Is It Our ADHD, OCD, and PTSD? Or Is It Us?

0:01None of the voices in this series are ongoing patients of Esther Perel. Each episode of Where Should We Begin is a one-time counseling session. For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, names and some identifiable characteristics have been removed. But their voices and their stories are real.

0:24You ever see a town just quietly do something unthinkable? Bloomington, Indiana did. We were hiking the hills, sipping coffee, strong enough to make you think you could move them, debating the absurdity of greatness. Then one day, greatness raised its cream and crimson flag. A town known for hoops. We make history. You'll want to do the same next time you visit. Bloomington. Not what you expected. Still, absurdly great. Support for this show comes from BetterHelp. Have you ever had so many tabs open that your computer starts slowing down? Life can feel like that, too. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report found that 74 % of Americans believe society still discourages asking for help.

1:12Therapy can help you sort through what's taking up space and quietly affecting you. With BetterHelp, connect with a licensed therapist online and switch anytime. Maybe it's time to close a few tabs. Visit BetterHelp.com slash VoxPods to get started. So the big one, of course, is the child. She's 18 months old, and she's our first child. We're never prepared for what kids are going to bring up in us. Since having a kid, he was in basically the worst depression of his life. Tons and tons of crippling anxiety. You know, she got pregnant quickly, and here we go. And in response to that, my anxiety and depression just shot through the roof last year.

2:01Everything became just so anxiety provoking around our child's sleep, around her eating enough, like everything. And I was kind of in the opposite world where I wasn't anxious and I wasn't super overwhelmed with it. And even to the point where I actually really want to have another child. and he's like, do you remember what it was like for me? A lot of that comes down to money as well and where we are with money. She decided early on that she didn't really want to continue work as it was and she wanted to be a full-time mom and wanted to move into illustration and being an artist. That's been a slow process.

2:44I have wanted to be an artist and an illustrator for my whole life. and now I had a kid and I really liked staying at home with her, but we're running out of money and he can't support us on his income only. So he's really pushed me and asked me, hey, it's time. If you want this dream, you have to choose it now. And then I will get mired in self-doubt and say that I will do things and then I have a lot of trouble actually doing them. There's issues of neurodivergence, my partner's ADHD, and my what might be neurodivergence or CPTSD or both. The last piece that's very big for us is our non-neurotypicalness.

3:30I have ADHD. He believes he has autism. And so both of us have very different ways of relating to the world. And that also plays into our struggles with communicating, with being kind to each other and supporting each other. When I read the intake interviews about the changes that had happened in this couple's life, they have an 18-month-old, they experienced the transition to parenthood, they experienced changes in their professional lives. But they also had a lot, a lot of jargon. A lot of therapy speak, a lot of words that are meant to help understand the other person, but in fact, they model it.

4:18It becomes a conversation of acronyms, ADHD, CPTSD, autism, neurodivergence, and there is definitely a need to attend to any of these acronyms. but also there's a need to understand the role they play in a relationship and the way that sometimes they are used between partners.

4:47All right. Let me do a quick pulse check with each of you. Where are you? Where do I find you? Not just geographically, but also mood, relationship, internal weather. we're in uh in our house i'm in my daughter's bedroom and i'm feeling a little bit nervous excited how old is your daughter she is 18 months and is she there she is gone with a friend wonderful yeah this is the first time that we've actually put her in someone else's charge for this long of a period. And you experience relief, freedom, space, or you experience primarily anxiety, worry, concern at your daughter being with a friend or even joy for that matter?

5:49Joy. Yeah. Joy. Yeah. Joy. Graciousness. Great. It's been a thing for a long time where I really felt like we need to create that space with her. I was ready for not the right reasons, maybe. What does that mean? What are not good reasons? To make my anxiety go away. My anxiety about? Literally everything. Yes, but what is the problem with doing things that diminish your anxiety? Why is that framed as something negative?

6:37Because what I've learned this year is that anxiety is a block to being able to live life in some capacity. And this year has been showing up to those scary things in service of the life that I want. in the past few days I just had a meeting with my business coach and he brought me to saying something that not only dissolved all my imposter syndrome it also dissolved this very powerful story that I'm pointless that my life is pointless that I'm never gonna be the person that I'm supposed to be and it all came out in this one very simple phrase and the phrase was the phrase was I help people solve their problems.

7:25And it didn't require me to be anything but what I was. I identify as an Enneagram 4, so there's a lot of staying in my own world and feeling lack and loss and grief and non-inclusion. And that's what's really changing this year after a really, really horrible year last year. Is it important for me to know about last year or is there a different place for us to start? I wish we had recorded literally the 30 conversations we've had approaching this time. Maybe I want to start asking you about that. How did you prepare and what has come up? Like what is the session that you have had or the sessions in preparation of this session?

