Shock, anger, sadness, shame. Guilt, grief, rage, uncertain. These are all some of the feelings that can come up when you find that your spouse has been diagnosed as an adult with ADHD.
A lot of them I’ve worked through, and a lot of them still show up from time to time when something reminds me that this is different than how I expected things to work out in my life, and to work out for my spouse as well.
Table of Contents
Why I wrote this post
I wanted to write this post to share some of the things that I felt when I first found out that my husband had ADHD. I hope that you who have maybe just discovered that your spouse has ADHD will feel a little bit less alone.
I hope you’ll understand that all these feelings are normal and you do get through them. And that you can continue in a relationship with someone who has ADHD and continue being happy, and grow, and learn so many things that will enrich your life and make this a really positive overall experience.
Prefer to watch or listen? Here’s the video version.
Why I was hesitant to share this part of our ADHD journey
I’ve hesitated to write this post for a long time because I never want anyone who is living with ADHD, that is, any person who has ADHD to feel like they are a burden or I wish that they were different.
There are some beautiful and amazing things about living with someone who has ADHD and being in a relationship with someone who has ADHD. These are things that I would have missed out on being in a relationship with someone who was neurotypical.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to make this video in a way that doesn’t add to the burden that people who have ADHD often carry, especially if they were diagnosed late in life.
There’s a lot of processing, a lot to unpack, and it’s easy for them to feel like they’re a burden to people. I don’t want to contribute to that feeling.
A message for those who have an ADHD diagnosis
So if you are a person who has ADHD just know that I think you’re amazing! I admire how much you’ve already worked through to get yourself to the point you’re at.
I’m really glad you’re watching this video. Also, if you’re not in a space where you can hear this safely, please feel free to just skip on it and move along.
For partners of ADHDers
For those of you who are in a relationship with someone who has ADHD, newly diagnosed as an adult… or if you’re married to someone who was diagnosed as an adult and you just found out… Whether you’ve just got the diagnosis, or you had it for a while and you just are now sort of sorting through those feelings…
I just want you to feel like, “Hey, it’s okay, you can get through this! And you can even come out the other side recognizing ADHD for the amazing gift that it can be.”
It is difficult. There are difficulties and I don’t want to minimize those at all. But there are also many amazing and beautiful qualities that I appreciate, and I’m thankful for, and I’m thankful for them being in my life.
How our ADHD story began
Just a little bit of backstory from me. We found out that our second daughter had ADHD about 6 years ago. That was after a lot of years of knowing something was different, but not being sure whether it was “different enough,” for lack of a better phrase.
@dinkumtribe Here are some of the things he knows about our oldest child that made us think that she was Neurodivergent. @DinkumTribe ADHD family travel @DinkumTribe ADHD family travel @DinkumTribe ADHD family travel #adhdtiktok #adhdingirls #adhdinkids #adhdparenting #adhdawareness ♬ original sound – DinkumTribe ADHD family travel
When you’re new parents it’s hard to know what things are normal kid stuff, and what things are actually needing attention, in that they’re different and you need to find a reason for it.
Our second daughter was diagnosed with ADHD and she was in elementary school still at the time. We were homeschooling, but she was still pretty young.
ADHD is biological, not a choice
I knew I needed to understand, “What does this mean?” I had done a thesis on it in my senior year at college, so I had some understanding that this was not a choice. It was not a behavioral issue all by itself, that it actually was in it actually comes out of brain chemistry and brain differences.
There are physiological differences in people’s brains who have ADHD and there are ways that their brains respond to happiness chemicals, and to motivational chemicals. Their brains just work differently.
The point is, this is actually something that’s biology. It’s not a choice on the part of the person who has ADHD. So I knew I needed to understand what that meant for my daughter.
I researched ADHD for my daughter…
As I started studying this I was reading books on it – about ADHD – and I realized, “Wow! A lot of these case studies sound like my husband!”
And I was thinking back to when I’d first met him in college when he was still a teen, and that’s when a lot of the case studies started to really sound like him.
ADHD masking in adults
Because of course, as you get to be an adult with ADHD, if you go years and years undiagnosed, the only way to do that is to learn really good masking skills.
@dinkumtribe ADHD generally doesn’t go away in adulthood. What happens is that adults have learned coping and masking skills that make ADHD much less obvious to people around them, and helps make ADHD much less disruptive to their every day life. @DinkumTribe ADHD family travel @DinkumTribe ADHD family travel @DinkumTribe ADHD family travel #adhdadult #adhdinadults #adhdmasking #adhdtiktok ♬ original sound – DinkumTribe ADHD family travel
So that you hide the things that make you stand out as different. You learn really good coping skills to compensate for the fact that your brain works differently, and it’s in a world and a society that is not designed for that kind of a brain.
