Reply to "I have my own way of doing things"

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Reply to ""I have my own way of doing things""

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[quote=Anonymous]22:28 has it right.

A long time ago, I had a serious problem. I joined a support group of people who also had this problem. At first, it  helped. Just knowing other people had dealt with this and make it through to the other side really helped. Then some of the people in the group started making suggestions that I try what had worked for them.

Sometimes, I knew immediately that what they suggested would not work for me. Other times, I'd try it and it wouldn't work. At the next meeting, they'd ask if I'd done what they suggested. They would be visibly annoyed if I said no. It was even worse if I admitted I had tried their suggestion, but it hadn't work. Usually, the immediate response was I must not have done it correctly and then they would repeat the suggestion while cross-examining me as to how I had tried to carry out their suggestion. One thought I needed a specific kind of therapy and of course thought her therapist was the person I had to see. I read a bit about the therapy and didn't think it was reputable.

Fortunately, I had a good pastor and I talked to him about this. He laughed. He said he had no experience with support groups for my problem.  However, he had a lot of experience with Alcoholics Anonymous, since he'd often been a sponsor for such groups, allowing them to meet at his church. He said there were some alcoholics who had reached sobriety who thought their personal experience overrode everything else. What worked for them would work for everyone. They crowned themselves "expert" based solely on their own experience. They thought experience made them more expert than people who were not alcoholics but had extensive academic training plus experience working with many alcoholics in a wide variety of settings. He said that being an alcoholic does NOT make anyone an expert on alcoholism and thinking it does makes these people very, very dangerous. As the sponsor of some groups in which this happened, he'd had to step in and often that resulted in ugly situations.

I think you're kind of like the people in my support group and the alcoholics my pastor talked about. The fact you have ADHD means you can be very helpful to your son in realizing that people with this problem can be successful in life. However, you need to recognize that you are NOT an expert on ADHD and that worked for you may not work for your son. Things that did not work for you may work for your son. What you really want to avoid is putting your son in a position in which he thinks he has to try your solutions and is reluctant to let you know that they don't work for him.

You need a true, objective expert. [/quote]

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