Transcript
Kristen Carder
Foreign Welcome to the I have ADHD podcast, where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults. With ADHD, I’m your host, Kristen Carter and I have ADHD, let’s chat about the frustrations, humor and challenges of adulting, relationships, working and achieving with this neurodevelopmental disorder, I’ll help you understand your unique brain, unlock your potential and move from point A to point B.
Hey, what’s up? You’re listening to Episode 13 of the I have ADHD podcast. My name is Kristen Carter. I am medicated, I am caffeinated, and I am ready to roll. I’m so excited about today’s episode, but first I want to tell you two items that I purchased this week. I bought blue blocker glasses, which I had read online and seen some of the people that I follow on Instagram use them to block out the blue light from computer and phone screens, and apparently it helps your body to create its natural melatonin in the evening, I have got to tell you that they work. They work really, really well. The first couple nights, I felt that my sleep was very different. I had very vivid dreams. I’m not sure what that means. I’m sure I could Google it, but I had really, really vivid dreams the first I would say, like seven days of using them, but I noticed that I was sleeping much harder, feeling better in the mornings. And I’m really, really, really trying not to drink alcohol in the evenings. I usually would like have a glass of wine after the kids go to bed, but I started to feel really groggy, you know, just like a half a glass of red wine. And now I’m starting to feel groggy in the morning, which is not great.
That’s not how I want to live my life. So these blue blocker glasses have really helped me a lot. It’s made it so that I am more tired by the time like 11 or 12 comes, which is wonderful, because a lot of the times that’s not the case. So yeah, highly recommend. I’m going to link the glasses that I have on my website so you can get them at I have adhd.com/resources, and also something else that I’m gonna link is something that I got today. I have not used it yet. I bought it semi impulsively yesterday, because I’ve been struggling so much with my phone, and just like the habit of logging on, I don’t know I said logging on, logging on. That sounds like I’m talking about AOL from, like, the 1990s Okay, any way hopping on my phone like all the time, like, constantly, and it’s driving me nuts. I know that it’s interrupting my productivity. I know that it’s interrupting me using my brain and creating ideas and even just, you know, interacting with my family. So I bought a safe that you can set to lock for certain, you know, either minutes or hours or even days. It locks for up to 10 days. And so I am going to use it like when my kids come home from school, that first hour that they’re home, there is no reason for me to be on my phone. I’m going to lock it up when I’m really trying to focus on work. I’m going to lock up my phone when I’m really trying to write this podcast. I’m going to lock up my phone because I notice that I use my phone to avoid hard things. I mean, obviously, right? But anytime that I come to a point in my work where I really have to feel uncomfortable and like dive into something difficult, I hop on my phone, and that’s just really not great. And so I will let you know how it goes.
I hang out on Instagram a lot. So if you want to see, you know, pictures, videos of, you know, my phone being locked up in this safe that’s the place to find them. Come find me at I have ADHD podcast, and I would love to be your friend. I love connecting with people on Instagram. Okay, so today is part two in our series on relationships. And last week we talked about a bunch of different things, but the two main things that we discussed, that I want to kind of review here right now, is we talked about knowing yourself and really understanding who you are, what you like, what you don’t like. If you’re introverted, extroverted, like what you need, what your needs are, and what your wants are, and what your Likes are and dislikes, all of those things are really important to understand about yourself, because before you can be a good friend or a good partner, you need to be a good person, like internally. You need to know yourself and like yourself and understand yourself, and that’s really, really important now, part of knowing yourself is becoming an expert on ADHD. It’s your job to take responsibility for your diagnosis and become an expert on the subject of ADHD. It’s really important that you’re able to recognize your symptoms and educate yourself and your loved ones on the impairments of ADHD. This is so important. I can’t stress this enough. Many of you listening don’t know that much about ADHD, and I don’t fault you for that at all when I was diagnosed with ADHD, my doctor didn’t tell me anything about it. I literally just thought it meant that I couldn’t pay attention.
