How about these quotes?
ADD children can hardly be said to have a will at all, if by that is meant a capacity which enables a person to know what he wants and to hold to that goal regardless of setbacks, difficulties, or distracting impulses. “But my child is strong-willed,” many parents insist. “When he decides that he wants something he just keeps at it until I cannot say no, or until I get very angry”. What is really being described here is not will, but a rigid, obsessive clinging to this or that desire. An obsession may resemble will in its persistence, but has nothing in common with it. Its power comes from the unconscious and it rules the individual, whereas a person with true will is in command of his intentions.
The child’s oppositionality is not an expression of will. What it denotes is the absence of will which–as with Steven’s abandonment of music–only allows a person to react, but not to act from a free and conscious process of decision making.
Counterwill is an automatic resistance put up by a human being with an incompletely developed sense of self, a reflexive and unthinking going against the will of the other. It is a natural but immature resistance arising from the fear of being controlled. Counterwill arises in anyone who has not yet developed a mature and conscious will of their own. Although it can remain active throughout life, normally it makes its most dramatic appearance during the toddler phase, and again in adolescence. In many people, and in the vast majority of children with ADD, it becomes entrenched as an ever-present force and may remain powerfully active well into adulthood. It immensely complicates personal relationships, school performance, and job or career success.
Counterwill has many manifestations. The parent of a child with attention deficit disorder will be familiar with them. Most obviously, it is expressed in verbal resistance, the “no’s”, the “I don’t have to’s”, the ” can’t make me’s”, in the constant arguing and countering whatever the parent proposes, in the ubiquitous “you are not the boss of me’s”. Like a psychological immune system, counterwill functions to keep out anything that does not originate within the child herself. It is present when the four-year old puts both hands over the ears to keep out the parent’s voice, or when the older child pins up an angry “keep out” sign on her door. It is visible in the body language of the adolescent and teenager: the sullen look and the shrugged shoulder. Its signs drive some adults around the bend, as in the futile “I’ll soon wipe that smirk off your face” of many a parent or teacher. Counterwill is also expressed through passivity. Every parent of an ADD child has had the experience of feeling intense frustration when, being pressured for time, they have tried to hurry their son or daughter along. The greater the parent’s anxiety and the greater the pressure he puts on the child, the more slothfully slow the child seems to become. Passivity begins to look like almost second nature to some of these children, although one may notice that when highly motivated the child will perform many tasks with alacrity. This passivity, what people may call laziness, can signal a strong internal resistance.
Counterwill is a natural inclination and does not mean there is anything intrinsically wrong with the child. It is not as if the individual does it; it happens to the child rather than being instigated by him. It may take the child as much by surprise as the parent. “It really is simply a counterforce,” says Dr. Neufeld. “The counterwill dynamic is simply a manifestation of a universal principle. The same principle is seen in physics, where it is considered fundamental to keeping the universe together: for every centripetal force there has to be a centrifugal one; for every force, a counterforce.” As all natural phenomena and all stages in the child’s life, counterwill has a positive purpose. It first appears in the toddler to help in the task of individuating, of beginning to separate from the parent. In essence, the child erects a wall of “no’s”. Behind this wall the child can gradually learn her likes and dislikes, aversions or preferences, without being overwhelmed by the far more powerful force generated by the parent’s will. Counterwill may be likened to the small fence one places around a young tender shoot to protect it from being eaten. The vulnerable little plant here is the child’s will. Without that protective fence it cannot survive. In adolescence counterwill serves the same goal, helping the young person loosen his psychological dependence on the family. It comes at a time when the sense of self is having to emerge out of the cocoon of the family. It is a defence mechanism to protect this fragile, threatened sense of self. By keeping out the the parent’s expectations and demands, counterwill helps to make room for the growth of the child’s own, self-generated motivations and preferences.
Figuring out what we want has to begin with having the freedom to not want. “Far from being depraved, counterwill is bequeathed by nature, to serve the ultimate purpose of becoming a separate being,” says Dr. Neufeld. “Counterwill, the dynamic, should not be identified with the child’s self. This is really important. It is not the person that we are getting to know when we get to know the resistance. Nature designed the child that way. It is really Nature that has a purpose, not the child.”
The great importance of understanding counterwill in attention deficit disorder stems from the extreme sensitivity of the ADD child who in this, as in many other things, is affected by environmental stimuli more than the average. Any force or pressure of whichever sort, no matter how good the intention, will be experienced by the ADD toddler, child, adolescent, or teenager to a highly magnified degree, and will generate counterwill of greatly heightened intensity. A vicious cycle ensues. The tendency of the ADD child is to behave in ways that evoke disapproval and attempts at parental control. Disapproval makes the child feel more insecure and promotes acting out, and the parent’s controlling responses deepen the child’s automatic resistance.
Emotional hypersensitivity in ADD is coupled with psychological underdevelopment. The weaker the child–or, for that matter, the adult– is psychologically, the more automatic and rigid the counterwill response becomes. A strong unconscious defence indicates a weak, undeveloped will, which is what is reflected in the oppositionality that seems intrinsic–but only seems that way–to the ADD personality. A strong defence is only there because there is threat, and the child is threatened only because a strong sense of his own self has not developed sufficiently. So the root of the problem is that, rather than being too powerful, the inner core of self, the true will, is stunted. This why the various epithets such as stubborn, wilful, and so on, denote not a strong will but the lack of one. An emotionally self-confident person does not have to adopt an oppositional stance automatically. She may resist others’ attempts to control her, but she will not do so rigidly and defensively. If she opposes something, it is from a strong sense of what her true preferences are, not out of a knee-jerk reflex. A child not driven by counterwill does not automatically experience any advice, any expression of the parent’s opinion as an attempt at control. Registering deep in her psyche is a sense of solidity about this inner core, this nucleus of the self, so there is no necessity to defend the will against being overwhelmed. “I will be able to hang onto myself,” an inner voice reassures her, “even if I listen to what somebody else thinks, or do what someone else wants me to do. I won’t lose my identity, so I don’t have to protect myself through resistance. I can afford to cooperate. I can afford to heed.” In contrast, the counterwill of the child with an underdeveloped self asserts itself ferociously. A parent meekly suggests that the child may wish to do her homework, only to get the automatic and combative “You are always telling me what to do!” .
REWARDS
The use of rewards–what might be called positive coercion–does not work in the long run any better than threat and punishment, or negative coercion. In the reward the child senses the parent’s desire to control.
To help the ADD child, we must strengthen the security of her relationship with the parents. The process of making the child feel safer, more secure in the relationship becomes much smoother and less frustrating if the parents understand counterwill and do what they can to relax its chronic hold on the child.
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