I once asked my husband if he thought I was contrary.
“What, are you kidding?” he said.
When I think about it, my mother could be quite contrary, too. She was generous and loving, but she did not like being told what to do.
I remember when she was in her nineties and living in assisted living. She ended up in the hospital with compression fractures of the spine and came home with a pacemaker. Back at her apartment, her doctor scheduled physical therapy so she could progress from a wheelchair to a walker.
I was there when the physical therapist, a young woman, arrived.
My mother said, “No. I’m not going.” Then she turned her wheelchair around and spun out of the room.
I felt flustered and a bit embarrassed. I didn’t know what to tell the therapist other than what was obvious: my mother didn’t plan to participate.
So, as I sat in the physical therapist’s waiting room for my 1:40 appointment after arthroscopic surgery for a meniscus tear, I felt my own contrariness kicking in. It buzzed at the top of my head.
I do not want to be here.
The room is freezing cold.
All the therapists are male.
They will be touching my leg.
I will have to make small talk.
And why do I have to wait after filling out all those online forms?
Then I told myself to stop. Just stop.
Fortunately, the buzzing feeling went away and I calmed down.
And much to my surprise, the intake director, Mark, was great. He explained things that my surgeon had glossed over. I learned that I was actually sabotaging my healing by standing too long and walking too far. And some movements that felt possibly, maybe, a little bit painful were actually okay for me to do.
But then the assistant Charlie told me I’d be warming up on a stationary bike. My eyes must have gone wide because he took one look at my face and asked “What?”
“There is no way I can pedal a bike,” I told him. “Low resistance or not. I can’t even bend my knee enough to get it on the pedal.”
The director came right over. “Let’s just try this: Halfway up, stop. Now pedal halfway backward.” Not a full revolution.
That much I could do.
In the end, my first physical therapy session turned out to be a pretty good experience—not just because I learned what I could and couldn’t do while my knee heals, but because it taught me something about myself.
Sometimes I am my mother’s daughter.
Give me a rule, a direction, or a perfectly reasonable suggestion, and a little voice in my head immediately says: No. I’m not going to do that.
Recently I learned that people with ADHD are often contrary. There’s actually a name for this response: reactance. It’s the tendency to push back when we feel our freedom to choose is being threatened. ADHD can make this response especially pronounced, but you don’t have to have ADHD to be particularly contrary.
I doubt my mother had ADHD, but my father sure did. My brother, too. I don’t know why she was reactance. I just seems that’s where I got it, and now I know my ADHD may amplify that tendency.
Maybe the trick isn’t to stop being contrary. Maybe it’s to pause long enough to find out whether the person telling me what to do might actually be able to help me.
But I still hate physical therapy.
And don’t ever tell me what to do.
