I've been thinking about forgiveness in ADD/HD relationships. My ADD spouse won't apologize about anything and yet insists that I have to forgive him which (sigh!) I always do. Over and over again... I'm finding, the need to protect myself somehow and choose to avoid conversations and situations that could provide yet another opportunity to forgive. I have to be very careful about what I say to avoid an angry retort. When he is angry, I try my best to respond and not react. This strategy is helpful but I cannot just relax and be myself. Forget social gatherings! Studies show that forgiveness eases stress but I have not read anything that addresses the wear and tear of chronic forgiveness. Evasive manuevers are stressfull too!
When something especially hurtful occurs, I find I need time to both mourn and recover before I can let go. I just want to be far away from him and withdraw. There is no explaining the situation as he loses track of what was said or forgets what happened. I struggle at times to forgive myself for being unable to find a way to communicate with him but, it's just shoulda coulda woulda. I just want to go away and lick my wounds. He says I am too sensitive (maybe) and vengeful (not) but when it works, he calls me the ice queen too (hmmm).
Any thoughts about forgiveness or coping with having to continually forgive?
Forgiveness...
Submitted by Jessa on
Read my post about my 10 yr. old asking for divorce. I have no real advice, but I can say that every single thing you said above, including the "ice queen" comment could have been written by me...at least a hundred times over the past several years. The latest example is last night, when my husband told me that this one incident was the only time anything like this has happened in the last three years, AND he thought that we were really happy and our relationship was wonderful! WHAT!?! When I tried (don't ask me why) again to reiterate some of the more damaging things he has said and done in front of our children, he actually laughed and told me I was making things up so I could "blow this whole situation up to make myself look better". When I asked him who he thought I needed to "look better" for, he said..."your family". Hello, he's an idiot...my family is well aware of everything as they have witnessed his behavior. In fact, so has his family, our friends, and I even met his highschool girlfriend and she asked me about it - I didn't ask her anything, she volunteered this information! Denial, Denial, Denial. I don't know what he will do with the future, but I am making plans for my own and for my children. One of us will be moving out soon...if he doesn't volunteer, then I guess I will move the children in with my parents. I hope he goes as moving will cause a lot of stress on the children and I want to keep them as stable as possible. I wish I could help with some advice...right now my advice would be leave and don't look back. But that is after 14 years of struggling to make it work. People can change, but I am not sure if changing can remedy what has already happened...forgiveness is one thing, but you probably won't forget, and moving beyond that is difficult. I hope you find what you need to be happy. I wish I had some good solid advice that I could offer!
I have read your post
Submitted by Clarity on
and remember asking my mom to divorce my dad about the same age too... she finally did about 20 years later. He never figured it out. He was always right and everyone else was wrong. It's crazy to think that I had to grow up with a man like that and now I've got another one to deal with! I'd leave if I could but I can't support myself. He's put us in so much debt I can't afford a divorce. At least my kids are grown. When they were younger I did what I could to avoid confrontations and sometimes they would tell him that what he said didn't even make sense! Often it was a real big deal about some small petty thing that could of easily been overlooked. All that anger and stress about nothing.
Melissa is right, proper medications have taken care of the angry outbursts here. It's helpful but, he needs more help. There's a gun in our house too. For hunting or safety? Yikes!
I wish I had options when my kids were younger. I was still trying to figure out what was going on back then. He had me convinced for years that I was the problem. After a lot of soul searching and a number of self help books and other research I figured it out. He recently decided that my problems have nothing to do with him, I had problems long before he met me. After 30 years and some recent Concerta, not that much has changed.
Maybe his heart's right but, he can't act right. With that kind of unstable behavior and a gun in the house, I would leave if I had options. Best of luck to you all!
forgiveness and repentance
Submitted by arwen on
Clarity, this has been a long-standing issue between me and my ADD husband, too. My husband would rarely apologize for anything, and when he did, it was usually in the tone that people use when they are annoyed because they think they shouldn't be having to apologize (you know -- "All right, already! I apologize!!) -- which isn't a real apology. I used to think that it was just one of those "male" cultural things, since I know plenty of other men (many of whom don't have ADD) who behave the same way. But as my husband and I tried to work through our problems, I came to realize that he has a totally different mental approach to mistakes, which also affects his approach to apology and forgiveness.
Put very baldly, my husband really doesn't recognize a lot of mistakes as mistakes. His whole concept of what constitutes doing something "wrong" is different from the norm. In his mind, he only does something wrong when he knew something was wrong and he intentionally did it anyway (like the Roman Catholic definition of sin). Since his ADD inhibits his ability to do *anything* intentionally, since a lot of his conversation and reactions are impulsive, he would consider very little of his errors of speech or action as "wrong". If he didn't *mean* to do/say them, he therefore can't have anything to apologize for. I, on the other hand, obviously think about what I'm doing or saying, so my errors must all be intentional, and therefore I need to apologize!
