Helping Your Partner With ADHD by Finding Solutions
Monitor
Insight, self-awareness, and self-monitoring all mean essentially the same thing: knowing yourself, your symptoms, your partner and your triggers. Use tracking sheets, journals, and charts to identify and understand your trends and patterns.
Regardless if you are the one with the diagnosis or not, you can learn a lot about yourself from tracking. Unless you know yourself, you cannot know ADHD.
Communicate
In any good relationship, your partner is your teammate. Honest, open, assertive communication helps ensure that she stays your teammate and not your opponent. Even the most exceptional treatment and self-monitoring are useless if you do not have someone at home to reinforce what you have learned.
Check in with your partner throughout the day, not only when situations become poor. Let them know what you are doing to improve your symptoms and the relationship and what she can do to assist.
Be Well-Rounded
Your relationship is likely more stressful than most others. When stress is high, supports need to be even higher to counteract. Schedule plans to leave home, meet with friends, exercise, attend church or support groups. Too much worry or involvement in the relationship leads to less sense of self.
Without a strong sense of who you are outside of the relationship, you cannot maintain the objectivity needed to help yourself and your partner truly. Your partner surely sways your happiness, but you cannot allow his symptoms to be your symptoms. Separation is needed.
Stop Fighting and Start Talking
People in relationships where ADHD is a factor are at higher risk of abuse that is verbal, emotional and physical. Because of this, you must establish ground rules for conflict and breaking points that you will not tolerate on any level.
Without establishing these preventively, you put your values and beliefs at risk since you will be less likely to react in an objective, rational way during periods of conflict.
No one deserves to be subjected to mistreatment of any variety. If someone is making you feel worthless, calls you terrible names or ever hits you, walking away is the best thing you can do.
Abusive relationships rarely get better spontaneously. Instead, the abuse tends to escalate in frequency and intensity. This is not a situation for you or anyone else.
Conclusion
ADHD does a great deal to add dissatisfaction to your relationship. To improve your situations, you must understand the causes before you can work towards solutions.
Along the way, be sure to create and communicate your deal breakers – lines that cannot be crossed. Following these tips might make a happy relationship with ADHD possible after all.
