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Thoughts To Make You Think: February, 2005 |
Copyright Patti Henry, 2005
February: The Monster in My Marriage
I'm a psychotherapist, so I should have known better. But I didn't. I spent seven years in my marriage getting progressively angrier and angrier at my husband who I adored. And I thought he adored me, too, so it really didn't make sense.
We met on an opera tour in Europe. He was in the orchestra and I was the stage manager of The New York Harlem Opera Ensemble. We did 256 Porgy and Besses in ten months in eight countries. We also had a wild and wonderful romance. Our hotels were the kind where the maids left chocolates on your pillows and the towel bars were heated. The scenery was amazing and the history wrapping itself around us was invigorating. We went to Anne Frank's house, the Sacra core, the Notre Dame, behind the Berlin Wall, and to sixteenth century castles. We went to the Moulin Rouge, the casinos in Monaco, the shipyards in Barcelona, and to some of the most famous art museums in the world. All the while falling in love. I remember my husband scratching out our initials together with a sandstone on the top edge of a castle turret, high in the mountains overlooking miles of countryside.
He was wonderful. What I didn't realize was how surrounded we were with distractions and a lack of reality. We ate out every meal every day. Our room was always clean when we returned to it: beds made, showers sparkling, fresh towels. He often rode on the company bus when we traveled; I had a chauffer. When we wanted to drive ourselves, a car was provided. Life was good. Unrealistic, but good.
Another year and a half passed before reality set in. We did Marriage of Figaro and Madame Butterfly and a year in Mexico City with the Philharmonic. It was fun and exciting, but again, we had a supporting cast: drivers, maids, cooks. It wasn't until we came back to the States for me to go to graduate school that I began to see rusty holes in my knight's not very shiny armor.
He lied to me. Or at least that's what I thought. He'd tell me he'd do it in the morning - and wouldn't. He'd tell me he'd be home at 6:00 - and wasn't. And what a slob! Without a maid, I noticed he accumulated piles and piles of junk. Junk mail he promised to “get to later,” dirty clothes, unpaid bills. Then there was the money problem. He didn't seem to understand it at all. The month our electricity got cut off because he never put the envelope in the mailbox, I went through the roof.
Things got worse. I got louder. Nothing seemed to get through to him. He'd apologize, feel bad, tell me he loved me and wasn't trying to hurt me, and yet would do the same ridiculous, ineffective behavior the very next day. Even more insulting, he would change the subject right in the middle of a conversation we were having about why I felt so hurt. It was crazy-making. I didn't get it. He was so sweet and seemed sincere. Why did he keep doing such hurtful and damaging things? Incredulously, he seemed to do things without thinking about how it would impact us. I struggled a long time trying to figure it out: was I crazy or was he?
The night I got the collect call from jail because he was arrested for outstanding parking tickets, I decided to get a divorce. By that time we had our first child, but that didn't even matter anymore. I concluded: to live with this man was to live in insanity.
I called my best friend, my sister, to tell her that even though I loved my husband very much, I was getting out. She was relieved because she had seen me struggle with him for so long. I was relieved. That very same day, however, standing in the grocery store check out line, a magazine cover caught my eye and changed my life forever. Even today, sixteen years later, I get dizzy thinking about it.
Bold letters screamed: Are you disorganized? Are you unable to finish tasks in a timely manner? Are you unable to follow through on promises you make? You may be suffering from Adult Attention Deficit Disorder!
Adult Attention Deficit Disorder?! My first thought was, “Oh, my word! This is it! This is what's wrong!” My second thought was, as a clinician, “Wait a minute, there's no such thing as Adult Attention Deficit Disorder! Kids outgrow ADD.” I grabbed up that magazine, fumbled for some money to throw down on the counter, and ran to my car to read it. “New research shows that children sometimes do not outgrow attention deficit disorder, but, in fact, carry it with them into adulthood…”
I cried. I cried because there was an explanation. I cried because I had emotionally beaten up my husband all these years because of something he couldn't help. I cried that the trauma could be over and we could love each other again.
Today, so many couples come to me for marriage counseling. The first thing I look for is ADD. Why? Because untreated attention deficit disorder can wreak havoc in a marriage. I think of the image of a bull in a china cabinet - that's untreated ADD in a marriage. I find, too, like in my own marriage, a couple with undiagnosed ADD is often fighting the wrong dragon. They are fighting a monster in the dark, never knowing what strategy would be effective having never met the monster face to face.
ADD is not a mental illness. Research suggests that it is a physical condition where the pre-frontal lobe of the brain does not receive as many electrical impulses as do the brains of people without ADD. This pre-frontal lobe is rather like our CEO. It's the part that organizes and shouts out orders and plans to the rest of the brain. It lets us plan ahead, focus and get things done, tie together cause and effect, remember commitments, organize and prioritize, and assess situations quickly on a multi-faceted level. Most importantly, it helps us self-correct. People with ADD have a deficit of electrical impulses in this area. They don't have a deficit of impulses in other areas of the brain - in fact, they have a plethora in other areas - but they do have a deficit in the pre-frontal lobe that can organize, prioritize, and filter out all those extraneous impulses.
A major problem? Yes. Hopeless? No. But you must take action. The hope lies in diagnosis and treatment. For my husband, medication has been extremely helpful. Most importantly, however, is our understanding of the problem. I no longer take it personally. I no longer beat him up for it. He no longer feels like he can't do anything right. We are a united front against it. There is me and him together, and outside of our circle of love, is the monster. We can see it when it rears it's ugly head, we recognize it for what it is, and we plot together to defeat it.
We also have come to realize, that for whatever reason, people with handicaps - and I do consider ADD a handicap - seem to have their own areas of giftedness. Someone who is blind often “sees” better than those of us with two perfectly functioning eyes. A Downs Syndrome child is refreshingly able to express love so profoundly. Beethoven was deaf when he wrote some of his best music. So it is with ADD.
Most people with ADD are very bright and creative. They are able to skip steps we linear thinkers are not. They are able to envision possibilities differently than those without ADD. Many clinicians believe Benjamin Franklin probably had ADHD (attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity) and that Thomas Edison did as well. In fact, many of the world's greatest actors and artists, inventors and scientists, have had ADD, some with and some without the hyperactivity.
So, if you have it in your marriage, I encourage you to seek diagnosis and treatment. Your partner, if he has ADD, will not be able to do these steps on his own. You will have to be the one to make the phone calls to find a therapist or psychiatrist you are comfortable with, set up the appointment, and drive him to it. You are the one who needs to educate yourself all you can about it, as well, since your husband will probably not be able to follow through in gathering information (an organizational task). The reference book I most often recommend to my clients is “Driven to Distraction” by Dr. Edward Hallowell and Dr. John Ratey, two psychiatrists who both have ADD themselves. The website I most recommend is the Attention Deficit Disorder Association (http://www.add.org/).
One final word: Sometimes women have resistance to and resentment about having to be the ones to take action. They insist their husbands should do the work. I promise you, they can't. This is part of the handicap. It is not compromising your soul to do all the work: it is giving your marriage a second chance. |
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