Coping is the Key
“It’s not about the cards you’re dealt, but how you play the hand.”(1)
My father joined the Navy at age 18. He always spoke appreciatively of the Navy for whipping him into shape. Obviously never knowing what my father was like as a kid, all I could witness was the after-Navy man. What I saw was a man with a strong work ethic who had a lot of healthy self-discipline routines and had a very hard time sitting still for any prolonged period of time. A perfect example of how this manifested itself: whenever my parents came out to visit me in Seattle, I needed to have a long enough list of projects so that my dad could have some productive time while he was out.
When it came to behavior, my dad used general, non-scientific terms such as “whipping into shape” and “control yourself.” And those worked fine for me growing up. I didn’t spend all that much time pondering over what came easy for me vs. what was a challenge for me. My peers also talked about my behavior non-scientifically, using words like “spaz” and “random”. I always credited my six brothers and sisters for being harder on me than any of my peers (I say this in the most loving and appreciative way), such that by the time I reached the point of hearing words like this directed at me, I had a pretty thick skin and rarely thought much of it. I knew my family loved me and I was as encouraged to give them a hard time as they were to give me a hard time.
By copying my dad’s behavior, things seemed to work pretty well for me. It wasn’t until well into my Microsoft career that I started to look at my behavior more objectively and scientifically. Why was I so routine-oriented? Why would I have unpredictable surges and lulls in my execution? Around this time, I read Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled.”2 Among the many takeaways I got from this book, one that was especially important was how he presented therapy. At that time, there was a huge stigma associated with seeing a therapist. If you were seeing a therapist, it meant you were crazy. Scott countered that, saying that the healthiest individuals are the ones that seek therapy, because they are prioritizing their health, and taking specific steps to understand more about themselves.
Scott’s perspective resonated with me. As a computer geek, I saw therapy as debugging my brain. And given how much I had learned about software through my debugging experiences, I actually became excited about going to therapy. From my earliest therapy, we replaced those general terms from my childhood with more scientific terms: “ADHD” and “addictive behavior.” There was no judgment or labeling associated with the use of these terms. It was all about understanding. As we talked about this science, I could replay my experiences and see how these behaviors were exhibited in my dad and in myself. The genetics behind this made that none too surprising.