And that is not even the tip of the iceberg of what this diagnosis means. So if you are someone who doesn’t really know much about ADHD, I beg you to begin to educate yourself so that you can really, really understand your own symptoms, your own impairments and how they’re affecting other people. So today’s episode is about relationships, and part of being great at relationships is really understanding who you are and knowing your ADHD, knowing when your behaviors are caused by your symptoms of ADHD. Okay, more on that later. The next part that I want to review about last week’s episode was the concept of having a top 10 list. Now your top 10 list is comprised of the people who you feel like are the most important priorities in your life. It’s really important for us with ADHD to be intentional about prioritizing our relationships, because what happens is when someone like new and bright and shiny comes into our lives, we can often gravitate to those people just because they are, they’re new and they’re stimulating, and we get kind of like a dopamine hit from from the new relationship. But what happens oftentimes is that we then neglect the people that we say are most important to us, like our partners or our spouses, our kids, our best friends, and so if you are intentional about creating a top 10 List, you’re much less likely to be distracted and kind of spend your your limited time, energy and effort on people who are Not. I This sounds terrible, because everyone is important, but what I mean is they’re not important in your life. They’re not important for you to be spending your time, energy and effort on. Everyone is important. All people are awesome. Okay, moving on. So it’s important that you, first of all, have a top 10 list of priorities, and maybe that list is smaller, but it should not be over 10. If you’re an introvert, maybe it’s five.
My list, you know, is between five and 10, depending on the season of my life. So educate the people on your top 10 list about your ADHD. These are the people that you really do want to know that you have ADHD? These are the people that should really understand who you are, and not just like the type of music you like or the way you parent your kids, but also your ADHD and how it affects your day to day and how it affects your relationship with them. If the people on your top 10 List don’t know that you have ADHD or don’t understand what that really means, it’s time to begin to chat about it. Weave it into your conversations. Develop a vocabulary for it. Help them to understand when you’re struggling with your symptoms. This is going to diffuse a lot of conflicts. So this starts with first educating yourself and understanding your diagnosis, what it means to have ADHD, what the common symptoms and impairments are and how it manifests in your life. And then the next step is being open about it and being willing to talk about it. For example, if you don’t want your friends to be mad at you every time you’re late, then you need to educate them on why you’re late. You’re not a bad person, you’re not selfish, you’re not self absorbed and inconsiderate, you’re time blind, you have ADHD you get stuck. In the black vortex of like the non existence of time, and you don’t understand the passage of time, and so often you will be late. It just is what it is. Now I’m not saying your friends have to like that part about you, but it’s a lot easier to accept someone who is struggling with a deficiency, rather than someone who is just selfish or self absorbed or, you know, inconsiderate. Okay, so educating the people in your life on your symptoms and how they affect your relationship is going to be really, really awesome now, as you begin to educate your top 10 list on your ADHD, what if they’re not receptive?
What if they don’t believe you? What if they don’t think that ADHD is real? Well, I would encourage you to consider whether or not they should be on your top 10. If someone on your top 10 really resists the idea of ADHD, and you have tried to educate them, and you’ve tried to bring them into your symptoms. And I mean, you’ve really made an effort, and I’d like you to write down 10 Ways, 10 different times that you’ve really made an effort to express what ADHD is, and the validity behind it and the symptoms that you’re experiencing. If you haven’t done it 10 times, don’t do anything drastic, but if you have really, legitimately tried to educate someone on your top 10 list about your ADHD and about yourself. I mean, remember, your ADHD is connected to you, right? It’s a part of who you are. I know a lot of people want to resist that and like it’s not, it’s not really who I am, but for me, at least in my mind, it makes a lot of sense to really embrace that diagnosis and really see my world through the lens of ADHD. I see my relationship through the lens of ADHD, I see my job. I see, you know, my work at home. I see parenting my kids. I see all of that through a lens of I have. ADHD, it makes everything harder. There are certain symptoms and impairments that are going to make things difficult for me. If someone on your top 10 List truly does not accept that.
