I'm a 52 year old man, diagnosed a week ago, on my second day of medication. Obviously that's a mixed outcome, it's great news, very late. After a lifetime of struggles to achieve what I thought I should achieve in school and in my career, I have some explanation. I went from a college dropout to a honors graduate of a top law school, there were failures and struggles, but real successes too, it's just I needed to be interested (and it really helped in law school that I needed to focus and produce for only 3 hours per class at the end of each semester). My career as a lawyer in law firms was marred by my inability to focus, and the stress of trying to figure out how to bill for 7 hours of unfocused progress and 3 hours of hyperfocus). I found and fell for my wife more than 30 years ago, and eventually persuaded her, and we became a couple way back in 1993 and married in 1998, and unfortunately separated in January and she's preparing to divorce me. Our marriage included some very high highs, we have five wonderful children, and there was a lot of laughter and love. But the marriage and our family life has been marred by ADHD. By my inability to focus at work, depriving my family of my time, but mostly by my quick temper and low tolerance for frustration. As the stresses of life compounded (did I mention we have five kids?), my ability to hold things together declined. We hit a patch where one kid struggled with a serious eating disorder that stressed our marriage, there were no good answers and it seemed we blamed each other for that (our daughter is years into recovery and is doing really well now), followed by a brief return to normal, then the pandemic, then some professional challenges for me with a really unbalanced workload and extra stress for more than a year, I'm sure lots of people recognize those challenges.  Then in mid 2021 I developed an autoimmune disorder that for months I didn't understand I had, and really lost it during that time. I was working 50 plus hours a week, not sleeping, in pain constantly, confused, and exhausted. My emotional dysregulation reached record levels. I thought I was handling it well, but I was not. I ended up losing my job in early 2022 and moving to a different, lower stress position, but the job loss was painful, and there was litigation around the termination, which was another incredible level of stress, it's not fun to fight with people who were colleagues and in a couple of cases friends. I'd always managed my stress and some of my emotional dysregulation with exercise, during the pandemic I was cycling 4000+ miles a year, but when I got sick, I slowly lost my ability to exercise, so my hobby of 35 years and my principal coping mechanism disappeared. That didn't help. Despite 30 months of illness now the only days of work I've missed where when I was jobless, but I know my desire to continue to work through the difficulty so I can provide for my family almost certainly has caused me to be worse to be around. I don't know what the right answer really would have been, the fact is the mortgage does have to get paid, we have 3 kids in college for the second year in a row, and my wife has a low-paying job after two decade as a SAHM. I thought I was sacrificing for us, but it looks like I was really burning our family up. 

My wife has had enough, and, since I've read a lot here, I get it. She says she thinks she has PTSD, and whether she does or not, I'm not in a position to say, she's certainly suffering with anxiety from the unpredictability of living with me and with trauma from dealing with my explosive outbursts, things that had happened through our marriage but which increased in frequency and severity as time went on. We are both separately in therapy, mine focused on my emotional dysregulation and learning to manage that, a process that began before my recent diagnosis. 

I would love to ask for advice about how to be better and how to invite her back, but I've read enough to know that I need to focus on being better, and she will come or she won't. I want to support her healing and I'm frankly terrified that that might mean letting her go. She's the best person I know and when we are good, we are wonderful, so it hurts to contemplate, or worse, acknowledge, where we are and what's likely coming. And, selfishly, it hurts to lose my favorite person in the world, especially after losing my health and in many ways losing my career. I don't even know what rebuilding without her would even mean at this point, the losses are just too much.

Rather than asking for advice on that--here's the twist--I'm looking for advice to help her see that she has ADHD too. Yep, we're one of those couples. When my daughter was diagnosed over the summer (it's a family affair!), she said to me, dad, you both have this. I'd long ago suspected I might, but my ability to focus, in particular to read, I thought meant it didn't fit--I just didn't understand what ADHD is. In trying to understand what my daughter is experiencing, I read a lot about how ADHD and saw that I had it, now confirmed, and read a lot about how ADHD presents in women, and I saw what my daughter saw. My wife has struggled with anxiety and depression for decades (independent of the issues in our relationship). She's a classic mixed case, she paces when we watch TV, when she leaves the house she makes 3 trips back in to get the forgotten items, she is always driven to be busy. She's coped by having a million lists, and by tolerating more chaos (more exactly, failing to bring order out of chaos) than I'd like, certainly more than most families have. (5 kids!) She's a wonderful mom in every way that matters, I shouldn't need to say that saying it's clear she has ADHD isn't a criticism of her as a person or wife or mom, but I'll say it anyway. 

How can I help her see that she almost certainly has ADHD? How can I help her understand the role that ADHD played in our marriage, when we both didn't know we had it? And its role in her anxiety and depression?

It's clear that so many of our struggles came from my ADHD, and in some cases from my ADHD reacting to hers and hers to mine. Both of us felt at different times that we needed to be the non-ADHD partner, but to be honest neither of us has the strengths of a non-ADHD partner, so playing that role made us even more frustrated, even angrier, than I think would be the case with a typical non-ADHD partner. Add in that we're both very sensitive to slights and perceived slights, rejection sensitivity. Maybe we just weren't meant to survive having this big family. I keep thinking we almost made it to the finish line, and then I realize she held on almost to the finish line. 

Anyway, that's the story, it feels tragic from where I sit. If you have thoughts about how I can invite her to see one of the sources of our and her struggles without making her feel insulted, let me know. When I've mentioned the possibility, it hasn't gone well. ADHD is my problem, you see, and she's not entirely sure it's caused trouble in our marriage, it seems convenient to find it now. I can't help but think that seeing what we were would help us each progress, would help her at least understand what went wrong in a different way, which seems like it might facilitate healing and forgiveness even if it doesn't lead to reconciliation.