I am a man in my retirement stages and I think that I still have some PTSD from being the constant target of bullies over 50 years ago. I was shoved, slapped, pushed, punched, kicked and spat on. My worst experience was in 6th Grade when an 8th Grade King Kong grabbed me from behind in a choke hold and tried to dunk my head into an unflushed toilet bowl.

Vic, I bleed for you and feel your pain. So please hear me out because I have lived it too and I care about what is being dished out to you. Don’t listen to any women, because they never had to endure this type of abuse and they just do not understand. As you are aware, male bullies take their aggression to a whole quantum level higher, well beyond insults and taunts. When they don’t get the reaction they want, they resort to physical a\acks. They can be vicious, violent, brutal and cruel. So here is my advice from real-life experience:

1. You cannot reason with or negotiate any sort of peace treaty with bullies. When verbal abuse does not elicit the response they want, they instantly ramp up to physical attacks.

2. Despite your best efforts to avoid a fight, A FIGHT IS EVENTUALY GOING TO FIND YOU, so you, like Ukraine, need a prepared defense plan in place. “Fighting will only get you both in trouble” wrote another ADDitude contributor. No it won’t. No it won’t. No fair-minded principal is going to punish a bully vic=m for fending off a wanton undeserved attack.

3. Forget about telling a teacher. The silence of omerta of crime families applies here too. Protesting to the school administration will brand you as a weakling and a coward. Ager the attempted toilet bowl dunking I complained to the principle. That bully was the MVP junior varsity football player and nothing happened.

4. Avoid the 300 lb (140 kg), 7 g (210 cm) gorillas. They will maim and mangle you and take fiendish delight in your suffering.

5. Have your parents enroll you in a boxing, judo or taekwondo class. This will teach you some useful schoolyard fisticuff combat tactics and help you steel your nerves while under extreme duress. If it becomes a fight where the bully sees it happening and has not been taken by surprise, most such fights that I have seen end in a draw with neither combatant landing a decisive punch. This case is not a total loss; you will have demonstrated that you will not meekly accept abuse.

6. Draw up a mental list of bullies your size or size or preferably smaller and swing into action if they commit an act of war. I learned from hard experience that trying to shrug off such attacks only makes things worse. Even the younger bullies took note and now joined in on the fun. This situation got completely out of control. Use the element of surprise if you can and strike back hard. Lest he counterattacks, continue to administer corporal retaliation until he surrenders or begs for mercy.

One day in 10th grade a terrorist-in-training runt grabbed the pencils and pens out of my breast pocket. I immediately swung into action and punched him HARD in the snout. He bled all over his shirt and ran off crying to the school nurse. Word of this instantly shocked the bully club and they took notice that I would no longer accept being the campus punching bag. Bullies do not want to mess with anyone who will resist. The principal was wise enough to correctly surmise what happened and I was never called onto the carpet. I had a peaceful life for the final 2 years of my high school tour of duty!

Schoolyard bullies are still an unfortunate fact of life and don’t insult my intelligence by making excuses for them because they also have ADHD. That is not relevant! The fact is that they have no right to take it out on innocent victims. My bad times were in the late 1960s but our then-HS freshman son had a bad experience with a local bully in the mid 1990s.

This neighborhood big tyrant stood in front of the school bus door and demanded a $1 “fare” from each boy. The school officials were mystified why that particular bus delivered only girls to the unloading area. We complained to the principal but he was annoyed (at us!) and said that there was nothing he could (or would) do because these incidents occurred far away from school grounds. We then had a sheriff’s deputy take a report. He promised to oversee boarding operations at the morning bus pickup but nothing ever happened.

So, Vic, hang in there and be brave. I wish you well and GBU.

For instance, start with the first step self awareness: #1. ADHD Self-Awareness Begins with Honesty

The article states that self awareness begins “with taking an inventory of your strengths and challenges: who you are and aren’t, what you are likely to do or not, how you work versus how you wish you worked.”

So a guide might look something like this:

List your strengths, the things that you do well.
(Add several lines below)
What things do you find challenging or do not like doing?
(Add several lines below)
Who are you? (Needs more explanation. Example: are you more of an extrovert, are you cautious, do you lead, follow or somewhere in the middle, etc)
Who you aren’t? ( Use the above list to find the opposite of and add any others you may think of.)
What you are likely to do? (Needs more explanation.)
(My addition: what motivates you? What helps you to stay on track?, etc.)

2. Practice ADHD Self-Acceptance
“Create a judgment-free zone, and let go of how you think you should be. “ That is easier said than done, especially if one has self-beliefs that have been embedded early in childhood.
A guide might suggest one to write down the negative self beliefs and give strategies for being aware of when we have them and ways to replace/change them.

I want to stress how much I believe that this article could truly help ADHD adults to become more self aware. I hope that you will take my comments into consideration and make a guide for the article. I hope to see it as a download one day.
Thank you for your time and consideration.

“The Federal Trade Commission alleges that BetterHelp provided its users’ email addresses, IP addresses and even responses to health questionnaires to third-party companies, in an effort to help them more effectively target advertising.”

They are also notorious for underpaying therapists and being an incredibly expensive service (several hundreds of dollars a month), while not providing adequate care for clients. I am disappointed to see this posted on ADDitude.

With my youngest – she is much more laid-back, has no side effects, and uses meds to help her focus and help with her dysgraphia (related to dyslexia, but affects writing instead reading), so she is usually off meds on weekend. Though now, as a young adult, she will often take her meds on weekends if she’s going grocery shopping with me (less sensory overload) or doing any other thing where she has to interact with people outside of our family. We’re both introverts with ADHD – meds help our social batteries last longer.