Celebrate your ADHD Child

Top Ten New Year's Resolutions

Top Ten New Year’s Resolutions

1. Give my self permission to lose control (in non-destructive ways).

2. Spend my time building on my strengths rather than patching up my weaknesses.

3. Ask myself every day “What do I need?” and then take a step to meet that need.

4. Make myself right instead of wrong.

5. Honor my sadness and know that living with great vibrancy is the greatest tribute to those we love.

6. Make a list of activities that are delightful and do one every week.

7. Honor pleasure over performance demands, some of the time.

8. Admit that I don’t know.

9. Slow Down.

10. Say “NO” to myself on occasion and to others on many more occasions.

Whereas most New Year’s resolutions impose rigid demands for self-reform, Dr. Lara Honos-Webb’s, Listening to Depression: How Understanding Your Pain Can Heal Your Life gives the healing message that the search for perfection can backfire. Learn how aiming for pleasure, permission, power and presence can offer so much more than losing those last 10 pounds. And how pleasure, permission, power and presence will make it so much easier to lose those last 10 pounds.

For more tips and tools about depression visit http://www.visionarysoul.com. Sign up for Dr. Lara Honos-Webb’s free newsletter at http://www.visionarysoul.com/newsletter.html.  Learn how to translate your pain into your purpose with individual sessions http://www.visionarysoul.com/sessions.html Dr. Lara Honos-Webb is a clinical psychologist and author of The Gift of ADHD and Listening to Depression: How Understanding Your Pain Can Heal Your Life. 

What's Wrong with A Child?

On November 11 the NYT prominently featured an article that prominently featured ADHD and depression the title was "What's Wrong with A Child? Psychiatrists Often Disagree" by Benedict Carey.

While this article raises the problem and raises an eyebrow about the escalation of diagnoses in children and the phenomenon of children with multiple diagnoses, it doesn't answer the question of why, or attempt to solve the problem. Dr. Lara Honos-Webb in The Gift of ADHD and Listening to Depression vehemently articulates that what you focus on you get more of. If you tell a child he has a deficit disorder is it a suprise that that child continues to get worse? Her approach not only explains the phenomenon of escalating diagnoses (epidemiologically and additional diagnoses for one child) but also offers an alternative. Translate symptoms into gifts and create a positive self-fulfilling prophesy rather than a negative one.

Here's the link.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/health/psychology/11kids.html?

what do you think? Post your comments here.

www.visionarysoul.com

ADHD Treatment: Find Your Strength Now

     The label of ADHD may keep you focused on the bad things in your life and prevent you from seeing the positive things in your life. You may have ADHD, but that is not all that you are. Ask yourself “What else am I?” What strengths do you have that the ADHD has not overshadowed? For example, you might write that “I have ADHD, but I am also a mother”, or “I am a professional”. In reflecting on your strengths, you might write that “I still am a wonderful cook,” or “I have overcome many difficulties in my life and therefore am strong and courageous.”

Sometimes it can be helpful simply to accept the reality of your ADHD. The strategies people use to self-medicate or deny their struggles often cause more problems complicating the existing ADHD. So you might want to answer the following questions to help face your ADHD while realizing that you are bigger than it.

• “I have ADHD, but one resource for helping me to cope is __________________________” (Answer this as many times as possible).
• “I have ADHD but I can reach out for help. The following people can support me through this:” (List as many people as possible)
• “I may have ADHD but one quality about myself that will help me to succeed in spite of ADHD is:” (Answer as many times as possible).
• “Even though I have ADHD it is not an excuse to fall back on the self-destructive habit of ______________ for coping with this ADHD”
• “I have ADHD but there are many professionals who are trained to help people who are struggling like I am. The following professionals can guide me through this difficult time: (list as many as possible, it might be a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, a primary care doctor, an energy healer, a naturopath etc.)”
• “The family members that will be the most useful in helping me cope with ADHD are:”
• “The family members that will be least helpful in coping with ADHD are: (List family members) and I might want to consider setting strong boundaries.”
• “The things I can do that will help me cope with this ADHD are:” (list as many activities as possible.”

