Recent forum posts (all topics)

Hi, everyone, my name is Rebecca and I believe my spouse may have ADD or ADHD.  After being married for five years (not a first marriage for either of us) I am completely at a loss to understand some of his behavior.  I feel like a tornado touches down sometimes with no warning at all.  I am exhausted and hope, by reading some of the information here, to learn some types of skills that I can use to cope with this situation.  I don't want to leave him but honestly, I can't see living another 20-30 years this way.

Thursday after work i came home sick as a dog... Shaking chills, terrible migraine, fatigue, weakness, muscle cramps, etc. DH was amazing, took care of me, practically waited on me hand and foot. Was really the super sweet man i married. 

Hello, I'm very sorry If I'm not going to be very clear -I"m disabled and it's 5.00 A.M here in Arkansas. I'm typing this after another terrible fight with my ADD husband who is snoring right now peacefully in a separate room after calling me insane, blaming all of his and his family problems on me and my disease, and threatening yet another time to cut off my medication and not pay for my basic needs, all this over a screaming fight that he started in the middle of a Walmart today for absolutely petty reason.

In the Fashion & Style section of the NYT there is a forum called Modern Love that offers up personal narratives and advice on marriage. Last Thursday's guest writer for the Modern Love column opined on endurance and marriage in a piece called "The Wedding Toast I'll Never Give."  She is young and I wish I could take her aside and gently introduce the subject of ADHD. The beginning of the article reads as if it it were lifted from this very forum: 

I'm hoping I can get some advice from families with small children. We have a 5 year old and a 6 year old who have both experienced the explosive anger from my husband. If I ever go out for dinner with a friend and my husband puts the kids to bed, I come back to crying scared children because daddy got so angry over something small.

Yet again I feel we are back where we started. We took and completed the couples seminar from here and I honestly thought we were both working hard to keep our marriage on track and were being open an honest with ourselves. Yet here I sit after Dh decided to unleash a torrent of how bad I am, how I don't like or love him, how he feels I control all aspects of how we live. So I ask ok what exactly am I stopping or controlling anything we do? No answer!! I ask and check in every couple of weeks if he is feeling good about us, I respectfully say At the time if he's being distracted or rude.

Just needed to put this out here today. I'm just tired. Tired of having to hold it all together 99.9% of the time. Tired of having a spouse that just can't allow me to be the weak one. There are times, as a human being, when I need to bitch, I need to be upset, I need to vent and let things go, but as the non-ADHD spouse, if I bitch and complain or vent too much, it just brings him further and further down. He turns into the angry one, the one who needs to vent, the one who is having the issues.

This is my first time properly posting here, but I have been reading through thread after thread for a while now and I cannot even begin to express how helpful this has all been. I feel like I am on my way to better understanding my ADHD husband’s reactions and triggers and feel as though there is hope for us and that there are things we can work on to improve our relationship, which had started to seem like it was doomed. But I’m still struggling with trying to figure out how to react and cope with my husband’s short temper and rages, which is what brings me to actually post. 

Anyone else have problems with the hyperactivity portion of ADHD? I feel like sometimes my husband's energy is so high and he gets overly focused and passionate about some things and can't like pull himself away...this is when he's off medicine too!