Yeah, what the title says.

When I try to explain to friends or family how difficult it makes things in a relationship when one person (me) has ADHD they never get it and I often get the impression they think my wife is overreacting.

I understand that they want to support me but they aren’t helping, it just makes me angry. I know that it’s not all my fault but I want them to understand what a mental and emotional burden it can be to be the partner of an ADHD-person. Even when I tell them that our problems are typical for ADHD-partnerships, that everything I’ve read about it tell exactly the same story that we have been going through, it doesn’t really make an impression and I want to scream at them “please for fuck’s sake believe what I’m telling you!!”

Ugh.

Edit: Looking at the comments and reading my post again I feel like I should have phrased it differently:

What bothers me is not that people don’t get how much I struggle with ADHD. What bothers me is that they can’t seem to comprehend how mentally and emotionally draining it can be to be the partner of someone with ADHD and seem to have very little understanding or sympathy for my partner. And that makes me so mad because everyone seems to think I’m this great person and my wife must be overreacting.

  • Not a newt@piefed.ca
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    3 days ago

    Not saying that it is the case here, but It is entirely possible for people to sympathize with your condition but still not being able to understand it because they have no point of reference. An example is the phrase “crippling pain.” Most people will think only of the somatic meaning of crippling, and think that because someone can still walk normally they’re not experiencing it. However, there’s also the psychological component: pain so persistent or insidious that it stops you from thinking straight. It affects your performance when you have a white collar job, it affects your mood, and it carries a lot of stigma and judgment because it’s not a visible disability. Heck, younger me was guilty of such preconceptions too. It didn’t mean that I didn’t care, but I had no way to mentally frame it within my own experiences. I still don’t, exactly, but I’m able to extrapolate the scale from other experiences. In other words, I kind of understand now to a degree that I can avoid sounding condescending when trying to be sympathetic.

    Again, I’m not saying that it applies in your case - I only have a couple of paragraphs from your post to go by. I’m only trying to convey that there is a difference between understanding and sympathy, and in many cases it takes education for someone who doesn’t experience ADHD to understand it. Sometimes it’s a futile exercise, yes, but in the cases where you can get through you’ll form a much stronger bond.

    • cinnamon@lemmy.cafeOP
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      2 days ago

      Thank you for your replying <3

      After reading the comments I went back and read my post and realized I didn’t get my point across. The thing that bothers me isn’t that I don’t get enough sympathy for my own struggle. What bothers me is that when I tell people “my ADHD has been eroding our marriage” everyone seems to be low-key (or not so low-key) assuming that my partner must be overreacting because it can’t be THAT bad. They think I’m just a bit more chaotic than most people and my partner must be overly sensitive.