I've never in my life experienced what is happening to me now. I am disorganized, easily distracted, incredibly overwhelmed and essentially unmotivated. I've been in a relationship with a man with ADD and depression for a little over 7 years. It took 6 years to get him on medication and therapy, which seems to be more the norm than the exception. The anger, dear god, his anger.
I've come to believe the anger is self-loathing over the number of times he does not complete a task, forgets entirely, does only part of a job, or takes months sometimes years to start or finish something. Part of it all makes sense. If I were continuously unsuccessful and couldn't hide it from my partner I'd be pretty miserable as well. The oddity is the mess that enables and contributes to the problem. His work environment has all sorts of papers strewn around. It would drive me wild if I had to find something in that mess. Yet, the anger is demonstrated the moment I ask for a document, paper or something that is on his desk or ask if he did something he was supposed to do and he did not.
My intense dilemma (and it seems like others share this problem) is why not FILE the documents on the desk so you can find them.... then you don't have to feel inadequate because you can't find them......then you don't have to get angry because you feel inadequate and nobody has to live in the equivalent of hell.
I started this post with the subject line "picking up ADD traits." I am not taking care of my work environment anymore, I am having trouble finding things, I am now keeping lists and putting up Post-It notes as reminders. Am I now in some sort of twisted symbiotic place with him? Have I taken care of so much for so long I just can't keep all the plates spinning? Am I acting out by behaving just like him so I can say "I forgot" just as often as he does? Is this revenge? I am wanting to take care of me for a while now. Frankly, because I'm terrified that I can't remember anything anymore and I feel like I lost myself in this whole thing. "I am lost. I've gone to look for myself. If I should return before I get back. Please ask me to wait for myself." - Unknown
Hello Soft Owl....
Submitted by c ur self on
Read your post like it belongs to me or someone else....This comment..."It took 6 years to get him on medication and therapy" I understand this, but, this is a control statement...I've made these same type decisions....My wife is a certain way, so I'm going to speak to her (this other adult) and instruct her on which direction she should take in life, so her life, my life, and our relationship can be better...Easy right? LOL.....
The only thing I can do is change myself or leave.....I've changed....I don't share finances, I don't do taxes w/ her, I keep the utility bills in my desk and away from her, organize and pay them...I can clean and do chores w/ out resentment....I can deal w/ the messiness and hoarding...I can live in many ways like she doesn't exist....I can accept her reality, and work around and not engage in things that are not wise....I can say No, smile and walk away....Or at least I'm getting better.....
I hear you about your life, I suggest you get back to it, just like before you met him....Our spouse's survived fine before us and will survive fine after us, when and if that happens....I allowed her to overwhelm me and dominate my thoughts for several years...God is to good and life is to short for that....He's a big boy, just step around him and ignore his outbursts. "When any of us wade into another person's chaos we are asking to part of it."
Many can be very dependent ( my wife is) and loves to drag you into their chaos or even blame you for things they can't find when they are frustrated or running late, etc...You can't fall into the trap of defending yourself for something you had nothing to do with.....
About your lack of memory and lack of motivation...It's probably the stress, and besides, most things that happen w/ an adhd mind happen's to all of us from time to time, just not so severely. Show me someone that never forgets anything, and I will show you someone who hasn't got much to do...
Blessings Soft Owl....
C
C,
Submitted by MidnightOwl on
Hi midnight owl....
Submitted by c ur self on
The main thing I try to be aware of in my marriage is to not lose ground...Some times because communication can be so challenging this can difficult...It's really important to communicate calmly, and with the needs of the other person in mind ( along with our on of course)...I suggest bringing this up when you are at your closest and most peaceful....He needs to understand it's not about him, or your feelings for him. But just part of your nature. So many times offenses can just happen seemly out of thin air, when efforts for understanding is all that is being sought...
C
I totally understand what may
Submitted by overwhelmedwife on
I totally understand what may be going on with you...
When H's issues are flaring, it took such a toll on me that I couldn't get things done. In fact, there were days (before he retired) that he would rage at night, and then rage in the morning all the way to the last second of walking out the door for work (usually late at that point), and after he'd leave I would be so mentally "spent" that I would spend the day doing things that made me feel better...chatting with a friend on the phone, watching a pleasant movie on TV, going to lunch with a friend, work on my business.....anything to distract me from what I had just endured.
Now that H has been on proper meds the last 2 months, I feel like my old self again. I'm getting more organized. I'm getting more things done outside of my business. Even one of our kids noticed and commented today.
I look at it this way....after your partner has unfairly raged at you, while likely not letting you defend yourself, and likely falsely accusing you of things, once you're away from him, you're licking your wounds. You're recovering from an assault...verbal, yes, but still an assault. Who at that point can be fully-functioning?
