Well I did it again. Last night I shared with my long-suffering wife the good news that I expected to max out on my incentive comp this year. She responded positively and asked how much I expected it to be. I said I wasn't sure, gave a number and an estimate of the amount net of taxes.
At which point she questioned the tax rate I was assuming. That did it. I became defensive and asked why she couldn't just focus on the good news rather than pick apart my estimates. She replied that she hates it when I shut her down and went into silent mode.
Before going to bed, an hour after the blow up, I admitted to her that I'd screwed up. The following morning I gave it further thought and concluded that my wife had done nothing wrong. What she said in the moment didn't bother me anymore. When I brought her coffee I apologized. She's still not recovered from the shock of yet another argument brought on by my defensiveness.
Despite all the reading, all the techniques, all the counseling, all the introspection the ADD again raises it's ugly head. I suppose I can point to the progress of realizing and owning my screw up faster as opposed to letting it fester for days or weeks as I used to. Admit the mistake, apologize and move one. Still, its disheartening for me and even harder on her.
What I need is an electronic zapper than can detect when I'm getting agitated and shock me back to my senses.
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Stoneman60
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So sorry. It is frustrating when people get so detailed about the little things we don’t know the answer to yet. Maybe you could say “Good news, I don’t have all the facts yet, but I’m excited!” And leave it at that. Keep up the communication and yes, always apologize for (and try to do better) snapping. We all get frustrated. But maybe you need a code word for “I can’t do this right now, I love you, and I don’t want to take out my irritation on you.” My family it’s “I’m going for bread!” (Had a past relative that went for bread and never came home, and we’ve turned it into a joke and a “I need a time out/ I need some me time.”
I wonder if eneagram may be useful for you. My wife and I sound similar to you and your wife and it has dramatically changed our relationship for the better to understand how we are wired differently and how our different unconscious motivators drive different best self and shadow selves.
yep, I hear ya. for me, regulating my emotions is the hardest ADHD symptom to master let alone manage. I am in same boat as you. I just blew up like that ( again) last Thursday. I think what looks like a “ blow up” to others, is actually a “ melt down “ for me on the inside. I just abruptly go out of my mind mad, and it doesn't last long but its explosive. Later, i will realize that i misinterpreted the whole situation n that the blow up/ melt down was not an appropriate response at all. Like you, I feel terrible afterwards. I agree- I need a shock collar too! ugh, we suck 😢
Has anyone in this group struggled severely with this same issue n is now successfully managing it? I would love to hear your techniques!
I have been attempting to work on my anger outbursts for a long time. its disheartening to me that all i can say is that my anger outbursts are way less frequent and I am able to come to my senses way faster.
I own my shit, but I cant get better n beat this ADHD feature on my own. My boyfriend is trying this new thing in which he takes the angle that when i have one of these fits of rage- its not unlike an epileptic person having a seizure. There is no control. So who gets mad n takes it personal when an epileptic person bites during a seizure? When people witness. seizure-they let it run its course and do damage control. I have asked him to extend the same empathy n understanding towards me. He does an amazing job at this request. I think this is the key reason my ADHD fits of rage have drastically reduced in frequency! Most people are not as willing / able to cope with our ADHD symptoms as well as my boyfriend does. I am fortunate.
I know that managing ADHD symptoms requires alot of support. So i appreciate his support but then I will feel guilty that he has to even deal with me. That is just my unfounded low self esteem pissing in my ear. Ugh…. you get it. lol.
This emotional regulation stuff is a freaking nightmare! 😜 I manage the other symptoms well, this one is wayyyy tough!
Whenever I feel tempted to make a knee-jerk reaction or get defensive in response to something someone said, I pause. During that pause, I look at what the other person said and try to be objective about it. In your case, I would think, is this person trying to attack me or provoke me - or are they just looking for information? This has really helped me a lot. There is power in the pause! That may sound hard to do, but I was highly motivated by a desire to change and it amazingly made a world of difference for me. ... That being said, I agree that your wife was being a bit nit-picky. It is entirely possible that you were both somewhat in the wrong. Your defensiveness was not productive, but neither was her assuming you were trying to shut her down, nor was going into silent mode. I would highly recommend marriage counseling to help the two of you improve your communication.
I struggle with the pause. Not on anger necessarily (my issue is perfectionism, needing to be "right", criticizing otherse), but with everything in general.
