Re-Write History: Understand Your Past (and Yourself) in a Different Way
by Ari Tuckman, PsyD, MBA

Adults with undiagnosed ADHD know all too well the price they've paid and continue to pay for their struggles. They may not know why they struggle so much, but they know full well how they struggle. Until the day they received a diagnosis, though, they'd found various other explanations for the behaviors that had caused their difficulties. Most of these explanations tended to be pretty negative. Therefore, it's important to learn about the many ways that ADHD affects your life so that you can replace those old explanations with more accurate ones.

It's not just that it helps you feel better about yourself, as in, "I'm not a bad or selfish person, I just have this brain thing that makes me do these things." It also offers some hope that the future can be different if you address your ADHD in more targeted and effective ways. This will probably make you more likely to work hard on changing these habits since they may actually lead to positive changes. Before being diagnosed, it can be easy to give up after trying a thousand new sure-fire strategies that were all mostly duds. It's therefore crucial to see getting diagnosed as a fundamental transformation in your life, a break that separates the past from the future. Without this, there's no reason to try anything different or expect any better results.

I'll sometimes use the following joke with clients or during presentations to make the point that it's easy to come up with the wrong explanations for why certain things happen. This then influences what we do, even if our assumptions are wrong. So here goes:

Johnny and Sally decide that they are now old enough to be allowed to curse. They decide that they will each curse at breakfast and see what Mom does. As they walk into the kitchen, Mom asks, "What do you guys want for breakfast?" Johnny is the first to speak, saying, "What the hell, I'll have pancakes." Mom whacks his butt and sends him up to his room. She then turns to Sally and asks, "Okay, what do you want for breakfast?" Sally looks Mom in the eye and says, "I don't know, but it sure as hell won't be pancakes."

What makes this funny is the mistaken assumption-Sally assumes that Mom was upset about being asked to make pancakes, rather than the cursing. Similarly, those with undiagnosed ADHD (and their family members) attribute their struggles and failures to various character flaws, rather than to an untreated neurological condition. Therefore, learning that you have ADHD puts you in a position of examining all those old assumptions and perhaps replacing a lot of them. All that old stuff now makes sense in a completely different way. It's similar to how a major scientific discovery forces scientists to re-evaluate many other theories. For example, when it was discovered that disease was caused by bacteria rather than spirits, it changed everything about how doctors treated and prevented disease. In the same way, the ripple effects of your personal discovery can travel to the farthest reaches of your past and re-write your history.

This doesn't only affect the obvious stuff, like why you had such a hard time with homework or why you now forget to send out the bills. This also affects the less obvious stuff, like why you tend to be pessimistic about things working out well and have struggled with anxiety and depression. Untreated ADHD is a set-up for these after-effects. That's the double whammy of ADHD-first you suffer in the moment, then you carry that suffering with you as you face future challenges.

You can feel better about yourself and your prospects for a good future by really understanding your ADHD. This means:

• Understand the many ways that ADHD affects your life, both currently as well as in the past.
• Fully accept, without shame or defensiveness, that you have ADHD, as well as other strengths and weaknesses.
• Choose to address the limitations that ADHD brings to your life, even when this means pushing yourself to do things that don't come easily.

We can't change the facts and events from our pasts, but we can change our interpretations of what happened and therefore how those old lessons carry forward into the present and future. It's amazing how some optimism for the future will reduce the sting of past troubles.

Test-Success: Helping Students Learn How to Study Smart
by Blythe Grossberg, Psy.D.,

From my years of experience working as a learning specialist at the Collegiate School and in my private practice in New York City, I've noticed that many intelligent students perform below their capabilities on tests simply because they don't learn simple, proven strategies that can help them show what they know on test day.

At this time, students in public and private schools have to take more tests than ever--including standardized tests to gain admission into college and state-mandated tests to advance to the next grade level. The economic climate in 2009 has made it even more important for students to perform well on tests to gain admission to competitive colleges that offer the most generous financial aid packages and to win scholarships.

Throughout the next few months, I will be preparing articles for myADHD.com News that will help students in middle school, high school and the first-year of college be better prepared to take tests. These articles will be drawn from my new book, "Test Success: Test-Taking and Study Strategies for All Students, Including Those with ADD and LD" (Specialty Press, 2009). Students, educators, and parents will be able to benefit from these articles.

Stay tuned to future issues of myADHD.com News to learn about:

• Valuable time-management strategies so students can make the most efficient use of their time and work around extracurricular activities.
• Strategies to help students grasp the unwritten rules of the classroom so that they can predict with greater accuracy what will be on their tests
• The importance a student's learning style plays in affecting study behavior and test performance
• Making use of different strategies for different types of tests (multiple choice, fill-in-the- blank, essay tests, etc.)
• Ways to outwit math tests (Einstein Made Easy)
• Strategies to master tests that require a lot of memorization
• Strategies to take the sting out of pop quizzes
• And much more!

Visit myADHD.com and use the follow tools this month to help children with ADHD establish household routines and to promote responsibility:

• My Daily Jobs
• My Morning Jobs List
• My Bedtime Jobs List
• Using a Home Token Economy Worksheet