#isn’t about anything or anyone in particular I’m just being me and having immense rsd. idk. the problem is I just. feel. like a pain in the

[godblooded]

tfw i have heard ‘kat could talk to a wall’ my entire life and it sucks when sometimes it genuinely feels like an insult.

[adhdtoomanycommas]

Emotional Abuse and ADHD

Ok, first real post on the ADHD sideblog, so lets dive straight into the heavy stuff.   TW/CW for emotional abuse, gaslighting, and probably some other things too (please feel free to let me know if I should add additional tags).

I had trouble sleeping last night because my brain kept insisting I needed to start this blog, like immediately, despite it being clearly not an opportune time to do anything of the sort. Or at least, it insisted, I needed to jot down all the essay/ramble/whatever topic ideas I had complicated thoughts on so I could start the blog today. I managed to resist doing both of those things, and get to sleep eventually, but here I am.  The first topic that brought this on was wanting to talk about my experience in an emotionally abusive relationship and how many aspects of that were exacerbated by various symptoms of my (then undiagnosed) ADHD. 

I’m going to assume a certain amount of baseline familiarity with some terminology and whatnot here, if you’re confused by any of the ADHD terms I use here I recommend heading over to theadhdmanual.com and reading their very helpful “three pillars” articles which do a great job of explaining Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) and emotional hyperarrousal (also elsewhere called emotional disregulation, I’ll be using both terms interchangably but won’t be abbreviating the latter for hopefully obvious reasons).  On the emotional abuse terminology front, there’s a couple great articles on gaslighting on everydayfeminism.com that I recommend seeking out. 

It is possible I am slightly stalling here by providing all this context.

At this point damn near ten years ago, for most of my senior year of college and for a good few months afterwards (I don’t remember how long exactly since adhd brains suck at timelines and I don’t feel like logicing it out right now) I was in what I later realized (with help from the aforementioned everydayfeminism articles) was an emotionally abusive relationship.  My then-boyfriend, who I will call Al, was insecure and jealous. I had more sexual experience than him going into the relationship, and he used that as an excuse to guilt-trip, manipulate, and ultimately control me.  I realize now, that the primary weapon he would use against me was my own RSD. 

Whenever I did something that upset Al, (typical infractions included things like accidentally mentioning one of my exes, correcting him about something,  “flirting with” --read: talking to-- any of my friends who were more my friend than his, or singing along to music) he would generally make his displeasure known by ignoring me--withdrawing all physical affection, coupled with the silent treatment.  If you’re familiar with RSD, you can already guess how effective this was.  If you’re not, then for comparison you should know that ADHD people can spiral very quickly into completely irrational “they hate me, don’t they?” thought spiral from something as small as a delayed text.  Al would almost never tell me what I did to upset him, and in my guilt-spiral I would usually tearfully beg forgiveness for everything I could think of until I guessed correctly and/or he arbitrarily decided I’d had enough. 

As an aside,  he would often do this silent treatment toward me in public while being perfectly cheerful and whatnot with our other friends, often making it seem to others like he was just joking or messing with me. On one memorable occasion he refused to say anything to me but the word “spoon” with varying inflections for the better part of a day--a pretty skillful gaslight because to everyone else around this just seemed like goofy ol’ Al being his silly self, but from context I knew this was part of a punishment, and I couldn’t express any kind of being upset about this, even annoyance, without looking like I was overreacting to a dumb joke.

Ultimately much of what he actually did (or didn’t do) in public didn’t look like much to an outside observer, but he knew my (RSD fueled) insecurity would make it hurt, especially when I wouldn’t be able to address anything with him until we were in private later. 