How do you "remember" to pause? How do you have time to insert your thinking mind in there before the words come out of your mouth??? lol ... I'm sure it's possible, but the ADHD brain really struggles with that.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychologist and Holocaust survivor said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I'm so glad you found the pause and worked on it! I need to practice this a lot more. Can you recommend any exercises, eg for deliberate practice, not just waiting for the opportunity to come up and then blowing it as always 😂
"remembering" to pause is hard, isn't it? And the perfectionism you mentioned, (which I share) can lead to beating ourselves up for not remembering.
As I mentioned in my response to Stoneman60, retraining a brain takes time and work. I have watched several videos by Dayna Abrams (of LemonLime Adventures blog which is free and accessible, Calm the Chaos parenting group, which is a paid group with videos and community Facebook chats) where she talks about practicing staying calm "outside of the moment." I'll paraphrase it and mesh it with other things I've learned about the brain from Dr. Ted Roberts in Pure Desire Ministries and Jenna Reimersma's videos on Internal Family Systems model. Dayna's technique is called "Stop, breath, anchor" and though I'm sure it's based on others' work, I don't know whose. It involves remembering a triggering incident, and noticing how your body feels while remembering/reliving it. This helps you notice earlier in the next interaction what path you're on. This practice of feeling how your body feels (tense shoulders, scrunched face, pacing, etc) helps our minds stay in thinking mode and slows the switch into Flight, Fight, Freeze (Fawn) where our pre-frontal cortex (the rational part of our brains) are literally are taken over by our limbic system (reactionary part of the brain) and cannot think for a period of time, but acts based on previously set up patterns. The purpose of this system is to protect ourselves, but it can get overprotective so we need to train it.
So the next thing we can practice "outside of the moment" is to stop our body (for example practice this while doing dishes and actually stop your whole body mid-task), breathe several deep belly breaths (not shoulder breaths), and think of our "anchor." The Anchor is highly personal based on yourself and your beliefs and experiences. It is something that reminds you that you are safe, have purpose, are loved, are needed or some combination of that. For some people, especially those triggered by their "out of the box" or special needs kids, they may think of their child when they were born, or a happy moment when their child was running to them to give them a hug. Others use things like "I can do hard things, I have before." My anchor is "Nothing can separate me from the love of Christ Jesus" because his love and grace covers me in my mistakes and sins and I don't need to create my own worth, I am loved and accepted by him and that will never change whatever else is going on around or inside of me. Practicing this "outside of the moment," perhaps multiple times a day, makes new pathways in our brains. Just stopping a behavior is very hard, but when we make a new neural pathway in our brain and use it often to strengthen it, the old pathways grow weaker.
Well, I've gotta post this and go get lunch for my kids!
ya, it's the same for me when I become defensive and I learned that ppl don't understand even if I lash out at them so I didn't see the point instead I tell ppl to give me space so that I don't lash out at them because it is just unhealthy cycle and my friends and family understand when I say I need space. It's okay to be mad but the other person won't understand why you are lashing out at them for simple things and even those simple things still trigger anger response for us as well as getting frustrated but then you with be constantly thinking and feeling guilty of your words and how it affects them. My friends used to tell me that if you are having an argument it's better to leave the room and come back after your head is cooled down.
I don't see anything inherently wrong with someone asking "how much" in response to the statement "I'm getting a bonus.". Or "What kind?" to the statement "I bought a new car." Perhaps a better more supportive response from her would have been "jeez, I can see you're getting agitated. Why?" but that is passing the buck. The problem is mine and I need to be able to manage these crazy emotions irrespective of with whom I'm speaking. So frustrating. The pause for me has been so elusive.
Responding to this specifically, I’d like to share my experience. I’m not sure this is ADHD, but when I’m excited about something I share with my husband, I want him to match my excitement. So, Any type of questioning on his part is immediately translates to me as him dampening the good news. So then I get upset…ooof. Not fair of me, but it’s in the noticing of these patterns that we can - at some point - begin to shift.
