Hi all,

I'm new here and what brought me here is that I have ADHD and I'm currently crashed. My DH gets upset at me when I crash and says it hurts him because I shut him out.

It usually starts like this. He'll say something and I take it all wrong and I just snap back.  The best thing I can do is walk away because otherwise the conversation quickly deteriorates into screaming and the more it goes on, the more angry and irrational I get.  Often my snapping for over something I shouldn't - usually something really innocuous, mundane and of little consequence btw - means that I am crashed.

Here's the thing, so long as I'm alone I have no idea I'm moody or crashed. Sometimes its the smallest thing that sets it off. Sometimes I'll stay crashed for a couple of days so I just want isolation, it avoids me being irrational and saying irrational things. DH feels that I"m shutting him out and that we should discuss whatever it is that's bothering me.  Thing is when I'm crashed I often don't have a clue why I'm crashed, I just need space, time alone where no one makes any demands on me - to just come to a calmer place and regain control over my moods, my emotions and my life.  It takes me some time to process events and sometimes I have no clue why I'm so angry  or what set me off until weeks later where I can finally see what happened and why I had a melt down.  Which is not related to the incident that got me to blow up.

A bit of background - DH is dyslexic and bi-polar, which means he shares some ADHD features with me. He took me to therapist last year because he felt I had traits like his, and therapist suggested I might have ADHD 3 months before I realized how right he was. I was 47  It didn't help that my mom was a teacher and she always claimed I didn't have ADHD. That I wasn't hyper. Just animated. The problems I had at school, at least in grades 1/2/3 were because I was a 'bored gifted child'. I had the same misconceptions that girls don't have ADHD.  It was reading a blog entry from a friend about her daughter with ADHD that I saw the light. Since then, I've read many articles about women with ADHD. I've also since borrowed any book from my local library on ADHD and can clearly see my therapist was right.

So far I am not on any medication as I am hypersensitive to medications in general, I always feel they f**k with my head. I try to avoid pills like the plague.  I  have not drank alcohol since I was 19, since I am completely out of control with alcohol. I've  received diagnosis of hypoglycemia in my 30's and modified my diet so as to suffer less from the effects of sugar highs/lows - which helped control my moods tremendously btw -  I was far worse before that point.  I also have no caffeine or chocolate.  I don't tolerate stimulants wells.  Since the diagnosis of ADHD, I've gone also gluten and casein free.    I've noticed an improvement in my overall health since the gluten went. 

However all that being said,  I've got lots of anger and hurt over things that happened in my past and that's something I'm working with my therapist at resolving because I sometimes feel the reason I blow up so easily is because I'm carrying so much baggage.  Some related to the fact I have ADHD and was undiagnosed for most of my life, some related to traumatic childhood experiences.

Just to make matters more interesting - DH and I are from 2 different worlds. He grew up in a country during civil war, so he has PTSD.  We've got a 15 year age difference too.  Putting all that aside, he's probably the best thing that ever happened to me. He's kind, loving and caring. We've been friends for over 15 years and a couple for 5, married for 4 years.   I have huge trust issues and while we've been  living together for 3 years [We lived apart our first year waiting for his immigration papers to be processed] - and he has never once given me a reason not to trust him, I still have huge trust issues. Not the cheating or lying type trust issues, but more if I let him get closer to me he'll used that to hurt me or something like that. And this creates intimacy issues for us.

On a tangent - one of the issues is that I have periods where I really don't want to be touched. I'm hypersensitive to touch at times. This kills him because he's from a culture where everyone hugs and kisses and touches all the time, and I can go for days weeks without wanting to be touched.

But at this moment - I'm crashed and all I want is to be left alone. I don't want to spend time with DH or with anyone else for that matter. I don't really go anywhere when I'm feeling like this, because I feel I bring other people down. As well I might just blow up again for no reason at some poor unsuspecting person  over something really insignificant. Sadly we were supposed to leave for vacation tomorrow morning and I just feeling like crawling under a rock.

Our vacation was a road trip with camping, was looking forward to it. Both he and I love camping and being in nature and we generally have a lot of fun when we travel together.  But when I'm like this I'm an accident waiting to happen, so I don't get behind the wheel. 

Something else I need to add, I may have gotten the diagnosis a year ago at 47, but I've known since I was quite young that I was different then others and as I got older I always felt I had some chemical imbalance.  Knowing what it was is helpful because I can work on reprogramming my brain. I make a lot of mistakes and I used to beat myself up constantly over it. Now I make a mistake and I just say to myself Oops  as  I correct it. It's normal to make mistakes so long as I catch them why be so hard on myself. I'm not upset to learn I have ADHD. It's also what makes me vibrant, passionate, intense, spirited and plenty of other good things, when I'm not crashed!   I see it as having a gift, but at the moment it's a gift I'm making really poor use of.

