Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

No self-help book, therapist or therapy hit me as hard as this book. I feel like my life and future has been saved due to it. Around 2/3rds of the way through reading it felt like a ”block” suddenly dissolved in my head, and all my anger of random past events (teachers who’d been mean to me, unfair society, my family who now barely talks to me, even very minor daily problems such as a smartphone game not loading) is gone. Most of my anxiety about everyday and future events has, if not disappeared, noticeably lessened since finishing the read. I’m 27, an ENTP, and didn’t know that I (and likely every ENTP) had ADD until I read ”Scattered Minds”. It turns out, I had every single symptom and mindset listed, including not having contact with hardly any of my extended family. I also have a logical ”source”: I was born 3.5 months early, thus spent my first months of life in a hospital incubator away from my parents. As an infant I was constantly "screaming so loudly and so long that my parents' ears would ring". My dad was often away for weeks at a time on business trips and my depressed mother, despite working from home, spent most of her attention on the 7 kids she babysat as part of her job instead of on her own kids. I went through preschool, then kindergarten. My parents divorced before I was 9 years old. Unlike some people I didn’t have much trouble in school and when I did, I blamed it either on the ”bad teacher” or on myself being stupid. Looking back on it after reading this book, I clearly had the most trouble at times when the lack of support/contact from my family was a highlighted issue in my life (which in a general sense began with a fervor in university, worsening with every year of my adult life. I married into an emotionally abusive family, which helped my ADD mindset to spiral out of control with every passing year until the current point where I’ve given up on standardized testing and job interviews due to testing stress — well illustrated in the book! — and was just barely keeping myself in check to not give up on school entirely). I also realized my sister, 8 years older than me, has ADD far worse than mine (she turned into a dropout and a drug addict, hopping between both jobs and boyfriends, examples of which are perfectly illustrated in the book), and my younger brother has at least some traits of it as well. Both me and my sister have been to many therapists, but as far as I know no one in my family has been diagnosed with ADD. I also feel that, like Dr. Maté's family, a lot of ADD generations began with parents who experienced WWII or the Vietnam war, or who were left in the home country while their lovers were away due to it. This likely influenced events in the lives of my own parents. I feel like I know what love actually is now, as well as what it actually feels like to be ”calm” and ”real”. I teared up three times during this book, and as the typically emotionally stunted ADD person, I’ve cried very few times in my life. I’ve been almost ten years in a depressed, angry funk and an emotionally rocky relationship where I wasn’t feeling real love, didn’t understand the love given to me or the needs of my partner, etc (all also perfectly illustrated in the book). For all my life I would physically recoil from touches such as hugs from family and hand-holding from dates, didn’t understand romance and frequently said the wrong thing or looked at the wrong place due to missing ”social cues”. I always felt that other people had or knew something I didn’t, that I was extremely abnormal. Thanks to this book I now understand what I was getting or not getting and I’m glad I can turn things around before it’s too late with my spouse and my life. I hope everyone, ADD or not, will read this book just so they can at least recognize and understand ADD people when they come across them, and so they can give them this book to help them change their lives too.

Even if you have never experienced ADHD, this book would be inspiring ✨️

papa 9ll99⁹