Hi all,

I'm new here and what brought me here is that I have ADHD and I'm currently crashed. My DH gets upset at me when I crash and says it hurts him because I shut him out.

It usually starts like this. He'll say something and I take it all wrong and I just snap back.  The best thing I can do is walk away because otherwise the conversation quickly deteriorates into screaming and the more it goes on, the more angry and irrational I get.  Often my snapping for over something I shouldn't - usually something really innocuous, mundane and of little consequence btw - means that I am crashed.

Here's the thing, so long as I'm alone I have no idea I'm moody or crashed. Sometimes its the smallest thing that sets it off. Sometimes I'll stay crashed for a couple of days so I just want isolation, it avoids me being irrational and saying irrational things. DH feels that I"m shutting him out and that we should discuss whatever it is that's bothering me.  Thing is when I'm crashed I often don't have a clue why I'm crashed, I just need space, time alone where no one makes any demands on me - to just come to a calmer place and regain control over my moods, my emotions and my life.  It takes me some time to process events and sometimes I have no clue why I'm so angry  or what set me off until weeks later where I can finally see what happened and why I had a melt down.  Which is not related to the incident that got me to blow up.

A bit of background - DH is dyslexic and bi-polar, which means he shares some ADHD features with me. He took me to therapist last year because he felt I had traits like his, and therapist suggested I might have ADHD 3 months before I realized how right he was. I was 47  It didn't help that my mom was a teacher and she always claimed I didn't have ADHD. That I wasn't hyper. Just animated. The problems I had at school, at least in grades 1/2/3 were because I was a 'bored gifted child'. I had the same misconceptions that girls don't have ADHD.  It was reading a blog entry from a friend about her daughter with ADHD that I saw the light. Since then, I've read many articles about women with ADHD. I've also since borrowed any book from my local library on ADHD and can clearly see my therapist was right.

So far I am not on any medication as I am hypersensitive to medications in general, I always feel they f**k with my head. I try to avoid pills like the plague.  I  have not drank alcohol since I was 19, since I am completely out of control with alcohol. I've  received diagnosis of hypoglycemia in my 30's and modified my diet so as to suffer less from the effects of sugar highs/lows - which helped control my moods tremendously btw -  I was far worse before that point.  I also have no caffeine or chocolate.  I don't tolerate stimulants wells.  Since the diagnosis of ADHD, I've gone also gluten and casein free.    I've noticed an improvement in my overall health since the gluten went. 

However all that being said,  I've got lots of anger and hurt over things that happened in my past and that's something I'm working with my therapist at resolving because I sometimes feel the reason I blow up so easily is because I'm carrying so much baggage.  Some related to the fact I have ADHD and was undiagnosed for most of my life, some related to traumatic childhood experiences.

Just to make matters more interesting - DH and I are from 2 different worlds. He grew up in a country during civil war, so he has PTSD.  We've got a 15 year age difference too.  Putting all that aside, he's probably the best thing that ever happened to me. He's kind, loving and caring. We've been friends for over 15 years and a couple for 5, married for 4 years.   I have huge trust issues and while we've been  living together for 3 years [We lived apart our first year waiting for his immigration papers to be processed] - and he has never once given me a reason not to trust him, I still have huge trust issues. Not the cheating or lying type trust issues, but more if I let him get closer to me he'll used that to hurt me or something like that. And this creates intimacy issues for us.

On a tangent - one of the issues is that I have periods where I really don't want to be touched. I'm hypersensitive to touch at times. This kills him because he's from a culture where everyone hugs and kisses and touches all the time, and I can go for days weeks without wanting to be touched.

But at this moment - I'm crashed and all I want is to be left alone. I don't want to spend time with DH or with anyone else for that matter. I don't really go anywhere when I'm feeling like this, because I feel I bring other people down. As well I might just blow up again for no reason at some poor unsuspecting person  over something really insignificant. Sadly we were supposed to leave for vacation tomorrow morning and I just feeling like crawling under a rock.

Our vacation was a road trip with camping, was looking forward to it. Both he and I love camping and being in nature and we generally have a lot of fun when we travel together.  But when I'm like this I'm an accident waiting to happen, so I don't get behind the wheel. 

Something else I need to add, I may have gotten the diagnosis a year ago at 47, but I've known since I was quite young that I was different then others and as I got older I always felt I had some chemical imbalance.  Knowing what it was is helpful because I can work on reprogramming my brain. I make a lot of mistakes and I used to beat myself up constantly over it. Now I make a mistake and I just say to myself Oops  as  I correct it. It's normal to make mistakes so long as I catch them why be so hard on myself. I'm not upset to learn I have ADHD. It's also what makes me vibrant, passionate, intense, spirited and plenty of other good things, when I'm not crashed!   I see it as having a gift, but at the moment it's a gift I'm making really poor use of.

I should mention I'm not mad at DH and we haven' had a fight. I blew up for no reason and walked away and have avoided direct communication because I want to be left alone and because if I am not I'm still likely to be a time bomb. Anything will set me off.  Our relationship is ok - but I need to improve my communication and hopefully not blow up so easily in the future.  If I don't our relationship will deteriorate.

So I'm here in hopes to get some insight or learn from other people's experiences.