by Peter  – drawing on my experience and teachings
A child is given the label (diagnosis) of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), also called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) when he is considered overactive, cannot pay attention and cannot sit still, ALL VERY subjective symptoms. We may well ask what lies behind this phenomenon of our times. This article will try to shed some light on this condition and show how it illustrates an aspect of human nature common to us all. We have all experienced the child who is disorganised, distracted, impulsive and hyperactive.

I recall 9-year-old Robert darting into my office at high speed and aiming for the objects on my table, then trying to sit on the chair but found himself climbing all over it and rolling around on it. His desperate mother tried to constrain him, saying Robert try and sit still so that Peter can talk to you and try and find out what is happening. I felt exhausted by just watching this ball of energy try to bring coordination and focus to his body.  Moms have an enormous task, each and every day, just trying to cope with these children. It is an exhausting and at times a thankless task. Most primary school classes have a teacher and a mother who have to deal with such a child day in and day out. It is fairly common for kindergarten or primary school teachers to have one or more such children in their classrooms and they will be severely challenged to teach effectively and prevent serious social disruption.

Ritalin
Attention Deficit Disorder and Ritalin have become almost synonymous. Up to 90% of children who are first diagnosed with ADD receive a prescription for Ritalin. At least a dozen other drugs are prescribed for these symptoms as well. There has been a 500% increase in the use of Ritalin alone since 1991. Short- term use of these medications is associated with a 70 to 80% improvement in symptoms. So naturally, it appears that the drugs have solved the problem. However, these studies don't show the entire picture. See Ritalin article else where on web page to see that there is no long term proven benefit of this drug and to the contrary the many side effects may have serious consequences.

Conventional Biomedical Science

What does conventional biomedical science know about this condition?
A.D. D. / A.D.H.D. refers to a syndrome that describes a cluster of symptoms listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association. These are all subjective symptoms that span a wide spectrum between normal and abnormal and that naturally make consensus difficult.  Who is not hyperactive or distracted at some time or other! There are innumerable studies of under diagnosis and over diagnosis and it is estimated that millions of children are incorrectly labelled and treated for nothing more than their immaturity, or that this is a symptom of stress in the home environment. A review1 of these studies shows clearly that 50% of children diagnosed with ADD/ADHD do not fit the officially accepted criteria and are therefore wrongly diagnosed.

Symptoms of ADD and ADHD
Hyperactive children are likely to have displayed some or all of the following symptoms as a baby.

ADD is usually diagnosed when a child starts school. Some of the symptoms displayed by school aged children & adults include some or all of the symptoms below. At least six are needed.

The term ADD/ADHD was first adopted in the 1980s to replace the scientifically unsustainable and inaccurate diagnoses of minimal brain damage or dysfunction. A huge body of literature exists on this subject but to date no definite biological, neurological or genetic impairments have been established to fully explain this condition.

There is often a strong family history – 43% of ADD/ADHD children have parents and some 25% have close relatives who suffer or have suffered from the same. Some authors feel that this points to a genetic factor, whereas others believe this indicates learned family behaviour. This learned family behaviour is probably the most over looked source of the problem to-date.

Environmental Factors
There appear to be many associated environmental factors which may explain the rising prevalence in ADD/ADHD in developed countries. Some of the following environmental steps are ways to help prevent ADD and ADHD (and in my experience have contributed hugely to the healing process) and to reverse the factors that cause them:

Understanding the child from within

Let’s start with the child as a physical/spiritual being. Just try this exercise for a moment. With present awareness imagine bearing witness inside the body of a child who exhibits the symptoms of attention deficit with hyperactivity. This body provides the child with a physical home and vehicle for his life's journey. His body is tense, muscles taut, and his breathing shallow. He does not seem to be aware of his body, he seems disconnected from it, it seems to move as if controlled by a force outside of itself. When we sense more deeply we feel a powerful surge of desire erupting from his deep subconscious soul life to experience the world outside.

