Six-year-old Ned was in a bad mood. His mother had taken to bed with flu, and he had been looking forward to going out on a family trip. Frustrated by the turn of events, he went up to his parents' room and started noisily opening and then banging shut the wardrobe doors. It was unclear how long the doors would withstand such an onslaught without damage occurring to them.
From her bed, Ned's mother remonstrated. Then Ned's father, who was also in the room, chipped in.
"Ned, this isn't what I'm used to seeing. I remember how, last time Mum was ill, it was you out of all the family who kept coming up to see her, asking how she was feeling and whether she needed anything to eat or drink. That was a really caring thing to do."
Ned looked at his father astonished, then burst into tears, went over to his mother, and gave her a big hug.
What had just happened? Ned's father could have told him to stop, shouted at him that he was going to damage the wardrobe, or chased him from the room. That would have been normal parental instinct.
But instead, he did something quite different. He conjured up "good Ned", praising him for a past action. Ned's intrinsic goodness then did the rest: "good Ned" won over "bad Ned", and that was that. Because both Neds were part of the same person, there was no conflict created between the members of the family. Essentially, Ned's dad facilitated Ned into goodness.
Ned has ADHD. And ADHD comes with a form of picture-thinking that is not just vivid, but has a lot of emotion attached to it. The "funky", entertaining images are the ones that draw the person's attention away from the real world, causing something that the world then sees as an "attention deficit". The exciting ones may make the person impulsive. The negative ones can cause extreme and chronic worry — another trait common in an ADHD profile. The frustrating ones make you... well... frustrated, often venting your anger in some way.
When we communicate in words, we are encoding our mental pictures in language, then the person we are talking to — if they are paying attention — unpacks our words into their own mental images. And if that person is an ADHD-thinker, the chances are that their pictures will evoke feelings, sometimes strong ones.
Whether or not our child has ADHD — but especially if they do — the way we communicate matters. Each communication we make is a "feeling cocktail". You get to choose whether you give your impressionable child a noxious, intoxicating cocktail or the healthy smoothie variety. Often, it can be difficult to pick the second — or even to know how to mix it — because you yourself are emotionally charged, and often — let's face it — exhausted by your child's challenging behaviours.
So in these situations, it's you the parent that first needs help. You need a very simple, fast-acting emotional reset technique — simple enough for you to remember to use and fast-acting enough to de-clutter your feelings and thinking right away. Then, you need equally simple communication techniques, along with a core understanding of how your neurodivergent child thinks and feels, and what internal mechanisms are governing their actions — for better or for worse.
Ned is now in his late twenties. He still has ADHD, but he is professionally successful, knows how to work with his ADHD as a strength, and is actually rather proud of it. He is a loving father, and his family is one of the best role models for family harmony that I know.
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