I want you to consider whether or not they belong on your top 10. Okay, now I know that’s really hard. I’m not talking about spouses. I just want to say that you know, not talking about spouses, but I’m just talking about people that you are friends with, or even family members that you love, that you know, of course, you’ll keep relationship with, but maybe you will not put them in priority in your life, because you need to be surrounded by people who get you. You deserve to be surrounded by people who, even though they’re not going to be happy about the way that your symptoms affect them. They will still accept you for who you are. They will still laugh when you say things impulsively. They will remind you to be on time. They will help you by picking up the slack in areas that you’re just not good at. Those are the kinds of people that you deserve to be around, people who are going to pick up your kids from school in a pinch when you forget, okay, that’s gonna happen. People who will co sign you going out to dinner because you didn’t make it, people who will have your back at work, you know, when you forget to turn in a project and they’ll cover for you or, like, do whatever that needs to be done to make it happen. You deserve to be around people who are helpful, who are kind and who are supportive. So if someone is rejecting your ADHD diagnosis, they’re allowed to do that right? They’re adults. They’re allowed to make their own decisions. They’re allowed to have their own ideas. They can ignore science if they want to, but you do not have to keep them on your list of high priority friendships.
Now, a lot of you have reached out to me, and you’ve told me that you have a very difficult time knowing what to say when you’re trying to educate your spouse or your top 10 about ADHD. How do you educate someone who doesn’t know anything about ADHD? So what I’ve done is I’ve spent a couple hours this week compiling what I think are the very best scholarly articles defending the validity of ADHD, and I’m creating it in a post that would be something that would be really, really, really helpful for you to share with your loved one. Now, if you choose to share the whole post with them, great, but what might be helpful is like, once a week, share one of the linked articles in the post. Correct. None of them are just like, you know, magazine articles like, it’s not like that. They are scholarly articles. They are evidence based findings on ADHD, and they will be great for you to share with your loved ones and just give them some medical background and insight into ADHD, so you can find that at, I have adhd.com/adult ADHD is real. What do you think about that link? That’s like, a pretty decent link. You know what I’m saying? I have adhd.com/adult ADHD is real. I really hope that you find that to be helpful, and I hope it gives you verbiage for how to educate your family and friends about what you’re dealing with. So make sure that you educate yourself about ADHD, and then you educate the people around you about ADHD, and then you make sure that your relationship priorities are in a good order.
Now I would say that the number one thing that you can do to make sure that you establish healthy relationships is that you seek treatment for your ADHD. If you’re not treating your ADHD, then you are not taking it seriously. So you can’t get mad at the people around you for not taking it seriously. This is absolutely 100% going to have an adverse effect on your relationships. You will be scattered, you will be forgetful, you will be impulsive, you will be emotionally explosive, you will be inconsistent, you will be hard to live with. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, okay, but I’m telling you this because I love you and I want the best for you. If you want healthy relationships, you have to seek treatment for your ADHD, in my opinion, the best treatment includes a unique to you, combination of medication, supplements, diet, exercise, therapy, coaching, and then the life hack items like the blue blocker glasses or phone safes that make life with
ADHD, doable. You need to be seeing a doctor regularly. You need to be seeing a coach or a therapist regularly. You need to be willing to spend money on your ADHD. You have to spend money on it. It just is what it is. You need to get over the idea that, like you don’t deserve to spend money to treat your ADHD that needs to go bye, bye. Okay, you can’t think that way anymore. I just read an article. I’m going to link it in the notes that said that ADHD may be one of the costliest medical, medical conditions. What? Yeah, ADHD may be one of the costliest medical conditions, because people with ADHD tend not to get higher education. They tend to be low achievers or unemployed, and they have a lot of like off days, which make it very difficult to perform and make money. Okay, so spend the time, effort, energy and money that you deserve to spend on treating your ADHD. Okay? So that’s what we’re going to talk about today, is ADHD and relationships as it relates to marriage or committed partnerships. Okay? Now there’s so much to say about this, and honestly, I’m a little scared because I feel the weight of responsibility of this episode. I just know it’s a big deal. I know that a lot of you are struggling and you’re desperate for help. I want to say that I honor that, and I’m going to take it very seriously, but you need to reach out for help beyond this 30 or 40 minute podcast. Okay, this is just a starting point. This is the diving board. This is just like the springboard into getting you in gear to do what you really need to do, to take care of your ADHD and your relationship. Okay, you’re not going to get all the tips and tricks and advice you need from me today. You’re just not. I hope and pray that this episode inspires you to seek out therapy or coaching to help you work through your relationship issues. I really, really do okay.
