I asked my spouse if he wanted to discuss his visit with a pastor last night. Before he left last night, he had told me he would tell me when he came home if he was going to stay or go. I was 'assuming' he had gone because he was miserable. Maybe hit bottom.
What he told me is the pastor said we needed to go to marriage counseling. I replied that we have been going to counseling for the past umpteen years. We also ended our last counseling sessions last January when we were both told we had things to accomplish before we could be helped.
then he said 1. we need to go to counseling with a man. 2. we needed to take the ADHD factor completely out of the counseling. 3. we needed to focus on how horrible it is that in our marriage we have had no intimacy for three years. I said that will be something to discuss because I have missed out intimate life to, to which he said"You hold that key. YOU hold that key."
Oiy.
Oiy. Oiy. Oiy.
Wow. That stinks. Does he
Submitted by PoisonIvy on
Wow. That stinks.
Does he mean that he doesn't want to talk about any behavior that's related to ADHD or just doesn't want to use the word "ADHD"? Because the latter might be workable, but the former would make the counseling dead in the water. I don't really KNOW that my husband has ADHD (as far as I know, it's not possible to be diagnosed with the precision of diagnoses for such illnesses as cancer and heart disease, for example) but if he were willing to discuss his behaviors, the particular label of the cause would not be essential. I'm guessing, though, that your husband doesn't want to talk about anything related to ADHD.
Now I am laughing
Submitted by I'm So Exhausted on
Rosered,
He doesn't want to discuss anything regarding ADHD. The behaviors are just who he is. And we should not bring-up anything negative. We need to focus on the positive.
The humorous part of this is that a large percent of things are OK. And only about 5% that make the biggest mess. And so he believes we need to just overlook them. Like, "Why can't we just forget Christmas Eve already - - I said I was sorry." Excu-use me? Hearing someone sort of snark at you, "If you really NEED to HEAR I'm sorry, well OK I'm sorry." just don;t cut it. I deserve better than that. He is hell-bent on his deep-seated belief that if he didn't purposely set out to hurt my feeling, than my feels cannot be hurt.
There is so much I overlook. I am just feeling invalidated - hmm maybe it is unvalidated. Well, I do not feel my ideas and feelings are validated :)
And I have tried my darndest to get past that 5%. But they are really monsters. Purple elephants in the room. Poke 'em and it is a stampede. Well, that has actually cut itself by 50% because I have refused to engage. But that hasn't fixed the problem.
I get it. There are lots of
Submitted by PoisonIvy on
I get it. There are lots of good things about my husband and many that aren't so good but that I can tolerate. And then there's the fact that he has had two good jobs in his life and has been fired from those two good jobs and didn't look for work for years after the first firing and at all after the second one. Sure, it's not the only aspect of his life, but it is a huge f-ing deal when it means that he and our family are rapidly running out of money. But I'm not supposed to talk about this topic, because it makes him feel bad about himself.
Why am I so warped I am finding humor in this! LOL.
Submitted by I'm So Exhausted on
Rosered,
He asked me what I ever do for him? I started to say, "Well I do your laundry. . ." - and he cut me right off mid sentence with, "You don't need to do my laundry, I can do my own."
Boy, oh boy, oh boy, am, I feeling I will no longer be doing his laundry. In the past 30 years, I think he has done one load of laundry. That never bothered me. Laundry has always been one of the domestic type chores that I love to do. I love the housewife role.
It was after he kept indicating I also needed a job to help with the finances, that I really started to feel things go badly around here. Doing the administration and bookkeeping for a plumbing business - with NO salary - is close enough to a full-time job for me.
I no longer have the need to justify my actions.
It is a real madhouse around here. He literally stormed in an angry voice for close to a half hour. After 30 minutes, I had my fill. I told him I believe we just have irreconcilable differences and need to be separate. That made him mad.
I do not see how all this anger and yelling and frustration is getting him anywhere. I want to ask him how it is working for him, but he sure hates Dr. Phill references. Yelling, and anger and stomping on my feelings is not making me feel any closer to him.
Oh honey! I relate to
Submitted by smilingagain on
Oh honey! I relate to this.
