Honestly just curious, does anyone else ever experience this?
Here's a real-life example of our common situation:
We're both artists/entrepreneurs. I just spent 2 hours cleaning and cooking in the kitchen to make dinner after a 10 hour day of doing chores while she worked on her creative project all by herself.
I told her dinner was ready, and she told me "Awesome, just got to send my project out to (random FaceBook group) before I'm done and see what they think" (this after she's already asked my opinon and I told her it looked great, with a genuinely critical but honest response).
So, knowing how much strangers traumatize her on the regular, and only trying to protect her mental health, I suggest that she show it to a close group oif friends first, whom opinions she can actually rely on and trust, before she shows it to a bunch of strangers whom she doesn't know and will most likely tear her down for reasons that shouldn't be important to her (because they're random opinions and it's HER art).
Well, essentially, to her this was me shutting her down. Then I get met with, after a 5 minute back and forth of me trying to explain how I just care about her and am trying to help her stop patterns that don't help her, "You stressed me out too much, now I can't eat" which only feels like a guilt trip to me, and now as I stand here tired and starving, as now I have to feel bad for hurting her feelings by trying to protect her as I eat and she's in the other room?
These day, as a mechanism of self-defense, I've had to separate myself physically in these situations to not feel guilted by the way she expresses her rejection sensitivity and ADHD. There's even been situations where I might have not said something like that, and what happens? She shows it to a FB group, some RANDOM stranger shits on her work, and she's depressed for two weeks and now I HAVE TO LIVE WITH HER. But when I tell her I'm only warning her because I want to protect her mental health from people/situations who hurt her in the past, and that I love and care for her? Nah, I'm just stifling her creativity and keeping her from getting out there because she "has a hard time making close friends" in "real life".
*Sigh*, struggles form a millennial non-ADHD partner, I guess.
Thoughts?
Oh yes
Submitted by swampyankee on
I have many examples of this kind of thing.
(While we were dating--red flag anyone?) calling me up at 3am to tell me he was not, after all, going to go up to a festival we'd planned to go to for months with me because I...
Deciding not to audition for that play because I...
Deciding not to come home and work on the garden with me because I.....
Rescinding the offer to make dinner because I...
I'm not sure this is really an ADHD thing. It seems more deliberately abusive and manipulative in my case. But probably the underlying reaction is a result of emotional dysregulation and poor impulse control.
This dynamic is familiar to
Submitted by needingstrength on
This dynamic is familiar to me. I'm the non-ADHD spouse. Husband is dx but unmedicated.
I can think of many scenarios that I can relate to your pattern with, but to keep privacy I'll summarize with generalizations. It seems as if people with ADHD are particularly sensitive to rejection (RSD). I think this comes from the attention struggles all the way from elementary school (struggling with coursework due to distraction, not necessarily intelligence) to the workplace as an adult (keeping track of appointments, calendars, schedules, multiple tasks at once). These continual experiences on behalf of the person with ADHD lead to a very strong sensitivity to rejection and feeling like they can't do anything right. Even though you were helping by giving your input and advice (and from a neuro-typical perspective, this is normal conversation between partners), your partner might have a knee-jerk reaction and feel all of the things they've dealt with their entire lives "I can't do anything right" "I can't even do this good enough" and then it snowballs into a rage fit (my partner struggles with a sense of time, so recalling past rejections are equally emotionally draining to the current one). So, while you are expressing care and concern by offering an alternate plan that really would have helped matters in the end, your partner zooms right ahead to their idea being not good enough and rejected and you told them their idea was "bad." My husband struggles with the "timeless" thing. To him a past event can come up just as emotionally intense and demanding equal attention to the event right in front of him. So the past feelings of rejection feel equal to the current scenario, even if they are totally different.
I'm not a doctor in the slightest but I've been doing some personal research on RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria) and it seems to fit the bill for my husband. Rejection, anticipated rejection, etc are all factors in this. Maybe this would be something to learn more about.