What am I doing…
My wife is my true love. We have been married twenty-two years and have two children.
I don’t understand why I push my wife away. I hurt her constantly. I avoid her and the conflict. I don’t communicate and when I do I am not clear. I am a workaholic.
I was married once before and after seven years my first wife had an affair. I found out and we got a divorce.
When we first were married I was a very insecure and jealous. My wife would sit for hours to make me feel secure and safe in our marriage. I always wanted to have my own business so she supported me in this endeavor. We had a business together and after ten years the economy changed and the business started failing. I kept this from her and then when the IRS started threatening I could no longer hide it. I was too embarrassed to tell her. I had a breakdown ended up in the hospital. So after our first six years of marriage I was diagnosed with ADHD, Depression, and PTS where I was put on medications. My wife had to deal with the IRS and the state alone. After getting out of the hospital I was able to sell my business and we broke even financially. I landed a great job and felt good about life. I worked twelve to fifteen hours a day and traveled a lot. Financially we had a late start but things defiantly turned around. I worked and my wife took care of everything else and I mean everything else. Without her total love support I would have never been able to do this.
Ten years ago at place where I worked a girl in the office thought I was the greatest. After about six months I went out to dinner with her twice. I had the opportunity to have an affair with her but realized what I was doing and that I truly love my wife. I stopped all interaction with this girl and she changed jobs shortly after.
Five years ago I was offered a position in another state. As a family we agreed to move and leave our friends and family for a better life. I was going to be able to work less and be available to my family more. Before we made the final decision to move my wife asked me if I had an affair. I told her no. Deep down she knew but felt our life would be different. I would be home more and that would make the difference. I finally told her three months ago about the other woman and what took place. She is angry.
My wife was a people person, will talk for hours to get the details about a situation, loves life, and is religious. Well after twenty-two years I changed that by pulling away, making her feel like she has no partner in life, I have said horrible things that I did not mean just so I would not have to confront issues. The problem with our marriage was me. I am introverted, do not communicate my feelings, walk away from confrontations, and fall into old habits. I have put this off for so long now that I can’t get passed her anger. I do not blame her. I do not want to hurt her any more. We had another fight last night. I don’t know why but this morning I told her I am not going to change and because I am hurting her and the children that I should move out. What am I doing? I can see it so clearly but as soon as we start to talk I get lost in thoughts and emotions. That’s when I fall into my old habit of claming up or saying something mean. Why?
emotions interfering with communication?
Submitted by arwen on
My spouse is ADD and has a lot of trouble communicating when he is in emotional turmoil. If our conversations were very emotional, he couldn't think straight, he became very impulsive, he would make things up, he couldn't listen and really hear what I was saying, all he could "hear" was the emotion because that's what consumed his attention.
I can understand very well why your wife is angry, but if you could both try to discuss your problems as calmly and as unemotionally as possible, it might help. I am an emotional person myself, basically an impatient and angry person, and it was very very hard for me to learn to keep a lid on my emotions (*not* suppress them, *not* pretend they weren't there, but working to keep them from taking over). Sometimes it actually made me feel sick to do it, and I resented it greatly -- but I could also see that my husband and I made more progress with our problems if I could keep more calm, so I could see it was worth it.
I urge you to read the blogs and posts here, there are lots of good ideas, maybe some will be of help to you. Good luck!
Thank you. We have tried
Submitted by unsure on
Thank you.
We have tried exactly what you have stated but it's been hard on her. I will keep reading and trying.
hello
Submitted by hope09 on
Hi, the non-adhd wife coming from a similar situation. If we make a little bit of progress he soon reverts to his old ways and it pushes me further then we were before. Can you try to make an understanding of just to walk away from the situation when you're feeling like you can't control your emotions and what you're going to say or do? I know its nearly impossible to catch yourself because you get caught up in the adhd state. I can relate to your wife...I'm shutting down from everything in life...I've only been married a few months...not where I expected to be...I'm not the same person. I posted the topic right before you about instincts...do you have any advice for me? Well, best of luck and feel free to keep coming back for support...you're definitely doing well by putting forth the effort and reaching out.
reverting to old habits
Submitted by arwen on
hope09, I used to have this same experience with my ADD husband. I don't know if my experience is relevant to your situation or not, but here it is for whatever it is worth.
I came to realize that when my husband and I "made progress", I was subconsciously taking the attitude of "Ok, good, now things are more on track", and I would assume I could consider the change as established and move forward to something else. I would feel more relaxed. This was a mistake on my part. Because of the way reward/reinforcement operates in a lot of people with ADD, I wasn't providing appropriate reward for the better behavior for a long enough sustained period -- relaxing and feeling positive and communicating that to my husband rewarded *me*, but it made him feel like his work was done and he didn't have to work at it anymore, when it really wasn't established yet. I learned I had to wait much longer for the progress to be really cemented before I could relax or go on to a next step, and I had to give sufficient but carefully measured rewards to help him sustain his efforts. I'm an impatient person, so this was very hard for me to do, but it was better than the one step forward, two steps back dance we'd been doing.