Living with someone like this creates a dysfunctional atmosphere....even to the nons.
When my H and I were separated (twice), I was very organized. I cooked, cleaned, worked on my business. Everything was in its place. (Also....it was so NICE to be able to put something where it belonged KNOWING that the ADHD partner would NOT be messing it up!
Don't many of us "give up" a little in regards to organizing when we KNOW that within 24-48 hours the ADHD partner is going to mess up the drawers, mess up the closets, mess up the counters, and on and on?
I would alphabetized my DVDs...but then I gave up because H would just grab a bunch and shove them back wherever. I would alphabetize the authors of our books.....H would mess them up. I would carefully fold his socks and underwear and Tshirts in his drawers...only to have him rummage thru and disrupt the order. Then it becomes a case of "why bother." He would even mess up my own personal drawers by claiming that he needed to find something he lost. Uh...no...your wallet would not be in my bra drawer or my make-up drawer!. Duh!
So, I think it's the dysfunction that is causing this.
I love your screen name. I
Submitted by NowOrNever (not verified) on
I love your screen name. I'll bet you do look at the world and think, Soft Owl.
I'm reporting in from a relationship with ADHD in it but nowadays much less angry acting out. I couldnt take the anger ... Because of my prior history, no relationship to me is worth me having anger dumped on me for nothing that I did. If I were living with the anger in the house that you are, it would be as bad for me as it has been for Overwhelmed...like for her, that irrational, targeted anger in the house would wreck a lot in me, I'd be so crushed with sadness that, and I have been, that everything slows to a crawl. i'd b fogged with sadness. In fact, with much less targeting of me than before and much less yelling--and he doesnt seem to register to himself that he is yelling, I'm still hit hard when we have some big crisis that throws the house, my ability to complete anything, any peaceability, out of kilter... I'm dealing with a week of that right now.
You wrote:
My intense dilemma (and it seems like others share this problem) is why not FILE the documents on the desk so you can find them....
Makes sense to you and me. But we dont have ADHD generated executive function problems, short term memory problems, and that attention that jumps around all the time.
Only the person himself or herself can make himself change habits of physical order and disorder. If nothing in his life makes your husband uncomfortable enough with his physical things that he himself decides that he must change how he handles them he wont. If that hasnt happened you dont have a chance in China that he will care about your things or care whether or not things that you both use are in order. His change has to come from within him, and about his things, or it wont happen at all.
I started this post with the subject line "picking up ADD traits." I am not taking care of my work environment anymore, I am having trouble finding things, I am now keeping lists and putting up Post-It notes as reminders. Am I now in some sort of twisted symbiotic place with him? Have I taken care of so much for so long I just can't keep all the plates spinning? Am I acting out by behaving just like him so I can say "I forgot" just as often as he does? Is this revenge? I am wanting to take care of me for a while now. Frankly, because I'm terrified that I can't remember anything anymore and I feel like I lost myself in this whole thing. "I am lost. I've gone to look for myself. If I should return before I get back. Please ask me to wait for myself." - Unknown
Bless you, Soft Owl, at the end there, you quoted a line that in various wordings, i've read written by partners of...well, not only people with ADHD, but also said or written by family members of someone whose illness makes very extreme demands on the attention, physical labor and ability to have one's own life. Its been said by parents of bipolar children, by parents or spouses of addicts. I've said it myself after years of be the solo caretaker of a very aged parent. My version of it then was, "am I going to age and die only having been this parent's nurse?" I had no life of my own for years. Whoever in the family ends up being the caretaker of an elderly person often reports this. No opportunity to plan, none to rest, etc. The sentence is: I've lost myself to this over-demand of my care.
This is an issue of this kind of relationship, especially if the partner is in denial and not willingly cooperating with medical and therapeutic treatment.
I completely agree with Overwhelmed and C that if you've been through 6 years of a partner not doing his own work of handling his ADHD, you likely are out of kilter yourself because you're stressed out, exhausted, I'd be struggling hard with depression, if it were me, if I were in your situation, my signature as well would be that I would be grieving, meaning going through that cycle of alarm-facing up to reality-trying and failing to bargain with reality-anger-working on letting go, round and round.
Yes, until I started to get a different handle on myself in this relation of mine that turned out to have ADHD in it, I was losing it. Like many report on this site, I had a pretty grounded personality, dealt with people pretty well, had lots of good relations with friends, etc. before my future husband started manifesting what turned out to be ADHD affected behavior. He had kept it well under wraps. I only began to see some major parts of what is daily and weekly for us, when I started becoming part of his intimate life. It was a very surprising vortex. I nearly fell apart physically. I am not overstating that. It didnt start to get better until I started to take myself in hand in things I'd never encountered in life before. My husband is a good man and I love him very much, and he loves me. These ADHD generated issues are a real bear. You have to take care of you. Differently.
