My husband is the ADHD partner.

My dad and brother were both ADHD so I went into the marriage already knowing a little about it, and on top of that I've listened to my husband's descriptions and done hours upon hours of my own dedicated research.  However--there are some aspects of being in a marriage with an ADHD partner that no amount of research can prepare you for.

I was warned from the beginning that he is a rambler.  He said from day one that he will talk for a seemingly endless amount of time, and seemingly saying the same thing over and over, but that it's just what he needs to do to be able to get out what he's really trying to say, and that he would be able to listen afterward.  I told him I could understand that.  That was at the beginning when he devoted almost as much time listening to me as I did listening to him, so I had no problem with it.

But as time has gone on, he's gotten absolutely horrible about listening to me.  I can't tell you how many times I've listened patiently to him talk for 15 or 20 minutes, and then just a sentence or two into a response been told he couldn't handle talking any more.  It is even worse if there's any tension in the conversation, like if it's an argument or even just something we disagree on, like certain political topics.  He also gets worse about it when he is tired (he is military and works an insane amount, sometimes going 2 days on only a few hours of sleep).  Not feeling like I have the floor for anything resembling an equal amount of time makes it harder and harder for me to hear him through, and it got to where I started getting really bad about interrupting.  I've gotten to where I basically expect that I won't have a chance to really say my part.  Me interrupting him a lot has in turn made him less likely to want to hear me through, and the whole thing has spiraled in on itself to where we're in a place now where neither of us feels listened to and after a fight we both feel like the other person overpowered the conversation.

He knows he has ADHD and knows that his struggles can be a burden on those close to him as well as himself.  I myself have OCD and PTSD as well as a somewhat more general anxiety disorder, and I too realize that my struggles can be a burden on those around me.  However, we handle this knowledge very differently from each other.  Because I realize my things can be a burden, I do my best to take it on myself and not put the weight on others whenever possible.  I also put a lot of effort into not putting blame on him when he triggers my anxiety or OCD and instead say I know this is hard, and I know it's not rational, but I'm feeling x or y because of my OCD or whatever and here is my need.  He does that some of the time, but a lot of the time he just gets irritated or mad and thinks it's ME, not his ADHD, that is causing him to have the reaction.  And the worst part is, he seems to think he's always right.  I've told him this before and he told me that wasn't true because if he reflects on his behavior and decides it was wrong of him, he will apologize of his own accord.  Which is true, and I love that about him, but that is only when HE decides he was wrong.  If I tell him he hurt my feelings and that the behavior wasn't okay, he won't give me the time of day.  Most of the time he won't even hear me through to explain it all the way, and even when he does he usually responds defensively and even tells me I'm imagining things and I need to get help.

It's not like I've never imagined things--I have PTSD, after all, and that kind of automatically means you sometimes perceive harmless things as threats--but I feel like he doesn't even respect my point of view, like he almost treats me like a child or like I'm crazy.  I know my issues, I've acknowledged them and continue to do so regularly, and I've even sought therapy.  When he tells me I've hurt him, I eventually always apologize.  But he doesn't do the same.  If I tell him he's hurt me he often dismisses it because I hurt him too, like he thinks his pains are more important, or he'll get even more upset and think I'm making him the bad guy when really he's innocent.  I'm serious, he'll get mad at ME for telling him he hurt my feelings, like I don't have a right to feel a certain way even if I AM overreacting.  If he said he understood how I was feeling but he really didn't think that was how it happened, that would be one thing, but he doesn't, he acts like I've done something wrong for even feeling the way I do, and especially for saying so.

