I know that is a foolish way to think of this, but I am trying to be totally honest so I can get help to get over these horrible feelings.  My husband is a good man, he loves our kids and me dearly.  But ever since he was diagnosed with ADHD, I have had a hard time thinking of him as just a regular guy.  He has (in my EXTREMELY limited opinion/knowledge on the topic) very mild issues with ADHD.  Our entire 20 year marriage has been OK, but with me always thinking he was really selfish/childish.  I always had the hope that it would change....but now, his doctor tells us that it doesn't ever go away, but can be "helped" some.  This basically knocked all hope out of me.  Now, I feel like a some sort of sick predator who has taken advantage of this nice guy who just can't help what he does or says or perceives.  I am drowning in guilt over this.   I have read that people with ADHD are just as intelligent as every other person around them, so I should NOT be feeling this way.  I can't help it though.  My gosh, when it comes to having sex, I feel disgusted at myself, as if I had molested him or somehow forced him into it.  I feel like even though he wanted to be with me as much as I did, that maybe he doesn't actually know any better & I should not even think of him that way.  I KNOW these are ridiculous feelings, so HOW ON EARTH DO I MAKE THEM GO AWAY??? 

I have thought years ago that ADHD (or some other issue) could be going on & I asked him to speak to someone about it.  He did see one doctor that suggested he be tested & said he believed that my husband did have ADHD.  I guess I should have pushed for help for him then, but I didn't.  Maybe I was being selfish and didn't want to face it as a real problem.  I don't know.  But now we have children & I have become even more guilt ridden because I worry that they may have issues like his too.  (Now, the doctor has said it is not thought to be genetic, so that gives me some relief.) 

I think it has all just been a huge weight put on my shoulders.  I worry to death to leave the kids with my husband, although they have always been ok with him.  I'm worried he will get distracted by whatever & he won't be watching them closely enough.  I have a hard time even running out to get my hair cut over fears like this.  I actually want my 10 year old daughter to be home with the younger ones even though my husband is there watching them all.  I never tell her she's watching them, but just having her there helps me be able to get things done that I have to do.  I know she would immediately call me if she didnt' think everything was ok. 

I am having such a hard time dealing with all this guilt.  My husband has never felt better.  He now has an answer to all the things that he did that bugged him & me.  He has what he needed to help him feel better about all of it & I am extremely relieved for him.  I just have to figure out how to deal with my ignorant issues that I have about it.  I feel bad because I knew something wasn't right a long time ago & I did nothing.  I feel bad because I don't know how to help now.  I feel bad because I have lost hope.  I feel bad because I have begun to think of him as one of my children & not the love of my life anymore.  I feel bad for thinking of my husband as childlike now & because of THAT I think of myself as a disgusting perverted predator who's taken advantage of this poor man for decades. 

So, now, after I have told you my horrible feelings & let you know just what a terrible wife I am, I am asking for your help.  Any advice on how to get a grip on my feelings about my husband's ADHD would be sincerely appreciated.  Any things you have learned that have helped you deal with your own problems would help too.  I want you to understand that I love my husband more than I can ever explain.  He is my world.  But since the day he was diagnosed, these feelings seemed to just fall on top of me & I can't climb out from under them.  Please, any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated.  I am desperate.   

We saw this movie last night. Don't see it with your ADD DH.  My DH is acting terribly suave and self righteous right now after seeing it.  He is giddy as a lark and on top of the world and I will have to put up with him for a while.  There is a couple who consist of an unhappy, nervous wife married to an impulsive, care free, possibly ADD husband.  I can read between the lines about why the woman is so nervous and unhappy but one of the heros of the story is the husband who, "gave ALL their retirement savings to a daughter, took another woman out for a romantic dinner and is caught holding another woman (to console her) all the while with the attitude of "Who, Me?". The story makes it out like the unhappy marriage is the wife's fault and that he is the way he is because she is an unhappy harpy.  She is demonized.  Of course we both saw the similarities of the couple in our own married life (we did not mention the similarities verbally).  DH keeps saying how great that movie was all day today. I am sure it feels like vindication for him and permission to go out freely and be happy and impulsive and divest himself of responsibilities and take up with other women like the character in the movie and then be celebrated at the end. I prayed to God, "Why do you want me to play THIS sad and lonely part?"  Warning to young people: The movie is about OLD, OLD people.  Definitely not interesting to a younger crowd.