There may not be anything inherently wrong with what she said, but it still sounds like couple’s counseling would be very helpful for both of you to learn to navigate the relationship better. That’s not passing the buck. That’s what married ppl do - or should do. It’s about finding ways to both reach your greatest potential as a teammate- the greatest potential for health and happiness in the team setting. For better or worse, our medical diagnoses belong to our family and friends too. My kids’ diabetes is mine to cope with too - to an extent. It’s what we do when we love someone. Honestly, loved ones can be so vital in helping us learn to manage. Hubby’s amazing example is the only reason i’ve managed to learn to cope with the emotional dysregulation. Even after years of practice with the pause, i still sometimes feel justified in lashing out. He’s the one that helps me recognize when i DO still need to take a step back. I’m not saying AT ALL that you’re allowed to pass off the responsibility to her. Only that you are both teammates and can learn to become a great resource for each other to lean on in life’s difficulties.
It's not some random point of nit-picking that you got so upset about, but getting nit-picked on a point of information that you were expecting to have a total positive reaction. Expectations are not bad, but being aware of them, especially when things don't go as expected, I've found to be really important. It may also be that you were tying a bit of self worth to having maxed out your incentive comp? (I have been trying for years to separate my productivity from my worth, so that's me seeing you through my lens. Toss that aside if it doesn't fit you.)
I've been learning a lot about brains through other life challenges lately and it seems you were in the fight, flight, or freeze response (sometimes called "going limbic" because of the part of your brain that takes over and not only doesn't reason objectively but blocks the part of your brain that does reason objectively). The fact that you could 1) realize you screwed up, and 2) apologize for it, does mean that you have probably been doing some serious work retraining your brain. Retraining a brain (that isn't the brain of a three year old) is a years- long process. Stay on the path. I also encourage you to look way back with your counselor at anger patterns/instigators/feelings that go with that if you haven't already. My guess is that ADD is contributing to the way the reaction goes, but that there are other roots to what the reaction is. Identifying possible roots can go a long way in slowing the anger response. I've found that my anger response is partly a learned pattern that was modeled for me in my childhood and that it hits me hard when I feel disrespected and disregarded by people not even pausing their activity to hear me for a brief request/inquiry so that I can go back to being productive/accomplishing something. AKA, if I'm being blocked in my accomplishment ("earning my worth") by someone who won't give me 15 seconds, I fly into a rage. When I dug deep I see it's based on being told I was "slow" much of my childhood (not academically, but at tasks like folding laundry, doing dishes, getting out the door to school etc). So I wrote a new/false rule in my little heart/head that in order to be applauded I had to do things quickly. Neither I, nor my parents, realized what was happening in my head or that it was caused by my ADHD day-dreaming. But finding that lie, calling it out for what it is, and replacing it with truth has been huge for me. The implications in my life are far reaching.
You mention all the work you've done on ADHD. I applaud you! I'm at the beginning of my ADHD diagnosis (39 and suspected for a few years, but recently tested, confirmed, working with a counselor, and trying meds) and it's hard to even get started let alone maintain work on something so tedious as self improvement! I'd like to suggest it's important to get your wife counseling too. Not just so she'll understand your ADHD and know what to do with it, but to help her heal from the past you implied by calling her your "long suffering wife" and your honest and brave confession that you used to let things like this fester.
Shutting down or walking out of a room during an argument sometimes is initially a defensive technique (protecting herself and the relationship/you from what she might say if she actually spoke in the moment). That can sometimes turn into an offensive technique, or can seem to, when it lasts for a long time. OR shutting down can be a part of fight, flight, or freeze, where freeze goes on to not be a short freeze but dissociating, which is a response to longer term difficult situations where one mentally separates from the situation. It's something I was doing for a long time in a repeated tough situation, but it's a negative coping mechanism. I encourage your wife to talk it out with her counselor if/when she has one. She also may need to go way back, possibly to before she knew you, to heal her hurts/find the roots of shutting down, though that may be hard to hear. Again, this is me seeing your situation through my lens and the work I've been doing. If I'm off target, just toss it aside.
Wow. First of all thank you for your thoughtful and articulate response. Much appreciated. You are spot on in nearly every observation. You say you're an artist and are at the beginning of your ADHD diagnosis but your insight suggests far more topic specific experience. Thanks again. I'm going to give your note a re read and more thought.
Boy am I glad my long ramble was helpful I definitely second guess myself when I get going like that. "Is this just me nerding out? Or . . .?"
