Relationships & ADHD: Executive Functionings Impact
With a divorce rate nearly twice as high for individuals with ADHD, focusing on your marriage can help you avoid becoming part of the statistic. Whether you are the partner with ADHD, you are the non-ADHD partner or both partners have ADHD, knowing some of the impacts the diagnosis can have on a relationship can help you come together and work on your relationship as a team.
ADHD looks different for everyone, but there are some common executive functioning challenges that impact most individuals with ADHD and in turn, also impact most relationships. Using Brown’s (2005) model of executive functioning, let’s break down the challenges that impact individuals with ADHD to then understand how those challenges impact relationships.
https://www.planetneurodivergent.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-adhd/
ACTIVATION
Activation impacts an individual’s ability to organize, prioritize and begin working. In a relationship, this can translate to feelings of inequality, feelings that one’s partner is not reliable, and/or that fundamentally the union is not a partnership.
Equality: The responsibilities in a relationship are not shared equally. When activation is difficult, the other partner often overcompensates and begins over-functioning to help manage the couple or family’s activities and make sure everything gets done. This can lead to frustration and anger.
Reliability: When activation is challenging, and especially when an individual is improperly diagnosed or medicated, this can lead to difficulties managing daily functioning. In couples, this can be really challenging as many tasks need to be done in coordination, especially once a home, children, or pets are involved. If the partner with ADHD cannot manage their daily activities, i.e., keeping their job, paying their bills on time, or regularly picking up the children from school then the other partner often feels like they must “do it all.” This leads to resentment and overwhelm because the non-ADHD partner often stops asking for help and just completes tasks on their own.
Partnership: Like being unreliable, when a partner does not feel that they can count on their partner that often means that they do not feel like they have a partnership. Partners can begin to feel like roommates, friends, or enemies. And this can lead to physical and emotional intimacy difficulties.
FOCUS
Focus affects an individual's ability to maintain, sustain and shift attention between tasks. Variable attention is often a challenge of focus, and that generally means that the immediate task feels more engaging than the more important task. In a relationship this can lead to challenges attending to one’s partner, connecting with one’s partner, and sustaining a romantic connection with one’s partner.
Attentive: The ability to maintain focus and attention on one’s partner. Although this is a big part of early love, when hyperfocus is often at play, further along in a relationship your partner may struggle to be attentive. The flowers and cards they used to shower you with, are now focused on the new stock they are investing in, showering all their love and attention onto that new thing. This can lead to partners feeling disconnected and unloved.
Connected: Ability to show garner one’s partner with attention at appropriate times. Given the challenges of shifting attention, this might mean that while you are in the middle of an important conversation, your partner’s phone goes off, and suddenly they are no longer having that important conversation. That can lead you to feel unimportant and unloved.
Romantic: The romantic connection in the relationship may fade as the ADHD partner’s ability to consistently show love may fade. Although this is often mistaken as no longer being in love, oftentimes this is due to challenges in maintaining attention and showing romantic love to your partner.
EFFORT
Effort impacts one's ability to regulate alertness, sustain effort, and work with adequate processing speed. Often this leads individuals to have trouble managing time, anticipating the duration of projects, and getting lost in projects. In a relationship, this can negatively impact reliability and respect. The non-ADHD partner may interpret these challenges as meaning that their ADHD partner is not reliable and does not respect them or their relationship.
Reliability: The ability to complete tasks when they are expected. This is an important component of a relationship. Reliability talked about earlier in the context of activation, is similar, but different in relation to effort. Often in a relationship as it pertains to effort, the non-ADHD partner can blame the ADHD partner for not trying hard enough to complete tasks and this can bring up old wounds many ADHD partners carry from childhood when they disappointed teachers, family members, and friends.
Respect: Timeliness is challenging for individuals with ADHD, and when a partner is always late it can start to feel like they value their own time more than their partner's time. The ADHD partner may be late due to challenges regulating alertness (difficulty waking up on time) or time-blindness (inability to sense the passing of time). This is often exacerbated by inadequate processing speed which can slow down the completion of tasks and lead to more extreme tardiness or completely missing plans. All of these challenges can lead partners to feel that they are not prioritized.
