Jeff’s A.D.D. Mind

A.D.D. Rage or The Centerless Facets

 

In an earlier entry I described the A.D.D. personality as being, not a coherent unit, but consisting of “facets” of a personality. The daily struggle is to keep particular facets in public view - the “good dad” facet or the “good worker” facet.¹ The facets are much like facets on a jewel, i.e., they are different faces that are seen from the outside. I included this image of a jewel (a ruby in this case² ) because I want to build on that metaphor of personality-as-facet.³

The major difference between jeweled facets and “personality facets”⁴ is that, unlike the jewel, there is no central core or solid substrate upon which the facets adhere. The core is a swirling viscous mass of A.D.D. emotion and energy moving at high speed much like the earliest stages of the universe’s Big Bang. Keeping the correct facet facing the world (i.e., making it visible to the outside) requires an enormous amount of countervailing energy to keep it in place. What you have here is A.D.D. rage just waiting to happen. The balancing act is between the internal explosive core and an external countervailing force (your willpower?)⁵ that tries to contain it. At the boundary of the two is the personality facet. When the forces can no longer stay in balance, you have A.D.D. rage. In the words of Yeats, “the centre cannot hold” and “anarchy is loosed upon the world.”⁶

Eventually the rage subsides but something else occurs. When the balance is again achieved, the particular personality facet that was at the boundary of the forces may no longer exist. It may have been completed destroyed and will never be visible again. Or it may have been severely damaged so that something is missing when it is seen by the public. Or miraculously that personality facet may have completed survived the explosion. But whether those around you have survived the explosion is quite another story.

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1. See “How Long Will ‘Me’ Last” on the description of personality-as-facet. [↩]
2. image comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cut_Ruby.jpg [↩]
3. Some readers may want to see this recent entry/page - “An Intellectual Journey” - which explains on a different level what you are reading (witnessing?) here, namely using writing as a means of thinking, hence my building on previous entries. [↩]
4. of course, I mean A.D.D. personality [↩]
5. Whether we want to call this willpower or something else, it is for this reason that I believe that controlling A.D.D. becomes more difficult with age because so much energy is needed to contain the explosive core and as your physical condition changes (deteriorates) it becomes that much more difficult to contain those explosions. Further, this is why physical activity is so important for an A.D.D.er. There are two beneficial effects: the physical activity becomes an outlet - a valve - for the built-up internal explosive forces to escape in a controlled manner while, at the same time, the physical activity increases the stamina needed to provide that countervailing force. Oh, one other thing. Physical activity improves your sex life. [↩]
6. ”anarchy is loosed upon the world” - now THAT’S a great description of A.D.D. rage. See also “Two Days of A.D.D. Rage.“ [↩]

Jeff posted this article under Anger on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 8:19 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site. Here's the Permalink. View Technorati Linkbacks.