Healing ADD : Simple Exercises That Will Change Your Daily Life [Paperback]

Thom Hartmann (Author), Richard Bandler (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 5, 1998

"Healing ADD" presents simple methods involving visualization and positive thinking that can be readily picked up by adults and taught to children with ADD. Those with ADD will learn to see their lives and the world around them differently. A series of instructions guides readers through transformational exercises that enable them to see, hear, and feel their own past behavior in a new and empowering way.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Underwood-Miller; 1 edition (March 5, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1887424377
• ISBN-13: 978-1887424370
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #69,252 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Thom Hartmann, who started in radio in 1968, is also an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. The co-founder (with his wife, Louise) of The New England Salem Children's Village (1978) and The Hunter School (1997), he has led national innovations in the areas of residential treatment for abused children and private/public education for learning-disabled children. Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of nineteen books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents. He is the former executive director of a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed and abused children, and has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, and the United States through the German-based Salem International program. Formerly rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of The Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP Trainer by Richard Bandler (who wrote the foreword to one of Thom's books), he was the originator of the revolutionary "Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis" to understand the psychiatric condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). A guest faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, he also synthesized the "Younger/Older Culture model" for describing the underpinnings - and possible solutions - to the world's ecological and socio-political crises, suggesting that many of our problems are grounded in cultural "stories" which go back thousands of years. His most recent books are "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class," "The Edison Gene," "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call to Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?"

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

226 of 233 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So Good That I Wrote a Thank-You Note to the Author, October 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Healing ADD : Simple Exercises That Will Change Your Daily Life (Paperback)

Five stars is all I can give this book in this format. It actually deserves a constellation.

It was hard to wait until I had finished this book to send a letter (well, an e-mail) of thanks to Thom Hartmann for not only explaining what ADD is but for his instructions on how to deal personally with some of the obstacles it presents. I am a person who has ADD, but when I was a child in the 1950's no one knew about the disorder. I got such a lifetime of negative feedback about myself that even major successes in my adult life (and I have had quite a few) did not make me feel adequate or whole.

There was an enormous healing for me in the first few chapters of this book. For the first time in my 51 years I actually understood my mother and the frustrations and pain she experienced having a child like me when there was no understanding or help available. The healing that took place with that alone would have been worth the price of the book. (I wrote my mom a letter saying, effectively, "Considering what you were up against, Mom, you did a pretty darned good job." She is probably going to faint when she gets it!)

But then, as though that weren't enough, I was able--immediately upon reading the instructions for the mental exercises--to truly put the past behind me and get it out of my way. Then I was able to "overlay" tedious situations with a level of interest that made it possible to start a project and stick with it for hours if necessary. (That's a tough one to explain unless you're Thom Hartmann, so read his book.) Upon mastering that technique, which took only about 30 minutes maximum, I got up and cleaned up my very messy kitchen--even cleaning out all the cabinets. And I have been transferring the technique to my job all week. I can't believe what I have accomplished!

It helps enormously that Hartmann has ADD himself. He is not just spouting a lot of theory and psychobabble. He IS there; he's doing that; and he isn't pulling your leg about anything. Self-help is a good thing. Self-healing is a victory like no other. Thanks again, Thom Hartmann, for showing us ADD folks how to do that. And thanks for interpreting our condition for the rest of the world in an enlightened and easy-to-understand way.

This book will not only heal ADD people, but their entire families. I can't wait to read the rest of the books on ADD by this author.

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Mind-Fodder - and Useful, Too!, April 7, 2005

By 

fast_matt (Dallas, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Healing ADD : Simple Exercises That Will Change Your Daily Life (Paperback)

This book is an amazing self-improvement resource; only rarely does a book impress me, but... I'm impressed!

Hartmann has an extremely engaging writing style, and displays great deftness in walking a very narrow path; most books gravitate toward either theories that are interesting but engender no action, or strident calls to action that would do a nagging parent proud.

Instead, his phrases twist, and turn, and *slide* through that narrow gap, right past all sorts of carefully-developed defenses, and inspire the amused reader to actually TRY some of the exercises he suggests. For some of us, believe me, that's no small task! As an added bonus, this book is also the best USEFUL quick-and-dirty introduction to NLP I've seen... I've toyed with experimenting with my internal programming before, and even seen some useful results when guided by a friend that's proficient in it, but Hartmann's descriptions and exercises immediately made sense and intrigued me.

An example - he talked of how most of us have a spatial representation of time, and picture the future extending in one direction and the past in another. Those with a less-than-functional internal sense of time have usually shifted them to a less-than-useful location and sure enough, I found my own representation to be within reason but somewhat skewed. After trying the associated mental exercise in the book, I suddenly found myself getting up, two mornings in succession, the *first* time my alarm went off - usually I'd hit "snooze" for at least an hour. As if that weren't enough, on the third day my alarm clock failed... the outlet was bad, and the alarm didn't go off. I STILL woke up at the appropriate time. This is fascinating stuff; next I'm going to play with resetting some old anchors and creating some new ones.

Whether you consider yourself to have ADD, consider yourself not to, or think it's just a negative label created to minimize people who shake things up a bit, this book is worth a read. Doubly so if you're an iNtuitive Perceiving personality type; it's a quick, entertaining, and very likely useful read... well worth a try in my book!

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary view of NLP applied to ADHD, October 29, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Healing ADD : Simple Exercises That Will Change Your Daily Life (Paperback)

This remarkable book not only offers one of the most cogent insights into ADHD (see the earlier long review a few back), and does address "attention" at length (in fact, it's all about how we attend, and to what, and in what ways), but it's also one of the best introductions to the use of NLP as a way of healing from the damage of growing up a Hunter in a Farmer's world.

Filled with practical, real-world exercises and techniques, Healing ADD (this is the first book with that title) really is about healing - coming to terms with what ADHD means in this world, learning new ways to function and position yourself in the world, and recovering from the traumas that virtually every person with ADHD who was subjected to public school carries.

This is a powerful book, with specific tools and techniques, an extensive discussion of how the ADHD attentional mechanism is different and unique for ADHD people, and one of the best introductions to NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) available, ADHD-context or not. Highly recommended, whether you've read the author's other books or not!