8:14Do we want to just like rattle them off? There's so many. there was the one and this is kind of a little self-serving there was the one where she for the first time turned to me and said I'm pretty sure I have OCD and I've been very controlling about things and that has been something I've been like waiting to hear and just have a shared understanding around so we can move through it

8:47I often say in the beginning of a session that I'd like to meet the people before I meet their problems. Because I sincerely believe that we are more than just the problems that we face. And the same is true for our diagnosis. It is helpful to know if we struggle with ADHD or if we have neurodiversions or if we are on the spectrum. all these terms that have really proliferated in the last years have helped us articulate ourselves make sense of who we are understand our relationship to others and to ourselves but I sometimes use them more cautiously because we sometimes also can run into the danger to collapse a person into a diagnosis to see them only through one lens many people live with health and mental health conditions.

9:41That doesn't define their entire being. It says a lot about them, but it doesn't say everything about them. And the last thing I would want to do in my work is curb the curiosity for knowing more because we think we know because we have the refuge of the labels.

10:02There's another conversation where we both acknowledge that for as much as we love and care about each other. We've been so focused on our own survival that we've treated the other person's coping mechanisms as a problem. And I was setting up a dynamic where I responded to her with judgment, annoyance, trying to change her, shaming her, telling her she's doing it wrong. And so that became a standard way of our interacting. So we had two accountability sessions. And you connect them to the fact that we were going to have our conversation today. Why? I tend to be the space taker. And so I would really like to create space for her to share.

10:57For her? Yes. This was a very nice move on his part. to know that he had had a chance to express himself at quite some length and to just basically say, I know I can take the space. I want her to join us at this moment. And I didn't say it, and I'm saying it now. I feel like the two of us are really committed to each other and really invested in each other. And we've spent a long time in our relationship. caring about one another's struggles, but we also feel so stubborn and so adamant about ourselves getting heard and feeling like we're really being taken seriously by the other person. I think that's a huge part of why we just keep running into the same problems in pretty much every area of our lives, is that we both care about each other deeply, but we don't trust each other to really care about the other person as much as we want them to.

12:19Say that again. We care about each other deeply, but the other person doesn't trust it. Yeah. So I care about you, but you don't trust that that's what I do. Yeah. And how does that distortion get created? What is it that you do, each of you, that lets the other person think, you don't have my back? I think our actions and our words are different. I certainly know that for myself with my ADHD. I struggle to actually do the things that we've spoken about in our partnership as important. He used to ask me for a Monday meeting every single week where we would sit down and we would talk together about what's coming up during the week, what we're going to do.

13:14And I think I made that Monday meeting a priority maybe twice in the many, many months that we tried to do it. Something would come up. I need a snack. I need to go to the bathroom. I could barely sit still. And I don't know why that was always happening at these Monday meetings that were very important to my partner. And I wanted them to be a priority and I felt so... Rebellious. Yeah. Yeah, rebellious is a huge part of my life. So would it be accurate to say we care about each other deeply, but we don't necessarily support the requests of our partner because we also experience these requests as controlling?

14:10Yes, absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. So we are very kind, compassionate people who get into power struggles, but we don't name them as power struggles. well we do actually okay um because one of the things that i have said is that i feel like i have no agency that she wears the pants in the family and i often state it in very either harsh or just like big energy but it's like they're angry ways because i feel small because i don't think they're going to be listened to and respected so then i'll say something like well, this isn't going to work anyway, or you're not going to do this, or I don't know what the point of this is.

14:53And then she complies. She complies. She basically acts in a way that completely agrees with what you just said. It's not going to work. Nothing's going to happen. Yes, she complies with that. She complies. Yes, yes.

15:12It's interesting to hear him say that he doesn't feel he has agency in the relationship, especially after both of them have just acknowledged that he can shrink her into a tiny shrimp. He can make her doubt herself. He can tell her that she's not proactive enough, that she's not confident enough about her job. He can rattle down a list of things that she does wrong. But in his mind, he's doing that because he feels small himself. and as a result he tries to bring her down to the same level where he is. And what's very interesting for me in listening to them is that they are full of self-awareness and they even have a lot of awareness about what they do to each other but it doesn't serve them.

16:08We have to take a brief break. Stay with us.

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18:35You know, I had a period, I tried to set up a lot of systems, because I'm a systems thinker. But yeah, it was that sense of like, okay, we'll try this, okay, we'll try this, okay, we'll try this. And then none of the things worked out, and I felt very alone. And the metaphor that I've been using a lot lately, the idea that I'm running around plugging holes on a boat left and right, and that's my entire existence. And I could imagine you saying, where's she on this boat? and I'm like oh she's up at the top deck pointing it at all the beautiful islands that she wants to go to and grabbing the steering wheel and sort of pulling it left and right while I'm down here by myself being like there's this massive hole and now there's all these other little holes that keep popping up every day that I have to keep fixing keep fixing keep fixing which as you can tell anxiety and really the question that I felt like we could bring to you was like how do we get So we're steering the ship together and plugging the holes together.

19:33That's your question. That's my question. What's your question? I want to know what's it going to take for us to trust each other? I think the way that we communicate feels like we don't believe each other's on the same team. And so I really want to find a way that we can connect and care about each other in our everyday life. Instead of? What do you do? It feels like now everything that I say to him, he's taking it as I'm judging him. I'm telling him he's wrong. I'm telling him he did something that isn't working. You know, I will say something to him like, oh, I'd really like for the baby's food to be cut a little smaller.