My husband fortunately came to accept pretty readily that not all my errors are intentional. But he had a really hard time accepting responsibility for his words and actions. For years, he would keep saying, "but I didn't mean to say that", or "but I didn't mean to cause trouble". I finally said that I was sick and tired of hearing about what he didn't mean -- I was only interested in what he did mean to do/say or what he meant to not do or not say. In other words, I expected him to actively mean to not say nasty things to me, I expected him to actively try to avoid doing hurtful things by trying to think first before acting, to actively avoid making a mistake. I offered the example of accidentally running over a child with a car -- nobody ever *means* to do such a thing, but the child is still going to end up hurt or killed, which is why we have laws that punish people for criminal negligence. This was a brand new idea to him. He still struggles with accepting responsibility for his behavior, but he does a lot better with this than he used to. He learned to genuinely apologize, although he didn't entirely understand the idea of really regretting what he did wrong. To him, a mistake is just a natural correction mechanism, to be fixed and go forward from -- what's to regret?
This continuing difficulty with regret led to the situation where he kept making the same mistakes and kept apologizing for them, but there was no improvement in learning from the situation. It's not unlike a mommy kissing a child's hurt finger -- it may make you feel a little better, but it doesn't fix the problem! I spent a few more years trying to get the concept of repentance across to him. I explained to him the Roman Catholic theology that I was brought up with, regarding confession and repentance -- how we could not be given true forgiveness without true repentance, which means that you regret what you did and are going to try your best not to do it again. I explained that I couldn't really forgive him if he didn't really repent of his mistakes. If he was really sorry about something, I told him, he would not just offer an apology, but would also take steps to try to stop the same thing from happening in the future. I think he appreciates the logic of this, intellectually -- but from an emotional perspective, it just seems totally unnatural to him. We have made progress of a sort, though -- when we discuss something wrong that he did, and he says he is sorry, I can now ask him "What are you going to do so that this doesn't happen in the future?", and he will at least genuinely consider the question. Sometimes he hasn't got a clue how to deal with it, and then I offer some suggestions. At first when I did this, he would nod and then ignore them. But I'm the relentless type -- when the problem would recur, because he hadn't taken any steps to prevent it, I would point out that I had suggested certain steps previously, and since whatever he had tried hadn't seemed to work, maybe he should now try one of my suggestions. He eventually got the idea that I was not going to be fobbed off with handwaving, and that he was going to have to *do something* about the mistake. Nowadays, he will listen to my suggestions and give them real consideration, sometimes using them, sometimes coming up with something different himself.
I don't think he still really "gets" the ideas of regret and repentance. The main reason he regrets or repents of doing something wrong is that he gets into trouble with me about it, and he isn't forgiven until he at least goes through the appropriate steps involved with repentance. I'm not sure he especially cares about being forgiven, but he does care about whether I'm on his case about things or not! While I think it would be more useful if he did actually understand, I'm willing to settle for him going through the process without understanding, if that's the best he can manage.
This process took place over roughly ten years. If I hadn't been groping in the dark, I think we could have probably gotten through it in 3-5 years instead. But I do think it needed to be this kind of progression. I think if I had tackled the need for regret and repentance before he'd gotten to a point where he at least accepted responsiblity for his mistakes, it would not have worked very well.
I don't know if any of my experience can help you with your situation of being asked to "chronically forgive" -- I guess I would just suggest to you that you may want to think about when it really is appropriate to forgive, and when maybe it isn't. It's very difficult to determine what a person with ADD can and can't control about their behavior, or to what extent they can control it -- but I feel strongly that if they can control something in their behavior, then they should be held accountable for it, and not let off the hook. I also feel that even if there is something about their behavior that they can't control today, it doesn't necesssarily mean they can't learn to control it in the future -- when my husband gives me the "I can't" routine, I ask him how does he know, what has he tried, and offer alternative approaches. Sometimes we eventually do conclude that despite both of our best efforts, we can't find a way for him to control some aspect of his ADD, and then he's pretty much off the hook in that area. More often we find a way to at least partially control his behaviors. It does take time and patience (which I do not naturally possess, so I understand your feelings of stress!)
Maybe it would help your husband understand your need to withdraw from him when he has been hurtful if you likened it to a physical wound. Even if "he didn't *mean" to", the fact is that he has hurt you, and since his behavior doesn't do anything to "salve" the "wound", you need to take the time to do what is necessary to "heal" the "wound" yourself,. And it's harder and longer for you when you have to do it alone, just as it would be if you had a bad injury and didn't have a doctor to give you proper medical care.