I should mention I'm not mad at DH and we haven' had a fight. I blew up for no reason and walked away and have avoided direct communication because I want to be left alone and because if I am not I'm still likely to be a time bomb. Anything will set me off.  Our relationship is ok - but I need to improve my communication and hopefully not blow up so easily in the future.  If I don't our relationship will deteriorate.

So I'm here in hopes to get some insight or learn from other people's experiences.

I am not a fan of throwing my issues out for all to see ... I have a strict rule on Facebook how our things stay our things.  However, I need help, and I'm really unsure where to turn next.

You know, I could take a collage of all the feeling here and throw them in this post, they're all so spot on (and I see people say that all the time, here, too!).

My DH has no real grasp of how much his ADHD causes pain and hurt and resentment.  It took a couple of years even to get him treated, and now on Celexa and Ritalin his moods have at least improved.  Supposedly, his focus has too.  But what about the habits?  What about having a job to do, and not putting quality into his tasks?  What about being asked to take out the trash, before I get home because he also scooped cat litter and the smells make me sick, means he doesn't have to do it until 5+ hours after I've been home, with 4 mentions of it since then.  Granted, I can't say "please get up and take out the trash now" because that's just rude and trying to make him feel like sh**.  But when he asks twice what he can do to help me out when my daughter and I are cleaning up the kitchen, and I tell him twice the Trash, and he doesn't do it, I'm still not allowed to be upset.  I've also asked twice tonight if he'll be able to do it tonight ... but I'm just a martyr, again, trying to make him feel bad.  He can do this whenever.

I could give example over example of this behavior.

I'm tired of crying myself to sleep.  I'm tired of the broken promises.  I'm tired of always feeling so lonely.  I'm tired of even my dreams leading to asking him for a divorce.

We've had the arguments about how his behavior hurts our family.  We've had calm collected conversations about it.  He claims he knows, but he doesn't take action to improve on any of it.  When called on it, he swears he is making improvements .. but if he were, then why do we always feel so hurt by him?  And, if I were to actually get divorce papers, why would I end up feeling so guilty?

I've asked for us to see a councilor together.  He's made it so clear he reserves the right to stop going or not go at all.  I think I'm going to have to see one for myself soon, with or without him.  I'm beyond the point of being able to handle this calmly.  I'm so full of resentment and stress at having to micromanage everything.  And yet, when I tell him how much stress that adds, he doesn't accept it.. I'm just being petty and mean again.  Maybe so, I'm at my breaking point.  I have been for almost a year.

I need someone who can be solid and reliable, for me and my 2 daughters (only the youngest is his).  From what I can see on these forums, it's nearly impossible for someone with ADHD to be that person.  To take on the weight of a partnership and help equally.  Some ADHDers here seem truly to want to be that person, so I'm sure some will achieve that goal.  I don't think my husband has that goal.

I honestly don't know what to do at this point.  I'm emotionally washed out.  I wish there was an easy answer.  I wish love didn't have to factor in ... I wish I had confidence that if I did ask to separate, he would be able to take care of himself.

We had a bit of a break this summer, and I really chilled out. My parents were mostly taking care of the kids most of the time and we were around a lot of people, which always makes my husband behave better. I've been worrying about what would happen once we got back to our normal life, just us and the kids, and needing to be on a schedule for school. Well, it's all fallen apart quickly. Since we've been home from my parents, he's been staying up until all hours, scheduling things he needs to do in the evenings, leaving me alone with the kids, not doing household chores on his list that we agreed to (like dishes), and this morning he totally bailed on the first day of school. He didn't get out of bed until ten minutes before we had to be out the door, then the little one fussed about her socks, and we were all off schedule. I have a back injury, and ended up straining something in the rush, and I can't really sit in the car without tremendous pain anyway, so the ride to school was horrendous for me. I was a little snarly, yes. Once we got the kids both off, we were alone in the car, he was saying that he would not bail tomorrow. And I expressed that I was worried because we seemed to be getting in back into the bad pattern of him being up late and not functioning in the morning. He then got mad at me. And when I said "shit" in the context of , "Let's stop at CVS and pick up what we need, I don't give a shit if takes an extra minute for me to get to work, I told them I wouldn't be in until 10am." He went ballistic, banged the gear shift into park, banged the steering whell, threw his glasses and started screaming at me. He doesn't like my cursing. So that was my big failure of the day. When he pulled up at the next stoplight and was still screaming. I got out of the car and walked home (painfully, slowly, miserably). When I got home, he started a monologue from the other room as he banged stuff around saying things like, "Well, if you thought it was bad before, you ain't seen nothing yet" and other miserable things. I just ignored him and signed on to work. He was just properly diagnosed with ADHD at the beginning of the summer, but is not yet taking any meds but Wellbutrin. I posted about that part of the process before. Now I'm just venting, because I had been trying to stay in a positive mood all summer, but now it's all fallen apart so quickly. I really don't want to get a divorce and split up because of the kids, and because I think he can get through this if he gets proper treatment and anger management help. And because I love the person he is underneath it all. But I can't live with that anger, and the level of mismanagement that comes with his ADHD.