Also (and I intend to write a whole different post about this later) my particular brand of emotional disregulation takes the form of crying extremely easily.  I cry when I’m sad, when I’m tired, when I’m happy, when I see something too cute to handle, and (most importantly, in this instance) when I’m angry.  Because of this, every time I tried to address some relationship concern I had with him, whenever I tried to call out some of his shitty behavior or bring attention to my own emotional needs, it was extremely difficult--nigh impossible--to do so without crying.  This gave him a massive amount of gaslighting ammunition--it made it very easy for him to say I was overreacting, overemotional, irrational, trying to manipulate him, et cetera.   And it was hard to defend myself against that, even to myself. After all, lacking the ADHD diagnosis and resources about emotional disregulation that I have now, I had pretty much internalized the idea that I’m just “oversensitive” when it comes to crying, so I rationalized that I was also being oversensitive about whatever concern I started with in the first place. So every time a conversation started with me telling him he hurt me some way, it inevitably ended with me apologizing to him instead of the other way around.

Just to add to the already nasty cycle, Al also considered crying over something he didn’t deem worth crying over a punishable offense, so it often triggered the previously discussed silent treatment. 

A third aspect of ADHD I haven’t discussed yet also played a major part in how I was abused--Memory.  I don’t have a good resource to link on this one (I’m pretty sure there are some good howtoadhd videos on it on youtube but I’m not going to go dig for them right now), but ADHD people, on the whole, have terrible memories, especially short term/working memory.  Mine in particular might be even worse for some kinds of things  for unrelated reasons (aphantasia, which I might write about later but this is already really long and it’s not actually that relevant here).

Al was perpetually convinced that I was cheating on him, and any time we were apart he would quiz me afterwards on where exactly I was, what I did, for how long, and in what order.  Any inconsistency in my account, or any “I don’t remember”s would mean he would accuse me of lying about the whole thing.  I am pretty sure I have in common with most ADHD people that between time blindness and bad working memories, giving a consistent and accurate account like that is basically impossible, so this rarely went well for me.  Just to further complicate matters, being accused of lying when I’m not is practically guaranteed to make me cry, and trying to keep from crying (to avoid angering him further) means I swallow a lot, and somewhere Al had heard that excessive swallowing is a sign that someone is lying, so again these various ADHD symptoms would combine to just make everything worse.  

 I eventually got out of that relationship, and not too long afterwards got together with my now-husband, who is wonderful, so that’s a happy ending. Getting diagnosed with ADHD a few months ago, learning about these symptoms, and figuring all this out has made this make much more sense to me than before.   But in addition to my ADHD symptoms making me more vulnerable to these emotional abuse tactics,  I’m pretty sure the leftover baggage from the emotional abuse may have made those very same ADHD symptoms worse, and while my new meds seem to help immensely with the executive disfunction aspects of ADHD, they don’t do a damn thing about RSD spirals or emotional disregulation.  Healing and processing it all is slow going, but it has gotten a lot better over the years, and knowing now that even another aspect of this isn’t my fault helps too.  And taking my meds today did help me motivate myself to write all this out, so maybe that will help as well. 

I’m not sure what the takeaway is here, other than I strongly suggest everyone learn what gaslighting and emotional abuse in general looks like, but especially if you have ADHD or suspect you might have ADHD because we might be more vulnerable to being on the receiving end of it than most people.  If anything I talked about here sounds a little too familiar, I strongly recommend reading up on gaslighting, and consider getting the heck away from anyone who sounds too much like Al.  Maybe us ADHDers will inevitably get into some nasty thought-spirals or bad emotional places sometimes, maybe we’ll cry over nothing or worry too much that something we said will make everyone hate us, but if anyone tries to use any of that against you, uses it to get you to do what they want, or intentionally makes you feel worse, they’re not someone worth being around, and I promise you deserve better.

Not sure if anyone will read this, much less any fellow ADHDers because yeah, it’s a big ol’ wall of text and I get that can be hard, but if you made it this far, thanks for listening and I’ll try to go not quite so heavy with my next post, (assuming, of course, that I have a next post and this blog doesn’t become yet another started-and-abandoned project).

That’s all for now.