This desire, from inside drives him through his finely attuned senses towards a myriad of outer sense impressions so that he is flooded and overwhelmed by them. He lives in his senses, driven by his will; he does not clearly think about what he sees, hears, or touches so that he is not fully conscious of what he senses. For to know what we sense we also have to connect a thought to it. His thinking is powerfully present in driving his desire, in impulsive and often creative ideas – I want to do this, I want to grasp that – and he finds it difficult to rest in reflecting about things. He will therefore continuously overstep his and others’ boundaries, because his reflective thinking is absent. He is a doer and a sensor, not a thinker. He is therefore distractible, impulsive, fidgety, and disorganised.

Where are his feelings in this mix of soul surges? When we look behind his aggressive and over-emotional exterior, we can sense his deep longing for something that he is painfully missing. There are feelings of being unworthy, inadequate, disappointed in himself, frustrated, doubtful of himself and in this negative frame of mind he is frightened of life. He lives in angst. These feelings will mobilise his basic survival instincts to protect himself in the best way he knows. He overcomes his negative self image with an over-powerful positive image, and he overcompensates with an unbridled force of will that expresses itself in the picture we know as ADHD. This hyper activity is just the bi-product of him trying to function normally. In fact he/she sees themselves as being normal within this difficult world.

When we engage one-on-one with him, then we can contact the deeper nature of the child and listen to the wisdom which knows that deep longing for what is painfully missing. . . . . .. , who longs for and who knows there is something missing? What is missing? It is all the same thing. It is the ground and centre of the child's very existence, his ‘I’, his soul or higher Self, that which gives him a secure sense of himself, which gives to him his unique nature, which makes him different from every other individual and directs his life journey in a unique and special way. It is this inability to be at the centre of his own experience that the child is longing for, that causes so much inner distress and permits other forces to overwhelm the child's being.
This is the sad and difficult picture of the child with ADHD. It is a condition of imbalance caused by the missing centre, the balancing power, the ‘I’, which harmonises the soul cognitive (thinking), emotive (feeling) and volitional (willing) functions and holds the polarities of too much spirit-too much matter in check.

Solving this situation

Once we understand this picture of imbalance, it also shows us how to solve it!!!!
A child with ADD was asked: What is ADD? He replied: ‘That's when nobody is at home’. There are many reasons why nobody is home. The owner may not be comfortable in his body, it doesn't really suit him – after all he received a ready made home at birth from his parents, and in the following years he may not have been able to work adequately to mould this home into one that fits his nature. In many instances he/she feels unsafe there. So he hangs outside too often. This is what makes them accident prone / clumsy / uncoordinated / can’t concentrate / forgetful, etc. It is more comfortable outside than inside. Furthermore, it does not help when this body is invaded by nutritional, environmental and chemical pollutants or excesses, or when his neuro-sensory apparatus is assaulted with audiovisual sense impressions.

Tensions in the home – often one of the major contributors

When his sense of self is further eroded by tensions in the parental home-life, and by pressures of many kinds, heightened by his sensitive nature, he feels even less inclined to stay at home and build from within, a healthy and stable life for himself.

How then can we invite the child to stay more often at home, how can we make it more comfortable and attractive for him to want to be there in his waking life? The child himself is unable to grasp an understanding of the missing person just because he is not present to do this, because he is not at the centre of his own experience. By puberty, with time and maturity most children do enter the home of their bodies sufficiently to function ‘normally’, because the progressive penetration of the ‘I’ into the body is the natural developmental process in all children. This is however not guaranteed and in many cases it remains like this for the rest of their lives. However, if we leave this to happen in its own time, there will be a huge cost to the child's psycho-spiritual well being as well as having a direct impact on their own life later on in life.