So in addition to the articles online that I’ve been reading and my very big brain, I used two books as resources for this episode, and they are the ADHD effect on marriage by Melissa Orlov, and more attention less deficit by Ari Tuchman. And I’m telling you, Ari Tuchman is moving up the ranks on my ADHD crush list of. Of psychologists. Oh my gosh, I love him. I love this book. It is such a great overview of ADHD. It’s such a practical book. It’s huge, but it’s easy to kind of thumb through and read topics that you are interested in. So I highly recommend it. I’m going to link it on my resources page, which is, I have adhd.com/resources, and you can purchase it. There it is. So I’m telling you, it’s such a good book. So if you’re someone who likes to read books, or half read books, as I like to do, or maybe you could get it on audio. Audio Book, is that what it’s called? I’m not sure. Anyway, you could listen to it as well, I’m sure. All right, so here’s where we’re going to start. You know, I’m a straight shooter, so we’re going to get right down to it. As a person with ADHD, you are likely very hard to live with, and if you’re not treating your ADHD, you should assume that you are extremely, exceedingly difficult to live with. Now my intention is not to make you feel badly about yourself. Okay, I know we have enough blame and shame going on up in here, so that’s not what this is about. This is about self reflection and understanding our non ADHD partners. It’s important that we understand that from our partners perspectives, we are the difficult ones in the relationships. In Melissa’s book, she says that the top marital issues that she has uncovered that both partners agree lead to feeling unloved are as follows, failing to remember what the other has said, talking without thinking, zoning out of conversations, having trouble dealing with frustration, underestimating the time needed To complete a task, leaving a mess, failing to finish household projects and blowing up inconsistently. Now, doesn’t this just sound like a symptom list for ADHD? Do you see now why it’s so so so important that we educate ourselves and our partners and friends on ADHD? It’s because these things that make our partners feel unloved, they are basically one through 10 are symptoms of ADHD, impulsivity, emotional explosions, time blindness, inattentiveness and forgetfulness so great. The things about us that are caused by ADHD are the things that make our partners crazy.
Your non ADHD partner may be interpreting your symptoms to mean something negative. So if they’re reacting negatively to your forgetfulness or your inattentiveness or your impulsivity, it’s because they’re interpreting it through a lens of you must not care about me. You must not care about our family. You must not care that the house is clean. You must not care. You must not care, or you must not love me, or whatever the case may be, okay, it would be really awesome if you were to ask your spouse in the midst of it, what do you feel like it means when I zone out of the conversation and see what your spouse says, my guess is that they think it means you don’t care or you’re not interested. And it would be super amazing if you could educate them and say, Listen, I do care. I love you so much. But we’ve been sitting here for 30 minutes and my brain is just having a hard time. Do you want to go for a walk and finish our conversation? You know, while we walk, something like that, can you see how that could diffuse the situation a lot of times, what happens is these huge fights break out, because at the core, there’s misunderstanding, and so if you want to kind of diffuse that, it’s really important that you are open To asking your spouse what they think your behavior means so you forget to show up for some sort of appointment that you’re going to together. Ask your spouse, what do you think it means that I forgot to come and if her response is it means that you don’t love me. It means that you don’t love our kid, it means that you’re careless, or you you have other priorities.