My husband has had to deal with himself long before the diagnosis of ADHD existed, so he does have some disciplines for himself that he has created. But they relate directly to him, most of them are not disciplines related to relationship.
If mine is like yours, your partner wont directly help you with any of your problems that you're having that are ADHD related. Even if he's turned a corner in working on his anger and himself, he'll not be able to do much to help you with your boundaries and emotional wellbeing. Or physical. One would wish that one's partner would, but that's not the way it goes.
He will have his hands full with himself, and he has a natural, ADHD related tendency not to notice outside of himself. Mine misses a lot. He doesnt have a good ability to predict the impact of his behavior on other people.
Overwhelmed and C are talking to you about their different ways of using boundaries, that have been necessary and have had a good effect on their own wellbeing. They're married to two different people and are two different people, so what they've worked out is specific to their specific relations. Reading their posts, it was striking that whatever they've worked out to do, part of what they do is take vigorous action to take care of themselves.
I'm using boundaries I've never in my past life HAD to use. I've never lived with my husband in particular before nor had any experience whatsoever, and no reading knowledge of ADHD before. But the!re necessary now.
I've held a job since I was 16, so have some pretty long experience of dragging myself through work, if I am sick and there's no backup or any way I can take off work...so I can get through tasks nearly always. So that will probably be nearly the last to go, for me. But where it went into emergency mode for me, Owl, was physical. My body started giving me more and more very strong signals that I either did new work on my emotional balance, and took different care of my body, or I was going to be in the hospital. Let's say that where it's hitting you in memory in focus that "the system is going down," those alarm bells went off in my body that told me I was falling apart. And like you, I'm not talking about whiney, pansy wansy falling apart, I'm talking about the system of me not taking it.
Dont wait for your husband to do anything to directly help you with things like depression, Owl. Just don't. You have to care for you. In the middle of it all, yes. I'm hard at work in this area. How are you today?
How am I today....
Submitted by Soft_Owl on
NowOrNever asked that question of me yesterday. C.S. Lewis wrote: "Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different."
Thank you for asking and thank you to all the other contributors who, in addition to NowOrNever, offered comfort, understanding and more than enough reassurance that the things I might be feeling, aren't all that unique considering the circumstances.
Truest statement ever: Dont wait for your husband to do anything to directly help you with things like depression, Owl. Just don't. You have to care for you. In the middle of it all, yes. I'm hard at work in this area.
This is a very solitary experience, I believe, because we are at crossed purposes. Living between his ears must be quite the environment. As I watch the things he immediately grasps and compare them to the things that are so difficult and troublesome, I see his profound competence juxtaposed to profound cluelessness. We all have found ourselves wondering "what was I thinking" or "that was so simple I can't believe I missed it." For us, those are moments, mostly infrequent and we rarely, if ever, spend a lot of time explaining our cluelessness. I know I am most anxious or off kilter when I can't find things, or my business isn't in order, or I've forgotten to follow up with a client, a friend or a relative. I am pretty sure I loathe being in that position so badly, I have set up my environment to be clean, orderly and task and goal oriented. I find that I've further perfected that original mindset of mine since the beginning of this relationship with my partner and ADD.
Juggling everything made me more capable of juggling more. If that makes any sense. I feel like I have a PhD in organizational skills. It almost irks me that there is a whole industry out there dedicated to performing the service of: Life Coaches and Organizational Specialists. Sometimes I wonder if I should just start a new corporation and market these skills.
But, alas I digress. I'm in the middle of a corporate lawsuit I instituted. Litigating this situation requires the summation of about 7 years of corporate transactions together with all their permutations for the purpose of proving conclusively that the entity I am suing should end in a judgment against them and a monetary award to my corporation. All of this has taken my focus away from my ADD partner as I have little time for "relationship and household oversight" anymore.
I do try (I'm not sure why) to get my emotional needs met by him and I have some insane thought he would speak to me in a soothing voice & listen to me speak about this legal action (sometimes I'm calm about it, sometimes I am really angry over it).
Essentially I am seeking a soft place to fall when I feel the need to crash and burn emotionally. It's not happening. Everything is about him no matter how much has absolutely nothing to do with him. It's positively uncanny. Talking to him is like speaking to the media. By the time he puts "spin control" on it...........it not only doesn't remotely resemble anything I said...........it doesn't resemble anything I might have meant......it isn't even about me anymore, it's wholly about him, and whatever angst we have is always pushed across the table as my fault.
"I didn't start the trouble, it was already there when I got here." - Unknown
Why bother?