You have to find all these coping mechanisms to make life work on a neurotypical scale when you are neurodivergent. As my husband got older, of course, a lot of those things weren’t as obvious.
I recognized my husband in the research
As I was reading these case studies I was realizing, “Oh my gosh this sounds like Brian when he was in college! Some of these are almost like somebody was watching him there!”
It was that close of a correlation to things I had watched him experience, or had gone through with him.
Then when I found out that kids who have ADHD have a 50% chance of one of their parents having ADHD I was like, “Oh, okay.” I started looking into it more and I started to realize, “I think this is what’s going on.” It started to make some pieces fall into place.
So I strongly encouraged Brian to go and get a doctor’s opinion on it. Which he did (thankfully), as I talked to him more about it.
Receiving an ADHD diagnosis
At that point we’d already been working with our second daughter for several months trying to work trying to help with her ADHD using just behavioral methods. Using coaching, using all sorts of timers, and various things.
We were trying everything to avoid starting medication because we wanted to see if we could manage this naturally.
My husband went in about 6 months after her diagnosis and he came home diagnosed.
All the feelings!
I remember there was a lot of emotions that I had to deal with. A lot of it looks a lot like a grief process and so I’m going to kind of talk about it from that angle.
Grief can happen any time when the unexpected occurs. You had a different expectation of a situation and when you’re faced with the reality that that’s not what’s going to happen, you can feel a sense of grief.
It doesn’t have to be the death of a person. It can simply be the death of expectations that maybe you didn’t even realize you had until you aren’t going to be able to experience those things anymore.
Processing stages of grief (grief cycling)
I found myself grieving and there’s several different stages. They call them stages of grief but the recognition now is that stages doesn’t mean you leave them, necessarily.
It’s actually more cyclical. You might go into another phase of it and then come out and then come back again.
It’s kind of more like a spiral, I would say, where you keep kind of going deeper. And it gets a little less painful as you go along but you’re kind of always going to cycle through it to some extent, and that’s to be expected.
Working through denial
Denial was the first one. I’ve actually just described denial to you because for years I had known there were things that were different about our daughter. I was puzzled by behaviors I saw in my husband that he didn’t seem to be able to get clear of, that neurotypical adults usually can.
Things like struggling with time: not being able to get places on time regularly, or not managing time well. Those were the biggest ones that I had seen.
Emotional swings – although I didn’t really recognize those very well because I’d grown up in a house with a volatile parent. So it was harder for me to recognize them as unusual because that had been my normal.
We had been in a very toxic environment, a very toxic family and church situation for many years. So even when I had those moments of wondering if something was going on, I didn’t have the energy or the resources or the knowledge to pursue that question in my mind. To even start to think seriously about it.
I was just overwhelmed by the demands of young parenthood. When Brian was diagnosed we already had six children. I was just overwhelmed with life in general.
It was easier to simply dismiss things that I saw that were different and hope that it would just get better over time. You know, he would mature out of it, is what I thought would happen.
The shock of diagnosis
Shock is the next stage that a lot of people talk about when you’re dealing with grief. This is where you actually come to terms with reality. That was when I started pursuing a diagnosis for our daughter.
We got her diagnosis. As I learned about it, I realized my husband fit the profile, and then he got diagnosed. He was about 36 at the time when he got the diagnosis.
Anger and rage
The two primary emotions I felt were anger- really rage, anger is putting it mildly- but I was enraged. The other primary emotion was a deep sadness, because I realized that there were some parts of this that were not simply going to go away over time.
Having a diagnosis means you have to let go of… with ADHD it’s not something that you can cure. It’s a brain difference and that means that it’s always going to be a part of our life.
Up to that point I have been able to cope by telling myself that it was getting better. That his behaviors (the behavioral issues I was dealing with) were getting better. That we would get out of this stage of parenting and they would get better.
I had reasons to keep thinking, “Okay it’s going to get better.” And now I just had to say, “Okay, this is probably going to be part of my life for as long as we’re together. Alright, that’s different…” I had to adjust the reality of that situation.
Why it took so long for us to recognize ADHD
The rage I felt was very strongly there. It isn’t the rage you might expect because I think I was mostly angry that it took us this long to figure this out.
I couldn’t understand how we didn’t know, how it didn’t clue into us sooner. Of course you know, looking back with hindsight, we were in such an abusive situation. We were so burned out for so many years.
