Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

The brain, flooded with multiple bits of sensory data, thoughts, feelings and impulses, cannot focus, and the mind or body cannot be still. In short, the policeman is asleep.

There is no path toward oneself that leads away from the pain.

Any passion can become an addiction. It’s simply a question of who is in charge: the individual or the behavior.

But parents can help their children come to grips with these difficult feelings, learn to tolerate a sense of loss and disappointment, and move on.”

The fear of being alone with the mind is, I believe, an implicit memory of finding oneself, in infancy, cut off from contact with the parent.

I have learned through my own process that a goal in life cannot be the avoidance of painful feelings.

we are not just the molecules that accidentally have come together to form our bodies, the thoughts that temporarily engage our minds, the feelings that agitate or soothe us from one moment to the next.

For people like me with ADD, and for everyone else, emotional pain is a reality. It does not have to exclude joy and a capacity to experience the beauty of life.

“Many parents have an especially hard time when their children are feeling sad and disappointed,”