ADULT OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER

This is some quick brain-storming about ADULT “oppositional defiance disorder,” which doesn’t show up on Google lists. ODD in adults: short fuse: impatience, rage, frustration, fear, confusion, contradiction. BUT sometimes visionary, idealistic, willing to sacrifice for a higher goal. Outlier in terms of emotion: too sensitive or overloads easily. Pain: thrashing to escape.

I’ve been throwing around the phrase “oppositional defiance disorder” too much and thought I’d better stop long enough to reflect about what I mean and why it’s coming to mind. When I google, all I find is stuff about children and promotions for “magic cures,” discipline “systems” to make all resistance to parental control go away. How to make your child a zombie.

Not far from this town was a private “school” for such children that was closed down because the magic wand was a stock prod. You see? That’s my attitude right there -- braced against authority figures, assuming that they will resort to punishment, even torture.

I remember being in faculty meetings where the principal was reading his latest list of edicts -- the same ones he had already handed out to us earlier in the day in printed form -- with me sighing, rolling my eyes, and kicking the chair in front of me. I was fired, of course. The students had the same attitude with ME being the stupid authority figure. But I couldn’t fire them, strike them, or even criticize them, One of those “magic system” teams came in to give us a lecture on how to set up detention, time-delays, elaborate systems of record-keeping that took up teaching energy and time and became an absorbing game for some kids.

Most of us know the developmental phase that all children go through when they oppose everything. “Would you like some ice cream?” NOOOOOO. It appears to be a kind of brain growth stage when some little processing station is either not quite online or is not properly connected up yet. The cooperation bump. It is frustrating for the parent -- and sometimes legitimately dangerous for the child. (“Look out for that car!” NOOOOO. Thump.) I wouldn’t be surprised to see that unaccounted-for child death stats spike at that age. A few children never get past that stage, especially if trauma is the suppressor the parent chooses to use to resolve the conflict. Intimidation is paralyzing.

Sometimes, I believe, the child, the teen, and the grown-up have this so-called “disorder” thrust upon them by the situation. Something is wrong -- anything from molestation to broad social injustice. The incorrigible kid, the freaked-out shooter, and the self-immolating nun seem different when considered from their own points of view, which is not the point of view of the authority figure or even society as a whole. These miracle discipline systems the snake oil salesmen invent are to sell to the authorities, not to those who defy them. Authorities have resources, like money. Oppositionally defiant individuals usually have nothing but their own minds, bodies and emotions.

In my own mental and emotional life, I see that my defiance of authorities is usually fueled by contempt at their incompetence, frustration that they can’t seem to understand what appears obvious to me, and indignation that they refuse to even talk about problems. This same dense principal was forcing us to write new curricula for the school and he wanted it in grade stair-steps. I wanted to write mine in strands: a reading sequence, a writing sequence, a listening sequence and so on. This was because kids who flunked English ended up taking three grades at once so I wanted to run a sort of one-room schoolhouse strategy. He couldn’t understand the concept so he opposed it. I don’t just mean he opposed the idea -- he could not understand that learning is not necessarily chunked up into grades.

When something like health or income is involved, I escalate, sometimes beyond reason. I mean, the first diagnosis of my marginal diabetes was made by a woman doctor who seemed to think she was entitled to dominate me like a popular high school girl looking for acolytes. I told her off before going to a different doctor, which is risky. After all, a doc can write things in your chart that contaminate how you are seen for many years. “Unstable, non-cooperative.” It can affect one’s access to care and cost a lot of money when the doc orders tests or writes prescriptions.

Clearly, a key issue is trust when one cannot have control. There’s little wonder that we have such a political trust crisis on our hands when so much of our compliance is based on force instead of willing consent. When there is a twenty dollar penalty for not having enough money to pay a bill, the temptation to play “uproar” is hard to resist. Surely there are better ways.

When I forget to cover my reactions and obviously bristle, some people come in closer and reach for control. Those fearful of sharing my punishment back away. Solidarity is threatened, which is hard on visionaries and idealists trying to force change. Did I say “force”?

By isolating myself in a small village where population density is thin, I can be far more of an outlier, a nonconforming person who is supersensitive about some things, easily overloaded by obligation and guilt. I have time to ponder and tease out the threads of something like oppositional defiance disorder. One thing I see is how easily an ODD person is controlled by their own automatic reactions. If you want them to go left, tell them to go right. The more subtle and alert will realize they are being controlled. But then they will tell even sympathetic persons the opposite of what they mean. They say they are fine when they are not and become enraged if you can’t tell they are NOT fine. It’s the confusion and automaticity of the strategy that keeps it from working better.

In the end the opposition and the defiance can either become exhausted disengagement or a thrashing desperation to escape the trap, to force someone else to take hold and resolve an intolerable and unjust torture. The best of all outcomes might be when the global situation shifts enough to open the jaws of the trap. That might mean a medical breakthrough, an economic reframing, or a social revolution. I have heard of schools or nursing homes where a team of concerned persons convene with the suffering “acting out” individual to evaluate and redesign terms. Isn’t that like a family? Sometimes they include family.

I don’t get into fist fights, but I’m hypervigilant, a compressed spring, tenacious, and waiting. Taking notes. Always writing as a way of getting at the truth. Stubborn.