Fear of Rejection in an ADHD Relationship

Despite all of the self-talk and the one-on-one with the father, I haven’t been able to muster up the courage to tell the Boyfriend about the ADHD. Maybe there is too much anger and pain woven into this four-year battle of trying to solve a disorder that has the frustration of reigning in wild mustangs. By nature a wild mustang needs to be set free and isn’t wired to pull people on a carriage.

The truth sits at the tip of my tongue because I am greatly fearful of being abandoned. I continue to wonder who would want a girlfriend or a spouse who is all over the board, and who has a tendency to start things and not complete them, not out of malice, but because that is how they are wired.

I’ve tried to get together with friends from the ADHD support groups and guinea pig groups that I used to attend, and inevitably those always fall through. Someone forgets about the appointment and doesn’t show up, or keeps changing it. The father tells me that two broken people can make a whole, but sometimes I just see two broken people as just that.

Then there is the fear of being discounted. I fear that the Boyfriend will look at me and laugh and say “Really, that’s all?” when I tell him about the ADHD. The truth is that this thing I consider a beast may sound anticlimactic. This isn’t cancer that we are talking about. Nobody is going to die here. And yet, when the disorder hits at the speed of a freight train, I want to die. No amount of physical pain can compare to the inner turmoil and depression associated with ADD.

Over the past month I’ve had several ADHD meltdowns over the fear of being abandoned. The fights with the Boyfriend have been over this thing that I long for which is clarity and certainty. People with ADHD do poorly without lack of direction, and his is the personality where things are known but not said. This is okay for most normal people, but I am not normal. A normal person would be certain that a boyfriend were really into them if they drove up three hours each way every week to come see them. A normal person would be okay with it, enjoy it and not fret about the greater meaning of it all.

I fully understand the consequence of the fear so I try to do what I can to stop it. At times the only thing I can do with this fear is to sit with it until the storm passes over. I am almost resigned to it and tell myself that all of this baggage is my fate. We all have an albatross in our life and mine is a thing called ADHD mixed with a checkered childhood, a mother who abandoned me and who abandoned my father. Things were far from perfect, but why can’t they just be good, isn’t that enough?

This past weekend I realized that things can indeed be different if I see things from a different perspective. The Boyfriend has seen me at my worst, during my meltdowns, he knows that I am a spaz, that I have a tendency to want to do too much because of an innate curiosity and also perhaps an unconscious desire to push people away. I don’t want to get too close and this I know is not the ADHD. It is my past, a personal history that I carry with me, it is a challenge that I need to tackle.