Submitted by Racpants on 05/01/2015.
Community members,
I'm looking for hope and inspiration for my non adhd wife and my marriage's sake....does anyone have sucess stories about coming back from a marriage that's on the brink of collapsing? what worked? what helped? I don't believe my wife understands ADHD. It is somewhat complocated because its paired with my bipolar 2 disorder. This combination might be specific but any advice and the coping with these comorbid conditions, singular (ADHD or bipolar or both) would be very help full. Thank you in advance.
Hello Melpants...
Submitted by c ur self on
I have some positive experience with working through a difficult marriage where ADHD is present...Here is a short list of things you two can try...
1) Counseling is a must for most marriages...esp...the one's as you say it; "that are on the brink"...A responsible third party who doesn't have a dog in the fight, will always see more clearly than either of you...
2) Boundaries...the reason your marriage is failing is because she wants you to be different...And you probably wish the same in many ways...So for accountability sake...set-up boundaries so that she has to be a big girl, and you have to be a big boy and deal with your own issues....Because if the marriage ends that's what is going to happen anyway....
3) Does your wife feel overwhelmed? Does she try and mother you, thinking your aren't capable? If so this has to stop, her emotional and psychological state will never improve until she disengages from this line of thinking...No one can really help her with this but you...
4) I suggest you get two copies of Melissa's book..."The ADHD effect on marriage...Let your wife read and mark her's up w/a yellow hilighter...And you mark your's up w/ a green or blue. Then swap books...You read all the marked up area's in her's and she can read your's...Also you both should add your own notes as you feel the need...Then set down and calmly talk about each of your own reality's, your mark ups and notes....If you can't get past angry, denial and blame it will be difficult....(I ordered mine from amazon and had it in a few days)
5) The hardest thing for me was to stop looking at her lifestyle as my problem, I had to stop making it my misery...You wife and you both need to be at peace in your spirits...Regardless if you stay together or not...There doesn't have to be a bad guy for two people to decide go separate ways...I'm no advocate of that, but, if my wife and I split, I will still love her, and I want be mad when she goes...Or I go:)
Blessings!
C
Hope and Inspiration
Submitted by kellyj on
I wrote this story as the culmination of very long process of self discovery and at a time when when my wife and I had already had two moments of calling it quits. We were at a stalemate and I was searching desperately to find and answer or anything I could use to help save our relationship. For anyone like yourself who has arrived to this forum searching for the same answers, I encourage you trust and listen to yourself in finding the same answers I did in my ability to come to these conclusions that I did before I wrote this story. The one that I would have written before I learned from the people here that have acted in generosity and caring would have been an entirely different story. Not unlike most of the stories that you will read here for the same reason.....they are struggling with there own fears and hurt that comes when your relationship is in trouble.
I want to emphasize to you and the ADHD men who come here looking for the same answers, to read this story carefully and put yourself into the shoes of each character in it. (and over looking my ability as a writer for sure!! lol...not so important ha ha) Even if you have to reread this story several times and imagine yourself as each character one at time....I strongly suggest that you do and imagine how you would feel and allow it in instead of discounting the characters themselves. This story has nothing to do with ADHD but it is your first clue to what you are looking for. Do this as many times as you need to in order to rid yourself of your own preconceived notions. Clear your mind and open your heart. If you can do this well....you will be ready to let the teachers on this forum give you the same lessons I learned and there are plenty of people on this forum that will listen and not judge anything you have to say to them but first....you need to learn what they are trying to say. Think with your heart....not with your mind. There is plenty of information here too....but I encourage you to do that separately at a different time and only focus on what I just said when you read the comments and experiences of the women who are with us. Let them be your teachers and trust the things that they are telling you. There are plenty of good comments made by the men here too for perspective if you get lost but your wives/partners perspectives and perceptions are the ones where you will find the answers you are looking for.