My husband and I have the same dynamic right now. If I address anything about his irrational, volatile and hurtful behaviors, he flips it around on me and accuses me of not wanting to be close to him and not being affectionate and letting us slide into being roommates (I'm pretty certain he would treat his roommate better or they would move out).
When I point out that I only became this way after he was volatile, unpredictable, and verbally abusive over a long period of time (many purple elephants in my house too), he accuses me of wanting to hold on to things and stay angry. Umm.... If I held on to things, we wouldn't be together. I let almost everything go.
I don't want to stay angry- but it makes me angry being treated poorly on an ongoing basis and it makes me angry that there is never any realizations or apologies. There is a total lack of accountability. I'm not sure whether he doesn't see things clearly or if he is deliberately lying and avoiding admitting when he has behaved egregiously.
Unfortunately it does makes me angry that he behaves terribly and it is always on me to forgive and move on and knit things back together. He is allowed to be angry over nothing and anything and to hold on to it for days. On the other hand, if I raise a legitimate complaint (after letting almost everything go), he turns it around and gets mad at me and then stays mad for days. Sigh.
Why would anyone want to be close to someone who takes them for granted, doesn't appear loving or kind, doesn't care about their concerns or hurts, and actually hurts them frequently? I am not a masochist- sorry.
Anyway- my husband flatly refuses to go to marital counseling. He told me that his behavior was fine and that it would be a waste of his time to go, since he was doing everything right already. According to my husband, if I would just change my behavior, things would be fine.
He also told me that he is the only one working on the marriage over the past 5 months. Um- excuse me? 4 and a half months ago he told me he was divorcing me, the marriage was dead, had been dead for 5 years, sex with me was like having sex with a robot, I have no interests, I am not affectionate, I caused him to quit a perfectly good job, I'm the reason he doesn't have a new job, I guilt-tripped him when he had kidney stones and only took care of him out of guilt, I pick on him and nag him constantly and never do or say anything nice to him.... Wah wah wah. He finally decided to stay after a 12 hour melodrama I could have done without...
For weeks after that, he alternated between treating me with icy silence (as though I was lucky to have him sticking around) or being over the top nice, where it wasn't authentic. In those nice times, he would make efforts do something nice for me (which he usually got wrong- but he was trying) or try to cozy up to me and get physically close (which sadly, makes me very uncomfortable now that I know he thinks having sex with me is robotic- which he has since taqken back- but you can't really take back words can you?)- but he never acknowledged how hurtful his behaviour was. He only apologized for it maybe a week ago and it was a qualified apology (I'm sorry you were hurt, but I was hurt too and...)
When it has come up, he flips it around on me and says he felt and feels unloved and that I was the one who brought up divorce or pushed him to bring up divorce, because I was saying I wasn't happy. (Um- does anyone else see the difference between saying you are unhappy vs. saying you are divorcing the other person and then trashing them up and down?)
I told him- I understand that you may have legitimate hurts- and I would be receptive to them if you brought them to me in a nice way. I too feel distant and want that closeness- But throwing a tantrum over a situation you created, well... suck it up. Sometimes when you have dig a hole for yourself, you have to climb out. You created the distance between us. My reaction- to withdraw from a source of pain- is quite natural and healthy. I am not punishing you. I am not leaving you. I want to be together. But I am not your property that you can kick around. When you treat me shabbily, there will be distance. That's how it works. Throwing a tantrum over it and attacking me is not the way to reverse that and achieve closeness with me.
So basically I said to him- your complaint was legitimate, but your reaction was totally inappropriate and disproportionate. Which he understands but doesn't understand.
Anyway- this was a little rambly sorry- things are still improving here- but not without lots of frustrating backslides... I'm still not sure whether this marriage can last long term- I am committed to sticking it out at least until my husband has a new job and is feeling happier. I woudl never leace him in the state he is in, because I think he's in a bad spot. But- if he has a new job and is happier and there isn't significant improvement, I will have to reconsider whether I can stay. My kids are 5 and 1 now. they adore him, but my 5 year old already sees and comments on some of the negative behaviours my husband exhibits. I don't want my kids to be around tension and conflict and I don't want my husband treating them how he treats me or them seeing how he treats me... So for now- I am waiting to give this a real chance for change- but if my husband can't pull it together to behave around them, I will end up leaving him. Period. Breaks my heart- but sometimes it's for the best. We'll see. I hope it doesn't come to that.
