The ADHD Effect on Marriage by Melissa Orlov

Author:Melissa Orlov
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Psychopathology, Psychology, Counselling, Marriage & Long-Term Relationships, Self-Help, General, Couples, Family & Relationships, Marriage, ADHD, Psychiatry, Personal Growth, Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADD-ADHD), Happiness
ISBN: 9781886941977
Publisher: Specialty Press
Published: 2010-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

Many non-ADHD spouses find themselves bereft of any ideas on how to improve their lives. In essence, under the symptom–response– response patterns of the ADHD effect, they find themselves stuck, with leaving the only way forward:

[My husband is] convinced that it was me. He’s even told his friends and family that it was me, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much this hurt…. He won’t see an ADD specialist, I think partially because he doesn’t want to be told that his mental disorder caused the disintegration of our marriage. I don’t think he could take that, so he stays with a non-ADD therapist who tells him what he wants to hear.

I’ve very recently given up on him. Not just on the marriage—on my husband as a person. He’s not a horrible man, but his condition—and his approach to dealing with it (or, more accurately, not dealing with it)—will be the death of me, and I have to get away from him. For months, I thought it was my job to “save” him and “save” my marriage, but I was getting so hurt from all of the misplaced blame…. He has a condition, he knows he has a condition, and he’s learned enough to know that it’s what wreaked so much havoc in our lives and hurt me (and him) so deeply. For him to scapegoat me and to refuse to take responsibility for himself is more than I’m willing to endure.

Effective treatment, used in the broadest sense of the word, can change the life of an ADHD spouse. It also radically changes the life of the non-ADHD partner. For me, the difference that my husband’s medication and behavioral changes make is huge. We are completely stable and happy now, because we have found strategies to accommodate ADHD, relearned how to trust each other to be affectionate and loving, and made sure we carve time out of our busy lives to focus on each other. But I was reminded of the role that medication plays in that balance when, two years into treatment, my husband decided to stop taking his medication for a week to see if he still needed it. Luckily, he warned me he was going to do this. At one point during the week he started yelling at me out of the blue. I began to fight back, then recognized the old pattern. “Listen to yourself right now,” I said. “You haven’t attacked me like this since you started your medication.” He was able to reflect on my comment, rather than be defensive about it, and started taking his medications again that evening.

It takes time to find the balance that my husband and I have found. Just as it is unrealistic to expect that people with ADHD can just “turn off” their ADHD symptoms, it is also unrealistic to expect that non-ADHD spouses can just “turn off” their response to their own experiences with ADHD.

I have been reading nonstop all week about adult ADD and tips/guidelines on how to work around this in a marriage.

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