20:40And he'll say, I've got it. I know what I'm doing. Don't tell me what to do. And he's always feeling, it seems like he can never do something right for me. And I think if we trusted each other more, he would know I wasn't coming from that space. I was just sharing my preference. In highly reactive couples, this is very common. If somebody says something about the food, the other person hears it as if it's about them. Everything gets personalized and seen as an attack. They talk about trust, they talk about vulnerability, they talk about anxiety, depression, they don't talk about aggression. But in fact, the relationship is permeated by aggression, covert and overt.

21:35And I think they're trying to behave very well in front of me. But when they say these things to each other, as she just said, around the cutting of the food, and he says, you know, once again, it's not the right. I'm imagining in myself a reaction in him where he feels attacked. It's that differentiation that needs to happen that is first and foremost to distinguish between a criticism and a request. And at this moment, this is blurred.

22:07And the other way around, how does it go? Yeah. I feel like I'm pretty generous with the requests he makes, but I often question them. and that also creates a lot of distrust. He brought something to me a couple weeks ago and said I'd really like to consider this as a new way of thinking about our child's sleep and I said well I don't really believe that. I don't really see it that way and when I say something like that he'll often say I really would have appreciated if you had said wow that's a great insight. I'm so glad you're learning that. That is so cool. I really want to support you. And I don't know that I trust that or that's not my opinion.

22:56But I often come back immediately with a response with some kind of triggered way of being that is just not appreciating and acknowledging him for the work that he's done. When he says, I've got this, I know how to cut the food. You think, oh, how could I say something and he not take it so personal? Or you get annoyed?

23:29Probably both. I wish that I could say something in a way that didn't make him feel bad about himself or wrong for doing something. But I also recognize that I comment on pretty much everything. And that's not necessarily helpful in a relationship.

23:54If when I sit with a couple and I see one person putting the other one down, there is a sense of, Oh, that's the direction of the arrows. But then if you wait long enough, you suddenly realize that actually the other person is doing something quite similar. So they are symmetric. They are both doing the same thing to each other. That's part of why they are both able to recognize we don't trust each other enough. We care deeply about each other. But in fact, in our interactions, that's not what we end up experiencing. And yet they both say, we have this deep connection and we could do better. And they find themselves a bit miffed that they are derailing.

24:36And they don't understand why they're at each other's throat much of the time.

24:45You know, you talk a lot about issues of trust. But I'm sensing other things as well. And I have a bit of a dilemma because you are very articulate people and you are extremely jargonized. You have internalized the entire vocabulary of modern psychology. You label every behavior. You label yourself. It's like you're not unhappy, you're depressed. You're not worried, you're anxious. you're not rebellious you're ADD you're not pissed that he's telling you what to do and you absolutely don't like anybody telling you what to do and so it becomes OCD and my reluctance is I don't want to add to that because I want to create more air and space between the two of you that isn't psychologizing jargonizing and pathologizing because that, I don't see where that helps with trust.

25:58Sometimes it's good to know and to name things. Don't misunderstand me. But this, it's like everything is labeled. So in effect, you never say what you feel. You know, when you say I'm a systems guy, she's rebelling and you are saying, I have better systems. and you're not actually reading when she says, I don't want all these structures. Don't tell me what to do. Then you suddenly start to feel depleted and defeated. It becomes depressive energy. It's a dance between the two of you that has a few elements. A, it has pieces of power struggles, but not acknowledged as such. spoken about in the language of compassion or lack of compassion and trust, but in fact, there's controlling issues.

26:52And that doesn't mean one of you is controlling. It means the other person experiences your requests as controlling. Two, everything gets personalized. Cut it differently becomes I can't do it right. Rather than, are you concerned that she could choke? or come back with the pieces and say, are they the right measurement, missus? Basically, you can regain a lot of power and a lot of control with humor because humor brings perspective to this. Instead of, oh, now I've been pierced with a dagger again, I can't even cut the food. And I'm thinking, this guy needs a lot of humor to diffuse this because he takes it so personal.

27:39And the third element is there's very few things that one of you can feel or do or say that doesn't elicit a reaction in the other. You're too close. Now, it's a terrible thing to say to people you're too close because we supposedly all strive for a certain kind of close. This is too close. That closeness leads to personalizing rebellion, friction, in order to create more distance. And so you each are constantly pushing your elbows to say to the other, give me space, give me room. I have a thing I call toxic coaching that I do only with her, where it stops being about me helping, it starts being about why isn't she getting this and when we got together I felt what we could be together I felt my potential I felt her potential and you're absolutely right that there has been something with her where I've been so impatient and so intolerant but I was so scared last year that we were going to run out of money and that all these other things are going to happen And part of the thing that kept me down last year was the feeling that not only was I unemployable, which I have a history related to that, but basically she's unemployable because of the ADHD, because of the challenges of being on time.

29:15It created enough fear that I didn't know she would actually be able to earn money, although she has earned money in the past. And actually, a large portion of our relationship has been the major breadwinner in her own way. That's fine. But, you know, she's been saying she wanted to be an artist for 10 years. And then now it's like, in a more impatient way, I'm like, okay, what are you doing? Just choose to do it.