It has been wonderful to read so many stories that sound familiar. Does anyone here have experience with this? Here is an example of what happens:

I am in the kitchen doing some task, thinking my own thoughts, and my husband walks in and launches into a tirade about the tasks he must do that day complete with details about what materials he will use, where he will find them, how long the tasks will take, why he is doing them, when he last did the same task, when he will probably do them again, then remembers more things he must do as a result of doing this particular task, and on and on, ad nauseum. Meanwhile, he has not greeted me, acknowledged my existence and I feel like a vessel into which all this information that I am not interested in is being poured, causing me to feel invisible and unimportant and repelled. Yet he stands near me as if he expects me to attend to this "list" and if I do not respond, or if I respond by saying, " I'm in the middle of something, can you wait just a minute?" in a calm, normal voice, and often his response is, "Okay, I'll shut up, nobody wants to listen to me anyway, I'll just go do my work and everyone can ignore me like usual." The first thing that goes through my mind is, "Hey, wait a minute, I didn't say anything mean to you, and you're behaving as if I have said, 'Shut up, I don't want to hear it!' Besides that, you haven't even said 'Hi' or even noticed that I was doing something else!" When I have dared to actually SAY this, his response is more of the same self deprecating stuff, like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm boring you, I don't even know why you talk to me anyway, go back to what you were doing, I'll just go work."

This really disturbs me and makes me feel as if he wants me to say, "No, no, honey, you aren't boring me, don't go do work, stay here so I can listen to your list!" But that leaves me no room to say what I deserve to be able to say which is, "I'm in the middle of something, can you wait just a minute?" I am being polite. I am even willing to listen to some of his list, even if it is not interesting to me, but when he responds this way to my reasonable request, I feel like he is putting me in a bad position and making me responsible for his feelings. Wen I have pointed this out, just this way, he even says, "I do everything wrong." There is no way for me to point anything out without having to put my needs aside.

This happens when I make a request like, "Can you please put a plate in the microwave when you put an onion bagel in there?" Suddenly, it's as if I've told him he's a bad person!!! His reactions are so over the top and paint me as the bad guy. It's like he's not able to take responsibility for anything! Any suggestions?

Finding myself so confused and deflated, and completely unsure what to do. I've posted on here a couple of times only but have taken a lot of heart from the many posts I've read over the last year or so. I've been married for 20 years to a man who was diagnosed adhd a year ago at the age of 48. Together we've faced a lot of big challenges, particularly in the last 8 to 10 years. DH is an alcoholic who has been sober nearly 4 years after some really close calls. He's been involved with numerous women over the past 8 years as well, acting out with both emotionally and physically relationships. The most recent one is ongoing - coming on to 5 years now, off and on. Two and a half years ago my father passed away after an intense year and a half long battle with cancer. I was responsible for a lot of the support and big decisions for my parents during that time. I confronted DH about the most recent affair the same weekend that I had to put my dad into palliative care. The illness was excruciating for my dad and also excruciating for those of us who had to watch it. I couldn't handle the pain of my father's illness and the pain of my DH's infidelity at the same time so I packed DH's bags and made him leave. It was a lonely and painful time - I am so not even close to healed from that winter.

Two years ago, sixth months after my dad's death, DH came home at his request. I, foolishly, picked him up from the girlfriend's apartment - he had been boarding in a house for the 7 months of our separation, not staying with her, but the term of his lease was up and so he went to her house for the day because he "had nowhere else to go." Now, 2 years later, their relationship is as strong as ever while ours is falling to pieces. There have been so many aha moments and ups and downs in the meantime: he's been in and out of counseling with 2 different therapists, he joined, and then left, a support group for sex addiction, I've been mostly regularly seeing a therapist, we've had couples therapy but only occasionally, he realized last spring that he has adhd and sought a diagnosis (which was temporarily liberating and uplifting), he was on meds for a few months then decided to quit without talking to me, etc. and on and on. He's pulled away from the girl and then pulled away from me instead, and back and forth. At times I've felt that I'm in a marriage with a man who is working so incredibly hard to get his feet under him, who is honest with me and respectful of me and of himself, that I can begin to trust and be open, and so on. At other times I think what on earth am I doing? This is one of the latter times.

