ADHD OMG

Posted by fxckfeelings on May 3, 2018

ADHD, like any cognitive disability, can be misdiagnosed as a personality flaw; seeing your problems as due to your character, not a disorder, can make you self-critical and vulnerable to the criticism of others at a time when you should be self-motivated and eager to find outside encouragement. Blaming yourself for everything you can’t achieve will just make you depressed, which just makes it harder to do well, which of course makes you feel even worse and more responsible, further impairing your ability to perform. So before you let your depression and/or critical audience bring you down entirely, push yourself to recognize that you aren’t a bad or worthless person, just a good person with the bad luck to have a quirky brain. Then develop standards that are realistic and respectful of good efforts rather than competitive results so you’ll be able to give yourself, and demand from others, the respect you deserve.

-Dr. Lastname

So my husband and I have had a very bad run over the last few years of our marriage, after we had our first child and made the mistake of getting into business together. We do things VERY differently; he’s always on time, organized and knows his mind, and I’m the opposite on all fronts. The cash flow and our available time kept dwindling while our family grew.  And I caused a lot of damage—in our relationship and in our business—so that we had to shut the business down. He kept telling me what I needed to do to change my ways, buying me books and sending me links to articles, all along believing that I would and wanted to change, until at some point he realized that I was uninterested in the work. He also concluded that I am the most selfish person he’s known, and that I have been lying, thieving, and not investing in our relationship a fraction of what he has. He stopped helping around the house and with the child. I now had baby, house AND work to do up to his standards in order to redeem myself. So from here it goes like this; I’m constantly in a frame of mind that I don’t have enough time so I don’t do anything significant to address things, then wait ’till the last minute and then throw up my hands saying that, well, I did not have enough time to do it (when in truth, I had a lot). He then turns into a nag, waiting to catch my every slip-up and make a mountain out of it. Now the house and the child also start getting short shrift, up until the point where EVERYTHING lies around incomplete or half done and I have no motivation to do even the things I loved doing. I don’t groom myself anymore. He’s so nasty with me that he’s recently become short with our child and physically abusive to me. My goal is to understand why I don’t do things I know I should be doing so I can overcome both my inertia to change and this hellish situation. 

F*ck PTSD: The F*ck Feelings Guide for Individuals and Support Groups

No matter how bad your organizational abilities may be—or how much worse they got with the added pressures of a business, a baby, and your husband’s blame—they’re still not a good reason to fault yourself, tear yourself down, or accept verbal or physical abuse from someone else.

If you want to throw blame around, you can toss some to your parents, whose genes gave you the ADD, or to your husband for his false expectations, or to the deity of your choice for withholding its blessings despite your annual livestock sacrifice. But all the finger pointing in the world won’t change the fact that, between ADD and depression, you’re functioning poorly, having trouble with self-care, and hating yourself for being the useless person your husband thinks you are.

You care about the right things—doing your share, being a mother, getting organized—but you can’t will yourself to overcome your deficiencies to meet your husband’s standards. You both must accept that fact before figuring out how to manage that difference, and there are many good tricks you can learn to keep yourself scheduled and on track, once your depressive symptoms ease up. At the same time, you have to put aside the one wrong thing you care about—punishing yourself—and ask yourself whether your husband’s punishing behavior is causing harm, both to you and your child, that needs to stop.

There’s no point in blaming yourself or others for problems you don’t control, but there’s every reason for you to start taking better care of yourself and respecting your strengths, despite your depressive thinking and your husband’s negative words and abusive behavior.

For one thing, you don’t have to believe those negative thoughts, and a positive cognitive therapist should be able to teach you ways to confront them and resist accepting them as truth. You can also work with a doctor to find ways to manage your depression and ADHD, from exercise and meditation to therapy and medication; antidepressants and/or stimulants may help you recover faster at pretty low risk (the antidepressant trial takes a month but a stimulant trial just requires a day or two).

Once you’ve recovered your perspective, you can judge your husband’s behavior objectively, decide what’s acceptable, consider your options, and do whatever is necessary to ensure your and your child’s safety. Meanwhile, don’t believe the nasty thoughts, be they from your head or your husband’s mouth. You both tried very hard with a business model that didn’t work, but you have a child, so you need a different way of making a living.

Respect yourself, your efforts, and what you’ve learned, and insist that your husband do likewise after deciding what role he can safely assume in the life of your family. Instead of blaming and torturing yourself over your failed business and personal flaws, take on the new job of learning to accept and manage those shortcomings and making the best life for you and your child.

STATEMENT:

“I feel totally useless, but half of it is because of symptoms and the other half is bad thinking and abusive treatment. I will remind myself of what I’ve accomplished, the strengths I possess, and the ways I’ll find to make better use of my abilities to parent, protect my family, and do whatever work I need to do to be an independent person.”