Hope this helps, good luck!
another try
Submitted by arwen on
I'm really sorry I wasn't able to offer you anything useful in my earlier response. I have some other thoughts that maybe will help.
You wrote, "...as soon as we start to talk I get lost in thoughts and emotions. That’s when I fall into my old habit of claming up or saying something mean. Why?"
I'm not a professional counselor, but I think I have an idea what is going on with my husband when he has been like this. My idea goes like this:
I believe that people with ADD have a harder time making sense out of the world, and the people close to them, than people without ADD do. I think this happens because (a) they have a hard time remembering all the relevant facts, and (b) because of distraction or hyperfocus, they tend not to notice important pieces of information (some of which are not obvious). As a result, people with ADD are trying to form an understanding of the people in the world around them *without all the key pieces of information*. But they don't *know* they are lacking important pieces. And sometimes a person with ADD has a hard time thinking about more than just a few pieces of information, because they can get lost trying to think about a lot of factors all at once. So, they happily try to put together ideas about people and situations without understanding that they have brought inadequate knowledge to the process.
It's like if somebody gave you a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box, and you don't have all the pieces, but you don't know any are missing. You try to construct the best picture you can figure out with what you have. Sometimes you can manage to put together the pieces so that the puzzle actually looks like something to you! But that doesn't mean that you solved the puzzle the way it was supposed to be solved. A person who has seen the whole puzzle put together knows that your solution is not the one the puzzle makers intended. What you put together with the pieces you had may be very very different from what the puzzle is supposed to look like.
You may feel that you've done a pretty good job with the puzzle -- you may sense that it may be a little "off", but it looks acceptable to *you*. But to the person who knows what the puzzle is supposed to look like, what you did may look all wrong. If that person doesn't understand that you thought you had all the pieces, if that person can't understand why you put the puzzle together the way you did, that person could become irritated and say negative things to you about it. To you, that may feel like an attack, because you tried hard and you can't see what's wrong with what you did. Since you don't know you are missing any pieces, you can't see any reason you should be criticized. It may feel to you that the other person isn't giving you any credit, that they are being unreasonable or mean. When we feel others are being mean to us, we often feel we'd like to be mean right back to them. It's a defense mechanism we often use when we feel hurt, to protect against further hurt feelings.
The fundamental problem is, neither of you can see the other's point of view. You may not even realize that you are looking at the same situation with a completely different perspectives. To each of you, your perspective makes perfect sense. When either of you are told by your partner that you are all wrong, it's very confusing and upsetting. It's easier to lash out at your partner than it is to deal with the real problem, especially if you don't understand what the real problem is! The ADD person often has a harder time dealing with these emotions because of the effects on the synaptic activity in the brain, and it's easier for them to lose control as a result.
My husband and I used to get into these kinds of fights all the time, about all kinds things. I didn't understand how he could come up with the ideas he had about things. He couldn't understand why I thought there was anything wrong with his thinking or conclusions. From his point of view, the way he thought about things, the way he tried to "solve the puzzle" of everyday problems, worked OK for him. What he didn't see was that it didn't work for me when he did that, instead it created a lot of problems for me, to me it seemed all wrong.
I had to learn to understand how his ADD mind works, so I could understand his thinking process. I had to learn how to explain the problems to him in ways he could understand. I had to learn to be calm and unemotional while I did this. He had to learn to listen more carefully. He had to learn to be open to change, and to not see every request for change as an attack on him. That means we both had to take the risk that we might be hurt in the process, and we both had to be willing to do a lot of hard work. We had to stop being adversaries, and we had to both be committed to finding solutions that would work, not necessarily the solutions either of us would like. We both had to be willing to give up some of what we wanted in order to get something that was better for both of us than what we had. We decided that saving our marriage was worth the risk of getting hurt, that the benefit would be better than the hurts along the way. But that meant that we both needed to work on accepting hurt sometimes, and we both needed to work hard at not hurting the other person.
My husband still gets defensive about making perfectly ordinary honest mistakes, and neither of us has been able to figure out why despite talking about it over and over the years. We still fight about this from time to time. But between my much better understanding now of how his ADD mind works, and what it can and cannot handle, and his greater openness to change and willingness to listen, we've dialed down the anger level. We have established over time a certain degree of trust in this process and in each other by *showing* each other with our less hurtful and more helpful behaviors that we *can* be trusted.
My husband finds it very difficult to initiate anything, he's basically a completely reactive person. So it was and still is up to me to initiate changes, to identify problems, to figure out what wasn't/isn't working well. I used to have a lot of anger about his ADD behaviors, and that anger got in the way of progress. I can really understand how your spouse feels, I've been there!!! I still get angry at times. But it helps to understand his ADD better. It helps for me to try to be calmer. If your spouse is not reading on this forum/blog/site, I urge you to suggest it, there is help for her here too.
I did not see anything in your post about whether you are still on meds, or whether you are getting any counseling. It's my firm belief that most people with ADD/ADHD need *both*. My husband still goes to counseling twice a month, even after 15 years. I have also seen a counselor in the past when we were having a lot of problems. I urge you and your spouse to seek counseling if you have not already.
I hope this makes some sense to you and will help in some way.