She noted how often I recheck, to the point that it nearly obscures some of my less troublesome symptoms.)
Which is true, I am that sort of person. Although I've managed to hide my perfectionism well, obviously. While my old preschool report cards note how quickly I got frustrated and started tantruming if something wasn't exactly right, by third grade I was "careless" and simply "resistant" to doing work. Not anal, and not concerned about getting it right.
(Despite the fact that I was generally a kid who wanted to be liked, not a kid who wanted to piss people off, my report cards sound more like I was bratty and defiant than inattentive. CAN do the work, but WON'T, willful, stubborn, resistant, avoidant "despite ability," refuses, tiresome...struggle, battle, fight, etc.)
I once joked to my mother that I am a "closet perfectionist." Her response was to say, "WAY deep in the closet!" She knows perfectly well, of course, how I reacted to failure as a kid (the tantruming continued longer at home, I think). But I long ago perfected my, "What, me, worry?"
All of this, Dr. Y says, is ANXIETY based. I don't really have OCD, or an anxiety disorder, but I'm an ANXIOUS person.
Anxiety issues, the hell?
Now, I know I'm a perfectionist, but the LAST thing I would have called myself is anxious. The very last. A little depressed sometimes, maybe...
Anxiety, to me, means exactly one thing - feeling stressed or worried. Anxious people just feel worried or stressed a LOT. I don't feel that way, therefore I am not anxious. It's really not complicated.
This is the thing about ADD in adults that has thrown me for months - the repeated references to anxiety being so common, almost universal among ADDers. I went to a CHADD conference for my practicum on Wednesday, and the psychologist giving her talk stated that anxiety - not necessarily anxiety disorders, just large amounts of anxiety - are so common that they top any other co-morbidity.
I'm not anxious, does this mean I can't have it?
I've been saying to myself for months that my biggest problem is not that I'm worried or stressed, it's that I'm not worried or stressed ENOUGH. I seem unable to be concerned about something until it's right under my nose. Earlier, I then used to panic, thinking that if I didn't do a perfect job, everyone would KNOW that I was actually stupid, lazy and a big fake...so I would get things done. At this point, I don't even hit that point, ever. It's all one big, "Is something important? I didn't notice."
I told Dr. Y how my best coping strategies have failed me. How I used to jump in the shower to relax and brainstorm, and get excited about projects that I had to do, so that when I got out, I was hyperfocused and moving fast. That doesn't work anymore - I try to do directed brainstorming on any one of the 5 million things I need to work on, and my brain's all over the place, refusing to do what I want it to. It's not unusual to me to not be able to focus when I'm not excited. It IS unusual for me to have lost the ability to free-think and GET excited.
Her interpretation of this is that school has hit the point where the work is mostly exceeding my abilities, and so I'm stressed. This is why my brain's all over. I can't keep pulling rabbits out of the hat with the increased workload.
Welll, I say...I don't feel stressed.
Of course not, she replies. You can't feel your stress. You can't stay with it. It's too overwhelming.
!
I am, she says, someone who feels anxiety deeply enough that I am not currently capable of facing it enough to allow myself to feel it. My brain sees the anxiety coming and dives off into the bushes.
Unfortunately, she says, this just reinforces it. I haven't faced it squarely, so it gets stronger. This makes sense, yes? She says I have to learn to stay with the emotion in order to get control of it. (How, we haven't covered yet. I'm uh, hoping we do.)
This idea is a COMPLETE turn around from what I was previously thinking (I don't worry enough, I'm lazy and don't care) but it makes sense because it wraps some things up that I was aware of, but didn't add together:
-I've said (to myself) that I'm highly escapist. I estimate I spend about 80-90% of my free time now doing something escapist. But what am I escaping, exactly?
Work! sez I.
Maybe that is still true, but work I can do without disproportionate struggle is something I never avoid. People have called me "hard-working" enough that I can almost believe it...
-Somatic expression of stress: I have stress-induced eczema (diagnosed as an infant, when I broke out during my family's first move across the country) that I battle every school year. I spent all of high school violently grinding my teeth in my sleep. I stopped tooth-grinding and started hair-pulling shortly after high-school graduation. (Luckily, my hair grows thick and fast enough that it's not usually apparent, but I have been known to freak my mother out by appearing at the dinner table sans eyebrows.)
I KNOW I don't feel my stress because all of these things have always been perplexing, and seemed spontaneous and unconnected to my life, somehow. My mother has pointed out that I get eczema when I'm stressed, but my entire family seems to experience stress only as physical complaints (inherited temperament thing?), so no one really knew how to help me connect rashes, pains and other physical symptoms to an emotion.
As far as I'm concerned, actually, stress is not an emotion. Panic is an emotion, but stress is something that appears on or in my body.
Don't exactly know where this'll go. Dr. Y says that since depression and anxiety are two sides of the same coin, my "anxiety" might actually be depression, but at this point, I don't think so.
Internal paradigm shift!
One more section of this to go. But right now, my shoulders are killing me from sitting here typing this all out.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-05 09:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-07 08:55 pm (UTC)(About that topic over there, otf_wank isn't really the place for serious discussion, and I'm not even sure I want to deprive them of one of their favorite villains. But I did want to interrupt the piling-on that tends to happen whenever the dreaded name comes up.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-09 11:29 am (UTC)and I've always heard that depression and anxiety are quite linked, but that linkage has never been something that I can really visualize.
you'd think that I might be able to make a sage point here, seeing as how anxiety is, if not my world, at least one of my more recent forwarding addresses, but... such closeness to a situation does not lend itself to insight.
um.. that and I just haven't been able to think for the last few months.
er... sorry.
*hugs*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-28 07:27 am (UTC)Am I right? So for homework or stuff you don't do anything because an individual assignment doesn't stick out, like the garbage from the general overwhelming melee? I think this is anxiety repressed when you can't see individual things but rather things come together in overwhelming wholes. I find sometimes writing lists help??? (i've got to stop put entry long answers in your posts and just post on mine. sorry)