The last bit of advise and one I am absolutely sure about without hesitation in giving you is......It is never what you think it is ( or what you imagine it will be like ....once you are actually there in reality. Imagination is the path but it by itself is not the answer. Start with the answer ( your partners Heart) and let your imagination and the teachers here in this forum. help guide you there. Allow it to happen and don't fight against with what you think you know by trusting what they have to say. Knowledge cannot always be trusted while your imagination is limitless.( a totally stolen and plagiarized revision of the author below) lol Stay positive as much as possible in order to hear them and if you get lost....come back and read this again if you need to get back on track. peace
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Albert Einstein
Strange Twist of Fate (revised version)
Submitted by JJamieson on Fri, 05/22/2015 - 10:17
You're post resounded something from my past which I believe very much are the things that are most important. When I recalled the memory of my mother, with every good intention when she started taking me to church when I was little (actually against my will...sitting still with ADHD? it was torture!) which preceded with me getting kicked out of Sunday school for asking too many questions? What occurred to me as I read what you said was there was a very good reason for this happening which I can explain better by telling you the entire story.....
It was very important to my mother that the facts to the stories I heard were accurate. Even then I questioned this? "How could anyone possibly know there was an Adam and Eve if they were the first people"...I wound argue, back then with my mother as she wanted to hear and discuss what I learned. She would get very frustrated with me and angry for not listening to her and believing her as she would try and answer any question that I would have, which I didn't because she could not make a good case with me and insisted they were "real people" and it was important that I believe this too, no room for discussion. She was insistent that I take what she was saying for face value and not question what she was saying. "Something wasn't right here?" as I recall, and I refused to believe her even if I would give in and keep my mouth shut and agree with her just to stop the argument. The next week I would continue this debate with the poor mothers who ran the Sunday school who eventually kicked me out for disrupting the lessons. I remember feeling really angry and dismissed which only made me resent going even more.
Sometimes doing the wrong thing is for the right reasons......as I apply my own thinking here. The message of the story of Adam and Eve as it was interpreted to me by my mother as not to be bad. Bad is bad, and good is good...and in her mind, she was good and therefor, so should I be. This is how she interpreted the story to me since she was in denial of the truth herself which is what I was rebelling against. Not being told the truth. I was even punished for not believing, but actually, it was my mother who couldn't believe or see this herself which set me up for the events that happened to me.
Since that time moving forward, I never changed my position to this day, but I was not wrong in that the message or the truth, was not being told to me and I somehow knew it even back then. It is also for this reason, that my mother suffered throughout her life because she was in denial of the truth, not that she was bad herself, but because she simply could not see. She stopped seeking the truth because she was afraid of what she might find in herself because she was afraid of what was bad. She mistakenly believed what she would find was the very thing that she believed and it became a self full filling prophesy. In my mother's case at the time, she was a victim in the truest sense of the word. She had been touch by the hand of evil and it wounded her heart in a way in which the betrayal itself was the very thing that prevented her from looking there again and only perpetuated and kept the deception alive in order to prevent her from speaking up and saying anything.
What my mother could not see was her own inner strength and did not know what she believed in, because everything she believed was taught to her and controlled tightly by a her mother who was obsessed (literally possessed) with making sure she believed the same things she did out fear. Her own fear about the world and not understanding the difference...fear of evil, fear of the devil, fear of her neighbors and people in general that were not of "her kind." In my grandmothers view of the world, her kind were only the people that she met and went to church with. To the point of completely overriding and usurping every original thought or creative outlet that my mother had. In other words, she controlled my mothers autonomy like a puppet master controls a puppet with strings. She was a "thing" not a person, to be used and controlled to fit her own wishes and how she felt "things should be." This is a form of psychological abuse that takes place when a parent does this to a child. If takes away freedom of choice and removes any ability for dissent or make changes to their life as an individual. So when when my mother, first started going to her mother with anything she believed that was true or the truth, her mother (who had too had been deceived in her own thinking which had been put in her mind for the same reason)began exerting and reinforcing her beliefs overriding what my mother thought not seeing that her own thinking had been put there in reality, by someone ( or something else) than what is true....(one of her kind).... that she also herself believed based on the concept that she trusted them to say what's true and not to doubt what they told her about herself and what was good. It never occurred to her question or doubt these things and therefor could not accept in her mind that she could ever be wrong or false in any way.
With all good intentions and with love in her heart, the presence of evil used this against both my mother and grandmother for it's own self serving needs and took advantage of the opportunity out of the thing they both feared the most. Evil and deception walk hand in hand and prey on the weak and innocent. My Grandmother's ability to imagine and dream had stopped out of fear, which in turn, replaced this same fear by taking away my mothers abilities to do the same by someone (or something else). My mother stopped questioning herself which blinded her from seeing the truth. However, my mothers good intentions and her love did not fail with me because of something that happened to her as a teenager and again with me around the same age.