I'll confess I do have a background in education, that I've spent a lot of time learning about emotional healing and re-training the brain in the last two years through a number of sources (mostly from Pure Desire Ministry and Jenna Reimersma), and since learning that I'm probably ADHD I've "gone all ADHD hyper-focus" on listening to Dr. Russell Barkley, several webinars from ADDitude Magazine, as well as reading countless articles from ADDitude Magazine. And in order to try to correct some of my parenting errors (blowing up) I also joined "The Huddle" by Calm the Chaos (which is a paid course).
I know there's only so much we can change at once, so I'm trying to slow down on the information and work with my counselor to put some things into action one at a time. In true ADHD fashion, all this info sometimes whirs around in my brain but doesn't always translate into a calmer more thoughtful me. I'm still learning
Learning mindfullness has helped me tremendously. Being mindful of my thoughts and my bodies reaction has taught me the 'pause and reflect' habit. What my brain tells 'me' can be responded to or let go. I know when I feel my body reactions to anger arise that I can choose the pause. Emotional regulation is a learned skill- kids are now being taught emotional intelligence in early grade school (thankfully!) and it gives them the strategy and methods to regulate their emotions. This is not easy for someone who has lived life not being aware that it is even possible to do. As I age I am naturally slowing down and realizing that it feels really good to not be a slave to my mind. The cool thing is that every day there are things that you can practice with. Notice all the things during the day that cause negative emotions or feelings. Start with the easy ones like the bad drivers on your way to work. Notice your thoughts and body. Feel the adrenaline rise and know that if you do 'calm, ease' breathing you can control it. 3 deep breathes, then breathe in for 7 hold 2 breathe out for 8-10. Your body and mind naturally relax with a longer out breath than in breath. This technique shifts the power to you instead of your thoughts. Repeat this until you notice control arrive. Mindfulness classes are becoming popular and their may be some locally. There is lots of information online. Folks like Jack Kornfield and Jon Kabat Zinn are excellent. For a long time I was addicted to the dopamine rush of anger. ADHDer's are deficient in dopamine. Stimulants give us that, but so do other things. I have Spotify playlists for each emotion. I use them like a drug. Some allow me to go deeper into that emotion and some pull me out of it. Just remember it takes time and practice to make gains. It helps to just know it is possible! Small successes lead to more and bigger ones. Wishing you peace and a life of 'calm and ease' (borrowed from the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh).
Hello StonemanYou can, absolutely look at the progress you have made and be proud of yourself ❤️. Sure, it hasn’t been easy for your wife, but it hasn’t been easy for you either. I am 54, I’ve been married for 34 years and I was diagnosed with ADHD six months ago. Honestly, I am grateful to my husband for sticking with me because his life wasn’t easy either. I don’t know how I would be if it was him who had ADHD. Maybe your wife could find someone to talk to; a best friend or a therapist. She needs to have her feelings validated and know that it’s okay, but she also needs to learn how to deal with them in a positive way. You both have a responsibility to your marriage. I do believe that there are support groups for family members living with someone who has ADHD. CHADD, CADDAC and ADDitude are all really great websites for helping support everyone in the family. I have listened to some really great webinars on ADDitude that have really helped me. I hope this helps.
I get disappointed in myself over this too. So I sympathise!
I have a (new) policy not to ever criticise or blame my partners adult child. (She is quite messed up and I don't agree with my partners parenting of her - but I have recently decided that is for my partner to deal with - not me)
So my partner recently started to pick at my behavior and pulled out the old chestnut stereotypical male "controlling"
It was a nonsense accusation as my partner is a strong woman....and the situation in question had (honestly!) zero "controlling". 🙄
Anyhow, pissed off that I was under a attack for (genuinely) bogus reasons - I found myself saying "I bet (insert her daughters name) put you up to this"
Ugh!
That didn't go well for me!
I broke my own rule about leaving her (adult) child out of it. Doh!!!
That put me MORE in the doghouse!
That mini 'situation' has since resolved
But a "think first" policy would have saved me.
I didn't realise blurting out ill advised comments could be related to ADHD until reading this.
But now realise it's one of my ADD son's "symptoms" too!
(PS I am not a monster I support my partner enormously with her daughter!)
I think that *both* my husband and I need to wear shock collars and let the other hold the control -- but I fear we'd end up shocking each other to death. 😁
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I definitely second guess myself when I get going like that. "Is this just me nerding out? Or . . .?"
Possibly screwed up........ again!
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