He becomes angry with me constantly, turning away and refusing to talk with me, leaving the house for hours, sleeping in the guest room for days or weeks at a time. Since he went off meds in February he's spent more days avoiding me than being with me. One of his "best" coping strategies is to project and that's one of the things that's happening right now. The thing is, he's so incredibly brilliant that he projects onto me his problems, but only when there's at least a grain of truth or accuracy about them. For example, he's been taking his intimacy away from our marriage and sharing it with someone else but his response whenever I express that I am upset is to say that I never share myself and true feelings with him. Well, sure I don't! First of all, you've betrayed my trust over and over and over again (of course if I actually say that out loud, he's out the door) and second, my own protective coping strategy in life is to shut down, and the thing is that I've had lots of cause to protect myself! 

He's so filled with shame and self-righteous anger, and the two take turns in presenting themselves. He can immerse himself in either of those feelings and then the only thing that makes him feel better is contact with that woman. He realized last year that, when he thinks of her, he feels just as high as if he was on his 2nd or 3rd pint of beer - the dopamine reaction. For a while then he stayed away from her but now he's forgotten that he had realized that. Good grief.

I get and agree with all of Melissa's advice, I take great pains not to react and it's all good with respect to the little stuff. But wow this is so not the little stuff and I feel like the world's greatest most incredible fool. My DH just informed me, a couple of hours ago, that he's going to go this summer, during our holiday, drive 11 hours and spend the night camping near the spot she'll be working, and then drive her here to our city the next day. I calmly said that, since she's just "a friend" (the relationship stopped being physical 3 and a half years ago because she decided to stop that aspect of it) then I should be a part of a summer jaunt to this lovely spot. He said I wasn't welcome. Really. My response was indeed calm - I said that wasn't okay and indeed not normal, that we are married and so for him to take a trip during our vacation with another woman was not what married people do. He interrupted to say, once again, that I don't share myself with him. I said not to do that to me, meaning that he shouldn't interrupt me to throw an accusation at me, and he left the room. I followed and simply continued what I had been saying only to have him tell me that he had stopped listening several minutes ago. I freaked. I'm so so so tired of being treated like that. 

He accused me of only ever being "okay" and smiley, which to him is a bad thing because he can't see how anyone can live in the moment and simply be happy and so therefore I must be "faking" it which makes me insincere and phony, and dramatically overreactive in his opinion. I am absolutely a dramatically reactive person, but, given the circumstances, am I overreacting? I don't think so. But then I seem to have no choice but to either disengage and be blamed for removing intimacy from our marriage, or else freak out and be blamed for that too. Here's the real kicker: he doesn't seem to remember the many times I've shared with him, gifted him with trust, forgiven him, accepted him, and opened up to him, even when I remind him of those moments and conversations - I HATE this faulty filing system!!!! I just wind up deep in a pity party, feeling so many ways a fool, and then I've got to get up every morning, put on my game face, and go to work. I come home to an empty house and then an empty bed and then he blames me. Tonight I asked why on earth he had been so insistent that we reconcile two years ago, why is he even here? How I so often wish he would just go, just leave. I have tried to make myself move out but can't put our 16 year old through that again. But I feel such a loser - what am I going to do, just sit here while he goes off gallivanting with his girlfriend this summer? How can I do that? And what has happened to the cozy, loving, fun and adventurous relationship I thought I was signing up for all those years ago?

Now he's said that the reason he's mad this week is because I posted on facebook on father's day that I really missed my dad and that I feel fortunate to have been his daughter. DH said that "broke his heart" not because he empathized with my pain, no, but because I put it on facebook but I allegedly don't share my grief with him. So he stopped talking to me again this week and then planned a trip with his girlfriend. Have I fallen down the rabbit hole? Thanks for reading,

Stuck and confused