So, my marriage has been suffering a very slow and painful death for many years. We've been together 13 years and only the first year was good because he was love bombing the hell out of me. We have been falling apart totally for about 5 or 6 years now. My husband has - in my unprofessional diagnosis - PTSD (from a traumatized family background), ADHD (disorganized, mess, lack of attention), RSD (severe, raging, irrational), and probably also a good dose of NPD (constantly talking about himself, needing ego strokes to feel okay).

He has other wonderful qualities and I have loved him and still love him. But there is no hope that I can see. He is no longer doing therapy because his therapist moved away, and that is a disaster for him because he really needs to be in therapy every week. He is dealing with a lot of personal stresses now, and he is spiraling. His behavior is really unstable and all his triggers are firing - he is like a terrain full of land mines. He is also much older than I am and dealing with health issues. 

I am 48. I feel about 150 after all these years with him. I also have health issues, and menopause. But I might have a few good years left if I can salvage whatever is left of myself which is NOT MUCH to be honest. I am flat, depleted, exhausted, depressed - a wreck. So I decided to finally call it completely yesterday by taking off my wedding ring and letting my husband know that I have done it, and I am not putting it back on again. 

We are now living on the same property but in different houses. Other people also live here on this property in another house. It is something of a community and I am really grateful for the presence of others here because for years it was just the two of us. 

The question is how to continue living here now that we are totally separated. We built this place together, it is both of our homes. I have absolutely no other good options for living and no decent cash income right now. So I have to pull my life together and create something for myself separate from him. I am an artist and I have neglected my art for years in service of our joint projects. So I am going to see if I can revitalize that part of myself. 

He has agreed to see a therapist with me to work through this divorce phase. He really desperately needs to be in therapy so I have all my fingers crossed that he gets something out of it and stays with it. But he is hyper sensitive to anything that smells like "control" right now so I can't push it. 

We did the Internal Family Systems therapy for the past few years and it really helped to give a framework and narrative for his complex presentations of emotional problems. Before I discovered IFS it was clear to me, after many years, that he really had distinct personalities. There was the wonderful guy I married, the wise man, the loving man. Then there was this total asshole who would emerge and really had nothing at all in common with my husband. It was like his evil twin. I truly hated that guy. Honestly I still hate that guy. He is intolerable and I do not want to be married to him, or work with him, or hang out with him at all. 

Over time I distinguished a few other parts to him, none of them good to deal with.

In IFS he encountered his totally traumatized inner child and his very angry teenager who was protecting the inner child. I definitely have to encounter those two constantly. The teenager is the slob who won't clean up after himself and treats me like his bitch of a mother instead of his beloved wife. 

Anyway, I have been thinking lately more about the NPD aspect of all this. I had a NARC mom and in my experience, NPD people generally refuse any kind of therapy or anything that might lead to self awareness. That is not really my husband. He has done therapy and he can actually be totally self aware and cop to what is happening - until he is triggered and his bad parts take over completely. So I have not imagined that he is a full NARC. However, he does have some really NARC tendencies and I wonder about the connection between ADHD and the NARC behavior.  

I have experienced the full nightmare of NARC personalities and maybe I just haven't been willing to see the full NARCness of my husband. Certainly other people see it. It's rather up front. He is a very brazenly egotistical person often and he takes up the full room when he expounds. 

Has anyone else wrestled with the ADHD and NARC interface? Any insights?

Yesterday, after I told him my ring was off and the marriage was over, he told me that he never feels any admiration from me. ADMIRATION?! That is the thing he upset about? Meanwhile, I have very recently been making a real effort to tell him how proud I am of his work which has been successful recently and he has worked really hard. I asked him if those statements I made to him even landed in his head. He said yes they did. So here he is, telling me he never gets admiration, while admitting that I have been openly admiring him a lot lately.

It's just this kind of thing, this irrationality, that defines his emotional relationship to women. 

What a sad, dreary, tangled swampy quagmire this all turned out to be. I thought I was marrying a wonderful, dynamic, loving, generous, worldly, successful, interesting, moral, brave, exciting man. But that was just one part of him - the part he showed me for the first year. He kept the rest of the parts under wraps. I feel this was a huge bait and switch. 

And of course I always feel sorry for him in the end because he reminds me of my mother's old crazy dog who used to bite people and then feel horrible about it later. Hanging his head in the yard. So you bring him back in ... and he bites you again. 

I'm a James Clear Atomic Habits fan (to a degree, let's face it, some of these people who preach habits and stuff seem to come across as having never encountered or lived with an ADHD-er or any other neurodiversity in my HUMBLE opinion :) :) ) and i got his newsletter quote today and wanted to share for all of you as I found it really profound. It doesn't make me want to make massive changes or go and give my partner 10x new podcasts to listen to or whatever, but it did make me pause, think and consider and gave me some hope. I hope it does the same for you all. 

"Move toward the next thing, not away from the last thing.

Same direction. Completely different energy."