Another thing that really makes me feel deeply disrespected is that when I have a PTSD attack during an argument and can feel that I'm about to descend into a panic, my therapist told me to ask for a timeout, 20 minutes to myself to calm down and breathe and regroup, and then to come back to talk about it when I am calm.  My husband does not respect this.  When he demands space, even if he's mean about it, I give it to him.  I am consistent about that, there have only been a few times when I kept going after he asked for space in a fight and usually that was when he'd say 10 things I'd done wrong and THEN say "but I need space, I can't talk more about it right now" without ever giving me a chance to defend myself against the accusations.  The mature thing to do would still be to give him his space and address my issues later, but it wasn't fair of him to set it up that way either, and basically the rest of the time I will walk away when he says he needs space.  But he doesn't do it for me.  I'm not one to make sweeping generalizations and say "always" or "never," but it's pretty darn close to "never" on this one, even objectively.  He just keeps talking or insisting that he NEEDS me to listen right that moment, and sometimes he'll even follow me into another room and kind of loom over me as he keeps talking, even when I'm begging him to give me even 5 minutes to calm down.  I've told him over and over that I take that time for him as much as for me, because when I get an attack like that I feel cornered and panicked and I lose control--I've screamed and screamed at him and sworn and told him he didn't care about me or never listened to me or whatever before, so many times, before I started getting help.  Now I'm more often able to tell when I start shaking or my heart rate goes up and if I can get away and calm down soon enough I won't go into a panic.  But it doesn't work at all if he won't let me go, if he just blatantly ignores my request, because that just makes me feel even more cornered.  No matter how many times I've addressed this the behavior doesn't change.  And he doesn't even seem to care.  He has never really acknowledged that this is a problem nor has he ever seemed to take it seriously.  This behavior actually frightens me and I have no idea why he does it.

It is also worth noting that he is fed up with getting yelled at--which, like I said, is something I do when a panic sets in--and that's totally understandable.  It is an issue I have that I have acknowledged and sought help for and am constantly analyzing and trying to address.  But like with the needing space thing, I feel like he isn't helping me.  He also won't listen to any of my issues with his behavior if I've yelled or sworn even for a second in the conversation.  Sometimes he won't hear my side if I've even interrupted him once, accidentally!  It's incredibly unfair.  And he yells sometimes too, less than he used to, but when he DOES it's an absolute horror show.  When I yell I accuse him of things like 'you aren't listening to me' or I'll tell him he's being an asshole, or I'll just yell out whatever point it was that I didn't feel like he was listening to.  But when he yells, he often says things like "I want a divorce" and throws his wedding ring across the room, or he'll call me a horrible name like "Satan," or make threats like that he's going to just leave if I don't listen or that he wants to "take a break" if I insist on taking space or insist that I'm right about something.  Today he even screamed at me that he hated me.  Sometimes when he gets into a rage like that he will break things, like he threw a glass once, and he broke my corkboard over his head, and he broke my underwear drawer over his head and threw the underwear at me.  I can't understand this because I would never say things like that.  I've never screamed at him that I wanted a divorce just because we were fighting, no matter how ugly it got, no matter even if the idea ran through my head.  That's just not okay, the same as screaming "I hate you" is just not okay.  I was taught that you'd better mean things like that if you say them, otherwise they're manipulative and verbally and emotionally abusive.  And if I even say something like "you don't even care about my feelings" when I'm mad, he'll be SO devastated and need so much comfort the next day, but he doesn't give me the same consideration when he does these really awful things.  I'm lucky if I even get an apology most times.  He seems to think his own pain, feelings, thoughts, emotions and viewpoint are actually more valid and important than mine, and I don't say that lightly.  When he's in a positive mood he's an absolute doll, and SO caring and tender.  He will go out of his way to validate me, do nice things for me, help me with my problems.  But if anything goes even slightly wrong to him (and bear in mind that his mood can snap in an absolute instant, with even the tiniest of triggers or even imagined ones), the world is ending, there is no consoling him, no defending myself, and no acknowledgment that maybe, possibly, there is a chance my point of view was true (or even worth hearing).