Now I feel sad for myself being angry at myself back then, because I had no brain space! So of course I wasn’t going to be able to pick up on something like this that requires a little bit of details and subtlety to pick up.
Caregiver neglect
I felt so much anger! “How did no one else in his life come to this conclusion? I mean, he has a master’s degree! How many teachers, how many special education departments, how many caregivers had he been in contact with? And nobody had ever suggested this?!”
The worst part for me, and the part that even now to this day makes me really upset is his mother has been in special education for Brian’s entire life. How did she miss this? How did she never think to pursue this?!
So there was a lot of anger that she never even considered It! And I know there’s reasons for it because she’s very toxic and dangerous. I understand that now. But at the time I was just… I was frankly livid.
Am I at fault?
I wondered if I was to blame, too. How did I miss this for so long? I did a whole thesis on it, I should have been able to pick it out! (Not really – a thesis in college isn’t the same as a degree, guys!)
There was also this anger of, “Oh, so I need to now come up with a different approach for this new situation.” And that was inconvenient.
Not that my husband was inconvenient! It’s not that I thought the people in my life who have ADHD are inconvenient. I want you to hear me on this: the inconvenience is that I’m going to have to adjust what I’ve been doing.
This is something that happens all the time in life. But it can be very frustrating when you already feel like you don’t have enough energy to manage your daily stuff and now you have something new to manage.
No support and no understanding
So that was what happened. I felt angry about that to some extent.
It’s better now. But I still get really angry when I think about how many years my husband dealt with this, and just had to try to COPE in whatever way he could.
He didn’t have any support. He didn’t have any understanding. He didn’t have anybody who was willing to pursue this.
Bargaining and all the “what ifs”
Then I started to move into bargaining. Bargaining is hard when you’re a smart person because you can come up with lots of “what if” scenarios.
I went through all the gamut. Was there a reason for it? Did something we do cause it, or something someone else did cause this?
The answer to all of those is no. It’s genetic, guys! Although traumatic brain injuries and things can cause the same kinds of symptoms, ADHD itself is simply a genetic feature.
I felt so much shame for how long he had been dealing with this and we hadn’t figured it out sooner. Was that shame right? No, but it’s a normal part of the process.
Sadness and loss
After working through all the what-ifs, and the “How could this have been better?” I finally had to sort through the sadness. And sadness is hard because you have to start to recognize that there isn’t a cure.
You can live a thriving, happy, prosperous life with ADHD, but it’s never going to go away. It’s always going to be there. You’re just going to figure out how to manage it well, if you do it properly. He can’t change that.
I felt sad too because there was also this sense of, these were all things I thought were character flaws that he had control over, that he could learn to change. And while coaching and therapy are very helpful in making these symptoms manageable, they don’t remove them completely.
I just felt so much grief for him. I still deal with that quite often because for 36 years of his life, he had all that negative messaging. He thought there were things that were wrong with him.
Self-esteem in late diagnosed ADHD adults
The impact on his self-esteem has been huge. A lifetime of being told that he was the problem instead of realizing that his brain works different. People thinking that it was deliberate, that being late, or turning papers in late, or being oblivious to certain social signals… things like that.
So many people in his life had assumed that he was just a terrible person. That he was doing those things to be mean, or unkind, or that he was an idiot, or whatever…all these terrible words! No support, no one who looked deep enough to recognize it.
Well, not no one. There were a few people he’s told me about – mentors and teachers, and people who saw through the behaviors and recognized there was something there he couldn’t help.
Lingering sorrow
But generally speaking the grief I still carry and still feel for him, and even for my kids too. They didn’t get diagnosed when they were really little, they got diagnosed mid-elementary school. So they had had some of that too.
The grief of them suffering through so many of these situations without even understanding, without support, without compassion, for something that they can’t help…
Also having to recognize it’s not immaturity. Okay, there are some emotionally immature things that he does – that I do – because we both came out of very dysfunctional families. That is a factor, but ADHD is not just emotional immaturity.
It’s not something he’s going to outgrow because that’s not the cause. So there was a lot of grief there.
Accepting what is
Finally now we are more in the stage of acceptance, and that’s the part that is so worth getting to.
If this is new for you, if you’ve just found out this diagnosis for your spouse or someone who’s close to you, I just want you to know that it will get less overwhelming, and it will get better.
Acceptance looks like recognizing that he is designed this way. He’s not flawed, he’s different.