...it makes me think: how much do I move away from my anger and resentment and how much does that drive me for the next thing....INSTEAD OF moving graciously towards to the next thing and leaving the anger/resentment/negative feelings behind?? 

I need some help or advice from you all who have gained wisdom over time! I'm panicking and not sure where to turn. 

My husband finally got diagnosed last week (it's been years in the pipeline). I'm 34 weeks pregnant with our second and I have a 2 year old (who has had a lot of behavioural issues).

I carry the whole family and I'm soo terrified of what's going to happen once this baby is born and if I'm going to be able to cope with still doing everything or it's going to finally break me/us. We have no family support. Im trying to put together some kind of support plan for myself (our first 2 years with our son were so so tough) but my husband seems to have no warning lights going off in his head. The medication seems to be working but only during his working hours and he's right back to not knowing left from right when he's around us. So many careless mistakes, not taking responsibility even for himself and so much defensiveness. 

We've tried so many different therapists over the 10 years we've been together - couples therapy, individual anxiety therapy etc. but he just doesn't implement the strategies/follow through. He seems to know what he needs to do in theory but just doesn't do it. He doesn't input into our marriage, doesn't step up to parent our son and just struggles to keep up with daily life or manage himself. I just feel like I can't rely on or trust him anymore. I'm so so exhausted from being let down and having to pick up the pieces after the things he does multiple times a day whilst juggling everything else on my own. I just don't know how I can keep going like this. But I've also got no other option it seems. It's maddening and I have no one around who would understand. Please offer me some wise words 

Hi, new here. I'm diagnosed ADHD, but due to some immersion experiences that occurred naturally in my adult life, I manage it all right and am not being medicated for it. I have the hallmarks of ADHD but never really found a medication that made a noticeable difference for me. I'm thinking of pursuing treatment since I'm falling behind in my professional life (after a very undistinguished academic career...) and having difficulty focusing on professional development and job hunting. But at the moment, I hope there are people who understand what I am going through.

It's been a really difficult ten-ish years with my (more ADHD) wife and I'm now audiobooking the Orlov book and am in (individual) counseling. Several things about her were like night and day before and after we married. We had lived separately in the same town beforehand. Probably most important was that after we got married she was revealed to be effectively unemployable due to being unable to cope with working under supervision or management. It's a trait that nobody would realize from knowing her; she's very sunny in disposition in public. But correction has to be presented to her SO gently and she needs to have her own ideas of how to do just about anything (creative outlet), so she always came home upset about work. The signs weren't strong enough when we were dating because she said some of her coworkers also disliked how their manager handled them. She changed jobs then and again while we were engaged, and then she started losing jobs or bringing home so many complaints every day that I eventually wanted her to quit, it was just too much. My parents have viewed her as a disappointment for a long time and pick up a lot of slack, and resent it, which is also difficult.

Being self-employed was also too much for her, she lost us thousands of dollars trying to run her own homemade educational goods business AND she required almost daily input from me to get any of it done. She didn't even really ask before committing us. More recently, she got hyperfixated on gardening, so we're now growing vegetables that mostly go to waste and cost way more than store-bought. I said, "why not grow berries? We'd eat all of them and they're expensive to buy". NOPE. Has to be the produce that's already the cheapest at the store for some reason and almost all of it rots in our kitchen before it can be used. And now she wants chickens.

After we got married, she took a deep dive into the world of "functional medicine" and never wants to treat any condition with pharmaceuticals if she can help it, even after our son's behavior has benefited from some. (That took years of arm twisting before she'd allow it.) Spurious supplements prescribed by a "real doctor" bring benefits to her mood and attention that I'd rate as no greater than positive thinking, but her perception of their effect is magnified, she swears by them, and she doesn't want to be any better. Meanwhile, the dishes and laundry pile up if I don't REMIND her to do them. They always need doing, but I have to remind her that they exist? And my clothes smell like mildew if I don't do them myself. I tell her "you should set a timer for the laundry, you can't forget to dry them if you do that". She won't do it unless I remind her to set the reminder. Until recently, I was supposed to be working remotely, full time, not backseat driving our household. We can't ever have anyone over because the house is never reasonably clean. And this is all WITH my additional assistance. I feel like I'm in prison, I'm always ashamed of our home. And it's not a problem that I can throw money at, I don't have it. I feel like our family is unequal to other people and has to hide. There isn't enough time for me to pick up all the slack around here.

Our children have always been dressed out of mixed up laundry baskets too. Even when she does fold their laundry, she never, ever puts it away, so it ends up just getting messed up in the baskets. She gets tired or distracted before she can put it away. I told her, why not just try taking the laundry (I sorted) upstairs and fold it INTO the dressers, that way her work CANNOT be wasted or undone. She agreed that this makes sense. She just will not do it this way, she has to have her own ideas.

Can I continue to live this way? Probably. I'm just very unhappy. We both are. But she will not change. I have a very self-sufficient outlook and always want to improve myself. She will not come along for the ride.