EMOTION
Challenges with regulating emotions and managing frustration impact individuals with ADHD. Individuals can find it difficult to navigate their emotional experiences and feel that emotions take over their thinking, making engaging with a partner difficult. When an individual with ADHD cannot navigate their emotions, that can lead to a lack of predictability about their partner and a feeling that there is no emotional safety in the relationship.
Predictability: Knowing how your partner will respond, especially to strong and challenging emotions. This is an important component of a healthy relationship. Conflicts regularly arise between partners and in an individual's life, and it is imperative for the health of one’s relationship to be able to talk through strong feelings to understand each other and connect. Anger, worry, disappointment, and other emotions also occur outside of the relationship, and if the non-ADHD partner is not certain how the ADHD partner will respond, that can lead to differential treatment. Sometimes, a non-ADHD partner will try to protect the ADHD partner from all challenging emotions. This protection comes from the place of wanting a peaceful and predictable relationship, but it can lead to resentment, dishonesty, and loneliness in the partnership.
Safety: Like predictability, if one partner is afraid of the other partner’s responses this can lead to a lack of emotional safety. Often non-ADHD partners will feel like they are “walking on eggshells.” This lack of safety can lead partners to shut down or look for safety in other spaces outside of the partnership.
MEMORY
Poor memory. Challenges utilizing working memory and accessing recall. This often leads individuals to feel that they have poor memories of recent events, and often struggle to hold multiple thoughts in their minds as they complete other tasks. In relationships, this can look like forgetting conversations and tasks as well as not recalling a partner's priorities.
Reliability: Poor memory of recent events can lead the ADHD partner to seem unreliable, forgetting important events and tasks, especially if what is forgotten is important to their partner. Without being able to recall important dates, events, or preferences, the non-ADHD partner can feel both forgotten and that they cannot count on their partner. This can lead to broader feelings that the ADHD partner will not be able to reliably love or care for their partner long-term.
Caring: Remembering important details and being able to recall recent conversations is often what helps individuals feel cared for by their partners. If an ADHD partner has trouble accessing recall, this can impact their ability to demonstrate care. This inability to demonstrate care can lead non-ADHD partners to feel unloved.
ACTION
Action is commonly described as impulsivity which is when an individual has difficulty monitoring and self-regulating actions. When an individual with ADHD acts impulsively, without thinking ahead and considering the consequences, that can lead the non-ADHD partner to feel that they are not trustworthy and reliable. It can even lead the non-ADHD partner to feel that the ADHD partner does not care about their well-being.
Trust: Challenges thinking about consequences and acting impulsively can impact trust in a relationship. When an individual does not think about the consequences of their actions, both big and small, it can lead to a lack of trust. The event may occur in smaller ways, like not getting up on time to get the kids ready for school. Or the event may be much larger, like engaging in an affair that feels good in the moment without a thought about the consequences. Both actions can break trust but at different magnitudes.
Reliability: If the ADHD partner is not able to think through the consequences of their actions, the non-ADHD partner can come to feel that their partner is not reliable. For example, the ADHD partner may stay late at work to finish a project and not realize that they are missing their partner’s work event. Additionally, an individual with ADHD may have difficulty monitoring their surroundings. This trouble “reading the room” can impact a relationship, because the ADHD partner may not be aware of their partner's feelings and may not appropriately alter their behavior.
Partnership: Challenges with impulsivity can lead the non-ADHD partner to feel like their partner is not making decisions for the betterment of the couple or family. When one partner is not thinking about the relationship long-term, often times decisions are not made in the best interest of the future of the couple or family.
If you want to learn more, don’t miss Dr. Branda’s talk, Marriage & ADHD: Focusing on Your Relationship. Sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/WLAChadd/events/282857035/. Join her and the West LA CHADD community on June 21st, 2022 at 7:00 pm. You can also reach out to her directly to book an appointment online or over the phone with Dr. Rebecca Branda, Psy.D. today.