Submitted by jennalemone on
Who would have thought at the beginning of your relationship that eventually you would think, "Why bother?" Yes, We are the company we keep. When tidy things are constantly disheveled, and not appreciated, the "Why bother" thing is a reality. When your clipping coupons is canceled out by his not working, why bother? When your gardening and decorating is topped of with rusting junk and smelly dirt, "why bother" is absolutely a question you ask yourself.
You are not alone. We definitely give up a piece of ourselves when we must "Let it go"..letting go of some of our preferences and expectations and standards.
I think the relationships that do work are those where EACH person is giving up some of their own preferences, expectations and standards.....not when only one person is needing to do all the giving up. Why bother if they are not also bothering?
You are not alone. We
Submitted by NowOrNever (not verified) on
You are not alone. We definitely give up a piece of ourselves when we must "Let it go"..letting go of some of our preferences and expectations and standards.
I agree..
Why Bother - Part Deux
Submitted by Soft_Owl on
jennalemone writes: Who would have thought at the beginning of your relationship that eventually you would think, "Why bother?"
Interesting observation and perspective. I have found myself asking that question a lot lately and it seems a logical question under the circumstances. However, that is the question of the non-ADD partner.
As we go through the process of trying to navigate ADD in a relationship there are zillions of times we are in a confrontation with our ADD partner that causes us to perhaps ask "why bother?"
I am intrigued with the absence of that statement from the ADD partner. I have yet to hear my partner exclaim, "I cannot put things away, I cannot remember things, I cannot stop making it all about me and I cannot make this relationship about you! Therefore, I give up ... why am I bothering?"
Yet, the non ADD partner can easily list all the things they can't do anymore. "I can't keep track of everything, I can't remember your stuff and mine, I can't keep putting things away and not finding them in that place a second time, I can't keep all the plates spinning all the time....why am I bothering?"
Wondering if all of you have some experience that might explain why the ADD partner refuses, is reluctant, is totally unaware the angst, arguments, problems have something to do with their ADD???
All I've seen at my end is an absolute acknowledgement on his part that he has ADD. He takes medication for it daily and we are seeing a counselor now (been there twice). Yet when he "presents" his complaints about the relationship (either to me or the therapist) there is *never* an associated statement that indicates improperly or under-managed ADD plays any role at all in the problems of the relationship. His mind is made up and he won't be confused with the facts.
Soft Owl....It's denial....
Submitted by c ur self on
(I am intrigued with the absence of that statement from the ADD partner. I have yet to hear my partner exclaim, "I cannot put things away, I cannot remember things, I cannot stop making it all about me and I cannot make this relationship about you! Therefore, I give up ... why am I bothering?" )
Adhd minds or no different than nons....They have the same sincere desire to do good, be good, and FEEL good about themselves....So fixed traits can be hard to accept.....I've never heard this statement from my spouse either...
I know plenty of adhd people who can talk about it, and will tell you strait up the impact it has on their lives, and what they have to be aware of daily....
Also from your other post, you said, that when you try to confide in your husband (need him to hear w/ understanding and empathy) about the legal stuff, it just back fires because he is incapable of not making it about himself.....This statement should have it's on book! LOL...
I think you have many things going against you here...One!, he is a man who loves you and wants to FIX anything that is bothering you...Which will shut down empathy most every time.....Just a man's way of thinking (Wars are usually not started by women)....Secondly many adhd minds cannot follow well to begin with, so frustration and boredom starts quickly when asked to set through a lengthy discourse that they don't like and are dying to interject an opinion (their way of helping) into anyway....
Many adders' speak their thoughts (Soliloquies) and this can cause confusion because of rambling, and subject hopping....My wife goes through the house doing this and many times I don't know if she is talking to me or herself....I've found myself doing this at time when I'm alone...And it's usually just practicing how I'm going to deal w/ a subject with her....Or I end up laughing at the rant, repenting and forgetting about it, because reality is reality :)
C
My wife goes through the
Submitted by NowOrNever (not verified) on
My wife goes through the house doing this and many times I don't know if she is talking to me or herself...
hahahaha, C, thanks for the cheer-up.
How many times have I heard a loud voice, lo! from the other end of our house, asking questions and talking, and I at my end say "what?" "Are you talking to me? "what?" to which my sweetie only sometimes vocalizes back (loudly, from his end of the house), "I was talking to myself"
but....sometimes... he IS talking to me, C.
Now I have to tell you, I sometimes am very sorely tempted to fool around with it, and do one of those two old codgers not hearing each other comedy routines with him....but so far, not..
Glad to hear that you, too, are living in a vocally rich environment
...needless to say, I've got my own idiosyncracies, and he gets to live with them too.