You can help her to see that that’s not the case. You forgot because you don’t have a good system for for remembering things you forgot, because your working memory is really poor, which is a symptom of 80. HD, these types of things you can come up with systems for, but it’s really hard to be motivated to come up for. Come up with systems if you just feel defeated to begin with, if you just feel like you’re a failure, if you feel shame, if you feel like you need to hide your symptoms or nobody really understands them. So make sure that you’re talking to your spouse or your romantic partner about how your symptoms are affecting your marriage. I’m not saying make excuses. Remember, ADHD is not an excuse. It’s an explanation. You are still responsible to try harder and do better, right? But by try harder, what I mean by that is figure out a system that’s going to work. Because obviously, you know what you did in that moment didn’t work. So I know a lot of you, my friends, have not yet been diagnosed. I’ve heard from a lot of you that think you have ADHD, but you have not sought out a diagnosis yet. And I just want to say that if you don’t have a diagnosis, I would highly encourage you to seek one out because you’re undiagnosed or untreated ADHD, they’re going to be misinterpreted.
You’re going to be labeled as unmotivated in your relationship, lazy, self centered, or just straight up flawed. This is why it’s important to get a diagnosis, own that diagnosis, embrace it and get treatment for it, and then educate your partner about it. Talk about it constantly. Bring it up in your daily life. That’s your job, not your spouse’s job. Okay? You bring it up when you feel like it’s affecting you, you can say something like, I’m so sorry. I’m having a major ADHD moment. Can you help me? And then you fill in the blank, or, I’m so sorry that I left all the cabinet doors open. It’s a lot easier if we bring humor into it. So you can make a joke about that. Obviously, you don’t want to bring humor into an actual, legitimate argument, but if it’s an annoyance that’s happening in your life that you know you do with your spouse all the time, it’s good to laugh about it, because if you don’t laugh, you’re just gonna get mad. Okay?
It’s your job to teach your spouse to see your ADHD when it manifests. Okay. Now, one of the most common mis interpretations of ADHD is feeling as if the ADHD spouse doesn’t love his partner anymore because he isn’t paying attention to her. Non ADHD partners often feel ignored, and loneliness is a key factor of the non ADHD experience. This was a really interesting one for me to read. I read it in several places, and it makes a lot of sense, because when the thrill of a new relationship is gone, then what we do, as ADHD ers, who are lacking in dopamine, we go looking for other thrills, don’t we? And I don’t mean like gross, nasty thrills. I mean thrills like keeping our brain engaged during the day, keeping our brain feeling like it matters. Ari Tuchman said that we have to feel okay in our own bodies, and in order to do that, we need so much stimulation in our brains.
And that really resonated with me. So even if we are very much in love with our partners, but the you know, initial newness of the relationship has worn off. Obviously that happens, and that’s normal and natural and totally fine. In order to feel better, in order to feel okay in our own bodies, we have to find something else that’s stimulating. I have found this to be true in my life and in my marriage. 100% I can totally see how my husband often feels as though I’m disconnected or I am, like, really distracted by something else that is just totally taking over my brain, and he can also sometimes just feel lonely in that I’m just not present with him. So it’s really important that we say things to our spouses, to clue them in on what we’re doing. Like this project is so exciting for me. It makes me feel so good. So if, if I start to ignore you, just remind me, because I want to make sure to pay attention to you. I’m just really excited about what I’m doing. That is an awesome way to just really be upfront with our spouses and communicate in a way that’s telling the truth. I. But also putting their relationship with you at a priority level. Another thing that often happens in relationships is that the non ADHD spouse can feel really angry, and this usually builds up over time, you know, because we are so inconsistent, because we are so forgetful, because we are impulsive, and we tend to make the same mistakes over and over if we do not have a therapist or a coach. The problem with that is that our list of grievances gets pretty long, and our non ADHD spouses, you know, where they could kind of brush things off maybe 10 years ago now they’re kind of done, and that can often happen in a relationship. And so if you notice that your non ADHD spouse is getting really angry pretty easily with you, it may be because he or she is just kind of done, and I don’t mean done with you, but I do mean done with the symptoms that you’re exhibiting.
