Getting Unstuck; Unravelling the Knot of Depression Attention and Trauma

Once in this state, W. thought about how she felt just before she decided she was going to get a drink, and she thought about making contact with the inner part responsible for that decision. The frustrated, tired, sad part that answered when she called said she was seven years old.

This part of ourselves is usually provided by our experiences with our parents. It’s called the parental introject, the image of our parents that we hold inside when they are not present.

The disorder is poorly named because many people have no absolute deficit in attention. Rather, they have a problem modulating their attention — that is, turning it on, keeping it on, and turning it off. Many people with ADD focus quite well, just not selectively or consistently enough to please everyone they need to please.

For the purposes of this discussion, when we say “left-brained” and “right-brained,” we are talking about two complementary modes of thinking that are at first primarily located as electrical activity in their respective hemispheres. They do not always stay so tightly localized. In people who develop in a healthy manner and remain relatively untrau

And just as Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden, so, too, all children, as they begin to label and value and judge, lose contact, at least somewhat, with their unselfconscious body-mind, with the ineffable, nonverbal garden within.

Effective executive functioning can be viewed as the opposite of being stuck.

The split between reason and behavior is also around us everywhere. It takes many different forms. The essential underlying ingredient is an experiential right-brained self that feels talked down to and misunderstood by the left-brain planner.

Even in the absence of any obvious dramatic trauma, an unavoidable consequence of childhood, of the process of understanding and adapting to the complex demands of reality, is that we judge certain aspects of ourselves to be unacceptable, to be “bad,” and we tend to dissociate those aspects of ourselves.

Probably one of the more interesting and consistent phenomena I have observed in the hundreds of people with ADD I have known is an almost reverential attitude toward genuine friendship. People with ADD are among the most loyal and dedicated friends imaginable. Perhaps because they so often feel misunderstood and rejected, when they do feel accepte