Many children that were born in the last decade or so, and at this time, are highly developed souls (you must have noticed how easily they take to computers, understand concepts etc compared to the older generation when they were kids. It is as though they were born with a computer mouse in their hands and know exactly what to do with it!!!) and are highly sensitive beings. Most Moms will identify with this of their child easily. If there is tension in the home in any way, they pick it up, they just know it – even if the parents think that they have not exposed there children to any hint of tension. This tension makes them feel ‘unsafe’ in their world and then they ‘pop’ out so to speak, or goes away so that “nobody is home”.

As the child's caregivers we therefore need to step in. We need to be a model of the power that the child is lacking. This requires us to find our right relationship with our own body and soul, with being at home with ourselves. This means creating in our life, the right balance, between too much spirit and too much matter, healthy rhythms and routines of living such as: eating, working, relaxing, and sleeping, a healthy diet and appropriate physical activity, a healthy interest in ourselves, in our primary and secondary relationships and in the world.

We can then offer the right support for the child who knows deep within himself what he is missing and for which he is desperately searching. We are then in the best position to apply all the above health principles to the child. If we have taken the interest to experience the child's inner life we will know how to support the child in the right way. The child will need to feel our ongoing interest and connection in his life, our consistent and firm containment of his excesses, our regular encouragement and praise for his real person. He will experience this as the support he needs for building up the missing centre and willingly re-enter his body and be part and partake in his world. This brings great inner joy for them.

All efforts should also then be made to remove environmental trigger factors as listed above, namely food sensitivities (elimination diet), allergic irritants, dietary excesses, environmental pollutants and excessive TV, video and computer viewing. Then consider this below.

Counselling – normally a family affair

Counselling family members has a huge impact and is normally the biggest contributor to normalising the problem. This in conjunction with the environmental factors mentioned above, can, in most instances resolve most issues if not all. The child in question is also encouraged to be at home in his body just like any other child. I have a particular technique that I apply when working with the child. It works very well, but must not be seen as the solver of the problem. This is normally a package deal, namely; address the environmental issues, address diet issues, address family issues and then address the child issue. When the child has settled they then play a very important role in reducing stress in the family environment, they also contribute to creating awareness in the family. This child is often the growth catalyst for the family.

We can then further help the child with an individually prescribed diet, natural dynamic medication and nutritional supplements to strengthen the centre, educational and remedial activities which support the child in his core being and specific therapeutic interventions such as body alignment, brain gym, cranio-sacral therapy and other modalities all aimed at building and maintaining a stronger sense of Self.

What needs also to be understood that once we have been able to “get” the “I” of the child to take it’s rightful place in the body – it feels normally very strange for them and takes a while to ultimately settle and find out how does being in this body now work as opposed to before. The more that his family support him the more he will stay in the body. In the follow up visitations I have measuring techniques that I use to see the progress and how well the process has worked. In most instances the parents indicate a marked shift in the next visit in the child which is confirmed in my measuring process. Children have somehow a knack of adjusting very rapidly.

Unfortunately the scope of this article does not permit a more detailed description of the therapeutic opportunities available. In the light of this picture, Ritalin, the schedule 7 drug routinely used to manage the ADHD child, must be seen as a desperate measure to control symptoms. It does not address the root cause of the problems and has the potential for mild and more serious side-effects at this young age as well as in later life. Please see Ritalin article on the web site.

The phenomenon of ADD/ADHD is a powerful picture of the struggle and challenge we all face in striving to hold the balance between too much light and too much matter.

However, while it is likely that many or all of these factors may be implicated to some degree, none is able to explain the underlying constitutional disposition of the child totally and there is, therefore, a clear admission that this syndrome is still poorly understood world wide. May this article contribute to the greater understanding!.

Contacting Peter - try any one of these peter@iempowerself.com

- Cell no. +27 82 855 4793      Practice no. +27 11 478 2633,     Fax no. 011 478 2596.

View my Fees and Policies page for my hourly rate. No medication is given what so ever.

References

Further reading