So this goes back to make sure that you are being amazingly treated for your ADHD with not just one thing happening, but several, I think that at all times, we should be getting at least three areas of treatment in our lives. So it’s really, really important. Okay, so if you’re on meds, that’s not enough, you also need to be seeing a coach or a therapist, or exercising regularly, doing meditation, like all of those other things that are really, really important. Okay, so make sure you’re treating your ADHD, and also reach out for help. This might be a great time for you and your spouse to start to see a marriage counselor. Know that there is sometimes, you know, mediation that needs to happen that you guys can’t take care of on your own, and that’s okay. It is totally okay. Now, another thing that will often happen in marriages where one partner has ADHD and one partner does not is that the non ADHD partner will often nag the ADHD partner, and this can become really, really obnoxious and annoying on both sides. So the ADHD partner feels like, oh my gosh, leave me alone. Why are you always on my back? And the non ADHD partner feels like, I wish you could just do these things without me nagging you all the time. I wish you would just show up and be a partner, and you know, I wouldn’t have to nag you. That again, is something that really could use some marriage counseling. But what I will say to this is that if you are the ADHD partner like I am, you need to know that your non ADHD partner is picking up a lot of your slack, and they are feeling tired, overwhelmed and maybe frustrated with your lack of participation. Again. This is not to make you feel badly.
This is just to open your eyes to how they may be feeling about the relationship. And so if you notice that your non ADHD partner is constantly nagging you, what I want you to do is some self reflection and figure out ways that you can set up systems to be more helpful. It just is what it is. Okay. A lot of us with ADHD don’t carry our own weight, and there are times when that is understandable, okay, there are days when we just have terrible days, and we need help from our partners. Obviously, that’s not unlike any other marriage. And I hope that you are someone who can see when your non ADHD partner is having a really hard day and you need to step it up and take care of them. So nagging is a symptom, okay? Anger is a symptom. There’s symptoms of bigger problems that are going on. So here are the 10 things that we need to do in order to be great at our relationships. We need to take care of ourselves. We need to talk to our doctors about our treatment, make sure that we are on the right medication, make sure that we’re taking our supplements, make sure that we’re exercising, that we are utilizing, you know, the amazing inventions of 2019 like, Oh, my word, blue blocker glasses to help your body create its natural melatonin. That’s amazing. That was the best 50 bucks I’ve spent in a long time. So things like that that are going to make, you know, my life easier, and make it so that I can function in a more typical way I’m. Gonna take advantage of those for sure. Make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Make sure, number two, that you consider seeing a marriage counselor to mediate and help you guys get on track. Now, I would love for you to ask your spouse whether you’re the ADHD partner or the non ADHD partner, why don’t you just ask your spouse, hey, do you think that it would be beneficial for us to see a marriage counselor? Because you might be listening to this as the ADHD er, and you might be like, Ah, whatever. We don’t need it. But I wonder if your partner would feel like you would benefit from it. It would be an interesting conversation to have. Number three, I think a really cool thing to do would be to just open up to your spouse and say, like, Hey, I’m really trying to learn about ADHD and how to manage it, and I realized that I might be a little bit difficult to be in relationship with.
So I’m wondering what’s the most important thing for me to change? Like, what’s the most annoying thing that I do that would make a big difference if I changed it. It might be something really little and, you know, relatively easy to change. It would be a really nice conversation to have. What would be the most helpful or communicate the most care or love.
