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A dysfunctional search for attention underlies some of the behaviors of the ADD child, as we have just seen. Poor self-regulation, poor impulse control are also responsible for many behaviors, as are unconscious shame or rage or anxiety. All these are expressions of vulnerability and pain, not of bad intent. And even if, on a given occasion, there is consciously harmful intent, we still need to maintain the spirit of compassionate curiosity. “Why would a child want to do harm?” asked without prejudgment is a question that can provide fertile ground for inquiry. What happened to this child to make her this way? What is happening now in her life to make her act it out? There is much we can find out if we know that we don’t know.

No child is by nature manipulative, no child by nature controlling. A child who does develop a propensity to manipulate or to control others is doing so out of weakness, not strength. Manipulation and the drive to control are fear responses based on unconscious anxieties. The truly strong person need not be so afraid that she has to direct and control every aspect of her environment. Given that children are always the weaker party in the relationship with the adult, it is natural for them to want to control at times.

“I don’t know why we hold it against our child,” says Gordon Neufeld. “The most ridiculous thing we can say is that ‘my child is trying to manipulate me.’ It’s like saying the rain is wet. Of course children want to get their own way, and often they can do that only if they get the adult to go along with them.”

If we can remain curious, we can explore why a child would need to manipulate.

Yellow highlight | Page: 178 No healing would come if the adult yielded to inappropriate demands or manipulative tactics, but no healing is possible, either, if the adult insists on seeing the child’s behavior as the primary problem.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 177)

Try as they might, poorly individuated parents cannot successfully foster individuation in their children. They are likely to have unsatisfactory relationships with their partners, especially after children begin arriving to upset the fragile emotional balance between them. They are also likely to fuse emotionally with one or another of their children. There may be the semblance of a close relationship between parent and child, but in reality the child’s individuation is hindered, as he grows up feeling automatically responsible for the parent’s feeling states. Later the child will harbor a sense of responsibility for the whole world. Even what can be seen as selfish behaviors represent nothing more than unconscious and desperate efforts to throw off that sense of overwhelming responsibility.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 166)

Self-regulation is not the absence of anxiety, at least not in the very beginning, but a person’s ability to tolerate her own anxiety.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 164)

As many men have proven, mothering—the sensitive nurturing of the child—can be learned when one needs to learn it, or when one decides to do so.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 111)

alienation, drug use and violence—what Robert Bly has astutely described as “the rage of the unparented.”

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 109)

The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual. ADD is not a natural state. It is, to adapt a famous phrase of Sigmund Freud’s, one of civilization’s discontents.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 60)

ALL ADDICTIONS ARE anesthetics. They separate us from the distress in our consciousness. We throw off our familiar and tired consciousness to assume another mind state we find more comfortable, at least temporarily. Desperate to be out of our mind and unaware, we surrender to the addiction, to be lulled into a walking sleep. [..] My route was the compulsive buying of classical records and compact disks, alternating with—or conjointly with—the frenzied purchase of books. On the surface these may seem like innocent and even admirable pastimes—as they would be if undertaken consciously and in moderation. The addict has no such control. The compulsion beckons; the addict runs to serve it. Gradually, in each orgy of buying, I felt myself shrinking into a ghost of myself, full of self-contempt and apologetic for my existence. I have treated heroin addicts, and I recognized in myself the same vacant and driven look I saw in their eyes. [..] The addiction, in a strange way, makes the addict feel more connected to life. The downside is that it separates him further and further from himself. He is feeding only his appetite, not his hunger. [..] It has become evident that the brains of people who are prone to addiction are biologically predisposed by some imbalance of brain chemicals. Narcotic addicts, for example, are thought to suffer from a relative undersupply of endorphins, the brain’s indigenous narcotics. People with ADD seem to be short on dopamine, the reward chemical. [..] While attention deficit disorder cannot be successfully treated as long as the addiction continues to dominate, neither can the addiction be given the appropriate attention if the ADD is ignored and if the common origins of both remain unexplored.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 297 - 304)

As a parent, I have found myself in this situation many times. I have felt the frustrated helplessness of being caught between the urgency to meet some inflexible deadline on the one hand and the recalcitrant immobility of a son or daughter on the other. The temptation is to scream, to take matters physically in hand without regard to the feelings and emotional reactions thus stirred up in the child. I have gone so far as to threaten to drag my child to school in her pajamas, or semidressed and barefoot, if necessary. One can get a child to school on time by such threats and desperation tactics—on time, but frightened, angry and humiliated. Again, at what cost?

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 149)

John Ratey has aptly observed that “I’m sorry” is the most common phrase in the vocabulary of attention deficit disorder. What strikes me immediately when I meet new ADD patients is how often they apologize.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 136)

As many men have proven, mothering—the sensitive nurturing of the child—can be learned when one needs to learn it, or when one decides to do so. [..] Far from being helped, working women are actively penalized if they wish to extend the time they are at home caring for their children. For men, it is not even considered reasonable to think of “interrupting” their careers in order to share in that process. Society does little to establish expert and compassionate day care for those children during whose early years the parent(s), for one reason or another, cannot avoid the necessity of working outside the home. Poor women, especially in the U.S., are economically terrorized by the welfare system into entrusting their infants to appallingly inadequate care situations, and then must spend hours daily traveling to low-paying jobs that barely allow their families a subsistence income.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 111)

Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense—rightly or wrongly—that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.”

Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment.7 Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody.

In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 72)

One is either hopelessly short of time, dashing about like a deaf bat, or else acts as if blessed with the gift of eternity. It’s as if one’s time sense never developed past a stage other people leave behind in early childhood.

[..] Only two units of time exist for the small child: the now and the not-now. The not-now is infinity.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 36)

People with ADD are hypersensitive. That is not a fault or a weakness of theirs, it is how they were born. It is their inborn temperament. That, primarily, is what is hereditary about ADD.

It is sensitivity, not a disorder, that is transmitted through heredity.

Sensitivity is the reason why allergies are more common among ADD children than in the rest of the population.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 59)

IT IS NOT that I wish to be late. I do not imagine for a moment that I will be late. I may have to be somewhere, miles away, at 9:00 a.m., but as long as it is not yet nine, I fully believe I have time enough. I am scheduled to attend ward rounds with nurses and other physicians at Vancouver Hospital. At 8:50 I leap into the shower, still confident: there is space between the big hand of the watch and the hour marker, so I am not late.

— Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté (Page 35)