I don't know what to do anymore, to be honest.  I feel like we need to be in the presence of a marital counselor before I'm even able to explain all these feelings to him, because I am so scared (sure, even) that I won't be heard through or treated tenderly or respectfully, and I'm not even sure I could get through talking about all that without snapping and yelling again if he even slightly disrespected me during it. He screamed that he hated me and demanded that I get out today, after unsuccessfully trying to discuss an unresolved fight from the night before, so I left and went to a friend's house, and he is spending the night at one of his friends' house tonight.  After that?  I don't know.  He said he wanted to take a break and he said I was "too much for him" so I don't know if he means it this time or if he was just saying mean things while he was mad, but I've gotten the impression he means it, and part of that is probably because saying that didn't work.  It didn't make me just break down and give up on my point.  I've gotten sick of the disrespect and I am standing up for myself.  I think it pissed him off that I took him up on his word and actually left too.  At some point we are going to have to talk and figure out what we're going to do, and I know I'm going to ask him to see a marital counselor with me.  I know that I need to be blunt and honest about how I'm feeling, but I just don't feel okay to do that in the space that has been set up between us.  I do not feel safe and comfortable to express myself when I have an issue with him, and he seems to think that is due 100% to my own trauma and not at all to his behavior.

This is probably the longest rant I've ever posted, and if anyone made it through, you are a saint.  I don't even know what I'm looking for.  Advice, for sure.  Solidarity.  Constructive criticism, if you have it.  Success stories. I'm so hurt and confused and scared, and this is really hard for me, and I want to work through these problems with him but we can't do that if I'm the only one looking to correct my hurtful behaviors, and I'm so scared that he won't realize that is what's happening--and if he can't even acknowledge any of this, then I don't see how it can work out between us.  I'm desperate and will take all the help I can get.

Blessings. Thank you.

So much is written about the non-ADD partner's anger and resentment. But I've found very little about what to do when the ADD partner accumulates these emotions. And that is where I live. Is this part of anyone else's experience?

We're coming up on 19 years of marriage, My wife and I have been banging away at ADD-related issues just about forever. It's been about six years since I finally responded to her prodding, bit the bullet, got diagnosed, got a good ADD-focused therapist, and a psychiatrist, and started trying the various drugs to treat my symptoms. We've read just about all the core books on ADHD in relationships, as well as a few of the core save-your-marriage-books. Have consulted about a dozen different mental health professionals all told. Did Ms Orlov's couples seminar two years ago and it was worthwhile, but real breakthroughs continue to elude us. Early on I was hopeful that we were going to turn the downward spirals around and save our marriage, but it's been very persistently difficult and things really don't look very good these days. We are now quite dug in, each putting up walls to protect ourselves from the other, each pretty disappointed, each with painful emotional damage, struggling with emotional disengagement. The drugs definitely help some but they are no panacea. My wife reports that she does not feel particularly angry or lonely, but I am deeply steeped in those emotions almost constantly. I feel like I have worked the many behavioral exercises in good faith with a fair amount of dedication, but my wife commonly perceives that I am not. It's hard to walk the line between appropriately practicing accountability for behavior and inappropriately keeping score and tallying grudges. We're told it's best to work on the process and not focus too much on the specific results, but when the task is to improve reliability and consistency ("improve my batting average") then we pretty much have to keep score. It's hard to shake feelings that I now live like Sisyphus striving eternally to earn love and intimacy, which is conditional, based on performance, and always more or less out of reach.

My wife is much more of a detail-oriented planner than I am. We are many years into the corrosive effects of an inadvertent parent-child dynamic that annoys the $^&@!! out of us both. Setting priorities, managing time, and scheduling our lives remain hot button issues. Over the last decade I've slowly and steadily accumulated almost unbearable amounts of resentment, frustration, and anger. I never in my life thought of myself as an angry person before, but I sure am now. I now experience wildly disproportionate rushes of just about all the negative emotions there are when my wife whom I love says or does a wide variety of little things. Anger, resentment, frustration, sadness, loneliness very noticeably affect my breathing, and cause chronic muscle tension in my shoulders and neck. When it's especially bad my skin just crawls and I can experience tension headaches. This all must be bad for my long term health.

