I was listening to the Tilt Parenting Podcast (Episode TPP 144) and heard psychotherapist Dr. Sharon Saline describe ADHD in a way I could finally understand:
Living with ADHD is like living with a thousand papercuts. It’s not Trauma with a capital “T”, as I like to see it, it’s a thousand little small things that create these small kinds of traumas.
Dr. Sharon Saline
I was also reading THIS ARTICLE and she states,
Tara Frieden
What if I told you that there was a child in a public school that used a wheelchair and was told every day that they should walk on their own without the wheelchair because everyone else is the class is capable of walking, what’s wrong with them? If they just tried harder they could walk.
And it gave me pause. When we interrupt Isabella, causing her mind to overreact or when we tell her to quit fidgeting OR when we tell her to “just go with the flow”, we are asking her to get out of a wheelchair and walk.
Isabella needs timed schedules, set plans and step-by-step what is expected of her. That way, her brain can create some order and she can focus. It’s complicated and we are still learning- getting rid of a lot of our preconceptions about ADHD and learning what it ACTUALLY means. A lot of learning and researching and then finding out what applies to our kid.
You know, so we aren’t giving her a thousand more papercuts.
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