So self-acceptance does not mean self-admiration or even self-liking at every moment of our lives, but tolerance for all our emotions, including those that make us feel uncomfortable.

Physiologically and emotionally, the child or adult with ADD swings back and forth between over-the-top, purposeless excitement and a nonrestful vegetative state in which the predominant emotion is shame. Some tend to get stuck at one or the other of these opposite poles. The two states may also be present at the same time, resulting in agitated, u

sense of urgency typifies attention deficit disorder, a desperation to have immediately whatever it is that one may desire at the moment, be it an object, an activity or a relationship.

These men and women, in their thirties, forties and fifties, have never been able to maintain any sort of a long-term job or profession. They cannot easily enter meaningful, committed relationships, let alone stay in one. Some have never been able to read a book from cover to cover, some cannot even sit through a movie. Their moods fly back and for

With ADD we witness a delayed or permanently arrested maturation of the balanced time sense most people achieve by adulthood. In attention deficit disorder, the circuitry of time intelligence is underdeveloped.

This much is perhaps self-evident, but the ADD adult tends to regard his undisciplined sleep pattern as a “symptom” of the disorder rather than seeing it as undermining his emotional state, his alertness and his capacity for attention.

The adult with attention deficit disorder needs also to gain a deeper understanding of herself, to undertake the task we will later describe as self-parenting.

take a very conditional attitude toward them. We wish to hold on to some, drive away the others.

When I explore with my clients their childhood histories, emerging most often are patterns of relationships that required the child to take care of the parent emotionally, if only by keeping her inmost feelings to herself so as not to burden the parent.