I resent my wife's dismissal of my feelings, interests, and desires. I bitterly resent and am deeply saddened by the loss of romance and all manner of intimacy. I feel belittled, unappreciated, and disrespected when I try to talk to her about some interesting thing that I have seen or thought of and her only response is to prompt me to get back to work on whatever task she has recently assigned to me. I feel anger about the implicit assumption that at any given moment my wife must know better than I do what is important, worthy of my time and attention, and worth doing. I feel anger about what I perceive as my wife's impatience. I resent her near constant expectation that I can do most all tasks faster than I am generally able. I resent the way she routinely assigns me tasks to accomplish while she's away. I could just about pay for all my spendy meds if I had a dime for every time she asked me pointedly, "What happened?" when some part of my day took longer than she expected. I understand that polite people apologize when they are late (my wife really stresses this), but it's hard to go through life constantly apologizing for being late without starting to feel like a loser. I routinely sleep very poorly because it's hard to get all these feelings out of my body. Ongoing sleep deficits make everything worse. In the last year I've developed a very noticeable involuntary tremor in my chest that is triggered by stress, especially when in bed with my wife. As the tension continues to accumulate I find that it takes very little to push me into emotional overflow. I find myself starting to do things like breaking dishes or shouting wild angry screams of frustration when I'm alone. I try very hard not to scare my family but sometimes I scare myself. So far I've been able to inhibit occasional momentary impulses to break big, expensive things. I don't think I'm a danger to myself or others, but I might just lose it and shout hurtful words at them some day. I worry about the effect of our strained marriage on our teenage daughter.

I empathize with my long suffering wife. I understand all the things Ms Orlov and others write about how many ways a marriage to an ADD person can create anger and frustration for the non-ADD spouse. But I have heard relatively little about how sucky the ADD partner can feel. I've been hanging in for many years but I feel like I'm just about at the end of my rope. Sometimes I marvel ruefully at how much amazingly negative emotion can be generated by two dedicated people of good will in a loving marriage. With despair, I observe most of John Gottman's "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" creeping into our marriage over the years (no open contempt yet, but I'm beginning to think pretty contemptuous thoughts). I try to imagine our future together and it looks blank- It's hard for me to even visualize it any more. Can we really still save our marriage, and if we can't then could I ever expect to have a better relationship with anyone else?

Ugh... That got longer and more explicit than I thought it would. I guess writing this down was a good thing. If you read this far then thanks for indulging me.

I used to love watching TV and it was one of the things me and hubby have in common. We've been married 14 years. Early in our marriage. We used to live to watch TV together. But I've come to realize it seems to be the thing he's closest too. I used to suggest doing other things with our time. Like board games. He did play a couple of times with me  but he was miserable doing it. The last time I suggested it. I had set up a table with 2 cups of hot chocolate & whipped cream and set up a game of backgammon. It looked so inviting too. When I called him over he was very insistant that he didn't want to play. Board games are boring! I tried pleading but he wouldn't budge. I finally threw the hot cocoa down the drain and just went to our room frustrated and upset. I gave up and just went along watching shows and movies. What else can we do. I feel as though I'm the third wheel. I would watch shows & movies with him, even ones I didn't care to watch just to go along and keep the peace. Never mind him watching what I want. I'd have to compromise watching either stuff we both liked or stuff he liked. It feels like he has a new best friend and wants me along to go and do all the stuff they like to do. We recently canceled cable & phone because of our finances and just have internet. We have Roku to watch Hulu. Forget about it! now he's able to watch and fall in love with old shows he grew up with all over again. And countless number of others. I just gave up and let him have his time with his new friend. Sadly it's feeling more and more like were losing "us". I've recently been formally diagnosed and am on medication for ADD (Concerta). It's helped me so much in getting more done around the house and with my kids. And has also improved my mood. I feel bored watching TV. And busy myself finally doing stuff around the house and spending more time with our kids.  It's helping me adapt. But I feel like were living two separate lives. Hubby does have ADHD. He used to take Ritalin as a child and fits all the symptoms in the checklists! I figure maybe getting treated might help. I asked him about it. He says Ritalin didn't work. I wish he would get help but he'll have to decide to want to do it on his own I guess. Forget about having deep meaningful discussions. It seems the most conversation we have his "how was your day" and daily mundane things.

As for the TV issue I've spoken to him about it several times, but he feels like I'm making a big deal about it. He's happy in his own world. I want to be a part of it but not as a spectator. So I guess I'll just get along in mine and enjoy the little time we have together when he's not with his best friend :(

oops