Ned Hallowell likes to say that ADD is a “gift that’s hard to unwrap”. Frankly, I’m not sure how I feel about the “gift” idea – instead I tend to think of ADD as something that can be “sweet and sour”. When a person with ADD is in what I think of as “good alignment” (or perhaps their “sweet spot”) life can be very sweet. But when it’s sour everything can be awful!
It seems as if a lot of non-ADD spouses at this site have been bending over backwards to accommodate their ADD spouse’s issues, often finding that doing so is exhausting and making them angry and miserable. I would like to suggest that while negotiating how to meet somewhere in the middle is a part of all marriages, many non-ADD spouses are giving (and giving in) way too much. Let me explain –
It’s awful to feel as if you are the only one who is doing chores around your household – not to mention exhausting. Here are some ideas for redistributing the housework from my own experience.
If, like me, you are a non-ADD spouse, it’s easy to dwell on the aspects of ADD that are inconvenient and troubling. But what about those things that an ADD spouse might find inconvenient about a non-ADD spouse, but which often don’t get voiced? I came up against this last night when in a conversation with my husband about how quickly the ADD mind works.
Stay or leave? That is a question that many exhausted spouses ask as they struggle through the rollercoaster of feelings in their ADD-affected relationship. At the suggestion of one of the readers of this site I have just finished reading a very interesting book about how to resolve this ambivalence and I think it could be an excellent resource for many here.
Tara McGillicuddy is an active ADHD coach and educator. Her online work, in particular, has brought coaching to a much larger audience of people who might benefit from it. I asked her to put together an overview of ADHD coaching to post here.
There have been quite a few comments lately on this site suggesting that people should avoid marrying someone with ADD. This advice makes me very uneasy and I would like to weigh in on it.
Are you angry that your ADD spouse is able to focus on something of great interest to him, and not to anything you want him to do (like the dishes, or childcare)? If so, you would not be alone.
This show with Dr. Hallowell has been taped but we do not know the air date. It is not the week of May 4th, as previously thought. We will post the air date here when we are given it, or you can go to the Dr. Phil Show web site each weekend for a list of the upcoming week's show topics. Thanks for your patience on this - t.v. often works this way! Comments for this post are disabled as of May 3.
For info on the Dr Phil Show, please see the more recent March 30 post. I didn't erase this spot because people had posted attachments to it which would have disappeared had I eliminated the post all together.