Good luck!
That's what I'm talking
Submitted by Clarity on
That's what I'm talking about! Thanks so much for your understanding and thoughtful analogies Arwen. It's interesting to read how you sorted through the process of recognizing bad behavior, repentance, forgiveness... Good for you to be able to keep up and at it over the years!
Seems your husband is willing to communicate and work with you, how did you get that to happen? Did the two of you go to counseling? Or does groping in the dark mean you had to figure it out on your own? So good to know I'm not alone...
communication issues
Submitted by arwen on
Somehow I missed seeing your post previously, or I would have responded to your questions earlier -- sorry! My husband has definitely not always been willing to communicate. When my spouse and I were first married, and we had a conflict, I'd try to talk it through, and he'd adamantly clam up and refuse to discuss it. Fortunately, his ADD was "in remission" at this point in our lives (in his family, ADD is hormone-related) so he was receptive to my suggestion that we do an experiment and try each way and see how the results worked out. On the issue where we didn't talk, we just kept having problems -- on the issue where we talked, we were able to find an acceptable compromise and stopped having problems. Even he could see the point. He still really didn't like to discuss things, but he would try. It took a few years, but he finally became comfortable with it.
Years later, when his ADD reasserted itself, communication became a problem again, (but for different reasons I later learned -- his ADD often caused him to get lost in his thinking and then he couldn't communicate about his thoughts, so he just wouldn't say anything). As his ADD worsened, so did the communication problem. When he was diagnosed in his early 40's, he started meds and counseling, which helped the communication problem some, but he still had a lot of problems when he'd get upset about anything. Then he started having problems with thinking he'd said things that he hadn't. He'd claim he'd told me things that I knew I'd never heard before, and he wouldn't believe me when I'd say so. Fortunately, there were enough times when I would ask him "When did you tell me this?" and he'd reference a time and place when there had been others present, and they would confirm to him that he had not said what he'd thought, so that he finally realized that he really wasn't communicating as much as he thought he was. At the same time, it made me realize that he was thinking he was communicating when he really wasn't -- he was having trouble distinguishing between what he thought and what he actually said. I could see that unless I drew him out and delved into details, I would never be sure that I was hearing everything I needed to know. I started asking more questions -- he *really* didn't like that. But at the same time he understood why I needed to know some of the things he wasn't communicating about. Also, some of these problems were beginning to surface in his work interactions as well, and that really bothered him a lot.
At that point, he started working with his counselor on his communication problems. I have no idea what approaches they used (my husband never tells me anything about what goes on in his counseling sessions), but the communications gradually improved. I think the counselor may have helped him see that my questions were useful rather than intrusive, because he stopped being irritated about the questions. By then we were having other communication problems. I didn't realize my husband could only concentrate on our discussions for a limited amount of time before his brain activity would kind of seize up, and I was getting really frustrated and angry with him. Even though he was communicating better, he was listening less and less well. (I think now that there's some kind of inverse relationship -- if he's concentrating on speaking, it's hard to concentrate on listening as well, and vice versa). Then, later, when we were separated a few years ago, his counselor suggested we have regular formal meetings several days a week, in order to communicate sufficiently to deal with the logistics of our situation and to work to repair our marriage. By putting our communications into a very structured environment, and by implementing a few simple (although not necessarily easy) rules (he is responsible for making sure we meet per schedule, we both have agendas going into the meeting, we both take notes, we don't yell), it helped my husband communicate better. And because I've learned to recognize and deal with his constraints better (by trying to keep discussions as uncomplicated as possible, not too long, and not too late in the day when he's tired), the process is less stressful for him than it used to be.
My husband is never going to be a fan of communication, but he accepts the necessity and is willing to work to communicate adequately to avoid other problems. But it took him a good 10 years to get to that point, even on meds and with counseling. We still have some difficulties during his SAD season, and when we get out of his structured routine, like on vacation, but it's very tolerable and we work it out.
Thanks arwen!
Submitted by Clarity on
I just found your post. I find it amazing that your husband would make the effort he does. I don't believe mine would. Though my ADD man is on medication, we cannot afford counseling at this time. He stated that he is not willing to pay somebody just to talk. He does talk but, it's light social banter, not communication. He's sure it wouldn't make me any different. I am not able to convince him to continue to educate himself about his behavior either. Now that he is medicated, he doesn't think there is anything wrong with his behavior or communication skills. It's very limiting.
Thank you for your detailed reply, I just don't have the energy anymore...