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Mine was “why can’t you be as hard-working as (whichever kid got the highest score)?”. Unless that kid was me, then it was suddenly irrelevant. Did fucking wonders to my work ethic.
“Why can’t I have a better parent to teach me?”
Sometimes teachers would use me as an example of a hard worker… when I was busy on yesterday’s homework or really caught up in a library book. Like, you sure about that chief?
“You kneel at my throne, unaware it was built of lies.”
Mine used to scream at me for being lazy all the time, and now she wonders why I don’t talk to her about anything 🤷♂️
Mine used the koosh ball slingshot
Coworker told me they were suspected of having adhd as a child and were tested. Doctors wanted to medicate to treat the adhd, but their mother said no, she didn’t want her kid zonked out on meds. She was self medicating with alcohol on the daily, turns out.
You just need to apply yourself
Oh my God, are you every teacher I had since the 4th grade?
Exactly. I started just doing it. Especially when it’s hard!
Next stop, curing depression by just not thinking about it.
Easy! Just don’t feel sad, and the thoughts will stop!
I have parents that love me to bits, but their strategy to get me to do my homework was… adversarial? It felt like they were checking my performance, just like the teachers were. It didn’t feel like they were on my side, even though I’m sure they were.
Getting told off even gently felt like an unbearable punishment for some reason. I read something recently about adhd folks being more sensitive to negative interactions?
And that’s how I became a pathological liar and master of masking!
Getting told off even gently felt like an unbearable punishment for some reason. I read something recently about adhd folks being more sensitive to negative interactions?
Check out Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. It’s a common side effect of ADHD.
that’s the one. As a kid I never understood why punishments even exist. People being mad at me was already unbearable torture
Because most people do not react the way you do. You do your best to teach kids why it’s wrong and have them correct behavior but letting them do whatever they want and not escalating when needed is a bad strategy as well. This works well in most children. To expect most parents today, much less 30 years ago to be able to closely identify what might be going on under the surface as well as a professional is unrealistic.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
Aw crap, it reads like a character sheet… Guess I’m binging this now.
Problem is that the approach “MUST do NOW, until it is DONE!” doesn’t work for many of us. I developed methods for myself, which I try to apply to my own child now, like: “When you get home from school, lay out everything you need to work, then relax. At time X, do 15 minutes on a timer, as far as you get.”
He still moans and groans about it, and it’s hard for me to tell if my “soft push” feels to him like the “hard push” I got. It’s all relative, and nobody else can tell.
The trauma of dad trying his best with 6th grade math homework he can’t actually do…
Don’t be too hard on your dad. When I went for my first ADHD test I had to do some math. I’m 41 years old and I realized with a shock that I’ve forgotten completely how to do long division. I think that’s 6th grade stuff.
A lot of parents don’t know better. This is what they grew up with.
The sad part is sometimes, it is your own voice calling you lazy while knowing full that you are depressed. Sometimes, it is more difficult to convince yourself that you need help more than convincing others
The Harsh Internal Critic has been the bane of my life. Every hobby or achievement has been hounded by that little voice. And as you say, when I think I need to get help, the voice tells me :No. Don’t do that, just sit there watching YouTube for another hour."
There are meditations which center around your inner voices and also the one which critics you. Helps you identifying these and realising when they come up to be not as influenced as before
Lazy is just a label we apply to people to shame them into doing what we want them to.
most engineers are lazy and that’s often a good thing
Old article, but it talks about harnessing that a little
Mine was “are you doing drugs?”
No I was just socially ostracized and receiving physical punishment at home on a daily basis and that made me angry at the world.
I’m sorry this happened to you and hope you are in a better place now. I know how it feels.
Thanks, I am in a much better place indeed. The psychological scars take awful long to heal, though. But now I have my own family and managed to break the violence cycle with my kids, who are wonderful people that I admire and respect. Never once raised my hand to them.
That is so nice to read. I wish you and your family all the best and be proud of your self.
Thank you! And same to you.
The thing that killed me was “Why don’t you just open a book and study” when I was stressed about school - in retrospect it’s because that’s absolutely antithetical to my learning style… I always struggled with the book heavy classes because I learn through practice and the lectures and books just woosh me unless I’m activating the information shortly after learning it (I’ve retained a lot of uni chemistry because we had a daily lab after the lecture).
Just got yelled at by a co-worker at a new job and called lazy because after only a month my invoices aren’t descriptive enough…I told them i have add but i think that like most people the don’t understand it. Just gonna keep doing my best and work on highlighting my good attributes : )
When a former employer sent me on business trips, the bean counters would complain that my descriptions for the purpose of meals on my expenses were not descriptive enough, as if the purpose of eating was not obvious. I ended up writing something like “nourishment to remain alive while traveling for XYZ project” out of frustration after that. That did the trick and shut them up. I suppose it was hard to argue that description, because if they disputed it, they’d basically be admitting they were sending me away because they wanted me to die.
That’s a fault of them telling you you’re doing it wrong, not telling you how they want it done. I wonder what they actually wanted
It really is bad when people expect you to intuit what they want from you
The trick is to either get an example from them of what they think is a descriptive invoice, or to break down your invoice filling procedure into a step by step workflow or checklist.
Someone isn’t necessarily being an asshole, that person has their own struggles, goals and priorities. Managing a condition and someone else’s expectations or their own condition is the hardest part of working together. This is where soft skills help, too
Plot twist for me:
The mother is also ADD.
Plot twist for me:
Is it really, though?
Yeah. The twist is, like this picture, neither of us really knew what that entailed until it was too late. :')
You’re describing Brendan and his mom from Home Movies
I was diagnosed with ADD around 199* I was prescribed Ritalin and eventually switched to concerta. None of the adults involved in that process checked in with me at all. I remember being scream-accused of not taking my medicine when I was in fact taking the meds. Funny how in a sea of lost memories, that one persisted.
if they aren’t hitting you it is because they don’t love you
This was exactly my teens, but I’m lucky that my mother quickly understood once it got bad enough and changed. She now does more than I’d ever ask and wish for, and I wouldn’t be here without her.
In the future I hope this won’t be such a universal experience.