Embracing ADHD strengths
So we play to his strengths. We find things that he’s good at. I’ve encouraged him to find things that he’s good at.
For years he never thought he was good at things. Through a relationship with me – and he’ll tell you this too, I’m not saying it’s to brag or anything. Honestly it shouldn’t be that I brag about being a kind person. That should be normal, but it’s just not.
Everyone can excel in something
I truly believe that everyone has something to offer and everyone has things they’re good at. That is my honest, deep heart belief: that everyone has things they’re good at and everyone has things that they can do better than most of other people.
My goal as a parent and as a wife and as a friend and as a community member is to help people see what they’re good at and encourage that.
That’s what I’ve helped Brian do too. I’ve helped him see, “You have some things you are amazing at!”
As an introvert, I suck at phone calls. He doesn’t mind making phone calls, he’s totally good with phone calls. That’s just a simple example there.
History: he can explain it in a way that I can follow and makes connections that I would never have seen. I am not skilled at that. So learning to play up the things that he’s very good at – that’s acceptance.
Accommodating the challenges of ADHD
It’s also about recognizing that he doesn’t have to be good at everything. He doesn’t have to be good at time stuff, he just needs to manage it appropriately so that he doesn’t get fired or something.
Acceptance looks like learning to make reasonable accommodations for the areas that he has difficulty, in the areas that my kids have difficulty in.
Parallels with chronic illness
Just like he makes accommodations for areas that I struggle with. You know, I’ve had chronic migraines for most of my life and we’ve done this for each other.
He is the reason I got treatment for my migraines because he started seeing how it was impacting me. I couldn’t see that for myself because I was so in it, and it had always been my normal.
He’s the one who saw how many migraines I was having and how miserable I was and how much of a struggle it was for me. Because of him seeing that and encouraging me to take action my migraines are much better.
And that’s what I’ve done for him with his ADHD: helping him realize, “Yeah, this is challenging.” It’s not intuitive, but there are some great things about it.
Making the most of the gifts of ADHD
We’ve learned to make the most of it. I love the spontaneity. I love the creativity. Oh my goodness! He comes up with so many ideas!
I struggle to come up with the ideas. He doesn’t struggle to come up with the ideas, he struggles to limit the ideas, and to implement all the ideas.
Acceptance looks like deciding to try medications, going to therapy. Learning new coping skills that are healthy, as opposed to the ones that he had to stumble onto on his own because he didn’t have appropriate support. And especially, finding community that supports neurodivergence.
@dinkumtribe I am free to take a moment to truly assess them and place them in a manageable order. I still possess more energy than the average person, but it doesn’t spike and drop the way it used to, and my brain is less likely to latch hold of a thought and hold onto it for dear life. Ironically, the best benefit of the medication wasn’t better focus, impulse control, or the many other needs I once had. The greatest benefit has been increased self awareness. Experiencing life before and after the medication opened my eyes to see just how much of my life was being impacted by adult ADHD. The change was just as noticeable to those around me as well. I now had a clearer understanding of how my body and mind worked, and I had experienced a better way of living. @DinkumTribe ADHD family travel @DinkumTribe ADHD family travel @DinkumTribe ADHD family travel #adhdtiktok #adultadhdlife #adhdmedication #adhdmeds ♬ original sound – DinkumTribe ADHD family travel
The importance of community and support
If you have just discovered that you or someone you love is neurodivergent – has ADHD, autistic, any of these scenarios – I cannot recommend enough finding people who also know what that’s like. It is a game changer just to feel like you’re not the only one!
Are there frustrations being married to someone with ADHD? Absolutely! And in my next post, I’m planning to talk about some tips we’ve learned about managing ADHD in a marriage, because it does have some unique challenges.
Finding community, support, finding people who get it, finding your tribe. I realize “tribe” has some connotations that people aren’t always comfortable with. But to me, that just means the people who are YOUR people.
Find them! Find the people who are accepting of difference and that can really just enrich your life so much and help you feel less alone on this journey.
Hope and happiness
I hope that me talking a little bit about the feelings that I’ve lived through with the new diagnosis when we had it… I hope that’s helpful for you if you’re new to this journey of ADHD.
If your spouse has just been diagnosed, I realize it probably feels super overwhelming right now. It’s okay to take time to just breathe and realize that there are so many great resources out there that are ready for you when you’re ready.
It’s not in any way a “death sentence.” It’s not the worst thing that could happen at all. Actually there’s so much good to it! Knowing that that’s what you’re dealing with makes a really big difference.
©️ Copyright Jennifer D. Warren 2024
