The more I work with clients with ADHD and explore the common threads that link us together, the less satisfied I am with the screening tools that are used. It’s not that the tools are inaccurate, it’s that they are incomplete, in my opinion. It is hard to boil the lived experience of ADHD down to 18 questions on a form, I’ll give you that, and you probably don’t want to make the form too long or complicated or the client will get distracted, forget that they are doing it, get bored and put it down and lose it, etc. Having said that, I find that one of the advantages of being a clinician who actually lives with an ADHD brain is that I can sometimes go beyond the surface-level questionnaires and dig a bit deeper into the more subtle aspects of being this way. For this reason, I have come up with my own questionnaire. It is not scored, there is no rating scale and there is no cutoff, categorical designation that tells you whether you “have it” or not. Instead, read through it, or have someone read it to you and think on each item: Can I relate […]
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All Aggression is Defensive
All Aggression is Defensive
Making a Case for a Single Motivation of Aggressive Behavior Lots of research in recent years has distinguished between two types of aggressive behavior: reactive aggression and proactive (or instrumental). So what distinguishes one from the other? Simply stated, reactive aggression is a response to something, whereas proactive aggression is not. It is also referred to as instrumental aggression because it can be seen as a means to a particular end. This distinction seems to make intuitive sense and the research seems to reinforce intuition in this instance. However, despite the surface differences between these forms of aggression, is it possible that something is missing? Is it possible that all aggression is reactive, or defensive, in nature? Consider the neurobiological home of aggression, the fight-or-fight (FoF) response of the nervous system. Aggression does not exist without arousal of the FoF system. Therefore, it stands to reason that even proactive aggression is caused by the brain’s perception of a threat that may warrant activation of the FoF system. After all, it is the FoF response. In order for a response to be elicited, there must be a stimulus that is being responded to. It is by this logic that it may […]
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