Despite the fact that my mother never could accept the bad or what was wrong with her and could only see the good and believed this is how people should be this is true......the same as her mother..... "should be" that had been created in her mind and what happened to her when a church elder inappropriately molested her, not once but twice after being re-invited back for a second time by my grandmother to their house for Sunday dinner. Her mother could not believe the truth as my mother told it to her after the first time it happened. My mother confused this to mean she was bad and could not see anyway of reconciliation or redemption for being wicked. In denial of what was bad not in herself, but by the hand of evil that had touched her. And as I was told the story of Adam and Eve...I somehow knew that something was missing even then and refused to believe her ( for the right reason) which also ended up as me being told I was bad by both my mother and the mothers who ran the Sunday school even though....in their minds I was preventing the true message or word from being told and needed to be excused by my behavior.
The source for denial is of the truth which is probably why I ended up being so stubborn even back then. ADHD probably helped but it's not the reason as I see it. Not believing what is wrong is not wrong and I knew it back then and have never changed even at times when I lost site of it... which in a strange twist of fate, my mother did something that changed the face of evil that had touched her into love for me and drew her inner courage and went face to face with her fears. She reached down inside herself despite her fears and went toe to toe with my father head on. "Bring it on Mother F*$#er" was her challenge to my father when she recognized something that she knew was wrong out of her love for me at great risk and fear of retaliation to her self (in my own words here of course) from the man she deferred herself to in everyway to tell her how to navigate and defined who she was. In this moment, a miracle occurred and she took her self back and took him on in no uncertain terms almost over night when she seized the opportunity with both hands for a second chance to make a stand for what she believed was right and true out of the goodness in her heart and the love that was there and had been there all along. I did have to pay a price for this lesson it is true, but the admission fee was worth every penny for the price I paid for believing in myself enough to know what was right and what was wrong even when someone who you need to believe you and hear you....and are telling them the truth...refuses to listen and hear the truth.
But the hero in this story was my mother and the courage and inner strength she summoned despite all odds to give me a chance that she never had with a giving that has no bounds and with no strings attached. It's the kind that only comes when called upon when you humble yourself enough to put someone else's needs in front of your own at a time when they cannot do this for themselves. This is the hallmark of character and the definition of a hero in the eyes of God even if my mother could never understand this or see it in herself. And in case you have any doubt after reading this.....I felt it pass too me even then, and though I too couldn't recognize it at the time, It is the reason that I can do this now for myself in finding the path to my heart and my ability to connect in the same way to my wife's heart as well.
Yes, you will always be ready for anything if you can just admit to yourself that you are wrong and are not always going to be good or right at anything you do in life. Even to the point that sometimes if you are angry, hurt and fearful.....you will do many things that you know you shouldn't do for that reason alone even knowing better. Hopefully, if you learn and remember these lessons and can admit the times you are wrong, you won't do them again, and hopefully this time you will take the opportunity you have and choose to do them for the right reasons.
If you cannot see this is true.......you will never be able to see the truth in anything....... including the same thing in other people....... and you will pay a high price for it in the end if you cannot find the path to your heart.
I think this story is just saying the same thing but twisted around a little differently:) lol
I Can't believe I'm here
Submitted by ADHD_Highway_to... on
I don't have much time to write this, but what I can say is that I never thought I'd ever be writing a POSITIVE post here on this site since I always used it when I was in trouble or in bad straits - which until recently, was just about most of the time. HOWEVER, for the past few months, my marriage with my bride has NEVER BEEN CLOSER. Briefly, some things that helped - I FINALLY found the right counselor who kind of pushed me over teh edge from where previous counselors brought me to - I just needed that final push. Unfortunately, after only a few months of finding him, he is closing his practice and moving out of state. Something also clicked to make my communication with my bride a whole lot better. While I am only responsible for ME, I would also say that something that helped was that my bride also went for counseling herself. Finally, I think another thing that pushed me was the help I was able to provide my DW after an accident that she got into - it was minor by all accounts and she was not injured, but it affected her a lot and I was able to be there for her and more present than I have ever been. For the first time in I don't know when, we BOTH feel like we've got each other's back, can lean on each other when needed, and can face just about anything together. Not sure if anyone will see this since it is an old thread, so hopefully nobody will mind if I repost this elsewhere on the site - in the "good news" success story section - which I noticed usually ran pretty light.