After completing these sentence stems you can also write free form reflections on resources you have available to you to help cope with your ADHD.

For more tips and tools about ADHD visit http://www.visionarysoul.com. Sign up for Dr. Lara Honos-Webb’s free newsletter at http://www.visionarysoul.com/newsletter.html. Learn how to translate problems into strengths with individual sessions http://www.visionarysoul.com/sessions.html Dr. Lara Honos-Webb is a clinical psychologist and author of The Gift of ADHD and Listening to Depression: How Understanding Your Pain Can Heal Your Life.

Coach Your ADHD Child

There is a story about a convicted felon who said that the best time of his life was his criminal trial because he received so much special attention from the judge, lawyers and jurors. This demonstrates that even highly negative attention can be highly rewarding. Part of being a coach to your child is understanding what may be motivating bad behavior and poor performance. In some cases negative attention that singles him out may in fact be meeting this basic need for being unique and special. One way to prevent this problem is to plan an activity that highlights how special your child is. This means something that only your child gets, and it involves a treat and extra positive attention. Sometimes if you take away treats, attention or a sense of uniqueness from from your child in response to bad behavior, you set up a vicious cycle. He desperately needs the special feeling so he acts bad – both out of frustration and as a strategy to get the special but bad attention. For this activity, make sure it involves only your child. If you have other children you can emphasize to your child that only he gets this activity and NOT his brothers and sisters (of course you’ll want to make sure each child gets a special attention activity). Use your creativity in planning this activity, but it could be as simple as taking him out to dinner just you and him with no siblings. Emphasize to your child that this activity is just to show him how special he is and he doesn’t have to do anything to earn it. www.visionarysoul.com

Using Your Passion As Springboard to Marketing Your Book

MP3 File Length- 36 minutes, 21 seconds

Dr. Lara Honos-Webb is interviewed by Deborah Harper, President of Psychjourney about how to use your passion for subject as a springboard for marketing your book. Websites, podcasts, blogging, and social networking are highlighted as tools for developing a cross-platform for attracting media attention and increasing sales of your books.

Visit Dr. Lara Honos-Webb's website Visionary Soul.

Listen to all of Dr. Lara's podcasts on Psychjourney Podcasts.

Healing Play

I'm working on my third book, A companion to the Gift of ADHD: 110 Activities for Transforming Problems into Strengths.  The book will be filled with activities that are not competitive and have no performance demands but contain within them implicit lessons that will help ADHD kids in particular, but any kid really!

One activity I'm developing is to help your child develop a healthy wince or a hearty WHOOPS! response. Here's a rough sketch:

Practice having your child make silly mistakes and practicing an exaggerated whoops response. Like a clown. The teaching of this activity is the “healthy wince”. Don’t waste your time teaching  your child to be perfect. Don’t try to teach your child not to fail. Teach your child the healthy rebound – resilience. Every life will face disappointment, rejection, failure. You don’t want to teach your child to be failure phobic. Play at failing and making a quick recovery. This way your  child won’t be tempted to make small dreams to avoid failure. They also won’t be stopped when they do encounter failure. This is the key recipe for success – big dreams plus not being stopped by rejection, disappointment or failure. The actual activity where they are encouraged to make a mistake could be anything from slipping and falling (a pratfall) to spilling water or dropping a ball while playing catch.

www.visionarysoul.com

ADHD and Depression

Many people with ADHD also suffer from depression. It may be that the difference of ADHD means living a life without all the approving nods that come to others so easily. ADHD often means living a life of self-reliance (what other people call defiance).

I'm gearing up with lots of excitement for the upcoming release of my new book, Listening to Depression: How Understanding Your Pain Can Heal Your Life. 

When I tell people about my book, they have a hard time believing that depression can be a gift. The book doesn't say that depression isn't painful, it says that there are treasures to be found if you listen carefully to your depression for guidance.

