OK so a few weeks ago we discovered my husband of 5 years has ADD (maybe ADHD, I dunno). It came as such a shock but it all made complete sense, every single one of our furstrations we saw was stemming from this. Anyway, we finally made an appointment with a therapist who specializes in ADD. I'm excited, but nervous. My husband has been to therapy before for another issue years ago, but I've never done it before. What can we expect the first time? We are going together, but will they probably want to see him by himself as well? I hear the first session can be really long, like 2 hours, true? I just have this huge fear that he will be skeptical about it all and not accept the diagnosis and not want to try. Mainly-he doesn't see how it's affected me all these years. He sometimes laughs when I express my frustrations. I assume that he may believe it more when coming from a therapist? Please tell me there's hope that he will one day "see". I have heard some of you with ADD say something similar to "the blanket has been lifted from my eyes and now I see what I've been doing to people". I want that blanket to be removed from my husband so badly! I don't know how realistic it is to assume it will ever happen. Unfortunately we have to pay for these sessions out of pocket, so I don't know how we can afford many of them. Do yall go every week? Month? Do you one day stop altogether if you feel you've gotten a good head start or is it an ongoing thing? Sorry for all the questions, but this site is awesome, thanks guys.
Have first appointment with therapist this week! What to expect?
Submitted by Cathryn on 10/04/2009.
what to expect with counselor
Submitted by arwen on
Cathryn, I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to respond to this before you had your first session.
Mostly you need to be prepared for things to take a lot longer than you'd like! While there are cases of rapid progress, they seem to me to be in the minority. I know that's tough when you are paying out of pocket, but unfortunately it's mostly counterproductive to try to force or rush the process. If you let the counselor know you are paying out of pocket, they may be able to give you some discounted pricing, I've heard some counselors do this.
My husband and I started out 15 years ago with a combination of joint and individual counseling. We saw the counselor every other week together, and in the intervening weeks my ADD husband saw the counselor alone. This allowed the counselor to see our dynamic (I had a lot of anger) and work on our marital issues and at the same time work separately with my husband on our ADD-related issues. Our counselor was not trained in counseling ADD, but he worked to acquire the necessary background, and while I think it caused our progress to be slower than I might have liked early on, it did eventually work out pretty well. After a while, we dropped the joint counseling (although we would have a joint session every now and then, as needed), and my husband was seeing the counselor every week for a little while. But pretty much the last 14 years, he has been seeing the counselor every other week.
I should mention that my husband has Seasonal Affective Disorder as well as ADD. Unlike most people with SAD, he doesn't really get depressed in the winter, but it does make his ADD behaviors worse. This has been a big contributor to his need for counseling in the last five or six years -- if he didn't have SAD, I'm sure we wouldn't have needed to go through so much counseling for so long.
I know a lot of people say that the really can't afford the counseling, but my view has always been that we can't really afford not to do the counseling. Without it, I'm sure we would have divorced a long time ago. We've had insurance through much of the time, but not always. Our counselor was very understanding, and when we didn't have insurance, he let us take longer to pay if we needed to.
Good luck with your counseling situation!