Now the next step is determine what you’re not good at. It’s really important that you’re realistic. So what if your spouse, after you ask them, like, you know, what could I do to help? What if your spouse says, I’d like you to take over the bills and the finances for the family. Okay? Well, that might be the most helpful to your spouse, but it might not be realistic. Since you have ADHD, you spend impulsively. You’re not great at understanding the long term consequences of things, and you’re not great at paying bills on time. Do you know what I mean? So like, be realistic about that. It’s important that you communicate things that you’re not good at. I think a lot of times, we want so badly to be able to function typically, that we’re just not honest with ourselves or with our friends or our partners about the things that we’re not good at. Like instead of just trying to be on time all the time, I have just started to say to my friends, like, Guys, I’m just gonna be late. Like, I’m sorry. You need to always plan for me to be late, and if it’s something really important, you can leave without me.
It’s okay. Like, it’s totally fine. But I’m just not in a place where I’m willing to keep feeling badly about my time blindness. I just, I just don’t want to anymore. Like, I’m kind of done feeling badly about it. Now, it doesn’t mean that it’s not obnoxious to my friends or my husband. I know it is, but I also just really try to educate them, and I try to be realistic, okay, which is the whole point of step four, be realistic. And that leads us into number five, set expectations, clearly and realistically. Again, don’t try to be someone that you’re not. You are who you are. So don’t just say you’re going to do something to appease your partner in the moment. If it’s not something you can do, be honest about it. Say so now there’s often unbalanced responsibilities in a marriage where someone has ADHD, okay, so do your best to balance the scale with the things that you’re good at, the things that give you enough motivation or stimulation, something like, well, laundry always feels really good when it’s all done. So I’ll take care of the laundry, because there is that sense of urgency where it’s like, we’re out of close it has to be done, rather than like, let’s organize the closet of shame. Like that is not something. Maybe that should be on your list or finances. So pick things to contribute to your relationship that are realistic. Here’s the next one, and I love this one so much, outsource whenever possible, outsource the jobs that you totally suck at. So let’s say that your wife is feeling like she is carrying the burden of both parents. So yes, you’re married and you’re in this partnership, but you’re not pulling your weight that just is what it is. So instead of beating yourself up about it and promising, you know, making promises that you can’t keep, what if you just hired someone to do the job for you, like, hire lawn service to take care of the lawn every week, or hire a cleaning service to come once a week or even just once a month, to deep clean everything. I mean, what a huge gesture that would be for your ADHD partner. And this comes back to our topic of finances. Money is amazing. If you have money, then. You have the option to hire out for these jobs that you’re really not good at, and so it’s important that you make your finances and your like eradicating debt and saving a priority so that you can live just like a better quality of life as someone with ADHD. So if you have the money to outsource, if you could do like, hello, fresh, or get freshly, or whatever it is like, that’s my next thing is, I want so badly to order meals from get freshly. They make the meals in advance, so you don’t even have to make it at all. You just grab it from the fridge and it’s made with fresh ingredients, and it’s amazing. And the next time that I have a salary bump, that’s what I’m gonna do guys, I am absolutely going to do it, because it is going to improve the quality of my life and my family’s life, like they won’t be eating the same meals over and over like we are right now. We’ll have some variety. It’ll make everything easier. I will have more brain power to put into the things that I actually want to think about, and I won’t be frustrated with my stifled creativity when it comes to now I have to spend the next hour making a meal for a family who’s not going to enjoy it anyway.
