Well after a year of 'calm' and the most peaceful quiet and 'normal' years in our relationship it feels like it's all starting to slip backward again and I am getting nervous and anxious about what's to come. My husband has been diagnosed with adhd and a mood disorder? and some form of PTSD. We haven't been told he's bipolar but his sister is and I don't know if his extremes are that intense or not to say that's the case.
His previous therapist which he only went to when our new marriage was on the brink of being destroyed, credited his 'issues' to his very unstable childhood. He was virtually homeless his entire life and grew up in chaos, his family members all have trouble controlling their tempers and moods. He's been around them more lately and I sware it's made him start to go backward. He grew up in rented rooms, sometimes in a trailer or truck, he never had a home,attended more than 40 schools, barely got a GED and as a teen/adult has had over 50 jobs. Partially from not being able to get along with people, stay on task and just stick with it. He finally found something he was at for 3 years, longest job every held, and he liked it, but unfortunately they didn't like him and after a while the conflict lost him the job. He was destroyed by it and it nearly broke us. He has a love him or can't stand him personality, which makes our social life as a couple difficult. He is very chatty and most times has no filter, which is so hard for me. We are essentially opposites extrovert and introvert. But at the same time his personality is the best thing about him. He would give anyone the shirt off his back, he's the guy who calls and checks in with people just to say hi and see how they are doing. He can spark up conversation with a peer or an elderly person. He's great with kids and really is a caring person. And so his sense of humor, loudness and sometimes overly friendliness has been his crutch to help him survive in the unstable environments. it's what people remember and like about him, problem is that it's also cost him friendships and causes us problems when interacting with each others friends/family. Sometimes he just doesn't shut his mouth and it turns some people off sometimes and frankly embarasses me too.
After a breakdown about 3 years ago finally we got him into therapy and on some meds. It stirred up everything negative in his life and was the hardest time we've had so far. He stopped talking to his family which was a good thing, he had to deal with the things they did that affected him. But his mother was able to weasel her way in with guilt and the rest of them followed, now they speak daily and feed off each others drama and overr eations. Currently I know he's feeling negative feelings about his biological father, who doesn't care to have a relationship with him and he's doing unreasonable things, like sending his dad copies of our mounting medical bills from his heart condition. He says hes doing it in hopes that he'll help us out. That is not realistic, isn't gonna happen and is just some crazy mind game he's doing to release some sort of negative feelings. Why is he torturing himself??? This is a behavior that 6 months ago he would not have done. He was all about being a better man than his father, showing him he doesn't need him etc. Now he's playing some strange game that's putting him in an awful place mentally. I hate to seem him be like this.
He was able to get social security to help us since keeping a job has been such a struggle. And we moved out of town and started fresh. He seemed to be doing so much better, was off 2 meds that didn't seem to help much with the impluse control as they were supposed to and his self esteem was higher than ever, our relationship improved dramatically, he stopped self medicating with marijuana as he had done for years. We found out he has a heart condition most likely due to too much recreational drug use(which he admits doing to 'escape his horrible life') and so that brought him down more than a few notches. He felt stupid for damaging his body, and more often now he's overly dramatic about everything, saying he won't be here long so what does it matter. Those awful extremes are rearing their ugly head again and I feel like he's slipping back into feeling out of control and chaotic. He's started on zoloft along with the cardiac meds so I don't know if that's causing it or if its all the anxiety of his condition, or his horribly dysfunctional family being back in the picture???? I am feeling grateful that we caught his heart condition and was feeling so happy and relieved but I can't live with a 32yr old who is settling into a depressed life of a crabby 80yr old man. I feel like all the work we had done, he had done, is slowly becoming undone and I am scared and sad. The tiptoeing and carefulness I do is starting to appear again. The other day he said he wanted to go to therapy again, I was glad I guess that he suggested it but sad that we are seeming to be going backward. We have no kids yet and the thought of waiting longer and longer until he's 'okay' makes me a whole other kind of sad.
Peacelove, your situation is
Submitted by dazedandconfused on
Peacelove, your situation is a little bit similar to mine. My hubby as ADHD and some sort of other mood disorder. I say PTSD (he was a cop), his sister who is about to graduate with a counseling degree says he has Borderline Personality Disorder. I don't think that he's that extreme, honestly, but who knows?
Hubby is much like yours. He's very much an extrovert, can talk to anyone, and may or may not have a filter. I always warn other people that he can come off like an a-hole! Or perhaps just "stuck up" as my stepfather described him because hubby is very intelligent and acts like he knows everything. Granted, he was given an intelligence test once and scored MENSA level, although he doesn't tell many people that. He has a lot of personality conflicts with people--as you said, people either love him or hate him. He excelled at being a cop but made a lot of enemies which have come out of the woodwork now that he is trying to get back into law enforcement. He was devastated when he learned that he had ADHD and that treating it may have saved his job (which he lost due to chronic lateness).
All families have some sort of dysfunction. Hubby was adopted by his parents, who desperately wanted a child, and loved him dearly, even when they eventually had his sister on their own. But his mother came from a troubled background (father was an alcoholic, mother was a manipulative monster) and that spilled onto him and his sister. Hubby finally met his birth mother close to three years ago--she's a wonderful woman and they were very much a like (nature and not nurture!). He was fiendishly angry for months afterward because he felt like his life would have been much different if he had been raised by her. He's recently been troubled by his biological father's disinterest in meeting him and has thought about contacting him (I don't know if he did). He was much closer to his adoptive father, but I think he's still troubled by his biological father's reaction to him.
It's OK to sad and scared. It's hard to watch someone you love go from functioning to slipping back into old habits. At least your hubby wants to get back into therapy. I think we have a tendency to think, "Oh I'll go to therapy and get better and that will be it." But sometimes it doesn't work out that way. People go in and out of therapy all of their lives--it's not a bad thing. It shows a commitment to improvement as we get older and wiser, IMO. Hubby and I will most likely be in and out marriage counseling for quite some time as we have various conflicts that need to be resolved now and will most likely have more down the road.
I can feel you on the kids thing. I have wrestled with that myself on numerous occasions. I fear becoming a single parent because hubby can't focus on caring for the kids (even though he is good with kids). I can't function as single parent--I don't want kids that badly, to be honest. Even though my mom has offered to pick up hubby's slack. But seriously--that's just another conflict waiting to happen. It won't be too long before she's at me about the fact that he's not as involved as he should be.
You've got to decide what you're willing to do in order to have kids. Are you OK with essentially being a single parent? Will you hold it together when things are going wrong and hubby is no where to be seen? Do you have a good support network? Introducing children will vastly change the dynamic of your marriage. My own mother had me because her marriage wasn't right and it still ended up in divorce when I was five. I turned out OK, but I have been uber-sensitive about bringing kids into an unstable marriage.
Hang in there. Get the counseling and hopefully things will get better or at least get back to where they were.