100s of tiny things add up
Submitted by I'm So Exhausted on
smilingagain,
I sometimes - not really but in retrospect - regret getting wiser. I can pinoint the exact day I wrote my spouse a letter about no longer being willing to be controlled by his anger. Day by day by day the more things stay the same the higher my frustration gets.
The areas of conflict around here are just crushing to my heart. I try a variety of ways to bring things up - at the exact time, the next morning, when things seem to be calm - asking if we can discuss the situation. I wish I could just say I choose to overlook them - but it is not the way to have a healthy relationship.
If only, if only, if only. When I was in counseling for eating disorders, the odd thing for me was - do not focus on the eating as it is only a symptom of the problem. Once I learned not to et people walk all over me, to hang on to my own opinions, to tell people when they hurt me - then the eating issues disappeared.
I just don't think that is how it works with ADHD. I understand that the behaviors are the things to address - chronic lateness, forgetfulness, procrastination, disorganization, trouble focusing, and then hyper-focusing.
I just do not want to live in a situation where in order to have harmony I can never voice an opinion that is different than my spouses, never mention if my feeling are hurt, only focus on the positive, do everything his way, and never mention his stuff - (hoarding behaviors. ) I do not want to feel controlled.
Ack. What am I doing wrong?
I might be in the minority
Submitted by PoisonIvy on
I might be in the minority here, but I tend toward the theory proposed by my (now-retired) therapist: that for people like my husband, anxiety comes first and drives the ADHD-like behaviors, not the other way around. So, if that theory is valid, then for some people with ADHD-like behaviors, dealing only with the behaviors is NOT going to be very successful, because the anxiety will still be there.
BTW, I also had an eating disorder (when I was a teenager). One thing I've taken from that experience is the belief that if you have an emotional or psychological disorder, you have a responsibility to engage in therapy or treatment or whatever it is that will help you get better. Watching my husband wallow in his misery annoys and frustrates me. If I could come back from near death to be a responsible, loving, hard-working adult, I think he should be able to deal with his issues, too.
Exactly
Submitted by I'm So Exhausted on
Rosered,
My spouse is in 100% absolute denial that, his poor social skills, and/or any of the negative behaviors of having an ADHD wired brain, offend anyone or cause any disharmony in our marriage. He will flat out deny - and is highly offended by the suggestion - that he has 'issues.'
Thinking back, while we were still dating in the early 80s, my spouse came with me to my counseling. One counselor said to him, "You think you can make her eat, let's see you do it." LOL! Of course he couldn't do it.
So I tend to think, if I can come back from "You lose one more pound and I'll slap you in the hospital" and also my own warped thinking of wanting help for my crazy eating - with the co-morbid mind set of "This is mine and no one is going to take it away from me." he can too.
But I knew it. I knew it was me. I accepted it was me. I saw it was not normal.
He said he is happiest alone with his stuff out in the yard/barn.
So I understand he does not want to look at it. I also understand I am trying to figure out what works best for me. He said he was supposed to avoid my opinions, and he does. He forgot the second part of those instructions - work on himself.
Denial is such a strong emotion. Gosh.
goodness
Submitted by Rh on
I just read the entire string of comments of your conversation and it always amazes me when I come to this site just how much I am not alone and that other women out there are experiencing the exact same insanity I am. I always wonder how much more of it I can take :( When you get screamed at and cussed out because you don't drive as reckless as your spouse and then accused of not caring that he needs to get home to get to bed, when I drove in the first place so he could rest on the way home and I was driving down a steep curvy intersection with a tractor trailer trying to get into my lane to get out of the way of an officer who had pulled over a car on the side of the road. Yeah, you're screaming at me helps so much dear. I am always at fault with him no matter what I do. I have resolved to not get pulled into his anger anymore, but sometimes it feels impossible, especially when you're stuck in the car together a couple hours from home. How do you do it? It's like the more I try to stay out of his insanity, the harder he tries to pull me into it and get me to react. And he adamantly refuses to get help so he remains untreated as for some reason he is terrified of medication, but he won't even take anything natural either. Ugghhh. And like you said, most of the time things are pretty great, but that 5% is so intense it's hard to remember the good then.