Make no mistake! The book will show you how to heal your depression but goes even farther than that. The book will tell you that depression will heal your life. If you listen to depression,  you won't just go back to normal. The guidance in depression will transform  your life to bring it into greater alignment with your deepest gifts, values, interests and needs.

I just saw the movie - Click - with Adam Sandler.  This is one of the best movies I have ever seen! It illustrates perfectly the idea of how easy it is to live a life totally off track from what we really want for ourselves. The main character wastes much of his life fastforwarding from one much wanted promotion to the next.  Luckily he gets a chance to do it over again because when he gets to the end, he realizes he missed everything that really mattered, and lost what was most important to him.

Because the idea of a gift in depression can be hard to believe at first glance I interviewed many people who tell stories of living through devasting crises and dark depressions and not only recovering from it but creating a life that is guided by a vision rather than passively following a life pushed and pulled by fears.  On my psychjourney blog, Listening to Depression, you can hear some interviews with these people profiled in my book including the President of Psychjourney - Deborah Harper.

more later,

Dr. Lara Honos-Webb

www.visionarysoul.com

Top Ten Tips for Parenting ADHD and Spirited Kids

From The Gift of ADHD by Dr. Lara Honos-Webb

www.visionarysoul.com

1. Advocate for your child. This means you need to “spin” your child’s behavior to friends, family and teachers. Has your child’s antics been any worse than our leading politicians? Probably not. Imagine the spinmeisters on talk shows who try to get their politicians elected. Do the same for your child.

2. Coach your child to name and feel ok with all their emotions. Kids act bad when they are mad, sad or “ascared.” When you coach your child to tell you what she feels, her bad behavior will heal.

3. Look inside yourself. Sometimes kids act out unexpressed conflicts of their parents. Are you struggling with depression, anxiety, rage? Get help for yourself and your kids will shape up.

4. Think of yourself as a coach. Your job is to coach your child to success in social, emotional and educational settings. Sometimes the answer is practice, practice, practice. Don’t get discouraged if you have to repeat yourself over and over again.

5. Ask yourself: “If my child’s most frustrating behavior was meant to teach me something – what would it be?” Many parents find themselves half distressed and half impressed at their child’s indifference to people pleasing. Sometimes this is just the lesson parents need to learn in their own lives – many parents have become imbalanced in attending too much to seeking approval from others.

6. Forget about the competition. Your child can still strive to be outstanding without it being about comparisons to other children. ADHD and spirited children are sensitive to tension produced by parents’ competitiveness and the fear based motivation inhibits them.

7. Keep Yourself Alive! It takes a lot of energy to keep up with ADHD and spirited kids. You need to become your own energy source. Feed your own passions. If you are married work to increase your intimacy with your partner. If you are single, keep your own love life alive.

8. Honor the kernel of self-reliance in all acts of defiance. Every time your child doesn’t do what you asked them to do, ask them for an explanation. Honor their independent thinking and consider what part of it you may want to incorporate into your discipline. Continue to insist that your child respect your rules while demonstrating respect for their own rhythm and logic.

9. Practice preventative medicine. Many times children’s bad behavior is a misguided attempt to get some precious attention. Fuel your child up with the highest octane energy you can early in the day. Spend a few minutes being entirely present with your child. Look them in the eyes, touch them lovingly and listen closely to your child. This intense presence will give them what they need and head off desperate pleas for attention. Sometimes just a few minutes will prevent large energy draining hassles.

10. Connect with your child’s teacher. Research has shown over many decades that your child’s educational outcomes are very closely linked with how much the teacher likes your child and how much they expect from your child.  This is why you need to advocate for your child at the same time as you connect with your child’s teacher. Show enormous respect for your child’s teachers and try to forge a close alliance with him or her. They will go the extra mile for your child.

Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist.  She is author of The Gift of ADHD: How to Transform Your Child's Problems into Strengths, the forthcoming Gift of Depression: How Listening to Your Pain Can Heal Your Life and more than twenty-five scholarly articles. Her work has been featured in Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and Publisher's Weekly as well as newspapers across the country and local and national radio and television. She specializes in the treatment of ADHD and depression and the psychology of pregnancy and motherhood; she speaks regularly on her areas of expertise. Honos-Webb completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at University of California, San Francisco, and has been an assistant professor teaching graduate students. Visit her website at www.visionarysoul.com.

ADHD and Entrepeneurs

Today, April 9, there is a great story in the Chicago Tribune business section profiling successful business people who attribute their success in part to ADHD. It is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who are trying to overcome their "disorder deficit"

Happily the story by Kathy Bergen mentions my book The Gift of ADHD.

here is the link to the story:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0604090280apr09,0,6482242.story?track=mostemailedlink

and an excerpt:

Lara Honos-Webb, author of "The Gift of ADHD," said, "there is substantial overlap in what it takes to be an entrepreneur and the traits [often are] associated with ADHD," among them high energy, a tendency to do many things at once, a proclivity for innovative thinking and taking risks.

The Chicago landscape is dotted with success stories so varied that it seems almost impossible to make broad generalizations about where individuals with learning issues will find success. Some of the highly accomplished have been honored by the Rush Neurobehavioral Center in Skokie, including Jacobs, Swonk, futures industry leader Jack Sandner, former Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas, chef Charlie Trotter, real estate executive Harvey Alter, Molex Inc. co-Chairman Frederick Krehbiel and Illinois Appellate Judge Anne Burke.

Nationally, business leaders with learning differences include brokerage innovator Charles Schwab, JetBlue Airways Corp. founder David Neeleman, Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea and John Chambers, chief of Cisco Systems Inc.

Rocky starts

For many of today's business leaders, childhood was peppered with frustration, humiliation and a sense of being different. When many of them were growing up, there was very little public awareness, if any, of learning differences, and very little help was available.

For more resources on The Gift of ADHD and changing the way parents, teachers and schools look at this diagnosis, stop by my website at

http://www.visionarysoul.com

ADHD Child: Parents Stop Apologizing

Parents, when you start advocating for your child and stop apologizing for them, you can transform bad behavior. Why? Your child's bad behavior is often an expression of their feeling of distance from you. The closer they feel to you the better they will behave. The harder they will try to tame their own wild child if they feel you are out there going to bat for them.  Read more to see the synergistic cycle you set in motion when you stop apologizing for your ADHD child.

Starting a Synergistic Cycle

            By becoming an advocate for your child, you start a synergistic cycle that transforms symptoms into talents or at the least – lovable eccentricities. This will contrast with the danger of developing a vicious cycle that easily develops when negative views are taken of your child’s symptoms. The synergistic cycle you can develop is that 1) as you advocate for your child you feel empowered and you maintain your positive view of your child, 2) as you feel better about yourself and your child your interactions with him are loving and rewarding for your child, 3) as your child feels loved and rewarded he tries to show his love through increased efforts at home and at school, 4) as your child tries harder at school he begins to experience more positive feedback at school, 5) as your child interacts with you in more loving ways you find it easier to maintain your positive view and loving interactions and finally 6) the result of this synergistic cycle is that you and your child have a loving, close connected relationship where you are working with each other, and are on each other’s side.

           The opposite to the synergistic cycle is the vicious cycle. The vicious cycle that is set up by being an apologist for your child looks like this: 1) You apologize for your child’s behavior after a teacher gives you negative feedback about his behavior, 2) by accepting this negative feedback your own view of your child is that there must be something wrong with him, 3) you feel like you must have done something wrong and feel worse about yourself as a parent, 4) you are more likely to become angry with or frustrated with your child, 5) as your child gets negative feedback from you and feels a lack of closeness he behaves in problematic ways to express his own distress, 6) the more your child acts in problematic ways the more negative feedback he gets at school and the more frustrated you feel, 7) the more frustrated you feel the more difficult it is to feel connected to your child, 8) you and your child both feel a growing distance between the two of you and you begin to feel helpless and hopeless.

You can transform your child's ADHD symptoms by becoming an advocate.