Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
Partners of people with ADHD tend not to name the lateness or the lost keys as the real injury. It is the size of the reactions. That is where the damage collects.
Annoying is survivable and frightening is not. If you are working through things in a rough order, the temper comes before the calendar, even though the calendar is what everybody talks about first. And if you are the partner, saying quietly and once which of the two actually hurts is more use than a full list of everything.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'do not quarrel with one another, or you may lose heart' (Quran 8:46). The warning is about what quarrelling does to the people inside it, not about who was right.
وَأَطِيعُواْ ٱللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُۥ وَلَا تَنَٰزَعُواْ فَتَفۡشَلُواْ وَتَذۡهَبَ رِيحُكُمۡۖ وَٱصۡبِرُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
Obey God and His Messenger, and do not quarrel with one another, or you may lose heart and your spirit may desert you. Be steadfast: God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 8:46read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review combining numbers and interviews concluded that emotion dysregulation is present in ADHD across the lifespan and is a major contributor to the impairment people live with. That is the evidence behind treating the emotional side as a priority rather than as the thing you get to once the organising is sorted. It concerns impairment in general rather than couples in particular.
Shaw P, Stringaris A, Nigg J, Leibenluft E. (2014). Emotion dysregulation in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.. The American journal of psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Being disappointed in someone wears differently from being afraid of how they will react.
When not to
If reactions at home include anything frightening or physical, that is a safety matter first and a treatment target second.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
When someone has gone flat, the question is not what they ought to be doing. It is what still has any life in it for them, however small or unimpressive, and then how to get more of that.
Instead of stopping the worry, follow it all the way to the end. And then what happens. And then what. At each step, ask whether you could bear that.
The change mostly happens between the sessions rather than in them. Catching a thought where it actually turns up, at the kitchen table or in the car park, is what makes a new one stick.