Okay, that was a side note. Outsourcing is going to save your sanity. So do it whenever possible. Make sure that you ask for help. Don’t hide your failures out of shame. If you are struggling with something, tell your partner. So last week, we had piles of papers in our little like nook, where we keep everything on the counter, as far as, like, medical bills for my eight year old son’s knee surgery, and we had all sorts of school papers and bills and an unpaid water bill from like, a month and a half ago. And I just, I’m the one that takes care of this stuff. But I looked at my husband, and I just pointed to the area, and I was like, I cannot do this. I am feeling so overwhelmed by all of this clutter. I really need some help. And he knows that, because of my ADHD, once in a while, things like this can get so overwhelming for me. And so you know what he did? He was like, okay, he went through all of the you know, clutter and just put it into piles for me. And so in 15 minutes, he called me over, and he’s like, here are the bills, here are the medical things you need to take care of. Here’s the insurance paper, like, all of these different piles. And then I had, like, a roadmap of, okay, now I know what to do, but when it was all just kind of like a messy mess, wow, my vocabulary is diminishing by the minute. When it was just a mess, I had a really hard time focusing and knowing where to start, so make sure that you ask your partner for help. Okay, the next thing, make sure that you agree to talk openly and remind each other without getting mad or upset. Okay, it’s a two way street. The non ADHD partner agrees to remind the ADHD partner in a friendly tone, without nagging, and then the ADHD partner agrees to receive the reminders Grace graciously and do your best to follow through. Okay, now, each person is more likely to stay friendly if the other person does too, so you’re both responsible for your own behavior, but make sure that when your non ADHD partner reminds you of something, don’t be a jerk about it. Okay, be thankful you’re lucky to have a partner that’s reminding you it’s wonderful, so be kind about it. Number nine, you can only control yourself. You can only control your own thoughts and your own feelings and your own responses. You have no control over your partner’s emotions or his or her responses or their pattern of thinking. It isn’t your job to be perfect for anyone, including your partner, and you can’t make choices for them, but it is your responsibility to inform them. Okay? This means describing what you do and why you do it, and then they get to decide how they think about it. You describe your ADHD, you describe why you know things are the way they are. They get to decide how they respond. You’re going to encounter some people in your life who aren’t willing to accept your diagnosis. Hopefully your spouse isn’t one of them. If they are, don’t stop trying. Don’t stop educating them.
If you go to I have adhd.com/adult ADHD is real. I have linked 10 scholarly articles, research papers and published articles in medical journals describing the validity of ADHD. ADHD. So if you are in a position where your partner refuses to acknowledge ADHD as a limiting neurodevelopmental disorder, then I invite you to go to I have adhd.com/adult ADHD is real, and get some clear verbiage to be able to share with them about ADHD. Lastly, remember that you love your spouse. Remember why you partnered with him or her in the first place. Remember that they’re worth fighting for. Remember that the time and effort and energy that you put into making your relationship great, it matters. It really, really matters. You won’t ever regret the time and effort and energy you put into making your relationship with your spouse amazing. You can only control yourself, you can only control your own thinking and your own thought patterns, but you are in charge of educating your spouse and helping them to understand your symptoms and how they affect your relationship. I really hope this was helpful. I really, really hope that you got a lot out of this episode, and I cannot wait to chat with you next week, my friend. I’ll see you next time. Bye.
Hey, if you made it to the end of this very long episode, congratulations. I am so proud of you. Two things before you go. Number one, I poured my heart and soul into this episode. I’m not kidding. It took me hours and hours and hours and hours. So if you enjoyed it, it would be incredibly awesome if you would rate the podcast, review it. Share it in your social share it with whoever you hang out with in the ADHD community. I would appreciate it so much that would mean so much to me. And secondly, I want to let you know that I’m opening up four coaching slots starting in April, and I already have two of them filled. But if you’re listening to this in real time, in 2019 I would love to work with you if you want to move from point A to point B, if you don’t feel like you are productive enough, if you don’t know how to go about getting treatment, if you are just kind of feeling like you are floundering. I would absolutely love to work with you one on one. So please reach out to me. I’ve already said it, but you can find me on Instagram at, I have ADHD podcast, or you can email me Kristen. At, I have adhd.com obviously you can find all of my contact information on my website and information about coaching. I would love to work with you friend. So please reach out to me if you want help. Thanks. Bye. You.
