I wish someone would write a book about all those successful people out there with LD/ADHD. It would be a tremendous help to let others see that a diagnosis is not your downfall and may eventually let you make tremendous gains in your life. Since being diagnosed recently, and realizing that I am not a failure becuase of this, I have learned alot about myself and changed many things in my life with just a tiny bit of work. I know that I still have alot to learn and this site has helped provide me wtih the encouragement. A book with all of the success stories written through out these boards would be really neat for others who are confused and newly diagnosed.
Re: It's been done, sort of
Hi Sue,
That book frustrated the heck out of me. I really did try to have a positive attitude and see if I could learn anything that might be helpful.
But for me, the experience was similar to watching the news where to entice you, they provide the headlines of a juicy story in the hopes that you’ll stick around. So in this book, the message seemed to be you have to reframe the issue. Ok fine, but how do you do that?
Finally at the end, there seemed to be suggestions for helping teenagers come to a point where they could do this but nothing was said about helping adults which frustrated me even more. Frankly, I ended up feeling extremely angry because LD seems to be the only disability where adults are blamed for their attitude when the real problem in my opinion is that services are non existent.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I definitely feel a positive attitude is a necessity. But to infer that just having one will make everything better is extremely unfair. By the way, I know you’re not doing that but I feel that was the book’s message.
Actually, I just realized that folks with a disease like cancer are blamed if they don’t have a positive attitude so I do understand that this situation isn’t limited strictly to people with LD.
Anyway, when I was having extremely organizational difficulties, you could have written a million inspirational books about adults with LD overcoming them and it wouldn’t have been worth a hill of beans unless you provided helpful solutions. It was only when I found a book that seemed to get it, “Organizing from the Inside Out” even though it didn’t speak specifically to LD issues is when my attitude about my organizational difficulties improved immensely.
Sorry, I don’t mean to be negative and perhaps if I reread the book, I would have a different opinion. But I had to share my initial experiences when I saw your post.
PT
Re: It's been done, sort of
Ashleigh
Check out the References for the paper “Top 5 Emotional Difficulties of People with Learning Disabilities” (http:ldpride.net/emotions.htm). I’m not personally familiar with them but the titles seem interesting. I’m thinking of looking them up myself. If I do, I’ll let you know.
Greg
“Exceeding Expectatoins” is all about highly successful folks with LDs. It’s not written as an inspirational book but rather pretty rigorously put together to analyze just what it takes to *be* one of those highly successful people. (Anger, by the way, is a very common factor…)